Penumbra

3

After ten days in space, enduring cramped living conditions and consuming recycled food and drink, a leave period on Earth was like parole in paradise.

Bennett drove from the spaceport on the perimeter of Los Angeles and took the highway into the desert. The shuttle had touched down in the early hours, and it was still a couple of hours until dawn. The road stretched away beneath the swollen lantern of the full moon, the tarmac laced with luminescents so that it glowed green in the night. In an age of draconian energy conservation, luminous road surfaces were a means of doing away with the expensive street-lighting of old. Seen from space, as the terminator swept across the Americas, the rising sun illuminated the roads that crossed the western seaboard like the veins on the brow of an old but healthy patriarch.

Bennett accelerated, enjoying the cool air on his face. He sipped occasionally from a carton of fresh orange juice and thought about the near miss in orbit. All things considered, his extended leave would compensate for the carpeting and/or fine he could expect on his return to the station in ten days. As he drove, he considered renegotiating his contract in favour of more leave on Earth. He even entertained the fantasy of changing jobs, looking for something a little more varied.

Two hours later he passed Mojave Town, where his father was hospitalised and Julia worked as a landscape designer. Constructed piecemeal at the end of the last century by eco-freaks dreaming of an environmentally friendly society, its population had been augmented over the years by an exodus of well-to-do home-workers, artists, computer specialists and on-line business people. In the light of the moon, multi-level domes glistened like agglomerated soap bubbles, interspersed with oasis gardens, trees and lakes, and tall masts bearing solar arrays.

Bennett’s habitat dome was situated twenty kilometres further along the highway. From the veranda of his dome, Mojave Town was a blur in the distance, and his nearest neighbour was ten kays away. He was surrounded by the soothing silence of the desert, his only company the occasional patrolling condor or scavenging jackal.

He pulled off the highway, trundled the final three kilometres along the rough track, and parked in the tropical garden that shaded his dome, patio and swimming pool.

The habitat came to life as he climbed the interior steps to the main lounge. Lights turned themselves on; he was greeted by a selection of his favourite music—mood-jazz from one of the colony worlds. Beside the sliding door to the veranda, his com-screen flared into life.

He took a beer from the cooler and sat in the swivel chair before the screen. One quarter of the screen displayed a head-and-shoulders shot of Julia, frozen mid-smile, another quarter someone Bennett had never seen before, a silver-haired man in his seventies. The upper half of the screen listed e-mail shots that had come in during his absence.

He regarded the pix of Julia, short dark hair parenthesising a calm, oval ballerina’s face. She was attractive and intelligent, and he never ceased to be amazed that their relationship had lasted so long—coming up to a year, now. They had met when he’d hired her to redesign his garden, began talking and never stopped. He’d been attracted to her sophistication—an attribute rarely found among the women on Redwood Station—and he assumed that she had found appealing the fact that he was a pilot and well off.

Their first rift, a couple of months later, had come about because Bennett had been fool enough to tell her this. She had been hectoring him for some declaration of commitment, a vow of his love for her. “Why?” he had responded. “You don’t love me. I’m just a rich high-orbit pilot to show off to your friends.” She had just stared at him, shocked. “You bastard, Josh. If that’s what you think I see in you…” and, unable to go on, she had hurried from the dome. A day later she had downloaded a vis-link to his com-screen. She had cried and told him that she loved himdespite the fact that he was a privileged, arrogant bastard and a pilot.

Shame, mixed with something akin to fear that she might be telling the truth, had stopped him contacting her for a few days. Then he had left a message to say that he was sorry, he knew what a shallow fool he was, and could they meet for dinner somewhere?

From then on things had never been the same. It seemed that his admission of blame gave Julia carte blanche to snipe away at his faults, psychologically reduce him to nothing more than a textbook example of adverse childhood conditioning. He wondered if it was the thought of being without her companionship that made him endure her hostility. Having someone, even someone who seemed to dislike him so much of the time, was preferable to being alone.

He brushed the back of his hand against Julia’s face, and instantly the smile unfroze. “Josh. I’m calling Sunday—you’re due back Tuesday, aren’t you?”

She moved away from the screen, touching her throat in the gesture he knew meant she was considering what to say next. She paused in the middle of her lounge, surrounded by baskets of hanging flowers. From there she looked back at the screen, as if to distance herself from what she had to say next.

“Josh… I’ve been giving things serious consideration lately. I’ve been considering my life, where I am…” This was typical of Julia, her tortured verbal circumlocutions and pained analysis. “I’ve been thinking about us, Josh. I wonder… when you get back Tuesday, could we meet for lunch? Say around one, at Nova Luna? Call if you can’t make it, okay?” She gave a final, sad smile. “Bye, Josh.”

