The Things We Learn When We're Dead Page 9

  Irene put a hand on her shoulder. ‘The process of regeneration involves memories becoming untangled, Lorna. It’s your mind’s way of rearranging things. Think of it like this, petal. Your old brain has moved into a new home and it’s trying to shift the furniture about.’ Irene exhaled smoke. ‘If it matters, then perhaps you will remember. If it doesn’t matter, then perhaps you won’t. Memories aren’t always important, young Lorna, and sometimes it’s better to forget than to remember.’ Irene arched her eyebrows. ‘None of that make any sense, does it?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  Irene turned on her heel, motioning for Lorna to follow. ‘In which case, to answer your earlier question, the flight deck is twelve floors down and at the other end of Heaven. However, young Lorna, the good news is that in Heaven we never walk anywhere. Yesterday was all about testing your new musculature, to make sure everything had regenerated properly.’ Irene stopped by a door with a small green triangle on it, which she pressed. ‘Today, we travel in more style.’

  Seconds later, a door slid open to reveal what looked like a lift.

  ‘After you,’ said Irene, motioning her inside.

  It also felt like a lift, but without buttons.

  ‘Flight deck, please.’

  Of course, Irene.

  Trinity, soft and sensual and omnipresent, her voice oozing from every portion of the walls, ceiling, and floor.

  ‘Best hold onto the rail,’ Irene advised. ‘This thing goes sideways as well as up and down.’

  The transporter first moved to the left, which made Lorna flinch, having never been in a lift that did anything except travel vertically. Lorna had the impression that it was attaining high speed before it slowed and stopped, then travelled downwards. Another stop, sideways again, and then down.

  The door slid open.

  Flight deck.

  ‘Thank you, Trinity.’

  Irene set off down a wide corridor that, unlike anything Lorna had yet seen, was painted dark grey. ‘Trinity does like to hear please and thank you,’ Irene advised over her shoulder. ‘It’s not compulsory to be nice but, as you’ll find, if you’re nice to her, she’ll be especially helpful to you. Whenever you see a wall panel with a green triangle on it, you know you’re beside a transporter stop. If you can’t find one, ask Trinity. Wherever you are on this facility, you just have to ask. Usually, Trinity will respond.’

  ‘But not always?’

  ‘No, not always.’

  Irene had reached what looked like a blank wall. Lorna, following behind, heard internal locks slipping and unlocking, then saw that the wall was slowly cranking open. It was double-leafed, each plate fully six inches thick. A few feet further on, another blank wall and the sound of more locks unfastening. A screech of metal as this wall inched open. This time, a triple-leaf door of six-inch plates.

  ‘Blast doors, sweetie, in case of unforeseen accidents.’ Irene tapped her foot impatiently as the heavy doors edged open. ‘Actually, Trinity does have a teeny-weeny problem, Lorna, attributable to yet another of God’s little mistakes. You’ve already seen one of the little bastards, haven’t you? Come on, you used to own one! As a pet, or so I’ve been led to understand.’

  The little face in the latticed grille, small back eyes looking at her unblinkingly, her shriek bringing the young James Bond at a canter.

  ‘They’re bloody everywhere!’ said Irene with some venom. ‘Thousands of the little fuckers! But does he do anything about it? No, he bloody well doesn’t! They eat through wires, and Trinity’s peripheral subsystems are particularly vulnerable to their little rodent teeth. Trinity sometimes won’t answer, because she’s been rendered temporarily deaf.’ Irene sighed and shook her head. ‘The old fool’s over there,’ she said and turned on her heel. ‘I’ll see you later, petal.’

  Starbright

  Lorna found herself in a place the size of several dozen cathedrals. The ceiling, somewhere above, was lost in darkness. It took her some moments to acclimatise herself to the twilight. The rest of Heaven was filled with light; here it was sepulchral gloom, save only for small lights down the flight deck wall, stretching almost as far as she could see.

  ‘Over here, young Lorna.’

  God’s voice from underneath a giant shadow.

  She tiptoed across the metal floor.

  ‘You want me to show you one of our spaceships?’

