The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  At the viewport, the dust and blue and white face of Earth hurling itself huge across the pane, they call up the messages for one last look. Pluto’s finger slides over the list. The screen is filled with countless messages – some pleading, some threatening – but none are from the parents. The title of the latest one, from the Pope herself, shouts: “YOU WILL BURN IN HELL!!!!!!”

  “Goodbye,” Sharon says, touching the big red X. “You are so not in the running anymore.”

  Pluto gets to her knees and puts her face to the floor, sniffs around the edge of the airlock hatch.

  “What are you doing?” Sharon asks.

  “I thought I felt air coming in from outside. Warm air. It smelt of fruit and flowers.”

  “There’s no air on Eros, Pluto.”

  Pluto takes a deep breath, lets it out. Takes another. She disarms the hatch locks. “I’m going outside. You coming?”

  Sharon looks through the viewport again, the angry visage of Earth slapping against it like a gigantic, malicious moth, and turns to her sister. “Will it hurt?”

  “No. It will be instant. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “Not that. I mean, will it hurt the parents? When we hit them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pluto waits for Sharon to join her at the airlock.

  “We’ll always be here,” Sharon giggles, tapping her chest. “What a load of fucking dreckitude.”

  She had waited a full turn around the galaxy to come back here. She could wait a couple terrestrial turns more.

  * * *

  This is one of nine wall hangings, all on astronomical themes, produced by the Working Men’s Educational Union. The Union (founded 1853) was a philanthropic society with the object of “the elevation of the working classes, as regards their physical, intellectual, moral and religious condition”. This banner would have been used in one of the Union’s many lectures. It depicts two star clusters or nebulae. (c1850)

  ENYO-ENYO

  KAMERON HURLEY

  Enyo meditated at mealtimes within the internod, huffing liquor vapors from a dead comrade’s shattered skull. This deep within the satellite, ostensibly safe beneath the puckered skein of the peridium, she went over the lists of the dead.

  She recited her own name first.

  Enyo’s memory was a severed ocular scelera; leaking aqueous humor, slowing losing shape as the satellite she commanded spun back to the beginning. The cargo she carried was unknown to her, a vital piece of knowledge that had escaped the punctured flesh of her memory.

  She had named the ship after herself – Enyo-Enyo - without any hint of irony. The idea that Enyo had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the satellite’s moniker, and her Second, Reeb, amused himself often at her shattering attempt at humor.

  After the purging of every crew, Reeb came into Enyo’s pulpy green quarters, his long face set in a black, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood.

  “Why don’t we finish out this turn alone?” he would say. “We can manage the internod ourselves. Besides, they don’t make engineers the way they did eight turns ago.”

  “There’s the matter of the prisoner,” she would say.

  And he would throw up his dark, scarred hands and sigh and say, “Yes, there’s the prisoner.”

  It was Enyo’s duty, her vocation, her obsession, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling umbilicus from the internod to the holding pod rotation of the satellite, to tend to the prisoner.

  Each time, she greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous green fluid with the same incurious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war. Some part of her wondered if the body would recognize it. If they could talk of those times. But who knew how many turns old it was? Who knew how many other wars it had seen? On a large enough scale, her war was nothing. A few million dead. A system destroyed.

  The body’s eyes were always closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tentacles and fleshy growths. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the black fungal sucker fused to the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of fulfillment.

  Enyo usually went straight back to the internod to recite her lists of dead, after. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat, gurgling drive that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

  She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become when they reached its destination. She lost track of time in these intimate reveries, often. After half a rotation of contemplation, Reeb would do a sweep of the satellite. He would find her alive and intact, and perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the engineers or concocting a vile hallucinogen the gelatinous consistency of aloe. They were a pair of two, a crew of three, picking up rim trash and mutilated memories in the seams between the stars during the long night of their orbit around the galactic core.

  When they neared the scrap belt called Stile, Enyo was mildly surprised to see the collection of spinning habited asteroids virtually unchanged from the turn before.

  “It’s time,” she told Reeb. “Without more fuel, we won’t make it the full turn.” And she would not be able to drop off the prisoner.

  He gave her his winter look. She had left the last of his engineers on a paltry rock the color of foam some time before. He did not know why they needed the crew now; he did not have her sense of things, of the way time moved here. But he would be lonely. It’s why he always agreed to take on another crew, even knowing their fate.

  “How many more?” he said.

  “This is the last turn,” she said. “Then we are finished.”

  She let Reeb pick the new crew. He launched a self-propelled spore from the outernod well ahead of their arrival on the outskirts of Stile. The dusty ring of settlements within the asteroid belt circled a bloated, dying star. Had it been dying the last time they passed? Enyo could not remember.

  Reeb’s sister worked among the debris, digging through old spores and satellites, piecing together their innards, selling them as pirated vessels imbued with the spirit of cheap colonial grit.

  Enyo had not seen Reeb’s sister in many turns, when speaking of the war, of genocide – in terms outside the propagandic – was still new and unsettling and got them thrown out of establishments. Broodbreeders and creep-cleaners called them void people, diseased, marked for a dry asphyxiation aboard a viral satellite, drifting ever-aimless across limitless space. They were not far wrong. Sometimes Enyo wondered if they really knew who she was.

