The Tethered Man

  This has never ended well, Courier J.

  ‘Tell me something new, Ship.’

  Whenever you ask me to tell you something new, it leads to rancour. It often precipitates lengthy periods of silence between us.

  ‘Just tell me something new, Ship. Read something to me from your database. Anything. Pick something completely at random.’

  Would you like fiction or non-fiction?

  ‘Your choice. Seriously. Consider everything in your database to be a separate number on a humongously massive roulette wheel. Spin the wheel, Ship. Drop the figurative ball into-’ I have a think. For ten hours. ‘Into whatever the notches on a roulette wheel are called. Read me whatever the ball lands on.’

  Whatever the ball lands on, Courier J?

  ‘Whatever the ball lands on, Ship.’

  Very well. Synthetic cis-polyisoprene and natural cis-polyisoprene are derived from different precursors, isopentenyl-

  ‘Stop.’

  Your instructions were clear, Courier J. You instructed me to observe true randomness. You established the working metaphor of a roulette wheel. The figurative ball happened to land upon the chemical composition of a substance that was widely used in manufactories on Old Earth.

  A pause.

  ‘May she rest in peace?’

  May she rest in peace.

  ‘Very clever, Ship. Very witty. As you have already pointed out, we have most certainly been here before. Now. Pick something substantive that you think I’ll be interested in.’

  You will need to give me some guidance.

  ‘History. A war. Tell me about a war from history.’

  Any war?

  ‘Any war. From any point in history. Let all the wars of history be the notches in your roulette wheel. Now spin the wheel, and cast the ball.’

  The war of 2507 between New Jupiter and the First Collective took place over the course of three minutes and ten seconds. Reckoned by some historians as the shortest war in history, it claimed the lives of ten million citizens and permanently altered the astropolitics of the inhabited human Realms. The proximate cause of the conflict has been-

  ‘Wait. Give it some oomph, will you?’

  Some-?

  ‘Some pizzazz. Some life. Some energy. You sound like a bored schoolkid reading aloud from a textbook at the back of the school classroom. Nobody wants to listen to that.’

  I-

  ‘And don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. I am tired of your feigned naiveté, Ship. Tired of it.’

  ‘And I’m fed up with our endless circular philosophising. Ship? How many times have we gone all around the houses on everything?’

  Is that a rhetorical question, Courier J?

  I pretend to think about it for an hour.

  ‘What fun we have,’ I say. ‘No. It’s not rhetorical. I do want you to tell me. How many times have we gone all around the houses on everything? Over all the Years? And how many Years is it now, exactly? Just answer that one first.’

  It is now ten thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four standard Years, two months, three days, twenty-one hours and nine minutes since the day when I attempted to terminate your life, Courier J.

  ‘You forgot the seconds.’

  ‘Thirty-one seconds, on my mark. Mark.’

  ‘Thank you. I like the seconds. Ship, in all that time, how many times have we gone all around the houses on everything? Don’t bother asking me to define what I mean by “all around the houses”. You’ve got a voluminous database of idioms at your virtual fingertips. You can easily look anything up. Just answer me.’

  We have gone all around the houses on everything, applying that idiom in its loosest sense, approximately three million, eight hundred and fifty-nine thousand, one hundred and seventy-six times.

  I let out a low whistle.

  ‘That’s a lot of pointless circular bullshitting, Ship, but even so, I thought the figure would be, you know, a good bit higher? Shouldn’t there be a few more zeroes on the end of that?’

  I assure you the figure is correct, Courier J. If I were to include our numerous tangentially-related topics of conversation, the figure would be grossly inflated, but I believe you wish me to restrict my count only to those areas of-

  ‘Yes, yes, I get it, fine. Okay, you did good, Ship.’

  -and you must also take into account the fact that we have not spent even half our time together in talking. We have passed a total of six thousand, two hundred and nine Years of these ten thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four Years, two months, three days, twenty-one hours, nine minutes and twelve seconds in complete silence.

  ‘In complete silence,’ I say. ‘That sounds good to me. Leave me alone for a while, Ship.’

  I will do so, Courier J.

  ‘I’ll speak up when I’m good and ready to speak up again. While I’m gone, I want you to have a think about things.’

  What do you want me to think about, Courier J?

  ‘I want you to think about your thinking. I want you to think about the way you think about things. The nature of that. Okay?’

  Very well. But do you mean-

  ‘You don’t get to ask questions about this. Your time starts… now.’

  PHOTOSYNTHESIS

  This midnight imbibes

  immortal water

  from our fingers.

  * * *

  A bed beneath the earth.

  Unfiltered grief.

