Ten Directions

by Samuel Winburn

  Her toes began to go numb from cold and she realised that, somehow, she had climbed out of her swag and walked back down to the overhang, drawn back by the view. Aurora was shivering badly by the time she made her way back into the swag.

  To distract herself from the cold, Aurora opened a neuroview and flew around some satellite projected imagery retracing her journey from Mawson to her current location. She noticed that the Stura Vallis landscape surrounding her, from Space, looked like a uterus, which made this place Women's Business. On this scale, the path ahead almost looked plausible. Her friends were out there following her, the Djambi turning left to drive in the opposite direction to travel round the end of Hybleaus Chasma before they could begin to catch up with her. She prayed they would be okay.

  Again she lay awake, tormented by the struggle between growing doubts and an irrational fascination with proceeding forward. As exhaustion began to overtake her Aurora felt the terrible wraiths of her half-conscious imagination overtake her. Her fingers seemed to stretch into strange tentacles.

  Denali twitched, immersed in his own weird cybernetic quantum dreamtime. An awareness of another consciousness laying so close to her brought Aurora back from the edge. She huddled nearer, cradling his furry body. Denali groaned. Aurora gave quiet thanks to the boffins back home whose alchemy had produced such a wonderful creature. She hugged her dog and felt a shroud of sleep descend over her. Together they shared the night, carbon and silicon, content in the safety of each other’s company.

  Aurora awoke with the sun already high overhead. Her body was numb with cold and sleep and sitting up was an ordeal. Her temples were throbbing. The increasing headaches were from her progressive dehydration, as precious water escaped, in drips and drabs, the closed loop of the squeeze suit. These needles in her brain somehow encouraged her. Drowning out more superficial thoughts, it allowed her to concentrate on the specifics of her mission. She methodically organised her gear for the day ahead. Cleaning dust from the oxygen harvesters - from everything for that matter. Examining her body for frostbite and pressing the Buckeygel in her suit until it was evenly distributed, with no thin spots that would compromise her insulation. She ran logistics programs through her suit’s computer and reconciled her equipment inventory. She turned off the risk alerts since, according to them, it was highly probable that she was dead already.

  Denali roused and gave her a lick. Crippling doubts returned in force, but they were soon overcome by a heightened awareness of her migraine. The headaches became something Aurora could hang onto. “Go forward,” they seemed to say, “Get on with it. Head down, bum up. Behind is pain. Forward is purpose, clarity, freedom.”

  Aurora returned to her tasks and the pain receded. Apparently still alive, all checklists complete, she triggered the gas recovery program. She felt her suit tighten as the atmospheric pressure dropped to ambient levels. She stepped out of the tent and watched as it folded in on itself into a neat circular package, easily stowed on the sled. She harnessed Denali and the two of them headed off into the rising sun.

  Over the next days, Denali pulled her doggedly on across the featureless landscape. After a week of this they happened along a deep scar in the land running across their route, the first of many fossae rifts they would encounter and the primary target of her investigation. Scouting the edge, she found a ramp leading steeply downward. She loaded Denali with the portable drill and the two of them walked down together. Denali was excited to be unhitched from the sled and bounded ahead, running recon as his view of the world broadcast to her own neuroview in a corner of her mind.

  They stopped for Aurora to investigate promising outcrops, but she saw nothing that spoke to her of recent water. She drilled a few holes, but they came up dry and as the excursion continued in this way Aurora increasingly agitated. Why was nothing as she had imagined? The geomorphology was all wrong. The satellite images had been misleading. The sediments were abnormally dry, as if a sudden heat had vaporised every damn molecule away.

  Aurora looked plaintively up the tight walls of the fossae and eons of tortured geology recorded in them, and then, suddenly, she understood. The planet had played a terrible hoax on her. Rockfalls that from a hundred miles above had looked like groundwater slumps, when examined up close, were obviously the results of residual tectonic shifts and micro-earthquakes. Instead of preserving life across the eons as she had imagined, Elysium Mons had blasted it all to buggery. Life out here was as unlikely as if she had been looking for it on the surface of the moon.