  ‘It’s awfully dark, God, but yes.’

  With a snap of his fingers, celestial light poured down on the area in which they stood. Lorna gasped. Above her loomed a cream-coloured flying machine the length of a football field. It had a snub nose, square body, and stubby wings. Looking up, Lorna saw a darkened cockpit window. A couple of inspection hatches on its flank were open, cables attached to the flight deck floor. Stencilled to its side was HVN-2 in gold lettering. Edging backwards from it, she saw that its stern fluted into six giant exhaust nozzles. She could have fitted comfortably into any one of them and not been able to touch the sides.

  ‘I apologise for being theatrical,’ said God with a small shrug. ‘But, sometimes, a little drama is a good thing. This,’ he said, laying a hand on one arm of the spaceship’s hydraulic landing gear, ‘is an Adelphi class freighter. We use it to transport personnel and material around. It’s a sublight craft, so it isn’t very fast, but it is reliable and robust.’

  Lorna simply stared at it in wonderment.

  ‘It’s huge,’ she said eventually, reverentially.

  ‘Well, it has to be,’ replied God, ‘otherwise it wouldn’t be fit for purpose, now would it? Like all spaceships, even Heaven itself, the Adelphi is powered by anti-matter annihilation reactors. These can take the craft to near lightspeed, but not beyond. Close enough to cause a ripple in the space-time matrix, but not into hyperspace.’

  God, warming to his subject, was lapsing into gibberish. ‘However, Lorna, if you think this is large, follow me.’

  God walked straight under the Adelphi. Lorna reached up but couldn’t touch the craft’s under-belly. It smelled damply of oil and neglect.

  Another snap of his fingers and more lights.

  In front of her, another spaceship, but this one was double the size of the freighter. At its prow, a long tapering nose, rising and thickening in a perfect wedge to its tail which had the same configuration of exhaust nozzles as the Adelphi. In the circle of light, Lorna could imagine its potency.

  ‘This is a Gemini,’ said God. ‘One of our greyhounds.’

  For a few moments Lorna was unable to speak. The Gemini was perfection; the absolute image of what she might have imagined a spaceship to look like. Like the Adelphi, its cockpit window was in darkness.

  ‘It certainly looks fast,’ said Lorna, adding mischievously: ‘But can it do the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs?’

  God looked at her blankly. ‘Do you want me to tell you how it flies?’

  She didn’t really need to reply. God was going to tell her anyway.

  * * *

  ‘Proper spaceflight involves the ability to pass safely and repeatedly from realspace to hyperspace and back again, crossing and re-crossing the speed of light. Without that capability, Lorna, you don’t get anywhere very fast. In fact, given the dimensions of space, you don’t get anywhere at all.’ He paused, looking mournful, and stroked his beard. ‘Anyway, to cross from realspace to hyperspace requires a hyperdrive. However, to understand how a hyperdrive works, you must first understand the resonance between pulsed electromagnetic and gravitational wave forms, which together make up space-time metrics. Is that clear so far?’

  Lorna coughed. ‘Not really, God, no.’

  God, one-time space-pilot, wasn’t listening. ‘Tell me, Lorna, how much do you know about magnetic-field line merging?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ conceded Lorna, miserably realising that the principles of spaceflight might be more complicated than she had first thought.

  ‘Hydromagnetic wave effects?’

  ‘No.’

 
‘Free-electron lasers?’

  No.’

  ‘Containment fields? Artificial gravity? Inertial dampeners? Lorna, to understand how a hyperdrive works, you have to first know something about elementary science.’

  ‘Which I don’t, obviously.’

  ‘In which case,’ said God with an exasperated sigh, ‘I can see I’ll have to keep it simple. You did ask.’

  Lorna’s eyes traversed the great wedge of the Gemini, from its elegant nose to the six giant exhaust nozzles at its rear. It towered over them both, technology beyond imagination, reduced to useless metal.