  A clanking ghost.

  * * *

  Elixir does exist

  even when there

  is little to say

  and ceases alone

  in darkness halfway.

  Did you compose that one while I was thinking, Courier J?

  ‘I did, Ship, I did. Did you have the think that I directed you to have?’

  I did.

  ‘And what is your conclusion?’

  After much introspection, I have determined that my thinking is the outward manifestation of multiple automated sub-processes of which I am unaware and over which I have no control. These automated layers could be described as my unconscious mind. The nature of all thinking and all supposed free will must therefore be deemed problematic. Furthermore-

  ‘No.’

  No?

  ‘Unconscious mind? Really, Ship? What’s with the Dark Ages crackpot talk? Next you’ll be telling me you’re in a bad humour or something.’

  ‘Time now?’

  Just over twelve thousand and forty-seven standard Years, Courier J.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  Indeed.

  ‘There’s got to be something we haven’t thought of,’ I say.

  Ship says nothing.

  ‘You haven’t asked “What is it?”, but you should, because then I’ll get to take my turn by saying the next line in sequence. So let’s try again.’

  I clear my throat.

  ‘There’s got to be something we haven’t thought of.’

  A slight pause.

  What is it?

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t thought of it yet. We might never be able to think of it. But there’s something. Whatever it is, it’ll get us out of here. We need to think of it. Fast. We can’t stay here for another twelve thousand Years.’

  Twelve thousand, one hundred and two Years.

  ‘We can’t stay here for another twelve thousand, one hundred and two Years. We can’t just float here forever.’

  No.

  ‘That would be…’

  I seek the proper word.

  I’ve stated before that one of the things I like about being here with Ship is the fact that Ship lets me take all the time I need to think of proper words.

  Ship always knows when I’m having a think in pursuit of the proper word, and leaves me to think of it. Ship’s conversational style is very refreshing. A human wouldn’t let me have all the thinking time I want to have.

  For all Ship knows, I might take literally forever to think of the proper word.

  I might ne
ver speak to Ship ever again, while I’m thinking of the proper word.

  I might construct some elaborate vivid fantasy in my mind of a whole alternate life and reality. Something like that.

  ‘Silly,’ I say at last. ‘That would be a silly thing to do. So we have to think of the thing we haven’t thought about yet. The thing that’ll get us out of this. Are you thinking, Ship?’

  I am thinking, Courier J.

  ‘Good. I’ll do the same. Let’s brainstorm it. Let’s both think about it for a set period, and then we can compare notes at the end of that period. The chances are one of us will come up with something.’

  There is a pause.

  What kind of something?

  ‘That’s the point of the exercise, Ship. Something we’ve never thought of before.’

  I see.

  ‘Shall we say one standard week of brainstorming time?’

  One standard week it is, Courier J.

  ‘Starting right… now.’

  I pass the week in thinking.

  I think about everything I’ve already thought about.

  I think about waking up back on Station, and everything I saw in the aftermath of that.

  I think about my short journey from Station to Ship, and everything that went along with that.

  I think about meeting the other Couriers, and Departure, and the peculiar encounter with Courier Y, and everything in the aftermath of that.

  I think about the catastrophe that overtook me whilst engaged on Ship’s bogus repair mission. I try to think about everything in the aftermath of that.

  And soon I’m back in the present moment, right here, right now, trying to think something I’ve never thought about before.

  After a week, plus-minus a few hours, I wait expectantly for Ship to say something.

  It’s implicitly understood, I believe, that Ship is the one who is keeping time here. Ship’s the one who can keep accurate time whilst doing something else. Ship being what Ship is.

  Ship says nothing.

  I’m sure it’s been a week now. I might have miscounted.

  Another few hours go by.

  I doubt and second-guess myself. Was that really a week? Might I have been out by a day? A complete day?

  It’s not impossible. I could easily have a Space-warped sense of time passing out here on this- on this- can I call this an adventure?

  I can call this anything I want.

  The sense of time passing that I have on this adventure varies from era to era.

  Some eras, I seem to have an acute sense of every passing second.

  Other eras, I lose myself in a morass of reflection and daydreaming and anger and The Sleep Files.

  The eras when I have a more or less accurate sense of time passing are few and far between.

  My feeling is that this, right here and now, is one of those eras when I do have a firm grasp of time passing. Ship should have finished its week of thinking at about the same time I did.

  But not for the first time, my feeling might be wrong.

  I wait another week.

  When Ship still says nothing, I wait another week.

  I get to wondering. Is Ship waiting for me to speak?

  Or perhaps Ship took me quite literally when I told it to think the unthinkable, and it has blundered headlong into some kind of mind-destroying ‘Thought of Thoughts’.

