In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Page 3

  “It was in a dream,” I told them, and looked from the reader out the port. Jupiter was off abeam, a featureless star so bright its light seems heavy. I can feel it in my eyes. Soon the image will spread, form a disc. I try to imagine what it will look like: a marble, a banded shooter, a catseye: I have seen pictures, but it will not be the same. There will be a salmon-colored eyespot, which I’m looking forward to seeing. It was our mission’s objective. At least it is something to wait for.

  Return transmission was eight minutes late. “We’ve asked Dr. Hayford to discuss this with you. If you’d like.” If I’d like: back at Houston, Hayford could have driven halfway home by now, leaving a string of words slung through the ether from mission control: I could no more shut him up than I could stop this ship. Since Stern and Peterson walked out on me, there’s been a lot of empty deference on the airwaves, mostly incoming.

  Dr. Hayford claims to know me better than my mother does, and this may be so, but I think he feels inadequate to this situation. “We’ve reviewed your transmission,” he says. “I gather it’s not your nightmare. So I’m glad. You mentioned a sound in this dream. That’s a good sign. Would you like to talk about it? I’ll wait.”

  I told him if I remembered it I wouldn’t have bothered them in the first place, I didn’t care about it anymore, let’s quit wasting time.

  I let him think it was only a sound, but it was more: it was a word.

  HERE IS A list of mission control’s euphemisms:

  the burn

  the event

  the incident

  the accident

  the unfortunate [all of the above]

  the spontaneous ignition

  the midcourse miscorrection

  the transorbital overenhancement. This one was my favorite, but the one they prefer is “the accident.” I have started to ask them, “Which one?”

  And they say I’ve lost my sense of humor.

  I STILL NEED to explain. We slept afloat, adrift like tethered fish, hugging ourselves to keep our arms from feeling awkward. My mouth opens in my sleep, sometimes saliva wells around my tongue, forms a sphere inside my mouth, and then I inhale it and wake, choking. I hack on the gob of spit, cough it out, and when I can breathe again I look around and see only dark, drifting shapes, I cannot remember who or where I am. I see Stern and Peterson afloat on their tethers; I hear them breathe, first one, then the other, a soft sound like water flowing into a drum. The ship cycles air, water; servos whine on and off around the hull, all these sounds are very close, and though I would wake immediately if they stopped, waking now gagging in the dark these sounds are stifling, and I think first I have awakened with a fever in my bedroom in my parents’ home, I have heard the horn of a freighter on the lake; but then a window drifts in front of me, a light shines far beyond the pane, and I see stars, so thick they seem a solid mass, and the cabin walls could dissolve in an instant.

  SICKENING PLUNGE THROUGH roaring; darkness; twitch at my belly the tether snapped; falling aft: down: we tumble together on the after bulkhead, Stern feet first and shouting, but the roar of the main engine drowns his voice, the darkness defeats us as we struggle. Peterson is motionless. The cockpit and controls now up against acceleration a dozen meters never meant to be climbed, I feel the distance stretching each second the ship leaps farther and faster ahead, leaving behind the fuel we need to get home. Banging my head against stanchions, losing my grip and slipping in the dark, alone, there is only one sound, and no progress upward: the ship is climbing away with us, and its gathering speed strips each moment out past measuring.

  Suddenly there is light and I am blinded, blinking at the workbench I hug. Stern hangs from the opposite wall. We look up. A speaker squalls “…status…cutoff…manual”: gibberish. I freeze, but Stern climbs again, barking more noise into air already too burdened to carry sense.

  Nineteen minutes and some seconds pass before we can override the impulses that somehow opened the fuel system. Silence, and we fall freely again through space, faster now: I can feel the pace in my pulse. Peterson drifts forward through the cabin, his head trailing a pennant of blood.

