The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  Ajax knows nothing about the ship, and when you check the colony logs, there is a ship named the Abraxas due to arrive that day. “They’re a supply ship, bringing new upgrades,” you’re told. You almost tell the Command Centre to let them know, so they can alert Ajax. But what will you say? Will you tell them he’s about to be arrested? You take your finger off the button.

  You say instead, “Can you patch me through to the Abraxas?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  “Only authorized personnel can use the communications. I’m sorry, Mr. Renault.”

  You understand. This is the limit of your face.

  Something grips you: you need to tell him personally.

  Marie’s panic, her fear, passes like lightning to you, and you don’t even take off your painter’s smock; you just put on a jacket. That same frenetic lightning makes you leave your dom and walk to the main shuttle platform to borrow a sitejet.

  You’ve been outside the base before. You’ve been down in the crevice before. You know exactly where they’ll be. And when you get close enough, the link in the suit will connect with them.

  “I need to do some work on the surface,” you tell the dock crewman who comes up to you to ask what you’re doing. The privilege you have carries you, even when it’s reckless. You tell the command centre and they ask the same question when you leave the base. “Just going out to paint the crevice.”

  You’ve flown a sitejet before, to do paintings above the surface of Ganymede, to fly around the outside of the buildings. You know what you are doing.

  They ask if you want someone to go with you because, sir, you’re not experienced enough to do this alone.

  “Oh, I don’t want to bother you. You’ve been so helpful in the past, but I think I’ll just be taking some preliminary scans. Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  Your plan is to sit at the edge of the crevice and wait for Ajax and his crew to come back up. You’ll catch them first. You fly to the crevice, where the elevators run down like droplets. Many of them are, of course, ninety-five kilometres below with the team. You land the ship not too far from the other transports.

  If you were a more competent pilot you would fly down the crevice to the dais below, but you are not that confident about your skills in a dark, tight crevice.

  You’ll sit and wait, watching the black carpet of stars above you fall until you are asleep.

  >?

  When you wake, the grey shape of the Abraxas comes into view above, like a floating tool in the dark cosmic sky, as it makes its way to dock with the Aethon Mining Colony. You decide that you cannot wait any longer.

  It is now a race.

  You will take an elevator. They took elevators, after all. Most of them are safe. You remember that occasionally they are not.

  You suit up. Your hands flutter over the straps, the helmet, turning on breathable air. You can hear Ajax’s voice: You shouldn’t be doing this when you’re upset. You’ll make a mistake.

  “You would have wanted me to tell you before they landed,” you say.

  Yes, you need to warn Ajax. You also need to be with him—this uncontrollable urge not to be pulled apart. Good things don’t come back, you hear Ajax say. This time it will be Ajax that’s taken from you. But now, you’ll go with him. You’ll stand by his side and your face, that lucky, privileged, celebrity face of yours, will buy his freedom, even if you have to use every last ounce of your influence.

  You shake getting in the elevator, stomping on the metal floor, connecting to it with your magboots. How did we get here? You punch in Ajax’s code, hoping he forgives you. You’ve seen him operate the controls maybe ten times but you weren’t watching the details. You were almost always looking out the window at the huge crevice walls, the layers of rock and ice. You said before, how they tell the history of this planet in ledger lines, an accounting of the build-up of ice over billions of years; of rock; of impact.

  It’s a language, you’d said.

  “It’s definitely a story,” Ajax had replied.

  So the buttons on the console that seemed so simple are not. You may have touched some of them two or three times. Finally, something moves, the whole elevator jolts a little, and you remember Ajax saying that some of the elevators gave bumpier rides than others. Because of corrosion.

  You can see Ajax saying, “They’ve promised us upgrades.”

  But the water and air business was so good. Everyone in space needs water and air. Especially this far out.

  The elevator moves down slowly—too slowly. Ajax hit a button to make it speed up. You can see outside the window if the other elevators are coming up. You can’t yet communicate with anyone below.

  Slowly you descend. At this pace, the trip will take you four or five hours to get through the crust and arrive on the dais below.

  The buttons are carefully, logically marked. You just have to be smarter than the elevator. You press what you think is the speed, but you’re jolted, and realize you hit the directional buttons; up and increase look the same, you think.

  The elevator crawls to a stop. You could be just a few miles into the crevice.

  You hear Marie’s voice in your head: You are not a miner.

  You press the down arrow. There is rattling and scraping and resistance. It doesn’t sound good. Then a big jolt frightens you. Then no movement.

  “In emergencies like this,” Ajax would say, “you call Command Centre and they send a sitejet.”

  And they will rescue you. Maybe they can take you down into the crevice—just one person. You realize now that taking one person along was not such a bad idea.

  You use your communication link and call the Command Centre. “I’ve gotten myself stuck in an elevator,” you say sheepishly.

  “We’ll be right there, Mr. Renault. Just hold tight.” And you know they will be scrambling because it’s you in danger. How embarrassing. What were you doing?