  She heard Reeb’s sister slide up the umbilicus into the internod. Heard her hesitate on the threshold, the lubrication of the umbilicus slick on her skin.

  “This your satellite?” Reeb’s sister asked.

  Enyo had expected to feel nothing at her voice, but like the body in the tank, she was sometimes surprised at what was fed to her. Something in her flared, and darkened, and died. It was this snapshot of Reeb’s sister that she always hoped was the true one. The real one. But she knew better.

  She swiveled. Reeb’s sister did not take up the tubal port as Reeb did, but inhabited it in the loose way the woman inhabited all spaces, wrapping it around herself like a shroud, blurring the edges of her surrounds – or perhaps Enyo’s eyes were simply going bad again. The satellite changed them out every quarter turn. The woman had once had the body of a dancer, but like all of them, she had atrophied, and though she was naturally thin, it was a thinness borne of hunger and muscle loss. Her eyes were black as Reeb’s, but their color was the only feature they shared. She was violet black to Reeb’s tawny brown, slight in the hips and shoulders, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough, perhaps, to fly.

  “Reeb says you need a sentient spore specialist,” the
woman said.

  “Yes, we have one last pickup. I need you to aid in monitoring our spore for the drop. I’m afraid if you do not, the prisoner may escape.”

  “The prisoner?”

  Enyo had forgotten. This woman had not met them yet. She did not know. Something inside of Enyo stirred, something dark and willfully forgotten, like a bad sexual encounter.

  “Where are the others?” Enyo asked.

  “Aren’t you going to ask my name?”

  “I already know it,” Enyo said.

  The day Reeb’s sister was born, Enyo had named her “Dysnomia.” She had cursed all three of them that day, and perhaps the universe, too. One could never be quite certain.

  Nothing had ever been the same after that.

  Because she could not go back. Only around.

  The sound of the machines was deafening. Enyo stood ankle-deep in peridium salve and organic sludge. Ahead of her, Reeb was screaming. High pitched, squealing, like some broodmeat. But she could not see him.

  Then the siren started. A deep seated, body-thumping wail that cut deep into her belly. Now we turn, she thought. This is a very old snapshot.

  Ahead of her, a few paces down the dripping corridor, Dax battered her small body against the ancient orbital entryway. Her tears mixed with sweat and grease and something far more dangerous, deceptive. Florets spiraled up the bare skin of her arms from wrist to elbow.

  Enyo raised the fist of her weapon and called the girl back, “Don’t go down there! Not there! The colonists are this way.”

  “I’m not leaving them!” Dax sobbed. Her white teeth looked brilliant in the darkness. What animal had she harvested them from? “I know what you did! I know you started this. You set this all in motion.”

  Enyo admitted that she had not expected it would be Dax who went back. Her memories were not always trustworthy.

  The satellite took a snapshot.

  Reeb’s tastes were predictable in their disparity. He brought up his new crew to meet with Enyo in the internod. The first: a pale, freckled girl of a pilot whose yellow hair was startling in the ambient green glow of the dermal tissue of the room. Enyo could not remember the last time she’d seen yellow hair. The war, maybe. The girl carried no weapons, but her hands were lean and supple, and reminded Enyo of Reeb’s hands when he was in his sixties: strong, deft, capable. Not what he was now, no, but what he would become.

  The other crewmember was a mercenary: a tall, long-limbed woman as dark as the girl was light. Her head was shaved bald. She wore a silver circlet above her ears, and half of her left ear was missing. She carried a charged weapon at either hip, and a converted organic slaying stick across her back. She smelled of blood and metal.

  “Do they have names?” Enyo asked Reeb.

  “Dax Alhamin,” the little pilot said, holding out her hand. It was a rude affectation picked up by many of the young, to touch when first meeting. They did not remember how the war had started, with a nit-infected warmonger who murdered superpod after superpod of colonists with a single kiss. Or perhaps they had simply forgotten. Enyo was never sure what side of the curtain she was on. The satellite distorted the universe at its leisure, often at her expense.

  The other one, the mercenary, laughed at the open hand the girl proffered and said, “I’m Arso Tohl. I heard you have cargo that needs… liberating.”

  Dax pulled her hand back in. She was smiling broadly. Her teeth were too white to be real. Even if she was the twenty years she looked, no real person had teeth like that – not even a rim world god. Not even a warmonger.

  “It’s necessary,” Enyo said. “We need to get back to the beginning.”

  “The beginning?” Dax said. “Where did you come from?”

  “It doesn’t matter where we came from,” Reeb said. “Nor where we’re going. That’s not how a satellite like this works.”

  “I think I’ve heard of this satellite,” Arso said. “Some prototype from the Sol system, isn’t it? You’re a long way from home. You were already old news when I was growing up.”

  Enyo closed her eyes. She ran through her litany of dead. At the end, she added two new names:

  Arso Tohl and Dax Alhamin.

  She opened her eyes. “Let’s tell them how it works, Reeb,” she said.

