The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  The Departure Lounge was quiet on the Day of the Ascension. Three more people had left since Carlton Ray’s announcement. Thirty-seven of us would ascend to Zedekiah’s ship. Some people sat quietly and prayed. The woman with the frown – her name was Julie and she had joined the group by walking out on a boyfriend that beat on her – sat and cried quietly all day. Carlton’s wife paced in the garden and chain-smoked.

  Only Carlton Ray himself seemed full of energy. He ordered everyone to stay in the house. Zedekiah would need us to stay in close proximity to each other to pick up our Evolved Vibrations. At about noon, Carlton disappeared into a shed out on the grounds and returned a few minutes later, heaving an industrial can of glyphosate weed killer. It sloshed thickly, like syrup.

  Jordan was entrusted to make a trip to the local store and buy orange juice and a pack of Dixie Cups. He asked if he could take me with him. It was the first time he had used my name in days, but Carlton told him I could not be spared. Zedekiah required my presence for navigation purposes.

  When he came back with the juice, Jordan was slurring slightly. There was a bottle-shaped bulge in his pant’s pocket and his hair smelt of weed.

  We watched in absolute silence as Carlton Ray poured a slug of weed killer into each cup of juice. I took mine and followed the others out in the garden.

  Carlton toasted the sky. “Zedekiah awaits us! Let’s leave these de-evolved bodies and let our souls be airlifted to the comet.”

  Some people were shaking. Randall, the man with the belly and the comb over slid to his knees, still clutching the cup in front of him. Next to me, Carlton’s wife was staring at her drink and shaking her head from side to side.

  All I could do was stare at the red cup in Jordan’s hand, knowing with total certainty that if he drank his, I would drink mine.

  As Jordan raised his cup to his mouth, Carlton’s wife screamed and threw her cup across the garden, knocking mine from my hand.

  “I won’t do it, Carlton, I won’t!”

  Carlton Ray gripped her arms. She was frozen, staring so hard at the ground that he had to crouch a little to get the trembling woman to see him.

  “Baby doll, don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust your Carly Ray? Look at me. We are going to fly away from this doomed world and find a new life.”

  She didn’t answer him. She couldn’t look at him.

  “Don’t you love me?” he asked. He cupped her face in his hand and made her look him in the eye.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “I trust you,” she said, eventually.

  Carlton Ray offered her his cup. “Then trust me now, trust me in this.”

  She stared at the cup for a moment and then took it with calmer hands.

  “We are going to be together forever,” he reassured her, kissing her softly on the cheek.

  He then turned to Jordon and told him to go prepare two more cups of Ascension juice. Jordan took the glyphosate into the house. While he was gone, Carlton insisted we all lay down in readiness and regaled us about the interstellar adventure that lay ahead of us.

  The last thing I saw was Jordan’s face as he handed me a fresh cup of juice. For a second, as his head blocked out the sky above me, he gave the tiniest shrug and then he slugged down his drink and lay down beside me.

  I drank down my juice in one. It tasted thick and metallic. I thought I might hurl, but I kept it down. I lay back on the lawn. The soft grass tickled my neck. I slipped my hand into Jordan’s. He surprised me by holding mine tightly in return.

  Around me people started to moan in pain. It hadn’t occurred to me that the ascension might hurt. Jordan made a noise in his throat, his hand started to spasm violently in mine. But even as I started to panic, I felt my body start to relax, and then I didn’t remember anything else.

  “Son? Son, can you hear me?”

  Someone gripped my arm and shook me.

  “He’s breathing. Get me some oxygen. Bob! Oxygen! Now!”

  Something cold clamped down on my face and stale, dusty air billowed into my lungs. I lurched up on my side and coughed my guts up.

  It was night. A bright clear moon illuminated the garden. There were electrical lights on stands. A few bodies were in black body bags, most were covered by blankets and sheets.

  Jordan’s hand was no longer in mine. A body was next to me, covered in a blanket. I recognized Jordan’s sneakers sticking out from under the end of it. I tried to get up, to pull the blanket from him, but the paramedic held on to me, pulling me tight against his stiff windbreaker, telling me over and over that I was going to be alright, but I knew I wasn’t.

