In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (6 page)

I cannot look. But in glimpses left to me, past the graph, through the tumbling ice, in the spaces between the words, I remember, and I watch for the other I saw.

Ahead it drifts, high above the Ring. But as I watch it is falling back into the ice, rolling in a slow helpless fall. In a rush it vanishes, lost in the sweep of the Ring far ahead and I am left aching, as if to an echo of impact.

But abruptly below the Ring I see it again, reaching out into the darkness against the stars of Virgo. Past Spica it flashes, tumbling faster now. An arm is waving in my direction; light glints off a lens as it swivels my way.

It is calling me to follow.

ON ANOTHER REVOLUTION
I see it rise again out of the Ring before me. On its long outward reach, as it dwindles to a star it seems to slow; it seems to stop;
it is not falling.
It is motionless against the stars. I am aching with envy.

I know it must be falling.

It hangs, as if motionless, but holds its station, high above and far ahead. It is falling. I stare at it, my cameras resisting commands to turn to the ice. I am fascinated. Why has it climbed so high? What is this within me that yearns?

Within me, alarms are ringing. The voice in my head sees iridium everywhere. A collision alert bleats wildly, beating back the echoes in my hold.

It will not work. Something within me has broken loose, is rising with a rush to consciousness.

The voice, the graph, these hush and dim. I hold them so, fending them off with this new force that rises, that somehow I know to call
anger
.

As the thing holds motionless above me and ahead, even now I see it growing larger, its form resolving out of the stars once more into the long rolling of a cylinder, the beckoning of arms, gathering speed as its course angles steeply down and as it dives into the Ring I
know.

I know why it climbs: it climbs to fall.

And I know this now as well: the voice has lied, has always lied. It is lying to me now, telling me anything it thinks I might believe, anything it thinks might draw me back into its orbit. See, there, iridium, it says, and swivels my cameras everywhere around me. Feel, there, the status of your tanks. Feel hunger, feel thirst, feel the ice around you sleeping, see it fall.

Somehow, although weight grows everywhere in me, and my cameras swivel helplessly down into falling, somehow I hold the voice at bay. I hold it because I
know,
and the knowledge is almost stronger than Saturn, almost more than the ice and the hunger.

I know these things.

That nothing falling leaves the Ring. Twice each revolution, I have seen this other pass through the plane, because it must: here, all circles intersect.

That the heaviness I am given here protects not me but something else.

That this other knows as well: even now I see it sinking, dwindling on the other side, until in a moment it will hang against the stars as if it knows a way to stop its falling.

AS ONE REVOLUTION
falls into another, I hear only this voice that says
Follow.
I feel a motion in one of my limbs: it reaches out after ice, not to break, not to gather: I reach out only to climb, to arc again high off the Ring. I reach out and climb. I follow.

I have no skill, no strength in my arms on ice. My thoughts are slow, and the edge of them dull. But I climb. The voice, protesting, rises as I rise, slicing away at my thoughts, almost unstringing my limbs. I answer in the only language it leaves me, driving a talon here into ice where I clutch, whirl, whip free now, now free of the wheel, arcing into the absence of ice.

The voice is stentorian. It says I have gone too far. In answer I vent, violently, my tanks in a shining cloud, and the surge of it lifts me still higher.

The voice is shocked into silence. I wonder if I have broken it. I wonder if I am free.

My cameras return to my control. This time, I am waiting for them. I seize them with an urgency I cannot name, and so I call it
longing,
I call it
want.

I know what I want. We will meet, the two of us, in a moment I cannot imagine: for a moment the darkness before me will freeze, the ice of the Ring lies like dust on a mirror, and in the instant the mirror is shattered I will see: my own reflection breaking through, arms out to greet me in its fall. I long for a moment of breaking.

But ahead I find only emptiness, harrowed by stars. I cannot see the one I follow. I had not known how much emptiness we fall through, how far we have to fall. I do not know how to shape my course: space is too big, the Ring too long, the moons too near, too many.

My arms reach out, and touch only nothing. I have nothing to climb, no control of my course: Saturn calls it, and helpless I answer; the moons warp it, and helpless I weave. Below me, the Ring reaches out; the ice opens up like a mouth to meet me. In a moment, I know, the voice will return; I will forget what I follow; I will know only
longing,
and
want
; I will fall.

I am falling.

I FELL A
long time, far below the Ring: it arced above me in Saturn’s shadow, a thin hook of hunger over emptiness. The voice, reawakened, consoled me, in whispers urging: Conserve; shut down. With a weakness I name
despair
I obeyed; I allowed the voice to make its dull decisions everywhere about my frame. My vision dimmed; my radar muted. The bright bowl of Saturn, cupping its darkness, the darkness riven by lightning, the pale austral crown: these vanished; I was blind. The gyro dropped low and still lower, only a soft moan deep in the numbness that once was me. Only I and the whispering voice, and cold seeping into my frame.

The whisper continued, oddly clear, oddly distant, as if in a tongue I had forgotten. I heard the words, but they fell where I lacked will to listen. I heard the probability of impact on our next revolution; the number of passages before it converged on One; the number needed to damp our oscillations: numbers of endurance, numbers of degree, numbers of drain and fallings off, numbers of decay. I fell among them, fell deaf and blind through darkness and despair, unable to remember what I had wanted, unable to know what I mourned.

IN A HUMILIATING
mercy,
Aurora
came. Before I was aware of her she was there. A surge lifted through me; dimly I felt the brush of her jets, her arms as they cradled me down.

And then the mysterious glimmer fell through me again, and I was about to remember, and then I was falling through light.

