In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  SO I AM alone. Mission control approached me later with a surprising delicacy, a care to avoid certain words. Perhaps my inaction on Peterson’s behalf disturbed them: or perhaps out of the three they had most expected me to jump. They may no longer feel sure of whom they’re dealing with, and their delicacy is the caution demanded by a dawning sense of ignorance. Perhaps they no longer think me trustworthy. I think when they failed to take this up with me, they stopped being entirely candid.

  THE SILENCE HAS burrowed deep into my dreams. In them, human forms flash by, and I see their faces turning as they pass, their lips moving, forming one word. Always it is the same word, but the sound I hear is not speech, nor is it ever the same. One figure passes, my mother, who tells me it is a car’s horn honking. My physics teacher says it is a hissing fire, a gas jet. To my dead brother, it is the sound of stones dropped in deep water. I call after them, but can make no sound at all until I wake, tangled in my sleep-tether, whispering “Wait” into an empty cabin.

  I wake from dreams into memories, moments long submerged resurfacing. Standing shivering by a swimming pool, my shadow beside me on the concrete a thin wavering, listening as an instructor down a line of slick-skinned children gave a command, and all down the line they flung themselves into the water. I remember watching a silver bubble burst and quiver above me, shimmering into the quicksilver sky, and then the ecstatic inrushing of water as if I too were rising.

  Years later, in school I learned about specific gravity, the opposing forces of air and water, how the nature of air is to rise, how any solid body, even if of rock, can reach its equilibrium and float—in air, if need be, if air be dense enough. And I thought: This is why I like science; and I felt once more the possibility of rising. But going into space taught me again. I unlearned, and science is a consolation only to the ignorant.

  CONSIDER THE NAMES of the ships: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo; Ares, where I earned my wings, and now Prometheus. Think how the missions lived up to their names: Mercury, an aery theft of thunder from the Soviets; Apollo, to a chaste sister giving sacrifice by fire; Ares, and the terror it brought us to. God save the man who rides on Kronos.

  THE COMPUTER IS my timekeeper, it is my courier and my library. It stores in its memory the pages I call up on the screen. For my collection I chose Shakespeare, Melville, the old myths. My crewmates left their libraries with me: Stern loved mysteries; Peterson was more a western man.

  I spend hours at the screen now, and though I am grateful for the machine, it leaves me skeptical. I wish often for the weight, or at least the solidity, of a book, instead of the image of words on glass. The transience of the picture worries me, and I have caught myself calling back earlier pages, comparing them to my own memory to see if the text has been altered by the computer’s traffic with so much other information. Sometimes, I am tantalized by a suspicion—surely that word was not noses, but something starting with a g; and that was cave, not save; not screen, but—I catch myself, and read on.

  MISSION CONTROL WANTS me to look at the communications antenna, which is a paraboloidal dish big enough for a man to lie in. Servomotors aim it constantly toward mission control, so the dish faces back the way I’ve come, my Janus. They sound more worried than usual back in Houston, and although it could easily be an act, put on for reasons I may no longer guess, it seems they really are having trouble understanding. Somewhere in the system something’s wrong, but at their end or mine no one can tell: they want me to go outside and see if, perhaps, something grossly physical (and therefore beyond their power to control) has come unhinged. They sound desperate.

  I switch on the aft external video and eye the dish. It eyes me back, pointed steadily at Earth, which is a white star off to port and well astern. The dish looks fine to me, I tell them, and wait. No, they insist, someone there believes a meteor may have knocked the antenna off focus: I must go see for myself. Without waiting for my reply, they begin to outline the procedure, the tools I will need, the complicated route along the ship’s back, how I must unhook my tether to clear the dish. Under Houston’s control, the inner airlock door slowly opens to receive me.

  I listen as the voice clips through the cockpit speakers, each syllable enunciated so sharply it stands alone. They are giving me instructions. I am not paying attention. Jupiter has crept into the forward section of the windshield, striped and swirling, closer, and suddenly the pattern I have watched for weeks snaps, and as if a picture has jumped off a printed page and rolled into my lap I see the planet’s marblings turn, and turn into clouds, winds: weather. It is a place, not a pattern. The red spot stands dead center, a catseye blinking back at me. I feel exposed.

