In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  I cannot remember when this was not so.

  I KNOW THE ice. I know the darkness north and south, I know the great bulk of Saturn below. I know Aurora rising to meet me in her time. Only myself I do not know.

  Of myself, I see only fragments. There is my auger, the sharp point of me, glittering at end like ice, scoured by ice and harder. There are my arms: these thin rods of titanium, articulate and shining, hooked at end with tungsten claws. The rest I do not see, and know only by a sensation I cannot describe: a dull vibration in the frame of me. There are doors: I shrug and they open for ice. And beyond the doors, a chamber where ice is melted, though I feel no heat; only the opening of valves. There are valves, and motors to drive them; nozzles where I vent off meltwater, a cloud of light returning to the Ring. And at my heart a gyroscope revolves, so finely tuned to falling that I cannot feel it, unless I turn against the fall.

  In the hollow that is most of me, the heavy elements of my refining linger. I know their names, and the weights of them: how they answer to Saturn by falling, to the call that comes louder as they press within me, but still we fall no faster, I do not feel them, I have no sight or taste or touch of them: only their heft, the mass that binds me still more strongly to the Ring, until Aurora comes, and I am set out again among the ice.

  Aurora always comes. What signals her I do not know. So much is out of my control.

  I do not sleep.

  I know sleep: it is in the motion of the ice that falls around me: falls, and does not change. It is in the falling of us all—in the ice adrift, in the darkness where we fall, the darkness there that draws me on but never into Saturn, only falling, the ice and I, toward sleep that never comes. It is one of those words from the darkness within me, words like hope, like pain, like love, one of the words that falls nowhere.

  I sense other words in the darkness, words I cannot hear. I only feel them echo in the hollow within me. They jar this voice that speaks distinctly in my thoughts—disturb it, as the ice around me jostles in its fall. They tell me that, in some other life I cannot imagine, in some time I cannot recall, I was not as I am now.

  THERE IS A voice in me that is not mine. It is all I hear between me and the Ring. The voice whispers: I am two point nine seven nine oh hours into this revolution; my target is at range three eight point oh six four; my payload is at thirty-five percent.

  It occupies my thoughts. It keeps the silence from entering. It carries me, as ceaselessly as time, as irresistibly as the Ring itself sweeps onward. I feel myself within it falling, unable to ignore it, unable to reply.

  I think sometimes it speaks to keep me from thinking.

  Vision also intercedes between me and the ice, lights that are to my mind’s eye as the voice is to my thoughts: in a violet line against the stars my target shows eight ragged peaks at wavelengths of so many nanometers. These are the signs of uranium, the voice tells me.

  In the darkness, in the silence, the voice and the visions, they comfort me.

  Saturn has voices; the Ring and the darkness have voices too: they chorus on some sense that once was hearing. At Saturn’s core a murmur speaks of time; above its poles, electrons wail in their spiraling fall. From the darkness, a dim hissing: this is the voice of the stars.

  And once each revolution I hear the Ring itself awake into the sun. It calls, in a cadence that pulses, waking echoes in the hollow within me, echoes that might be words: words like sorrow, like loss; but the voice inside me whispers static discharge, coulombs, hertz: the voices of the Ring are hushed, the echoes die away, and I am comforted.

  But still, each revolution, at the pulsing of the ice, in a hollow inside me something opens. In the dull drum of me something beats, as though trapped and calling, the note of it fading, and then only silence, and within me the sound of a motor whining briefly, venting ice.

  ONE BY ONE, the moons draw near. In my frame I feel them: Iapetus and Phoebe, Dione and Tethys, Rhea, and the largest one, orange and featureless in my long-range vision. I know their names, I do not know how. In my frame a yearning rises, but it is not for them. For something like them, but what I cannot say. I long for some great fall. Not into Saturn, not into the night that holds us all, but into what I cannot say: into something that is not the Ring, something distant and solid, like the moons. Like myself.

