Vinge, Joan D - SS - View From A Height.pdf - Joan D Vinge - przemosta

VIEW FROM A HEIGHT

The race is not always to the swift, nor even to the persistent-it is sometimes won by the reluctant.

JOAN D. VINGE

SATURDAY, THE 7TH

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 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 1 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 PhD in deep space. Talk about your field work.

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 oneway 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 any more. 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!

SUNDAY, THE 8TH

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 1 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.

MONDAY, THE 9TH

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, THE 10TH

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 ...

Instead I read the printout of the article today. Hoping I'd find a flaw! If that isn't the greatest irony of my

entire life. For two decades I prayed that somebody would find a cure for me. And for two more

decades I didn't care. Am I going to spend the next two decades hating it, now that it's been found?

No . . . hating myself. I could have been free, they could have cured me; if only I'd stayed on Earth. If

only I'd been patient. But now it's too late . . . by twenty years.

I want to go home. I want to go home. . . . But you can't go home again. Did I really say that, so blithely,

so recently? you can't: You, Emmylou Stewart. You are in prison, just like you have always been in

prison.

It's all come back to me so strongly. Why me? Why must I be the ultimate victim— In all my life I've

never smelled the sea wind, or plucked berries from a bush and eaten them, right there! Or felt my

parents' kisses against my skin, or a man's body. . . . Because to me they were all deadly things.

I remember when I was a little girl, and we still lived in Victoria—I was just three or four, just at the brink

of understanding that I was the only prisoner in my world. I remember watching my father sit polishing his

shoes in the morning, before he left for the museum. And me smiling, so deviously, "Daddy . . . I'll help

you do that, if you let me come out—

And he came to the wall of my bubble and put his arms into the hugging gloves, and said, so gently, "No."

And then he began to cry. And I began to cry too, because I didn't know why I'd made him unhappy. ...

And all the children at school, with their 'spaceman' jokes, pointing at the freak; all the years of insensitive

people asking the same stupid questions every time I tried to go out anywhere . . . worst of all, the ones

who weren't stupid, or insensitive. Like Jeffrey . . . no, 1 will not think about Jeffrey! I couldn't let myself

think about him then. I could never afford to get close to a man, because I'd never be able to touch him. .

. .

And now it's too late. Was I controlling my fate, when I volunteered for this one-way trip? Or was I just

running away from a life where I was always helpless; helpless to escape the things I hated, helpless to

embrace the things I loved.

I pretended this was different, and important . . . but was that really what I believed? No! I just wanted

to crawl into a hole I couldn't get out of, because I was so afraid.

So afraid that one day I would unseal my plastic walls, or take off my helmet and my suit; walk out freely

to breathe the air, or wade in a stream, or touch flesh against flesh . . . and die of it.

So now I've walled myself into this hermetically sealed tomb for a living death. A perfectly sterile

environment, in which my body will not even decay when I die. Never having really lived, I shall never

really die, dust to dust. A perfectly sterile environment; in every sense of the word.

I often stand looking at my body in the mirror after I take a shower. Hazel eyes, brown hair in thick

waves with hardly any gray . . . and a good figure; not exactly stacked, but not unattractive. And no one

has ever seen it that way but me. Last night I had the Dream again ... I haven't had it for such a long time

. . . this time I was sitting on a carved wooden beast in the park beside the Provincial Museum in

Victoria; but not as a child in my suit. As a college girl, in white shorts and a bright cotton shirt, feeling the

sun on my shoulders, and—Jeffrey's arms around my waist. . . . We stroll along the bayside hand in

hand, under the Victorian lamp posts with their bright hanging flower-baskets, and everything I do is fresh

and spontaneous and full of the moment. But always, always, just when he holds me in his arms at last,

just as I'm about to . . .1 wake up.

