by Adam Roberts
Hieronimo ran inside calling for his father. ‘A gentleman is here, father,’ he called out, ‘and he says he has met mother.’ Had he said, a soldier is here, father, and is asking for you, then perhaps his father would not have come - might, say, have slipped out the back and gone down to the lake, or run to his brother-in-law’s farm, four leagues away. But instead Hieronimo said, ‘A gentleman is here, father, and he says he has met mother.’
‘What’s that?’ father boomed, and came striding from the back of the house, and through the workshop and out into the yard. He stopped dead. The soldier, still on horseback, was aiming a pistol at his chest. It took Hieronimo long seconds to understand what was happening.
His father stood with his arms at his side, and drew in a long breath, and breathed it out again. When he spoke it was in a deep, clear voice. He said, ‘I’ll be more use to you alive, as a wheelwright. The army always needs wheels.’
‘It needs discipline even more than it needs wheels,’ said the soldier.
Hieronimo took a step forward, filled with the need to say something, to try and defuse, or more simply to understand this sudden and terrible situation. But he did not know what to say. His left foot went forward and touched the dirt. At the very moment Hieronimo’s foot touched the ground the soldier’s pistol discharged. It made a noise like a very great thing being suddenly broken, and it conjured from its end a white cloud right there, in the air, down near the ground, a cloud that immediately began moving, as clouds in the high-sky do, drifting away. The noise was so loud it made all the portions and members of Hieronimo’s body jerk in unison. He leapt a little way in the air. His father stumbled backwards and fell on his back on the ground. He lay. Father lay motionless, and there was a dint in the middle of his chest, such as a heavy iron hammer might make on soft, new wood; and straight away the dint filled with blood, and the blood poured out of the wound and pooled the ground, and the pool grew.
The noise had chucked a great many squawking birds into the sky.
The horseman had sheathed his pistol, and was saying something, but Hieronimo’s ears were not working. Likely they had been deadened by the sudden noise. The man touched his bonnet, and nodded, and spoke some more, and this time Hieronimo heard, ‘in a day or two, lad, which’ll be time enough to see you again.’ And he turned his horse and rode away.
The sound of the gunshot, of course, brought people from all the houses around. Some were silent, and some whispered or muttered. A woman stuffed her apron into her mouth. Hieronimo was bustled up in a storm of neighbourly activity. People clutched him to them, and cried, or crossed themselves. Quite a large crowd assembled in the road. His father’s body was wrapped and carried to the churchyard, and the soil of the yard where he had bled was dug and taken away in a cart to be dumped in the lake. Hieronimo was himself taken to Elsa’s house, and Elsa made much of him. Her husband, a sharp-nosed, bald-headed cobbler and glover, was there too, but didn’t say anything. Elsa said, ‘Hieronimo, you may stay with us for some days, if you choose, at least until your father is properly buried.’ And Elsa’s husband said, ‘He’s not a child, Elsa, and you oughtn’t to coddle him as one.’ But then he added, ‘I’m sorry though. Your father was a good man.’
‘He’s with your mother now, at any rate,’ said Elsa.
Jacob Fisherman came in and gave Hieronimo a fish, wrapped in leaves and tied with string. ‘I’ve cooked it,’ he said. ‘You can eat it when you like.’
Hieronimo nodded, and clutched the parcel to his stomach, but didn’t say anything.
By now it was late afternoon, and the whole town was alive with chatter about what had happened. The beadle didn’t come, though, and people said he had more sense than to poke his nose into military affairs. Elsa’s husband excused himself, but he had shoes to make that would not make themselves. Elsa herself went over to Marta’s to talk about what happened. Hieronimo sat in their house with the fish on his lap. Some of its juice had come out and dirtied his breeches, but he did not think of that. Instead he got up and walked up the street to the house. It was, as several people had told him during the course of the afternoon, his own house now. He walked across the yard. The digging up of the padded-down mud had thrown up worms, and the goats were rummaging in the dirt for them, feeding on the spot where his father had died.
