Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

We are not where we were. We are pinned to these walls, but they are not here. I cannot describe who is with us, because they are like ghosts, but made of something, like sound or light, but not either of those things. It hurts to even think of them; to imagine them. They find the thing I saw in the fields, but it’s different. It’s clean. It’s so old, still, but clean. It is a spacecraft where it should not be. Printed on the side, it reads Voyager: its name.

The things that I cannot explain find it, caught in a swirl of liquids and gases, and they drag it to where they live. They crack it open and they find the record. It looks the same. They do not know what it is, and they move around and through it, and they try to decipher it. There is something inside it, an isotope that they cannot understand, and it hurts them. It mingles with them, with their atoms, because this is who they are, what they are made of, and they cannot adapt to it. They degrade. I try to scream at them, and they notice me, but this is not now. This is another time, and they keep trying with the disc. They are dying: whatever is inside this golden record is killing them. They are sick, and they are changing. One of them manages to channel the sound from the record, garbled and distorted through a sad approximation of a mouth: Hello from the children of planet Earth . They know where it came from; who sent this, to kill them. Then they stop dying: they have found a way to take this in, to make it a part of themselves. They were threatened and they survive. They make a decision. They rebuild the spacecraft. They alter it. They send it back to us.

I hear Paul screaming. “The fuck was that?” he yells. “Seriously, now, what the fuck happened there?” I open my eyes, and we are all on the floor. Something is wrong with me: I can barely move. I watch Paul pushing himself to his feet. I want to tell him to stop, but I know what he’s going to do. The record is on the table, and he picks it up and holds it between his hands, and bends it until it snaps. “Oh my god what was that?” he says. Ella and Lars and Rickey and the others are still on the floor as well, but they pick themselves up, and they ask each other if they are okay. They check, to see. They can move. They come to me eventually, and they feel my forehead. I am burning up. They can see how sick I am.

I am worse than I thought I was. I must have been out there for far, far too long. I must have been.

The others drag me to my bed, and they lay me down. Paul can’t get over what we saw, saying over and over how he doesn’t believe it, how it can’t be real, and it’s only this that keeps me grounded: that all of us were in there. Otherwise I might have thought that it was a hallucination, or a vision, or a dream.

They all remark that they have never seen anybody as sick as I am. I think it’s only the distraction of the record’s vision that stops them putting me out of my misery, I really do.

If I had to guess, I would swear that I am about to die. I wake up, and I feel on the cusp of it; and I breathe, sure that it will be my last, because it’s as if I can see it in front of me: the haze of my life, leaving my body.

Or maybe it is just me getting used to this: somehow taking the sickness in. Eventually, that’s how we overcome anything, I suppose. I breathe, and gasp, and it as if air isn’t what I need, so I choke; but then it’s back. Oxygen saves me, and I take it in, and sleep once more.

When I wake up I don’t know how long I have been asleep for. I climb out my bed find the bottles of water, and I drink it, three bottles, but it all makes me sick. It all makes me feel worse, for some reason, and I cannot keep it in. I cannot even bear it touching me. I get on the floor and lurch, and push it all back out, soaking the floor and myself. I sob, because I am so thirsty.

My foot touches a part of the record: still golden, still cold to the touch, even through my fever. I pick it up, and I press it to my chest. It’s like water over a fire: I am sure that I can hear it sizzling.

I sleep with it held there: comforting to me, and making me feel better. Dragging me back towards who I am.

In the morning, I feel good: the fever broken, my body no longer clammy, my head no longer swimming. I look at myself in the mirrors. All scars of the blisters and pustules have gone. It’s a miracle. It’s when they set in that you’re lost. An early warning system. Paul stands and watches while I turn the showers on, and I ask him if he’s thought any more about what we saw. They run cold, because that’s better. I can’t take the heat now.

“I don’t care what it is,” he says. “I don’t care.”

“But it was important,” I tell him. “I think we sent it up there. We hurt them.”

“There’s no Them,” Paul tells me. “We had a◦– I don’t know◦– a mass hallucination. That sort of thing happens when you’re exposed too long.”

“It was real,” I say. “Don’t you want to know what we saw?” I switch the showers off, and he throws me a towel. I put it to one side.

“No,” he says. “I don’t want to know a thing. We’re okay, right?”

“Right.”

“So, that’s fine. You need anything? We’re doing a run.”

“It’s not your turn,” I say. “The record didn’t get us anything, so I still have to contribute. Besides, I saw a Tesco we haven’t tapped. I can find it again. I’ll go tomorrow morning.”

“Fine,” he says. “Your funeral.” Strange phrase, now, because we don’t even bury our dead. We leave the bodies outside. They’re decayed within a few hours. Paul walks off, and I finish getting dressed. My skin is totally dry as I pull on my trousers and my shirt, and I find myself wondering how that happened, because my towel is still on the side, as I haven’t used it yet.

As I’m getting dressed I notice that there is something in my eye. I get close, and lean in, and I stare, and the headache hits me, a shiv in my head. It looks, for a second, as if my eye has dissolved; passed into nothingness. The black part, the white part, the colour: all a mess, swirled together. It looks like a galaxy or something. I blink and it’s gone, and the pain with it.

I stare again, willing it to happen once more.

The others are all still asleep as I watch the sun come up through the outer door. As soon as it’s light enough I put my suit back on, and my helmet, and I take a water bottle from the stash, and I get my bike. Jane asks where we’re going, and I use my last destination. It’s easiest that way: the supermarket was on that road, and Jane is nothing if not predictable. She never changes her routes. I pedal. I am not sweating, not even at all, because I feel cold. In myself, if I touch my skin, it feels cold. Like metal, almost. There is a wind, it feels like, but I can’t see it. Everything else is so still.

Prepare to turn left , Jane says, but I ignore her. I stay forward, like I did before, over the rubble and the remains and the solid ground that looks like it must have done years ago when somebody last bothered to plough it, nothing here to upset it or move it or anything, not even any animals to dig in. There are some somewhere, that’s the rumour. Some of them went underground; maybe others are ruling the cities somewhere. Taking this back for themselves.

I see the supermarket up ahead. I know I have to go there to pillage it, and I have to face whatever’s inside; but I don’t, not yet. I keep pedaling. I haven’t far to go, and I have never ridden so fast in my life.

It is in the field where I left it. It’s not burning any more, which is a relief. I pass the black box and leave the bike there. It’s how it looked in what the record played for us; I can see that now. The same shape, mostly.