Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  I look over to Dave, looking for reassurance, perhaps.

  Onward rolls the film: talk of ignoring advice, and insanity. Kris watches the suicide doctor’s message again. The dead doctor says: “They won’t understand.” There is an unexplained child on the film with him. The doctor says, ominously: “I am my own judge.” The end of the video message sends chills through my body. “It has something to do with conscience,” the doctor says to Kris. “I really wanted you to get here in time.” He turns off the screen; the suicide’s implied.

  I look at my drink: I’m sucking on dregs, on the air between slowly melting ice cubes, on nothing. I shouldn’t get another, not yet.

  Onscreen, Kris sleeps, and dreams of a beautiful woman. It’s the woman from the picture he was burning before; she’s a brunette with an incredibly striking face. He wakes, and she is there watching him.

  “Not a bad looker,” Dave observes. “I guess they’ve got that, at least.”

  But my mind is on the movie now, not the commentary. The woman is almost impossibly beautiful; I feel a pang of sadness, knowing I’ll never know her. She kisses Kris and lays next to him; I have the sense that she’s his wife, or that she was. The suicide pistol is at her feet.

  Kris starts to undress her. There is a needle-mark on her arm. He looks truly disturbed.

  With that, Part I ends; I stretch and wander off to the bathroom and fix myself another drink as an organ interlude plays.

  “Odd movie,” Dave says.

  “Yes. Odd.”

  When the movie starts back up, Kris is sending his wife away on a rocket. He puts her through the hatch and steps away to a crude launch console that’s far, far too close for anything resembling safety. The rocket rises away ridiculously slowly, spewing fire. Kris is still barely ten feet from it, so close his clothing’s singed by the flames. It’s impossibly absurd, and I catch myself laughing aloud.

  More heads turn up front. For the sake of our hosts, I know I should settle down, but I whisper to Dave: “That’s one way to get rid of your wife, huh?” And then: “They do seem to be falling behind us in the special effects race.” He gives a grim grimace.

  Onscreen, Kris explains to another scientist that his wife had, in fact, died ten years before. The scientist explains that what he had seen was a “materialization of a concept,” the physical embodiment of his ideas of her. These apparitions had been visiting the crew for some time, ever since they’d started radiation experiments, bombarding Solaris’s ocean with strong X-rays. The other scientist, Dr. Snaut, explains that the ocean “probed our minds and extracted something like islands of memory.” Somehow the planet Solaris was creating walking and talking people, physical beings, based on the crew’s dark thoughts of the past.

  At night, Hari, Kris’s wife, comes back. She starts undressing and climbs into bed.

  In the morning, he sees her clothes and knows it was no dream. He leaves and goes out into the hallway; she starts pounding on the metal door like some horror movie monster, and bursts through it, cut and bloodied and crazy.

  Dr. Snaut can see her too, it turns out. He gives some ridiculous explanation for her physical existence; she’s composed of neutrinos, he says, stabilized by Solaris’s force field. He stares out the circular windows at the ocean below and explains that she’s immortal. He wants to dissect her.

  I watch all this and feel a deep sadness coming over me, a bleak heaviness I cannot comprehend. I start falling asleep; in between, I catch snippets of film: a waking dream, or a nightmare.

  Snaut explains that the regeneration is slowing down; the ocean derives their guests while the scientists sleep, but they’re going to transmit their waking thoughts and see what happens. Hari knows she is not Hari; she knows the real Hari poisoned herself. “The longer this fog lasts, the worse it will be for you in the end,” she tells Kris.

  There is a skip in time…more sleep? I’m vaguely aware I’m being rude, but this is a long movie, and I don’t entirely care.

  Onscreen, Kris and Hari go to the station’s central library. It is, absurdly, no different from one on Earth: there are green-painted walls and black leather chairs and a large round wooden table; there are marble statues and globes and old books and candles and chandeliers. Snaut shows up and starts reading a book. “’They come at night, but one must sleep sometimes,’” he reads to Kris, then goes on: “That’s the problem. Mankind has lost the ability to sleep.” He gives Kris the book. Kris reads: “When I sleep, I know no fear. No hope, no trouble, no bliss. Blessings on him who invented sleep. The common coin that purchases all things. The balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. There is only one bad thing about sound sleep. They say it closely resembles death.”

  A shudder passes through me. I look around the auditorium at the assembled guests, heads silhouetted in the projector light. No one seems to react.

  In the movie, the other station inhabitant, Dr. Sartorious, toasts Dr. Snaut. “We don’t know what to do with other worlds,” he says. “We don’t need other worlds, we need a mirror.”

  I don’t know what to make of this. I look at the guests for their reaction: nothing.

  In their strange movie library, Dr. Sartorious is prattling on about the “foolish human predicament of striving for a goal he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man.” Then Snaut toasts Gibarian, the suicide doctor. “He died of hopelessness,” Snaut says. “He thought all this was happening only to him.”