  “Wait a minute.” I speak before I can catch myself. “This isn’t—” The airlock door waits, open like a mouth. I know now where I have heard all this before. My breath is taken away by the stupidity of the ploy. Do they think because I am out here I cannot remember old movies? Is no one back there capable of original thought?

  Am I?

  IN THE FORTY minutes before they could respond, I watched Jupiter turn ahead: the red spot lay obliquely now; sleepily askance, it eyed the insertion point for the orbit I must assume if mission control’s plan to rescue the ship is to succeed. But it was the opening of the airlock door that reminded me: they can fire the engines for the braking maneuver just as well from Houston as I can here; better. How much better? How have they calculated my unreliability by now? How large is that factor in their equations? How does it balance with the safety of the ship?

  I know how to balance an equation.

  I ponder now how much of their talk has been of rescuing the ship, not me. Did they think an omission like that would pass me by?

  I ask the computer: Is there enough fuel left to shake me from the dish and still save the ship at Jupiter? The computer gives the figures: fuel for the braking burn and some to spare. I stare at the screen, wondering if the answers are reliable, wondering if even now mission control is feeding me false data. Time elapsed from last transmission stands at 08:20, 21, 22. I am safe for thirty-one more minutes. And then? How much longer before they think up some subtler stratagem? If they grow desperate enough, will they simply open the outer airlock door?

  The voice of mission control courses on, urging me to check the seals on my cuffs. Hurrying, I pull the spacesuit from its locker. High in my chest I feel the seconds ticking.

  EMPTY SPACE. STARS swarming in: I heard them humming in my headphones. I closed my eyes: darkness, stars shining through. I put my hands to my eyes, but the gloves fell flat on my faceplate. My head afloat in its helmet, sweat stung my eyes; I leaned my skull against the globe and through the glass heard nothing. No: there, between Castor and Capella, something flashed, faded, flashed again. Something whispered in my ear. Something reflected the sun as it tumbled. “Peterson,” I whispered, and it flashed. I watched, and the light neither grew nor faded, nor moved against the stars. It was following.

  I turned and held hard to the ship, and though I felt the light flash behind me, counting its rhythm against my pulse I crawled along the hull. I passed portholes through which I saw the cabin, lighted and calm, where objects waited as if left by someone else. I reached the knot where I had spliced Peterson’s tether to mine. I passed over lettering painted on the hull: signs and insignias lay like shells on the seafloor, like fossils in rock. I waited for one of them to move.

  When I reached the dish I turned to look. There was the lander hovering, there was Peterson’s mummified face pressed close to mine, gibbering in his helmet—for a moment every direction was down.

  Then there was nothing, just my tether trailing back to the open hatchway, and the slow revolution of stars.

  The dish was fine. I crawled around it, gripping the tripod that held the antenna at its focus, and my shadow fell across its face. Radio traffic was passing through my body, my computer talking to theirs, and probably them talking to me, spinning out their story; static. I gripped the antenna boom and stared at it:
instructions for removal, the NASA insignia, but no clue, no hard fact explaining what was going wrong between us: nothing.

  Nothing: I had come to the end of my tether and found—I turned and faced the flashing following me: nothing. Only the on and off of it, on and off. Static; and in my helmet, my breath, and the sound of swallowing.

  I reached for the antenna to tear it off, to do away with mission control and their instructions. Fools or liars, I can no longer tell the difference: everything they say sounds false, devoid of sense; or in this void of sense, nothing they can say will help. It does not matter. But as I reached up I looked and saw the flash, fade, and flash again.

  “No,” I said, and it vanished. No: and it never reappeared.

  No. I would not rip out my tongue for mission control.

  I went inside and overrode antenna guidance, steered it away from Earth. Mission control faded in midsentence like a dream. I swiveled the dish a hundred eighty degrees in azimuth, faced it forward until the decameter hiss of Jupiter filled the room.