The image froze, dissolved. Josh sat staring at the emptied quarter of the screen, sipping his beer and trying to work out his reaction to what Julia had said.

It was over, at last, just as for months he had known it would be. He had never expected Julia to be the one to end it, and he had declined to do so because during the short periods he had spent on Earth he had enjoyed her company, had felt a genuine affection for her. But… what was it that Julia had called a man’s declaration of genuine affection? “Nothing more than a euphemism for ‘You’ll do until I find something better.”

He finished his beer. He would meet her at the restaurant later today, chat over old times, agree that they were going nowhere, and part on civil terms. He just prayed that she wouldn’t create a scene, accuse him of being a cold emotionless bastard, as she had done publicly more than once in the past.

He touched the second quarter of the screen, activating the face of the well-dressed stranger. The man sat sidesaddle on the edge of a desk, like an executive giving an informal pep-talk to a team of salesmen.

“Joshua Bennett? I’m sorry to have called when you’re away. I’m Dr Samuels, consultant geriatrician at the Oasis Medical Centre in Mojave. Your father is under my care. I understand that you are returning on the twenty-second. If you could contact my secretary and arrange a meeting on that day, or whenever is convenient for you…”

Dr Samuels paused, and Bennett wondered what was coming next.

“Mr Bennett, your father has requested the option of voluntary euthanasia. As his doctor, my consent is mandatory, and I was wondering how you, as his only next of kin, felt about the issue. As I’ve said, if you could contact me as soon as possible I’d be grateful. Thank you, Mr Bennett.”

Euthanasia… Bennett had never expected it to come to this. He wondered why he was so shocked: because of the imminence of his father’s extinction, or the fact that he had chosen this way to go? He had always expected to be informed of his father’s death in his absence, had reconciled himself to the fact and rehearsed what little grief he might feel. But euthanasia… He realised he was shocked because his father’s option of euthanasia would include himself, Bennett, in the process of his going. He would have to face his father one last time, discuss with him his reasons, exhibit sympathy for someone he did not and never had loved.

Not for the first time, he cursed his father for being so inconsiderate as to start a family at such an advanced age. Hell, there had been a certain affection between them, at times, he thought; and after all, he was—is—my father. Bennett knew what Julia might have to say about that affection.

He pushed himself from the swivel chair and stepped out on to the veranda. Dawn was rushing in over the desert, turning the sky to the west a burnished, blue-tinged aluminium and washing the stars from the night overhead. He had slept on the shuttle, eaten just before touchdown. He could not sleep now, especially after the message from Dr Samuels.

On impulse he took the steps from the veranda to the garden and climbed into his car. He drove away from the dome along a rough track, passing sentinel cacti like overgrown candelabra. Fifteen minutes later he made out the low-slung dome in the distance, to the right of the track. He pulled up beside the overgrown and neglected garden, the sight of the abandoned dome bringing back a slew of unwelcome memories.

He climbed out and approached the dome along a lichen-carpeted path, batting aside encroaching fronds and palm leaves. The dome stood in the dawn light like some abandoned habitat on an alien world. Seeds had worked their way inside and filled the main cupola with riotous growth so that it resembled a steaming arboretum. The habitat had been empty a year now, ever since his father’s hospitalisation. Bennett had grown up here, with his stern and pious mother, his often absent father, and Ella.

He moved around the dome and stepped into the enclosed garden at the rear, aware of the pounding of his heart.

His relationship with Ella had been unlike the usual elder brother-little sister confrontation. Excluded from the affection of their elderly parents, they had sought companionship and succour in each other. She might have been four years his junior, but she was his equal in terms of intellect and understanding. Being the elder, and a boy, he had often incurred the brunt of his mother’s temper, and rather than gloat as little sisters were wont to do, Ella did her best to cheer him. She had been more like an elder sister in her apprehension of his pain.

And then at the age of ten she had fallen ill. She had spent long periods in hospital, during which time Bennett was never told of the true seriousness of her illness. He had watched her waste away, never truly understanding what was taking place. Then, the day before Ella was due home for the very last time, his father took him to one side and explained, with a brutality that struck him at the time as cruel, but which later he came to understand was an inability to articulate his feelings, that Ella was dying. “I’m afraid she is very ill, Joshua. The medics have told me that there’s no hope.”

He had always assumed she would get better. To be told that Ella would soon die had filled Bennett with a sense of disbelief and, later, anger.

Two days later Ella had died, with Bennett and his parents at her bedside, and with her impossible death something within Bennett seemed to vacate him, leaving in its place a vast and terrible emptiness.

A week after the funeral, his father had interrupted his com-screen lessons. He had done his best to avoid his parents since Ella’s death; he felt a residual resentment at being kept in the dark for so long, and had no desire to see his grief mirrored in theirs. Now his father said: “We’ve decided to establish a memorial to Ella, Joshua, in the garden where you played together.” And he had told his son what it was.