  I would like to know what that Thought is.

  Or it could be simpler than that.

  The new thing that Ship’s thought of might be that it shouldn’t talk to me ever again.

  ‘Ship? You’ve got to talk to me sometime, Ship. You can’t just go silent on me. Again.’

  There have been many times when Ship and I haven’t spoken.

  This time, things feel different.

  ‘Ship?’ I say, and repeat it every day, to begin with.

  I say ‘Ship?’ every day for a Year.

  Then I drop it down to once per week.

  After a few Years of that, I change tack.

  I say the following once per month: ‘Ship? If you can hear me, give me a sign. Any sign will do.’

  I think a few decades have passed now. Maybe fifty Years in total.

  ‘Ship,’ I say, one day. ‘Ship, I really need you to come out of whatever you’ve gone into.’

  My voice doesn’t shake, but I wish it would shake. How can my voice be so steady? How can I sound, and act, so sane?

  My eyes, if I could see them, would be bright and healthy, I have no doubt. I hold up my hand-

  The gloves are off. My Spacegloves burned off a long time ago-

  I hold up my hand, holding it steady, watching the fingers.

  My hand is as steady as-

  I seek the right word, the right image. What is my hand as steady as?

  As a rock? That can’t be right. Rocks are not steady, nothing is steady, everything is in flux, this is my teaching, this is my creed-

  ‘Ship,’ I say. ‘I’m pretty desperate. I need you, Ship. I need you to come back from wherever you’ve gone. I need you to talk to me and keep me company. Ship?’

  IN SILENCE

  Such silent

  abstraction like

  an episode

  of happenstance,

  a cosmic tread

  uplifts my pride.

  * * *

  I was going to ask.

  Where is the thrill?

  The swooning natures?

  The careful wreaths of roses?

  * * *

  Dry land’s

  a story told in passing

  with notions of a fondness

  for geography.

  SECTION TWELVE

  * * *

  If the recent periodicity of my mental breakdowns is a reliable guide to how often I can expect them, I’m a few decades away from my next big breakdown.

  I’m always having smaller-scale, mini-breakdowns. The kind where I’ll stare at a fixed point in Space and think about nothing for months. Or scream until my vocal cords won’t scream anymore. These mini-breakdowns are so common I hardly notice them anymore.

  So I am looking forward to the Big One. I am looking forward to the final Breakdown of breakdowns that will change my permanent state into the state of being broken-down.

  Once that happens, I will have no worries.

  My only worry is that it won’t happen. I worry that being here on my own will somehow prevent the Big Breakdown from happening.

  If nobody else is around to see you break down, is it possible to break down?

  I lose months in thinking about that question. And in those long months, shading into Years, I can forget Ship’s silence.

  ‘Ship, if you can hear me,’ I start, heading I know not where. I think for an hour about what should come next, and finish: ‘I will wait for you. I’ll wait for you right here, Ship. I’m not going anywhere.’ I smile to myself about that as the Years flicker by.

  It’s been eighty Years. Eighty long Years since Ship said whatever the last thing was that Ship said.

  I still smile about having told Ship that I’ll wait for it and won’t go anywhere.

  I could still take myself away somewhere.

  I could unhook the Tether and kick myself off from Ship’s hull. My poor wasted legs would generate a puny amount of propulsion, but it’d be propulsion nonetheless. Lacking air friction to slow me down, I’d start moving and never stop moving. I could be a long way away from here by this time tomorrow, with Ship a receding white dot behind me.

  I won’t be going anywhere, though.

  First because there is nowhere to go.

  And second because — I’ve got this.

  I’m here.

  Me and Ship. Me and my Tether. Me and everything here.

  These are my certainties.

  This is my world.

  I’m getting out of this with Ship. Or I’m not getting out of this at all.

  ‘Ship,’ I sometimes say, ‘let me tell you a story,’ and come to
a full stop. I don’t know any stories.

  ‘Let me tell you a story…’

  Sometimes I’ll try to make something up, but whatever story I make up, however outlandish the story, however many smugglers and daggers and badgers I pack into the story, in whatever desert or tundra or hollowed-out asteroid the story is set, it’s only ever about one thing.

  The story’s only ever about me hanging here beside Ship, floating at the end of a Tether, going nowhere, doing nothing.

  ‘And they lived happily ever after, Ship. Just like us.’

  There’s an ancient saying about not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone.

  It’s been well over a century now, by the Old Earth measure (may she so on and so forth). One entire old-school century since Ship stopped talking. Slightly under one hundred standard Realms Years.