The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  He carries a tiny Saturn’s Tree with him everywhere, carefully, as if it was a full cup of tea.

  Then a customer tells him about the grove.

  “The greatest Saturn Trees you’ll ever see!” she says. “And you walk in amongst them and can feel your blood racing, your heart so solid and strong, and you smile, and you should hear the laughter in there. Strangers all together as one. It’s beautiful.”

  I think of our own Saturn Tree, how even standing next to it makes my mouth droop, and my eyelids heavy.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” I say. The customer laughs.

  “It’s not really for people like you.” She actually winks at my son, and he winks back, as if he knows what she is talking about.

  He leaves with her. I tell her that he needs help and she laughs at me again, as if I am making things up, have invented all the hours I spent cleaning him up, trying to teach him.

  He isn’t gone long. He comes back quiet, but he seems happier.

  “It’s so beautiful there. The sky looks bluer than it does here. But she was wrong, that woman. It is for people like you. It’s for everyone. Next time, can you take me?”

  “Maybe,” I say, the universal, eternally polite parental No.

  Ninety-seven customers later, he goes out and doesn’t return. I know where he’s gone; I only wonder how he travelled. I call him. He says, “Come and see, Mum. You’ll love it, you really will. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”

  He sounds so bright I wonder if something has changed within him.

  I set some clothes to spin and close the shop.

  The streets are quiet with the Saturnalia well over. There is a low hum, a low moaning, I think, but I see that people are humming and I realise it is music.

  I drive to Saturn’s Grove. The sign is cracked, tired-looking; the “o” lookes like an “a”.

  From the moment I enter, I am filled with a sense of my own worthlessness. Pointlessness. I am uninteresting. Unlovable. I think the customer was right; this place is not for me.

  There are hundreds of metallic trees, growing as tall as redwoods, wide as sequoias. I can barely see the top of them.

  I find my son, his arms stretched around the base of one of them.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he says. He’s never cared about anything before, beyond food. He reaches his hands up to swing on one shining branch. He winces, pulls away, and I see that his skin has reddened.

  At the base of many of the trees are clothes. Perfectly good, most of them.

  “What are these?” I say, smiling. I think He brought me here, to collect the clothes. It is kind of him, bringing me here.

  “People don’t want them any more,” my son says. So I start to gather them up, to take home and clean. At least washing clothes gives me a kind of purpose. I feel giddy if I look up, so I look mostly at the clothes on the ground.

  “We’ll be able to get most of these stains out easily,” I say. He was right; I do feel delighted now. Excited.

  He doesn’t answer. I thought he was behind me but no.

  He has stripped naked and is already three metres up a tree. I haven’t seen him naked since he was 14 and insisted that he could wash himself. “This is the one. This is my tree.”

  I look up. “It’s very high.”

  With my head tilted back, I can see that many of the trees have do have flowers at the top. Some are bulbous. Some brightly coloured.

  “I thought they didn’t flower?”

  “That’s the others. That’s each one who’s climbed. As the tree grows, they reach closer to Saturn.”

  He drags himself up further.

  “Don’t go any higher,” I say. I fall to my knees. I don’t want him up there. “I’ll make you any meal you like, just name it. And you don’t have to clean the clothes if you don’t want to. We’ll find you something else. And we’ll find you someone nice to be with and don’t forget Saturnalia, how much you loved it! Only another ten months and there’s another!”

  But he climbs up. I watch him and want to follow him, but even the feel of the tree under my palm makes me sick. I sit at the base, waiting for him to come back down again. I can hear him crying.

  “Son! Come down! You don’t need to feel pain!”

  “It’s not painful,” he calls, but his voice is shaky, withered. “I’ll be down soon. Wait there.”

  I have to trust that he will return. I sort the clothes I’ve collected by material and colour. People watch, asking questions. Distracting me. Until one woman says, “Do you need a hand to get all those things home?”

  “I’m waiting for my son. He’s climbing up. He’ll come down soon.”

  The woman shakes her head. “Look,” she says. She leads me through the trees.