  Still, you think, when they come you will convince the pilot that you need to go into the crevice.

  It’s a failure of your name, your face, if it can’t warn the person you love that danger is coming.

  You sit down and wait, and you imagine there will be a trial, and that you will testify, and that the men will testify. You practice what you might say as if speaking to a jury, and the jury is the crevice.

  The window outside provides you with a good view of the crevice wall. It is a magnificent, talkative piece of art. You can follow the years down; the ice layers, the rock layers, the dark mica and the clear, reflective quartz sparkling like a diamond. It is the long history of Ganymede. You can almost hear it competing with your own narrative.

  “Why did I do it?” you answer a judge that is not there. “Your honour, the case against Ajax is not that which should be tried, but the case against Helios is. They neglected their miners.”

  Surely any jury in the world could see that, you say to the crevice. It speaks back to you in billions of years. Your moments mean nothing to it.

  As the solar system formed, it was here, gathering layers, the ice and the rock and the mica and the sand and the frozen ground all nestling together to form a layer. What does it matter, the crevice says?

  You press your hands against the clear window, appealing to the jury. “We matter.”

  The elevator leans sideways, groans. You fall against the wall to your right, against the door you entered, which is closer to being a floor now, as it is pressed against the crevice. You don’t move.

  You look outside and see a shadow fly across the crevice wall, like an eagle looking for Ganymede. It’s the sitejet. The pilot hovers outside the elevator with a look of horror on his face. You wave, trying to get his attention.

  Your communication link clicks on. “Mr. Renault? It is you.”

  “Somethi
ng happened to the elevator,” you say.

  “Mr. Renault, just sit tight,” the man says. He flies around the elevator, comes back and hovers in front of the window. “I can’t dock with the door. But I can take apart the panels on the top of the elevator. I’m just going to call this in, get some help. We’ll cut you out if we have to. Just don’t move very much if you can help it.”

  “I’ll root myself to the floor.”

  And you do. You breathe in and think that it’s all going to be good. Things happen for a reason. You look through the window at the crevice. I’ve been waiting for six billion years for you to see me like this, it seems to say. It’s all you can see; you can’t see the stars from where you’re seated.

  Accidents happen all the time. They don’t choose who to affect based on income or importance, or race or creed or gender. They are the great leveller. They are random, though you increase your chances of having an accident when you go to a dangerous place, board an elevator of dubious condition; when you’ve panicked and allowed fear to take control. You have been to fifty-three memorial services in eight years and you can remember the details of each one. Most of them were young men and women; a few were supervisors and foremen. Many were knowledgeable, professional, the best at their jobs. Some of them had shoddy equipment. Some of them made mistakes. Some of them had “an unfortunate circumstance.” The injured in the infirmary were broken in much the same way. This was a dangerous place. Marie was right.

  You look up at the beautiful crevice and it seems to be reaching out to you, coming closer, but then you know it’s not the crevice but the elevator that’s moving.

  You are going to fall.

  “Something’s happening,” you say to the Command Centre.

  “Mr. Renault, we are grappling the elevator with claws—”

  The elevator shifts, but not up.

  It falls, slowly, because the gravity is lighter here—only a tenth of Earth gravity. But you are aware that you are not in the claws of an eagle.

  The drop is sheer. It never makes contact with the edge of the crevice.

  You can look out the window and read the whole story now, travelling slowly by—the whole history of Ganymede. It was as if you were running down the crevice. I could survive this, you think. You’re only going about nine miles an hour—that’s just running.

  But you are falling, and falling inside something that weighs 2000 pounds at a tenth of Earth’s gravity. You can’t be sure of things like survival.

  You say into the communication link, “Please tell Ajax—” But you hear static and then a pop and the link disappears.

  You pull yourself in a little. The elevator is not turning but falling flat because the backside of the elevator weighs the most. So you sit on the wall and pull your arms and hands in close to watch the last movie of Ganymede on the window in front of you. You figure you have three hours.

  You put your hands into your jacket and feel something wet. You look down at your hand. Is it blood? No, it is brown.

  It is burnt umber.

  You lean over the floor and you paint. When you look up, you see the sitejets beside you, trying to match your speed. Three of you are falling now, drifting really, like a snowflake falls, down into the crevice. You are your own floating city, rapidly descending into the deep ocean of a moon.

  >?

  They say they saw you painting on the way down. They considered flying a ship under you and letting the elevator piggyback on the ship, but you were too close to the edge and they couldn’t get the wings of the sitejet under you, no matter how they tried. They feared causing the elevator to turn.

  You were still going too fast to make that manoeuver safely.

  Another sitejet hovered over you, trying to lock on and slow your speed. They scratched the surface of the elevator and it wobbled. They pulled up.

  If you hit the ocean below, it might not break the elevator; however, below every elevator was a long, connected steel dais—a platform used for haulers who took the salt water out to the loading bay.

