A gleaming object crossed the space over their heads. Pacal, like Xeno and Abdelkrim, watched it move from north to south in the exosphere. Xeno explained to Abdelkrim, mechanically, that it was a surveillance satellite that circled Earth fourteen times a day in its polar orbit. They too were being observed.
He remembered the talk that Pacal had given on the precise predictions of eclipses in pretechnological societies like the Maya and the Dogon. Afterward at a dinner in his honor, they were introduced. And later, as they walked back to Hotel Avante in downtown Mountain View, Pacal told him that a Chinese agent had contacted him to work on a space project. They wanted to design rockets capable of placing hundred-pound satellites in a low orbit for under a million dollars.
“That’ll go down the toilet before you know it,” Xeno predicted, having heard of the project.
“He’s in the darkest spot,” Xeno said, looking toward the place where the plant cutter was lying on his back.
They got out of the jeep, sand crunching under their sneakers as they walked down the road among agave plants. When they turned to climb up the other side of the gulley, the star-filled sky opened up again over their heads.
Pacal, who heard them coming, waited until they were a few steps away before he stood up. His round face gave off a resinous sheen in the darkness.
“Salaam aleikum,” said Abdelkrim, while the other bowed his head slightly.
“Good evening.”
Abdelkrim asked if Pacal was looking for something specific.
“No, I was just checking for snakes. I wanted to lie down and look at the sky.”
When Pacal was five or six years old in Guatemala, his family lived in a small adobe house in a valley of volcanic origin. There was no public lighting, or even electricity, for many kilometers around. His father, a professor of mechanics in the School of Agronomy in Bárcenas, in the highlands, used to wake the boy before dawn, and they would leave the house when it was still dark enough to see the stars. “‘To look at the stars is to look into the past,’ my old man used to say,” Pacal told them. “He was an atheist. And so am I.” They lived very high up, he said, some two thousand meters above sea level, and on moonless nights, the canopy of stars filled young Pacal with religious terror.
“It was frightening,” he said, “to see so many stars.”
That was 1986, the year the Challenger exploded and the year Halley’s comet returned. Pacal claimed to have seen the comet in the dark Guatemalan sky with the little telescope his father had given him.
“He’s a child of darkness,” Xeno later said to Abdelkrim.
At the age of eight, after seeing the photos that the Voyager took of Uranus, Pacal decided he would be an astronomer. He read scientific magazines brought home by his father, who encouraged him and helped him with his studies as much as his modest means would allow. His family was poor, closer to the bottom than to the top of the Guatemalan social pyramid. His mother—a rural schoolteacher like his father and a practitioner of Mayan astrology—had died when Pacal was thirteen, but he’d kept her memory alive through force of will. “You’ll go very far,” she’d prophesied.
After completing his studies, Pacal told them, he entered community college, where he studied pure physics; at that time in Guatemala, astronomy didn’t exist as a major. Because of his outstanding grades, he received a fellowship to study astronomy at the Autonomous University of Mexico. A year later, recruited by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), he did his internship in Green Bank, West Virginia. When he was about to graduate as a radio astronomer, another headhunter offered him a position at the European Space Agency. From the plains of Westerbork in the Netherlands, his job was to monitor pulsars—neutron stars, remnants of the explosions of supernovas (“the size of Guatemala City,” he liked to say), that spin on their axes several hundred times a second, the most powerful magnets in the universe.
“But the ESA began to lose personnel to China, which could pay much more,” Pacal had said at the end of his talk at the university. “It became clear that with every foreign project, the researchers would move to countries with more resources and better labs.” Yes, and those laboratories, Xeno thought at the time, were funded by big arms manufacturers.
Of all the people he’d had a chance to meet in the New World, Pacal was the strangest, Xeno wrote in an email to his sister, Nada. “The Maya,” Pacal used to say, “came to Central America from China thousands of years ago. It was they, not the Spanish, who discovered America.” This seemed plausible, given Pacal’s own appearance: round, compact, unibrowed. In fact, although light skinned, Pacal looked more Polynesian than Mayan. He knew and could write Chinese (and swore that in Guatemala there were now as many Mandarin- as English-language schools).
