Oh, I looked after Tom, materially anyhow. I never disappeared into drink or drugs or VR fantasyland, the way a lot of people expected me to, I think. I kept working, going through the motions of class after class, semester after semester, one faceless cadre of students after another, though I gave up on the idea of any original work. I kept functioning. Maybe it was “stoicism,” as one artificial-sentience therapist assured me. The way I see it, I just kept up the shell.
After Morag’s death, I lost a decade. That’s how I look at it now. Then, one day, I found myself inhabiting my life again.
When I looked around I was suddenly in my forties. Tom, in his late teens, had grown away from me, not surprisingly. And if I thought my career was stuck when I was thirty-four, it certainly was now. It’s a depressing progression. By twenty I knew I would never be an astronaut. By thirty I knew I would never be a brilliant engineer. And by forty-five I was all I would ever be, for the rest of my life.
But I still needed money. I kept up my teaching at Cornell, but I put some feelers out for consultant work.
I got a lucky break when Shelley Magwood contacted me, out of the blue. She was in one of my early cadres of students at Cornell. By age thirty or so she had already made herself rich with shares in a start-up company specializing in aspects of the new Higgs-field technologies.
She carved me out consultancy assignments based on Higgs, and on my deeper experience in the nuclear field. For a transition period the two technologies would have to work together providing power to the common grid, and there were interfaces, protocols, loading balances, and other technical details to be worked out.
So the work kept coming. I did it well enough. Shelley said I had inspired her, as a teacher; without me she wouldn’t have carved out her own successful track, and so forth. I appreciated the morale boost, and the money. But we both knew Shelley was doing me a favor.
Then Shelley drew me into another of her ventures.
“I remember how you always used to throw in space technology applications into your lectures,” she told me. “It was obvious where your heart was. I think you might enjoy working on this.”
When the request-for-proposals for the project that became the Kuiper Probe arrived, Shelley’s consultancy company was small and nimble enough to be able to position itself to grab the work, but smart enough to see the potential for the future. “This is only a paper study,” she told me. “But it might get picked up. And even if not, we’re going to be paid to think about how to use Higgs to drive spaceships. We’ll be like Renaissance shipbuilders, holding a patent on sail technology, just as Columbus is about to embark…”
Shelley quickly put together a team with a number of freelancers, like me, and input from various other companies on specialized aspects. We rarely met; almost everything was done remotely, as Shelley’s “paper” study, actually a software abstraction, was driven to successive levels of design detail.
Kuiper was an obvious application for Higgs technology. But for me, it was no more than a start to use this miraculous energy source as a way to drive steam rockets. In the long-term, I dreamed, control of the Higgs field could give us control of inertia itself: we could banish mass. I imagined a day when vast spaceships would float from world to world, light as thistledown.
My God, I loved the work. It paid pennies, but it kept me sane.
Shelley emerged from her quick review. “So you haven’t screwed up too badly. But your mind must be with Tom. Mine would be.”
I tried to tell her something of my relationship with Tom. “Everything changed the day Morag died,” I said. “I took ten years to get over that. If I ever did. And Tom—”
“Tom thinks you miss the dead baby more than you love him. Is that it?”
That shocked me. “It isn’t true,” I said. “It never was.”
“Maybe not,” Shelley said. “But these things get stuck in your head.”
“How would you know?”
She looked a little uncomfortable. “When I was younger I had a lot of rivalry with my father. He was a tough character. Didn’t suffer fools gladly, he always said. But the trouble was he couldn’t distinguish between a genuine fool and a kid trying to learn.”
I listened to this carefully; she’d told me little about her past. “I think I remember him.”
“Oh, you met him during my college days. Parents and teachers. He was always on his best behavior, at open days and graduation. And he was never cruel. He was loving, but in his own way. But his way was a stream of put-downs. I grew up thinking I could never be good enough for him — until one day I decided I was going to beat him.”
“And that’s why you work yourself to the bone.” We’d had arguments about her work-rate and its effects on her health right back to our college days, when I tutored her.
“Anyhow that rivalry stuck. And then he died, before I had a chance either to beat him or give up the chase… Now I’m stuck with it.” She glared at me. “Nobody gets out of the past without scars. What you have to do is deal with it, and move forward. Right now Tom is all that matters.”
“OK,” I said. “But things may be a little more complicated than that.”
I was thinking of my visitations by Morag.
I felt an impulse to tell her, to confess. I still hadn’t even told John about it. But I was starting to think I ought to open up to somebody about it. But, as well as I knew Shelley, I had no idea what her reaction would be. I guess I was afraid of losing her.
Maybe she intuited some of my confusion, if not the reason for it. She leaned forward. “Focus on Tom,” she said. “The project doesn’t need you right now. But he does.”
I nodded. The moment passed, and my secret stayed intact a little longer.
During their long interstellar jaunts in the monastic silence of his ship, Reath encouraged Alia to study the history of mankind. “If you don’t know where you’ve come from,” he would say, “you certainly don’t know where you’re going.”
And in this study, as he had been throughout her life, it was the small, dark, unhappy form of Michael Poole that was her companion, and her anchor point.
Humanity was thought to be some six hundred thousand years old, six hundred thousand years since the root stock had diverged from still more primitive forms. For the first hundred thousand years, mankind was confined to Earth — a period that had actually ended in Michael Poole’s own lifetime. This era was a lengthy and mostly uninteresting saga of a groping toward rationality and material command, amid endless wars.
“The most interesting thing about mankind in this long Earthbound period is its fragility,” Reath said. “Think about it. Humanity was confined to one rocky world in a remote corner of the Galaxy — indeed, imprisoned in a membrane of water and organics smeared over the planet’s surface. Up to Michael Poole’s time, that was all the life anybody knew about in the whole universe! Why, the slightest disturbance could have wiped us out — destroyed mankind before we got started — and that would have been that.”
The terrible contingency made Alia shudder. “Poole’s generation referred to his time as the Bottleneck.”
“They were right,” Reath said. “But it wasn’t the only age of crisis. There were several points in human history where things went badly wrong. Seventy thousand years before Michael Poole’s time there was an immense volcanic eruption that disrupted the planet’s climatic systems. Even earlier, while mankind was still just a species of upright apes among many others, a plague cut the rootstock down to a few dozen. Mankind reduced to just fifty or so! — think of it. You can see traces of such times in our genetic legacy even now, traces of a dreadful simplifying. The major difference with the Poole Bottleneck was that this was the first anthropogenic crisis — the first caused directly by the actions of mankind.