The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  He was breathing hard, hauling the thin, strange air into his heaving lungs. “Okay. Give me the medical status of Mo Yussef.”

  Yussef is dead. His vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-five Zulu.

  “Do the rest of the crew know?”

  McMasters is dead. His vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-one Zulu. Malinska is dead. Her vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-one Zulu. Halliwell is dead. Her vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-two Zulu.

  Johnson reflexively caught himself from drifting, grabbing a handhold on the wall.

  “All the crew except for me are dead.”

  That is correct.

  “What,” and he had to clear his throat, “what killed them?”

  Please repeat.

  “What was the cause of death?”

  I do not know the answer.

  “Why won’t the airlock door open?”

  The ship is in vacuum.

  His fingers flexed around the handhold.

  “Has there been a hull breach?”

  No.

  He screwed his eyes up, trying not to cry. “What happened to the air?”

  It was vented to space according to annex four of the emergency protocol.

  “Ah crap.” Rusa had been right all along. She just hadn’t found the code in time. “What else is in the emergency protocol?”

  That is classified.

  He didn’t need to be told, though. He knew what he’d do, if he was them.

  “Can I repressurise the ship?”

  No.

  “If I vent the air in the airlock, can I enter the ship?”

  The computer went silent. It was thinking, like the genie of the lamp, whether or not to grant Johnson his wish.

  Yes.

  He resealed the suit, then switched on all the life support systems he’d just turned off. With the two second tap in his ears again, he pressed the button to cycle the outer door. He felt his suit expand and go stiff again.

  Then came the moment when his plans could either be realised, or crushed like an empty can. He reached out to the internal door and gripped the release mechanism.

  He felt the locks slip through his gloved hand, and the tell-tale turned from red to green.

  He pushed the door aside, and eased himself into the ship. He didn’t have much room to manoeuvre. His suit’s torso was scarab-like, and his back fat with machinery. He knew he could make it through the bulkheads, because they’d been designed that way, but he had to be cautious and careful.

  Johnson floated across the cabin to the ladder, which he caught one-handed. He turned himself so that he was head down along the axis.

  He glided along the ladder’s length, broaching the bulkhead into the flight deck, which he could see into if he craned his neck just so.

  Malinka had been strapped in, and she remained in her couch, but McMasters was floating free, as was his tablet, still playing the last recorded view the orbiter had of the aliens on Mars.

  There wasn’t much blood in the cabin. Malinka’s nose was dewdropped with a frozen scab, but the few spots that glittered and spun like garnets were a poor signpost to the murder of the crew. The computer had killed them, slowly and painlessly. More or less. Her eyes were frozen open, irises of the clearest blue and sclera of the deepest red. Thread veins spidered across her puffy face.

  Johnson pulled himself through and jumped for the pilot’s chair next to her. He straddled the seat awkwardly, trying not to lean back against his life support.

  “I want to calculate an intercept course to Phobos. What delta v do we need?”

  Four hundred metres per second.

  “Okay. I need to do a burn of a third of a g for two minutes. We can finesse it as we go.”

  “What’re you doing, son?”

  Bradbury was in another spacesuit, hanging off the back of Johnson’s chair.

  “Crashing the ship. We still have four live nukes on board, and I reckon I should put them out of harm’s way.”

  “That’s smart thinking, but what if they try and stop you? What if they can fire up the rockets themselves and use the whole ship as a missile?”

  “They’re over three hundred million kilometres away. By the time they know what I’m doing, it’ll be too late.” He started fetched out a fine stylus and started dabbing it at the astrogation screen.

  “And what about you, Leroy? What happens to you?”

  “Turns out I wrote myself into one of your stories after all, Mr Bradbury. This is how lots of them end, right? Bittersweet. I save the aliens from the crazy Earthmen, and die in the process.”

  “You’re doing the right thing.” Bradbury leaned forward so that his helmet went tock against Johnson’s. “This is the moral choice.”

  “You would say that. Since you’re me.”