  Some have tiny thin trails of blood to the ground, crystallised. “Every last one of them climbed like he did,” she says. “Step by step as if there was no other way. This one’s my daughter’s tree.” She stands and puts her hand near a tree that dwarfs many around it. She doesn’t touch it.

  My son has become one of them.

  There are others, lost like me, gazing up and weeping. The woman says to me, “The only certainties in life are air, water and the grave. Saturn’s sons, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. The only ones he didn’t kill. That’s all that’s real anymore.”

  “I’m going to get my son down.”

  I don’t want to go up. The thought of it makes me want to cry and never stop.

  But my son is up there and I want to bring him down.

  Each step is like climbing on sharpened knives. Blood pouring

  I don’t have the strength. I can’t do it.

  “He won’t come down anyway. There’s nothing you can do. Once he’s climbed all the way up, it’s too late,” the woman calls. She tugs at my ankles.

  As if to demonstrate, one bright green bead of liquid drips down past my face.

  Do I love him enough to die trying to get to him? I climb for another hour, making no progress, slipping backwards, dragging the skin from my arms and hands, from my cheek. Then I’m stuck. I can’t move up and down. Frozen.

  “Stretch your fingers. Spread them. Let go. We’ll catch you,” they call from below, and I do, and they do.

  “It’s too late. He’s so deep now, you’ll never get him out, even if you get him down. They climb up there to die; at least it’s a choice. No one has come back down again, not alive.” My new friend shakes, rolls her shoulders. “I come back every now and then to take a piece of my daughter’s tree,” she says. “She’s happier now her suffering has ended.”

  “What about us? What about our suffering?”

  She lifts her arms. Smiles. The rest of her is shivering; only her lips are still. She reaches into her bag and offers me a small bottle of vodka. It sparkles. I shake my head at her; not that.

  I cry then. I’ve always known I’ll lose him, but I didn’t know he’d choose to go. I cry, leaning against his tree, until I realise my tears re being drawn in. Absorbed.

  I break a piece of his tree off to bury it. It is stained slightly with his fluids.

  I make his grave in a tiny, tiny pot next to my other Saturn’s Tree. It will grow if I look after it. Feed it. Water it. It may fruit one day, as do the trees in the grove. We watch them grow, the other grievers and I. I say to them, “Whoever said these trees don’t flower? There are our children up there, fruiting.” Sometimes one drops and shatters, looking like an arum lily, the corpse kind. Surrounded by crystals worth a lot of money, and I wonder if people will use them, if it will come to that, and what they’d call the drink. A friend brings me some Sparkle, and another does too, and once I remember how good it is, and forget all the rest, things are better.

  I re-open my shop when I run out of clothes to clean. My job is so instinctive I can do it Sparkled or not.

  Air, water, the grave.

  And Sparkle.

  There is more to life than you or me. I want to be a part of something bigger than e
ither of us.

  * * *

  A Boxwood diptych dial, consisting of two leaves that fold together when not in use. Chinese characters in red paint read: “Moon plate” and “Combined Sun and Moon dials”. The second leaf features a vertical dial, within which four characters read: “The tiny shadow [i.e. time] is precious”. (c1850)

  ONLY HUMAN

  LAVIE TIDHAR

  There are four Three-times-Three Sisters in the House of Mirth, and five in the House of Heaven and Hell, and two in the House of Shelter. Four plus five plus two Three-by-Threes, and they represent one faction of the city.

  You may have heard tales of the city of Polyphemus Port, on Titan, that moon of raging storms. First city on that lunar landscape, second oldest foothold of the Outer System, or so it is said, though who can tell, with the profusion of habitats in those faraway places of the solar system? A dome covers the city, but Polyport spreads underground – vertical development they called it, the old architects. And its tunnels reach far into the distance, linking to other settlements, small desolate towns on that wind-swept world, where majestic Saturn rises in the murky skies.

