In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (3 page)

T
here is something I can’t recall. It has a name, like
farther,
or
whom
, but these are wrong. It was in the dream that woke me this morning, we call it morning when I awaken here, but I couldn’t remember the dream: only the shape of the word dissolving, a pair of lips parting, puckering
shh
. I told this to mission control, I don’t know why. Maybe because the way they say “Good morning” annoys me: it’s afternoon in Houston, and it’s nothing you could call anything here. So I said there was something I couldn’t remember, ate breakfast, and turned on the reader.

My coffee was cool by the time the reply came, breaking into their recitation of today’s schedule: which system did I think it was in? Without pausing they returned to their list and read on. I lowered the gain, said “No, it’s nothing real, it was in a dream. It sounds like
hips,
or maybe
warm
.” I mixed more coffee and started a new story, one of Stern’s mysteries: murder and incest, funerals, gunfire, somebody floating face-down.

Mission control muttered softly, static on the air. “Say again,
Prometheus?
” They hate to ask for confirmation, now the line of sight has stretched to twenty minutes. The distance makes communication between us strained, as I have come to suspect the lengthening pause between question and response. It makes their politeness sound too deliberate to be genuine. This is only an illusion, the effect of distance.

“It was in a dream,” I told them, and looked from the reader out the port. Jupiter was off abeam, a featureless star so bright its light seems heavy. I can feel it in my eyes. Soon the image will spread, form a disc. I try to imagine what it will look like: a marble, a banded shooter, a catseye: I have seen pictures, but it will not be the same. There will be a salmon-colored eyespot, which I’m looking forward to seeing. It was our mission’s objective. At least it is something to wait for.

Return transmission was eight minutes late. “We’ve asked Dr. Hayford to discuss this with you. If you’d like.” If I’d like: back at Houston, Hayford could have driven halfway home by now, leaving a string of words slung through the ether from mission control: I could no more shut him up than I could stop this ship. Since Stern and Peterson walked out on me, there’s been a lot of empty deference on the airwaves, mostly incoming.

Dr. Hayford claims to know me better than my mother does, and this may be so, but I think he feels inadequate to this situation. “We’ve reviewed your transmission,” he says. “I gather it’s not your nightmare. So I’m glad. You mentioned a sound in this dream. That’s a good sign. Would you like to talk about it? I’ll wait.”

I told him if I remembered it I wouldn’t have bothered them in the first place, I didn’t care about it anymore, let’s quit wasting time.

I let him think it was only a sound, but it was more: it was a word.

HERE IS A
list of mission control’s euphemisms:

the burn

the event

the incident

the accident

the unfortunate [all of the above]

the spontaneous ignition

the midcourse miscorrection

the transorbital overenhancement. This one was my favorite, but the one they prefer is “the accident.” I have started to ask them, “Which one?”

And they say I’ve lost my sense of humor.

I STILL NEED
to explain. We slept afloat, adrift like tethered fish, hugging ourselves to keep our arms from feeling awkward. My mouth opens in my sleep, sometimes saliva wells around my tongue, forms a sphere inside my mouth, and then I inhale it and wake, choking. I hack on the gob of spit, cough it out, and when I can breathe again I look around and see only dark, drifting shapes, I cannot remember who or where I am. I see Stern and Peterson afloat on their tethers; I hear them breathe, first one, then the other, a soft sound like water flowing into a drum. The ship cycles air, water; servos whine on and off around the hull, all these sounds are very close, and though I would wake immediately if they stopped, waking now gagging in the dark these sounds are stifling, and I think first I have awakened with a fever in my bedroom in my parents’ home, I have heard the horn of a freighter on the lake; but then a window drifts in front of me, a light shines far beyond the pane, and I see stars, so thick they seem a solid mass, and the cabin walls could dissolve in an instant.