  “And you’re sure of that? Wouldn’t it be better to think that part of me is part of you? That everyone who’s ever read me makes me just a little bit alive?”

  “Hold on, or whatever it is you do.” Johnson dabbed at the screen one last time. “Initiating burn. And make sure Abe doesn’t fall on you.”

  The silent rocket motors rattled the ship, and McMasters’ body slipped stiffly down the wall to the floor. Johnson watched his crew mate settle on the rubber matting, all angles and bones. The tablet clattered next to him.

  Bradbury shuffled over to the man on his hands and knees. “I wonder if he did get to talk to them. I wonder if they know what we’re doing.”

  Johnson didn’t answer: he was watching the lines on the screen, the complex layers of planets and orbits, the natural and the artificial overlain, and his own progress amongst them. He was rising away from the surface, an arc of silver against the black, right into the path on onrushing Phobos.

  His mouth was dry, and he took a sip of cold, chlorinated water from the straw in his helmet. He’d never been hit from behind by a quadrillion tonnes of moon. What would that feel like?

  “Is there any way I can get out of this?” he asked.

  Bradbury looked up from McMasters’ screen, reflecting the images from it on his curved faceplate. “You got the wrong guy, Leroy. If you wanted some kind of technical fix, you should have had Arthur. He was always doing that sort of thing. What was that one on the Moon?”

  “A Fall of Moondust?”

  “No, the other one, where the guy bails out of his rocket and gets saved by orbital mechanics.” Bradbury tried to mime the scenario.

  He knew it. “Maelstrom.”

  “That’s the one. Any chance of you doing something like that?”

  “I’ve got about an hour’s air left in this, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re a long way from home and there’s no one to rescue me.” Johnson watched the lines on the screen converge.

  Bradbury clambered from the floor and shook him hard by the shoulders. “What do you mean, no one to rescue you? Who the hell is that down on Mars?”

  “What makes you think they’ve even noticed us up here?” Johnson gestured at the screens around him. “They’ve never answered a single question we’ve put to them in two years. That’s pretty much how we got to be in this god-awful situation in the first place.”

  “Maybe we were asking the wrong questions. I don’t know, Leroy. Isn’t it worth a shot?”

  Johnson tried to scrub at his face, but his glove banged against his helmet. “I don’t know either.” His arms slumped down by his side, the weak gravity adding to the futility of his defeat.

  Bradbury was suddenly in his face, helmets touching, the old man looking down at him through two thicknesses of clear plastic.

  “You’re not giving up, Leroy. I won’t let you. Turn that big dish you’ve got up top and point it at them. Tell them you’re scuttling your ship and bailing out. See what they do. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “I die quick or I die slow.”

  “You get to look at Mars for another hour, son. Right up close.”

  Johnson eased Bradbury aside and dabbed hi
s way through the communications systems to turn the high-gain antenna at Mars. It wasn’t like he needed to be accurate with it, just aim it broadly in the right direction. When it had slewed around, he opened the microphone and said:

  “My name is Commander Leroy Johnson of the space ship Pacific. My crew are dead and I am destroying my ship to prevent it from harming you. If you can hear me, I am abandoning ship. I will die shortly afterwards. If you want to pick me up, I’ll be right behind the big moon. If you’re longer than an hour, don’t bother.”

  He pushed himself out of his seat and started back up the ladder, squeezing himself through the bulkhead. He bundled into the airlock, and Bradbury’s face appeared at the tiny window in the internal door.

  “You’d better hurry. That moon’s coming up awful fast.”

  Johnson slapped the external door switch with his hand. “This is not easy.”

  The door swung open, and he gripped the edge of the airlock. He was facing Mars. Then he looked down the length of the ship, and there was Phobos.

  If he thought Mars looked big, Phobos was bowel-emptyingly huge. Something the size of Delaware was about to ram the tiny, fragile Pacific and squash it like a summer bug on a windshield. His heart stopped and his fingers froze.

  “Leroy. You got to jump. You got to jump now.”

