The Ghosts of Heaven (30 page)

Perhaps
, he thinks,
I should never have tampered with my psychometric test results …

It is an uncommon moment of doubt for Bowman, and it soon passes, because his hands and his mind are busy. There is only one choice, in his mind, one option. He is going to take the ship to the source of the spiral.

He has the computer lock the source of the radio wave in its starfield. He gets the flight computer to calculate the change of direction that the ship will have to make. Wryly, he thinks the flight computer could at least thank him for something to do; it has been flying in a straight line for the last forty years, without even once encountering an incident such as an asteroid field to compute a trajectory around.

The ship is traveling very fast now. It is not a ship designed to turn corners. The best it can do is to offer gentle curves by a fractional displacement of the virtual sail that is emanated in the space of the ship's toroid.

The flight computer gives him the results; it will take eight years to make the turn, another three to reach the calculated source of the radio wave.

“What's eleven years,” Bowman says, “to a man who sleeps for ten every night?”

It takes him the rest of the day to complete the protocols for the diversion of the mission. The ship will only allow it at all because it agrees with the assessment that intelligent life has been found.

The mere fact that it
will
allow this shows Bowman that he is right: the Global-Government lied about New Earth. There is a high chance that if and when the occupants of the
Song
eventually get there, it will be an uninhabitable ball of rock, choked by acids and gasses. The Government Council that created the mission knew that there was always another option: signs of intelligent life denote a habitable planet, and all the best astro-biologists agree on one thing; that life is such a precious and precarious thing, that the conditions on Earth were so specific in allowing its creation, that any intelligent life on
other
planets will almost certainly indicate that the life there arose in very similar circumstances to our own. That the planet, therefore, will be like Earth, or near enough. Such is the arrogance and self-centerdness of the human. And that belief, that other life will be humanoid, is why the
Song of Destiny
carries an armory of weapons on each PTP.

*   *   *

At moments when he has to wait for the ship to perform various calculations, he starts work on his sentinel pod. He has changed his mind about staying awake. He would rather dream his way to the rendezvous. He hacks into the system that controls sleep cycles, and sets his pod to wake him after eleven years. He also finally tests and reboots the alert systems, and finds traces that someone has indeed been tampering with it. He knows now that it was him who did that, an uncomfortable feeling, but as he reaches the end of his work, he realizes that he has been working constantly, without any losses of time. He can remember everything he has done, and that gives him hope. Maybe whatever happened to his mind has rectified itself and there is no more cause for alarm.

What happened to the fifteen pods is regrettable, of course. But now there is a bigger mission, something that outweighs everything, something to rewrite the pages of history, something that changes everything about human existence and belief, forever.

And he, Keir Bowman, will be the one to do it.

He will change the universe.

*   *   *

Without any hesitation whatsoever, he makes the final keystrokes, and fixing the initialization vector to zero, prepares to unlock the secrets of the ghosts.

The ship begins its infinitesimally shallow turn.

Bowman retires to his pod, and prepares to dream his way to immortality. Just before the pod lid closes, he leans down into his personal effects drawer and takes out his book of poetry. Something has touched inside him, a memory of a poem in the book.

There is no more time to read it now, but he holds the book to his chest as he goes under, intending to read it in his dreams.

 

377

How arrogant is man, Bowman has sometimes wondered, to think he can know everything about the universe while stuck to the surface of a tiny planet in a remote region of the galaxy? Yes, great things have been learned, but not everything. There is always the unknown. No matter how high you climb on the spiral staircase, there is always another turn of the stair, out of view, and that's where the unknown lies.

We learned long ago about such things as black holes; when certain stars die and collapse in on themselves, creating a gravitational effect so strong that not even light can escape its pull. And their counterparts, the white holes, spewing matter out into the universe, creating new galaxies, new stars, new planets. Are these two things linked? Is there a tunnel between them, from one place in the universe to another, or even from one universe to a different one entirely? Perhaps that's where we began, spewed out of a white hole as a star in another universe died.

*   *   *

At these physical limits, who knows what happens to the laws of the universe? And who knows what other extraordinary things have yet to be found, far from Earth?

The
Song of Destiny
hurtles onward at speeds once thought impossible. Inside the ship, it is totally silent. It is near dark. Nothing moves, except the dreams of Sentinel Bowman.

His dreams have taken on a new character. They have opened out, they have calmed down; in his dreams, he dreams about dreams. He dreams about dreaming about dreaming, and for almost all the eleven years that he sleeps, a calm greater than anything he has ever known settles within him.

But space is not as well-studied as the scientists back on Earth liked to think, as the
Song of Destiny
is about to discover. Ahead of it, in the extraordinary cold emptiness, there is the thing that Bowman has dreamed of, so often; a thing for which words do not exist.

The
Song
glides onward, traveling so fast now as to impress itself on the universe around it; blundering blindly toward this volume of space that is torn, damaged.

At first, the ship detects nothing wrong, but then, physical transformations begin to occur, and it registers a breach in the hull, even though no such thing has yet occurred.

Detecting the breach, the ship triggers emergency responses and wakes Bowman.

He climbs out of the pod, forgetting that he had placed a book on his chest eleven years before. It tumbles to the floor of the deck.

He looks at it, then ignores it, and looks at the clock on the wall. He reaches for his suit and checks his bio-clock again.

The ship groans.

It actually makes a sound, giving a vast and deep moan. It is the first unexpected sound that he has heard in fifty-one years, and it terrifies him.

