With her brown hair drawn back and caught in a net, she must have looked like some idealized Pravda cameo of the Worker in Space, easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender. She checked the Alyut’s chronometer again and poised her hand above the buttons that would trigger the first of her flares. Colonel Tovyevski had no way of knowing that she was nearing the point in space that would eventually be known as the Highway.
As she punched the six-button triggering sequence, the Alyut crossed those final kilometers and emitted the flare, a sustained burst of radio energy at 1420 megahertz, broadcast frequency of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky’s radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to stations in the southern Urals and New South Wales. For 3.8 seconds the Alyut’s radio image was obscured by the afterimage of the flare.
When the afterimage faded from Earth’s monitor screens, the Alyut was gone.
In the Urals a middle-aged Georgian technician bit through the stem of his favorite meerschaum. In New South Wales a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT.
The elevator that waited to take me up to Heaven looked like Hollywood’s best shot at a Bauhaus mummy case – a narrow, upright sarcophagus with a clear acrylic lid. Behind it, rows of identical consoles receded like a textbook illustration of vanishing perspective. The usual crowd of technicians in yellow paper clown suits were milling purposefully around. I spotted Hiro in blue denim, his pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt open over a faded UCLA sweat shirt. Engrossed in the figures cascading down the face of a monitor screen, he didn’t notice me. Neither did anyone else.
So I just stood there and stared up at the ceiling, at the bottom of the floor of Heaven. It didn’t look like much. Our fat cylinder is actually two cylinders, one inside the other. Down here in the outer one – we make our own ‘down’ with axial rotation – are all the more mundane aspects of our operation: dormitories, cafeterias, the airlock deck, where we haul in returning boats, Communications – and Wards, where I’m careful never to go.
Heaven, the inner cylinder, the unlikely green heart of this place, is the ripe Disney dream of homecoming, the ravenous ear of an information-hungry global economy. A constant stream of raw data goes pulsing home to Earth, a flood of rumours, whispers, hints of transgalactic traffic. I used to lie rigid in my hammock and feel the pressure of all those data, feel them snaking through the lines I imagined behind the bulkhead, lines like sinews, strapped and bulging, ready to spasm, ready to crush me. Then Charmian moved in with me, and after I told her about the fear, she made magic against it and put up her icons of Saint Olga. And the pressure receded, fell away.
‘Patching you in with a translator, Toby. You may need German this morning.’ His voice was sand in my skull, a dry modulation of static. ‘Hillary –’
‘On line, Dr Nagashima,’ said a BBC voice, clear as ice crystal. ‘You do have French, do you, Toby? Hofmannstahl has French and English.’
‘You stay the hell out of my hair, Hillary. Speak when you’re bloody spoken to, got it?’ Her silence became another layer in the complex, continual sizzle of static. Hiro shot me a dirty look across two dozen consoles. I grinned.
It was starting to happen: the elation, the adrenaline rush. I could feel it through the last wisps of barbiturate. A kid with a surfer’s smooth, blond face was helping me into a jump suit. It smelled; it was new-old, carefully battered, soaked with synthetic sweat and customized pheromones. Both sleeves were plastered from wrist to shoulder with embroidered patches, mostly corporate logos, subsidiary backers of an imaginary Highway expedition, with the main backer’s much larger trademark stitched across my shoulders – the firm that was supposed to have sent HALPERT, TOBY out to his rendezvous with the stars. At least my name was real, embroidered in scarlet nylon capitals just above my heart.
The surfer boy had the kind of standard-issue good looks I associate with junior partners in the CIA, but his name tape said NEVSKY and repeated itself in Cyrillic. KGB, then. He was no tsiolnik; he didn’t have that loose-jointed style conferred by twenty years in their L-5 habitat. The kid was pure Moscow, a polite clipboard ticker who probably knew eight ways to kill with a rolled newspaper. Now we began the ritual of drugs and pockets; he tucked a microsyringe, loaded with one of the new euphorohallucinogens, into the pocket on my left wrist, took a step back, then ticked it off in his clipboard. The printed outline of a jump-suited surrogate on his special pad looked like a handgun target. He took a five-gram vial of opium from the case he wore chained to his waist and found the pocket for that. Tick. Fourteen pockets. The cocaine was last.
