She can say this without thinking now. She hears it in her sleep.
And on, for four hours. By the end, Shell is frustrated but not showing it, she has a headache, her ass throbs and she is sure there’s an increased risk of deep-vein thrombosis.
The sun is low in the sky when she emerges, exhausted. A man waits near her car. He has the easy grace and haircut of a military person. He’s dressed in what he thinks passes for mufti.
“Michelle Campion?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“My name is Aaron. I was… ah, I was on the Ragtime.”
“Come back tomorrow. I’m tired today.”
“No, I wasn’t… I wasn’t a passenger. I… the Clandestine was my ship. I boarded you.”
Familiar name. “You’re the one who got medals for your actions.”
“Not just me. The crews of the Rowdy and the Pica. Posthumous for the latter. The Decisive crashed into—”
“I’m all out of apologies, Aaron.”
“I’m not here for that.”
Shell nods, waiting.
“I have a message for you from Joké.”
“Joké’s gone.”
“She appeared to me on Lagos. I might have been dreaming, I’m not sure. She said to tell you that she knows what happened to Hal. And that she will be in touch if you want, selah.”
“If I want.”
“She said she will know if it’s something you’re interested in. Does this seem weird to you?”
“Is there any aspect of this whole thing that doesn’t seem weird, Aaron?” Shell walks around him and gets into her car. “Thank you for taking the time. Have a safe trip back to Lagos.”
“I’m not going back just yet.”
“More fool you,” says Shell.
He shrinks in the rear view.
Shell passes other people lining the boulevard and she is amazed that some of the survivors wear both Tehani t-shirts and the Ragtime mission patch. She can’t help thinking they are flaunting them in her face, daring her to react. She never does. It’s not like her to be baited. She does feel that homicidal urge come back each time she sees Brisbane was Right or What are they telling you? What are they not telling you?
Not killing Brisbane personally is unsatisfactory. It leaves her with a sense of something undone, an itch unscratched.
She runs. Since her return, since her physiological markers returned to normal after prolonged life in space, she has been trying to get some bone density back. She is using weights every third day and running on alternate days. They warn her that her muscles need to recover, and to be gentler on her joints, which haven’t known real gravity for so long, but she doesn’t care.
As sweat drips from her nose, she mouths to herself that she is not atoning, not punishing herself.
It wasn’t my fault.
No.
But it was my responsibility.
And from this she cannot run.
Afterword
I don’t generally enjoy talking about a book I’ve written because it always strikes me as a kind of failure. The book should be able to stand on its own. If it can, this is superfluous. If it can’t, I’ve failed anyway, and an afterword won’t save it. That said, and salvation aside, I do think it’s a good idea to contextualise what I’ve done.
Far from the Light of Heaven was inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). I thought to myself, what if Locked Room Murder, but in space, the ultimate locked-in environment? It was around the time a hole was discovered drilled into the Soyuz capsule docked to the International Space Station in 2018. I’m a fiction writer and details like this tend to set me off on a speculative adventure.
I’d never written about space before, definitely not long-form. I knew that I didn’t want to depend on decades of reading and watching space opera. I wanted to set my story in an environment that, as much as possible, was derived from the actual experience of astronauts rather than the tropes of science fiction writing.
Which is tricky because tropes exist for a reason. Some aspects of human experience don’t translate easily into a narrative structure. Who would the audience be? The usual readers of spacefaring adventures have been trained to accept certain fictional conventions like Faster Than Light travel and artificial gravity. Many don’t mind if you play fast and loose with orbital mechanics, although many do.
And was I writing space opera? This is a conversation my editor, my agent, my cat and I had many times over the ensuing months. Current wisdom is that the book isn’t space opera.
Research. Yeah, I did the reading, as they say. I can only conclude that space is weirder and more frightening than science fiction prepares you for. One thing that came out of that research loud and clear is that space is always trying to kill you, which is where the saying “Space is the Brink of Death” came from. In space, you’re always on the verge of dying.
I found out that space smells like barbecue, that astronauts may hide mental disturbances so that it doesn’t disqualify them from flying, that the first astronauts thought orbiting the Earth was beneath them since many were test pilots and you don’t actually fly the space capsule, meaning there was little difference between them and Laika the space dog. That the expulsion of astro-urine is a beautiful sight when you’re in orbit. That astronauts are freakishly cool under pressure (you can check out the telemetry from Apollo 13).
There are four kinds of stressors in space: physical, mental, interpersonal and habitability. I had to introduce all of these in my novel. I had to remind myself that the book was not about space travel. It was about a murder in a closed environment. When I lost my way, which happened frequently because I love facts and digressions, I reminded myself what this book was: a murder mystery of sorts.