  NOW THAT THE cabin is empty, there is no reason to float around in bed any longer than the moment I awake: off tether, off to the head, breakfast, mission control like the morning news on the radio. I read more and more each day: deserts, dry gulches, buzzards circling. Jupiter stands off to starboard, brighter than before, and now I see a disc. I realize what I said in my first entry was a lie: I can’t compare its size to anything we know, the head of a pin, an egg, my eye. If I had a penny, I could hold it to the glass and compare, but there’s not a cent aboard, isn’t that odd? I’m glad I can’t: the comparison would show me nothing but a penny in my hand, and beside it, so far away I count the space in months, not miles: a planet. Its image is as clear as if etched on the glass, its satellites are perfect points of light beside it, all on a line, balancing. I envy them. I feel heavy and obtuse.

  But I am weightless: an overhand pull swung me out of the cockpit and back into the cabin. Gone these five months and not once thought of cash, but I spent the rest of the afternoon tearing through Stern’s and Peterson’s effects, rifling the ship just to see. Not a cent.

  MISSION CONTROL HAS many suggestions: about me, the ship, our mission. They are like bachelors babysitting. I sense fear in their omissions. “In theory…” they say, and skip ahead to speak of Jupiter. While I hang here listening, they weigh the orbits open to me there, and plan for my survival until rescue comes. They appear to have made a decision: they offer to make me a constellation, translate me into the sky with Io, Europa, and the rest. I am skeptical. It is not mission control that sets my course; it is ahead, Jupiter growing broader and brighter by degrees so small I never see the change, whom I must answer to. In practice, I doubt that I will have much to say in the matter.

  There is one group that wants me to stop these recordings, and another wants them transmitted instead. A third thinks I should carry on, and one lonely man is horrified at the prospect. I suspect he knows what he is talking about, and wish he would shut up.

  THE SHIP MOVES on, and forces me to choose. Here, the choices are simpler, the rules clearer: action, reaction; mass acting on mass; an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless…But this kind of clarity is useless to me now, since I can see Jupiter clearly ahead, and know how all these equations balance, what answers they will come to: something very like a zero. I could crash there, of course; I could orbit it and wait for mission control; or I could crack the whip around it, shoot out in any direction I choose: how much more poignant to fly past Earth on my way out into darkness, moving too swiftly to say goodbye. I’d prefer to keep on the way I’ve come.

  I prefer: in none of the equations for action, mass, and motion have I ever read a term for my capacity to choose. There are more things in heaven than in earth, I see that now. I am not in theory anymore; philosophy is not a dream. I am alive, that star behind me is the earth, and there is no “unless” in Jupiter. But there are choices.

  WHILE THE BALANCE of its mind was disturbed, mission control brought my parents in to talk to me today. I mean that. I think they have taken leave of their senses, lost their marbles, gone off the deep end. My parents are in their nineties, and have not left the retirement home since I put them there ten years ago, and I do not visit often. Dad is aphasic; Mom talks, but how much is there to say? She asks me how my work is going, and I tell her,—Okay, and she says, brightly,—Good. Generally we leave it there, and spend our time more fruitfully on doctor’s appointments, outings to the mall, the hazards of slippery floors. Once, when I told her I had just returned from Mars, confusion overwhelmed her. I pitied her then, with a generosity I needed desperately at the time. It is only recently I have come to wonder if her confusion is not after all a state of grace.

  And now they’ve sent an air-conditioned sedan to fetch them to the airstrip, bundled them on a NASA jet, transshipped to Houston. Here. For a m
oment it seemed the radio was eavesdropping on my childhood, the voice in the speaker calling from the kitchen door, come in for supper, put on your jacket, its getting late, time to come home. I shook my head, wondering if this were one of Hayford’s radio dramas, and I the only one without a script, hearing her say,—Your father’s here. His voice saying,—Where is he? and then the cabin walls, the stars outside, all fell away and I could see them in their Florida clothing, their heads quivering on their delicate necks as they turn to watch technicians passing, voices hurrying saying nothing they can understand.

  “Get them off. Get them out of here. Take them home.”

  I cut the connection.