  Flickers of film, and consciousness: time starts skipping again, into blackness, and dreams, and in between, more scenes. Kris remembers winter on Earth. The Solaris ocean stirs and seethes. Kris hears a crash. He sees Hari, covered in ice; she drank liquid oxygen to kill herself. “Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story,” Snaut tells Kris. Then, horribly, Hari jerks awake, convulsing on the floor but finally coming to life. “I can never get used to all these resurrections,” Snaut says.

  I am tired and exhausted and heavy, fading in and out. I see scenes and quotes. “Whenever we shun pity, we ravage ourselves” and “Love is a feeling we can experience but never explain” and “Maybe we’re here to experience people as a reason to love.” Kris is sick; there are fevered dreams and kisses, and scenes with Hari again.

  And then she is gone.

  “When man is happy, the meaning of life and other things will no longer interest him,” Snaut tells Kris. He responds: “To ask is always the desire to know. Yet the preservation of simple human truths requires mystery. The mysteries of happiness, death and love.” Then: “In any event, my mission is finished. But what next? Return to Earth? Little by little, everything will return to normal. I’ll even find new interests and acquaintances. But I won’t be able to give myself to them fully. Never.”

  There are clouds over the ocean. Kris is hoping for his wife to return. I sleep and wake; I see shots that echo the beginning of the film: long-bladed grasses underwater. Kris is back at the cabin, but it is winter now. I fall asleep again.

  When I wake, the end credits are rolling. People are looking at me strangely.

  “You were talking in your sleep,” Dave explains.

  I mix another drink, pound it, stumble up to my room, and collapse.

  Somewhere in the night I wake from a blackout opening the door to a room that isn’t mine. I hear angry Russian voices; I turn and run like a frightened deer, and darkness overtakes me again.

  •••

  In the morning, I’m confronted by the unexplained: gaps in my memory, bruises, looks of disappointment from Dave.

  After another day of meetings, we fly back to Houston, from ice and cold and darkness to warmth and light. But something feels wrong.

  My first day back, Deke pulls me in and tells me I’m being taken off the project. It’s unclear whether I’ll get another assignment. It’s a week before Christmas.

  I don’t know what to tell my wife, don’t know what to tell my kids, don’t know what to tell myself.

  I don’
t say anything, not that night. I cannot sleep, though; I’m restless and irritable, and I toss and turn; I want to shut off my thoughts.

  •••

  The next night, I stop off at the bar on the way home from work. I have one, then another, then another. I call Joan; she is angry. I stop at the liquor store, buy a bottle. I head home but decide I’m not quite ready. I head to another bar.

  My night dissolves into darkness and splintered scenes: rain-slicked asphalt, slow-changing traffic lights, country roads, city roads.

  Then: headlights. An oncoming car that swerves the same wrong way I do, like a sick funhouse mirror.

  A brief look of horror on the driver and his wife.

  A final crash into blackness.

  VENUS MISSION

  PART IV: THE VOYAGE HOME

  There is a library composed entirely of hexagonal galleries stretching out into infinity. On the shelves of the galleries are every book known to man, every possible book, all the combinations of letters one can imagine. There are books identical to one another except for a single letter; there are nonsensical books; there are stories that start out as narrative but dissolve into gibberish, and others that stay coherent. I am thinking that, if I look at enough books, I might find my story.

  This library exists in the pages of a book, a slim volume of stories by an author named Borges, something that was in Kerwin’s collection. Yet it’s described so compellingly that I imagine it completely; the real world has fallen away; the cruel confines of the sleeping chamber where I have spent so much of the past year have vanished, and I’ve spent a few blessed moments in an infinite elsewhere.

  The last few months, and indeed the entire latter half of the mission, have been strangely uneventful. Which is not to say it has been anything like we envisioned during the planning: it’s just the two of us now, of course, Kerwin and myself. And we’re still tapping out our messages home via Morse. It took weeks after Shepard’s burial before everything started settling down, before we got used to our new normal. We’ve been plumbing the depths of the universe, using the X-ray telescope to peer out of the Solar System and into deep space, looking at the structure of the universe and sketching it out in great detail. We’re observing galaxies arranged in clusters and superclusters, and the background radiation left over from the Big Bang; we’re assembling copious notes, and transmitting reports on our findings.

  And between all that, we’ve formed a book club of sorts. We’ve long ago exhausted our stores of conversational material; we know all there is to know about one another. So we’re trying to read and discuss everything we have onboard. The Borges book is weird, but memorable: stories about made-up languages, and an author trying to recreate Don Quixote, and a man trying to dream a man into reality. Some of the ideas seem rather outlandish, but as Kerwin says, nothing ever becomes real without first becoming an idea. It’s called Garden of Forking Paths. I’m quite sure I’ve never seen it before.

  I take a break and float on upstairs to the bathroom. I’m still thinking about the story I just read: if there are infinite books in the library, there are infinite versions of my story: versions where we never flew to Venus, versions where Shepard’s still alive.

  I find myself looking at myself in the mirror. These are not the same eyes that were looking back at me a year ago; beyond the wrinkles at the edges, there is the weariness of having seen so much, and spent so much time so far from home. These are not the same eyes, but they wouldn’t have been the same if I’d stayed home, either, so it’s just as well that I’ve gone.