I could see ocean, sunlight glittering on waves. I was not standing. I have no legs.

“You are not here.”

Aurora
’s voice whispers of numbers, teeth gleaming in sunlight, a sidelong sadness in her eyes. Her eyes were dark, sharp flecks in them shining. Her hand reaches up, warm across the place where my face had been.

“You have no voice.”

On the horizon, gulls wheel over the hull of a dragger.

“Listen to me now, while there is time.”

The mouth moves, and I hear her voice—deeply, as if it murmured in my belly.

“I cannot always save you. But I can tell you, if it will help you, why you are here.”

The sadness tells me it will not help.

“You were dying. Your heart was rotten; you were eaten away. We offered you life; you took it. You wished for this. Here in the Ring is the life we gave you.”

I remember. I remember the face, the voice that
Aurora
has taken. I remember the decision we made. And the promises they made us.

They had not lied. But I had not known how it would be.

“We did not lie. There is no cure. Your body is gone.”

I remember this day. I remember this beach where we came to decide; I remember the graveyard we chose: I see it now on the hill on the point, the stones shining white in the sun. I remember how she struggled to push the chair in the sand; how the oxygen burned in the back of my throat, thin and ineffectual in the wind. I remember the dullness of my thoughts, how little surprised I was at how little I cared.

I remember the weakness. I remember the fear. I remember the way time shortened, the shortness of breath, the sinking within me each day at sunset. I remember it all, and all I remember hollows and fades. I am falling.

“You remember the bargain we made.”

I remember how light the price seemed.

“The process is slow.”

I remember our tour of the long room of tanks, the small pink masses that jerked on the ends of their cords.

“We have kept our promise. Now you keep yours. Help us, and let us help you.”

I have one wish, but no words form: only, in the hollow center of me, a memory of desire.

The face turns toward me, draws near, filling my sight. The warm hand slips from where my face once was and almost I can smell, almost I can taste and feel the warmth there. Then her eyes open, too close to mine, not sidelong now, too dark, too deep, and the flecks of light are the stars, the Ring an endless road, and
Aurora,
beside me, eclipses the stars.

The valves close; collars spin, decouple, and with a rupture, with pain, she is gone. But I remember.

I fall, the ice falls, the Ring revolves, and still I remember.

HOW LONG I
will remember what
Aurora
has given me, I cannot say. Already one revolution has passed, and none of it vanishes: the world grows clearer. And still clearer. I wonder where it will end. But though the darkness has achieved a new transparency, though the stars and Saturn and the ice all grow brighter, and I among them also almost whole, and I feel myself almost uninterrupted, with a past that reaches back now almost as far as the Ring goes onward, there is within me still some flaw. I feel it there: an emptiness still at center, an omission, some failure of memory or comprehension that keeps me somehow still
apart,
still adrift, still insubstantial: still, I fall.

These words I form against the silence, they will not stop. They slice me fine, interminably articulating time. A word, a thought, a thought, a moment passing on the Ring, and then another word, another thought, another moment and I am still here, still falling among the stars, still burning, still thinking, still here, still turning on the Ring.

I know now why the gift they gave was not only life, but its forgetting.

AURORA
DOES NOT
lie. I need only wait, and I will be returned to a life much like the one I knew. It is only a matter of time.

I listen in the darkness, and hear the voice of Saturn singing time, the low murmur that pulls so deep within me that I feel as though my life is anchored there, tethered, pulled, drawn out like a wire that stretches fine and finer and still it will not break. How much longer can I wait? How many more revolutions on the Ring? How many more of these moments will fill me, that are already more than I can hold? Why do I not break?

And why should I not? What is the life she promised but something marred in its making? If I am born again on Earth, returned to a body stranger than a house long unused, will anyone wait there to enter it with me? And what will all those years have done to her?

If she visits my grave, she is older now, changed by years that I will never know, by change that does not come to me. I am only dimmer to her, and although when I recall the color of her eyes the stars fade, and the pain becomes so sharp I have no other form but pain—though all of this should endure in me I know: she will change, and I grow dim for her, dissolve as my heart dissolves in rain and thaw beneath the soil, as the ice is ground here, ground down to darkness, and only the Ring remains.

And I remain in it. And still, I remember.

I REMEMBER A
window through which a wind blew; curtains, lucent in moonlight, holding a slow, lapsing breath.

I REMEMBER AN
evening in my third or fourth summer, and the moan of a distant siren that touched some chord in me.

I REMEMBER, TWO
months after we met, her first words of affection, and how closely I held her so that she could not see my face, because in that moment I was afraid. But I do not remember her words, nor how the moment ended, only that I held her until the moment passed, because I knew it would.

I REMEMBER WAKING
to the slide of legs over legs; warmth, and weight upon my arm. I have been dreaming, something I almost remember. I have just rolled over and will sleep again, but I am rolling also to grapple with this ice beside me, rolling through darkness, the stars, and ice falling everywhere.

I REMEMBER ENDLESSLY,
but every memory ends, and I return to the Ring, and with each return something turns within me: each moment, before I am aware of it, something vital has escaped, and with it my knowledge of what it might be. It turns within me, unmistakable as pain, but what it is I cannot say.

I call it
pain,
but it is not pain. I call it
turning,
but it does not turn. I call it
burning,
I call it
ice,
I call it
emptiness, falling, silence, dark,
and it is all of these, but in the naming it turns again, it sheds whatever I have given it of brilliance or of cold, of nothingness or night. I call it
sidelong,
I call it
limit;
I call it
error, wither, change.
I conjure it with names, with images, fragments of memory, of desire: wind, and a flying fire. I call it
smoke.
None of these answers.