  He climbed out onto the hull, hooking one hand on the door frame so he could coil his feet under him, push his legs down as far as they’d go. The bone-grey moon started to swell, and he opened his hand.

  For a moment, he crouched. Then he jumped, hard and straight and true. He closed his eyes, screwed them tight shut, because he was terrified. He’d rather not know that Phobos would hit him with all the casual effort of swatting a moth.

  There was nothing. And nothing. And nothing.

  “You did it,” shouted a jubilant voice in his helmet, “You made it, Leroy. God speed, you glorious man. Say hello to the a –”

  He opened one eye. Mars. Big and red. He opened the other. To his right, Phobos ground on in its orbit, chemical fire stuttering to an end on its planetward limb. Dust twinkled in its path, and patted softly on Johnson’s space suit. As the moon receded, even that lessened, and he was left alone, face down over Elysium.

  The two second tick had gone. And with it, Bradbury.

  His own breathing. The pulse in his ears. The hum of fans and the hiss of air. That was going to be it from now on, until those failed and fell silent. Some time later, his orbit would decay, and he’d fall, a fiery Icarus to the land below. Parts of him would reach the surface, and the bacteria within him would spill out onto an alien and inhospitable environment, in turn to wither and die.

  Or perhaps not.

  A spark of light flashed at the edge of the ice cap, and rose towards him on a pillar of ragged smoke that dragged through the clear, pink Martian sky.

  We saw a ship emerging from near the point of flare. It grew steadily larger, catching flecks of sunlight, like the carapace of a golden insect.

  * * *

  A mezzotint representation of a bright exploding meteor, seen over London on the evening of 1850. The original drawing was Matthew Cotes Wyatt. Wyatt also produced the engraving so that “a faithfully graphic exhibition of its appearance might be more generally diffused”. (1850)

  SAGA’S CHILDREN

  E. J. SWIFT

  You will have heard of our mother, the astronaut Saga Wärmedal. She is famous, and she is infamous. Her face, instantly recognizable, appears against lists of extraordinary feats, firsts and lasts and onlys. There are the pronounced cheekbones, the long jaw, that pale hair cropped close to the head. In formal portraits she looks enigmatic, but in images caught unaware - perhaps at some function, talking to the Administrator of the CSSA or the Moon Colony Premier; in situations, in fact, where we might imagine she would feel out of place - she is animated, smiling. In those pictures, it is possible to glimpse the feted adventurer who traversed the asteroid belt without navigational aid.

  We knew her only once, on Ceres.

  You will have heard of what happened on Ceres.

  Ours is one of many versions of Saga’s story. Widely distributed are a number of official biographies, and you can easily find another few dozen from less reputable sources. She is the subject of documentaries and immersion, avatars and educational curricula. We were not consulted in their production. But then, we did not know her; we only knew her contradictions, of which there were many. One small but significant example: she renounced her European passport in order to gain Chinese citizenship, yet she gave each of us a traditionally Scandinavian name.

  We can say for certain that Saga was born in Ümea, Sweden, where in winter the darkness lies low and thick and heavy and the snow crunches underfoot with that particular sound heard only on Earth. Ulla, the oldest of us, remembers Ümea snow. She remembers the flakes falling on her head and the cold tingling sensation as they melted through her hair into her scalp. At least, this is what she says, and so we agree that this is how it was.

  We know that Saga grew up in Ümea with a single mother. The biographies depict her as an exceptionally clever child, excelling in the fields of science and mathematics. A solitary creature. Decisive. Sure. In some editions, Saga herself is quoted:

  It was when I saw the lights for the first time, the Aurora Borealis. The most beautiful thing on Earth. But it wasn’t on Earth. That’s when I knew what I wanted to be.

  So she did what every child who wishes to be an astronaut must do. Saga taught herself Mandarin.

