The Ghosts of Heaven

by Marcus Sedgwick

  He lifts his head, and sees that oxygen levels are being restored from the surpluses in Base Five and Three.

  Everything is quiet, and Bowman knows that he has arrived at the source of the radio wave.

  There is no real need to see in space. The ship is not designed with much in the way of viewing platforms and the few limited portholes on the decks account for most of the facility to look outside—the sentinels know where they are because the ship shows them on screen, but when Bowman looks at one particular screen and sees that the Song of Destiny believes it is in orbit around a planet, he needs to see for himself.

  There are cameras on the outside of the ship. They are used in the extremely unlikely event of an EVA, to provide a visual check on the astronaut making the journey outside the Song.

  Bowman turns on the cameras, and moves them until he sees that the computer is not lying to him. They are in orbit around a planet, something he cannot make himself believe, and then, twinkling like a small star in front of him, he sees something else.

  There is another ship.

  Just ahead, following the same orbit, there is another ship.

  It is a Toroid Class IV.

  Bowman cries out, an incoherent cry, as he zooms in on it.

  The lie was a lie!

  There are other ships, after all. The Song is not alone.

  He fiddles with the camera zoom, but it’s dark; the ship ahead is caught in the dark side of the planet’s orbit, but Bowman can see that dawn is about to break. Both he and the other ship are about to move into the light of whatever star this planet revolves around.

  The ship ahead reaches the light.

  Bowman can read its name now, painted in vast letters around the outside of the spinning ring: The Song of Destiny.

  610

  Bowman remembers, from his training that now seems to be as faint as to be almost nothingness, that exposure to astral radiation has been known to cause hallucinations. He also remembers that the hallucinations in question are small things—random flashes of “light” seen by the brain and known as phosphenes that take the form of lines, dashes and, now he thinks about it some more, spirals. But not entire spaceships. What he sees before him now, he knows, is not a hallucination.

  * * *

  Just outside the airlock, Bowman prepares his EVA suit carefully.

  The ship, the other Song, appears to be lifeless. He has tried to contact it, without success. He has tried to get his ship to network with this other version of itself, but it cannot. He has performed a lifescan of the ship, but it is too far away to yield any information. The only sign of life is that this second Song is the source of the phi radio wave. Apart from that, as far as he can tell, it is a ghost ship.

  He has to know.

  This is why he has come.

  He prepares his EVA suit carefully, pulling on the pieces one by one, like a knight putting on his armor.

  At each step, he checks and double-checks the integrity of the suit, until finally he is ready, fully dressed in the large and cumbersome unit, apart from the helmet which hangs ready for him to step up underneath, and seal.

  He hesitates, and then, seeing a Lethno probe attached to the wall, slides it inside his suit. Just in case.

  Before he puts his helmet on, he checks the keypad on the sleeve is responding to the ship’s network; that he has full control of the Song from within the EVA suit, then he steps underneath the helmet, fixes it, and starts the breathing supply. Satisfied, he begins the sequence to open the inner door of the airlock, using only the controls on his keypad to do so; he wants to make sure they work.

  The inner door opens, and he steps inside. He types a command on his sleeve; the door closes behind him.

  Fixing a remote tether to the waist of his suit, he turns to the outer door, types another command, and the feeble bubble of atmosphere that was with him in the airlock is sucked away into the void.

  He test fires his motors, just a gentle puff, but enough to send him out of the door. So close up, the Song seems enormous, and he focuses on that, rather than the infinity around him. He makes some corrections to his trajectory and, with little puffs, squirts his way over to the other Song.

  He wonders at it, but there is no need for wonder. It is here, and he has come here to find it.

  The other Song is close to four kilometers ahead of him, in exactly the same orbit. It’s easy enough to pay out on the micro-fine tether attached to his waist, which can extend to seven if need be, as fine and strong in relative terms as spider’s silk.

  He approaches the ship.

  Still it seems lifeless, but then, glancing at the readout on his sleeve, he sees that his suit has already automatically networked with this ghost Song.

  There is an airlock. It looks like Base Two. He heads toward it, and types a command to open the outer door. For one moment, it seems as if nothing is happening, but then the door opens, and Bowman neatly glides inside. He closes the outer door, opens the inner one, and steps into the preparation room, identical to the one he has just left, glad to feel the return of gravity under his boots, artificial though it is.

  It is impossible to walk more than a few steps in the EVA suit. He begins the painfully slow process of removing it, one eye on the door to the rest of Base Two as he does so.

  It’s done.

  He opens the door, concealing the probe in his hand, and begins to explore.

  The ship is quiet, the lights are dim, but there are functional levels of oxygen in the atmosphere, which almost certainly means that someone is awake.

  He makes his way along Deck Two, past the row of pods curving up, away, in front of him, out of sight.

