Ian R. Macleod - New Light On The Drake Equation

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New Light On The Drake Equation

by Ian R MacLeod

As he did on the first Wednesday of every month, after first finishing off the bottle of wine he'd fallen

asleep with, then drinking three bleary fingers of absinthe, and with an extra slug for good measure, Tom

Kelly drove down into St. Hilaire to collect his mail and provisions. The little town was red-brown,

shimmering in the depths of the valley, flecked with olive trees, as he slewed the old Citroën around the

hairpins from his mountain. Up to the east, where the karst rose in a mighty crag, he could just make out

the flyers circling against the sheer white drop if he rubbed his eyes and squinted, and the glint of their

wings as they caught the morning thermals. But Tom felt like a flyer of sorts himself, now the absinthe was

fully in his bloodstream. He let the Citroën's piebald tires, the skid of the grit and the pull of the mountain,

take him endlessly downwards. Spinning around the bends blind and wrong-side with the old canvas roof

flapping, in and out of the shadows, scattering sheep in the sweet hot roar of the antique motor, Tom

Kelly drove down from his mountain towards the valley.

In the bureau de poste, Madame Brissac gave him a smile that seemed even more patronising than

usual.

"Any messages?" he croaked.

She blinked slowly. "One maybe two." Bluebottles circled the close air, which smelled of boiled sweets

and Gitanes and Madame Brissac. Tom swayed slightly in his boots. He wiped off some of the road grit

which had clung to the stubble on his face. He picked a stain from off his tee-shirt, and noticed as he did

so that a fresh age spot was developing on the back of his right hand. It would disappoint her, really, if he

took a language vial and started speaking fluent French after all these years-or even if he worked at it the

old way, using bookplates and audio samples, just as he'd always been promising himself. It would

deprive her of their small monthly battle.

"Then, ah, je voudrais …" He tried waving his arms.

"You would like to have?"

"Yes please. Oui. Ah-s'il vous plaît …"

Still the tepid pause, the droning bluebottles. Or Madame Brissac could acquire English, Tom thought,

although she was hardly likely to do it for his sake.

"You late." She said eventually.

"You mean-"

Then the door banged open in a crowded slab of shadows and noise and a cluster of flyers, back from

their early morning spin on the thermals, bustled up behind Tom with skinsuits squealing, the folded tips of

their wings bumping against the brown curls of sticky flypaper which the bluebottles had been

scrupulously avoiding. These young people, Tom decided as he glanced back at them, truly were like

bright alien insects in their gaudy skinsuits, their thin bodies garishly striped with the twisting logos of

sports companies and their wings, a flesh of fine silk stretched between feathery bones, then folded up

behind their backs like delicate umbrellas. And they were speaking French, too; speaking it in loud high

voices, but overdoing every phrase and gesture and emphasis in the way that people always did when

they were new to a language. They thought that just because they could understand each other and talk

sensibly to their flying instructor and follow the tour guide and order a drink at the bar that they were

jabbering away like natives, but then they hadn't yet come up against Madame Brissac, who would be

bound to devise some bureaucratic twist or incomprehension which would send them away from here

without whatever particular form or permission it was that they were expecting. Tom turned back to

Madame Brissac and gave her a grin from around the edges of his gathering absinthe headache. She

didn't bother to return it. Instead, she muttered something that sounded like I'm Judy.

"What? Voulez-vous répeter?"

"Is Thursday."

"Ah. Je comprends. I see …" Not that he did quite, but the flyers were getting impatient and crowding

closer to him, wings rustling with echoes of the morning air that had recently been filling them and the

smell of fresh sweat, clean endeavour. How was it, Tom wondered, that they could look so beautiful

from a distance, and so stupid and ugly close up? But Thursday-and he'd imagined it was Wednesday.

Of course he'd thought that it was Wednesday, otherwise he wouldn't be here in St. Hilaire, would he?

He was a creature of habit, worn in by the years like the grain of the old wood of Madame Brissac's

counter. So he must have lost track, and/or not bothered to check his calendar back up on the mountain.

An easy enough mistake to make, living the way he did. Although …

"You require them? Yes?"

"S'il vous plaît …"

At long last, Madame Brissac was turning to the pigeonholes where she kept his and a few other

message cards filed according to her own alchemic system. Putting them in one place, labelled under

Kelly; Tom-or American; Drunk; Elderly; Stupid-was too simple for her. Neither had Tom ever been

able to see a particular pattern which would relate to the source of the cards, which were generally from

one or other of his various academic sponsors and came in drips and drabs and rushes, but mostly drabs.