  There’s a discussion about grappling hooks that you never hear, and if suddenly grabbing the elevator would knock you around, if it might hit the crevice. All you hear is the sudden slam of metal on metal, and the elevator jerks and you are thrown into the ceiling. You can see through the window as it scrapes the side of the crevice. You’ll never see how much, but it leaves a mark several hundred metres wide, the swing of it, as the sitejet tries to pull the elevator up.

  That scrape is your part of Ganymede’s story.

  And it tears open the elevator and you fall through.

  >?

  When they get the ship up top and set the elevator down, gently, they notice the scrape has cut into the side of the elevator. And when they open the ship, you are gone, having dropped out of the elevator somewhere along the way.

  But against the wall, they see a painting.

  >?

  You loved that last hour inside the elevator. You had burnt umber and phthalocyanine blue and yellow cadmium light and titanium white in your pockets, but no brush. So, with a smile, you finger painted, just like you did when you were a child, and you smiled and you cried and you thought not in a million years has any artist been given this opportunity, to paint in freefall on the side of an elevator through a crevice on Ganymede.

  Outside, Ganymede tells its own story. Look where I began! And the years pass by so quickly, thousands of them in a moment. Look what I’ve endured!

  Inside, you told your story. Because you wanted so badly to be with Ajax, you painted him on the wall, his arms around you, and you were both looking back at you, the painter, as if they were watching you in some alternate moment. They were content, in their dom in Aethon. You lightened the blue to make Ajax’s hand, tight around your arm, his other hand resting on your leg. You painted with your whole hand that middle darkness of Ajax’s chest, as if you were touching him, and you could feel him.

  You cried, but you kept painting, these two men who were content with the eight years they had. You didn’t have to say it—even if they didn’t hear what you wanted to say over the comm, they would see it here. These two men, oh they loved each other, you saw that and wished you could save them both. And you looked up to the crevice wall, the years passing by, sobbing, tears streaming down your face, and you turned back to your painting and placed the words Still Life with Ajax, because it will make him laugh.

  You rejected Falling in Love All Over Again out of good taste.

  For Marie you wrote The Work is Complete.

  For the courts you wrote that you were responsible for the men and women who participated in The History of Our Sol.

  If you were lucky, you could just stay here against this wall and the fall would not destroy the painting. Acrylic dries quickly.

  The sound of metal hitting metal happened above, and then the lurch of the elevator, upending you. The scrape happened right under you.

  Your helmet was broken and breached, and all the air from around you disappeared like a breath, even as you slid through the cut in the elevator and fell into the mouth of Ganymede.

  >?

  You hold your breath.

  You fall so much slower now, about as fast a person walks. You can’t reach out to the wall to slow your speed; it’s too far. The sitejets don’t know they’ve dropped you. Above, they carry the elevator and your art to safety.

  If no one came for you, if you did not run out of breathable air, you would have eight hours to fall. It is as close to flying as you may ever get. You take the paint tubes in your hands, unscrewing the caps, and squeeze out the paint, which falls up above you and stays, almost stationary, and you leave an air trail of blue, yellow, brown, and white. You squeeze them hard, getting every last ounce of colour and paint out of them. If you weren’t going to die, this would be the most enjoyable, and most unusual time you�
�ve ever had painting.

  There’s not enough oxygen or atmosphere on Ganymede for a human to breathe, and so you suffocate, the tubes leaving your hands, finally, squeezed empty of all colour.

  You don’t see the sitejet, how it hovers next to you, putting a wing under your body and letting you fall there so that you don’t have to make the rest of the journey down into Ganymede. Someone climbs from the sitejet onto the wing to retrieve you, pull you inside the cramped two-person sitejet. They pull your helmet off, call your name, but they can’t resuscitate you. Quickly, they ascend out of the Mouth, hoping to get you to the infirmary in time, startled when they suddenly meet some of the blue, the yellow, the brown, and the white on its way down, marking the sitejet in ribbons of colour.

  >?

  Together, your first big posthumous show, is in Antigone. Marie has asked Ajax for your work, but Ajax won’t let it go unless he comes with it—he can’t be separated from your work now. The miners also ask to bring the work you did personally for them, and in the wake of this Sol-wide tragedy, Helios participates in full, even sponsoring the show, else they might be implicated in the killing of the famed painter Renault. Of course, charges are dropped against Ajax. How can they prosecute the man whom Renault loved?

  The men and women who were part of The History of Our Sol on the Arms that Built It are the keepers of the last great masterwork ever done by Renault, and so these miners are celebrated, envied. Their images are everywhere, as if, in some way, they hold a spirit of Renault, and they will never lack for support or money. They bare their torsos and arms for the Antigone show, and tell not only how they lived as miners but also how they lived and knew Renault. People come to touch them, to touch the History of Our Sol, to be a part of it, too. Several of these miners eventually become artists and begin travelling through the cities, painting the people, and wherever they go, they are feted in the Orange Buddha, in Greystokes, at Atlantis Hall.