  By age sixteen she was fluent. She applied to the most prestigious university in Beijing to study astro-engineering, and graduated with the top marks in her year. She was promptly accepted as a trainee astronaut in the Chinese Solar System Administration, a move almost unheard of for Europeans, and especially at such a young age. From there her career took off in meteoric fashion. News of her escapades was celebrated across worlds. She mapped the Martian planet. She led the first missions to Jupiter’s moons.

  The biographies are less interested in Saga’s domestic life, if we can refer to it as such, and even between us we are not entirely settled on the details. We were raised by our fathers and grandmother. We knew Saga only through occasional communications from the outer planets, and nothing of one another’s existence. She sent us the debris of space. In our bedrooms we stored asteroid crystals and jars of red dust from Mars. We dreamed of Saga sailing through the stars, tailed by comets.

  In her transmissions, she would tell each of us the same thing.

  She loved us.

  We must work hard.

  Seek wisely.

  Dream deeply.

  Her hologram, flickering gently the way we imagined ghosts might, would flood us with bewilderment. We wanted to touch her, but when we put our fingertips to hers, there was nothing but air.

  Since we found one another, we have spent many hours puzzling over the mystery of our existence. We do not mean this in an existential manner, although of course we ask those questions as much as the next human being. The mystery we share is something more personal. We would like to know why Saga chose to create us at all.

  Ulla’s conception must have been an accident – still early in her career, it was not a good time for Saga to have a child, and an abortion would have been more practical. Ulla was born in Ümea (or says she was, as she says she remembers snow. But her father brought her up in Beijing, where, we imagine, he lived out his life awaiting Saga’s return. He waited a long time) but the greater question is why she was born at all. Could Saga have been unaware of her predicament until it was too late? How had she failed to take precautions?

  Five years later, Per appeared on the Moon colony. He may have been intended, although a relationship with his father was not. (Nonetheless Per’s father did his best until Per reached sixteen, upon which date his father moved to Mars, we imagine, to search for Saga. He searched a long time.) Per grew up among space farers. Pilgrims, adventurers, criminals on the ru
n, ambassadors, colonists and writers: all passed through Moon and recounted their tales whilst Per, in his first paid job, served them cups of mulled moonshine.

  None of us are astronauts, but we have travelled. It is true that much of our journeying was done before we were born. Ulla went to the Moon and back, the size of a fingernail. Per went as far as Mars, and felt its heavy gravity pulling him down against the lining of Saga’s womb. Signy, we believe, was conceived on a ship orbiting Europa under Jupiter’s yellow gaze, and later returned to Earth and entrusted to the care of Saga’s mother in Sweden. Signy is the only one of us to have known our grandmother.

  It was in the year preceding Ceres that we learned the truth. Saga had recorded a transmission on Mars where she was readying for her latest expedition to the dwarf planet, which at that time was being prepared as a mining centre for the asteroid belt. Ceres would cement China’s wealth and fund the Republic’s empire for a long time to come. We had a hazy awareness of these events, but if we are honest, we did not tend to pay much attention to the expansion. You have to understand that it was a painful thing, to consider the world our mother had chosen over us. Most of the time we preferred not to think of other worlds at all. We were trying to live our lives as unobtrusively as we could, and avoid people discovering the identity of our mother.

  Of course, we couldn’t help our dreams.

  We were to discover that we have very different lives. Per is a shuttle engineer – we assume he inherited most of Saga’s genes. Ulla teaches the old Earth art of yoga and works primarily with pregnant women. Signy is employed by the Earth Restoration Commission and travels to blighted patches of ocean or forestry. We thought it interesting that we had each taken a restorative, vocational pathway. We were feeling for one another’s personalities, on that first night.

  Saga had contrived for the transmission to reach us at the same moment across our locations of Moon Colony, Tianjin and the Indian Ocean. It arrived with Per over breakfast: spinach and eggs; he always has them poached. Ulla received it when she returned home from an intensive Bikram class: she had been working on her own practice that day, and her mind was still revolving through salutations. Signy was the last to view it, from the cabin of a ship, which despite Signy’s best efforts smelled of stale sweat and salt, as did her clothes.