Those old brown lines of wooden boxes, which looked as if they had probably once held proper

old-fashioned letters and telegrams, and perhaps messages and condolences from the World Wars, and

the revolutionary proclamations of the sans-culottes, and decrees from the Sun King, and quite possibly

even the odd pigeon, disgorged their contents to Madame Brissac's quick hands in no way that Tom

could ever figure. He could always ask, of course, but that would just be an excuse for a raising of Gallic

eyebrows and shoulders in mimed incomprehension. After all, Madame Brissac was Madame Brissac,

and the flyers behind him were whispering, fluttering, trembling like young egrets, and it was none of his

business.

There were market stalls lined across the Place de la Révolution, which had puzzled Tom on his way into

the bureau de poste, but no longer. The world was right and he was wrong. This was Thursday. And his

habitual café was busier than usual, although the couple who were occupying his table got up at his

approach and strolled off, hand in hand, past the heaped and shadowed displays of breads and fruits and

cheeses. The girl had gone for an Audrey Hepburn look, but the lad had the muscles of a paratrooper

beneath his sleeveless tee shirt, and his flesh was green and lightly scaled. To Tom, it looked like a skin

disease. He wondered, as lonely men gazing at young couples from café tables have wondered since time

immemorial, what the hell she saw in him.

The waiter Jean-Benoît was busier than usual, and, after giving Tom a glance that almost registered

surprise, took his time coming over. Tom, after all, would be going nowhere in any hurry. And he had his

cards-all six of them-to read. They lay there, face down on the plastic tablecloth; a hand of poker he had

to play. But he knew already what the deal was likely to be. One was blue and almost plain, with a

pattern like rippled water, which was probably some kind of junk mail, and another looked suspiciously

like a bill for some cyber-utility he probably wasn't even using, and the rest, most undoubtedly, were

from his few remaining sponsors. Beside them on the table, like part of a fine still-life into which he and

these cards were an unnecessary intrusion, lay the empty carafe and the wine glasses from which the

lovers had been drinking. Wine at ten in the morning! That was France for you. This was France. And he

could do with a drink himself, could Tom Kelly. Maybe just a pastis, which would sit nicely with the

absinthe he'd had earlier-just as a bracer, mind. Tom sighed and rubbed his temples and looked about

him in the morning brightness. Up at the spire of St. Marie rising over the awnings of the market, then

down at the people, gaudily, gorgeously fashionable in their clothes, their skins, their faces. France, this

real France of the living, was a place he sometimes felt he only visited on these Wednesday-this

Thursday-mornings. He could have been anywhere for the rest of the time, up with the stars there on his

mountain, combing his way through eternity on the increasing offchance of an odd blip. That was why he

was who he was-some old kook whom people like Madame Brissac and Jean-Benoît patronized without

ever really knowing. That was why he'd never really got around to mastering this language which was

washing all around him in persibilant waves. Jean-Benoît was still busy, flipping his towel and serving up

crepes with an on-off smile of his regulation-handsome features, his wings so well tucked away that no

one would ever really know he had them. Like a lot of the people who worked here, he did the job so he

could take to the air in his free time. Tom, with his trois diget pastis merci, was never going to be much

of a priority.

Tom lifted one of the cards and tried to suppressed a burp as the bitter residue of absinthe flooded his

mouth. The card was from the Aston University, in Birmingham, England, of all places. Now, he'd

forgotten they were even sponsoring him. He ran his finger down the playline, and half-closed his eyes to

witness a young man he'd never seen before in his life sitting at the kind of impressively wide desk that

only people, in Tom's experience, who never did any real work possessed.

"Mister Kelly, it's a real pleasure to make your acquaintance …" The young man paused. He was clearly

new to whatever it was he was doing, and gripping that desk as if it was perched at the top of a

roller-coaster ride. "As you may have seen in the academic press, I've now taken over from Doctor Sally

Normanton. I didn't know her personally, but I know that all of you who did valued her greatly, and I,

too, feel saddened by the loss of a fine person and physicist …"

Tom withdrew his finger from the card for a moment, and dropped back into France. He'd only ever met

the woman once. She'd been warm and lively and sympathetic, he remembered, and had moved about

on autolegs because of the advanced arthritis which, in those days at least, the vials hadn't been able to

counteract. They'd sat under the mossy trees and statues in Birmingham's Centenary Square, which for

him had held other memories, and she'd sighed and smiled and explained how the basic policy of her

institution had gone firmly against any positive figure to the Drake Equation several decades before, but

Sally Normanton herself had always kept a soft spot for that kind of stuff herself, and she'd really got into

physics in the first place on the back of reading Clarke and Asimov. Not that she imagined Tom had

heard of them? But Tom had, of course. They were of almost of the same generation. He'd developed a

dust allergy from hunching over those thrilling, musty analog pages as a kid. They chatted merrily, and on

the walk back to the campus Sally Normanton had confided as she heaved and clicked on her legs that

she had control of a smallish fund. It was left over from some government work, and was his to have for

as long as it took the accountants to notice. And that was more than twenty years ago. And now she was

dead.

