Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“People don’t want them any more,” my son says. So I start to gather them up, to take home and clean. At least washing clothes gives me a kind of purpose. I feel giddy if I look up, so I look mostly at the clothes on the ground.

“We’ll be able to get most of these stains out easily,” I say. He was right; I do feel delighted now. Excited.

He doesn’t answer. I thought he was behind me but no.

He has stripped naked and is already three metres up a tree. I haven’t seen him naked since he was 14 and insisted that he could wash himself. “This is the one. This is my tree.”

I look up. “It’s very high.”

With my head tilted back, I can see that many of the trees have do have flowers at the top. Some are bulbous. Some brightly coloured.

“I thought they didn’t flower?”

“That’s the others. That’s each one who’s climbed. As the tree grows, they reach closer to Saturn.”

He drags himself up further.

“Don’t go any higher,” I say. I fall to my knees. I don’t want him up there. “I’ll make you any meal you like, just name it. And you don’t have to clean the clothes if you don’t want to. We’ll find you something else. And we’ll find you someone nice to be with and don’t forget Saturnalia, how much you loved it! Only another ten months and there’s another!”

But he climbs up. I watch him and want to follow him, but even the feel of the tree under my palm makes me sick. I sit at the base, waiting for him to come back down again. I can hear him crying.

“Son! Come down! You don’t need to feel pain!”

“It’s not painful,” he calls, but his voice is shaky, withered. “I’ll be down soon. Wait there.”

I have to trust that he will return. I sort the clothes I’ve collected by material and colour. People watch, asking questions. Distracting me. Until one woman says, “Do you need a hand to get all those things home?”

“I’m waiting for my son. He’s climbing up. He’ll come down soon.”

The woman shakes her head. “Look,” she says. She leads me through the trees.

Some have tiny thin trails of blood to the ground, crystallised. “Every last one of them climbed like he did,” she says. “Step by step as if there was no other way. This one’s my daughter’s tree.” She stands and puts her hand near a tree that dwarfs many around it. She doesn’t touch it.

My son has become one of them.

There are others, lost like me, gazing up and weeping. The woman says to me, “The only certainties in life are air, water and the grave. Saturn’s sons, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. The only ones he didn’t kill. That’s all that’s real anymore.”

“I’m going to get my son down.”

I don’t want to go up. The thought of it makes me want to cry and never stop.

But my son is up there and I want to bring him down.

Each step is like climbing on sharpened knives. Blood pouring

I don’t have the strength. I can’t do it.

“He won’t come down anyway. There’s nothing you can do. Once he’s climbed all the way up, it’s too late,” the woman calls. She tugs at my ankles.

As if to demonstrate, one bright green bead of liquid drips down past my face.

Do I love him enough to die trying to get to him? I climb for another hour, making no progress, slipping backwards, dragging the skin from my arms and hands, from my cheek. Then I’m stuck. I can’t move up and down. Frozen.

“Stretch your fingers. Spread them. Let go. We’ll catch you,” they call from below, and I do, and they do.

“It’s too late. He’s so deep now, you’ll never get him out, even if you get him down. They climb up there to die; at least it’s a choice. No one has come back down again, not alive.” My new friend shakes, rolls her shoulders. “I come back every now and then to take a piece of my daughter’s tree,” she says. “She’s happier now her suffering has ended.”

“What about us? What about our suffering?”

She lifts her arms. Smiles. The rest of her is shivering; only her lips are still. She reaches into her bag and offers me a small bottle of vodka. It sparkles. I shake my head at her; not that.

I cry then. I’ve always known I’ll lose him, but I didn’t know he’d choose to go. I cry, leaning against his tree, until I realise my tears re being drawn in. Absorbed.

I break a piece of his tree off to bury it. It is stained slightly with his fluids.

I make his grave in a tiny, tiny pot next to my other Saturn’s Tree. It will grow if I look after it. Feed it. Water it. It may fruit one day, as do the trees in the grove. We watch them grow, the other grievers and I. I say to them, “Whoever said these trees don’t flower? There are our children up there, fruiting.” Sometimes one drops and shatters, looking like an arum lily, the corpse kind. Surrounded by crystals worth a lot of money, and I wonder if people will use them, if it will come to that, and what they’d call the drink. A friend brings me some Sparkle, and another does too, and once I remember how good it is, and forget all the rest, things are better.

I re-open my shop when I run out of clothes to clean. My job is so instinctive I can do it Sparkled or not.

Air, water, the grave.

And Sparkle.

There are four Three-times-Three Sisters in the House of Mirth, and five in the House of Heaven and Hell, and two in the House of Shelter. Four plus five plus two Three-by-Threes, and they represent one faction of the city.

You may have heard tales of the city of Polyphemus Port, on Titan, that moon of raging storms. First city on that lunar landscape, second oldest foothold of the Outer System, or so it is said, though who can tell, with the profusion of habitats in those faraway places of the solar system? A dome covers the city, but Polyport spreads underground◦– vertical development they called it, the old architects. And its tunnels reach far into the distance, linking to other settlements, small desolate towns on that wind-swept world, where majestic Saturn rises in the murky skies.

There are two Five-times-Six Sisters in the House of Forgetting, and five Eight-by-Eights in the House of Domicile. We who are a ones, and will one day be zeros, we cannot hope to understand the way of the Sisterhoods of Polyphemus Port, on Titan.

Understanding, as Ogko once said, is forgiveness.

Shereen was a cleaner in the House of Mirth in the day, and in the evening in the House of Domicile. It was a good, steady job. On Polyport all jobs connect to trade, to cargo. A thousand cults across space arise and fall around cargo. In the islands of the solar system cargo achieves mythical overtones, the ebb and flow of commerce across the inner and outer systems, of wild hagiratech from Jettisoned, best-grade hydroponics marijuana and raw materials from the belt, argumentative robots from the Galilean Republics, pop culture from Mars, weapons from Earth, anything and everything. Polyphemus Port services the cluster of habitats that circle Saturn, and links to the Galilean Republics on the four major moons of Jupiter. It links the inner system with the wild outposts of Pluto◦– with Dragon’s World on Hydra and Jettisoned on Charon, and the small but persistent human settlements beyond Saturn, in the dark echoey space that lies in between Uranus and Neptune.