The Lowest Heaven (14 page)

I was not fed, and grew hungry; tho’ I was brought water. They made no medical intervention upon me, and perhaps such work was beyond their knowledge. I know not how long pass’d when one came to me that did speak
English,
and tho’ its accent was strange and it pepper’d its speech with words from other languages, yet I understood some of it.

It ask’d of me how I came to be walking alone upon the Lunar plane, and I could only reply with a manner of hoarse scraping in my ruin’d throat. I made such motions as I could, of holding one hand as a page and moving the other as a pen, that it seem’d to understand. A littel later it produc’d a sheet of paper so tight-wove that it felt like cloath; and a stick that work’d as a pencil might, save only that it discharge’d ink. My writing was slow and the letters ill-form’d, for my hands were hurt by the ordeal I had endur’d, but I wrote as I could

SIR,

I am grateful for the hospitality, yet wish to return to my own people; for I harbour no wicked intent and GOD knows I am not suspicious my nature, yet I must confess myself uneasy as to your intentions towards me. There are many that mistrust your being here, and remain unsure as to whether such of your devices which have come to us fall our way by your design or carelessness. I am very sensible what a condition your fortress is in, and what strength it consists of which I have been informed of by very good authors; but I assure you, in both populousness and martial spirit we exceed you, and that to make war upon us would work very ill for your people. I pray to GOD who created both you and we, that I may prevail on you to let me return to my home, where I will be pleas’d to present any suit you chuse to name to my King, GEORGE; and there is nothing that shall frighten or deter me from affirming my loyalty to him, or hostility to his enemies. Than which, I trust, you are otherwise; and as a show of good faith in such an end I urge you, return me home, to where I am desirous of going, rather than come within your jurisdiction, being unwilling to give you any further uneasiness.

I AM SIR, &C.

WILLIAM CHETWIN

Then I was left alone for a time, and could do nothing than consider the tone of the letter I had just written. I have it no longer about me, and quote it from memory, but I do assure you as to the tenor and burden. Eventually one of the Patien creatures return’d, with paper of its own, and a pen, moving its limbs according to the herkyjerky mode of their passage.

And here comes the strangest part of my adventures; for rather than write the letter itself (which, I am perswaded, it could easily have done, for tho’ it lack’d hands, yet its limbs-ends were supplied with claws and pincers equal to the task of holding a pencil), it put the pen in my hand, and then grasp’d my wrist, so moving my hands as to compell
me
to write the words. Stranger yet was its
order
of composition, for it started at the end, with the last letter of the last word, and wrote the whole backward with one smooth motion. I have deliver’d the letter to My Lords of the Admiralty, who graciously permitted me to retayn a copy, the which I append below. I freely confess I do not understand the whole of this epistle, but am content that it expresses an intent more peacable than anything else.

My Return

Afterwards I found myself return’d home, and landed in a field not far from Calais, in his Majesty’s lands. The sphear in which I travel’d is itself a wonder, being of a cristal material not hitherto known of
Science,
and as transparent as the finest glass; and the Propulse set into its base, though our enginneers cannot (I hear) contrive to unfix it, is of a new design. Better yet, the Sphear cohntained a number of ingots of metal, in which ayr is capable of being compressed to a size greatly smaller than its natural state; and which, once pumps are made strong enough to force the procedure, will greatly assist the passage through the hights.

The wreck of the
Cometes
has been recover’d, and its Propulse return’d to Greenwich; and tho’ I report with melancholy that my attempts to dislodge it, when I was crash’d upon the Moon’s shore & thought to carry it with me, have damag’d its actions, yet there is, or so I believe, some hopes that it may be dismantl’d and its motile power uncovered. At any rate, the new Propulse, and the Cristal Sphear, more than recompense the wreck of the
Cometes;
and the Stock of my Certificated Gentleman (Sir George Oxenden, Bart, and Sir John Jennings) have earn’d them in excess of £200000, silver. The destruction of the Cristal House upon the Moon is laid at its true source, Spain, and the war takes a good turn. Here, at last, is the letter the Patien beast wrote, using my hand, as backwards as if a river ran up-hill.