  “I was supposed to go,” I yelled, “I was supposed to go with them.”

  I looked up at the night sky, desperately searching for him. But if there was a comet with a tail amongst the stars, I couldn’t find it.

  I was still crying when my Pa came. They’d told him that I had survived, but he still ran up to me, tears in his eyes, and held onto me.

  “I could’ve lost you,” he kept repeating. “I could’ve lost you.”

  There was orange juice and a whole heap of whiskey in my stomach, but nothing else. No trace of weed killer. Jordan had never believed that he was going anyplace but the grave. It took my father to explain to me that Jordan hadn’t abandoned me – he had saved me.

  I was the only person to attend his funeral. Just me and an elderly preacher, with barnacle skin and a mean-ass spirit.

  “Some people don’t the sense they were born with,” he muttered as we stood by the grave.

  “No, he knew what he was doing.”

  “Then he committed a mortal sin,” the preacher said.

  “Jordan didn’t do nothing wrong,” I told him. “He stayed as long as he could.”

  I looked up at the night sky, desperately searching for him.

  * * *

  A photographic slide, showing the passage of a comet. (c1900)

  THE GRAND TOUR

  JAMES SMYTHE

  “There’s a harvest,” Paul says, so we draw straws and I am the unlucky one. We call everything new that’s outside a harvest, if it’s anomalous. There’s always something to salvage.

  It is a ten-minute process at this point: actually trying to get myself dressed to go out there. The things we have to consider – rads, rays, whatever you call them – we haven’t got anything to guard against fully, so we’ve been forced to adapt. We have fragments: old suits from the nuclear plant nearby that we’ve pulled apart and repurposed. Better that ten of us can share the wealth than one. My headpiece was originally another suit’s thigh. I have attached goggles to it, sealing them; split the end so that it stretches over my entire head, my shoulders, even. You try to make sure that there are no gaps of skin showing through. I’m sure that a doctor would tell me that what I was attempting was pointless: that if something out there was going to get to me, it was worming its way in whatever I did. But we don’t have a doctor, so.

  We’ve made our own airlock into the basement. There are three doors between us and the outside; two that are meant to be here, another that we brought down and fastened to the walls. We have soldered the gaps where we can, and we’ve run carpet along the inside of the door seams. Anything extra that we can do. It’s a heave: open one door, close it; open the next, close it; then the last, and you are outside, in the sunlight and the glare and the haze. We call it an airlock, but we don’t know how tight it is. We’ve stayed mostly healthy so far.

  There’s a harvest. That’s all I’ve been told. Could mean anything.

  Whatever they’ve found is three miles away from base camp, so that means I have to cycle. I pick one of the old BMXs, because I’m heading towards roughage, and I need the rugged stuff. There are jumps out there, and rocks. Sometimes you’re told to just get on the motorway, head down towards Junction 10 or 9, and then you can take a road cycle, one with thin tires and curved handlebars. But in the roughage, the tyres would be wrec
ked in seconds, and we’re running out of repair kits. No sense in playing games now.

  This used to be proper fields; that’s what we remember. It gets fuzzier, week by week, so we tell stories about what it used to be like, but they change. You can hear it happen if you pay attention: a yellow becomes a burned golden colour when we tell the stories. We always try and embellish our own stories, because that makes the now worse. We should be trying to make this better but we don’t really have an interest in that. We like dwelling on the past. Now, everything is dismal. But remember when all of this was green? Remember when the fields grew corn and wheat and whatever that beautiful burned golden stuff was? Wasn’t that time amazing?

  The bike whines under my weight, but that’s fine. I am not built for this sort of machine, which I accept. I look lumbering on top of it: hunched over, clenching the rubber-grip handlebars, my back arched, my legs pumping. My knees hit my elbows if I am cycling even slightly up-hill. We used to have a mountain bike, but that went missing. Wasn’t a problem: it was too heavy to carry back if something broke. The frame on this one is light, and you can hear echoes through it when stones hit the metal. They make the GPS voice shiver. We were amazed when we discovered that GPS still worked. The satellites are still up there, that’s why, we reckon: still spinning, in orbit of us. As long as we charge the VDUs on the solar racks down here, we get a few hours use out of them. Of course, they refer to roads that no longer exist; whole towns and cities, in fact. You are now entering London, it might say. No I’m not, I might reply. Maybe I would have been once upon a whenever.

