In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (5 page)

When I reached the dish I turned to look. There was the lander hovering, there was Peterson’s mummified face pressed close to mine, gibbering in his helmet—for a moment every direction was down.

Then there was nothing, just my tether trailing back to the open hatchway, and the slow revolution of stars.

The dish was fine. I crawled around it, gripping the tripod that held the antenna at its focus, and my shadow fell across its face. Radio traffic was passing through my body, my computer talking to theirs, and probably them talking to me, spinning out their story; static. I gripped the antenna boom and stared at it: instructions for removal, the NASA insignia, but no clue, no hard fact explaining what was going wrong between us: nothing.

Nothing: I had come to the end of my tether and found—I turned and faced the flashing following me: nothing. Only the on and off of it, on and off. Static; and in my helmet, my breath, and the sound of swallowing.

I reached for the antenna to tear it off, to do away with mission control and their instructions. Fools or liars, I can no longer tell the difference: everything they say sounds false, devoid of sense; or in this void of sense, nothing they can say will help. It does not matter. But as I reached up I looked and saw the flash, fade, and flash again.

“No,” I said, and it vanished. No: and it never reappeared.

No. I would not rip out my tongue for mission control.

I went inside and overrode antenna guidance, steered it away from Earth. Mission control faded in midsentence like a dream. I swiveled the dish a hundred eighty degrees in azimuth, faced it forward until the decameter hiss of Jupiter filled the room.

I KEEP THE
radio on, now the time is free for me to fill, metered only by the tripping in my chest. I have shorted out the cycle on the cabin lights and gone to manual. Sometimes, I work in the hold, removing instruments from one of the capsules. The instruments are useless to me now; I want the shell. Sometimes, on ship’s radio, I transmit. Music. I have not spoken yet. Jupiter has not answered. It grows oblate ahead, and I wait for word.

AHEAD HAS BECOME
beneath.

We thread through satellites too fast to read Europa’s scars, past Io’s peacock eyes, the radio snarling static from the radiation belts. We dive down deep, into Jupiter’s sphere now filling the sky, now out of sky we fall. A horizon encircles us, flattens to a wall we climb, a ceiling we cling to, striped with fire, clay, cream, rust, slate, straw, snow. I doubt my calculations, doubt the sense of reckoning with anything this huge. The whole world hangs above, a few dim stars below. We soar or swim, I do not know. We must be close enough to see, or it was all for nothing. I will have all or nothing.

The computer chatters beside me, parroting the terms I fed it weeks ago, but my eyes are pulled from its screen out past our bows, to the end of the broad brown ridge of cloud we follow, ahead where darkness rises. It sweeps up and over us in a second and the sun is gone: the aft camera shows a rim of red stretching from horizon to horizon, then, dizzying, the computer swivels the ship to face the sunset where light filters like an infection deep into the planet’s limb, until Jupiter seems lit from within by fevers, forges; moonsglow falls ashen on cloudtops. The computer throws a series of numbers across its screen, countdown glowing green in the darkened cabin, gleaming across my knuckles where they grip the armrests, and as the numbers reach zero and turn to the word
Ignition
we have ignition and the world is flattened.

OUR ORBIT IS
low, in more than secular decay, mission control would have said, leaving me to wonder how much weight to give which meaning of the word.

I am grateful already for the silence they finally surrendered me: I no longer hear their echo mocking in my ears. Only Jupiter fills them now, the voice proper to the scene I see, if only I could fit the sounds to sight and make some sense of both, strain an answer from the chaos below. I need new words for what I see, and as we pass low over the cloudtops, the hazy regions where my decaying course will drop me, spiral me down in a week or a month, I don’t care to calculate, somewhere in my chest I sense the suspension—above or below—of a crushing weight.

JUPITER SPEAKS SYLLABLES,
sibilants, subsides. I no longer need direct the antenna: the sound seems to pierce the cabin walls, rising from the chaos below. I have broadcast nothing since we entered orbit, but hourly I feel silence grow gravid around me. I have moved Stern’s couch from the cockpit, and fitted it in the empty capsule.

