Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“You aren’t here,” Mr. Loury said, from directly below me, and I could tell he was looking up at me, trying to reach me, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

“I belong here. My dad works here, and you’re trespassing. You got fired,” I told him, clinging to the beam. I didn’t care about quiet any more. I wanted someone to hear me, and yet, somehow, I didn’t scream for help.

“I tried to tell you,” Mr. Loury said. “The stars are gone and all of them are gone with them. They want boys, and that’s all. She doesn’t want me anymore.”

The telescope completed its tilt, flipping me so that I faced down, and I saw what the open shutters looked into, what I was dangling over.

There was lava below us, a crater full of it, glowing orange and red, and in the lava there were women, stretching their fingers to touch the metal of the telescope, pressing their nails into it.

I saw the incandescent roots of the world, and the way the women were tangled in them, their mouths open, a deafening murmur like wind tearing trees. I saw Mr. Loury’s wife, the Kodachrome version of her, her white skin and bright hair, her eyes big and black-rimmed with fake lashes. The sunglasses she always wore were missing. She was naked, her long arms savaged and blistered, her ribs skinny and her hipbones sticking out. Come here, she mouthed, and her lipstick was perfect. Other mothers were there too, and I knew them.

I’d been to their funerals and gone to school with their abandoned children. I’d seen the X’s where they weren’t. I saw all the dead women in the center of the earth, and then I saw them reach up toward where I dangled.

I saw my third mother, and she saw me.

Somewhere I heard a door slam, a shout, and Mr. Loury, just for an instant, was silhouetted against all that light and fire.

Then, like the Krakatoans, the astronomer’s wives were gone, and my mother was gone, and all that was left were black skeletons, ashes floating on rafts of darkness, lists of dead stars. I heard myself screaming.

The asbestos-tiled floor of the observatory appeared beneath my cheek, and my head appeared on top of my body, sharp pain and dull ache at once, and there was my dad, kneeling beside me, his eyes still bloodshot.

“Can you move?” he asked me. “Is anything broken?”

I could move. Nothing was broken. The roof rotated and where the sky had been dark, it was now all stars and Milky Way. I stood up, bruised, and tried to figure out where my feet were. My dad had me by the arm, and he was moving me out of there, faster than I wanted to move. I looked back at the telescope, and I could feel everything getting taken away from me, forever, and all at once.

My dad carried me to the car, fastened my seatbelt, and drove me down the spiral road, and to the hospital. He told the nurses I’d fallen from something high, and they looked into my eyes and agreed that I was looking out at the world through a concussion. They showed me my pupils in a handmirror, one big, one tiny, Martian moons in an eclipse, or the sun trying to shine through a sky full of ash.

I put my face into a crisp white shoulder and cried there, but when I lifted my head, I was done, and no one asked.

Mr. Loury’s abandoned house and its volcano got paved over when they redid the spiral road in the late 70’s.

My dad drowned in 1984, on a trip to the South Pacific, diving into an underwater cave and failing to equalize his pressure, but he was an old man by then and hadn’t been in touch with me in a long time. There were no more mothers.

The astronomers at Palomar kept finding supernovae and charting galaxies, but the largest telescope in the world was surpassed in size in the early 90’s. The last time I drove there, up the spiral road and to the tourist center, it was daylight, and the only person I saw was not an astronomer, but a painter pulleying himself around the walls, rolling white paint slowly over the dome.

When I tried to ask him a question, he shrugged and turned back to his job, pulling himself along the dome, hand over hand.

I stood there a while, watching him spackling the fine cracks all over the surface, the ones that stretched up from the gravel and all the way to the top of the dome itself. The observatory was getting old. I bent down, and put my ear to the ground, but there was nothing to hear. When I stood up, the painter was looking at me.

He reached into the pocket of his overalls, and tossed me a small white rock. Later that night, in my hotel room, I soaked it in alcohol. Underneath the paint, the rock was black and porous, but that was all.

My Commission

In all respects aiming at brevity, I here set down the account of the cruize I undertook to the Moon, afterwards returning again to this, our world, in the years of our Lord, 1726 & 27. There is (as is well known) littel enough in the Moon to justify the expence of crewing and leasing a vessel; save only that it is upon the Moon that the Patiens make their habitation, and as such some do go in hopes of obtaining or otherwise laying hands upon any and all devices or vessels of their design. Howsoever rarely this is achiev’d, and with what poor returns upon the market here is well known, for perhaps one in every four items brought back to our world is of any use to us at all, and the main amount of such chattel merely reproduces what is already in the possession of mankind, where such novelties most often prove impossible for the wits of men to decipher.

So was I sworn by the First Lord Commissioner, the Earl of Berkeley Viscount Dursley , during the early days of the late war between Spain and Peru; for at time of war was the urge to uncover such Arms as may be secreted amongst the machinery of the Patiens, tho’ never yet accomplished. It is known now (forall that I was bound with oaths of secrecy at that time) that His Majesty’s Own Ambassadors were treating with Brasilia and Peru, and that the Americas were eager to have a European allie in their struggle against the Spaniards. To that end, and to ease such discussion with proof of our intent in stopping Spain from locating any Weapons such as may or may not have been available in the Sky-lands. I was Commission’d to make my way thither, and funds were furnished upon the Stock of Sir George Oxenden, Bart, and Sir John Jennings, who became Certificated Gentleman with shares of 20/100 apiece in any prize we might win. But this manner of voyage is so different to admiralty work, and plunder so rare to come by, that their shares were in turn underwritten by His Majesty’s Office of Swedish Finance.

My Lords approach’d me, I do not doubt, on account of my experience going thither into the tallest hights, and having previously publish’d Round the World by Way of the Attenuat’d Hights , published at Mr. Crowther’s , 1717, I do commend this account to my present readers. As to the obtaining of the vessel, I shall here say littel; for it is well known that most of the Patien devices with useful function reside in private hands, for all that the Crown urges its Subjects to sell them to the State. There being in divers hands four devices for Communication over Vast distance, none of which I have ever seen; and upwards of two dozen devices for elevating vessels to the greatest hight; yet these latter have yet to be prov’d, for only when the Vessel so uplifted has left the thickness of Earthly ayr below it may it be in any fashion steer’d, such that the creation of craft that may Fly about the Skies of this world has not been accomplish’d. Yet the Chinese claim they have modify’d such a Vessel, as we may very well expect it shoud be possible to do; or else (as in the present wars) Craft must fly up to the Attenuat’d Hights in order to come back down again in another place. There was but one device found useful for applying Heat via a wand of some metallick quality, and it the only Patiens-ware ever seiz’d by the Crown, upon the Royal Warrant, and taken to the Royal Armouries where its mysteries were not exhum’d and (as I heard) it was spoyl’d by those who examin’d it and now rests mere junk.