  I HAVE BEEN floating here in silence since, thinking of my alternatives, to stop at Jupiter or travel on: the journey outward, into silence so thick as to become something: a pressure, a presence here with me. As weight surrounds a mass, so silence would fill the air around me, falling in, rising from blood rustling in my ears to become a whisper, a word spoken, a cry, the roar of burning and finally the crash of everything that falls. Beyond Pluto, silence would be more than absence of speech: even zero has meaning, but what is zero taken to an infinite power? And on what fingers do I count it? Though I could hear the singing of the spheres, see colors off the spectrum, touch nothing: how could I tell? and whom?

  I reach up and touch my ears: they are cool. I try to trace their infoldings with my finger, picture the pattern there, but my mind won’t follow: pinna, auricle, these words drift through my thoughts, and I don’t know where I learned them, or how they might help me in the silence beyond Jupiter. I only know that between cool flesh and colder vacuum, I will have my hands full. I am Jupiter-bound.

  But by how long a chain?

  STERN AND PETERSON left in that order, on successive days. The initiative was Stern’s. We did not talk much in the days following the burn. At first, I attributed this to simple shock, and fear for our survival. Conversation seemed at first a burden, then a risk. But just as we no longer sensed our new velocity once acceleration ceased, so our increased risk became a piece with the fears we’d shared since liftoff and before. Still we found it hard to talk, even to meet each others’ eyes: as if the sudden return to free fall, the leap from acceleration to silence, had shaken something loose and left us trying to remember how to talk.

  Stern started mumbling after a week, odd things, as if he thought we wouldn’t hear: “elucidate,” “supernal,” “ineluctable.” He prowled like a pregnant cat, carrying objects to and from the hold: I remember his back receding through the hatch, shoulders hunched and holding something precious: a hand-vacuum, binoculars, a hair-dryer. On a Monday I heard him mutter “Terra matter,” and on a Tuesday he was gone. He left in the lander, leaving us its portable seismometer and a set of digging tools, a deeper silence, and then the voice of mission control, advising us of a change of plans.

  He left at night. The whine of servomotors woke me and Peterson to wonder why the hold had opened, and where was Stern, and then, befuddled, why the hold-hatch was dogged: through the deadlight we saw nothing, then stars burning in vacuum, and we understood, slowly, why the hatch wouldn’t open, why we were locked in, and as we floated there, feeling like children at a bedroom door, Peterson croaked “Wait”—to Stern, to himself or no one—concussion echoed through our hands, knees, noses, whatever touched metal, and the hold was filled with fog, swirling, clearing: empty.

  We tracked Stern by the light of his main engine until he faded in the stars, and then by radar. He dropped rapidly astern, but before we lost him we learned his trajectory. He would fall into the sun sometime in May.

  Naturally Peterson was hurt. He and Stern had trained together, shared Naval Academy ties and a series of backyard barbecues in Houston, of which there is still a Polaroid taped over the galley microwave: two men, two women, the men wearing dark glasses, the women with the loopy shut-eyed look that comes from too much sun and a fast shutter. Their arms are mostly hidden: here and there a hand appears, disjointed beside someone’s neck. There is no indication who took the picture, but in my imagination I am the photographer, and I think this prevents my tearing it up. I am surprised Peterson did not take it with him: it was Stern’s second wife, but Peterson’s first.

  JUPITER WAS ACTIVE on the decameter band this afternoon, crackling and hissing like a witch and her cauldron. I piped it back into the hold all day while I worked there on one of the instrument packages. I have been dreaming again, a nightmare in which I am unable to awake. This makes the silence in the ship nerve-wracking: hence Jupiter. It reminds me of surf, and the hold can be my boathouse, my Ogygya. I may leave the radio on tonight, a mood record, like those used in nurseries to lull the babies with big soft noises—but something stops me. This is not a record.

  At the suggestion of mission control, who want one instrument package sent to Io in place of the lost lander, I work in the lighted hold, holding on to handgrips with my toes as I modify the contents of the capsules—three featureless shells. They shine in the floodlights, smooth as pills rolling under your tongue, as hard to hold on to; so blandly polished their scale is as hard to grasp as their surfaces: from across the hold they can look as small as BBs, and the hold no wider than a mailing tube; sometimes they could be worlds, and at the hold-hatch I cling to the top of a well dropped down from heaven. The weightlessness does this.