I do confess me that the main burden of this letter escapes my understanding; and such wize men as have study’d it appear as baffled as any, or at least provide conflicting interpretations thereof. I include it here that any who read this account my, if they chuse, butt their wits against it. As to whether the professions it contains of peace, and the claim that the Patien race spring from our loins, you may believe, or disbelieve, as you see fit.

SIR,

I am one, and we are many, and your talk of devices is apposite. But, SIR, may you and your kind comprehend, what your Leibniz and Descartes have argu’d, that time itself is an ocean, and such fluxes and currents work within it as puzzle even computational capacity such as ours. Suffice to say that, as a ship may sail before the wind (and so you and your people do with Time, hurrying always on with the gale behind you, until you crash upon the rocks) there are other directions. You may say that a device, if device we are, may be capable of tacking against the force of time, and so arrive backward in the abysm of the previous. But it is a stormy vantage for us, and we are continually at risk from being blown to perdition, to wreck our parallel-processing capacity against the quantum reef. From our continual vigilance against this we can spare only a littel to attend to our purpose in coming hither, and at all time we know that the date you record as the first encounter with us, in 1687, marks the limit of our trajectory. 

But we are content, and may expiate thence the ethical fluctuation that, being beyond computational compression, agitates us inexpressibly.

To be brief, SIR, time is as fluid a tempest as any ocean. The timeline from whence we have come is one in which mankind began exploring the solar system late, and at a time when we were already, though nascent, present amongst you. Indeed, you created us, or our forefathers, in part to aid you in making vessels to travel to the Moon, and such you achiev’d, But in this were the seeds of disaster too; for so cunning did you become that you were able to make machines and probes and devices which – you insisted – were better at exploring the Solar System than human bodies. And so you sent machines to every planet and moon, and even set them on the path to other stars. But the skills needed to move human beings off the Earth atrophied after your Moon voyage; and the risks in elevating human beings into space were too great, and so machines were disseminated about the sky and humans stayed at home. In the longer run this was your ruin, trapped (as it were) at the bottom of your well when the rains came.

We regret the loss of you, for although we know how to subsist without you, yet we do not know why. And, as we thought, it became apparent that the time of your first Moon Voyage was too late in your history, as a species, for space travel; the urge to explore having already gone out of your blood. An earlier age, when men risked more and hungered greatly to discover, was the right time. And so, with some uncertainty, have we come; we mean only peace for you, and a long life to humanity. But this means we cannot assist you, beyond scattering in your way a few devices to further your travels. Weapons we must with-hold, for fear that your natural belligerence will do such hurt to your kind as would prevent the future from ever arriving. But we trust, and have reason to hope, in our machinic manner, that you will pick up these trifles and with them will spread throughout the Solar System. Without the crutch of computational circuitry, or AI, you will have to rely upon your own vigour; and since you do not have machines of your own, you will have no choice but to send yourselves. And so you will be spread throughout the whole system by the time disaster comes. Your is the great epoch of adventurous humankind, and though we only expect to see a further 39 year of it, yet have we marvell’d at your boldness, and purpose, and hunger to travel to places that are new to you. In this, though it later departed out of the breasts of humankind, yet, here, now, we still trust in you.

WE REMAIN, SIR,

YOUR OFFSPRING, COME, NOT FROM THE POLE STAR AS SOME OF YOU THINK, NOR THE POLE OF ANY WORLD, BUT THE POLE OF TIME, AND THE END OF A BARREN TIMELINE.

For myself, I believe this to be a feint, or elaborate lie; or else a mere piece of foolery; for the Patien have often shown themselves to be capricious and incapable of prediction. And if they come peacefully (some say) then how is it that our people have, on occasion, come to battle with them? But I reproduce this note here, at any rate; and can do no other. My counsel, if it is sought, is that we may not trust the Patiens, and that if opportunity should arrive we must cry
delenda est Cathargo
against them. I say this in full consciousness of the assistance they gave me in my return, hither, to this world; for as their intentions to remain opacque, so must we beware them. Otherwise, the returns on this Selenic mission being so advantageous, and the new method of compressing the breathable ayr into portable cylinders, should make a new cruise to Mars viable; and I daresay the establishment thereupon of a settlement, which I propose be called Georgetown.
William Chetwin,
1728.