  Saturn is not solid: the voice tells me so, feeding me data: the pressure there so many millibars, the composition so much of ammonia, free hydrogen, water-ice. The temperature is so many degrees Kelvin, and I know that is cold, although here in the Ring the ice is colder. But what a millibar is, what once was fractured into thousands, I cannot say, nor what was Kelvin before it became a thing of degrees. Nor how I know a milli is a thousandth, or a degree a thing of crumbling.

  Ammonia, water: I know these. These are the constituents of ice. I know, too, that I need them to survive: they feed me, in some way I know only from the hunger that I feel for them. And though I do not taste them, I know them with the intimacy hunger brings. I see them. I hear them always calling from the Ring, from the ice I grapple, from the shining spray I vent, prismatic in the sun, a glory I fall through as it fades, vanishing, returned into the Ring.

  So much is vanishing here. Only I do not: I remain, the moons’ stress in my frame telling me only I am solid. And echoes, telling me I am a thing of—echoes.

  I CANNOT SEE the sun. I have tried, but there is a command in me that will not let me look. The voice tells me my cameras cannot stand the light: an instant, and I would be blind, and without vision I cannot mine the ice. And without ice, it tells me, my life will be an endless fall through hunger: a fall through time made merciless by darkness, through darkness unbroken by change.

  But I have tried. I do not know why. Only that the way the sunlight breaks upon the ice—the brilliance of it flashing here, where seeing and vanishing are one; this poignancy I cannot capture, though it touches me each instant as I turn, and turn, and fall upon the Ring: all of this, and what more I cannot say because it comes from what within me I do not know—all of this draws me, despite all warning, to look toward the sun.

  I cannot. My cameras swivel, focus, range and shift all out of my control, and never in all the revolutions of the Ring have they let me see what lies there, where shadows fall from.

  But still I want to see.

  OUT OF THE A Ring, bright against the Division, falling now into the B Ring and toward me, Aurora comes. I see her engines flare: flakes of ice vanishing in bright vapor she brakes, nearing now: beside me, docking: our collars match, mate, our systems mesh, and once again she is here.

  From connections I cannot feel Aurora’s presence floods through me, lights and echoing voices not my own flow in. My sensors detune, the stars dim, and before the new instructions seat themselves, I know that once again I am about to remember.

  But then the sun flickers, the sky is black again so soon I cannot remember what color it was; the bulk of Aurora eclipses the stars, the new instructions execute, and the voice in me returns.

  It is speaking of iridium. It has a warbling note, four peaks on the spectral graph.

  I cannot remember what I remembered. For one brief moment’s inward fall I know that in a moment more I will forget I remembered at all, and now only the dim shiver, low in my empty hold.

  I DO NOT know the nature of my thoughts. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Are they saved or are they lost? Does Aurora hear them, or something beyond Aurora? I cannot say. I know only that to me they are irrevocable: I think them, and they vanish. This is the nature of the Ring.

  But if I could recall these words, hear them once again above the voice that distracts me, I might know what it is that pains me. But now Aurora signals her departure, and with a rupture, with pain, the channels break, the valves seal, collars spin, decouple. Her jets flare in the sun and she is gone.

  I watch, hoping to learn where she goes. The flame of her engines lifts her above the Ringplane and out, climbing, brilliant again agai
nst the Division, then over the A Ring and dwindling, the shape of her lost below resolution, the flame finally below my cameras’ threshold and I am falling.

  I do not know where these words go. They vanish from me, into darkness. And like the Ring, their vanishing is endless.

  I FALL THROUGH darkness, the sun eclipsed by Saturn’s huge night. Along the Ring, a dim bridge into light, I listen, urgent after iridium. I grapple ice loud with it, auger in. It breaks, pieces fall away. I gather them, feed them into me. My frame rings loudly with their impact within.

  I gather all but one: it has flown farther, up out of the Ring. I follow, clamber, carom, climb up into spaces where ice is scant. And there, my limbs go sluggish.

  It is always like this. There is a command within me: it will not let me too far from the Ring: it outweighs even the hunger for ice. Off the Ring, the voice tells me, the emptiness is deadly: ten hours without ice and my systems fail. So when I try to climb I am given heaviness, a reluctance that would be fear but it does not belong to me. I feel it imposed, a command that does not need a voice: it has my limbs in its control, my strength its hostage.