Hiro came over just as the Russian was finishing. ‘Maybe she has some hard data, Toby; she’s a physical chemist, remember.’ It was strange to hear him acoustically, not as bone vibration from the implant.
‘Everything’s hard up there, Hiro.’
‘Don’t I know it?’ He was feeling it, too, that special buzz. We couldn’t quite seem to make eye contact. Before the awkwardness could deepen, he turned and gave one of the yellow clowns the thumbs up.
Two of them helped me into the Bauhaus coffin and stepped back as the lid hissed down like a giant’s faceplate. I began my ascent to Heaven and the homecoming of a stranger named Leni Hofmannstahl. A short trip, but it seems to take forever.
Olga, who was our first hitchhiker, the first one to stick out her thumb on the wavelength of hydrogen, made it home in two years. At Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan, one gray winter morning, they recorded her return on eighteen centimeters of magnetic tape.
If a religious man – one with a background in film technology – had been watching the point in space where her Alyut had vanished two years before, it might have seemed to him that God had butt-spliced footage of empty space with footage of Olga’s ship. She blipped back into our space-time like some amateur’s atrocious special effect. A week later and they might never have reached her in time; Earth would have spun on its way and left her drifting toward the sun. Fifty-three hours after her return, a nervous volunteer named Kurtz, wearing an armored work suit, climbed through the Alyut’s hatch. He was an East German specialist in space medicine, and American cigarettes were his secret vice; he wanted one very badly as he negotiated the air lock, wedged his way past a rectangular mass of airscrubber core, and chinned his helmet lights. The Alyut, even after two years, seemed to be full of breathable air. In the twin beams from the massive helmet, he saw tiny globules of blood and vomit swinging slowly past, swirling in his wake, as he edged the bulky suit out of the crawlway and entered the command module. Then he found her.
She was drifting above the navigational display, naked, cramped in a rigid fetal knot. Her eyes were open, but fixed on something Kurtz would never see. Her fists were bloody, clenched like stone, and her brown hair, loose now, drifted around her face like seaweed. Very slowly, very carefully, he swung himself across the white keyboards of the command console and secured his suit to the navigational display. She’d gone after the ship’s communications gear with her bare hands, he decided. He deactivated the work suit’s right claw; it unfolded automatically, like two pairs of vise-grip pliers pretending they were a flower. He extended his hand, still sealed in a pressurized gray surgical glove.
Then, as gently as he could, he pried open the fingers of her left hand. Nothing.
But when he opened her right fist, something spun free and tumbled in slow motion a few centimeters from the synthetic quartz of his faceplate. It looked like a seashell.
Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine; at the Plesetsk laboratories alone, she was represented by more than two million tissue slides, racked and numbered in the subbasement of a bomb
proof biological complex.
They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Olga’s seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of…Olga’s seashell.
The initial findings on the shell made two things clear. It was the product of no known terrestrial biosphere, and as there were no other known biospheres in the solar system, it had come from another star. Olga had either visited the place of its origin or come into contact, however, distantly, with something that was, or had once been, capable of making the trip.
They sent a Major Grosz out to the Tovyevski Coordinates in a specially fitted Alyut 9. Another ship followed him. He was on the last of his twenty hydrogen flares when his ship vanished. They recorded his departure and waited. Two hundred thirty-four days later he returned. In the meantime they had probed the area constantly, desperate for anything that might become the specific anomaly, the irritant around which a theory might grow. There was nothing: only Grosz’s ship, tumbling out of control. He committed suicide before they could reach him, the Highway’s second victim.
When they towed the Alyut back to Tsiolkovsky, they found that the elaborate recording gear was blank. All of it was in perfect working order; none of it had functioned. Grosz was flash-frozen and put on the first shuttle down to Plesetsk, where bulldozers were already excavating for a new subbasement.
