“Earth,” he said, “is just below the horizon.” He pointed. “There. Mars, I think, is over there.”
“Send them a signal.”
“I did. But why should they be listening for a signal from this stretch of space? It’s not even on the ecliptic. It’s not as if there are any astronomers on Mars. And if there were, if there were any, you know, amateurs, why should they be looking down here? No, that’s not what I woke you up to show you.”
“What then?”
“The stars aren’t moving. I’ve been watching for an hour. I was waiting to see Earth come up over the horizon so I could send them a message. But it’s not coming up.”
“You thought it was an hour,” said Murphy, crossly. “Clearly it
wasn’t
an hour. You probably sat there for five minutes and got impatient.”
So they settled down together, and all checked their watches and looked east to where the sun had set, where familiar stars pebbled the sky. And an hour passed, and another, and the stars did not move.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
“Somebody has stopped the stars in their courses,” said Murphy. “We’re dead, we’re all in the afterlife. Is that what happened? We crashed the ship and died, and this is the land of the dead.”
“I thought you were the one, Murphy, who wanted to apply Occam’s razor?” chided Edwards. “That’s a pretty
elaborate
explanation for the facts, don’t you think? I don’t feel dead. Do you? You feel that way?”
“Certainly not,” said Vins.
“But we’ve no idea what it feels like to feel dead,” Murphy pointed out.
“Exactly! It’s a null hypothesis. Let’s not go there. There must be another explanation.”
“The other explanation is that we’re not rotating.”
“Except we saw the sun go around and set, so we
are
rotating. An Earth-sized world, pulling an Earth-strength gravity, rotates for half a day and then
stops
rotating? Impossible. That makes no sense.”
“I’ll tell you what makes sense,” said Murphy, hugging himself against the cold. “This is a banned world. We are not supposed to be here. That’s what makes sense.”
“Of course we’re not supposed to be here,” agreed Vins. “Supposed to be Venus, that’s where. That’s where we’re supposed to be orbiting. Not here. But that’s not to say it’s a forbidden planet.”
“You were the one who said so!” Murphy objected.
“I was joking,” said Vins.
“Your joke may be turning out right,” said Murphy. He coughed, loud and long. Then he said, “The sun rises in the west, and the stars don’t move. You know what that is? That’s things that the human eye was not supposed to see. That’s a realm of magic—fairy, that’s where we are, and the fairy queen is probably gathering her hounds to hunt us down for seeing this forbidden place.”
“Very amusing, Murphy,” said Edwards, in a bland voice. “Very fanciful and imaginative. Your fancy and your imagination, I find them amusing.”
“I’m going to sleep.” Murphy sulked, picking himself up and going back inside the ship. “I’ll meet my fate tomorrow with a clear head at least.”
The others stayed outside under the splendid, chilly, glittering stars and under that silkily cold black sky. They talked and reduced the possibilities to an order of plausibility. They discussed what to do. They discussed the possibility of making the ship whole again; perhaps by dismantling one of the thirty-six thrust engines and reassembling it as a sort of welding torch, so as to make good the breaches in the plasmetal hull. Nobody could think how to launch into space, though; the craft had not been built to achieve escape velocity unaided. They had not been planning on landing on Venus, after all. (The very idea!) Finally the sky started to pale and ease, as if the arc of the western horizon were a heated element thawing the black into rose and pearl and blushed tones of white.
The sun lifted itself into the sky.
“Well,” said Vins, with a tone of finality, “that settles it. Clearly we
are
rotating. The lack of movement of the stars and the apparent movement of the sun: These data contradict one another. Seem to. It’s hard to advance a coherent explanation that includes both of these pieces of observational data. Are we agreed?”
“I can’t think what else,” said Edwards. “We assume the sky is a simulation of some sort. Do we assume that?”
“We do,” said Sinclair.
“One of two explanations, then,” said Vins. “Either the sky is a total simulation, upon which is projected a moving sun by day and motionless stars by night. Or else the sky is a real feature but some peculiarity of optics distorts the actual motion of the stars in some way.”
“It’s hard to think what sort of phenomenon . . .” began Sinclair. But he stopped talking. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say; and—anyway—the dawn was so very beautiful. They all sat looking down, all distracted by the loveliness of the view from their highland vantage point: down across sloping grasslands and marsh and the beaming seas and gleaming channels of water. And, awakened by the light, the first birds were up; dancing in nimble flight and giving voice to nimble birdsong, bouncing their tenor and soprano trills off the blue ceiling of the sky—or whatever it was.