  Prepare to turn left, the voice says. I have set it to be the voice of a woman called Jane. She has a hint of an Irish accent, or somewhere from the north: Liverpool, Manchester. I’ve never been up that far north, so I can’t tell which. I don’t even know if they still talk like that up there. Also, she’s pretending that she’s posh. It’s something that actors used to do, I’m told. I talk back to her, imitating her voice a little. It’s playful teasing.

  “There is no left,” I say to her. “There’s only an over. I can veer, though.” Through the makeshift helmet, my voice is muffled. I miss the road turning that she wanted me to take because it doesn’t exist, and she tries to readjust, finding me in a no-man’s land of space on her screen. Recalculating, she says, and then, just when she thinks she might have found it, Recalculating, again. Where I am now, there were houses once. I can see the lines in the ground, the foundations; the lines of walls and doors and entire lives.

  I keep going. There are the fragments of roads, but I avoid them, because here they’re too broken up; and the occasional jut of a power cable or telephone mast, sticking out of the ground as if this is a pincushion.

  I pedal harder. Doesn’t matter how much I sweat. Go left on the roundabout, Jane says, but that’s when you can hear her accent most: rind-a-bite, she says.

  I pass a supermarket that I haven’t seen before. It’s shelled, mostly, but there is a section with a roof, and most of the walls are here, and the doors. We never hold out hope, because there’s a chance that anything left is either contaminated or just useless, but we always check. I park next to it and creep inside, and I hear their voices echoing down the aisles before I see them, which is lucky. We are not always so lucky. I back out: I have no wish to fuck my day up like that. No way, no how.

  The bike groans again when I get onto it, and Jane threatens to ruin everything when she tells me that she is Recalculating, but they don’t hear her, I don’t think; and I am long gone by the time that they might be coming out to see what that noise was.

  The bike’s front wheel snags on a rock, and I come off. On the dust, the gravel, I clutch at my knee and I check the suit. That would be a worry, if I had ripped it and cut myself; if there was an open wound for infection to set in. But there isn’t. It’s dusty and dirty but that’s all.

  Used to be grazed knees and whatever. Get up, carry on. Other concerns, now. Back onto the bike, and I have lost a few minutes, and my knee hurts, so I pedal slower for a while. They say, don’t stay out more than two hours. I can’t see me being back in time. I wonder what will happen to me.

  The harvest is metal, whatever it is. I can see that from here. And it’s on fire, which doesn’t bode well. We can’t put it out, so we leave it to burn off and then pick through what’s left. Some of the people at camp, they think that fire has started to burn hotter than it used to. They blame whatever’s in the air now for that: makes it harder to put out, makes it nastier. It’ll melt through anything, like white phosphorous. I haven’t seen that happening, but I’ve seen the evidence: the puddles of dull silver that used to be household appliances, now smelted to the ground. When I was a kid, we stuck a coin to the floor in the shopping centre with superglue and watched people try to pick it up. Funniest day. That’s what they remind me of.

  As I get closer I see the satellite dish, like we’ve got fastened to the sides of houses, but much larger. It’s on a base, cylindrical, covered in these gold reflective panels, glinting the sun back at me, even through the smoke; and there are these giant things sticking out of it, like spider’s legs, so long, cracked and bent and twisted on the ground. The whole thing is damaged and battered. It must have fallen from the sky; only explanation. The heat from it comes surging at me in waves. There’s a hatch swinging open through the flames, but I cannot see inside it. What if this is a person? What if there’s somebody in there? Maybe they were up in space before, and this is their return.