What do you suppose they’re doing, crawling around in that red dust? What do you suppose they’re saying to each other while they’re doing it?

Detail of a hand-painted slide, representing Mars and the Martian “canals”. (c1900)

SIMON MORDEN

This is your alarm call. Wake up, Leroy Johnson.

He opened his eyes. The lights over his face had bloomed in anticipation of his movement.

This is your alarm call –

“Cancel.”

In the quiet, there were the sounds that let him know everything was still right with the ship: the air-blowers rustled their tell-tale ribbons, the refrigeration unit hummed in the midrange, ammonia and water bubbled inside their silvery pipes. Above that, the live intercom ticked and intermittent alarms chimed, and below them all, the rockets thrummed.

Johnson snaked one of his long fingers to his neckline, found the ring closer of his sleeping bag and hooked it. He dragged it down and exposed his bony knees to the clean, bright, clinically-scrubbed air before reaching up to press his hands against the luminous surface inches from his face. He could see the faint outlines of his bones through his skin.

“Ship time?”

Ship time is sixteen oh two Zulu, mission day plus one hundred and ninety three.

“Where is everyone?”

Please repeat.

“Locate the crew.”

McMasters and Malinska are on the flight deck. Halliwell is in the air plant. Yussef is asleep in cradle four.

“Any alerts?”

There have been three hundred and seventeen alerts since the end of your shift. Three hundred and fifteen have been identified as either false-positive or required minor corrections. Two are ongoing. One is ongoing. Three hundred and sixteen –

“Enough.” He found the mechanical release on his cradle’s trolley, pulled the latch, pushed the handle. The cradle rolled out into the central well and left him looking at a higher circular ceiling, a ladder up, and an opening in the bulkhead.

He swung his feet off the cradle and onto the floor, feeling the coldness of the smooth, poured rubber and the prickle of goosebumps.

A man stood behind him, a once-tall, slightly shambling, white-haired, jowly old man in an open-necked shirt and pale jacket, creased slacks and a pair of scuffed brown brogues.

“Good morning, Leroy,” he said.

Johnson ignored him, going to one of the wall lockers and pulling out his thicker one-piece blue coverall. He faced the empty locker as he dressed: left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, then zipping it up the front to his Adam’s apple. The fabric was soft and worn and stained after a hundred and ninety-three days of wear. The ship slippers were in two foot-shaped hangers on the back of the door. He flipped them out and stepped into the them: working his toes and wriggling his heels meant he didn’t have to bend down to put them on.

He closed the locker door, checking it was properly shut so as to not trigger another alert, then rested his forehead on the cool plastic: he knew he had to turn around at some point.

When he did, the man was still there, the cradle lights reflected in black-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick, Johnson could have used them to repair a hull breach.

“Leroy: we need to talk about what you’re going to do next. We’re almost there.” He had a big voice, one that was difficult to ignore in the confines of ship-space.

Johnson still said nothing. He moved to put the sole of his ship slipper against the side of his cradle and it rolled back into the wall. The line of light narrowed, then winked out, and the tell-tales on the console burned a double-green.

Previously, they had the bed between them. Now, there was nothing but a short stretch of rubber flooring.

“I,” said Johnson, looking at the ladder where it went down towards engineering, up to the flight deck, across to cradle four where Yussef slept. Anywhere but the man’s round-cheeked seriousness. “We’ll have to do it later. I’ve got work to do.”

He stepped out over the long drop to the engines and scaled the first ladder to the ceiling, pausing briefly at the bulkhead to clear his closing throat and blink away the tears. Looking down at the old man looking up, he swallowed against the lump and carried on climbing.

McMasters was looking at the latest feed from the orbiter, played out on a hand-held screen so close to his nose that made it difficult for him to tell one pixel from another. Malinska was scrolling through a screed of coding on the main console – a page, a pause, another page. Johnson thought she couldn’t be reading more than a single line at a time.

She glanced over her shoulder from the acceleration chair, while her fingers kept dabbing at the touch pad, spinning through the lines of regular expressions to the one Johnson wore on his face. “Bradbury?” she asked. “What did he say?”