Below, finally, it spreads over the pale horizon and advances: the Great Red Spot I called it, but now I see only a tide of red swallowing everything. The nose of the ship bleeds pink, the light in the cabin suffuses dim red. We have arrived, and nothing is as I expected. Spot? A continent swirls below me, the skin of a world stripped off and spread still dripping across the flanks of Jupiter. I look down and see clouds churn, swallowing, the whole so huge we seem to slow in our passage, or else the ship is drawn toward the shadowed hollow at the center.

THE HOLLOW PASSES
off our starboard wingtip, and leaves me wondering what to call it now that I have seen: a cyclone, monsoon, typhoon—metavortex to the dozens I see spun off and shattered below, as much in size to them as they are like a hurricane. No. I do not know. This storm will blow for a million years, as it has blown since before a man worked stone, learned fire, or sketched the shadow of his hand against a cave wall. And at its center, a hazy depth, calm blue, blue as eyes, leading in. I must see closer.

The radio is silent.

IT CHANGES HUE
with every revolution: now an ember, now a rose, a sore, the underside of my tongue.

We pass far north of it on one orbit, and it lies on the horizon like the glow of a city.

We pass over its center, and the dark center, its rim raised, is a caldera. Etna, I think: Olympus. My chest aches. Ten years ago I stared down the throat of Olympus Mons on Mars, alone at the controls of a ship much like this, while Stern descended to the surface, and returned with eight charred bodies, five women and three men, my crewmates. Through twenty orbits returning like a tongue to a broken tooth I looked down, I wanted to see, there, on a piece of soil irrevocably so, the place where the rocks had burnt blacker, the shards of the ship shining. I looked down, fearing to see the flame of the lander ascending, dreading the quiet at our reunion, a stillness still unbroken.

Now I see. I look down on the eye of the storm, and though the resemblance is uncanny I feel nothing: I am careful not to move: a word was balanced within me, but down the vortex I see nothing. A drop of water drifts before my eyes. In it I see reflected all the colors that are on Jupiter. I find I have been sobbing.

It drifts away, and I sleep, undreaming. When I wake my chest feels emptied, the cabin is filled with light, and I lie quiet.

I SPENT THIS
day at the telescope, watching the surface, setting up a trajectory on the computer. I returned to the instrument capsule, the hollow shell of it, and began again, piling on the couch inside it some things I should jettison: the program manuals, two photographs, some tools. Each thing suggested a dozen more alike in their absurdity, their profanation of this place, and then I worked through a time that passed unnoticed, until I found the capsule almost full and the hold, the cabin, the cockpit stripped, a free space almost like the one outside, bounded only by these featureless walls, this steel painted white. I had not thought the shell would hold so much.

I heard it then at last, in the silence I have heard more clearly since I left the earth behind: I heard the word I came so far to learn.

I heard no signal, saw no blinding flash; the heavens did not open, nor the rocks: but as I fitted in the sphere a single shoe—lost half of a pair once made by Converse but the name no longer matters—only now that all these things are gone and my world is empty do I understand: nothing. Nothing: in a world of lies, the only word that tells the whole unholy truth. It was before my beginning, it waits beyond my end. It inhabits every word I have recorded here but these words too are nothing. Only nothing: and nothing is a word and nothing more.

All or nothing: I threw into the capsule the object I held in my hand, but before I seal them all inside I must complete my mission: all or nothing.

I have not dismantled the ship: I need it to live in until I die. But I will make an exception now, and open the panel where the computer’s memory lies. On the hard drives, wheels within wheels, the many million words: they all must go. Drive follows drive into the capsule, until only one remains, still spinning: listen. I will not touch it. I can jettison the rest, drop every trace of Earth, every memory of mission control into the eye, and cleanse myself of the last of my earthly inheritance. And on the necessary air, food, fuel, and water, and this small store of words, my own, await my story’s end.

IN THE ECHOING
emptiness left in the ship I watch and I wonder as the capsule drops shining away, sun lighting its limb, a crescent moon, Diana, what I would see and what hear had I gone, as it sounds down into the eye of the storm darkly blue with the baying of God’s great hounds. I see the capsule turn in its fall, a slow dreaming spin, a top’s sleeping. I see its porthole come round, a flash in the sun blinking back at me.

