Terrence Holt: In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

No. I would not rip out my tongue for mission control.

I went inside and overrode antenna guidance, steered it away from Earth. Mission control faded in midsentence like a dream. I swiveled the dish a hundred eighty degrees in azimuth, faced it forward until the decameter hiss of Jupiter filled the room.

I KEEP THE radio on, now the time is free for me to fill, metered only by the tripping in my chest. I have shorted out the cycle on the cabin lights and gone to manual. Sometimes, I work in the hold, removing instruments from one of the capsules. The instruments are useless to me now; I want the shell. Sometimes, on ship’s radio, I transmit. Music. I have not spoken yet. Jupiter has not answered. It grows oblate ahead, and I wait for word.

AHEAD HAS BECOME beneath.

We thread through satellites too fast to read Europa’s scars, past Io’s peacock eyes, the radio snarling static from the radiation belts. We dive down deep, into Jupiter’s sphere now filling the sky, now out of sky we fall. A horizon encircles us, flattens to a wall we climb, a ceiling we cling to, striped with fire, clay, cream, rust, slate, straw, snow. I doubt my calculations, doubt the sense of reckoning with anything this huge. The whole world hangs above, a few dim stars below. We soar or swim, I do not know. We must be close enough to see, or it was all for nothing. I will have all or nothing.

The computer chatters beside me, parroting the terms I fed it weeks ago, but my eyes are pulled from its screen out past our bows, to the end of the broad brown ridge of cloud we follow, ahead where darkness rises. It sweeps up and over us in a second and the sun is gone: the aft camera shows a rim of red stretching from horizon to horizon, then, dizzying, the computer swivels the ship to face the sunset where light filters like an infection deep into the planet’s limb, until Jupiter seems lit from within by fevers, forges; moonsglow falls ashen on cloudtops. The computer throws a series of numbers across its screen, countdown glowing green in the darkened cabin, gleaming across my knuckles where they grip the armrests, and as the numbers reach zero and turn to the word Ignition we have ignition and the world is flattened.

OUR ORBIT IS low, in more than secular decay, mission control would have said, leaving me to wonder how much weight to give which meaning of the word.

I am grateful already for the silence they finally surrendered me: I no longer hear their echo mocking in my ears. Only Jupiter fills them now, the voice proper to the scene I see, if only I could fit the sounds to sight and make some sense of both, strain an answer from the chaos below. I need new words for what I see, and as we pass low over the cloudtops, the hazy regions where my decaying course will drop me, spiral me down in a week or a month, I don’t care to calculate, somewhere in my chest I sense the suspension — above or below — of a crushing weight.

JUPITER SPEAKS SYLLABLES, sibilants, subsides. I no longer need direct the antenna: the sound seems to pierce the cabin walls, rising from the chaos below. I have broadcast nothing since we entered orbit, but hourly I feel silence grow gravid around me. I have moved Stern’s couch from the cockpit, and fitted it in the empty capsule.

Below, finally, it spreads over the pale horizon and advances: the Great Red Spot I called it, but now I see only a tide of red swallowing everything. The nose of the ship bleeds pink, the light in the cabin suffuses dim red. We have arrived, and nothing is as I expected. Spot? A continent swirls below me, the skin of a world stripped off and spread still dripping across the flanks of Jupiter. I look down and see clouds churn, swallowing, the whole so huge we seem to slow in our passage, or else the ship is drawn toward the shadowed hollow at the center.

THE HOLLOW PASSES off our starboard wingtip, and leaves me wondering what to call it now that I have seen: a cyclone, monsoon, typhoon — metavortex to the dozens I see spun off and shattered below, as much in size to them as they are like a hurricane. No. I do not know. This storm will blow for a million years, as it has blown since before a man worked stone, learned fire, or sketched the shadow of his hand against a cave wall. And at its center, a hazy depth, calm blue, blue as eyes, leading in. I must see closer.

The radio is silent.

IT CHANGES HUE with every revolution: now an ember, now a rose, a sore, the underside of my tongue.

We pass far north of it on one orbit, and it lies on the horizon like the glow of a city.

We pass over its center, and the dark center, its rim raised, is a caldera. Etna, I think: Olympus. My chest aches. Ten years ago I stared down the throat of Olympus Mons on Mars, alone at the controls of a ship much like this, while Stern descended to the surface, and returned with eight charred bodies, five women and three men, my crewmates. Through twenty orbits returning like a tongue to a broken tooth I looked down, I wanted to see, there, on a piece of soil irrevocably so, the place where the rocks had burnt blacker, the shards of the ship shining. I looked down, fearing to see the flame of the lander ascending, dreading the quiet at our reunion, a stillness still unbroken.

Now I see. I look down on the eye of the storm, and though the resemblance is uncanny I feel nothing: I am careful not to move: a word was balanced within me, but down the vortex I see nothing. A drop of water drifts before my eyes. In it I see reflected all the colors that are on Jupiter. I find I have been sobbing.

It drifts away, and I sleep, undreaming. When I wake my chest feels emptied, the cabin is filled with light, and I lie quiet.

I SPENT THIS day at the telescope, watching the surface, setting up a trajectory on the computer. I returned to the instrument capsule, the hollow shell of it, and began again, piling on the couch inside it some things I should jettison: the program manuals, two photographs, some tools. Each thing suggested a dozen more alike in their absurdity, their profanation of this place, and then I worked through a time that passed unnoticed, until I found the capsule almost full and the hold, the cabin, the cockpit stripped, a free space almost like the one outside, bounded only by these featureless walls, this steel painted white. I had not thought the shell would hold so much.

I heard it then at last, in the silence I have heard more clearly since I left the earth behind: I heard the word I came so far to learn.

I heard no signal, saw no blinding flash; the heavens did not open, nor the rocks: but as I fitted in the sphere a single shoe — lost half of a pair once made by Converse but the name no longer matters — only now that all these things are gone and my world is empty do I understand: nothing. Nothing: in a world of lies, the only word that tells the whole unholy truth. It was before my beginning, it waits beyond my end. It inhabits every word I have recorded here but these words too are nothing. Only nothing: and nothing is a word and nothing more.

All or nothing: I threw into the capsule the object I held in my hand, but before I seal them all inside I must complete my mission: all or nothing.

I have not dismantled the ship: I need it to live in until I die. But I will make an exception now, and open the panel where the computer’s memory lies. On the hard drives, wheels within wheels, the many million words: they all must go. Drive follows drive into the capsule, until only one remains, still spinning: listen. I will not touch it. I can jettison the rest, drop every trace of Earth, every memory of mission control into the eye, and cleanse myself of the last of my earthly inheritance. And on the necessary air, food, fuel, and water, and this small store of words, my own, await my story’s end.

IN THE ECHOING emptiness left in the ship I watch and I wonder as the capsule drops shining away, sun lighting its limb, a crescent moon, Diana, what I would see and what hear had I gone, as it sounds down into the eye of the storm darkly blue with the baying of God’s great hounds. I see the capsule turn in its fall, a slow dreaming spin, a top’s sleeping. I see its porthole come round, a flash in the sun blinking back at me.