Penumbra

5

Bennett left the hospital just before one o’clock and boarded an electric shuttle to meet Julia at the Nova Luna restaurant.

He arrived early and sat at an outside table overlooking the lake. He ordered a beer and watched the swans upending themselves in the water. He was in no mood to face Julia, her complaints and criticisms. He decided he would make his excuses and get away as soon as possible.

He was on his second beer when Julia approached from around the lake. She smiled and waved, but Bennett knew from experience that her apparent good mood was no indication of what to expect: on every occasion in the past, when their meetings had descended into a minutely detailed catalogue of his faults, she had deployed a gambit of good cheer to hide her intent.

She ordered a coffee from the bar and carried it carefully across the lawn, a tall, tanned woman in her early thirties wearing a long red dress. She was barefoot, and Bennett wondered why this fact should nag at his memory. Then he remembered: Ten Lee Theneka went barefoot also. It was, he thought, the only similarity between the two women. Julia was a hard-headed pragmatist who believed exclusively in the here and now. At least she and Bennett had that much in common.

She sat across from him, meeting his gaze with a slight nod. “Josh.”

“I’m afraid I’ve already eaten, Julia. Go ahead and order—I’m okay with this.” He lifted his beer.

She ordered something called an Acapulco salad from the waiter.

“So,” she said, between minute sips of cappuccino, “how were things in high orbit?”

He shrugged. “As ever. No, I tell a lie. Perhaps even more monotonous than ever.” He paused, then said: “Anyway, I’m seriously considering a change.” As soon as he’d said it, he wondered why.

Something in her gaze, outwardly friendly so far, hardened. “And how many times have I heard that?”

“No, I mean it this time. I was almost involved in an accident up there. I’m not happy with the safety standards.”

“What did you tell me last time, or was it the time before that? Weren’t you up for promotion, some kind of liner job out of Mars?”

“I didn’t get it, but I was shortlisted.” The lie came easily, surprising him.

She sipped her coffee, eyeing him judiciously over the chocolate-sprinkled froth. “So, what are your plans?”

He lowered his gaze. “I haven’t got that far yet.”

Her salad arrived, and from her indulgent expression he guessed that she was calling a truce. She forked cubes of avocado and chewed, watching him. “How’s your father keeping, Josh? Have you had time to visit him yet?”

He nodded. There was no way he could talk to Julia about the morning’s events. “You know how he is.”

He ordered another beer, his third. Already he was feeling light-headed, abstracted from this ridiculous little scene with someone he could no longer bring himself to regard with any degree of affection whatsoever.

Julia paused, brie-loaded fork halfway to her lips. “Josh, you’ve visited Ella’s hologram since you’ve been back, haven’t you?”

He shrugged, surprised by the turn of conversation. “What if I have?” he said, then: “How do you know?”

“Because you’re always so… I don’t know, melancholy, I suppose, after visiting the SIH.”

Referring to Ella’s image as the SIH was Julia’s way of ridiculing his time spent in the memorial garden.

He nodded. “We talked. It was good to see her again. I haven’t seen her for over a month.”

“It’s not a ‘her’, Josh, for Christ’s sake. It’s a computer program, a projection.”

“I know that.” He stared at her. “But apart from my memories, that’s all I’ve got of Ella.”

“You should make do with your memories then, like most grieving people.”

“But memories aren’t enough, Julia. I need more. I feel I have a relationship with her.”

Julia dropped her fork, theatrically, into her salad. “Jesus Christ.”

Bennett felt anger rise within him. “I do. I feel—”

“Josh, you can’t have a ‘relationship’ with a damned machine!”

“I don’t know. I think I can. I relate to her. I respond. She responds to me.”

“Let me put you right, Josh.” She picked up her fork and used it to point at him. “A relationship is a two-way thing between two human beings. A transaction of feelings, emotion, concern. But of course you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? A machine is about all you’re able to feel anything for.”

His voice cracking, he said, “The program learns, stores what I say, remembers our conversation. It’s like talking with a real person, Julia, except that it’s impossible to touch.”