What would I see? This ship, winged V, Nike, Styxdaughter, Zeus-attending. No more. The noise of our fall would grow, swell, soaring. Down faster now, through thin keening, clouds whipping: it hazes a minute and I fear it lost. Then again suddenly smaller it flashes falling silver into the indigo center, one bright swimming in violet falling and deeper. The sound would be shaking now as it slows, glowing dull red from the wind, the action of sounding. Weight grows on it, pound on pounding, and I think of a bubble in water unsinking and see: it is gone. See no splash. Silent.

T
he ice falls, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that now it falls, free in its falling, the drift of it I envy. See it roll. See the breaking of it, ice on ice, the brightness of it breaking in the twilight, breaking into shards, into dust, into shining, into a haze of light, into darkness: see it vanish.

And on the Ring I only do not break. I do not vanish: I ride the wheel of it, arms out against the fall. No glittering shards of me disperse. My heart is solid inside me, a steady turning.

I cannot remember when this was not so.

I KNOW THE
ice. I know the darkness north and south, I know the great bulk of Saturn below. I know
Aurora
rising to meet me in her time. Only myself I do not know.

Of myself, I see only fragments. There is my auger, the sharp point of me, glittering at end like ice, scoured by ice and harder. There are my arms: these thin rods of titanium, articulate and shining, hooked at end with tungsten claws. The rest I do not see, and know only by a sensation I cannot describe: a dull vibration in the frame of me. There are doors: I shrug and they open for ice. And beyond the doors, a chamber where ice is melted, though I feel no heat; only the opening of valves. There are valves, and motors to drive them; nozzles where I vent off meltwater, a cloud of light returning to the Ring. And at my heart a gyroscope revolves, so finely tuned to falling that I cannot feel it, unless I turn against the fall.

In the hollow that is most of me, the heavy elements of my refining linger. I know their names, and the weights of them: how they answer to Saturn by falling, to the call that comes louder as they press within me, but still we fall no faster, I do not feel them, I have no sight or taste or touch of them: only their heft, the mass that binds me still more strongly to the Ring, until
Aurora
comes, and I am set out again among the ice.

Aurora
always comes. What signals her I do not know. So much is out of my control.

I do not sleep.

I know
sleep
: it is in the motion of the ice that falls around me: falls, and does not change. It is in the falling of us all—in the ice adrift, in the darkness where we fall, the darkness there that draws me on but never into Saturn, only falling, the ice and I, toward
sleep
that never comes. It is one of those words from the darkness within me, words like
hope,
like
pain,
like
love,
one of the words that falls nowhere.

I sense other words in the darkness, words I cannot hear. I only feel them echo in the hollow within me. They jar this voice that speaks distinctly in my thoughts—disturb it, as the ice around me jostles in its fall. They tell me that, in some other life I cannot imagine, in some time I cannot recall, I was not as I am now.

THERE IS A
voice in me that is not mine. It is all I hear between me and the Ring. The voice whispers: I am two point nine seven nine oh hours into this revolution; my target is at range three eight point oh six four; my payload is at thirty-five percent.

It occupies my thoughts. It keeps the silence from entering. It carries me, as ceaselessly as time, as irresistibly as the Ring itself sweeps onward. I feel myself within it falling, unable to ignore it, unable to reply.

I think sometimes it speaks to keep me from thinking.

Vision also intercedes between me and the ice, lights that are to my mind’s eye as the voice is to my thoughts: in a violet line against the stars my target shows eight ragged peaks at wavelengths of so many nanometers. These are the signs of uranium, the voice tells me.

In the darkness, in the silence, the voice and the visions, they comfort me.

Saturn has voices; the Ring and the darkness have voices too: they chorus on some sense that once was hearing. At Saturn’s core a murmur speaks of time; above its poles, electrons wail in their spiraling fall. From the darkness, a dim hissing: this is the voice of the stars.