  There are two Five-times-Six Sisters in the House of Forgetting, and five Eight-by-Eights in the House of Domicile. We who are a ones, and will one day be zeros, we cannot hope to understand the way of the Sisterhoods of Polyphemus Port, on Titan.

  Understanding, as Ogko once said, is forgiveness.

  Shereen was a cleaner in the House of Mirth in the day, and in the evening in the House of Domicile. It was a good, steady job. On Polyport all jobs connect to trade, to cargo. A thousand cults across space arise and fall around cargo. In the islands of the solar system cargo achieves mythical overtones, the ebb and flow of commerce across the inner and outer systems, of wild hagiratech from Jettisoned, best-grade hydroponics marijuana and raw materials from the belt, argumentative robots from the Galilean Republics, pop culture from Mars, weapons from Earth, anything and everything. Polyphemus Port services the cluster of habitats that circle Saturn, and links to the Galilean Republics on the four major moons of Jupiter. It links the inner system with the wild outposts of Pluto – with Dragon’s World on Hydra and Jettisoned on Charon, and the small but persistent human settlements beyond Saturn, in the dark echoey space that lies in between Uranus and Neptune.

  People are strange in the Outer System, and the few Others, too, who make their homes there. Some say the Others, those digital intelligences bred long ago by St. Cohen in Earth’s first, primitive Breeding Grounds, have relocated en masse to the cold moons of the outer system, installing new Cores away from human habitation, but whether it is true or not, who can tell? Whatever the truth of all this is, it suffices to say that all jobs on Polyport, directly or indirectly, are linked with the business and worship of cargo, and that some jobs are always in demand.

  Shereen apprenticed as a cleaner in the landing port beyond the city, a vast dust-bowl plane where RLVs like busy methane-breathing bees rise and fall from the surface to orbit, there to meet the incoming and outgoing space-going vessels to ferry people and cargo back and forth. She was seconded to Customs Inspections slash Quarantine, scouring ships’ holds for unwanted passengers, the rodents and bacteria, fungus and von Neumann machines; from there she moved dome-side, abandoning her public sector job in favour of the private. She cleaned houses both above- and under-ground, until at last she settled on the dual work for the House of Mirth and the House of Domicile, a work associated, after all, with cargo and religion both.

  It is said that Dragon, that enigmatic entity living on the moon Hydra, its body composed of millions of discarded battle dolls, had passed through Polyport on its way from Earth. If so, local historical documentation is nonexistent, and anecdotal evidence spurious. Nevertheless, an uncle of Shereen’s, a Guild-certified cleaner in his own right, used to tell the tale of Dragon’s arrival as though he had known it for truth.

  In the story, Dragon’s Core, the hub of it, remained in orbit around Titan, carried as it were in a converted asteroid; and it trailed behind it kilometres-long lines of suspended second- and third-hand Vietnamese battle dolls, strung on wires; while Dragon manifested upon the streets of Polyport in a doll body of weathered humanoid form of little distinction. It was then, said Shereen’s uncle, that Dragon met the woman who had once been One-times-One, then One-times-Two, and was finally a Three-times-Three; but whose name had once been Haifa al-Sahara.

  Did Dragon – who split itself across a million bodies – suggest to al-Sahara a similar possibility? Ask at the House of Mirth, or at the House of Forgetting, and you shall receive no answer. Yet whether it is felt the question too ridiculous to answer, or if, rather, there is a kernel of truth in it, the silence does not say.

  Be that as it may. You can read more about the early history of the Houses in Sisters of Titan, by Hassan Sufjan, if you were so inclined or, of course, in Gidali’s classic novel, Three Times Three Is One (adapted by Phobos Studios into a lavish three-part production starring Sivan Shoshanim).

  What’s important is that, at the time that Shereen was working at the Houses, trouble had been brewing for some time. And that, one day, a new novice came into service in the House of Mirth.

  Or is that important? It was to Shereen, certainly, eventually. It was to the novice, too, whose name was Aliyah. How we assign importance depends on where we ourselves stand in the story. For Shereen, it was a moment of significance, the point in which light breaks through the transparent dome, and Saturn rises. Seeing Aliyah walk into the House of Mirth was like being thirsty, and then being given drink; like having been sick, and suddenly feeling better; and so on and so forth.