  Terminal Base Three is deserted, but he knows where he is going, and he begins to hurry through Deck Three, passing his own pod, toward Base Four. The lid of his pod is open, and so, when he walks into Terminal Base Four, he knows who will be there.

  “Yes,” says his other, ghost self.

  Bowman stares. It is unnerving, unnatural to see yourself. Even to see yourself on camera is not a natural thing, a thing no normal person is comfortable with; for it shows us as others see us, not as who we believe we really are. But to come face to face with his own self is almost more than Bowman can bear. He hesitates, then forces himself to take a step closer to his ghost, who swivels his chair round to face him.

  “You dropped your book,” says his ghost, holding out the book of poetry with which Bowman slept for eleven years.

  Bowman doesn’t reach out for it.

  “Or is it my book?” the ghost says, pulling it back toward himself.

  Bowman doesn’t care about the poetry.

  “You brought me here?”

  “It was easy enough to rig the distress system,” says his ghost. “You know that. To broadcast a signal. Funny, isn’t it, how they actually put a functional distress system on a ship when there was never going to be anyone to broadcast to? All part of maintaining the deception, I suppose.”

  Bowman knows all this.

  Somehow, he knows all of this, it’s like miming along to a tape of yourself that you’ve heard a hundred times.

  Bowman looks around the Terminal. He sees several things.

  He can see the schematic of the pods. All he can see is red lights. Not one single green light. They are all dead.

  He sees a video looping of him watching himself climb into his pod the last time.

  And he sees his ghost’s EVA helmet, sitting on the floor near his feet. There is something wrong with the helmet. Scratched into the supposedly unbreakable glass face, is a large and bold but madly executed spiral.

  His ghost throws the book of poetry at him and it lands by his feet.

  “Why don’t you read it? You might understand.”

  “Understand?” asks Bowman.

  “What the spiral means.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I, or rather we, are here, to complete another turn in the sequence.”

 
Bowman shakes his head.

  The ghost him stands.

  “I need you. Or rather, I need your ship. For mine, as you have seen, is dead.”

  “You killed them?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But I saw you. On the video. You were on my ship…”

  “Are you sure? Wasn’t that you?”

  Bowman fights to think clearly, but his ghost is speaking again already.

  “You’re right. I was on your ship.”

  “But how? There weren’t two of us then. How can you have been on my ship? There can’t have been another you, until we came through that…”

  “That what?”

  “That,” says Bowman, waving a hand behind him, the only thing he can do to indicate the gate through which he has come, the ripped gut of space, through which they have both come.

  “And having been through there, are you still so sure you want to hang on to ideas about time? And about the order of events? About what comes first and what comes second, about the meaning of how one thing causes another to happen? Did you hit your head on the maintenance drawer, and that made you see me? Or did you see me, which made you hit your head on the maintenance drawer?”

  Bowman understands that much, at least—that these are things that cannot be understood.

  “So you killed people on my ship? My Song?”

  “I did,” his ghost says, “but don’t think too badly of me. I wanted their air, because the Ship’s chlorophyll banks were damaged and, perhaps more important, I wanted to draw your attention to the number phi. They would have died in the end anyway. Look at my ship. Every one of them dead.”

  “But the damage to the oxygen happened only because we came here…”

  “Are you sure you don’t mean that the other way round?” says his ghost.

  Bowman cannot think. He shakes his head in frustration.

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How did they die?”

  “The cargo? They died because they stopped living. No one has ever tried this before, to have people sleep for so long. No one knew what effect it would have on the mind, and the body is nothing without the mind, is it? As a great thinker once said: ‘man cannot bear a meaningless life,’ and what is more meaningless than floating through space to an ultimately futile goal? Of course, they didn’t know it was futile, but the effect of all those years of sleep must have felt the same. Some lived longer than others. I have an idea that those who dreamed the most vividly were the ones who held out the longest.”

  Bowman knows he is talking about him. Both versions of him.

  “So why do you need me?”

  “I said: I need your ship.”

  “Why?”

  “Because eleven years is a long time to think, and I have changed my mind.”

  “You were awake?” cries Bowman, disbelieving. “Through all that time? Through that place?”

  Bowman looks at the scratched face of the EVA helmet, and wonders how much of the eleven years was spent making tiny marks in it that slowly built into the spiral.

  “As I said, I have changed my mind. When I learned that the mission was a lie, I decided to try the other option, just as you have done.”

  “But that option was the radio wave. You made the radio wave. That can’t have been there before.”

  “It was there. It was made by the version of me that came before us. Who would have followed a radio wave left by the version who came before him.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “I told you. You can no longer hold to ideas about the order of things. It appears that we have been here, forever, you and I, or two versions of ourselves, repeating this little conversation, forever. Just as the spiral goes on forever. It has no beginning and no end.”

  “So? What now?”

