by Adam Roberts
The sunlight winks out behind the pregnant-belly line of the horizon. Slater looks down again at the scintillated darkness of the globe. There is nothing he can do.
The sensation in his hand dies again. He feels the cool on his face, although his suit preserves the temperature differential.
He looks forward, to where the knife-like edge of the atmosphere gleams a vast thin arc of blue-tinted rainbow as he hurtles towards the sunlight again. And then he is out in the light again, and the sky over the western Pacific is filled with little dappling clouds like a school of white-silver fish.
It occurs to Slater that he ought to prepare himself for death, but he has quite literally no idea how to go about such a task. He is not a religious man. He believes in no god, no soul, no afterlife; and yet the thought that the long, uninterrupted stem stretching from his childhood to now could be snapped off abruptly is very difficult for him to hold in his head. It is not an impossible thing to conceive; he can, by concentrating, fix it in his mind, this notion I am going to die, but it slides out of thought without even indicating its departure, and he finds himself in the middle of a train of unconnected thought. The mind is unreceptive to the idea. It is like holding a bar magnet north-down over the north pole of a stronger magnet: with focus and a strong wrist it can be done, but if the attention wanders it slides frictionlessly away.
He thinks of the last conversation he had with his wife. He wishes he had some way to contact her. If she were up here she’d at least be able to pray, or something.
At least I’ll die a colonel. This thought makes him laugh, briefly.
He imagines that his wife has secretly been deceiving him, has had her pharmakos reversed and is again flopping in the intensities of bipolar religious faith under the lubricious ministrations of her preacher-man. Perhaps she will pray to God for him, which would at least relieve him of the burden of doing so. His habits of strategic thinking have rendered him incompetent at singlemindedness. It has for too long now been his job to consider all angles on a question, to forestall objections, to plan for immediate victory over the Uplanders to considerable resistance by the Uplanders. Which means that, in extremis, his brain nags with his counterfactuals, wat if there is a god, wat if you go to hell for your atheism?
Wat if he dies, but his soul remains trapped inside this suit, circling forever cold around and round the world, endlessly frozen?
Wat if time slows for consciousness as death approaches, such that, hurtling through the atmosphere and burning, seconds stretch to minutes, to hours, to decades of fiery agony, the sequence unspooling like x→x2?
Wat if he lives? But obviously - not.
Wat if death is not a blankness, or an altered consciousness, but no consciousness at all; neither thing nor nothing, an actual point beyond which it is meaningless to talk of Slater? This he has always believed to be true, if anybody had asked, but now that he comes to think of it he cannot find it in his mind. Trying to speak about the impossibility of language, or a fish trying to conceive of a medium other than the water in which it swims. Or, no, that is not right, for there are media other than water, even for a fish’s mind (gasping and flipping epileptically on the quay under the pitiless sun), where there is no medium in which his mind can exist except life. But the bar-magnet slides effortlessly away, and he finds himself thinking about wat time it is in Florida right now, whether the kids are at school right now, wondering wat Marina is doing and thinking.
It is night again, below him, in Russia. He is definitely speeding up.
He fumbles with the controls in the right glove, unwilling simply to plunge into fire. He needs more time to think through the implications of wat dying means. He’s been a professional soldier for more than ten years and he has always assumed that he was ready to die, if his job demanded it, though naturally he would prefer to live given the choice. But now that he is facing the actuality, he discovers a deep-seated revulsion in his heart to the notion. Perhaps, he told himself, he could manipulate the suit to bounce him higher into orbit, slow him down, head himself for a slow cooling. It dawns on him that the cold and dwindling air might just put him to sleep, where plummeting into the atmosphere would plunge his acute consciousness into agony.
But as soon as he has had this thought his spirit revolts against it. It is, he recognises, cowardice. He’s going to die either way, so he can at least ensure that he does not die a coward! Dive in, dive in. That’s the way to do it.
The suit can generate only a small EleMag field. He pushes the finger buttons in various combinations, experiences a series of lurches and physical shuffles, an anapaestic trill of tremors, a sensation, very slight, of deceleration in his stomach.
He has studied the discipline. He passed the army exam on EleMag physics, in the top fifteen per cent as it happens. As he comes into the sunlight again he knows that on this side, under the pressure of solar wind, the lines of force emanating from the world’s pole and sweeping down to the world’s opposite pole are squashed together, giving more resistance to the action of an Elemag action. He knows, similarly, that on the nightside the lines are tugged bakwards into an invisible wake, which gives that medium a different feel. This close to the Earth the difference is not as pronounced as it is further out, but it is different enough to be palpable.
He sweeps into the sunlight again, and tries the finger buttons. The reaction is a little more pronounced. He feels the tug in his stomach, and unexpectedly, flips about in a pirouette. He pushes the buttons again and flips round about.