SICKENING PLUNGE THROUGH
roaring; darkness; twitch at my belly the tether snapped; falling aft: down: we tumble together on the after bulkhead, Stern feet first and shouting, but the roar of the main engine drowns his voice, the darkness defeats us as we struggle. Peterson is motionless. The cockpit and controls now up against acceleration a dozen meters never meant to be climbed, I feel the distance stretching each second the ship leaps farther and faster ahead, leaving behind the fuel we need to get home. Banging my head against stanchions, losing my grip and slipping in the dark, alone, there is only one sound, and no progress upward: the ship is climbing away with us, and its gathering speed strips each moment out past measuring.

Suddenly there is light and I am blinded, blinking at the workbench I hug. Stern hangs from the opposite wall. We look up. A speaker squalls “…status…cutoff…manual”: gibberish. I freeze, but Stern climbs again, barking more noise into air already too burdened to carry sense.

Nineteen minutes and some seconds pass before we can override the impulses that somehow opened the fuel system. Silence, and we fall freely again through space, faster now: I can feel the pace in my pulse. Peterson drifts forward through the cabin, his head trailing a pennant of blood.

NOW THAT THE
cabin is empty, there is no reason to float around in bed any longer than the moment I awake: off tether, off to the head, breakfast, mission control like the morning news on the radio. I read more and more each day: deserts, dry gulches, buzzards circling. Jupiter stands off to starboard, brighter than before, and now I see a disc. I realize what I said in my first entry was a lie: I can’t compare its size to anything we know, the head of a pin, an egg, my eye. If I had a penny, I could hold it to the glass and compare, but there’s not a cent aboard, isn’t that odd? I’m glad I can’t: the comparison would show me nothing but a penny in my hand, and beside it, so far away I count the space in months, not miles: a planet. Its image is as clear as if etched on the glass, its satellites are perfect points of light beside it, all on a line, balancing. I envy them. I feel heavy and obtuse.

But I am weightless: an overhand pull swung me out of the cockpit and back into the cabin. Gone these five months and not once thought of cash, but I spent the rest of the afternoon tearing through Stern’s and Peterson’s effects, rifling the ship just to see. Not a cent.

MISSION CONTROL HAS
many suggestions: about me, the ship, our mission. They are like bachelors babysitting. I sense fear in their omissions. “In theory…” they say, and skip ahead to speak of Jupiter. While I hang here listening, they weigh the orbits open to me there, and plan for my survival until rescue comes. They appear to have made a decision: they offer to make me a constellation, translate me into the sky with Io, Europa, and the rest. I am skeptical. It is not mission control that sets my course; it is ahead, Jupiter growing broader and brighter by degrees so small I never see the change, whom I must answer to. In practice, I doubt that I will have much to say in the matter.

There is one group that wants me to stop these recordings, and another wants them transmitted instead. A third thinks I should carry on, and one lonely man is horrified at the prospect. I suspect he knows what he is talking about, and wish he would shut up.

THE SHIP MOVES
on, and forces me to choose. Here, the choices are simpler, the rules clearer: action, reaction; mass acting on mass; an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless…But this kind of clarity is useless to me now, since I can see Jupiter clearly ahead, and know how all these equations balance, what answers they will come to: something very like a zero. I could crash there, of course; I could orbit it and wait for mission control; or I could crack the whip around it, shoot out in any direction I choose: how much more poignant to fly past Earth on my way out into darkness, moving too swiftly to say goodbye. I’d prefer to keep on the way I’ve come.

I prefer: in none of the equations for action, mass, and motion have I ever read a term for my capacity to choose. There are more things in heaven than in earth, I see that now. I am not in theory anymore; philosophy is not a dream. I am alive, that star behind me is the earth, and there is no “unless” in Jupiter. But there are choices.