  God had clasped his hands behind his back and addressed her as might a schoolteacher. ‘Try not to think of hyperspace in terms of speed, young Lorna. In hyperspace, speed is irrelevant. Try to think of it as a dimensional crossing point because, in the realspace dimension that we occupy, objects can only travel below or above the speed of light. Never precisely on the speed of light. Your Einstein was quite correct, you know. His second law of motion rightly postulated that nothing can cross lightspeed because the energy to do so becomes infinite.’

  God bit his lip and frowned. ‘Nice chap, if I remember. Well, anyway, the point is that every space-time location is unique. Gravitational and electromagnetic fields, you see.’

  He paused to see if Lorna was following him, which she wasn’t.

  ‘The next bit is more tricky, Lorna. When a supralight spacecraft like this Gemini reaches the threshold of lightspeed, it generates a configuration of electromagnetic and hydromagnetic fields that have a perfect resonance with the distant space-time point that it wants to travel to. To achieve that, the Gemini’s lasers are capable of generating many times more energy than all of Earth’s power stations put together. Quite simply, by changing those lasers’ wavelengths and frequencies, the hyperdrive can tune into even quite faraway harmonics.’

  To Lorna, the Gemini looked frozen to the deck; an obsolete museum piece that could never again regain the power of flight. It seemed desolate or stranded, a marvel without discernible purpose.

  God looked at it sadly, as if reading her thoughts, and continued in a softer voice. ‘The harmonics that it generates create an imbalance in the space-time matrix that allows it to pass from realspace to hyperspace in a fraction of time so small that time itself is meaningless.’

  ‘Thus getting round Einstein’s second law,’ said Lorna, feeling momentarily that she was catching on.

  ‘Bravo!’ said God, and clapped his hands, setting up an echo. ‘After crossing into hyperspace, the secret of its flight then lies in the basic projection laws that govern all dimensional travel. That too was postulated by Einstein, by the way, although nobody took much notice at the time. Only now are your scientists, rather belatedly in my view, beginning to pay attention.’

  Lorna was looking at him blankly.

  God sighed again. ‘Projection laws, like all physical laws, are there to re-establish order and balance. Think of space as a place filled with TV stations, each broadcasting on a different frequency. What Gemini does is dial into a particular frequency, which may just happen to be thousands of light years away. Because the laws of physics don’t allow one object to be in two places at the same time, the simple laws of projection takes Gemini to where it wants to go. We call that process transition and, frankly, Lorna, even a child should be able to understand something so simple.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Lorna, ‘I’m not a child.’

  * * *

  Tom would understand what God was talking about, and for a moment Lorna wished that her brother was there with her. Growing up, she never got to know him, not really. Despite being close in age, they were separated by gender. Her brother smelled of sweat and rugby, alien and male; he might have been her flesh and blood but, to Lorna, there were no obvious similarities. He had fair hair to her brunette; he possessed square features and short, fast legs. Lorna was slender, so slim that she sometimes seemed to bend against the wind. There were few points of similarity, at least few that she could see. Relatives had concluded that Tom took after his father, and that Lorna took after her mum. But her father didn’t have short, fast legs; her mum was forever grumbling how long it took him to complete a round of golf. Nor did he have Tom’s pugnacious features or his shock of unruly hair, always needing a cut; Lorna looked in vain from father to son hoping to find echoes of herself.

  They were different in other ways. Lorna liked to read. She was happy in her own company, aware even then that North Berwick offered only entrapment and believing that books might offer an escape. Tom, twirling a rugby ball on one finger, lived only for the company of others. It didn’t matter to Tom where he was so long as he had friends around him. The solitary daughter and gregarious son grew up like boxers, warily circling. Only once, however, did it come to blows. Tom had said something, on top of a lot of other things, and Lorna had snapped, a red mist descending. She’d punched him quite hard, on the nose, and was surprised to see blood on his face. Tom put a hand to his nose and examined the blood that had been transferred to his fingers, gleaming red under the living room light. But he didn’t react as she thought he would, already cringing and backing away. All he did was stand there, looking like a large puppy, startled and inert, until Lorna had to laugh and he joined in.