And once each revolution I hear the Ring itself awake into the sun. It calls, in a cadence that pulses, waking echoes in the hollow within me, echoes that might be words: words like
sorrow,
like
loss;
but the voice inside me whispers
static discharge, coulombs, hertz:
the voices of the Ring are hushed, the echoes die away, and I am comforted.

But still, each revolution, at the pulsing of the ice, in a hollow inside me something opens. In the dull drum of me something beats, as though trapped and calling, the note of it fading, and then only silence, and within me the sound of a motor whining briefly, venting ice.

ONE BY ONE,
the moons draw near. In my frame I feel them: Iapetus and Phoebe, Dione and Tethys, Rhea, and the largest one, orange and featureless in my long-range vision. I know their names, I do not know how. In my frame a yearning rises, but it is not for them. For something like them, but what I cannot say. I long for some great fall. Not into Saturn, not into the night that holds us all, but into what I cannot say: into something that is not the Ring, something distant and solid, like the moons. Like myself.

Saturn is not solid: the voice tells me so, feeding me data: the pressure there so many millibars, the composition so much of ammonia, free hydrogen, water-ice. The temperature is so many degrees Kelvin, and I know that is cold, although here in the Ring the ice is colder. But what a millibar is, what once was fractured into thousands, I cannot say, nor what was Kelvin before it became a thing of degrees. Nor how I know a
milli
is a thousandth, or a
degree
a thing of crumbling.

Ammonia, water: I know these. These are the constituents of ice. I know, too, that I need them to survive: they feed me, in some way I know only from the hunger that I feel for them. And though I do not taste them, I know them with the intimacy hunger brings. I see them. I hear them always calling from the Ring, from the ice I grapple, from the shining spray I vent, prismatic in the sun, a glory I fall through as it fades, vanishing, returned into the Ring.

So much is vanishing here. Only I do not: I remain, the moons’ stress in my frame telling me only I am solid. And echoes, telling me I am a thing of—echoes.

I CANNOT SEE
the sun. I have tried, but there is a command in me that will not let me look. The voice tells me my cameras cannot stand the light: an instant, and I would be blind, and without vision I cannot mine the ice. And without ice, it tells me, my life will be an endless fall through hunger: a fall through time made merciless by darkness, through darkness unbroken by change.

But I have tried. I do not know why. Only that the way the sunlight breaks upon the ice—the brilliance of it flashing here, where seeing and vanishing are one; this poignancy I cannot capture, though it touches me each instant as I turn, and turn, and fall upon the Ring: all of this, and what more I cannot say because it comes from what within me I do not know—all of this draws me, despite all warning, to look toward the sun.

I cannot. My cameras swivel, focus, range and shift all out of my control, and never in all the revolutions of the Ring have they let me see what lies there, where shadows fall from.

But still I want to see.

OUT OF THE
A Ring, bright against the Division, falling now into the B Ring and toward me,
Aurora
comes. I see her engines flare: flakes of ice vanishing in bright vapor she brakes, nearing now: beside me, docking: our collars match, mate, our systems mesh, and once again she is here.

From connections I cannot feel
Aurora
’s presence floods through me, lights and echoing voices not my own flow in. My sensors detune, the stars dim, and before the new instructions seat themselves, I know that once again I am about to remember.

But then the sun flickers, the sky is black again so soon I cannot remember what color it was; the bulk of
Aurora
eclipses the stars, the new instructions execute, and the voice in me returns.

It is speaking of iridium. It has a warbling note, four peaks on the spectral graph.

I cannot remember what I remembered. For one brief moment’s inward fall I know that in a moment more I will forget I remembered at all, and now only the dim shiver, low in my empty hold.

I DO NOT
know the nature of my thoughts. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Are they saved or are they lost? Does
Aurora
hear them, or something beyond
Aurora?
I cannot say. I know only that to me they are irrevocable: I think them, and they vanish. This is the nature of the Ring.

But if I could recall these words, hear them once again above the voice that distracts me, I might know what it is that pains me. But now
Aurora
signals her departure, and with a rupture, with pain, the channels break, the valves seal, collars spin, decouple. Her jets flare in the sun and she is gone.

