Mysteries of Motion (79 page)

O B A F G K M R N S

O Bring A Full Grown Kangaroo My Recipe Needs Some

O Brutal And Fearless Gorilla Kill My Roommate Next Sunday

T
HOSE CAPITAL LETTERS
refer to star categories in that great work of nineteenth-century spectrum analysis, the old Henry Draper catalogue.

Those two lines beneath are how a couple of Harvard students of the era, reeling from the telescope, tried to remember them.

Idling at the porthole here, I compose my own jargons. In continuous star-weather it takes stamina not to be Olympian. The
Courier
might be some cracked palace in which a small royal clan is under house arrest, at standstill in an omnipresent golden cave of carbuncles whose fires burn well back or are extinct. While the populace, though at enormous distance, may stroll by to view. Prison used to be more private. Prisons open to view are the last refinement of my century.

But no one can prevent us from leaving our century. No one. My heart, which after strange infarction seems once more coiled red in its original factory tubings, leaps at that. The nature of nature is always to begin again.

As I, Gilpin, begin this log:

We cannot tell you where we are except by intuition. We speak often of how we came. There was a moment—we decided after many sittings on the question—which must have been the one when a try for jettison was made. This moment we reverted to again and again, describing the sensation in the flesh as we dropped, yet our cells held fast, as bottomless loss sucked us downward, to a point where in our former lives we would have smashed, fallen from a skyscraper’s pinnacle to the Lilliputian pavement below. Then, at the nadir, came that stony reply—we all felt it—from space itself:
No. Gather them.
There has been some discussion about the No.

At the moment we speak of, Lievering was in the Payload Bay, alone. The special cargo he’d been left to shift—by means of a set of computer commands he can still repeat like the stations of a rosary—had not budged. Later, as each of us in turn became his apprentice to carry back to the cabin the day’s ration of consumables, he would point out how the rest of the payload around it had. So, our consensus is that the
Courier
still has in its belly a terrible beauty which may be born—Wolf’s own phrase for it—but not by any push from him. It’s the least he can do, he’ll say, with that stiffish grin of his; he doesn’t say for or against whom. Considering the work he has done on the flight deck since, we can only bow to it.

For we did not dock, did we. During those first hours—or days?—after that fierce pull-up, it seemed to us, in our numbed, almost pleasant state, that we had, and were merely being held for embarkation in some customs process under which all clocks were stopped. I remember hunting for my scrip. For, during the next days—or hours?—we were still in communication with you—it can only have been you, just as we had been during those two apogee weeks of what we now think of as the
Courier
’s youth.

Certain never before activated remote-call boxes—our ignorant term for them, located in the public rooms, which installations Mulenberg has since explained are on unique radio-telephonic circuits decoding to ordinary ones—did bring you in, in one of your ordinary broadcasts. We heard nothing from Joint Command itself and of course had no way of talking back—though if we could have got to the flight deck, whose circuits to us were out, we would have tried. But like all watches and dials in the cabin, which had stopped, the door to the corridor had self-sealed, as it would at docking, according to its own dial, and like our watches, at half-past two. This has since become our calendar.

(Since then the call-boxes have subsided. Though not operable in reverse, or not by us, we think of them as ever on the ready, a solace from waning corridor to corridor. The cabin keeps bright. The video never revived.)

Can you imagine us then, having to construct our position via your brilliantly wigged juries of the newsbreaks (we recognized the anchormen & women’s voices), of the self-perfected faces in which a jaw by Daumier, a wrinkle by Breughel, never appears? Perhaps you no longer find it a peculiar way to learn one’s destiny, since so many of you do, but by now we have had a perspective. We thank you for it, and for the news as well.

Gradually it became clear to us from those dutifully opaque releases and guarded voices that it might be a while before the world was revealed our whereabouts—that intransitive phrase being theirs. We were a security matter. Joint Command was quoted only, their location also being under risk. What was happening on the platforms of the world? On the subject of civilian missions, Congress performed loudly, and on us in particular very affectingly. The laiety stormed predictably, falling back like a well-divided apple, in equal parts. The broadcasters kept the best faith with us after all, mentioning us hourly, especially when signing off.