A clamour of wings above his head, like a spun lathe, and three pigeons flustered through the air to land on the roof.
He went inside and put the fish in the larder. Then he took down his father’s cloak - a little too large for him, but not too bad a fit - and his father’s walking stick. He paused only long enough to fill a leather bottle with water from the well, and to tuck some bread in his pouch, and then he set out.
By the time he had climbed the hill the sun was setting, and the whole town - the whole of the land — was steeped in the colour of blood. The horizon hardly stirred, although you might think it would shiver with fear at the approach of something as blinding and roasting as the sun. Its stillness was admirable. There was clover in amongst the grass at Hieronimo’s feet. There were sheep on the hill, which hurried away in a mass as Hieronimo passed. He made his way to the single tall tree. The sky was scarlet and purple near the sun, and directly above him it was russet-yellow like a deer’s back, and away towards the east it was blue-black. The brightest stars were just becoming visible, and the moon was very clear, an arc of moon, like the curve of white at the bed of Hieronimo’s thumb. The moon was his father, whose beard would grow larger and larger, black as the night sky, until, after a month, he might shave it all off with his own razor, revealing the large-chinned, pockmarked white of his face underneath it. The sun was his mother, whose face could not be seen, because to look at it was to dazzle the eyes. He was - was. He was still alive.
He sat himself down, wrapping the cloak more tightly around him. This was a spot where coneflower grew. The sheep would eat most things, including thistles, but not these. He pulled up a stem of it and plucked the petals one by one and crunched them in his mouth. They tasted sour, like slate, or like rotten water, but he chewed anyway. He thought about his father. He tried to remember him smiling, or laughing, or happy, but could not. He chewed another petal. He could remember his father’s beard, but nothing of his face.
He chewed another petal.
The stars were coming out now, clustering together, pricking out like tears. Hieronimo was not crying. He considered this. He ought to weep. He thought of the word, orphan, and then he said the word aloud, and said it again, but it didn’t move him. It was, perhaps, that he knew his father to be a stubborn man, far too stubborn to die so quickly. Dying for him would be a drawn-out process, many days in the frame being bent out of life, and him struggling all the time. Consequently his father was not dead. It might, Hieronimo conceded, be that he was in the process of dying, for had he not said as much? But that was surely different to being dead. And again it was a matter of appearances and reality. If his father appeared dead, it might be that he, Hieronimo, was not attending carefully enough to the reality. He had been beaten, many times, for not divining the truth behind the appearance of things. He had often been called fool, and, he thought, rightly enough.
The stars were very large, now, and were all about him. There was a glory about the face of the setting sun, seven spires of flame, and a kindly face looking out of it. And the stars were buzzing at his ears and eyes, like bees, honeyed bees; six-pointed, not seven, but that was because they were younger than the sun and not as beautifully adorned. Hieronimo spat half-chewed fragments of petal onto the grass. The inside of his mouth was powerfully sour, and he fumbled for his leather bottle to wash the bitterness away, but he could not seem to lay his hand upon it. The air on the hill was thickening, and folding about him, as a cloak might. There was a roaring, very loud, very near-by, and Hieronimo decided to stand up to go look for it. But he could not rouse his legs. He tried again and he seemed to strike solidity, for he fell like a drunkard. T
here was a curvature in the very fabric of things. Hieronimo found himself on all fours. He tried to crawl forward, but something was preventing him. He tried again, reaching out with his right hand and then, suddenly—
The sun had a face. The world was at his back. He was through the sky. He was reaching out toward—
~ * ~
The world is simple. Behind the world is not simple.
~ * ~
2. Jerie
The Kyd drive had rendered interstellar travel a possibility at last, and humanity had, by following the complex wave-form and sinusoidal unlogic of its energy-distance equation, settled many new worlds, orbiting far-distant stars. Settlement happened in banded zones, shelled like nesting spheres around the central point of the original homeworld, which still acted as a hub for travel. This was because whilst it was relatively easy, relatively cheap, to reach stars forty-two and eighty-four light years distant, it was forbiddingly expensive and difficult to reach stars at twenty or sixty, save by complex triangulation of three (or more) forty-light-year journeys in tangential directions - and who could be bothered with that? It was necessary, for almost everybody, to remain within a simple jump of Earth, our home and holy site. And besides, there were immense numbers of habitable worlds within the settlement zones. Only hermits and eccentrics and people who wished to live undisturbed fled to stars in the intervening zones.