  And to oppose it I am given only hunger.

  Caught between the heaviness and hunger I stop, still drifting out.

  Here above the Ringplane, a kilometer of emptiness below me, I circle with the Ring, a ghost off a ghost-road through darkness. Uneasy, I yearn for the Ring. Under the prompting of the voice, I thrust: I feel the spray of vapor oppose my momentum, but it is too weak: soon it sputters, it tails off, my tank is empty, and I am drifting. Anxious now I listen, but for a long time the voice within me, intent on the Ring, is silent.

  Then a slow number speaks itself. I am drifting far out, far into stillness, and even the voice is still.

  Far from the Ring I am drifting, helpless to control my flight. In the emptiness here, my horizon opens. Space is everywhere. It seems to open even into me. In the silence, heedless for once of ice, my cameras drift. The voice is still; the echoes are still as well. Only these thoughts remain, loud and uncontrollable.

  Without warning, the Ring below bursts into light. The ice awakens, the Ring’s chorus pulses; slowly, the sound fades away.

  When the silence returns, light lies everywhere around me, and still the voice is silent. The silence is harrowing. The light is merciless. The transparency of space appalls me. Below, Saturn’s body is alive: I see each storm as it uncoils, each uneasy surge of ice-fog, and everywhere the sheer terror of wind. And on the Ring I see the multitudes of the ice, each in its singularity distinct, each in its moment of flashing as sharp, as ephemeral as pain. It is all here, and I am here in it, solid, drifting, and strange. It is as though I have never seen this before.

  Far ahead in the darkness, something hovering over the Ring catches the light of the sun. Its graph is dim, peaked in a pattern I have never seen. The voice says nothing. Without it, I am helpless to identify. But something inside me has started to clamor. With an effort, I swivel the long-range camera forward.

  At the limits of resolution, it shows me a cylinder spinning slowly, end over end. A narrow neck. The ungainly growth of a head. I see a pair of arms: thin, articulate, and hooked at end. It drifts through emptiness, even farther from the Ring than I have come. It falls, flashing in the sun, its arms held out against the fall.

  Abruptly, the voice returns. It tells me we are falling; in two point nine oh two hours we will return to the Ring, entering at a relative velocity of so many meters per second: three point seven encounters with ice of average mass will disperse the polar vector of our speed. We are saved.

  I am not listening. I am struggling not to listen. I am struggling to hold on to my cameras, struggling to hold the silence, struggling to remember what I have seen; struggling against the voice, against the ice, against the Ring, against the fall back into sleep. I am falling.

  In the depths of my hold, as I turn to face the Ring, as I ready my arms for ice, like a bad bearing starting to break down, like an ingot working loose, something shudders against the fall. The echoes inside me are loud.

  I AM PLAGUED by double vision. My cameras, compelled, seek ice. They are bound to iridium, to measuring vectors of collision and capture, as my thoughts are bound to the Ring and the voice. But a memory has survived in me, a silence I wedge between us. In instants that pass almost before I can grasp them, I can see.

  I cannot look. But in glimpses left to me, past the graph, through the tumbling ice, in the spaces between the words, I remember, and I watch for the other I saw.

  Ahead it drifts, high above the Ring. But as I watch it is falling back into the ice, rolling in a slow helpless fall. In a rush it vanishes, lost in the sweep of the Ring far ahead and I am left aching, as if to an echo of impact.

  But abruptly below the Ring I see it again, reaching out into the darkness against the stars of Virgo. Past Spica it flashes, tumbling faster now. An arm is waving in my direction; light glints off a lens as it swivels my way.

  It is calling me to follow.

  ON ANOTHER REVOLUTION I see it rise again out of the Ring before me. On its long outward reach, as it dwindles to a star it seems to slow; it seems to stop; it is not falling. It is motionless against the stars. I am aching with envy.

  I know it must be falling.