Pacal’s syncretic religious beliefs, however, were an abomination to Abdelkrim; he tolerated them, as a good Muslim was supposed to, but couldn’t take them seriously.
“You give alms to a beggar,” Abdelkrim said, mocking Xeno, “and then you wash the hand that touched him.”
Xeno wondered if he had inherited this obsession with hygiene from his father. He had certainly seen him do what Abdelkrim described.
“It is written,” the Moroccan would say, “that we who follow the true faith are obliged to understand, to tolerate, and to trust that with the help of Allah, we can persuade those who have not had the good fortune to grow in our faith, that they might receive the milk and honey of Islam—sweeter than the finest honey, more delicious than a mother’s milk.”
They squatted down on the ground like Bedouins. All that was missing was the tea, Xeno said. Then he mentioned a possible ancestor of Pacal: Pacal the Great, whose sarcophagus was discovered in the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque. Some people called him the Mayan cosmonaut. Pacal laughed—he rejected the idea of any relation. Next, they talked about the possibility of space voyages that would not depend on the combustion of fossil fuels and nuclear power—methods such as had been used by . . . by whom? A system, maybe, that would use water as fuel to reach outer space, and then liquid oxygen.
“Wouldn’t it be possible,” Pacal had suggested, “to use a volcano as a cauldron in which water could be converted into energy?”
“Now we are really mkiyif !” Abdelkrim commented.
Instead of being shocked by the ideas that divided them—the Sunni Muslim, the Greek Orthodox Christian, and the Guatemalan atheist—they had taken the heavens above them as a point of reference in relation to which they could be almost equals.
“For us,” Abdelkrim said after another surveillance satellite had passed over their heads, “a certain type of ignorance is necessary to reach a state of grace. You two can take charge of designing the machine and drawing up the maps. I’ll handle the flying and navigation.”
Pacal looked up at the sky. No one said anything.
“Our mission, our cause,” Xeno continued, “will be to disable as many satellite systems as possible—low orbit, medium, and geostationary. And after that, or perhaps at the same time, to dismantle the principal transoceanic cable connections. In short, to create chaos. To offset the damage done, and to prevent further damage by other nation-states, we’ll need to go back several centuries, technically speaking.”
“Our cause is chaos?” said Pacal.
They dropped him off at Hotel Avante.
“We’ll have to stay in touch,” he said in parting, “so we can keep talking about how to destroy the world.”
It was the first time Xeno had seen him smile.
IV
The last winter he spent in Patmos, Xeno was plagued by doubts. Although religious faith seemed necessary to him, it did not seem sufficient, as he told the abbot when he visited. The old man was stretched out on what they both knew would be his deathbed.
“You could take my place, if you wanted to,” the abbot said, gripping Xeno’s hand. Nodding, Xeno squeezed his hand in return.
The island was almost deserted. The hills, very green an
d mantled here and there with red poppies or daisies, vibrated between the blue of the sky and, in the background, the blue of the sea. Too much beauty, Xeno thought, for too sad a day. For no reason, he remembered a poor neighborhood in Boston he’d visited when he had first gone to MIT. Now, walking through the narrow alleys among the whitewashed stone houses of Khora on his way back from the Byzantine stronghold, Xeno, as he’d done since childhood, avoided stepping on the spaces between the slabs. He walked hurriedly, though there was no reason to—he had nowhere to be—and his steps clapped on the stones like the beats of a tabla.
“Not to lie, not to kill, and to give to those in need.” These were the last words he heard the abbot say.
All actions—good, bad, even indifferent—have a double effect. What had been the aim of his actions lately? He felt, with the sudden force of a revelation, that he had a special task to complete during his residency on Earth. He felt goose bumps, a sensation that bordered on the voluptuous, and then a shudder. Was it the spirit of the other—the person who’d just died—that had entered him?