  I prefer to work inside them, where I curl comfortably. Their brushed-metal interiors give back no reflections (outside, the distortions are immense), only a dim shape that moves with me in the corner of my eye. Jupiter’s speechless hissing comforts me then, a voice tongueless as a radio wave. But I know when the cabin lights cycle off tonight and I float to sleep, I will not have the courage to keep a radio turned on in this ship. I possess already—perhaps I have dreamed it—a sense of how it will be when I wake suddenly to Jupiter’s voice pronouncing words, whole sentences, my name. I have enough trouble with my dream.

  In my dream I am Peterson, or with him in his suit, and we are looking back at me, at the ship, as Peterson drifts away. His tether gone or never connected, tumbling through the stars revolving, looking out, looking back, we do not see my face in the cockpit window. In my dream I know the ship is deserted, and although it is I who have left it, I feel abandoned. Lights burn in every port along its length, and every port shows empty in the light. The hold stands open, open on a two-car garage, lined with lawn mowers, ladders. The cars are gone. Oil gleams darkly from the center of the floor, unreflecting. I change my mind. I am too sad, too tired or sick or small to go, and I want to turn back, but it is too late.

  He took no means of rescue with him. Once he stepped outside the airlock unattached, once he jumped, he was committed. I think he knew the limits of his resolve, and surrendered himself to physical law before he could recant. In my dream, I open my mouth to speak but I cannot. There is no air. Tears puddle in my eyes but won’t fall. The absence of air, the suspension of gravity: I recognize these things. They return to me, as if I knew them once but long ago forgot. Breath, weight, those are spells finally broken, exceptions now set aside. This is real.

  And only when I pass beyond denying this can I awake and remember the rest of the story.

  I don’t know what woke me, the night Peterson left. The operation of the airlock is almost silent, and unless he made some sound, I cannot explain how I came to witness his leap of faith. I suspect he did signal me, deliberately, banging a wrench against a bulkhead until he saw me move, and then he turned to the open hatch, to crouch and spring. He was not far when I reached a porthole.

  When I saw a spacesuit in free fall beside us, I turned to summon Peterson, to tell him there was a man out there, should we shoot a line? There was something terrifying about the absence of an umbilical between the suited figure and the ship: my mind refused to supply the missing connection. I was afraid to look behind me. Long seconds passed, in which the image of a human form, tumbling in somersaults, shrank. I floated, I froze, I gav
e no thought to rescue, to fear or pity, to anything but the gradual diminution of the figure, until I recognized his waving arms, and remembered the man they signified: I bolted overhand—away from the airlock, my eyes clenched shut. Blind momentum carried me to the cockpit, and the radio.

  His frequency was full of speech when I found it. A sob rocked the room before I could back off the gain, and then, gasping, Help me, and, I’m sorry.

  I sat in my couch and looked out the windshield, where the galaxy slanted across the ecliptic, between Gemini and Orion. I tried to find the lines between the stars that make a pair of twins, a hunter, but the figures crumbled, forming trapezoids, triangles, and finally single stars burning red, blue, gold at the bottom of the black.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Nothing moved.

  “What is it?”

  Only stars far away, and his voice coursing on unnoticing, his remorse weighting me, and I stayed and watched the stars beyond the screen and listened, as if the voice were a lost memory, a dead child, a dream.

  And even when I moved to ask the proper questions, he did not respond. I knew his receiver was finally Off, and it didn’t matter. I saw nothing when I returned to the cabin port, but his voice remained, lingering in the radio, where it cried and cried. His signal followed, fading too slowly, for hours: time enough to return, and return, to the sorrow and the emptiness. He thought it was a trick, an exercise, a game, but he was wrong it’s only empty space and I’m sorry. Help me.

  I switched it off.