Three years later, the morning after they lost their seventh cosmonaut, a telephone range in Moscow. The caller introduced himself. He was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. He was authorized, he said, to make a certain offer. Under certain very specific conditions, the Soviet Union might avail itself of the best minds in Western psychiatry. It was the understanding of his agency, he continued, that such help might currently be very welcome.
His Russian was excellent.
The bonephone static was a subliminal sandstorm. The elevator slid up into its narrow shaft through the floor of Heaven. I counted blue lights at two-meter intervals. After the fifth light, darkness and cessation.
Hidden in the hollow command console of the dummy Highway boat, I waited in the elevator like the secret behind the gimmicked bookcase in a children’s mystery story. The boat was a prop, a set piece, like the Bavarian cottage glued to the plaster alp in some amusement park – a nice touch, but one that wasn’t quite necessary. If the returnees accept us at all, they take us for granted; our cover stories and props don’t seem to make much difference.
‘All clear,’ Hiro said. ‘No customers hanging around.’ I reflexively massaged the scar behind my left ear, where they’d gone in to plant the bonephone. The side of the dummy console swung open and let in the gray dawn light of Heaven. The fake boat’s interior was familiar and strange at the same time, like your own apartment when you haven’t seen it for a week. One of those new Brazilian vines had snaked its way across the left viewport since my last time up, but that seemed to be the only change in the whole scene.
Big fights over those vines at the biotecture meetings, American ecologists screaming about possible nitrogen shortfalls. The Russians have been touchy about biodesign ever since they had to borrow Americans to help them with the biotic program back at Tsiolkovsky 1. Nasty problem with the rot eating the hydroponic wheat; all that superfine Soviet engineering and they still couldn’t establish a functional ecosystem. Doesn’t help that that initial debacle paved the way for us to be out here with them now. It irritates them; so they insist on the Brazilian vines, whatever – anything that gives them a chance to argue. But I like those vines: The leaves are heart-shaped, and if you rub one between your hands, it smells like cinnamon.
I stood at the port and watched the clearing take shape, as reflected sunlight entered Heaven. Heaven runs on Greenwich Standard; big Mylar mirrors were swiveling somewhere, out in bright vacuum, on schedule for a Greenwich Standard dawn. The recorded birdsongs began back in the trees. Birds have a very hard time in the absence of true gravity. We can’t have real ones, because they go crazy trying to make do with centrifugal force.
The first time you see it, Heaven lives up to its name, lush and cool and bright, the long grass dappled with wildflowers. It helps if you don’t know that most of the trees are artificial, or the amount of care required to maintain something like the optimal balance between blue-green algae and diatom algae in the ponds. Charmian says she expects Bambi to come gamboling out of the woods, and Hiro claims he knows exactly how many Disney engineers were sworn to secrecy under the National Security Act.
‘We’re getting fragments from Hofmannstahl,’ Hiro said. He might almost have been talking to himself; the handler-surrogate gestalt was going into effect, and soon we’d cease to be aware of each other. The adrenaline edge was tapering off. ‘Nothing very coherent. “Schöne Maschine,” something…“Beautiful machine”…Hillary thinks she sounds pretty calm, but right out of it.’
‘Don’t tell me about it. No expectations, right? Let’s go in loose.’ I opened the hatch and took a breath of Heaven’s air; it was like cool white wine. ‘Where’s Charmian?’
He sighed, a soft gust of static. ‘Charmian should be in Clearing Five, taking care of a Chilean who’s three days home, but she’s not, because she heard you were coming. So she’s waiting for you by the carp pond. Stubborn bitch,’ he added.
Charmian was flicking pebbles at the Chinese bighead carp. She had a cluster of white flowers tucked behind her ear, a wilted Marlboro behind the other. Her feet were bare and muddy, and she’d hacked the legs off her jump suit at midthigh. Her black hair was drawn back in a pony tail.