  Ten feet away and I jump off the bike, and I rush towards the fallen harvest. I throw myself at it, hoping to salvage something. I’ve come this far. I look away from the flames and get close enough that I can feel them, and I reach into the hatch. I am breaking, and I realise how unsecure my suit is: the smoke, whatever’s burning here coming into the mask. I breathe it into my lungs, and it covers my skin. Still, I am here now. I fumble, feeling wires and wires and a box, which I grab and tug out. It’s black, and hot, and melting. I take it and back off, but it’s too hot so I throw it ahead of me. The gloves are on fire, so I peel them off as well. My hands are going to fry, I know, but it’s that or burn. We can’t deal with fire burns properly, and an infection would kill me. I risk it and drop them behind me, and they are swallowed by their own flames.

  The box has broken in front of me. There, in the heat, I pick up the bits from inside it and see what they’re worth. Nothing: photographs; bits of paper so charred I can’t make them out; and a golden disc as wide as my forearm. It catches the sun and the fire both, and it’s somehow cold. Not freezing, but cold. It gives me a shock when I touch it, static; as if it were a pin, and I have pricked myself on it. I tuck it inside my suit, opening the zip to slide it in and make it safe. There’s nothing else. In the distance, whatever the satellite-thing was, it is engulfed: the flames rushing out like thick red fingers clawing at the dirt.

  Paul went to school here; that’s how we knew to find it. The school had tunnels underneath, running all the way through. Emergency tunnels, escape tunnels. He said that they used them during the wars before, when they needed to. That’s how old the school is. It was perfect. But there are things we could moan about: how dark it is; how damp; how tight the tunnels are. I am always close to somebody, even though they are so long. You hear things as well: echoes. It’s scarier than it need be. Almost all of us are young. We were quickest getting down here, to start. We were lucky. Maybe, because we’re younger, we fight off whatever’s out there better. Or maybe this is just how it’s meant to be: the young outlive the old, that’s nature’s law.

  We’re so casual about when we die, now. We have to be. I remember when we first came down here there were twenty-five of us, all from around here. Paul knew about it, and we knew that we had to move quickly. London was gone, and we lived in a commuter town. No chance of our parents coming back, for most of us. Ella’s mum came, but she died pretty fast, because she went to look for her son, who in turn had been to look for his father. Ella s
tayed firm, like the rest of us. We spent a year waiting to see if anybody else came, but nobody did. When that year was done, we opened the doors and started going out. Twenty-five down to ten in only two and a bit years. Those aren’t good odds.

  The others have already turned the showers on for me when I get back. I strip under them, and I let the suit and the golden disc lie on the floor at the side. The water is so hot that I am the only one in here. Even the steam’ll threaten to strip your skin. Mine is, I can see as I look down, pink and blistering. I was outside for too long. I knew it. The water makes some of the bubbles under my skin burst, and then the skin goes soft and flat and rippled. I touch them, because you have to. This is part of how you heal. You get the badness out, before it can become a part of you. When it gets into you properly, that’s when you get truly sick; and that’s when they put you out to pasture. What’s it that Paul says? When they send you to live on the farm. That’s a good way of putting it. I have blisters all over me, more than I have ever had before. It takes so long to burst them all or to pull the top-skin of them off; and to let the water go all over me, into them and through them, and taking the badness out and down the plughole. I use soap when I am done, disinfectant bleach soap, and it stings every part of me. I howl, but, I tell myself, this is better than the alternative. Oh my god is it better than the alternative.

  “So what is it?” Paul asks when I’m dried off. My whole body hurts. This is healing. I’m at risk from so many things: infections, disease. I’m wrapped in a towel that has the name of a fancy hotel from when London was still London stamped onto it, only the threads have started pulling, so now it’s the Do-c-es-er –otel, which just isn’t the same. Paul’s taken the golden disc from me, and he’s flipping it in his hands. He turns it, over and over. I’ve seen this before; I remember it. It’s at least slightly familiar, this action. He whistles. “This is probably worth something. Must be worth something, I reckon.” He throws it into the air and it spins, and he catches it. “Is it actually gold?” He puts it between his teeth and pushes down. I don’t know what he thinks that will prove: his bite on the thing.