  “As I said, I have changed my mind. Eleven years is a long time. I thought the mission was pointless, a terrible lie, but it is my destiny, just as it is will become your destiny, to try and fulfill that lie. I need a ship to head to New Earth, and it needs living pods to give me a reason to do it. We may even make it there if our dreams are strong.”

  Bowman’s hands are trembling. He needs to sit down. He feels weak and he cannot think straight.

  “You will never find it,” his ghost says.

  “What?”

  “What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.”

  Bowman sinks to the ground, his head hangs. In his mind is wet grass, and his father’s face, smiling down at him. The apple tree above him.

  His hands loosen, and the Lethno slips from his fingers, onto the floor.

  “That was the other thing I wanted from you,” his ghost says, and stepping forward, picks up the probe from the floor.

  Bowman reacts, too slowly, and as he tries to rise, his ghost self sticks the probe into his chest, and pulls the switch.

  Bowman flies back across the room, flung to the floor. He does not move.

  “Are you still so sure about the order of things?” his ghost self says, and then vanishes.

  987

  When Bowman wakes, his ribs feel as though he’s been hit by a god’s fist but at least, he realizes, he is alive.

  His ghost has gone, and he knows that for sure when he brings up a scan of the space outside the ship, because his Song, the one still with over four hundred living occupants, is gone, too.

  Bowman knows where he has gone. He has decided to reclaim the mission to New Earth anyway, despite the near certainty that it will fail.

  Is it true? he wonders. Has this been happening forever? A ghost version of himself luring him to this rendezvous, to steal his living ship, leaving him behind on that floating mortuary he had always feared.

  There can be no other answer, he thinks. It has to be true, or I wouldn’t be here.

  * * *

  For the rest of the day, he explores the dead Song.

  His ghost has done well to sabotage it. All the EVA suits have great slashes in them—beyond immediate repair. One of them has only a small puncture, which he might be able to mend with some materials from the PTP. The ghost returned to the living Song in the suit that Bowman came over in, leaving behind his spiral-scratched helmet.

  So what does he do now?

  He sees two options; the first is to go mad, and through his dreams, enter his own mind on the next version of the Song, perverting his thoughts with spirals and codes, and have him start murdering the occupants in the phi pattern of six, one, eight. Set up a distress code, and lure himself here to repeat the process all over again.

  That is the first option, but Bowman, this Bowman, did not try and make the eleven-year journey awake. He slept, and while he might not be the sanest occupant on board the ship, he is still far from crazy.

  Let the other infinite versions of Bowman sail on to their destiny at New Earth. He himself sees a second option. He himself has another intention.

  * * *

  There is a planet below him, around which the dead Song is orbiting. He will perform a scan on it to be sure, but somehow he already knows the results, as if he’s run the scan a hundred times before.

  It is a habitable planet. A little smaller than Earth maybe, but it looks promising, it looks very promising indeed. Why didn’t his ghost just end the mission here? Is there something he knew about the planet that Bowman doesn’t? Or was it just madness that pushed him away? Bowman brushes these thoughts aside, and gets to work.

  * * *

  While he makes a repair on the EVA suit, and gathers food from the other PTPs, and makes other preparations for the descent to the surface of the
planet, he also spends idle minutes reading the book of poetry that his ghost threw at him.

  Now that he reads it again, he finds that he knows it very well indeed, as if he’s read it a thousand times, almost as if he wrote the poetry in the first place, and as he reads, those spiral forms in his mind finally raise themselves into his consciousness, and Bowman starts to learn.

  As he reads the ancient poetry, he finds that he comes to a very different conclusion about the spiral than the miserable, pessimistic interpretation his ghost found.

  The spiral, he decides, is the ultimate symbol of life. It is infinite. It copies itself and builds on itself, forever, like life. And life has patterns that repeat themselves, but they are never quite the same, for time, if nothing else, has moved on. On that point at least, he agrees with his ghost, but he finds it a positive thing, not a negative one, because it liberates him. It makes him free. No longer will he have to live trying to get back to something that has gone. No more chasing the past. Yes, his father is dead, but Bowman remembers him. Even if all he ever has is that one memory underneath the apple tree, he remembers him.

  With that thought, he knows he was wrong to float free, to run away from people all this time. Rather than running from his fear of his inability to recreate the past, he should have been building a new future, finding someone to love, and be loved in return by them.

  Now that Bowman knows he is unable to go back, he is free to move forward, ever higher on the spiral stair. There is always only the future, and though unknown, the spiral leads us all, ever higher and higher, toward the divine.

  Toward the beautiful unknown.

  * * *

  As the PTP leaves the dead Song behind, and begins its descent to the surface of the planet, Bowman reads aloud from the book.

  And what did you expect?

  Satisfaction, understanding?

  Salvation before the ending of the days?

  Yet, just around the turn of the stair,

  a glimmer of torchlight awaits your discovery.

  I renounce belief.

  I renounce belief in going home.