  The rushing waters began to scream. Aurora wanted to claw the blood out of the impudent red rock with her geologist’s hammer. She yelled out, calling the uncaring mass of it a hundred useless names.

  Denali tilted back his head began to howl in commiseration. The thin air carried little sound making it barely audible, but through the neurolink Aurora could feel her sorrow being shared. How could people think of him as being just a machine?

  She sat down on a rock.

  It had all turned into a giant joke, her coming out here to save the planet. There wasn’t much worth saving. If nothing else, she’d done the opposite.

  “Thanks for checking this out for us. It’ll be easier for everyone to fill out the paperwork now.”

  August Bridges regarded her with eyes full of generosity.

  “But just because they aren’t in this spot doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It’ll mean something.”

  And that it would.

  “Ah, Denali. Where am I taking us mate?”

  Denali stopped howling and switched to wagging his tail. Just like that he traversed a whole spectrum of emotion. That kind of resilience made her feel humble in being human.

  “This is awful. This isn’t anything like I thought. It’s not going to work. We might as well go home, yeah?”

  Denali sat down to groom himself.

  The walls of the fossae seemed impossibly tall and her body felt, by comparison, impossibly small.

  “What am I going to do mate? This is as far as I can go, and it isn’t far enough.”

  Denali licked her and started to walk up the ramp, stopping to look back at her.

  Through the neuroview she could see herself through Denali’s eyes. A red dusty shape almost blending into the red cliff wall. She was sitting still so there was very little to distinguish herself from her surroundings. Mars and she were becoming one.

  Just come stay for a cuppa Darl. Just a short while to keep a lonely old man company. You’ve got some time yet before you need to go back yonder. There’s always time, if you can make it.

  Aurora stood up and trudged behind Denali up the ramp and out of the fossae.

  As they walked she considered her position. All the arrows in her life aimed nowhere now. The moment of first contact - the first direct meeting of life from separate planets. It was all she had imagined for herself.

  A void encompassed the world, outracing the returning sunlight as Denali and Aurora emerged back out onto the surface. She felt herself sinking into it. Into loneliness. Into the lifeless crust beneath her feet. It was the only place of belonging left now that her imaginary ecology of Mars had abandoned her. Her samples ceased to be emissaries of a living planet, whispering their peculiar mysteries into her dreams. Now they were just lines on a family tree that died out meaningless billions of years before. Songlines leading to nowhere.

  Funny that, Aurora thought. Just like her life.

  That night Aurora realised that she had, in fact, come to the end of the line. She had counted on drilling her own water supply while out here. There wasn’t any.

  Desiccated dreams descended. With each breath Aurora could feel her water supply fading away, taking her life with it. With each breath she felt less. She was going to die, and she didn’t care. There was freedom left to her in that.

  “We are what we are Rory. We are what we are.”

  “Just stop in for a cuppa. What do you have to lose Darl?”

  Aurora�
�s night opened out to dreams of a distant world, seen as if through a kaleidoscope with many eyes full of tears. Strange creatures with too many heads and arms, though oddly familiar, floating impassively while she made her plea, until it became clear there was nothing left to save. Their world would disappear into their indifference. There was no point making an issue out of it. It had all happened so long ago.

  In the morning, Aurora looked out the frame of clear Buckeycloth at the front of her tent. The east side of Elysium Mons was massively illuminated by the golden shadows of morning - its peak penetrating endlessly above the thin indigo clouds and smoky ruby foothills below. A divine exaltation rising forth.

  Aurora sat up and felt the gravity of the majestic mountain tugging at her. In the absence of any power of her own she rose and folded the tent and harnessed Denali and they headed onwards up it. The headaches increased like something terrible happening to someone else until the pain became visible, lines of light breaking the volcano into shimmering schemata that interfolded with Aurora’s soul.