  “Enyo-Enyo makes her own fate,” Reeb said. “Her fate is ours, too. We can alter that fate, but only if we act quickly. Enyo guides that fate. Now you’re part of it.”

  Arso snorted. “If that’s so, you better hope this woman makes good decisions, then, huh?”

  Reeb shrugged. “I gave up on hoping that many cycles ago.”

  “All that we are is sacrifice,” Enyo’s first squad captain told her. “Sacrifice to our countries. To our children. To ourselves. Our futures. We cannot hope to aspire to be more than that.”

  “But what if I am more than that?” Enyo said. Even then, she was arrogant. Too arrogant to let a slight go uncommented upon.

  Her squad captain smiled; a bitter rictus, shiny metal teeth embedded in a slick green jaw grown just for her. The skin grafting hadn’t taken. Enyo suspected it was because the captain neglected the daily applications of salve. People would take her more seriously, with a jaw like that.

  “I know what you did, Enyo,” her squad captain said. “I know who you are. This is how we met out justice on the Venta Vera Arm, to war criminals.”

  The captain shot her. It was the first time Enyo died.

  As Enyo gazed up from the cold, slimy floor of the carrier, her blood steaming in the alien air, her captain leaned over her. The metal teeth clicked. Close enough to kiss.

  The squad commander said, “That is how much a body is worth. One makes no more difference than any other. Even the body of the woman who started the war.”

  As her life bled out, Enyo’s heart stopped. But not before Enyo reached up and ate half her captain’s spongy artificial jaw.

  Enyo secured her comrade’s skull in the jellied dampener beside her. All around her, the spore trembled and surged against its restraints. Reeb had created it just an hour before and clocked in the elliptical path it must take to get them to the rocky little exoplanet where the cargo waited. The spore was ravenous and anxious. Dysmonia already lay immersed at the far end of the spore. She looked beautiful. Peaceful.

  Dax eased herself back into her own jellied dampener. Torso submerged, she remained sitting up a moment longer, cool eyes wide and finally, for the first time, fearful.

  “Whose skull is that?” Dax asked.

  Enyo patted the dampener. “Yours,” she said.

  Dax snorted. “Whole bloody lot of you is mad.”

  “Yes,” Enyo said.

  Arso pushed through the still-slimy exterior of the spore and into the core where they sat. She spit a glob of the exterior mush onto the floor, which absorbed it hungrily.

  “You sure there’s no one on that rock?” Arso said.

  “Just the abandoned colonists,” Reeb murmured from the internod. The vibrations tickled Enyo’s ears. The tiny, threadlike strands tucked in their ear canals were linked for as long as the living tissue could survive on their blood.

  “It was simply bad timing on their part,” Reeb said. “The forming project that would have made Tuatara habitable was suspended when they were just a few rotations away. They were abandoned. No one to welcome them.”

  “No one but us,” Enyo said, and patted the skull beside her. For a long moment, she thought to eat it. But there would be time for that later.

  “Foul business,” Arso said.

  Enyo unloaded the green fist of her weapon from the gilled compartment above her. It molded itself neatly to her arm, a glittering green sheath of death.

  “You have no idea,” Enyo said.

  Enyo screamed and screamed, but the baby would not come. The rimwarder “midwife” she’d hired was young, prone to madness. The girl burst from the closet Enyo called home three hours into the birthing. Now Enyo lay in a bed soaked with her own perspiration
and filth. The air was hot, humid. Above her screams, she heard the distant sound of people working in the ventilation tube.

  So it was Enyo who took her own hand. Who calmed her own nerves, who coached her own belabored breath. Enyo. Just Enyo. Why was it always the same, every turn? Why was she always alone, in this moment, but never the others?

  She pushed. She screamed herself hoarse. Her body seemed to tear in two. Somewhere far away, in some other life, in some other snapshot, she was dimly aware of this moment, as if it were happening to some character in an opera.

  The death-dealers banged on the door and then melted it open. They saw she was simply birthing a child alone… so they left her. Sealed the room behind her. Like most rim filth, they hoped she would die there in child bed and spare them the trouble. They could come back and collect her dead flesh for resale later.

  Enyo grit her teeth and pushed.

  The baby came. One moment, just Enyo. The next… a squalling, writhing mass no more sentient in that moment than a programmable replicator, but hers nonetheless. A tawny brown child with her own black eyes..

  “Reeb,” she said.

  She reached toward him. Her whole body trembled.

  The second child was smaller, too thin. This was the one she would give away. The one who would pay her way to the stars.

  This one she called Dysmonia.

  Enyo voided the body for delivery. Capped all the tubes. A full turn about the galaxy in transit for a single delivery. A single body. Back to the beginning. How many times she had done this, she wasn’t certain. The satellite, Enyo-Enyo, revealed nothing. Only told her when it was hungry. And when it was time to station itself, once again, on its place of origin.

  She pushed the body’s pod over and it floated beside her, light as a moth’s wing. She placed her fingers on top of the pod and guided it down into the cargo bay. The body stirred gently.

  The interior of Enyo-Enyo was mostly dark. Motionless. Not a sound. They were the last of the living on Enyo-Enyo, this turn. They usually were. The satellite was hungry. Always so hungry. Like the war.