View from a Height
Joan D. Vinge
I want to know why those pages were missing! How am I supposed to keep up with my research if they leave out pages—?
(Long sighing noise.)
Listen to yourself, Emmylou: You're listening to the sound of fear. It was an oversight, you know that. Nobody did it to you on purpose. Relax, you're getting Fortnight Fever. Tomorrow you'll get the pages, and an apology too, if Harvey Weems knows what's good for him.
But still, five whole pages; and the table of contents. How could you miss five pages? And the table of contents.
How do I know there hasn't been a coup? The Northwest's finally taken over completely, and they're censoring the media—and like the Man without a Country, everything they send me from now on is going to have holes cut in it.
In Science?
Or maybe Weems has decided to drive me insane—?
Oh, my God … it would be a short trip. Look at me. I don't have any fingernails left.
("Arrwk. Hello, beautiful. Hello? Hello?")
("Ozymandias! Get out of my hair, you devil." Laughter. "Polly want a cracker? Here … gently! That's a boy.")
It's beautiful when he flies. I never get tired of watching him, or looking at him, even after twenty years. Twenty years … What did the Psittacidae do, to win the right to wear a rainbow as their plumage? Although the way we've hunted them for it, you could say it was a mixed blessing. Like some other things.
Twenty years. How strange it sounds to hear those words, and know they're true. There are gray hairs when I look in the mirror. Wrinkles starting. And Weems is bald! Bald as an egg, and all squinty behind his spectacles. How did we get that way, without noticing it? Time is both longer and shorter than you think, and usually all at once.
Twelve days is a long time to wait for somebody to return your call. Twenty years is a long time gone. But I feel somehow as though it was only last week that I left home. I keep the circuits clean, going over them and over them, showing those mental home movies until I could almost step across, sometimes, into that other reality. But then I always look down, and there's that tremendous abyss full of space and time, and I realize I can't, again. You can't go home again.
Especially when you're almost one thousand astronomical units out in space. Almost there, the first rung of the ladder. Next Thursday is the day. Oh, that bottle of champagne that's been waiting for so long. Oh, the parallax view! I have the equal of the best astronomical equipment in all of near-Earth space at my command, and a view of the universe that no one has ever had before; and using them has made me the only astrophysicist ever to win a Ph.D. in deep space. Talk about your fieldwork.
Strange to think that if the Forward Observatory had massed less than its thousand-plus tons, I would have been replaced by a machine. But because the installation is so large, I, in my infinite human flexibility, even with my infinite human appetite, become the most efficient legal tender. And the farther out I get, the more important my own ability to judge what happens, and respond to it, becomes. The first—and maybe the last—manned interstellar probe, on a one-way journey into infinity … into a universe unobscured by our own system's gases and dust … equipped with eyes that see everything from gamma to ultra-long wavelengths, and ears that listen to the music of the spheres.
And Emmylou Stewart, the captive audience. Adrift on a star … if you hold with the idea that all the bits of inert junk drifting through space, no matter how small, have star potential. Dark stars, with brilliance in their secret hearts, only kept back from letting it shine by Fate, which denied them the critical mass to reach their kindling point.
Speak of kindling: the laser beam just arrived to give me my daily boost, moving me a little faster, so I'll reach a little deeper into the universe. Blue sky at bedtime; I always was a night person. I'm sure they didn't design the solar sail to filter light like the sky … but I'm glad it happened to work out that way. Sky blue was always my passion—the color, texture, fluid purity of it. This color isn't exactly right; but it doesn't matter, because I can't remember how anymore. This sky is a sun-catcher. A big blue parasol. But so was the original, from where I used to stand. The sky is a blue parasol … did anyone ever say that before, I wonder? If anyone knows, speak up—
Is anyone even listening? Will anyone ever be?
("Who cares, anyway? Come on, Ozzie—climb aboard. Let's drop down to the observation porch while I do my meditation, and try to remember what days were like.")
Weems, damn it, I want satisfaction!
That idiot. That intolerable moron—how could he do that to me? After all this time, wouldn't you think he'd know me better than that? To keep me waiting for twelve days, wondering and afraid: twelve days of all the possible stupid paranoias I could weave with my idle hands and mind, making myself miserable, asking for trouble—
And then giving it to me. God, he must be some kind of sadist. If I could only reach him, and hurt him the way I've hurt these past hours—
Except that I know the news wasn't his fault, and that he didn't mean to hurt me … and so I can't even ease my pain by projecting it onto him.
I don't know what I would have done if his image hadn't been six days stale when it got here. What would I have done, if he'd been in earshot when I was listening; what would I have said? Maybe no more than I did say.
What can you say, when you realize you've thrown your whole life away?
He sat there behind his faded blotter, twiddling his pen, picking up his souvenir moon rocks and laying them down—looking for all the world like a man with a time bomb in his desk drawer—and said, "Now don't worry, Emmylou. There's no problem …" Went on saying it, one way or another, for five minutes; until I was shouting, "What's wrong, damn it?"
"I thought you'd never even notice the few pages …," with that sidling smile of his.
And while I'm muttering, "I may have been in solitary confinement for twenty years, Harvey, but it hasn't turned my brain to mush," he said, "So maybe I'd better explain, first"—and the look on his face; oh, the look on his face. "There's been a biomed breakthrough. If you were here on Earth, you … well, your body's immune responses could be … made normal …" And then he looked down, as though he could really see the look on my own face.
Made normal. Made normal. It's all I can hear. I was born with no natural immunities. No defense against disease. No help for it. No. No, no, no, that's all I ever heard, all my life on Earth. Through the plastic walls of my sealed room; through the helmet of my sealed suit … And now it's all changed. They could cure me. But I can't go home. I knew this could happen; I knew it had to happen someday. But I chose to ignore that fact, and now it's too late to do anything about it.
Then why can't I forget that I could have been f-free …
… I didn't answer Weems today. Screw Weems. There's nothing to say. Nothing at all.
I'm so tired.
Couldn't sleep. It kept playing over and over in my mind … Finally took some pills. Slept all day, feel like hell. Stupid. And it didn't go away. It was waiting for me, still waiting, when I woke up.
It isn't fair—!
I don't feel like talking about it.
Tuesday, already. I haven't done a thing for two days. I haven't even started to check out the relay beacon, and that damn thing has to be dropped off this week. I don't have any strength; I can't seem to move, I just sit. But I have to get back to work. Have to …