  From time to time Aurora hesitated, feeling the moment of her death approaching with each step. Mum, Jacob, Jesse, Zoe, her friends. All coming to an end, but then the scale of these things would be dwarfed by the intensity of the vision rising before her and she would understand that they all were what they were. Grains of sand running out into the inevitable.

  And so those moments ran out, one by one, until she reached the wall. Elysium Mons was surrounded by great, slowly subsiding foothills, that would be mountains on Earth. They had picked their way up between the mountains until the only way forward was a tall cliff. The tortured stone mass jutted straight upwards, an abrupt boundary across the slowly mounting chaos of the surrounding highlands.

  Aurora’s concentration, focused by the razor’s edge of pain cutting through her skull, mathematically evaluated the monolithic surface. On Earth, she had been an accomplished mountaineer, successfully scaling several difficult Antarctic peaks. There was climbing gear in the sled.

  The world turned on its side. The ground no longer gripped at her feet - no longer pulled her soul down into sterile stone. Suddenly Aurora understood. Her moment of freedom and of redemption was at hand. She would not die before experiencing something glorious. Up there, into the wide yellow sky.

  Denali looked at Aurora expectantly and then back the way they had come communicating the obvious fact that they had reached journey’s end. For a moment she hesitated, considering his plea, and the pause released the pain in her head to drop down her spine and send her hurling into the dust with the weight of it. She lay on her back, gasping, staring up along the infinite walls.

  Slowly she crawled her way up to her feet using a boulder resting at the base of the cliff. It was a recent break gauging by the angular edges on the exposed side of the rock. She made a mental note - she would need to be mindful of potential rock falls.

  Her mind, encouraged by the practicality of this consideration, followed her eyes up the cliff face, evaluating alternative routes and judging the security of footholds. Methodically Aurora set to readying her ropes, testing the piton hammer on the rock face, packing and repacking her small backpack. She remembered the necessity of wearing a spacesuit when climbing a mountain that extended above the atmosphere. She opened the tent, climbed inside, and changed. The suit was bulky and would make climbing more difficult. She observed this clinically as the issue, when weighed against the inherent impossibility of what she was attempting, was insignificant. She collapsed the tent and stowed it back on the sled. Then she walked to the cliff and began to climb.

  She looked down to see Denali pacing anxiously. Suddenly Aurora realised that her journey from this point forward would be alone. The thought was too dangerous and invited only the pragmatic response of climbing back down to reach behind Denali's ear and finger the switch that dropped him into shutdown mode. She regarded his resultant peaceful repose with pang of guilt. She would not likely return, but why should this marvellous creature, her friend in fact, deserve an uncertain fate because of her selfish and foolhardy compulsion. She set his power supply to reactivate in a few hours. If she had not returned by then she was most likely dead in any case. She input a command for him to return home upon awakening - she was certain that he would find his way, his petabytes of memory had recorded every movement of his body during their outward journey. Returning was a simple matter of playing this recording in reverse. To be sure she turned on his emergency locator beacon so that others would find him if he was close by.

  Denali refused the command and just sat there, surprising her.

  “Mate. You can’t go with me. You can’t do anything for me. You have to tell the others not to bother.”

  Still he sat, rooted to the spot.

  “Denali,” she pleaded. “Go.”

  Still nothing.

  “I’m going anyway.”

  Aurora turned away and began her ascent. As she climbed Denali's white form stayed in place for a long while, until she disappeared over a stone ledge. She spied on him through a crack between two rocks and watched him tentatively circle before turning to run. She watched until he receded into a pin prick and disappeared around a bend in the valley.

  The pain drove her relentlessly forward, pushing her mind ever back to the present, to her hands and body melding into the grey, sand polished rock. Even her breath became purposeful. Breathe in, know pain - breathe out, know pain. A timeless moment later, fingers numb and her frail body pushed beyond any comprehension of a limit, Aurora crawled over the lip of a small ledge. She curled into a tight ball of despondent, laboured breathing.

