passionate communion. He was perfectly willing to starve for that, fight for that and die for that. Every form of intercourse between man and woman was fraught with illusion, and the bigger, the better. Every hour that passed was an hour they had not been parted.
They had to sleep rough. Their clothes became filthy. Then, on the tenth day, they got arrested.
She was, of course, an illegal alien, and he had the good sense to talk only Spanish, so of course, he became one as well. The Immigration cops piled them into the bus for the border, but they got two seats together and were able to kiss and hold hands. The other deported wretches even smiled at them.
He realized now that he was sacrificing everything for her: his identity, his citizenship, flag, church, habits, money… Everything, and good riddance. He bit thoughtfully into his wax-papered cheese sandwich. This was the federal bounty distributed to every refugee on the bus, along with an apple, a small carton of homogenized milk, and some carrot chips.
When the protein hit his famished stomach Felix realized that he had gone delirious with joy. He was growing by this experience. It had broken every stifling limit within him. His dusty, savage, squalid world was widening drastically.
Giving alms, for instance-before his abject poverty, he’d never understood that alms were holy. Alms were indeed very holy. From now on-as soon as he found a place to sleep, some place that was so wrecked, so torn, so bleeding, that it never asked uncomfortable questions about a plumber-as soon as he became a plumber again, then he’d be giving some alms.
She ate her food, licked her fingers, then fell asleep against him, in the moving bus. He brushed the free hair from her dirty face. She was twenty days older now. “This is a pearl,” he said aloud. “This is a pearl by far too rare to be contained within the shell of time and space.”
Why had those lines come to him, in such a rush? Had he read them somewhere? Or were those lines his own?
The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars - IAN MCDONALD
British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking In Tongues. His stories have appeared in our Eighth through Tenth, Fourteenth through Sixteenth, and Nineteenth Annual Collections. His most recent books are a chapbook novella Tendeleo’s Story, and a new novel, Ares Express. Coming up is another new novel, Cyberabad. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a Web site at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~unicorn/mcdonald/.
In the lyrical story that follows, we learn that sometimes the dream is what counts-no matter how different the dreamers are.
From the summer room he watched the car wind along the road by the bay, and he thought, They will be bringing the dog. His pleasure at seeing them all again did a sharp down-turn at that. He did not like the dog. He did not like dogs in general; fawning, attention-seeking things, with a surfeit of bodily fluids, and this dog in particular owned a superabundance of those things. It was a tatty white-and-black urchin with a need for human attention so consuming that once, coming down in the night for a drink of water, he caught it four-square in the middle of the kitchen table, enthusiastically pissing on the tablecloth. It had been lonely. He had scrubbed, steeped, disinfected twice, and said nothing as Paavo and Raisa and Yuri sat around it pouring their coffee and breaking their rolls.
You can no more kick a man’s dog than his child. Even for pissing on the table. And Yuri adored the beast.
As he always did when they came on their twice yearly visits, he lit all the house lights so that there should be a welcome as they came across the causeway over the frozen inlet. Last of all were the porch lights, as he stood by the open door in the knifing cold of December and the car turned in the gravel drive, sending its headlight beams washing over him. He could hear the dog barking in the back. It had probably been barking like that all the way from Haapsalu.
Yuri came running in first; then his son and Raisa, beating their hands and stamping their feet. Breath-steamy kisses with the dog leaping up at him, leaping and leaping and leaping until he stove in its ribs with a timely lifted knee.
“The roads bad?”
Paavo lumbered in with the bags.
“Bad enough. Down to thirty this side of Tallinn. Repair budget’s probably putting some councillor’s kid through university.”
“Ah, no budget for anything, these days.” He looked out at the setting indigo before closing the porch door on the winter. The silhouettes of the trees across the bay were still discernible, shadows against the infra-blue; low over them, Jupiter rising, and the early stars. Another thing we couldn’t afford.
“You can cut the rest, but you have to have infrastructure,” Paavo was saying as he moved the bags into the hall.
“Spoken like a good new Russian,” the old man said, but Yuri was running ahead of any of them, even the dog.
“Where are they, can I see them?” he called out, questing in at the open door though he knew what room they were in, where they would always remain, that they were always his to look at and marvel over. Grandfather Antti paused in the study doorway, reluctant to break the shell of unalloyed wonder. Yuri stood in the center of the threadbare Kazakh rug, head thrown back, looking up at the models hanging from the ceiling. Revolving slowly, unconsciously; the photographs and certificates and engineering diagrams and artist’s impressions spinning around him. Relativity.
The dog scuffled at his heels, horrified that it was missing something. Antti shoved it away with his foot. Dare break the moment and, Yuri notwithstanding, I will poison you. Twice a year, summer and winter, was a meager ration of wonder stuff, and its half-life was so short. Years and peers and sophistication would kill that thing you feel, orbiting beneath the models of the ships that should have taken us to Mars.
Yuri stopped.
“That one. That wasn’t here before.”
“It’s new, that’s why.”
“I can see that. Show me.”
Antti pulled over the peeling swivel chair to stand on and unhook the curved delta of aerobody from its fishing line rig.
“What’s that bit?”
“That’s the fuel processing module. The idea was that it would go down first, maybe even six months before, and manufacture the fuel for the return trip.”
“An empty tank mission.”
“Empty tanks.” The boy had the language. “That’s right.”
Yuri turned the aerodynamic plastic wedge over in his hands, stopped at a hieroglyph in curvilinear blue.
“This isn’t Russian,” he pronounced. “I know this sign. That says NASA. But I don’t know this bit.” A line of red, alien letters above the noble blue insignia.