Humanity spread itself to ten thousand worlds and lived unexceptional, ordinary lives. But storytellers are naturally drawn to the occasional non-standard individual. The woman convinced that immortality, or God, was hidden on a world orbiting a star in the Kyd-blank zones; the man driven to explore inhospitable places because of their very inhospitality.
Jerie was one such. I knew him as a trader, a man who accumulated money with a ferocity unusual even amongst the neo-humani. But he wanted money for one reason only: to buy a craft large enough to store fuel enough to travel further than anybody had gone before. ‘We know what the equations say happens as the distances approach infinity with the Kyd-drive effect,’ he would say. ‘But equations are not the same thing as reality.’ It was impossible to dissuade him from this stupidity, to say to him beware. He built a ship, and stocked it with fuel, and he set on his way. There was enough interest in his crazy scheme, and he did a poor enough job of security-checking his craft (for his attention was focused so intently upon the goal, the prize, the destination) that when news portals seeded the cabin with media-dust he did not purge it. Accordingly we all had access to a multiple nanofeed coverage of his voyage, or of the early stages of it at any rate. I, who knew him personally, was almost embarrassed by how unaware he seemed to be of the spies in his cabin; although afterwards it became clear that he knew about them very well, and tolerated them because he wanted a record of his departure.
And so away he went, with jumps of forty, of eighty, of one hundred and sixty, three hundred and twenty, six hundred and forty, just as the earliest probes had done. But Jerie had been talking to people who claimed to have found ingenious mechanical solutions to the forces that had broken those probes to shivers, and he had spent an enormous amount of money on their quack-tech. The intensity of his dream had made him gullible. But what could we do? He was an adult humanus, and free to kill himself if he chose. At 10,240 light years away the media-dust began to thin, for the repeated jumps needful to draw them back to a point from where their data could be uploaded were becoming too much. By 20,480 light years away the coverage was so patchy as to lose dimensionality and colour. Here it was that Jerie revealed he had known about the media-dust all along, for he turned to the empty cabin and announced: ‘People dream of travelling to the stars, but I want to go further than that; I want to see what is behind the stars!’ Merest idiocy, of course. Impossible and suicidal. Only one media-particle was retrieved after 81,920 light years, and it showed - in a blur that rivalled the earliest photographic plate of sunlight upon a nineteenth-century church tower for inexactness - Jerie gazing through the forward portal, his right hand out touching the glass. It is likely that he survived to 163,840 light years, and possible that he survived to 327,680; but the jump to 655,360 would have ground him and his craft into atomic and subatomic fragments. Poor fool.
The sums are easily done, but sums do not capture the craziness of what he was about. In this sense at least he was correct, for mathematics, where it is easy to play with very large numbers, does not correspond to reality where travelling very large distances is overwhelmingly difficult. But assuming an unfeasible supply of fuel, and an impossibly resilient craft, it would have taken eighteen such exponential leaps until he was travelling distances that are larger than can be contained within our cosmos. Dead, long before.
So, I lived my life, and renewed it, and lived it again. I travelled far, and saw five new shells of human habitation settled, centred as all religion requires on the sacred home of God, the Earth; and I saw many many worlds in those zones filled with human offspring, with mechas and gene-peoples. Some I visited. Most I did not. And I forgot all about Jerie, until a man I had never met before came to see me at my ranch. He did not say how he had found me, or why he had gone to the trouble of jumping back to hub and out again (for his home was Serenea in the reach of Bridgeman) just to exchange a few words with me. I was impolite enough, and suspicious enough of contamination, to request him to stay in his walker, which he did with an easy grace. He claimed to have met Jerie, but this was a name from such a long time ago that, believe it or not, I had to check with my ligeia before I could even remember whom he meant.