  It hangs, as if motionless, but holds its station, high above and far ahead. It is falling. I stare at it, my cameras resisting commands to turn to the ice. I am fascinated. Why has it climbed so high? What is this within me that yearns?

  Within me, alarms are ringing. The voice in my head sees iridium everywhere. A collision alert bleats wildly, beating back the echoes in my hold.

  It will not work. Something within me has broken loose, is rising with a rush to consciousness.

  The voice, the graph, these hush and dim. I hold them so, fending them off with this new force that rises, that somehow I know to call anger.

  As the thing holds motionless above me and ahead, even now I see it growing larger, its form resolving out of the stars once more into the long rolling of a cylinder, the beckoning of arms, gathering speed as its course angles steeply down and as it dives into the Ring I know.

  I know why it climbs: it climbs to fall.

  And I know this now as well: the voice has lied, has always lied. It is lying to me now, telling me anything it thinks I might believe, anything it thinks might draw me back into its orbit. See, there, iridium, it says, and swivels my cameras everywhere around me. Feel, there, the status of your tanks. Feel hunger, feel thirst, feel the ice around you sleeping, see it fall.

  Somehow, although weight grows everywhere in me, and my cameras swivel helplessly down into falling, somehow I hold the voice at bay. I hold it because I know, and the knowledge is almost stronger than Saturn, almost more than the ice and the hunger.

  I know these things.

  That nothing falling leaves the Ring. Twice each revolution, I have seen this other pass through the plane, because it must: here, all circles intersect.

  That the heaviness I am given here protects not me but something else.

  That this other knows as well: even now I see it sinking, dwindling on the other side, until in a moment it will hang against the stars as if it knows a way to stop its falling.

  AS ONE REVOLUTION falls into another, I hear only this voice that says Follow. I feel a motion in one of my limbs: it reaches out after ice, not to break, not to gather: I reach out only to climb, to arc again high off the Ring. I reach out and climb. I follow.

  I have no skill, no strength in my arms on ice. My thoughts are slow, and the edge of them dull. But I climb. The voice, protesting, rises as I rise, slicing away at my thoughts, almost unstringing my limbs. I answer in the only language it leaves me, driving a talon here into ice where I clutch, whirl, whip free now, now free of the wheel, arcing into the absence of ice.

  The voice is stentorian. It says I have gone too far. In answer I vent, violently, my tanks in a shining cloud, and the surge of
it lifts me still higher.

  The voice is shocked into silence. I wonder if I have broken it. I wonder if I am free.

  My cameras return to my control. This time, I am waiting for them. I seize them with an urgency I cannot name, and so I call it longing, I call it want.

  I know what I want. We will meet, the two of us, in a moment I cannot imagine: for a moment the darkness before me will freeze, the ice of the Ring lies like dust on a mirror, and in the instant the mirror is shattered I will see: my own reflection breaking through, arms out to greet me in its fall. I long for a moment of breaking.

  But ahead I find only emptiness, harrowed by stars. I cannot see the one I follow. I had not known how much emptiness we fall through, how far we have to fall. I do not know how to shape my course: space is too big, the Ring too long, the moons too near, too many.

  My arms reach out, and touch only nothing. I have nothing to climb, no control of my course: Saturn calls it, and helpless I answer; the moons warp it, and helpless I weave. Below me, the Ring reaches out; the ice opens up like a mouth to meet me. In a moment, I know, the voice will return; I will forget what I follow; I will know only longing, and want; I will fall.

  I am falling.

  I FELL A long time, far below the Ring: it arced above me in Saturn’s shadow, a thin hook of hunger over emptiness. The voice, reawakened, consoled me, in whispers urging: Conserve; shut down. With a weakness I name despair I obeyed; I allowed the voice to make its dull decisions everywhere about my frame. My vision dimmed; my radar muted. The bright bowl of Saturn, cupping its darkness, the darkness riven by lightning, the pale austral crown: these vanished; I was blind. The gyro dropped low and still lower, only a soft moan deep in the numbness that once was me. Only I and the whispering voice, and cold seeping into my frame.