He had avoided going into the garden for a long time after Ella’s death. He did not want to be reminded of his loss. The memorial seemed to him a crass memento of someone once so vital and alive. Later he wondered why people with the Christian beliefs of his parents had erected such a tawdry icon, and came to understand that it was merely their way of coping with a grief just as real and painful as his own.

Perhaps a year after her death, Josh realised that he could no longer hear Ella’s voice in his head. He had forgotten the sound of her confiding words, her excited chatter, and that terrified him. One afternoon, after ensuring that his parents were away from the dome, he had stepped with trepidation and curiosity into the enclosed garden.

Now Bennett pushed open the rusty iron gate to the memorial garden. A riot of untended blooms, frangipani and rude bougainvillaea, crowded the paved enclosure like unwelcome guests at a party. He quickly crossed the garden, his throat tight and sore, swept away fallen leaves from the mock-timber bench and sat down. A high voice asked, “Hi, Josh, how’s things in space these days?”

The dark-haired little girl in a blue dress crouched before Bennett, tanned arms wrapped about tanned legs. Her blue eyes, so treacherously alive, stared at him with delight.

He came almost every leave to the memorial garden, and every time the sight of Ella struck him a painful blow in the solar plexus.

“Oh, fine… you know, it’s a job.”

“Anything exciting happened?”

She stood and moved to an overhanging branch, reached up, grasped it and swung back and forth. She was perhaps a metre from him, as visually substantial as the bench on which he sat. He stared at the brown straining muscles of her arms, her impishly pretty face and long black hair. He wanted suddenly to reach out, take her in his arms and crush her to him, and the desire brought tears to his eyes.

“I was in a close shave yesterday, Ella,” he said. He told her about the accident, enjoying her open-mouthed, wide-eyed reaction, her little girl exclamations.

As they chatted, the pain abated. He enjoyed the company of this ersatz sister, this companion ghost of many years. She might only have been a fabulously intricate simulated identity hologram, a genie conjured by state-of-the-art logic circuits, and no more real or sentient than the com-screen back at his dome, but the illusion satisfied some deep need within him. She salved his pain, briefly; she fuelled his memories.

“Ella, you know I told you that Daddy was ill last time?”

She nodded, suddenly serious. “How is he?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, not good. He’s just so old—over a hundred now.”

Ninety years older than you were when you died, Ella. There was no justice in the world.

“Does he still tell you off?”

Bennett smiled. What a little girl thing to say! It was what he loved about his hologram sister. It was just what Ella would have said.

“No, not any more, Ella. He’s still... I don’t know, censorious—I mean critical. Still finding fault in everything l do. I’d like to win his respect,” he said, and hated himself for the admission. He shrugged. “He’s very old and frail now, but inside he’s still the same person he always was.”

“Why do you mention him, Josh?”

There were times when the program was just too advanced, Bennett thought. Would Ella have asked him that?

“His doctor contacted me yesterday. Dad wants to exercise his right to undergo euthanasia.”

Ella frowned. She was seated cross-legged on the ground now, her hands placed primly on her bare knees. “What’s eutha— whatever?”

“It means he wants to die. He wants to take a drug that’ll end his life. I’ve got to go and see him today. Talk it over.” He stared into her big, unblinking eyes. “You don’t understand, do you?”

She pursed her lips, then nodded. “I think I do, Josh. You feel guilty.”

The program running the simulated identity hologram had a learning facility. Over the years it had integrated everything Bennett had said to Ella, analysed and interpreted his pronouncements for meaning.

“It’s just…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to do this, Ella. I can’t face him about this. I don’t want him to see that I understand his life’s been a terrible failure.” After so long being so distant from his father, he realised, the time was coming when they would have to share an unaccustomed emotional proximity. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t want his father to see that he really cared.

Ella was smiling at him. “You’ll do okay, Josh,” she said. “You know what you always tell me?”

“What?”

She pulled her pretty, thinking-cap face. “What is it—something like, reality is never as bad as you expect it to be.”

He laughed. “I’ll remember that, Ella. Thanks.”

They stared at each other for a long time.

At last she said, “Josh,” and slowly, watching him, she reached out a slim brown arm, fingers outstretched towards him.

He reached too, staying his hand so that his finger-tips were millimetres from her own, so as not to spoil the illusion. Like this, he told himself, in the long silence there was some kind of contact happening that could not be quantified by logic.

He dropped his hand. “I must be going, Ella.”

Still seated, she gave a quick wave in the air. “Come back soon, okay, Josh?”

“I’ll be back.” He stood, and the image of his sister disappeared before his eyes.