WHILE THE BALANCE
of its mind was disturbed, mission control brought my parents in to talk to me today. I mean that. I think they have taken leave of their senses, lost their marbles, gone off the deep end. My parents are in their nineties, and have not left the retirement home since I put them there ten years ago, and I do not visit often. Dad is aphasic; Mom talks, but how much is there to say? She asks me how my work is going, and I tell her,—Okay, and she says, brightly,—Good. Generally we leave it there, and spend our time more fruitfully on doctor’s appointments, outings to the mall, the hazards of slippery floors. Once, when I told her I had just returned from Mars, confusion overwhelmed her. I pitied her then, with a generosity I needed desperately at the time. It is only recently I have come to wonder if her confusion is not after all a state of grace.

And now they’ve sent an air-conditioned sedan to fetch them to the airstrip, bundled them on a NASA jet, transshipped to Houston. Here. For a moment it seemed the radio was eavesdropping on my childhood, the voice in the speaker calling from the kitchen door, come in for supper, put on your jacket, its getting late, time to come home. I shook my head, wondering if this were one of Hayford’s radio dramas, and I the only one without a script, hearing her say,—Your father’s here. His voice saying,—Where is he? and then the cabin walls, the stars outside, all fell away and I could see them in their Florida clothing, their heads quivering on their delicate necks as they turn to watch technicians passing, voices hurrying saying nothing they can understand.

“Get them off. Get them out of here. Take them home.”

I cut the connection.

I HAVE BEEN
floating here in silence since, thinking of my alternatives, to stop at Jupiter or travel on: the journey outward, into silence so thick as to become something: a pressure, a presence here with me. As weight surrounds a mass, so silence would fill the air around me, falling in, rising from blood rustling in my ears to become a whisper, a word spoken, a cry, the roar of burning and finally the crash of everything that falls. Beyond Pluto, silence would be more than absence of speech: even zero has meaning, but what is zero taken to an infinite power? And on what fingers do I count it? Though I could hear the singing of the spheres, see colors off the spectrum, touch nothing: how could I tell? and whom?

I reach up and touch my ears: they are cool. I try to trace their infoldings with my finger, picture the pattern there, but my mind won’t follow:
pinna, auricle,
these words drift through my thoughts, and I don’t know where I learned them, or how they might help me in the silence beyond Jupiter. I only know that between cool flesh and colder vacuum, I will have my hands full. I am Jupiter-bound.

But by how long a chain?

STERN AND PETERSON
left in that order, on successive days. The initiative was Stern’s. We did not talk much in the days following the burn. At first, I attributed this to simple shock, and fear for our survival. Conversation seemed at first a burden, then a risk. But just as we no longer sensed our new velocity once acceleration ceased, so our increased risk became a piece with the fears we’d shared since liftoff and before. Still we found it hard to talk, even to meet each others’ eyes: as if the sudden return to free fall, the leap from acceleration to silence, had shaken something loose and left us trying to remember how to talk.

Stern started mumbling after a week, odd things, as if he thought we wouldn’t hear: “elucidate,” “supernal,” “ineluctable.” He prowled like a pregnant cat, carrying objects to and from the hold: I remember his back receding through the hatch, shoulders hunched and holding something precious: a hand-vacuum, binoculars, a hair-dryer. On a Monday I heard him mutter “Terra matter,” and on a Tuesday he was gone. He left in the lander, leaving us its portable seismometer and a set of digging tools, a deeper silence, and then the voice of mission control, advising us of a change of plans.

He left at night. The whine of servomotors woke me and Peterson to wonder why the hold had opened, and where was Stern, and then, befuddled, why the hold-hatch was dogged: through the deadlight we saw nothing, then stars burning in vacuum, and we understood, slowly, why the hatch wouldn’t open, why we were locked in, and as we floated there, feeling like children at a bedroom door, Peterson croaked “Wait”—to Stern, to himself or no one—concussion echoed through our hands, knees, noses, whatever touched metal, and the hold was filled with fog, swirling, clearing: empty.

We tracked Stern by the light of his main engine until he faded in the stars, and then by radar. He dropped rapidly astern, but before we lost him we learned his trajectory. He would fall into the sun sometime in May.