I watch, hoping to learn where she goes. The flame of her engines lifts her above the Ringplane and out, climbing, brilliant again against the Division, then over the A Ring and dwindling, the shape of her lost below resolution, the flame finally below my cameras’ threshold and I am falling.

I do not know where these words go. They vanish from me, into darkness. And like the Ring, their vanishing is endless.

I FALL THROUGH
darkness, the sun eclipsed by Saturn’s huge night. Along the Ring, a dim bridge into light, I listen, urgent after iridium. I grapple ice loud with it, auger in. It breaks, pieces fall away. I gather them, feed them into me. My frame rings loudly with their impact within.

I gather all but one: it has flown farther, up out of the Ring. I follow, clamber, carom, climb up into spaces where ice is scant. And there, my limbs go sluggish.

It is always like this. There is a command within me: it will not let me too far from the Ring: it outweighs even the hunger for ice. Off the Ring, the voice tells me, the emptiness is deadly: ten hours without ice and my systems fail. So when I try to climb I am given heaviness, a reluctance that would be
fear
but it does not belong to me. I feel it imposed, a command that does not need a voice: it has my limbs in its control, my strength its hostage.

And to oppose it I am given only hunger.

Caught between the heaviness and hunger I stop, still drifting out.

Here above the Ringplane, a kilometer of emptiness below me, I circle with the Ring, a ghost off a ghost-road through darkness. Uneasy, I yearn for the Ring. Under the prompting of the voice, I thrust: I feel the spray of vapor oppose my momentum, but it is too weak: soon it sputters, it tails off, my tank is empty, and I am drifting. Anxious now I listen, but for a long time the voice within me, intent on the Ring, is silent.

Then a slow number speaks itself. I am drifting far out, far into stillness, and even the voice is still.

Far from the Ring I am drifting, helpless to control my flight. In the emptiness here, my horizon opens. Space is everywhere. It seems to open even into me. In the silence, heedless for once of ice, my cameras drift. The voice is still; the echoes are still as well. Only these thoughts remain, loud and uncontrollable.

Without warning, the Ring below bursts into light. The ice awakens, the Ring’s chorus pulses; slowly, the sound fades away.

When the silence returns, light lies everywhere around me, and still the voice is silent. The silence is harrowing. The light is merciless. The transparency of space appalls me. Below, Saturn’s body is alive: I see each storm as it uncoils, each uneasy surge of ice-fog, and everywhere the sheer terror of wind. And on the Ring I see the multitudes of the ice, each in its singularity distinct, each in its moment of flashing as sharp, as ephemeral as pain. It is all here, and I am here in it, solid, drifting, and strange. It is as though I have never seen this before.

Far ahead in the darkness, something hovering over the Ring catches the light of the sun. Its graph is dim, peaked in a pattern I have never seen. The voice says nothing. Without it, I am helpless to identify. But something inside me has started to clamor. With an effort, I swivel the long-range camera forward.

At the limits of resolution, it shows me a cylinder spinning slowly, end over end. A narrow neck. The ungainly growth of a head. I see a pair of arms: thin, articulate, and hooked at end. It drifts through emptiness, even farther from the Ring than I have come. It falls, flashing in the sun, its arms held out against the fall.

Abruptly, the voice returns. It tells me we are falling; in two point nine oh two hours we will return to the Ring, entering at a relative velocity of so many meters per second: three point seven encounters with ice of average mass will disperse the polar vector of our speed. We are saved.

I am not listening. I am struggling not to listen. I am struggling to hold on to my cameras, struggling to hold the silence, struggling to remember what I have seen; struggling against the voice, against the ice, against the Ring, against the fall back into sleep. I am falling.

In the depths of my hold, as I turn to face the Ring, as I ready my arms for ice, like a bad bearing starting to break down, like an ingot working loose, something shudders against the fall. The echoes inside me are loud.

I AM PLAGUED
by double vision. My cameras, compelled, seek ice. They are bound to iridium, to measuring vectors of collision and capture, as my thoughts are bound to the Ring and the voice. But a
memory
has survived in me, a silence I wedge between us. In instants that pass almost before I can grasp them, I can see.