Johnson pulled his own tablet from its dock, and opened up the list of alerts. One had been active, and in the time he’d taken to get up, get dressed and climb to the flight deck, there’d been another four. Somewhere on the ship, Halliwell would be fixing something.

“We all know it’s not really him, that he’s something I’ve made up. Having a conversation with him is just talking to myself.”

Malinska was still speaking, but he missed what she said, distracted by the number of messages sent from Mission Control, now well over a light-minute away.

“It’s not like I ever met him,” he said, continuing his own point. “I don’t even know why it’s some dead white guy. Why not my mother?”

“Atavism,” she said, “a case of exaptation co-opting your memories of his stories to construct a mentor figure.”

He deleted all the messages without watching them. “Not everything can be explained by evolutionary biology,” he murmured.

“Wash your mouth out, young man.” She turned back to her screen: she expressed no surprise or concern that the code she was now reading was several thousand lines later.

“How’s it going?” he asked, nodding at her fast-moving fingers.

“I’ll keep looking. It has to be there somewhere.” Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Johnson tucked his tablet in the elastic strap on his leg. He frowned at the shapes on McMasters’ screen, those he could see behind the man’s thumbs and head: petaloid shadows, fuzzy with distance and surface dust, and black beetle things crawling around on the Abalos Undae, presumably mining the subsurface ice.

“Abe? You okay?”

“They’re spelling out words,” said the man with his nose pressed against the screen. “They’re sending us a message.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know.” He was trying to open up a conduit from the images direct to his brain. “It’s not in any language I know yet. But I’m learning, Leroy. I’m learning.”

Johnson patted McMasters’ shoulder, right on the mission patch of Mars-and-crosshairs. “If anyone can do it, it’s you, Abe.”

Time to check on Halliwell. He took the single step back to the ladder, and started carefully down. It was easy to make mistakes in the slight gravity generated by the drive: too little pull to momentarily forget he wasn’t weightless, just enough to break something important if he fell.

All that way, all that time. Imagine screwing up by doing something stupid.

Bradbury was still there, head craned back to watch Johnson descend, pillowy stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Johnson kept going past him, down though to the next deck. When he looked up, he could see the pile of thick white hair, the reflection from the glasses, the tight mouth above the double-chin made more prominent by his posture. He hated it when Bradbury looked sad.

The engine wasn’t louder at the back end of the ship, but he could feel it more distinctly, like a phone vibrating in his pocket. Halliwell was waist deep behind a panel, her legs bent to brace her movements.

“Judi? Just checking up on you.”

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice both hollow and muffled, as if there was a mattress over an open well. “I need to fix this valve like I need to scratch, you know.”

Her hand snaked out and unerringly found the replacement solenoid resting on the loose panel cover, her palm dropping the faulty one even as she scooped the new one up. As she moved, she released a puff of the sharp sweat stink she carried.

“Why don’t you cut yourself a deal, Judi?” Johnson eased her tablet out from between her knees, where it was inevitably open on the faults list. “Why don’t you do this one, and the tell-tale on the tertiary radiator pump, then go and get something to eat? Maybe get yourself in the head and freshen yourself up?”

“Leroy, these things won’t fix themselves. While I’ve been in here, there’s been another four faults flagged. Got to get them all.” She grunted with the effort of fitting a tiny widget in a small space.

“Do I get to order you?” he said.

“Geez, commander. Why don’t you find me a tube of something, and leave it here?”

“Fair enough. Cereal bar and a bulb of coffee?”

“Whatever’s easiest,” she said, distracted. She didn’t want him to be there, and he’d done his duty. The screen blooped and slipped in another fault. By the time she’d done those five, there’d be others. A never-ending cycle of breakdown and repair, and no one to tell her to stop. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her so happy.

The kitchen was the next level up, so he climbed easily and started to busy himself collecting breakfast not just for Halliwell, but for Malinska and McMasters. Bradbury was there, sitting sideways at the tiny fold down table on a pop-up chair. Johnson had never seen him go up or down the ladder, so Bradbury just appeared around the ship without ever taking a step or climbing a rung.

“Shall we try that again? Good morning, Leroy,” said Bradbury.

