The Ghosts of Heaven (32 page)

Bowman's hands are trembling. He needs to sit down. He feels weak and he cannot think straight.

“You will never find it,” his ghost says.

“What?”

“What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.”

Bowman sinks to the ground, his head hangs. In his mind is wet grass, and his father's face, smiling down at him. The apple tree above him.

His hands loosen, and the Lethno slips from his fingers, onto the floor.

“That was the other thing I wanted from you,” his ghost says, and stepping forward, picks up the probe from the floor.

Bowman reacts, too slowly, and as he tries to rise, his ghost self sticks the probe into his chest, and pulls the switch.

Bowman flies back across the room, flung to the floor. He does not move.

“Are you still so sure about the order of things?” his ghost self says, and then vanishes.

 

987

When Bowman wakes, his ribs feel as though he's been hit by a god's fist but at least, he realizes, he is alive.

His ghost has gone, and he knows that for sure when he brings up a scan of the space outside the ship, because his
Song
, the one still with over four hundred living occupants, is gone, too.

Bowman knows where he has gone. He has decided to reclaim the mission to New Earth anyway, despite the near certainty that it will fail.

Is it true
? he wonders. Has this been happening forever? A ghost version of himself luring him to this rendezvous, to steal his living ship, leaving him behind on that floating mortuary he had always feared.

There can be no other answer, he thinks. It has to be true, or I wouldn't be here.

*   *   *

For the rest of the day, he explores the dead
Song
.

His ghost has done well to sabotage it. All the EVA suits have great slashes in them—beyond immediate repair. One of them has only a small puncture, which he might be able to mend with some materials from the PTP. The ghost returned to the living
Song
in the suit that Bowman came over in, leaving behind his spiral-scratched helmet.

So what does he do now?

He sees two options; the first is to go mad, and through his dreams, enter his own mind on the next version of the
Song
, perverting his thoughts with spirals and codes, and have him start murdering the occupants in the phi pattern of six, one, eight. Set up a distress code, and lure himself here to repeat the process all over again.

That is the first option, but Bowman,
this
Bowman, did not try and make the eleven-year journey awake. He slept, and while he might not be the sanest occupant on board the ship, he is still far from crazy.

Let the other infinite versions of Bowman sail on to their destiny at New Earth. He himself sees a second option. He himself has another intention.

*   *   *

There is a planet below him, around which the dead
Song
is orbiting. He will perform a scan on it to be sure, but somehow he already knows the results, as if he's run the scan a hundred times before.

It is a habitable planet. A little smaller than Earth maybe, but it looks promising, it looks very promising indeed. Why didn't his ghost just end the mission here? Is there something he knew about the planet that Bowman doesn't? Or was it just madness that pushed him away? Bowman brushes these thoughts aside, and gets to work.

*   *   *

While he makes a repair on the EVA suit, and gathers food from the other PTPs, and makes other preparations for the descent to the surface of the planet, he also spends idle minutes reading the book of poetry that his ghost threw at him.

Now that he reads it again, he finds that he knows it very well indeed, as if he's read it a thousand times, almost as if he wrote the poetry in the first place, and as he reads, those spiral forms in his mind finally raise themselves into his consciousness, and Bowman starts to learn.

As he reads the ancient poetry, he finds that he comes to a very different conclusion about the spiral than the miserable, pessimistic interpretation his ghost found.

The spiral, he decides, is the ultimate symbol of life. It is infinite. It copies itself and builds on itself, forever, like life. And life has patterns that repeat themselves, but they are never quite the same, for time, if nothing else, has moved on. On that point at least, he agrees with his ghost, but he finds it a positive thing, not a negative one, because it liberates him. It makes him free. No longer will he have to live trying to get back to something that has gone. No more chasing the past. Yes, his father is dead, but Bowman
remembers
him. Even if all he ever has is that one memory underneath the apple tree, he remembers him.

With that thought, he knows he was wrong to float free, to run away from people all this time. Rather than running from his fear of his inability to recreate the past, he should have been building a new future, finding someone to love, and be loved in return by them.

Now that Bowman knows he is unable to go back, he is free to move forward, ever higher on the spiral stair. There is always only the future, and though unknown, the spiral leads us all, ever higher and higher, toward the divine.

Toward the beautiful unknown.

*   *   *

As the PTP leaves the dead
Song
behind, and begins its descent to the surface of the planet, Bowman reads aloud from the book.

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.

I renounce belief.

I renounce belief in going home.

And with that thought

the chemical action of radiant energy

strips us of delusions,

destroys those thoughts that would hold us back,

would have us turn back, forever.

Thus, illuminated, we are free,

and turning to your friend you say:

It is enough to know that not to know is enough.

It is enough not to know.

And what you could not hope for, you found.

Wet grass under your hands and knees,

sunlight falling through the apple tree,

and protection.

And then, in the stillness

between breaths;

redemption, safety, and love.

 

1597

She is the one who goes ahead,

when others stay behind.

She is the one who goes to the water's edge,

though the sky is dark and cut through with a falling star.

The others watch from the trees,

while she, the one who goes ahead,

the one who makes marks in the sand with sticks,

and who paints on walls

with the red stone and black charcoal,

watches the fall of a star.

The star shoots at the water,

pounding the great lake with a mighty fist,

so that the earth shakes

and a terrible wave washes over them all.

Yet still, clinging to the trees,

she stands, while the others run in fear.

She waits, watching the water,

which settles.

And then, the water starts to move again,

but gently this time,

as just a stone's throw away,

a monster appears.

It is vast and slow, and lumbers from the lake,

with a shining skin and a glistening face.

There is a mark on its face;

like the marks she makes in the caves,

like the turn of the snail, and the fall of the falcon,

but then,

the monster removes its skin,

and its shining head,

and out steps not a monster but a man.

The man steps forward.

In his mind is a gate,

an apple tree, and a thought:

to be remembered in the heart of a loved one is to live forever.

The man laughs at the wonder in the young woman's eyes.

Yes
, he says.

 

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ALSO BY MARCUS SEDGWICK:

Revolver

White Crow

Midwinterblood

She Is Not Invisible

 

 

Text copyright © 2014 by Marcus Sedgwick

Published by Roaring Brook Press

Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

macteenbooks.com

 

First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Orion Children's Books, London

All Rights Reserved

 

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

 

Sedgwick, Marcus.

    Ghosts of heaven / Marcus Sedgwick. — First American edition.

        pages cm

    “First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Orion Children's Books, London.”

    Summary: Four linked stories of discovery and survival begin with a Paleolithic-era girl who makes the first written signs, continue with Anna, who people call a witch, then a mad twentieth-century poet who watches the ocean knowing the horrors it hides, and concluding with an astronaut on the first spaceship from Earth sent to colonize another world.

    ISBN 978-1-62672-125-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62672-126-5 (e-book) — ISBN 978-1-250-07367-9 (trade paperback) [1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.

    PZ7.S4484Gho 2015

    [Fic]—dc23

2014040471

 

eISBN 9781626721265

 

First hardcover edition, 2015

eBook edition, January 2015