Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

What would I see? This ship, winged V, Nike, Styxdaughter, Zeus-attending. No more. The noise of our fall would grow, swell, soaring. Down faster now, through thin keening, clouds whipping: it hazes a minute and I fear it lost. Then again suddenly smaller it flashes falling silver into the indigo center, one bright swimming in violet falling and deeper. The sound would be shaking now as it slows, glowing dull red from the wind, the action of sounding. Weight grows on it, pound on pounding, and I think of a bubble in water unsinking and see: it is gone. See no splash. Silent.

The ice falls, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that now it falls, free in its falling, the drift of it I envy. See it roll. See the breaking of it, ice on ice, the brightness of it breaking in the twilight, breaking into shards, into dust, into shining, into a haze of light, into darkness: see it vanish.

And on the Ring I only do not break. I do not vanish: I ride the wheel of it, arms out against the fall. No glittering shards of me disperse. My heart is solid inside me, a steady turning.

I cannot remember when this was not so.

I KNOW THE ice. I know the darkness north and south, I know the great bulk of Saturn below. I know Aurora rising to meet me in her time. Only myself I do not know.

Of myself, I see only fragments. There is my auger, the sharp point of me, glittering at end like ice, scoured by ice and harder. There are my arms: these thin rods of titanium, articulate and shining, hooked at end with tungsten claws. The rest I do not see, and know only by a sensation I cannot describe: a dull vibration in the frame of me. There are doors: I shrug and they open for ice. And beyond the doors, a chamber where ice is melted, though I feel no heat; only the opening of valves. There are valves, and motors to drive them; nozzles where I vent off meltwater, a cloud of light returning to the Ring. And at my heart a gyroscope revolves, so finely tuned to falling that I cannot feel it, unless I turn against the fall.

In the hollow that is most of me, the heavy elements of my refining linger. I know their names, and the weights of them: how they answer to Saturn by falling, to the call that comes louder as they press within me, but still we fall no faster, I do not feel them, I have no sight or taste or touch of them: only their heft, the mass that binds me still more strongly to the Ring, until Aurora comes, and I am set out again among the ice.

Aurora always comes. What signals her I do not know. So much is out of my control.

I do not sleep.

I know sleep : it is in the motion of the ice that falls around me: falls, and does not change. It is in the falling of us all — in the ice adrift, in the darkness where we fall, the darkness there that draws me on but never into Saturn, only falling, the ice and I, toward sleep that never comes. It is one of those words from the darkness within me, words like hope, like pain, like love, one of the words that falls nowhere.

I sense other words in the darkness, words I cannot hear. I only feel them echo in the hollow within me. They jar this voice that speaks distinctly in my thoughts — disturb it, as the ice around me jostles in its fall. They tell me that, in some other life I cannot imagine, in some time I cannot recall, I was not as I am now.

THERE IS A voice in me that is not mine. It is all I hear between me and the Ring. The voice whispers: I am two point nine seven nine oh hours into this revolution; my target is at range three eight point oh six four; my payload is at thirty-five percent.

It occupies my thoughts. It keeps the silence from entering. It carries me, as ceaselessly as time, as irresistibly as the Ring itself sweeps onward. I feel myself within it falling, unable to ignore it, unable to reply.

I think sometimes it speaks to keep me from thinking.

Vision also intercedes between me and the ice, lights that are to my mind’s eye as the voice is to my thoughts: in a violet line against the stars my target shows eight ragged peaks at wavelengths of so many nanometers. These are the signs of uranium, the voice tells me.

In the darkness, in the silence, the voice and the visions, they comfort me.

Saturn has voices; the Ring and the darkness have voices too: they chorus on some sense that once was hearing. At Saturn’s core a murmur speaks of time; above its poles, electrons wail in their spiraling fall. From the darkness, a dim hissing: this is the voice of the stars.

And once each revolution I hear the Ring itself awake into the sun. It calls, in a cadence that pulses, waking echoes in the hollow within me, echoes that might be words: words like sorrow, like loss; but the voice inside me whispers static discharge, coulombs, hertz: the voices of the Ring are hushed, the echoes die away, and I am comforted.

But still, each revolution, at the pulsing of the ice, in a hollow inside me something opens. In the dull drum of me something beats, as though trapped and calling, the note of it fading, and then only silence, and within me the sound of a motor whining briefly, venting ice.

ONE BY ONE, the moons draw near. In my frame I feel them: Iapetus and Phoebe, Dione and Tethys, Rhea, and the largest one, orange and featureless in my long-range vision. I know their names, I do not know how. In my frame a yearning rises, but it is not for them. For something like them, but what I cannot say. I long for some great fall. Not into Saturn, not into the night that holds us all, but into what I cannot say: into something that is not the Ring, something distant and solid, like the moons. Like myself.

Saturn is not solid: the voice tells me so, feeding me data: the pressure there so many millibars, the composition so much of ammonia, free hydrogen, water-ice. The temperature is so many degrees Kelvin, and I know that is cold, although here in the Ring the ice is colder. But what a millibar is, what once was fractured into thousands, I cannot say, nor what was Kelvin before it became a thing of degrees. Nor how I know a milli is a thousandth, or a degree a thing of crumbling.

Ammonia, water: I know these. These are the constituents of ice. I know, too, that I need them to survive: they feed me, in some way I know only from the hunger that I feel for them. And though I do not taste them, I know them with the intimacy hunger brings. I see them. I hear them always calling from the Ring, from the ice I grapple, from the shining spray I vent, prismatic in the sun, a glory I fall through as it fades, vanishing, returned into the Ring.

So much is vanishing here. Only I do not: I remain, the moons’ stress in my frame telling me only I am solid. And echoes, telling me I am a thing of — echoes.

I CANNOT SEE the sun. I have tried, but there is a command in me that will not let me look. The voice tells me my cameras cannot stand the light: an instant, and I would be blind, and without vision I cannot mine the ice. And without ice, it tells me, my life will be an endless fall through hunger: a fall through time made merciless by darkness, through darkness unbroken by change.

But I have tried. I do not know why. Only that the way the sunlight breaks upon the ice — the brilliance of it flashing here, where seeing and vanishing are one; this poignancy I cannot capture, though it touches me each instant as I turn, and turn, and fall upon the Ring: all of this, and what more I cannot say because it comes from what within me I do not know — all of this draws me, despite all warning, to look toward the sun.