"… physicist. But in clearing out and revising her responsibilities, it's come to my attention that monies

have been allocated to your project which, I regret to say …"

Tom span the thing forward until he came to the bit at the end when the young man, who had one eye

green and one eye blue-and nails like talons, so perhaps he too was a flyer, although he didn't look quite

thin enough and seemed too easily scared-announced that he'd left a simulacrum ai of his business self on

the card, which would be happy to answer any pertinent questions, although the decision to withdraw

funds was, regrettably, quite irrevocable. The ai was there, of course, to save the chance that Tom might

try to bother this man of business with feeble pleas. But Tom knew he was lucky to have got what he got

from that source, and even luckier that they weren't talking about suing him to take it all back.

Aston University. England. The smell of different air. Different trees. If there was one season that

matched the place, a mood that always seemed to be hanging there in the background even on the

coldest or hottest or wettest of days, it had to be fall, autumn. How long had it been now? Tom tried not

to think-that was one equation which even to him always came back as a recurring nothing. He noticed

instead that the wineglass that the pretty young girl had been drinking from bore the red imprint of her

lipstick, and was almost sad to see it go, and with it the better memories he'd been trying to conjure,

when Jean-Benoît finally bustled up and plonked a glass of cloudy yellow liquid, which Tom wasn't really

sure that he wanted any longer, down in front of him. Voilà. Merci. Pidgin French as he stared at the

cards from Madame Brissac's incomprehensible pigeonholes. But he drank it anyway, the pastis. Back in

one. At least it got rid of the taste of the absinthe.

And the day was fine, the market was bustling. It would be a pity to spoil this frail good mood he was

building with messages which probably included the words regret, withdraw, or at the very least, must

query … This square, it was baguettes and Edith Piaf writ large, it was the Eiffel Tower in miniature. The

warm smells of garlic and slightly dodgy drains and fine dark coffee. And those ridiculous little poodles

dragged along by those long-legged women. The shouts and the gestures, the old widows in black who

by now were probably younger than he was muttering to themselves and barging along with their stripy

shopping bags like extras from the wrong film and scowling at this or that vial-induced wonder. And a

priest in his cassock stepping from the church, pausing in the sunlight at the top of the steps to take in the

scene, although he had wings behind him which he stretched as if to yawn, and his hair was scarlet.

Another flyer. Tom smiled to think how he got on with his congregation, which was mostly those

scowling old women, and thought about ordering-why not?-another pastis …

Then he noticed a particular figure wandering beside the stalls at the edge of the market where displays of

lace billowed in the wind which blew off the karst and squeezed in a warm light breeze down between

the washing-strung tenements. It couldn't be, of course. Couldn't be. It was just that lipstick on the edge

of that glass which had prickled that particular memory. That, and getting a message from England, and

that woman dying, and losing another income source, all of which, if he'd have let them, would have

stirred up a happy-sad melange of memories. She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress and was

standing in a bright patch of sunlight which flamed on her blonde hair and made it hard for him to see her

face. She could have been anyone, but in that moment, she could have been Terr, and Tom felt the

strangely conflicting sensations of wanting to run over and embrace her, and also to dig a hole for himself

where he could hide forever right here beneath this café paving. He blinked. His head swam. By the time

he'd refocused, the girl, the woman, had moved on. A turn of bare arm, a flash of lovely calf. Why did

they have to change themselves like they did now? Women were perfect as they were. Always had been,

as far as Tom was concerned-or as best he could remember. Especially Terr. But then perhaps that had

been an illusion, too.

Tom stood up and dropped a few francs on the table and blundered off between the market stalls. That

dark blue sleeveless dress, those legs, that hair. His heart was pounding as it hadn't done in years from

some strange inner exertion of memory. Even if it wasn't her, which it obviously wasn't, he still wanted to

know, to see. But St. Hilaire was Thursday-busy. The teeming market swallowed him up and spat him

out again downhill where the steps ran beside the old battlements and the river flashed under the willow

trees, then uphill by the bright, expensive shops along the Rue de Commerce, which offered in their

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