  Aliyah came into the House of Mirth dressed in the modest jilaabah of the Sisters, in the plain black of the Noviates. Underneath it, Shereen knew, Aliyah would bear the scars and grafts of Noviatehood; while inside the filaments would be growing, burrowing under the skin and showing as fine blue lines under direct white light. Shereen was cleaning unobtrusively in the background. Robots could do some of the work, sure, but robots, or Others, were not welcome in the Houses of the Sisters. And humans were so much more... human. The Sisterhoods rejected the Way of Robot, and the ideal of Translation. They were, for whatever it’s worth, still human.

  In a manner of speaking.

  Underneath her head scarf, Shereen knew, Aliyah’s head would be shaven, misshaped by augmentation. Only her eyes could be seen, a startling, deep scarlet like the colour of the sky above the port. In her eyes were the storms of Titan. Perhaps it was then that Shereen fell in love. Or perhaps love is merely the illusion of body chemistry and brain software with deep-embedded evolutionary instincts. Though that hardly sounds very romantic.

  The poet-traveller Bashō, who had visited Titan, once wrote:

  Laf hemi wan samting

  I no semak

  Ol narafala samting

  Which translates, from the Asteroid Pidgin, as: Love is one thing / that is not like / any other thing, and which is as unhelpful as Bash ever got.

  Their eyes met across a crowded room...

  Though it was not crowded, and that first time Aliyah barely saw Shereen, only perhaps as a reflection in a shiny surface. It is easy to unsee cleaners, they walk like shadows, they are unobtrusive by training.

  Shereen, then, watched as Aliyah arrived; and as she was ushered in to the inner sanctum by the Three-times-Three. And she brooded.

  It was – as has been mentioned – a time of tensions in Polyphemus Port. The reasons are arcane and somewhat boring. It could be argued that Three-times-Three is the most stable form of Sisterhood, a linked network, nine minds all linked and working in parallel on a perfect grid.

  But there were, at the time, as we’ve said, other forms. The asymmetrical Five-times-Sixes of the House of Forgetting, and the Eight-times-Eights of the House of Domicile – the largest Sisterhood on Titan. And these joined forces – politically speaking – against the older and more established Three-times-Three Sisters o
f Mirth, Shelter and the House of Heaven and Hell.

  There is a lot of politics in the solar system. There is the corporate rule of most of the asteroid belt; the mellow capitalism of such old-established settlements like Tong Yun or Lunar Port; the socialism of the Martian Kibbutzim, or the despotic rule of dozens of obscure space habitats. There is the mind-meld democracy of the Zion asteroid (which had since departed the solar system to destinations unknown), the libertarian anarchy of Jettisoned, the militarism that had led to the Jovian Wars in the Galilean Republics for a time, and so on, and so forth.

  Titan was, nominally, one of those places with no clear system in place beyond the benign rule of machines; which is to say, autonomous systems kept the fragile balance of human lives functioning on an essentially hostile world, and the humans, robots, Others, Martian Re-Born, tentacle junkies, followers of Ogko and so on simply got on with whatever it was they were doing, most of which – as we’ve said – revolved around cargo.

  The rise of the Sisterhoods, however, changed things. They were not exactly a religious order, though their business was the transport of cargo and thus assumed religious nature. They were a mixture of business and religion, then, human mind-melds functioning like digital intelligences, their component parts replaced as they grew old and died, but the basic mind kept on, gaining new perspectives and notions with each new cell of a Three-times-Three or a Five-Times-Six. In a world with few genuine Others, and only the occasional robot pilgrim on its way to or from the Robot Vatican on Mars, the Sisterhoods were near unique, and their power had risen as they assumed onto themselves new followers.

  Against this background of rising tension, Shereen and Aliyah had fallen in love.

  “Hello.”

  “Oh... hello.”