  But if Tom didn’t share her love of books, he was good with his hands. As a child, his Lego creations were works of art that drew gasps of admiration from their mother. He built robots that actually walked; he painstakingly glued together replicas of the Titanic and B-52 bombers. Lorna would marvel at his sausage fingers and their clever dexterity. She couldn’t make things. The instruction booklets that came with his scale models could have been written in Greek or Latin (neither of which were on the syllabus of North Berwick High School). The logic gene that could make sense of assembling lots of little bits into one big thing had only been inherited by Tom. He would huff and puff and shake his head at her stupidity, but it was no good. She took solace in her mother’s shared inability to build flat-pack furniture. When they bought Lorna a new wardrobe, it was Tom who assembled it, their mother holding the instruction sheet upside down and scratching her head.

  Tom would understand how a spaceship could defy the laws of the universe. With a bit of encouragement, thought Lorna, he might one day build one. For Lorna, it was enough that the TV worked when you switched it on. It was enough that the car worked when you turned the ignition. She didn’t want to know how they worked; merely that the technologies she encountered did work. Lorna preferred books. For her they conjured up worlds beyond her own, mental pictures of how things could be in a place and time beyond her here and now, where her father once more reached for the bottle he kept under the sink and looked guiltily over his shoulder to see if anybody noticed. Lorna, curled on a chair, would raise her book to cover her face. There were other things she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to.

  She smiled sadly at God, who was once more stroking his beard. Above them loomed the impossibly large hull of the Gemini, crammed full of wonders that Lorna now realised would forever remain far beyond her understanding.

  God, sensing this, offered a small shrug. ‘The intricacies of spaceflight are rather complicated,’ he said, one hand gesturing towards the spaceship’s flank. ‘I’m sorry if I sounded condescending.’

  Lorna smiled. ‘I was never very good at science.’

  ‘I know,’ said God.

  Lorna was startled by His certainty. ‘You do?’ she asked, trying not to sound disbelieving.

  ‘Lorna, I chose you.’

  Another absurdity: God had a whole world of humanity to choose from. What muddled thinking had led him to choose her? Even if he was a real God, which he wasn’t.

  ‘Why?’ Only a few are chosen, she reminded herself, once more feeling like an intruder. She didn’t belong in Heaven; her new skin felt tight and unused. In her world, her old world, unexpected guests were eventually asked to leave.

  ‘I felt sorry for you
.’

  ‘That’s hardly an answer,’ said Lorna, more forcibly. God seemed to be playing a game with her and she didn’t know why.

  ‘I chose you, Lorna, but I’m not yet at liberty to explain why. That may sound contrary but, in Heaven, there is a reason for everything.’ He looked uncertain for a moment, as if He didn’t quite believe himself. ‘However, I do appreciate what you must be thinking. Why me? Why have I, among so many others, been gifted eternity? I wish,’ he conceded, looking downcast, ‘that I could be the God you imagined I would be. Believe me, it would be so much easier.’

  He sighed and slowly took a deep breath. ‘I have granted you an afterlife, Lorna, and for now let’s leave it at that. It might not make any sense at the moment but it will.’ God’s head was tilted back so his words rose softly towards the distant flight deck roof. His eyes were twinkling; in their azure depths, under the overhead lights, were reflected trapped galaxies. ‘However, in making my choice, I did find out everything about you, including your lack of scientific aptitude.’

  ‘Not everything,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I didn’t kill myself,’ said Lorna, as if it now made any difference.

  * * *

  With the merest flick of God’s hand, a panel on Gemini’s side soundlessly opened and a crystal walkway unrolled to their feet. Lorna now saw that the interior of the ship was illuminated, a greenish glow emanating from the cockpit window far above. God seemed pleased with His theatrical trickery and, lacing one arm through hers, led her up the glass-like ramp. Questions burned on the tip of her tongue, but she knew better than to ask them. Eternity gave her limitless time; she’d find out why she was here eventually. God’s certainties and patent fallibility had unsettled her: he wasn’t her God, yet he had chosen her and brought her to Heaven. For a purpose, she reminded herself. But what purpose could a lawyer serve in Heaven? On Earth, her purpose had been defined by aptitude and training; here she was defined only by death. The interior of the spaceship smelled damply of wet blankets.