He thinks. Electromagnetohydrodynamics. He knows it is a relatively weak interaction, but he also knows that it doesn’t need to be very strong to have usable effects. In a plane, with powerful motor generating the sculpted force, it can haul considerable mass up through the air and through vacuum. A single-person suit could never achieve such effects, lifting a body up into space; but perhaps it could - he think of it like this - act as a small paddle thrust into the flowing water. It might break his motion a little, it could slow him.
He wishes he knew how much juice there was in his suit battery. Nobody had expected him actually to go out into vacuum wearing this suit; it had been a mere matter of regulations to dress him in it. Would the ground staff have properly cheked all general-use suits, making sure the battery was charged fully before each signing-out? He thinks, on balance of probability, not.
But then again, he thinks: wat else is there to do?
He pictures again, as he flies towards the terminator line again, the world-tree itself: a vast willow, with a central trunk that pours branches out in all directions to bend and flow downwards. Willow leaves, with their silvery undersides, like colored parchment schematic cutouts of minnows pouring from some spout and seeking the cold waters again. There is a huge willow by a pond at Macquarie’s, a leisure outlet not far from his Florida home, where he sometimes takes the kids, and he thinks of it now; he can almost see this tree swaying uncertainly in the breeze, looking more rooted to the pondwater with its many drinking-straw tentacle branches than to the ground.
He is passing at ninety degrees through the slap and thrum of all these branches now.
He squeezes the finger buttons again. The deceleration is slight, but palpable.
If he had some plan — or some way of mathematically modelling wat he was doing. But there’s nothing.
By trial and error he finds the optimum pattern of pressure to call that gut-sensation, that slight stress in his stomach that indicates slowing down. Press, press, press, and he slows. His heart is shaking at his ribs. It occurs to him that he should try and control his breathing, that he doesn’t know how much air there is in the suit, but he can’t prevent these vast gulping suks of air.
Suddenly he is very excited indeed. Maybe there is a way —
But this is a much less tolerable position in which to be. He is more scared of his sudden access of hope than he was of dying. Of course he is still dying.
Tug, and he slows. Tug, and he slows. The
Earth is in darkness beneath his feet, like a footstool, and he is flying towards the dawn line again, he can see the great curve of dawn lying over the world.
He has a vision of himself standing, motionless (as if there were such a thing as motionlessness!) miles above the Earth. To orbit is to fall towards the Earth and endlessly to miss the horizon. Then, that tug in his gut, slowing some more, he becomes aware of confusion in his thinking. Geosynchronous satellites are standing still, are they not? Yet they’re clearly not, they’re hurtling at tens of thousands of kilometres an hour. How can something be standing still, as if at the top of a giant pole, and yet hurtling faster than a missile? It baffles his brain.
It occurs to him that his air might be running out already - so soon - and that he is experiencing the early stages of hypoxia. He knows all this stuff; he studied it. He’s lived and worked in the Uplands for many years. How can it be a problem?
It’s not a problem. It’s relative. It’s the central stem of modern physics, from which all the branches emerge, this understanding that everything is relative to everything else. That’s the answer. Although, thinking about it some more, he’s not sure how that answers his problem.
The world has swollen. Directly beneath his feet is a dappled expanse of closeweave cloud, like an oblong carpet stretching over Europe and Atlantic. Occasional irregular circular gaps in the coverage resemble primroses. Slater tweaks the controls, pulsing that tug in his gut, and considers this display. Its beauty seems very acute, very vivid, to him: he is surprised that he has noticed so little beauty in his environment over this last year. His mind has been on other things. The optical impression is such that the cloud cover can be read as blue flowers against a white ground, or else as a white fleece dotted with flower-shaped gaps that display the blue beneath, which (of course) is wat it is. But, to his delight, he sees that he can flip from one way of looking at it to another: the duk becomes a rabbit and switches bak as easily as mentally counting. Blue-on-white, white-on-blue, and soon he has passed over the clouds and is heading towards the line of darkness over Russia again. He tries to remember the Russian he learnt at school, but only a few words remain. Chort!
Squeeze, slow, squeeze wobbly-slow, squeeze —
Chort is Russian for devil, he remembers that from somewhere, one of his various language classes. The recollection sets in motion a non-specifically metaphysical series of thoughts. It has never occurred to him before, but does so now, that perhaps life itself needs a ground against which to be perceived at all, in the way that the line of a drawing only is a line because of the blank white paper against which it is formed. Has his own life, unbeknown to him, existed only as a series of marks placed on a revealing medium, some substratum or plenum upon which all life is, somehow, inscribed? It’s a mystical thought, and makes him heady, unless that’s the hypoxia. And anyway (he thinks) it can’t be right. We see a drawing of a tree on paper in the same way that we see the lines of a winter tree against the sunset sky, blak bands and strands piked out by the red-gold glory behind: but the tree exists when seen from any angle, against any sky, or even in the blakest night. The tree just is, whether we see it or not.
Spurts of deceleration. He seems to have been over the nightside longer than before. Perhaps these little spurs of invisible energy are indeed snagging against the transparent branches, slowing him, slowing him.