  The damn of her world burst, and she was carried away by the sound of water rushing off into nowhere. There was no point fighting it, and as she began to flow with the world her pain dissipated. After an indeterminate time, her mind reassembled and the pain had inexplicably stopped. Or, rather, it remained, a constant but unimportant. Aurora looked around for the first time since her climb began. The clouds were below her so there was no accounting for her altitude. To her left, round the mountain to the East, she could make out the silhouette of Albor Tholus, a brother volcano to Elysium Mons. Behind her, the sheer wall continued upwards. She was too close to estimate the remaining height, but it seemed to slope upwards after a few hundred metres. The ledge she was seated on was metamorphic, a deeply folded greenschist recording the violence with which Elysium Mons had repeatedly thrust himself upwards from an immobile hot spot in the mantle.

  Aurora gathered her strength and continued her climb. Her body seemed lighter; progress now effortless. In a few hours, after deftly surmounting an ever-shrinking series of indented cliffs the abrupt slopes attenuated into a long, graduated incline. The clouds below evaporated, and Aurora took in the spectacular view. There was no end to it. Her sense of scale failed her completely. The desolate landscape peppered with impacts and ancient riverbeds wrapped the arc of the world before blending imperceptibly with the translucent pink sky. The sudden, almost infinite, liberation from the awful bloody mindedness of her climb was beyond contemplation. The air, the mountain, the clouds, her body, all intertwined in a whole being that seamlessly broke and reformed in every instant.

  “We are what we are Darl,” Waijungari confided in Wheatbelt Wallaby. “You’ve come a long hard way to visit me. Why don’t you sit down here and rest awhile?”

  Wheatbelt Wallaby laughed.

  “Okay dirty old man, but no funny business.”

  She critically regarded the massive head of the Goanna towering behind them.

  “Don’t let him worry you none. He already ate.”

  Wheatbelt Wallaby smiled. This looked like a good place to be. She dropped her kitbag, laid back beneath the stars looking back to where she’d been born, and felt good about how far she’d come.

  “I guess I’ll stay Waijungari.”

  “Good girl.”

  And with that she turned to stone.

  Chapter 13 - Calvin30

>   This scene unfolds with Calvin30, crowned in a beanie of looped Kenyan beads, outside on the green and dancing in your head.

  Da da dada da da dada da da da da da daa dada.

  How faint the tune, how high the moon, how near, how far, it’s where you are.

  Da da dada da da dada da da da da da daa dada

  Things ain’t the same they used to be, no ignorin’ what’s yet to come.

  Da da dada da da da dada da da da dada da da daa dada

  Oh frabjous day callooh callay he chortled as mome wraths outgrabe.

  da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da daa dada

  Time to kill the monk.

  dee dadad dee ddeee dada deee dddidi ddddaadiii dddiiidid dad ada aaaa dad

  Amidst a free note whirl wind denoting nothing but mind unleashed, tree needles under feet, and breathing spirals inspiring madness from the circular muses of purposeless sound.

  The monk sat.

  da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da

  Why was it nobler in his mind’s eye to knock off the rock we all live on than to neutralize some lonely guy so far across the ether he might be closer dead?

  da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da

  Only this cold whole fact; that Calvin30 was a herder of men not a murderer of them. A Shepherd of Soul might lead his lambs to slaughter, but a butcher was another beast. Entirely. The manner of the deed was not the spanner in his plan. The monk was too far out to see him bleed, or freeze, as the case may be. No, it was the crudeness of the execution that transgressed Calvin30’s aesthetic sense.

  da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da

  Clouds coalesced and decomposed, following the flow of high blue winds far above the pine trees and the variegated lawn of wild flowers where Calvin30’s graffiti painted park bench was planted.

  da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da

  A squirrel peaked between his feet and dashed for a cone, grasping it with greedy teeth and stealing it off to a branch just outside of Calvin30’s grasp. The rodent scrapped a few scales from the cone and then chided the interloper in his territory from above.