But still, science fiction lied to us. Between 44 and 67 per cent of astronauts experience space motion sickness on their first flight. Duties and actions have to be scheduled and controlled because the normal cues (sunrise/sunset, temperature, circadian rhythms, actions of other people) are gone and this can cause a whole raft of problems. Sleep problems can lead to errors that might cost lives. Overworking can cause errors just as much as boredom can.
The best data we have on psychological adaptations to long-duration spaceflight comes from long-duration Russian missions. They identify four stages, the early two of primary adaptation that coincides with the time needed for physiological microgravity adjustment, which takes about six weeks. Stages three and four include sleep disturbances, irritability, excitation, agitation, lack of self-control and even euphoria. There are issues with… well, sex. There’s an issue about crew size and odd versus even numbers. There are issues with cultural differences. Any negative personality traits get heightened. Spaceflight is wild. This may be due to spaceflight being rare. After a thousand years of routine interplanetary trips, maybe humanity will grow used to it and a jaunt to the moon will be like taking a night train.
The weirdest thing I came across had to do with the psychological effect of not seeing Earth any more, which can possibly lead to psychotic symptoms.
Did you know that cosmonauts used to piss against the side of the bus that takes them to a rocket before launch for good luck? Female cosmonauts would bring vials of urine and splash it. New suit designs made this impossible from 2019. Yuri Gagarin possibly started this in 1961, but it may have started earlier. We’ll skip right past the Vladimir Ilyushin conspiracy theories.
So space is weird and dangerous, but the ways were not all useful narratively or I’m not a good enough writer to utilise them. I had to leave a lot of stuff on the “cutting room floor” for the sake of storytelling. You can bet I took artistic licence. This is a novel, not Popular Mechanics. Story comes first.
I fell back on what I knew: my own experience as a highly trained professional in a high stress environment. It had to be someone’s first flight, a high performer who lacked experience. I drew on my experience in my first few months out of medical scho
ol. You’re well-trained, you know a lot, but you’re aware of exactly what you don’t know. It’s a combination of terror and exhilaration on the inside and calm on the outside. I remember the first time I treated a patient on my own. When the person improved, I thought, “Oh, shit, this stuff they taught us actually works!”
And that’s where Shell Campion comes from (Campion is the name of a ward I trained on). I needed to portray her like I had seen the real astronauts in crisis, in other words, calm and methodical no matter what crazy stuff the situation threw her way. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I’m happy with how she turned out.
With all of this, I still managed to include my Afro-spiritualist leanings, because reality is more fluid than we think, and aliens must be alien. I try to lean away from aliens being Other because that’s tied up with colonialist thinking. It’s one of the reasons I tried to avoid empires and massive space battles. I just have people who want to survive in the wider universe.
We shouldn’t forget the victims of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. At least 20,000 out of 60,000 sent to the camp died. This was the slave labour that produced the V2 rockets. You can thank Operation Paperclip and the corresponding Soviet Operation Osoaviakhim for spaceflight by employing thousands of German scientists that worked on the Nazi rocket programme. We can’t erase the murderous origins just because we can see the first sunsets from Mars.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my book. I enjoyed writing it, but it’s you, the readers, who make it possible. You keep reading and I’ll keep writing.
Tade Thompson
2021
Acknowledgements
Couldn’t have done this without the following people: Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliot, Alexander Cochran, Jenni Hill, Nivia Evans, Nazia Khatun, Joanna Kramer, Rob Dinsdale.
Moral support from Gavin Smith, RJ Barker and Ed Cox.
My research drew on the works of Carlo Rovelli, Mary Roach, Nick Kansas, MD and Dietrich Manzey, PhD among others. I listened to a lot of Chris Hadfield talks. I watched hours of astronaut and cosmonaut footage. Thanks to the brave people of the various space programmes, and those lost. Thanks to the International Space Station staff and ground crew who share a large amount of data.
Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine.
Blame me, because dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not an astrophysicist.
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meet the author
Photo Credit: Carla Roadnight
TADE THOMPSON is the author of the Rosewater novels, the Molly Southbourne books, and Making Wolf. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nommo Award, and the Prix Julia Verlanger and been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award, the Locus Awards, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Hugo Awards, among others. He lives and works on the south coast of England.
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if you enjoyed
FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN
look out for
NOPHEK GLOSS
The Graven: Book One
by
Essa Hansen
Caiden’s planet is destroyed. His family gone. And his only hope for survival is a crew of misfit aliens and a mysterious ship that seems to have a soul and a universe of its own. Together they will show him that the universe is much bigger, much more advanced, and much more mysterious than Caiden had ever imagined. But the universe hides dangers as well, and soon Caiden has his own plans.
He vows to do anything it takes to get revenge on the slavers who murdered his people and took away his home. To destroy their regime, he must infiltrate and dismantle them from the inside, or die trying.
Chapter 1
Tended and Driven
The overseers had taken all the carcasses, at least. The lingering stench of thousands of dead bovines wafted on breezes, prowling the air. Caiden crawled from an aerator’s cramped top access port and comforting scents of iron and chemical. Outside, he inhaled, and the death aroma hit him. He gagged and shielded his nose in an oily sleeve.