We’d met for the first time at a party out in one of the welding shops, drunken voices clanging in the hollow of the alloy sphere, homemade vodka in zero gravity. Someone had a bag of water for a chaser, squeezed out a double handful, and flipped it expertly into a rolling floppy ball of surface tension. Old jokes about passing water. But I’m graceless in zero g. I put my hand through it when it came my way. Shook a thousand silvery little balls from my hair, batting at them, tumbling, and the woman beside me was laughing, turning slow somersaults, long, thin girl with black hair. She wore those baggy drawstring pants that tourists take home from Tsiolkovsky and a faded NASA T-shirt three sizes too big. A minute later she was telling me about hang-gliding with the teen tsiolniki and about how proud they’d been of the weak pot they grew in one of the corn canisters. I didn’t realize she was another surrogate until Hiro clicked in to tell us the party was over. She moved in with me a week later.
‘A minute, okay?’ Hiro gritted his teeth, a horrible sound. ‘One. Uno.’ Then he was gone, off the circuit entirely, maybe not even listening.
‘How’s tricks in Clearing Five?’ I squatted beside her and found some pebbles of my own.
‘Not so hot. I had to get away from him for a while, shot him up with hypnotics. My translator told me you were on your way up.’ She has the kind of Texas accent that makes ice sound like ass.
‘Thought you spoke Spanish. Guy’s Chilean, isn’t he?’ I tossed one of my pebbles into the pond.
‘I speak Mexican. The culture vultures said he wouldn’t like my accent. Good thing, too. I can’t follow him when he talks fast.’ One of her pebbles followed mine, rings spreading on the surface as it sank. ‘Which is constantly,’ she added. A bighead swam over to see whether her pebble was good to eat. ‘He isn’t going to make it.’ She wasn’t looking at me. Her tone was perfectly neutral. ‘Little Jorge is definitely not making it.’
I chose the flattest of my pebbles and tried to skip it across the pond, but it sank. The less I knew about Chilean Jorge, the better. I knew he was a live one, one of the ten per cent. Our DOA count runs at twenty per cent. Suicide. Seventy per cent of the meatshots are automatic candidates for Wards: the diaper cases, mumblers, totally gone. Charmian and I are surrogates for th
at final ten per cent.
If the first ones to come back had only returned with seashells, I doubt that Heaven would be out here. Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. We may never find out where or how he got it, but that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years. Charmian says we’re like those poor suckers on their islands, who spend all their time building landing strips to make the big silver birds come back. Charmian says that contact with ‘superior’ civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy.
‘Ever wonder how they thought this scam up, Toby?’ She was squinting into the sunlight, east, down the length of our cylindrical country, horizonless and green. ‘They must’ve had all the heavies in, the shrink elite, scattered down a long slab of genuine imitation rosewood, standard Pentagon issue. Each one got a clean notepad and a brand-new pencil, specially sharpened for the occasion. Everybody was there: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Skinner rat men, you name it. And every one of those bastards knew in his heart that it was time to play his best hand. As a profession, not just as representatives of a given faction. There they are, Western psychiatry incarnate. And nothing’s happening! People are popping back off the Highway dead, or else they come back drooling, singing nursery rhymes. The live ones last about three days, won’t say a goddamned thing, then shoot themselves or go catatonic.’ She took a small flashlight from her belt and casually cracked its plastic shell, extracting the parabolic reflector. ‘Kremlin’s screaming. CIA’s going nuts. And worst of all, the multinationals who want to back the show are getting cold feet. “Dead spacemen? No data? No deal, friends.” So they’re getting nervous, all those supershrinks, until some flake, some grinning weirdo from Berkeley maybe, he says,’ and her drawl sank to parody stoned mellowness, ‘“Like, hey, why don’t we just put these people into a real nice place with a lotta good dope and somebody they can really relate to, hey?”’ She laughed, shook her head. She was using the reflector to light her cigarette, concentrating the sunlight. They don’t give us matches; fires screw up the oxygen-carbon dioxide balance. A tiny curl of gray smoke twisted away from the white-hot focal point.