‘It must have been long ago,’ I said. ‘That you met him, I mean, for he has been dead a very long time’.
‘I met him in the last ten-month,’ he said. ‘Not long at all.’
Then I knew him for a fool, or a crank, and was ready to dismiss him. ‘He told me to tell you something,’ said this fellow.
‘So tell me it, and go off on your own business,’ I said, cross.
‘He wanted me to tell you two things,’ said this man. I pulled up a scan of the inside of his walker; but he looked just like any other person - red-brown skin, dark-cut hair, shining eyes, muscles. There seemed to be no hostile dot-tech or contaminants, but I sensed something wrong about him, or his message, and I remained suspicious.
‘Will they take long in the telling, these two things?’ I asked, growing more crotchety.
‘Not long at all,’ he said, ‘and then I shall go back.’
‘Do so, then.’
‘First,’ said the stranger, his eyes smiling, ‘was that he’ll see you soon, that he is looking forward to meeting you again after all this time.’
‘By that,’ I said rashly, ‘I know you a liar.’ He seemed, however, not to take offence at this. ‘Go on,’ I said, eventually. ‘Tell me the second thing, so that you can go on your way and leave me in peace.’
‘The second thing,’ he said, ‘is this:’
My words shall still you, motionless as stone in sheerest wonder, And I shall beat upon your mind, and break it all in sunder
That caused me to stop and breathe deep. ‘Where did you meet him?’ I asked the stranger. ‘What is your name?’ I asked the stranger. ‘What did he look like when you saw him? What did he tell you of his travels? Stranger—’ I said. But he had already sealed his walker from all surveillance and was going away, and my questions went unanswered. I have been going about my business ever since, and every day I wake and think to myself: Will it be today that I meet Jerie again ?
~ * ~
I asked myself the same question this very morning.
~ * ~
Commentary
The starting point for the first of these two linked stories was the illustration known as the ‘Flammarion woodcut’, a striking and, I think, haunting image that has been widely reproduced. Originally it was believed to be an authentic medieval woodcut, but it was subsequently discovered to be a much later pastiche of earlier visual styles, probably fr
om the nineteenth century - its earliest recorded appearance was in an 1888 book by French astronomer Camille Flammarion. [Daniel Boorstein, The Discoverers: A History Of Man’s Search To Know His World And Himself (New York: Random House 1983), 7.] But rather than undermining the power of the image, its ersatz, pastiche quality in fact focuses its power: it is about the past rather than embodying the past, and amounts to a piece of historical fiction. My story ‘Hieronimo’ glosses the picture, building on visual elements from within it: an ordinary man who is dressed for a long journey, but who has, to his astonishment, broken through the sky to see the hidden workings of the world. That he sees a cosmos defined by giant wheels and circles provides one of the thematic structures for the tale; the odd, interlocking double cartwheel object in the top-left hand corner of the image suggested to me that he might be a wainwright or wheelwright. The world behind him is medieval, and probably Central European.
What the ‘Flammarion woodcut’ emblematises, in fact, is that central aspect of science fictional writing: conceptual breakthrough. John Clute and Peter Nicholl’s standard critical reference work for science fiction stresses the centrality of this trope to the genre: ‘of all the forms which the quest for knowledge takes in modern sf, by far the most important, in terms of both the quality and the quantity of the work that dramatises it, is conceptual breakthrough.’ [John Clute and Peter Nicholls (eds), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit 1993), 254.] Clute and Nicholls go on to discuss many examples from SF - Arthur C Clarke’s classic novel Childhoods End (1953) and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey are two of the most famous - stories of characters who break out of conventional reality altogether. But they also mention non-genre work, such as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), in which the hero, who has grown up in a valley-kingdom in Abyssinia, travels into the wider world. This encounter with radical otherness, quite as much as the search for knowledge, defines what science fiction is; and otherness need not be located in the future, or even far away.