Then you left us. One fact seemed to have been spared us. We did not know where we were. Yet an impression persisted that everybody else did.

So we have taken what we could from you, putting together what Wert suspected, Mulenberg had not yet told us and Mole had let drop. To which we have since added that intuited sense of its own motion which even the babe in arms, fearful of falling yet trusting some arms subliminally, is said to have.

We are in orbit, quite apparently. We assume ourselves to be in orbit around Island Five. Perhaps—indefinitely? Or perhaps you are pursuing the matter. We await your call. Giving you news of us meanwhile, which you may never receive. We have had our conferences on whether you may or may not wish to.

We, on the other hand, wish to reveal all.

Log of the U.S. Civilian Shuttle
Courier,
on what we have decreed to be the thirty-first of May.

Orbiter Characteristics

(Values are approximate)

LENGTH:
74 m (244 ft.)

HEIGHT:
34 m (144 ft.)

WINGSPAN:
48 m (156 ft.)

WEIGHT:
Gross lift of 4 000 000 kg (9 000 000 lb.)

THRUST:
Main Engines (6)
4 200 000 N (940 000 each)

CARGO BAY:
Said to be at least four times that of commercial shuttle dimensions, which last were 18 m (60 ft.) long; 5 m (15 ft.) in diameter

ACCOMMODATIONS:
Unmanned spacecraft to fully equipped scientific laboratories

(My apologies for any error. We study as we can.)

When Lievering emerged from the cargo or Payload Bay, saved by those very protections which had overzealously guarded the two beauties in there, he was not surprised to find himself alone. On the other side of the bay, massive shiftings had effected little breakage, but a creative disorder. Consumables were in siege supply. One nearby box had already been raided—beer. He took a bottle along with him to the flight deck, to which he had been instructed, if equivocally, to report back, but found it sealed, as all forward hatches appeared to be, perhaps for secret operations. The vehicle must already have been engaged in that wide sweep of the heavens which has continued. (You will excuse the word heavens; a log engenders such usages—and perhaps our present life.) When he had twice tried the signal-plate on the flight deck entry and the alarm as well, he sat down on a housing and had his beer. Finding himself alive had made him meditative. He may have slept.

On his way aft to us through the length of the ship, he tried every hatch along the path. Cabin Two was as silent as the flight deck—not a whistle. On Cabins Three and Four, which quartered the replacement personnel, he admits to having fudged or delayed his report to us, wanting to spare us immediate decisions which might be hard to make. Though he was never to admit that there had been any reply.

It had by now occurred to him that all sectors of the vehicle might be sealed. He knew from the viewing that Cabin Five contained further Priority Payload (inventory since found shows it to harbor a complete lab for the manufacture of viral insecticides). He tried that door too, as he says—For luck. His humor grows increasingly Germanic. I mean to say—his humor grows. No doubt concomitant with those duties which (for some months, we think?) he soon set himself, shanghaiing Jack Mulenberg to help.

After Cabin Five, he says, he stood at the entrance to our own sector for some time, unable to make himself go on. When he found by the signal-plate that it was unsealed, though apparently immovable, at first he told himself that this was all a friend could ask for, then stood narcotized by how much it was not—all. When he tells us this, as he often does now, we are embarrassed, for he tends to spell out to each of us our value to him, one by one. And we must all be wary here. Emotion takes energy. The median is best.

He must then have been emerging from one of those attacks, now familiar to us, which lend him temporary powers beyond any of ours. The entry, like all throughout the ship perhaps, was sealed only to those inside; from his side it was merely stuck fast to any except extraordinary strength. Perhaps this was true of Cabins Three and Four also. I would not care to say.

He decided to urge his way in—one doesn’t slam-bang an airlock. If successful, he would find himself in our general corridor. At last he did so. There he found Mole.

