It was the teenage summer that never ends. The golden days of hope and promise.
My physical world is contained by the village. The school. The church with tree-shaded graveyard. The ‘Coach & Horses’ pub, with the village shop a stroll across the crossing. And Marie, the Catholic girl who lives a little way up the lane. My days divide between impossible thoughts of her, and the garish SF paperback that’s permanently rammed in my back pocket. I sit on the five-barred gate overlooking the field that stretches all the way to the river. The air drowsy with insect hum. And I snatch a chapter. These are the future days I will grow into. Not quite like this. But close enough. And the wait seems endless…
I read in breathless anticipation. On the page, the protagonist knows that in the canal-side taverns of Mars they laugh at old Ahab, adrift in a cosmic mistake, lost in worlds that can never be. In the ruined palaces of the Venus rainforest and the domed cities of the Lunar Sea of Storms, they watch his battered old Solar Ship rise into the silence and darkness, the dark silence between worlds, hunting rim ghosts and angel bubbles. Until Mars recedes to a star large enough to hold cities and deserts and canals, yet small enough to keep safe in his back pocket. Spacefarers are a superstitious breed, they travel on the whims of fate. But they laugh at old Ahab’s space-wreck story. About how he was rescued adrift oxy-starved, off Iapetus on the debris of his ship. Alive against all the odds. His ramblings about hearing the song of sirens, and of being nurtured by benign space-whales, has been mocked ever since. How they come fishtailing on ripples of micro-moons, grazing on gravitational radiations, eddying on the tides of space. But he persists. And whenever funds allow, he hunts Saturn’s rings for evidence, in an aimless dragonfly dart of solar sails.
I recognise this as a story about yearning. Because all I have is yearnings. Marie has freckles. All I want is to eat freckled kisses. But how can I tell Marie that I have the soul of a poet, when all I have is fumblings? People create dreams. This is a dream that created itself.
As I cross the crossing towards the bus stop, Marie is already standing there beneath the shading lilac tree, she’s waiting to catch the same bus into town. There’s no space to back down or swerve. She smiles. We talk. She talks easily, fills in for my tongue-tied silences. Tells me about school, which teachers she likes, which teachers she doesn’t. And about the things her friends confide in games of truth or dare. She looks down and sideways, as though either checking for the bus arrival, or if we are being overheard. She tells me ‘They asked me, do you fancy Andrew Darlington?’
How do I respond to that? I blurt out ‘and what did you tell them?’
She smiles in a way that rocks the planet on its axis. ‘I said, it might be nice to find out.’
The rest of that summer belongs to Marie. But not beyond. In the same way that those cosmic futures never quite arrive. In the same way that they get frittered away in day-to-day trivia. But it was beautiful while it lasted. How could it be otherwise?
In the novel’s second half, after the point where the paperback creases over neatly into two equal parts, and pages come adrift and float free, Ahab is approached by a collector with a research ship and a sponsorship deal, to find the ethereal beings once and for all. Ahab has his battered Solar Ship, its sails drinking in light. The Toison team follow in their larger sleeker model. Looping Saturn’s rings he hears the faint song of sirens, and follows, until they see a formation of five bright stars. Only they’re not stars, because they move at surprising speed in tight spirals, smooth, lustrous and blinding in their luminance. They swim a sea blacker than shadow and as quiet as sleep, yet engulfed in a tight universe. A quickening seed of thought. A leakage, a spill from parallel timestreams, shifting through cracks in biological limbo?
Vast, but insubstantial, propelled by a flick of their mighty tails, stars can be seen through their huge ghost-shape dimensions. And these void-dwelling organisms sing the song of sirens. His is his vindication. No longer can they mock grizzled old Ahab. Toison’s ship is filming, taking readings, recordings, measuring. No doubts now. No more ridicule.
It’s only then that he sees Toison’s ship manoeuvre, and he watches with growing horror as the harpoon portal slide open. He realises their intention. Without hesitation he turns his Solar Ship in a tight curve, grips the controls so tight his knuckles whiten, braces himself hard, and dives an unwavering collision course. They monitor him too late. The battered Solar Ship impacts the harpoon eye in a sudden blossom of flaring fire…
Instantly Ahab awakes to fishtail on ripples of micro-moons, graze on gravitational radiations, eddying on the tides of space beside the shoal, others of his own kind. He sees the wounded Toison ship limping back towards Titan… then forgets it all, as he falls through familiar nothingness, swimming from noplace to nowhere, delightfully lost in infinite negation.
I close the book. I think of Marie. So are the space-whales nothing more than a clumsy poetic metaphor for chasing impossible dreams, a contrived plot-device? Or are they more than that? There seems to be a truth here that I can’t quite decipher.
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BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
From an idea by Karen Smithey.
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