The rhythm of walking had cheered him, and he had an easy slope ahead of him. Perhaps he was giving in to arrogance. Perhaps to feel what he was feeling, it was necessary to see things from on high. “One should not expect God to come from the earth but from heaven,” Saint John had written. Couldn’t he, Xeno, two thousand years later, transform his own world from heaven? Wasn’t it possible, he wondered, looking at the sea from a bend in the path, to overcome evil from time to time? Below him he saw a half-broken old dovecote with several doves cooing and flying around it. Shouldn’t it be possible, at least, to end physical violence? (Suffering was another matter; perhaps it could never have an end.) Buddha, Jesus, even Marx must have felt something like this. I could fail too, he said to himself, and at that moment the monastery bells—five different sizes of bells—of Saint John the Theologian rang out. It was as if the melody, familiar as an old toy, had transported him to a new dimension. He felt it the way animals feel such things, with a shiver.
He stopped at a little convenience store to buy fruits and vegetables before going home. On the front page of a newspaper, he saw a photo of an old, dark-skinned African man lying on the beach, wearing white pants and a red T-shirt. The photo was artfully composed: the man was stretched out on the cream-colored sand between two patrolmen dressed in black, under a cloudless sky on the island of Kos. “Drowned man surprises tourists,” the caption said.
It was not acceptable that in the present day there should be so much material suffering. A certain former trafficker of pirated videos born in Jordan, a drug user with the aura of a loser, had founded a bloody caliphate (prompted, as everyone knew, by US military action in Iraq) that fomented religious massacres and that had spread with a success as implacable as it was unforeseen. In the space of only a year, threatened by the meteoric success of the new caliphate, almost a million people had fled Syria and Iraq to seek refuge in Europe. Today, the most powerful nations on Earth could not contain its expansion or guarantee the safety of their own citizens. None of this seemed mysterious to Xeno. The arms industry resembled the mythical Uroboros, the enormous serpent that devours itself tail first. The making and selling of weapons had become necessary to sustain the economies of powerful nations (the US, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the others) and to maintain the lifestyle of the people who lived in these nations, people who were accustomed to feeling protected by their governments, irrespective of their ideologies. In order for these economies not to collapse, the powerful had to sell weapons to their enemies, enemies they could no longer control, who were attacking them for ideological reasons. The image of the collective suicide of the human race passed through his head. Someone had written that the works of man would be the cause of his extinction. Xeno hadn’t forgotten:
Out of the depths of secret caverns, beings will arise to sow danger and death, leaving mankind prostrate with suffering. Those who submit to the law of these beings, after much sacrifice, will find momentary pleasure. But those who fail to pay them homage will find only agony and death. These beings will make men wretched; they will incite them to betray and to steal from each other. They will cause men to distrust those nearest to them. They will reduce free cities to slavery. O vile monsters! How much better were it for men that you shouldst return to hell!
Leonardo was speaking here, enigmatically, of metals. And man, Xeno thought, who had extracted these metals from the earth, was annihilating himself at the same time that he launched these metals into the heavens. “And the dead would no doubt be many more in number,” the Florentine wrote in yet another riddle, referring to armor, “if other soulless beings did not emerge from the bowels of the earth to defend them.”
V
In 2014, a Russian space agency had proposed a system to eliminate a great deal of the space garbage floating in low and medium orbits around Earth, propelling it into a “graveyard” orbit far beyond the geostationary. From there, space carcasses would spiral outward, drifting farther and farther from Earth. According to the agency, the system would cost about three billion dollars. It was on the basis of this idea that Xeno conceived his own project, demented in appearance but achievable. Neither the arms manufacturers nor their clients would be able to survive the revolution that, with the help of luck and a circle of friends, Xeno planned to set in motion.