Death does not need to be intuited. Much else about Mole did, on which we have all since collaborated, though I have had the main hand. By a second effort at our own cabin’s hatch, Lievering was able to satisfy his need to see all of us summoned at once—which is interesting in the light of what our conduct was to be. I shall give a name to that, but not yet—to the way we act in concert more and more.

I have myself seen early shots done with box cameras of a group of people standing over one of their own tumuli, hands hanging. The presence of burial mounds may even affect an otherwise primitive drawing. Druid groups around their dolmens or cromlechs may well have been in similar attitude. Longboats come to mind. I saw such a group once around a dory which had no man in it. There need not be a body, but there has to have been a ritual death. The group is always consanguineous, or as with us now, has the look of it. They are assigning the death its role.

Mole’s body lay in a triangle no living body could make, its head doll-sideways on the neck, though looking straight up. The left forearm, lying on the gun, looked most natural. Mulenberg was the first to bend down to him. There was no connection other than his posture to remind me that this was the same man who had once torn open the dress of a corpse dear to him, but I was so reminded, as perhaps the others were. When many in a group know bits of each others’ history, these tend to unite. Delicacy has so grown upon Mulenberg here. We were watching its growth in us.

He turned upward Mole’s left wrist. I could report aeromedically on the progress of rigor mortis in partial G-force, but will not trouble you here. What we saw was that the purple identification mark was gone.

Lievering at once jerked his own wrist upward. We followed suit. We were all still clearly marked. Later we would recall that since these brands have a time limit—two years—we may at least once be able to know accurately the duration of our stay here—but as yet we had no apprehension it might be that long.

Veronica was the next to kneel. I felt our collective presence nudge her to it. She made no attempt to close Mole’s eyes, but then she was not his next-of-kin. I thought at first she might not have heard of this kindly custom of shielding the eyes of the living from the dead ones. For of course—as Jack has said since—it is done for us. Instead, in one whip-tip motion she laid her head alongside Mole’s. Her body’s angle, though fearfully contorted, was alive; that is, comparing the two bodies, one saw what life was. Then though still lying there, she moved, her face traversing the 180-degree arc from the base of one wall, up and across the ceiling, down the other. “He saw something. I know Mole.” We thought both of those allegations unlikely. Increasingly though, it is our habit not to contradict. The data will in time shape itself to our needs.

She stood up then, tossing her head with the defiance I saw in her at seventeen, and thought then would keep her limber. “I didn’t close Vivie’s eyes either. My stepmother’s. They have to know what they know.” The word
know
is the key to Veronica, isn’t it.

When she stepped back into our group Soraya shrank from her, shuddering against Wert, and I saw who would comply most in the burning of widows. Soraya pointed at the body with a long Muslim nail. In Persian art there is often one such fluid extension, snaked from the phalanx of faces behind. “He was the mascot, yes? The mascot is always the youngest, yes?” From behind her waist Wert clasped hands over his child. “Not if you don’t name it. A mascot has to be named.” Their relationship has changed. His face was almost sly. Though he will not win that battle, we can understand why he resists having a child called Hossein. And once you name them, the gods do notice them.

“He was the messenger.” Lievering said no more.

It was my turn. I could assent to that. From my own classical education. But I am always a little out of the ritual. Or that is my hope. I knelt down. All heard my knee snap. It has never recovered. I prefer that. Little enough. A man must have a mark of what he has been and seen. Though the knee worsens, it serves as a spur to my own duty, this log, and we need constant reminders here. Orbiting ultimately penetrates the inhabitants of any heavenly body, man-made or not—just as the cyclic patterns of your own earth—one or more of which has caused us to be where we are, attest. So far, we experience only those brief hazes of forgetfulness which occur in people of middle age. Perhaps we age quicker here; certainly the skin does. My own face is riddled as if from bittern, which is what my island called the salt lye crystallized from seawater. All six of us are what the elders there used to call cabin-thin, a phrase descended to them from the days of sail. Otherwise it seems to us that our mental faculties per se have been quickened, the way a body in a centrifuge might have all its blood fly to its brain. In an orbit like ours we seem to ourselves constantly flung toward the a priori principles—and to brood on them.