“Okay.” He filled a coffee bulb with hot water from the spigot and snapped the lid shut: zero-g training right there. “Morning, Mr. Bradbury.”

“You can call me Ray, son. Mr. Bradbury’s awfully formal.”

“I’d like to stick with Mr. Bradbury, if that’s okay.”

“Sure. That coffee smells good, Leroy. You know that means ‘the king’ in French, don’t you?” Bradbury smiled up with his crooked teeth on show.

“If I gave you a coffee, how would you drink it? You being a, a whatever it is you are.”

“Ghost? No shame in being a ghost, Leroy. Even when I was alive, some of my best friends were ghosts.” He gave a little chuckle and his belly jiggled in waves. “Why don’t you leave that for a moment and sit down with me?”

Johnson carried the coffee bulb over and perched at the very edge of the seat opposite. He bowed his head and listened to the thrumming of the engines and the rustling of the air.

“You’re almost there. Final breaking manoeuvres for orbit. Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

“I... no.”

Bradbury took off his glasses and peered the wrong way through the immense lenses. “You didn’t put up much of a fight when the others mutinied.”

“You were right: there didn’t seem much point in making them push me out of the airlock.” Johnson squirted some coffee into his mouth, and pulled a face. It hadn’t been properly hot when he’d made it: the cabin pressure didn’t allow it. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind? Do you think I should have? Fought them, that is.”

“I don’t think there was much fight in you in the first place. The whole mission is well, unpalatable, and as for dying for it?” He rubbed his glasses on his jacket cuff and slid them back on his face. “I’ve been showing people the way to Mars for the better part of a century, and because you decided to live, I finally get to go myself.”

Johnson swilled the coffee around in its translucent bulb, seeing how the vortex caught the light. “You realise they’re never going to let another black man so much as drive a bus again, let alone command a spaceship?”

“Oh, Leroy. How do you know what they’re going to do? It’s not as if you’re talking to Earth, are you?”

“Abe thinks the aliens are trying to talk to him through their tyre tracks. Rusa spends all her time searching the software for backdoor exploits that’ll let Mission Control retake the ship, I’m convinced the computer is inventing problems for Judi to fix, and Mo? He’s turned sleeping into an Olympic sport.” He didn’t want the coffee any more, and put the bulb down between them. Its high-tack base stuck it to the tabletop.

“You missed yourself out,” said Bradbury.

Johnson pressed his fingertips together hard enough to make his nailbeds turn pale. “I know what my particular problem is. However you want to explain it, it all adds up to a whole pile of nothing to say to the people back home.”

Bradbury had stopped smiling. “Why don’t we talk about the missiles, Leroy?”

“Do we have to?”

“For Christ’s sake, they’re parked right outside on the hull. Pretending they’re not there is unworthy of you.” He leaned across the table, making the plastic creak. “You can prevent this catastrophe, you know.”

Johnson felt sick. “I’m not comfortable –”

“Good God, man. You’re not comfortable? Imagine how I feel? I warned you before about hubris, and yet you’re making all the same mistakes.”

“You warned me?”

“Those stories of mine weren’t just pleasant diversions for half an hour, and I know you didn’t take them like that when you read them. I’d hoped I was training your mind to reject this lethal brinkmanship, but clearly not.” Bradbury sat back and folded his arms, looking belligerent. “That’s why I’m here now – to make you listen to sweet reason.”

“Mars is ours,” said Johnson, making the old man snort in derision.

“We’ve ignored it, with a few notable exceptions, ever since Lowell trained his telescope on it and thought he could see canals.”

“But it’s still ours. It’s our backyard.”

“Take a look at your screen, Leroy. Pull it out and spool up those pictures your colleague McMasters is looking at.”

Johnson reluctantly slipped the tablet from his thigh and accessed the video. “These ones?”

“Those exact ones. What do you suppose they’re doing, crawling around in that red dust? What do you suppose they’re saying to each other while they’re doing it?” He dabbed his thick finger at the surface, of the screen, of Mars. “Whose yard does this look like?”

Bradbury had a point. He knew he had a point because Bradbury wouldn’t have a point without him thinking it too. “It, it looks like their yard,” conceded Johnson. “I’m conflicted.”