He runs to Base Four, and is soon out of breath, even worse than before. He can barely pull himself inside Terminal Base Four and collapse in the chair at the console, and when he does, he sees the reason why.

There is a breach to the Base Four chlorophyll bank; oxygen is at critically low levels, about half what it should be. Already he recognizes the signs of oxygen deficit. He has a terrible headache, he is finding it hard to think clearly and every action takes an enormous amount of effort, leaving him spent.

He starts to get the ship to report on the status of all systems, that way he can just sit back in the chair, and …

What? Isn't there something he's supposed to be doing?

There was something that had happened. He knows they're heading for New Earth, but it seems that has he been woken a year late. Eleven years of sleep, not the usual ten. Haven't the other sentinels noted anything strange? Slumped in his chair, he reads their reports, trying to figure out what it is that bothers him about their words. There was something about the other sentinels, wasn't there? And their words.

Their words …

Words …

*   *   *

Then the
Song
slams into the destroyed pocket of space, the unknown, broken gate.

Bowman stands, and staggers, just as space and time stagger around him.

He sees a spiral of cold blue fire rise from the floor of the Base and twine itself around him.

The spiral vanishes.

Then the words come:

Why have you come?

says a voice from the air,

and what was it that you expected to find?

You who have come to trouble the dead.

You whose voice was swallowed by dark

should know the path that was laid for you.

*   *   *

Yes!
Bowman thinks. He has learned something, that the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Bowman can still half see the console in front of him, but it is faint, mixed with other images now.

Words coil around him. The words are Allandra and the other dead of the
Song
. They speak to him with their dead mouths, trying to explain themselves; they want only to be understood.

… should know the path that was laid for you.

Bowman cries out.

“Path? What path?”

Through the gate, under the apple tree,

across the wet grass …

*   *   *

The ship begins to complain. Forces greater than anything it has known start to claw and tear at it from inside and out. It shudders, and the spasms of the ship send great thunders of sound rolling down the curved decks of the ring.

Bowman stares down at the console, through a series of twisting ropes he can just make out the schematic of the pods, red lights flashing across his eyes.

There is a pool.

A pool of cold brown water, stained by the peat from the dales. He's in the water, swimming, unable to breathe. He sees a spiral carved into the underwater rock. Hands reach for him as he tries to reach for the keypad to see if the leak in the chlorophyll banks can be contained.

He swims to the surface, spluttering, and finds that the pool has gone.

Behind Bowman, a dark gray figure walks across the room, calmly yet curiously regarding him fighting with the computer that won't seem to wake him up. Bowman knows that he needs the computer to wake him, or he won't be able to be here to do the things he has to do so he programs it to wake him. Then, he waits to see himself come in through the door.

As Bowman turns to Deck Three, waiting to see himself, the dark figure walks out to Deck Four, a Lethno probe in its hand. In the same moment Bowman realizes that
he is on deck
, that he is already awake because the computer
has
woken him. He is able to do what he needs to do.

He shakes himself, but it's so hard to think. His headache is slicing.

The ship's systems are fighting, burning.

Bowman sees that the other four Bases report no sign of oxygen leakage, but he wonders how much longer the ship can hold together.

Here, now, standing beside him on the deck, is an American poet.

He drowned himself, pushed over the edge by a meaningless spiral left on some unknown other's grave, having just retold a little girl called Verity a beautiful thing about geese.

“Let me tell you a poem,” he says to Bowman.

Bowman stares, but in his mind he says,
Yes
.

“It's not by me,” the poet says. “Mine were dark things that no one wanted. But I did not mind. Let me tell you this poem, now.”

Bowman nods, slowly, once.

And those who never smiled at the sun,

and lay on thorns, watching the moon,

the thirsty, the hungering, the hollow,

the trodden-down.

Those who watched the damaged stars,

waiting for One who would never come

while beyond the final, broken gate

the voices of ghosts come out of the air.

What was it that you expected to find?

And what did you expect?

Satisfaction, understanding?

Salvation before the ending of the days?

Yet, just around the turn of the stair,

a glimmer of torchlight awaits your discovery.

“What do you think?” asks the poet. “Those are just a few lines, of course, but I find it startling and powerful.”

“I don't understand,” says Bowman.

The poet smiles.

“Neither did I,” he says. “But I do now.”

*   *   *

The poet is gone. In his place, Bowman finds that he is standing in a workshop of some kind. Carpentry tools lie spread on the bench beside him, curls of wood shavings lie in little spiral forms all about him, on the bench, on the floor. He hears the scrape of a spoke shave and turns to see a man working on a long wooden box. The man is middle-aged, heavy, and his hands are both powerful and delicate at the same time. He lifts his head and looks at Bowman.

“You know they used to use nails,” he says. “In the old days. Poor folk still do. Not the best idea, a nail in a coffin.”

Bowman says nothing, but in his mind, he asks,
Coffin?

The man nods, smiling. He picks something up now, and shows it to Bowman, for inspection. It is a long brass screw.

“That's better,” he says. “Better than a nail. Notice anything about it?”

Bowman shakes his head.

“The screw runs widdershins. Back to front. 'Gainst the clock. All other screws in the world turn the other way to this one. But coffin screws are different.”

Bowman forms a word in his mind.

Why?

The coffin maker smiles.

“To stop them coming back, of course.”

Bowman closes his mind for a moment and, with it, his eyes.