Terrence Holt: In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

Nineteen minutes and some seconds pass before we can override the impulses that somehow opened the fuel system. Silence, and we fall freely again through space, faster now: I can feel the pace in my pulse. Peterson drifts forward through the cabin, his head trailing a pennant of blood.

NOW THAT THE cabin is empty, there is no reason to float around in bed any longer than the moment I awake: off tether, off to the head, breakfast, mission control like the morning news on the radio. I read more and more each day: deserts, dry gulches, buzzards circling. Jupiter stands off to starboard, brighter than before, and now I see a disc. I realize what I said in my first entry was a lie: I can’t compare its size to anything we know, the head of a pin, an egg, my eye. If I had a penny, I could hold it to the glass and compare, but there’s not a cent aboard, isn’t that odd? I’m glad I can’t: the comparison would show me nothing but a penny in my hand, and beside it, so far away I count the space in months, not miles: a planet. Its image is as clear as if etched on the glass, its satellites are perfect points of light beside it, all on a line, balancing. I envy them. I feel heavy and obtuse.

But I am weightless: an overhand pull swung me out of the cockpit and back into the cabin. Gone these five months and not once thought of cash, but I spent the rest of the afternoon tearing through Stern’s and Peterson’s effects, rifling the ship just to see. Not a cent.

MISSION CONTROL HAS many suggestions: about me, the ship, our mission. They are like bachelors babysitting. I sense fear in their omissions. “In theory…” they say, and skip ahead to speak of Jupiter. While I hang here listening, they weigh the orbits open to me there, and plan for my survival until rescue comes. They appear to have made a decision: they offer to make me a constellation, translate me into the sky with Io, Europa, and the rest. I am skeptical. It is not mission control that sets my course; it is ahead, Jupiter growing broader and brighter by degrees so small I never see the change, whom I must answer to. In practice, I doubt that I will have much to say in the matter.

There is one group that wants me to stop these recordings, and another wants them transmitted instead. A third thinks I should carry on, and one lonely man is horrified at the prospect. I suspect he knows what he is talking about, and wish he would shut up.

THE SHIP MOVES on, and forces me to choose. Here, the choices are simpler, the rules clearer: action, reaction; mass acting on mass; an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless…But this kind of clarity is useless to me now, since I can see Jupiter clearly ahead, and know how all these equations balance, what answers they will come to: something very like a zero. I could crash there, of course; I could orbit it and wait for mission control; or I could crack the whip around it, shoot out in any direction I choose: how much more poignant to fly past Earth on my way out into darkness, moving too swiftly to say goodbye. I’d prefer to keep on the way I’ve come.

I prefer: in none of the equations for action, mass, and motion have I ever read a term for my capacity to choose. There are more things in heaven than in earth, I see that now. I am not in theory anymore; philosophy is not a dream. I am alive, that star behind me is the earth, and there is no “unless” in Jupiter. But there are choices.

WHILE THE BALANCE of its mind was disturbed, mission control brought my parents in to talk to me today. I mean that. I think they have taken leave of their senses, lost their marbles, gone off the deep end. My parents are in their nineties, and have not left the retirement home since I put them there ten years ago, and I do not visit often. Dad is aphasic; Mom talks, but how much is there to say? She asks me how my work is going, and I tell her, — Okay, and she says, brightly, — Good. Generally we leave it there, and spend our time more fruitfully on doctor’s appointments, outings to the mall, the hazards of slippery floors. Once, when I told her I had just returned from Mars, confusion overwhelmed her. I pitied her then, with a generosity I needed desperately at the time. It is only recently I have come to wonder if her confusion is not after all a state of grace.

And now they’ve sent an air-conditioned sedan to fetch them to the airstrip, bundled them on a NASA jet, transshipped to Houston. Here. For a moment it seemed the radio was eavesdropping on my childhood, the voice in the speaker calling from the kitchen door, come in for supper, put on your jacket, its getting late, time to come home. I shook my head, wondering if this were one of Hayford’s radio dramas, and I the only one without a script, hearing her say, — Your father’s here. His voice saying, — Where is he? and then the cabin walls, the stars outside, all fell away and I could see them in their Florida clothing, their heads quivering on their delicate necks as they turn to watch technicians passing, voices hurrying saying nothing they can understand.

“Get them off. Get them out of here. Take them home.”

I cut the connection.

I HAVE BEEN floating here in silence since, thinking of my alternatives, to stop at Jupiter or travel on: the journey outward, into silence so thick as to become something: a pressure, a presence here with me. As weight surrounds a mass, so silence would fill the air around me, falling in, rising from blood rustling in my ears to become a whisper, a word spoken, a cry, the roar of burning and finally the crash of everything that falls. Beyond Pluto, silence would be more than absence of speech: even zero has meaning, but what is zero taken to an infinite power? And on what fingers do I count it? Though I could hear the singing of the spheres, see colors off the spectrum, touch nothing: how could I tell? and whom?

I reach up and touch my ears: they are cool. I try to trace their infoldings with my finger, picture the pattern there, but my mind won’t follow: pinna, auricle, these words drift through my thoughts, and I don’t know where I learned them, or how they might help me in the silence beyond Jupiter. I only know that between cool flesh and colder vacuum, I will have my hands full. I am Jupiter-bound.

But by how long a chain?

STERN AND PETERSON left in that order, on successive days. The initiative was Stern’s. We did not talk much in the days following the burn. At first, I attributed this to simple shock, and fear for our survival. Conversation seemed at first a burden, then a risk. But just as we no longer sensed our new velocity once acceleration ceased, so our increased risk became a piece with the fears we’d shared since liftoff and before. Still we found it hard to talk, even to meet each others’ eyes: as if the sudden return to free fall, the leap from acceleration to silence, had shaken something loose and left us trying to remember how to talk.

Stern started mumbling after a week, odd things, as if he thought we wouldn’t hear: “elucidate,” “supernal,” “ineluctable.” He prowled like a pregnant cat, carrying objects to and from the hold: I remember his back receding through the hatch, shoulders hunched and holding something precious: a hand-vacuum, binoculars, a hair-dryer. On a Monday I heard him mutter “Terra matter,” and on a Tuesday he was gone. He left in the lander, leaving us its portable seismometer and a set of digging tools, a deeper silence, and then the voice of mission control, advising us of a change of plans.

He left at night. The whine of servomotors woke me and Peterson to wonder why the hold had opened, and where was Stern, and then, befuddled, why the hold-hatch was dogged: through the deadlight we saw nothing, then stars burning in vacuum, and we understood, slowly, why the hatch wouldn’t open, why we were locked in, and as we floated there, feeling like children at a bedroom door, Peterson croaked “Wait”—to Stern, to himself or no one — concussion echoed through our hands, knees, noses, whatever touched metal, and the hold was filled with fog, swirling, clearing: empty.