  I KEEP THE radio on, now the time is free for me to fill, metered only by the tripping in my chest. I have shorted out the cycle on the cabin lights and gone to manual. Sometimes, I work in the hold, removing instruments from one of the capsules. The instruments are useless to me now; I want the shell. Sometimes, on ship’s radio, I transmit. Music. I have not spoken yet. Jupiter has not answered. It grows oblate ahead, and I wait for word.

  AHEAD HAS BECOME beneath.

  We thread through satellites too fast to read Europa’s scars, past Io’s peacock eyes, the radio snarling static from the radiation belts. We dive down deep, into Jupiter’s sphere now filling the sky, now out of sky we fall. A horizon encircles us, flattens to a wall we climb, a ceiling we cling to, striped with fire, clay, cream, rust, slate, straw, snow. I doubt my calculations, doubt the sense of reckoning with anything this huge. The whole world hangs above, a few dim stars below. We soar or swim, I do not know. We must be close enough to see, or it was all for nothing. I will have all or nothing.

  The computer chatters beside me, parroting the terms I fed it weeks ago, but my eyes are pulled from its screen out past our bows, to the end of the broad brown ridge of cloud we follow, ahead where darkness rises. It sweeps up and over us in a second and the sun is gone: the aft camera shows a rim of red stretching from horizon to horizon, then, dizzying, the computer swivels the ship to face the sunset where light filters like an infection deep into the planet’s limb, until Jupiter seems lit from within by fevers, forges; moonsglow falls ashen on cloudtops. The computer throws a series of numbers across its screen, countdown glowing green in the darkened cabin, gleaming across my knuckles where they grip the armrests, and as the numbers reach zero and turn to the word Ignition we have ignition and the world is flattened.

  OUR ORBIT IS low, in more than secular decay, mission control would have said, leaving me to wonder how much weight to give which meaning of the word.

  I am grateful already for the silence they finally surrendered me: I no longer hear their echo mocking in my ears. Only Jupiter fills them now, the voice proper to the scene I see, if only I could fit the sounds to sight and make some sense of both, strain an answer from the chaos below. I need new words for what I see, and as we pass low over the cloudtops, the hazy regions where my decaying course will drop me, spiral me down in a week or a month, I don’t care to calculate, somewhere in my chest I sense the suspension—above or below—of a crushing weight.

  JUPITER SPEAKS SYLLABLES, sibilants, subsides. I no longer need direct the antenna: the sound seems to pierce the cabin walls, rising from the chaos below. I have broadcast nothing since we entered orbit, but hourly I feel silence grow gravid around me. I have moved Stern’s couch from the cockpit, and fitted it in the empty capsule.

  Below, finally, it spreads over the pale horizon and advances: the Great Red Spot I called it, but now I see only a tide of red swallowing everything. The nose of the ship bleeds pink, the light in the cabin suffuses dim red. We have arrived, and nothing is as I expected. Spot? A continent swirls below me, the skin of a world stripped off and spread still dripping across the flanks of Jupiter. I look down and see clouds churn, swallowing, the whole so huge we seem to slow in our passage, or else the ship is drawn toward the shadowed hollow at the center.

  THE HOLLOW PASSES off our starboard wingtip, and leaves me wondering what to call it now that I have seen: a cyclone, monsoon, typhoon—metavortex to the dozens I see spun off and shattered below, as much in size to them as they are like a hurricane. No. I do not know. This storm will blow for a million years, as it has blown since before a man worked stone, learned fire, or sketched the shadow of his hand against a cave wall. And at its center, a hazy depth, calm blue, blue as eyes, leading in. I must see closer.

  The radio is silent.

  IT CHANGES HUE with every revolution: now an ember, now a rose, a sore, the underside of my tongue.

  We pass far north of it on one orbit, and it lies on the horizon like the glow of a city.