Julia was silent for a while, staring at him. She leaned forward and whispered with vehemence, “But you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’d like to touch her, wouldn’t you?” Her gaze was relentless. “Or let me put it another way: you’d like to fuck her.”

“You bitch.”

He was overcome with the sudden urge to hit her, wipe the smug expression from her face. Then he thought he should walk away, just leave. But both options, he realised, would be craven.

“I’m serious, Josh. I don’t know what went wrong after Ella died, but it screwed you up. It warped you so that you couldn’t relate.”

“What crap!”

“No? Look at the girlfriends you’ve had over the years—not many, I must say, but a reasonable enough sample to trace a definite trend. What did all those women have in common, Josh?”

She waited, watching him.

“I’ll tell you. They were all tall, dark, dominant, pretty, younger than you. They were all grown-up versions of Ella, Josh. Ella as she might have been had she lived. You’re trying to find in us something of Ella, and when you fail to do so you close up. No wonder we can’t relate.”

He finished his beer and gestured to the waiter for another.

Surprising himself, he leaned across the table and said, “You’re so full of shit! If you spent half your time applying your half-baked psychology to yourself, you might learn something.”

He was aware of the other diners, watching him.

Julia was half-smiling at him. “Such as?”

He leaned back, suddenly weary and ashamed. He shook his head. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

He fell silent. He stared around the outside tables, suddenly aware of the other diners. They shied away from his regard and spoke in lowered tones, embarrassed.

After a while, he said, “Why did you want to see me? Is there someone else?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. There might be. I just had to tell you that it isn’t working. I owed you that, at least.”

He nodded, kept on nodding at the inevitability of what she had said. Julia finished her salad, slowly picking through the debris of endive and watercress.

Bennett drank his beer. When she looked up, he said, “You might think I’m a cold bastard, Julia, but we’ve had some good times.”

She was good enough not to contradict him. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for, Josh. I really do.”

“Julia,” he began. He almost reached across the table to take her hand, but stopped himself in time.

She stood and strode from the table, paid her bill at the bar and hurried away through the trees. Bennett watched her go, filled with that strange mixture of regret and relief he knew so well from all the other partings in the past.

He drank steadily during the afternoon, feeling the unaccustomed effect of the beer dull his senses. On Redwood Station he hardly socialised, and drank only occasionally. He pushed the thought of the station from his mind. He sat and watched the swans, their antics at once comic and undignified: they tipped themselves upside down, rubber-looking orange feet flapping, soiled scuts waggling.

He considered what Julia had said. He wondered if he was really looking for some mature version of Ella, the only person he had ever really loved. He found that the hardest thing in the world was to look into himself and attempt to determine the truth, so wrapped up as it was with the deception of self-interest and vanity. The thought that his actions as an adult might have been conditioned by events in his childhood filled him with fear, a terrible sense of not being in control of his motivation, and therefore his destiny.

He finished his beer and walked back through Mojave to his car. He drove slowly through the shimmering heat of late afternoon, aware of the effects of the alcohol. He arrived at his dome with the grateful sense of having gained refuge.

Mood-jazz began a gentle syncopation as he entered the lounge. He turned it off. The com-screen came on and the picture divided into small squares, each bearing a frozen face. He wondered why he should have been bombarded by so many calls. As he sat down in his swivel chair, he understood: these people were all friends or business associates of his father. He cycled through the messages of condolence, the dispiriting repetition of inadequate sentiments: “Your father was a fine, God-fearing gentleman, Joshua. He’ll be missed by everyone at the Church’; “I’m calling to offer my condolences, Mr Bennett…” Others were evidence of a side of his father’s character that he had managed to keep hidden from Bennett: “I was saddened to hear of your father’s passing. I worked with him back in ninety-five and I never met a more caring and compassionate man’; “Your father helped me out in a time of need back in the fifties, Mr Bennett. I’ve never forgotten him for his kindness.”