“Back in there, kid,” his father shouted from the ground.
Caiden crept to the machine’s rust-eaten rim, twelve meters above where his father’s wiry figure stood bristling with tools.
“I need a break!” Caiden wiped his eyes, smearing them with black grease he noticed too late. Vertebrae crackled into place when he stretched, cramped for hours in ducts and chemical housing as he assessed why the aerators had stopped working so suddenly. From the aerator’s top, pipes soared a hundred meters to the vast pasture compound’s ceiling, piercing through to spew clouds of vapor. Now merely a wheeze freckling the air.
“Well, I’m ready to test the backup power unit. There are six more aerators to fix today.”
“We haven’t even fixed the one!”
His father swiveled to the compound’s entrance, a kilo-meter and a half wide, where distant aerators spewed weakened plumes into the vapor-filled sky. Openings in the compound’s ceiling steeped the empty fields in twilight while the grass rippled rich, vibrating green. The air was viciously silent—no more grunts, no thud of hooves, no rip and crunch of grazing. A lonely breeze combed over the emptiness and tickled Caiden’s nose with another whiff of death.
Humans were immune to the disease that had killed every bovine across the world, but the contaminated soil would take years to purge before new animals were viable. Pasture lots stood vacant for as far as anyone could see, leaving an entire population doing nothing but waiting for the overseers’ orders.
The carcasses had been disposed of the same way as the fat bovines at harvest: corralled at the Flat Docks, twokilometer-square metal plates, which descended, and the livestock were moved—somewhere, down below—then the plate rose empty.
“What’ll happen if it dissolves completely?” The vapor paled and shredded dangerously by the hour—now the same grayish blond as Caiden’s hair—and still he couldn’t see through it. His curiosity bobbed on the sea of fear poured into him during his years in the Stricture: the gray was all that protected them from harm.
“Trouble will happen. Don’t you mind it.” His father always deflected or gave Caiden an answer for a child. Fourteen now, Caiden had been chosen for a mechanic determination because his intelligence outclassed him for everything else. He was smart enough to handle real answers.
“But what’s up there?” he argued. “Why else spend so much effort keeping up the barrier?”
There could be a ceiling, with massive lights that filtered through to grow the fields, or the ceiling might be the floor of another level, with more people raising strange animals. Perhaps those people grew light itself, and poured it to the pastures, sieved by the clouds.
Caiden scrubbed sweat off his forehead, forgetting his grimy hand again. “The overseers must live up there. Why else do we rarely see them?”
He’d encountered two during his Appraisal at ten years old, when they’d confirmed his worth and assignment, and given him his brand—the mark of merit. He’d had a lot fewer questions, then. They’d worn sharp, hard metal clothes over their figures and faces, molded weirdly or layered in plates, and Caiden couldn’t tell if there were bodies beneath those shapes or just parts, like a machine. One overseer had a humanlike shape but was well over two meters tall, the other reshaped itself like jelly. And there had been a third they’d talked to, whom Caiden couldn’t see at all.
His father’s sigh came out a growl. “They don’t come from the sky, and the answers aren’t gonna change if you keep asking the same questions.”
Caiden recalled the overseers’ parting words at Appraisal: As a mechanic determination, it will become your job to maintain this world, so finely tuned it functions perfectly without us.
“But why—”
“A mechanic doesn’t need curiosity to fix broken things.” His father disappeared back into the machine.
Caiden exhaled forcibly, bottled up his frustrations, and crawled back into the maintenance port. The tube was more cramped at fourteen than it had been at ten, but his growth spurt was pending and he still fit in spaces his father could not. The port was lined with cables, chemical wires, and face-plates stenciled in at least eight different languages Caiden hadn’t been taught in the Stricture. His father told him to ignore them. And to ignore the blue vials filled with a liquid that vanished when directly observed. And the porous metal of the deepest ducts that seemed to breathe inward and out. A mechanic doesn’t need curiosity.
Caiden searched for the bolts he thought he’d left in a neat pile.
“The more I understand and answer, the more I can fix.” Frustration amplified his words, bouncing them through the metal of the machine.
“Caiden,” his father’s voice boomed from a chamber below. Reverberations settled in a long pause. “Sometimes knowing doesn’t fix things.”
Another nonanswer, fit for a child. Caiden gripped a wrench and stared at old wall dents where his frustration had escaped him before. Over time, fatigue dulled that anger. Maybe that was what had robbed his father of questions and answers.
But his friend Leta often said the same thing: “You can’t fix everything, Caiden.”
I can try.
He found his missing bolts at the back of the port, scattered and rolled into corners. He gathered them up and slapped faceplates into position, wrenching them down tighter than needed.
Far from the Light of Heaven Page 24