His project—his mission—was to create three vast rings of destruction around the planet. A single spaceship stationed at one of the Lagrangian points—the points where a small object, by virtue of gravity, can maintain its position in outer space with respect to two larger bodies, such as Earth and the moon—could do the work that Xeno envisaged: a small technological apocalypse in the low and medium orbits and then, afterward, in the geostationary. “The Rings of Earth,” Xeno had said, feeling inspired. The ship would be equipped with a small radio telescope, like the Hubble but much less powerful, made not to detect pulsars and quasars but to locate and pursue satellites of various kinds—communications or surveillance, including AWACS (airborne warning and control system). “Automatic target recognition,” Pacal quoted. “With a medium-power laser, it’ll work.”
“We need to try it out,” Xeno had said that night in the desert. The word apocatastasis flashed before his eyes.
“What about a nuclear detonation at a certain point in the synchronic orbit, to create an electromagnetic pulse? That would do more damage in less time,” Abdelkrim suggested. “And it would be less expensive.”
Xeno objected. To begin with, he didn’t want to use nuclear weapons. Besides, whoever detonated the bomb would be condemned to death. This was not the message he wanted to convey.
“But think of the budget,” Abdelkrim repeated. He was suggesting that he would be willing to sacrifice himself.
Xeno shook his head. He didn’t approve of this kind of martyrdom.
It would be his great accomplishment: the Rings of Earth.
They would have to disable hundreds of satellites—worth between a hundred million and a billion dollars each—in the space of twenty-four hours. This idea would turn him into a martyr, he said to himself with a certain pious thrill, as he looked out at the sea from his garden terrace.
First they’d have to obtain the essential components: the ship’s carbon-fiber frame and its ceramic, temperature-resistant covering; layers of fireproof material; the engine; the air reactor; and the oxygen cooler—the most complicated part of all (it would have to cool the air, in a fraction of a second, from 1,000 degrees to 150). They would take all the components to Turkey—perhaps—or to Mexico to reassemble them, he imagined, in some well-funded museum as part of an exhibit of “space art.” A performance. Something like the erection of the cigar-shaped Skylon in London in 1951.
“In spite of the rain, I like Patmos better in winter,” he wrote to his mother, who insisted he take the ferry to Piraeus and spend New Year’s Eve in Athens with the family.
VI
That spring Xeno received his doctorate in fluid mechanics from Stanford University. Toward the end of May of the same year, while laid over in Madrid on his flight from Boston to Athens, he read a story called “An Asian Fable” in a Spanish magazine. It was also the year the Chinese project that Pacal had worked on fell apart—as Xeno had predicted it would.
Xeno’s mother was planning a banquet for a group of summer vacationers, some of them owners of houses on Patmos, some of them possible buyers—or sellers—of very, very expensive art, and also the usual friends.
Mrs. Galanis had gotten up that day in an excellent mood. She sent Assia, her Bulgarian cook, by taxi to look for fish at Grikos, a fishing village. Now she was going over the guest list. She had a mental diagram in front of her, and she was arranging guests around the imaginary table according to a mix of considerations, advantages, and probabilities. She asked Xeno to help her make the confirmation calls.
There would be twenty-two guests.
“Counting the four of us,” she said, “that’s twenty-six.”
There were two last-minute cancellations.
Xeno approached the stairwell and heard his mother in the kitchen, speaking affably with Assia, who had just come back from Grikos with three sea bream of four pounds each, the catch of the day.
“Efharistó.”
“Parakaló.”
“Marina and the duke aren’t coming!”
“Why not?”
“They can’t,” Xeno said.
This produced a silence.
“Call Eleni. She’s here with her new boyfriend or whatever he is. A Central African. His name is Homer—can you imagine? Why not? Bangui is the capital, right?”
Xeno nodded from the top of the stairs, and his mother recited Eleni’s number from memory.
A few minutes later Eleni confirmed. “Can I bring something?” she asked through SMS.
Chaos, A Fable Page 5