Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

I cannot. My cameras swivel, focus, range and shift all out of my control, and never in all the revolutions of the Ring have they let me see what lies there, where shadows fall from.

But still I want to see.

OUT OF THE A Ring, bright against the Division, falling now into the B Ring and toward me, Aurora comes. I see her engines flare: flakes of ice vanishing in bright vapor she brakes, nearing now: beside me, docking: our collars match, mate, our systems mesh, and once again she is here.

From connections I cannot feel Aurora ’s presence floods through me, lights and echoing voices not my own flow in. My sensors detune, the stars dim, and before the new instructions seat themselves, I know that once again I am about to remember.

But then the sun flickers, the sky is black again so soon I cannot remember what color it was; the bulk of Aurora eclipses the stars, the new instructions execute, and the voice in me returns.

It is speaking of iridium. It has a warbling note, four peaks on the spectral graph.

I cannot remember what I remembered. For one brief moment’s inward fall I know that in a moment more I will forget I remembered at all, and now only the dim shiver, low in my empty hold.

I DO NOT know the nature of my thoughts. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Are they saved or are they lost? Does Aurora hear them, or something beyond Aurora? I cannot say. I know only that to me they are irrevocable: I think them, and they vanish. This is the nature of the Ring.

But if I could recall these words, hear them once again above the voice that distracts me, I might know what it is that pains me. But now Aurora signals her departure, and with a rupture, with pain, the channels break, the valves seal, collars spin, decouple. Her jets flare in the sun and she is gone.

I watch, hoping to learn where she goes. The flame of her engines lifts her above the Ringplane and out, climbing, brilliant again against the Division, then over the A Ring and dwindling, the shape of her lost below resolution, the flame finally below my cameras’ threshold and I am falling.

I do not know where these words go. They vanish from me, into darkness. And like the Ring, their vanishing is endless.

I FALL THROUGH darkness, the sun eclipsed by Saturn’s huge night. Along the Ring, a dim bridge into light, I listen, urgent after iridium. I grapple ice loud with it, auger in. It breaks, pieces fall away. I gather them, feed them into me. My frame rings loudly with their impact within.

I gather all but one: it has flown farther, up out of the Ring. I follow, clamber, carom, climb up into spaces where ice is scant. And there, my limbs go sluggish.

It is always like this. There is a command within me: it will not let me too far from the Ring: it outweighs even the hunger for ice. Off the Ring, the voice tells me, the emptiness is deadly: ten hours without ice and my systems fail. So when I try to climb I am given heaviness, a reluctance that would be fear but it does not belong to me. I feel it imposed, a command that does not need a voice: it has my limbs in its control, my strength its hostage.

And to oppose it I am given only hunger.

Caught between the heaviness and hunger I stop, still drifting out.

Here above the Ringplane, a kilometer of emptiness below me, I circle with the Ring, a ghost off a ghost-road through darkness. Uneasy, I yearn for the Ring. Under the prompting of the voice, I thrust: I feel the spray of vapor oppose my momentum, but it is too weak: soon it sputters, it tails off, my tank is empty, and I am drifting. Anxious now I listen, but for a long time the voice within me, intent on the Ring, is silent.

Then a slow number speaks itself. I am drifting far out, far into stillness, and even the voice is still.

Far from the Ring I am drifting, helpless to control my flight. In the emptiness here, my horizon opens. Space is everywhere. It seems to open even into me. In the silence, heedless for once of ice, my cameras drift. The voice is still; the echoes are still as well. Only these thoughts remain, loud and uncontrollable.

Without warning, the Ring below bursts into light. The ice awakens, the Ring’s chorus pulses; slowly, the sound fades away.

When the silence returns, light lies everywhere around me, and still the voice is silent. The silence is harrowing. The light is merciless. The transparency of space appalls me. Below, Saturn’s body is alive: I see each storm as it uncoils, each uneasy surge of ice-fog, and everywhere the sheer terror of wind. And on the Ring I see the multitudes of the ice, each in its singularity distinct, each in its moment of flashing as sharp, as ephemeral as pain. It is all here, and I am here in it, solid, drifting, and strange. It is as though I have never seen this before.

Far ahead in the darkness, something hovering over the Ring catches the light of the sun. Its graph is dim, peaked in a pattern I have never seen. The voice says nothing. Without it, I am helpless to identify. But something inside me has started to clamor. With an effort, I swivel the long-range camera forward.

At the limits of resolution, it shows me a cylinder spinning slowly, end over end. A narrow neck. The ungainly growth of a head. I see a pair of arms: thin, articulate, and hooked at end. It drifts through emptiness, even farther from the Ring than I have come. It falls, flashing in the sun, its arms held out against the fall.

Abruptly, the voice returns. It tells me we are falling; in two point nine oh two hours we will return to the Ring, entering at a relative velocity of so many meters per second: three point seven encounters with ice of average mass will disperse the polar vector of our speed. We are saved.

I am not listening. I am struggling not to listen. I am struggling to hold on to my cameras, struggling to hold the silence, struggling to remember what I have seen; struggling against the voice, against the ice, against the Ring, against the fall back into sleep. I am falling.

In the depths of my hold, as I turn to face the Ring, as I ready my arms for ice, like a bad bearing starting to break down, like an ingot working loose, something shudders against the fall. The echoes inside me are loud.

I AM PLAGUED by double vision. My cameras, compelled, seek ice. They are bound to iridium, to measuring vectors of collision and capture, as my thoughts are bound to the Ring and the voice. But a memory has survived in me, a silence I wedge between us. In instants that pass almost before I can grasp them, I can see.

I cannot look. But in glimpses left to me, past the graph, through the tumbling ice, in the spaces between the words, I remember, and I watch for the other I saw.

Ahead it drifts, high above the Ring. But as I watch it is falling back into the ice, rolling in a slow helpless fall. In a rush it vanishes, lost in the sweep of the Ring far ahead and I am left aching, as if to an echo of impact.

But abruptly below the Ring I see it again, reaching out into the darkness against the stars of Virgo. Past Spica it flashes, tumbling faster now. An arm is waving in my direction; light glints off a lens as it swivels my way.

It is calling me to follow.

ON ANOTHER REVOLUTION I see it rise again out of the Ring before me. On its long outward reach, as it dwindles to a star it seems to slow; it seems to stop; it is not falling. It is motionless against the stars. I am aching with envy.

I know it must be falling.

It hangs, as if motionless, but holds its station, high above and far ahead. It is falling. I stare at it, my cameras resisting commands to turn to the ice. I am fascinated. Why has it climbed so high? What is this within me that yearns?

Within me, alarms are ringing. The voice in my head sees iridium everywhere. A collision alert bleats wildly, beating back the echoes in my hold.