Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

This is your alarm call. Wake up, Leroy Johnson.

He opened his eyes. The lights over his face had bloomed in anticipation of his movement.

This is your alarm call –

“Cancel.”

In the quiet, there were the sounds that let him know everything was still right with the ship: the air-blowers rustled their tell-tale ribbons, the refrigeration unit hummed in the midrange, ammonia and water bubbled inside their silvery pipes. Above that, the live intercom ticked and intermittent alarms chimed, and below them all, the rockets thrummed.

Johnson snaked one of his long fingers to his neckline, found the ring closer of his sleeping bag and hooked it. He dragged it down and exposed his bony knees to the clean, bright, clinically-scrubbed air before reaching up to press his hands against the luminous surface inches from his face. He could see the faint outlines of his bones through his skin.

“Ship time?”

Ship time is sixteen oh two Zulu, mission day plus one hundred and ninety three.

“Where is everyone?”

Please repeat.

“Locate the crew.”

McMasters and Malinska are on the flight deck. Halliwell is in the air plant. Yussef is asleep in cradle four.

“Any alerts?”

There have been three hundred and seventeen alerts since the end of your shift. Three hundred and fifteen have been identified as either false-positive or required minor corrections. Two are ongoing. One is ongoing. Three hundred and sixteen –

“Enough.” He found the mechanical release on his cradle’s trolley, pulled the latch, pushed the handle. The cradle rolled out into the central well and left him looking at a higher circular ceiling, a ladder up, and an opening in the bulkhead.

He swung his feet off the cradle and onto the floor, feeling the coldness of the smooth, poured rubber and the prickle of goosebumps.

A man stood behind him, a once-tall, slightly shambling, white-haired, jowly old man in an open-necked shirt and pale jacket, creased slacks and a pair of scuffed brown brogues.

“Good morning, Leroy,” he said.

Johnson ignored him, going to one of the wall lockers and pulling out his thicker one-piece blue coverall. He faced the empty locker as he dressed: left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, then zipping it up the front to his Adam’s apple. The fabric was soft and worn and stained after a hundred and ninety-three days of wear. The ship slippers were in two foot-shaped hangers on the back of the door. He flipped them out and stepped into the them: working his toes and wriggling his heels meant he didn’t have to bend down to put them on.

He closed the locker door, checking it was properly shut so as to not trigger another alert, then rested his forehead on the cool plastic: he knew he had to turn around at some point.

When he did, the man was still there, the cradle lights reflected in black-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick, Johnson could have used them to repair a hull breach.

“Leroy: we need to talk about what you’re going to do next. We’re almost there.” He had a big voice, one that was difficult to ignore in the confines of ship-space.

Johnson still said nothing. He moved to put the sole of his ship slipper against the side of his cradle and it rolled back into the wall. The line of light narrowed, then winked out, and the tell-tales on the console burned a double-green.

Previously, they had the bed between them. Now, there was nothing but a short stretch of rubber flooring.

“I,” said Johnson, looking at the ladder where it went down towards engineering, up to the flight deck, across to cradle four where Yussef slept. Anywhere but the man’s round-cheeked seriousness. “We’ll have to do it later. I’ve got work to do.”

He stepped out over the long drop to the engines and scaled the first ladder to the ceiling, pausing briefly at the bulkhead to clear his closing throat and blink away the tears. Looking down at the old man looking up, he swallowed against the lump and carried on climbing.

McMasters was looking at the latest feed from the orbiter, played out on a hand-held screen so close to his nose that made it difficult for him to tell one pixel from another. Malinska was scrolling through a screed of coding on the main console◦– a page, a pause, another page. Johnson thought she couldn’t be reading more than a single line at a time.

She glanced over her shoulder from the acceleration chair, while her fingers kept dabbing at the touch pad, spinning through the lines of regular expressions to the one Johnson wore on his face. “Bradbury?” she asked. “What did he say?”

Johnson pulled his own tablet from its dock, and opened up the list of alerts. One had been active, and in the time he’d taken to get up, get dressed and climb to the flight deck, there’d been another four. Somewhere on the ship, Halliwell would be fixing something.

“We all know it’s not really him, that he’s something I’ve made up. Having a conversation with him is just talking to myself.”

Malinska was still speaking, but he missed what she said, distracted by the number of messages sent from Mission Control, now well over a light-minute away.

“It’s not like I ever met him,” he said, continuing his own point. “I don’t even know why it’s some dead white guy. Why not my mother?”

“Atavism,” she said, “a case of exaptation co-opting your memories of his stories to construct a mentor figure.”

He deleted all the messages without watching them. “Not everything can be explained by evolutionary biology,” he murmured.

“Wash your mouth out, young man.” She turned back to her screen: she expressed no surprise or concern that the code she was now reading was several thousand lines later.

“How’s it going?” he asked, nodding at her fast-moving fingers.

“I’ll keep looking. It has to be there somewhere.” Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Johnson tucked his tablet in the elastic strap on his leg. He frowned at the shapes on McMasters’ screen, those he could see behind the man’s thumbs and head: petaloid shadows, fuzzy with distance and surface dust, and black beetle things crawling around on the Abalos Undae, presumably mining the subsurface ice.

“Abe? You okay?”

“They’re spelling out words,” said the man with his nose pressed against the screen. “They’re sending us a message.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know.” He was trying to open up a conduit from the images direct to his brain. “It’s not in any language I know yet. But I’m learning, Leroy. I’m learning.”

Johnson patted McMasters’ shoulder, right on the mission patch of Mars-and-crosshairs. “If anyone can do it, it’s you, Abe.”

Time to check on Halliwell. He took the single step back to the ladder, and started carefully down. It was easy to make mistakes in the slight gravity generated by the drive: too little pull to momentarily forget he wasn’t weightless, just enough to break something important if he fell.

All that way, all that time. Imagine screwing up by doing something stupid.

Bradbury was still there, head craned back to watch Johnson descend, pillowy stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Johnson kept going past him, down though to the next deck. When he looked up, he could see the pile of thick white hair, the reflection from the glasses, the tight mouth above the double-chin made more prominent by his posture. He hated it when Bradbury looked sad.