The arc of haze of the world seen face on is a little fatter, blue tingeing into almost invisible long threads of rainbow intensity on its outer side. The arc itself is straighter.
His fingers are starting to cramp. He gives an overlong squeeze, and for some reason, some invisible kink in the lines of force through which he is spurling, he tumbles forward, spinning over and over. More squeezes, and he rights himself. There are startles in his eye, retinal flashes as if his tumble involved him hitting his head, which of course it didn’t. He cheks again, and the flashes are from below. He is over a night-time stormcloud that is shorting its jags of lightning into the Siberian ground below this shroud, and also, equal-and-opposite, puffing short-lived blotches of bright electric light into the upper atmosphere.
He tries to think slow, slow, as if perhaps the patterns of electrical impulses in his brain might even interact with the branches of the world-tree and slow him down further. He is rather taken by this thought, and then doubly pleased that the thought about his thoughts can only add to the drag he is creating. Think more complex thoughts! The sheer craziness of all this makes him laugh aloud. He’s going crazy, with the isolation, and his craziness is manifesting itself as a huge enthusiasm for the approaching death. Bring on the fire! Into the fire!
Will to stand still. Squeeze, squeeze, a series of irregular shakes and heaves in his gut, as the dawn line below him seems to be creeping more slowly, more slowly.
The world has crept up on him. The horizon line is perfectly level now, or near as damniny. It lies like a weighty bar separating the tiklishly bright and diverse world below from the enormous obscurity above. It gives the cosmos a craked, bipolar look, two sides of the same thing separated by a rainbow chasm and on their own terms indistinguishable, as if (blue-on-white, white-on-blue) the world is an immense globe of flawless blak oil above him, and the heavens are a quilted confusion of blue and tan, grey-green, white, yellow and shine, below.
He has no audience for his journey, even though he is flying angel-like over the heads of the busy people below. He thinks: for whom am I laughing? Who is watching me? Nobody of course. The eye is a tiny central circle of blak vacancy moated about with the beautiful bicycle-spoke colours of the iris, radial barcode lines of blue or brown like craks in glaze, and round that the fat glistening white of the eye that bespeaks the fat glistening globe of the eyeball itself. But the Eye of the Cosmos, if you’ll, if you’ll indulge me in, the Eye of the Universe is all blak vacancy and nothing more, nothing at all.
The line of darkness that indicates where the dusk is seeping through the city streets below him, where the fields and forests are darkening before the night, that line is approaching noticeably more slowly than before; he can actually see the extent to which he has slowed (squeeze, slow, squeeze, slow). He is also close enough, now, to see that it does not constitute a sharp line, like a diecast plastic shield being slid over the curved surface, but is instead a frayed blur from light through purple-grey and purple-blak to darkness. To one side he sees the bright-lit hills of the central EU, the white thorn-shapes of mountains glinting white-pink in the sunset, the little irregular patches of urban sprawl amongst the hills or between myriad tiny rectangular agricultural fields, looking like the scabs grown over grazed skin. Moving his gaze minutes, an inch east, over this living map, he sees the negative: light cities on a blak ground instead of the reverse - bright clusters of lit-glass dust clumped together against a dense volume of darkness. Yet even in the darkness Slater can see gradations, a dusky variety, bruise-coloured, grape-coloured, redwine- and coal-coloured, crowblak and holeblak.
His heart is still doing its desperate, rapid, pump-thrust. It is working so strenuously, Slater wonders whether it isn’t thrashing his blood to foam and bubbles in his vessels. Squeeze with the fingers, slow, slow.
He moves slowly over the line from day to night. He moves slowly.
Longer pressure on the finger-button produces relatively stable deceleration. He is slowing. The wasteland of darkness below him moks the night sky with its dribbles and scrabbles of random light, spatters of luminous fluid here and there gathered into mini-pools at the location of cities. It’s not a patch on the real constellations. It laks the amplitude and the random harmony.
Even though he is round the bak of the world, away from the boiling sun, he is aware of warmth in the soles of his feet. A spark, lazy as a spectral bumblebee, drifts out from his toe and floats up past him.
This, he tells himself, is the beginning of the burning. He has nothing to lose now, except the life in his bloodstream and lungs, the skittery constellations of electrical
linkages and decouplings in his brain that simulates thought - nothing at all that isn’t already lost. Two more sparks, five more, flitter from the soles of the suit. Heat, convecting through his exposed dead blak hand, creates a wan, unsettling sensation of heat in the bones of his left forearm.
He squeezes all the fingerbuttons. He flips over, feels a surprisingly powerful kik in his stomach. He no longer cares about his orientation, it is all over anyway, so he simply pushes as much resistance to the electromagnetic medium as he can. He yearns to stop dead, like a baseball at the zenith of its trajectory, simply to hang there suspended on nothing except the infinitesimal stretch of a moment. It’s impossible, of course.