  After floating back downstairs, I pour myself into the book once more. The title story, the final one, is about a Chinese spy in Britain during the First World War, on a mission the reader doesn’t understand. He ends up visiting a professor, a Sinologist, no less, and they end up in a strange existential conversation about a bizarre Chinese manuscript written by the spy’s ancestor, a book in which all possible outcomes occur because time itself forks and splits. The Sinologist tells his visitor: “…your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of these times, we do not exist; in some, you exist, but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.”

  The story ends with a horrible twist, one that reverberates through me and lives on: thoughts and possibilities echoing inside my mind.

  Our story’s close also draws near. We have only one full day left up here, roughly 37 hours to Earth. Everything I see, all the aluminum walls and triangular floor grids that have come to seem so impossibly permanent, will soon be hurtling through the atmosphere, a fireball of molten metal.

  •••

  The last day is a day of collection and recollection.

  We are preserving what we need, what we can; we are moving our records and journals up into the command module at last, and the film from the automated flyby cameras and our Hasselblads. And Shepard’s belongings, too: we want to keep as much as we can, so as to have something to give his family.

  As always when dealing with artifacts, there is a tendency to look at them and remember the past to which they belonged; if you don’t keep moving forward, it’s easy to end up mired in the molasses of memory. Of course our time here is finite, much more so than most times are for most people, but as the mission clock counts down, through 20 and 19 and 18 hours remaining, we still spend some of it in that strange slowness of nostalgia. But there is still work to do, reviewing the reentry procedures and heating up the meal trays and such, and I am grateful for that.

  “How’d you like the book?” Kerwin asks over our last dinner.

  “Yeah. Strange read. Very bizarre. But it sticks with you.”

  We’re both eating Salisbury steak, perhaps our favorite meal. There is a large stack of trays remaining, a full sixth of the food we brought on the mission, all the breakfasts and lunches and dinners Shepard never got the chance to eat; we’ve had some liberty to take what we like and ignore the rest. It is strange to remember that I once worried about running out of food.

  “I thought it was a good one to finish with,” he says, bobbing lightly in the zero-G. “Another way to explore the same things we’re exploring.”

  “Do you think that’s realistic? An infinite series of times? Parallel universes and such?”

  He takes a bite, chews, thinks. “Hard to imagine, I’ll admit.”

  “Impossible. I don’t know what it is about some authors; they seem to like these flights of fantasy that avoid the facts. What’s wrong with simple scientific truths? The known and the provable? The real world’s strange enough.”

  “Every story’s fantasy, in a way,” he says. “Even history. You’re recreating something that doesn’t exist anymore; the only place to do that is in the mind of the reader. So they’re filling in the blanks with images from their own past, faces they’ve seen, places they’ve been. If you saw the real thing, it would be different.”

  “But this one…time forking and splitting…”

  He shrugs. “Maybe it does happen. Maybe it happens at night, when you sleep. Maybe that’s why you don’t remember things correctly, or you find things in places you’re sure you already looked. You’ve been cycled into a new universe, a new set of possibilities.”

  I take a bite of mashed potatoes and give him a funny look.

  “Why not?” he asks. “If you believe in God, I’d say you have to believe that God knows all the possibilities, everything that is and ever was, everything that could have been. Maybe it’s all equally real in God’s mind, and we are only conscious of one.”

  “Whic
h one?”

  “I don’t know…the one where we’re learning whatever lessons we need to learn.”

  “None of this is science. You couldn’t prove any of this.”

  “Why would God be provable?” he asks. “Why would God take away the fact that you have a choice whether or not to believe?”

  “Parallel universes…I still can’t see it.”

  “You can’t imagine the world when you’re in the womb, either,” he says. “Is it hard to believe there are things that will forever remain beyond our understanding?”

  “We should go with the simplest explanations, though, right? If someone’s making outlandish claims, it’s on them to back them up.”

  “We should,” he says. “But still, you have to stay open. The modern physics explanations sounded pretty outlandish to everyone who only believed in Newtonian physics. Still, it could be…” he starts, then cocks his head like he’s trying to readjust his thoughts. “When you think about the Big Bang, the moment of creation, and then this…this theory that it’ll all collapse back together, it could be that it’s one universe, with fixed endpoints, and all these possibilities in between, and yet the certainty that it will all come back together in the end.”

  “But now isn’t possibility. Now is real.”

  “Maybe it’s like a guitar string,” he says. “The ends are set in place. You pluck it and you see it in this hazy shape, this vibration; you can’t be sure exactly where it is right at the moment you’re observing. You put your finger on it, and it’s fixed into place there, where you are. Like that present moment, living and observing, is what condenses the cloud, is what collapses the probability matrix and turns all the hazy possibilities into reality. But still it’s vibrating before and after. The future’s this…hazy mess of possibilities, but the past is, too; all of the possibilities that got you to where you are could have been real.”