When we die, do we wake out of reality at last, and all our dreams come true? When I die . . .1 will be

carried on and on into the timeless depths of uncharted space in this computerized tomb, unmourned and

unremembered. In time all the atmosphere will seep away; and my fair corpse, lying like Snow White's in

inviolate sleep, will be sucked dry of moisture, until it is nothing but a mummified parchment of shriveled

leather and bulging bones. . . .

("Hello? Hello, baby? Good night. Yes, no, maybe. . . . Awk. Food time!")

("Oh, Ozymandias! Yes, yes, I know ... I haven't fed you, I'm sorry. I know, I know . . .")

(Clinks and rattles.)

Why am I so selfish? Just because I can't eat, I expect him to fast, too. . . . No. I just forgot.

He doesn't understand, but he knows something's wrong; he climbs the lamp pole like some tripodal

bem, using both feet and his beak, and stares at me with that glass-beady bird's eye, stares and stares

and mumbles things. Like a lunatic! Until 1 can hardly stand not to shut him in a cupboard, or something.

But then he sidles along my shoulder and kisses me—such a tender caress against my cheek, with that

hooked prehensile beak that could crush a walnut like a grape—to let me know that he's worried, and he

cares. And I stroke his feathers to thank him, and tell him that it's all right. . . but it's not. And he knows

it.

Does he ever resent his life? Would he, if he could? Stolen away from his own kind, raised in a sterile

bubble to be a caged bird for a caged human. . . .

I'm only a bird in a gilded cage. I want to go home.

WEDNESDAY, THE 11TH

Why am I keeping this journal? Do I really believe that sometime some alien being will find this, or some

star-ship from Earth's glorious future will catch up to me . . .glorious future, hell. Stupid, selfish,

short-sighted fools. They ripped the guts out of the space program after they sent me away, no one will

ever follow me now. I'll be lucky if they don't declare me dead and forget about me.

As if anyone would care what a woman all alone on a lumbering space probe thought about day after day

for decades, anyway. What monstrous conceit.

I did lubricate the bearings on the big scope today. I did that much. I did it so that I could turn it back

toward Earth . . . toward the sun . . . toward the whole damn system. Because I can't even see it, all

crammed into the space of two moon diameters, even Pluto; and too dim and small and faraway below

me for my naked eyes, anyway. Even the sun is no more than a gaudy star that doesn't even make me

squint. So I looked for them with the scope. . . .

Isn't it funny how when you're a child you see all those drawings and models of the solar system with big,

lumpy planets and golden wakes streaming around the sun. Somehow you never get over expecting it to

look that way in person. And here I am, one thousand astronomical units north of the solar pole, gazing

down from a great height . . . and it doesn't look that way at all. It doesn't look like anything; even

through the scope. One great blot of light, and all the pale tiny diamond chips of planets and moons

around it, barely distinguishable from half a hundred undistinguished stars trapped in the same arc of

blackness. So meaningless, so insignificant . . . so disappointing.

Five hours I spent, today, listening to my journal, looking back and trying to find—something, I don't

know, something I suddenly don't have anymore.

I had it at the start. I was disgusting; Pollyanna Grad-student skipping and singing through the rooms of

my very own observatory. It seemed like heaven, and a lifetime spent in it couldn't possibly be long

enough for all that I was going to accomplish, and discover. I'd never be bored, no, not me. . . .

And there was so much to learn about the potential of this place, before I got out to where it supposedly

would matter, and there would be new things to turn my wonderful extended senses toward . . . while I

could still communicate easily with my dear mentor Dr. Weems, and the world. (Who'd ever have

thought, when the lecherous old goat was my thesis advisor at Harvard, and making jokes to his other

grad students about "the lengths some women will go to to protect their virginity," that we would have to

spend a lifetime together.)

There was Ozymandias's first word . . . and my first birthday in space, and my first anniversary . . . and

my doctoral degree at last, printed out by the computer with scrolls made of little x's and taped up on the

wall. . .

Vinge, Joan D - SS - View From A Height.pdf

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