  We pass over its center, and the dark center, its rim raised, is a caldera. Etna, I think: Olympus. My chest aches. Ten years ago I stared down the throat of Olympus Mons on Mars, alone at the controls of a ship much like this, while Stern descended to the surface, and returned with eight charred bodies, five women and three men, my crewmates. Through twenty orbits returning like a tongue to a broken tooth I looked down, I wanted to see, there, on a piece of soil irrevocably so, the place where the rocks had burnt blacker, the shards of the ship shining. I looked down, fearing to see the flame of the lander ascending, dreading the quiet at our reunion, a stillness still unbroken.

  Now I see. I look down on the eye of the storm, and though the resemblance is uncanny I feel nothing: I am careful not to move: a word was balanced within me, but down the vortex I see nothing. A drop of water drifts before my eyes. In it I see reflected all the colors that are on Jupiter. I find I have been sobbing.

  It drifts away, and I sleep, undreaming. When I wake my chest feels emptied, the cabin is filled with light, and I lie quiet.

  I SPENT THIS day at the telescope, watching the surface, setting up a trajectory on the computer. I returned to the instrument capsule, the hollow shell of it, and began again, piling on the couch inside it some things I should jettison: the program manuals, two photographs, some tools. Each thing suggested a dozen more alike in their absurdity, their profanation of this place, and then I worked through a time that passed unnoticed, until I found the capsule almost full and the hold, the cabin, the cockpit stripped, a free space almost like the one outside, bounded only by these featureless walls, this steel painted white. I had not thought the shell would hold so much.

  I heard it then at last, in the silence I have heard more clearly since I left the earth behind: I heard the word I came so far to learn.

  I heard no signal, saw no blinding flash; the heavens did not open, nor the rocks: but as I fitted in the sphere a single shoe—lost half of a pair once made by Converse but the name no longer matters—only now that all these things are gone and my world is empty do I understand: nothing. Nothing: in a world of lies, the only word that tells the whole unholy truth. It was before my beginning, it waits beyond my end. It inhabits every word I have recorded here but these words too are nothing. Only nothing: and nothing is a word and nothing more.

  All or nothing: I threw into the capsule the object I held in my hand, but before I seal them all inside I must complete my mission: all or nothing.

  I have not dismantled the ship: I need it to live in until I die. But I will make an exception now, and open the panel where the computer’s memory lies. On the hard drives, wheels within wheels, the many million words: they all must go. Drive follows drive into the capsule, until only one remains, still spinning: listen. I will not touch it. I can jettison the rest, drop every trace of Earth, every memory of mission control into the eye, and cleanse myself of the last of my earthly inheritance. And on the necessary air, food, fue
l, and water, and this small store of words, my own, await my story’s end.

  IN THE ECHOING emptiness left in the ship I watch and I wonder as the capsule drops shining away, sun lighting its limb, a crescent moon, Diana, what I would see and what hear had I gone, as it sounds down into the eye of the storm darkly blue with the baying of God’s great hounds. I see the capsule turn in its fall, a slow dreaming spin, a top’s sleeping. I see its porthole come round, a flash in the sun blinking back at me.

  What would I see? This ship, winged V, Nike, Styxdaughter, Zeus-attending. No more. The noise of our fall would grow, swell, soaring. Down faster now, through thin keening, clouds whipping: it hazes a minute and I fear it lost. Then again suddenly smaller it flashes falling silver into the indigo center, one bright swimming in violet falling and deeper. The sound would be shaking now as it slows, glowing dull red from the wind, the action of sounding. Weight grows on it, pound on pounding, and I think of a bubble in water unsinking and see: it is gone. See no splash. Silent.

  AURORA

  Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.—JOB 40:14

  The ice falls, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that now it falls, free in its falling, the drift of it I envy. See it roll. See the breaking of it, ice on ice, the brightness of it breaking in the twilight, breaking into shards, into dust, into shining, into a haze of light, into darkness: see it vanish.

  And on the Ring I only do not break. I do not vanish: I ride the wheel of it, arms out against the fall. No glittering shards of me disperse. My heart is solid inside me, a steady turning.