Rather than sit through them all and then reply individually, he set his screen to record, and said: “Joshua Bennett… Thanks for calling. Sorry I was unable to speak to you personally. You’re welcome to attend my father’s funeral, on the twenty-sixth at three p.m. at the Mojave Grave Gardens. Thank you again.” He sent the recording as a one-off shot to all the callers, then sat back.

He hadn’t eaten since early that morning, but he didn’t feel all that hungry. He was about to take a cold beer out on to the veranda when the screen chimed with an incoming call.

Another of his father’s acquaintances? Or perhaps Julia, calling to initiate a second round of abuse? He pressed the secrecy decal on the touch-pad and the image of a uniformed man in his forties flooded the screen. Belatedly, Bennett recognised Matheson, the flight manager up at Redwood. Only then did he remember his promise to get a report on the accident to Control.

He accepted the call and sat up.

“Bennett?” Matheson stared out at him, his expression uncompromising.

“Bennett here. About the report—I know, but I’ve had a few personal matters to sort out down here.”

“Forget the report, Bennett. As of now you’re on indefinite suspension. I want you up here in four days, noon western seaboard time, to face disciplinary charges.”

The effects of the beer slowed his response. “Disciplinary charges? What the hell… ?”

“Don’t look so goddamned surprised, Bennett.” Matheson leaned forward, staring at him. “The Viper debacle, remember? The accident? The starship you nearly decommissioned?”

Bennett shook his head. “Hey, hold on there. We weren’t at fault. It was a glitch in the Viper’s sub-routine. The ship rejected Ten Lee’s rewrite and—”

“Listen up, Bennett. Your reaction time was sloppy, no matter what your excuses. Have you any idea how much your incompetence cost Redwood? The bill for the repair of the Viper and the starship? You’re lucky we can’t sue you for it. You’ve no damned excuses.”

“But—”

“I’ll see you at noon on the twenty-sixth, Bennett. Out.”

The screen died. The twenty-sixth was the day of his father’s funeral.

He sat back, angry at the injustice. Suspension without pay, a fine or demotion at best. He wondered if Redwood had enough evidence of incompetence to fire him. But Ten Lee had been running systems checks constantly that flight, and the rejection of her rewrite should not have happened.

The screen chimed again, this time with an incoming pre-recorded message.

Bennett pressed accept.

A chunky, belligerent-faced man with grey curling hair began a fast, rapid-fire delivery. Bennett watched in a daze, catching none of it. The man was sitting behind a desk, a logo on the wall to his right: a stylised letter M shot through with an arrow. Encircling the logo was the legend mackendrick foundation.

He played the message again from the beginning.

“Mackendrick here, Bennett. I’m a busy man and I can’t waste time chatting one to one, hence this shot. Heard about your little bust up with Redwood—don’t worry about it, pal. You know what those Vipers are—pieces of shit. It was a systems error the Viper should’ve picked up, and we all know that. Look, I won’t waste your time or mine: I’m in LA tomorrow and recruiting. I need good pilots for an upcoming project. Don’t worry about the bastards at Redwood—I’ll sort them out. I’ll be in my offices at the shipyards from noon. See you then, pal.”

The screen went blank.

Bennett replayed the message, doing his best to assimilate what Mackendrick was telling him.

He was being exonerated from blame by a stranger—Mackendrick of the Mackendrick Foundation—told to forget Redwood, and offered a possible job on some “future project’.

He wondered if this was someone’s idea of a joke.

He reached for the touch-pad and accessed GlobaLink. He typed in “Mackendrick Foundation’, and two seconds later the message flashed up on the screen: “Three thousand articles re. Mackendrick Foundation. State specific area of interest.”

He typed “Mackendrick Foundation: summary’.

Seconds later text filled the screen: “Mackendrick Foundation, formed 2102. Extra-Expansion exploration company. Primarily concerned with discovery and exploration of new worlds beyond already charted space. [See: worlds discovered.] Fourth largest such company in Expansion. [See: business prospects.] Director: Charles Mackendrick. [See: Mackendrick: biography.]”

There was more, but Bennett had seen enough for the moment.

He fetched a beer from the cooler, stepped out on to the veranda, and watched the sun going down over the desert.