They were all tired. They’d been up all night. Eventually they went inside the spaceship and slept.
The third day and the third night.
Vins, Sinclair, and Edwards woke sometime in the afternoon, the sun already declining toward the east.
Murphy had gone.
They searched for him, in a slightly desultory manner, round and about the ship; but it was clear enough where he had gone: a trail scuffed, slightly kinked but more or less straight, through the grasses and downward. Clambering onto the top of the ship, Edwards could follow this with his eye, and with binoculars, down and down, a wobbly ladder in the resplendent material of the fields all the way to where forest ruled a dark line.
“He’s gone into a forest. Down there, kilometers away.” He wanted to say something like, Imagine a stretch of gold velvet, all brushed one way to smoothness, and a finger dragged through the velvet against the grain of the brushing—that’s what his path looks like. But he couldn’t find the words to say that. “Should we go after him?” he called. “Should we go?”
“He knows where we are,” said Sinclair. “He knows how to get back here. He’s probably just exploring.”
“And if he gets into trouble?”
“It’s his lookout. He must take responsibility for himself,” said Vins. “We all must shift for ourselves, after all.”
The three of them breakfasted on ship’s supplies, sitting in the warm air and listening to the meager, distant chimes of the birds and watching the flow and glitter of wind upon the grass. “I could sit here forever,” said Edwards, in a relaxed voice.
The other two were silent, but it was a silent agreement.
“We need to get on,” said Vins, as if dragging the sentence up from great deeps. “We need to explore. To fix the ship. That’s what we need to do.”
They did nothing. After breakfast they dozed in the sun. Murphy did not return. Who knew where he had gone?
The one thing so obvious that none of them bothered to point it out was that this world was paradisical compared to the wrecked and wasted landscapes of their home. And that because it was paradisical, it was very obviously not a real place. They were dead and had gone to a material heaven, perhaps on account of some sort of oversight. They had died in the crash. Or they had been transported through a different sort of spatial discontinuity, one that translated them from real to mythic space. They were to feed among the mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters now.
The land of the sirens, in which Odysseus’ crew had languished so pleasantly and purposelessly. Was
that
a forbidden world? Was it banned to subsequent explorers? Why else was it never again discovered?
It may still be there, some island or stretch of coast in the Mediterranean protected by a cloak of invisibility, some magic zone or curtain through which only a few select and lucky mariners stumble. Who knows?
All this culture and learning bounced around their heads: Vins, Sinclair, and Edwards. They knew all about Homer and Mohammed, and they knew all about Shakespeare and Proust, even though those people about whom they were so knowledgeable were a completely different sort of creature from themselves. Those Homers and van Goghs were all super-beings, elevated, godlike; and the residue of their golden-age achievements in the minds of the scientists had the paradoxical effect of shrinking them by comparison.
Best not think about it. What and if they
are
in the land of the Lotus? Maybe they’re lucky, that’s all.
The sun set in the east. The color and illumination drained out of the western sky and out of the zenith, flowing down to the east with osmotic slowness and leaving behind a rich, purply black dotted with perfectly motionless stars. The last of the day was a broad stretch of white-yellow sky over the eastern horizon, patched with skinny horizontal clouds of golden brown. For long minutes the last of the sunlight, coming up over the horizon, touched the bottom line of these clouds with fierce and molten light, so that it looked as if several sinuous heating elements, glowing bright and hot with the electricity passing through them, had been fixed to the matter of the sky. Then the light faded away from the clouds, and they browned and blackened against a compressing layer of sunset lights: a sky honey and marmalade, and then a gray-orange, and finally blue, and after that black.
It was night again.
Something agitated Vins enough to get him up and huffing around. “The stars have moved a little,” he said. “There—that’s the arc of the corona australis. Say what you like, but
don’t
tell me I don’t know my constellations.”
“So?”
“It’s higher. Yesterday the lowest star was right on the horizon, on that little hill silhouetted there. Today it’s a fraction above.”
“So we’re rotating real slow,” said Sinclair. “I can’t say I care. I can’t say I’m bothered. I’m going to sleep.”
The fourth day and the fourth night.
In the morning Vins left the ship. He set off in the opposite direction to Murphy—not down the slope toward the forest and the long shining stretches of open water but up, higher into the highlands. He had no idea where Murphy had gone, or what he had been after; but something inside him prompted him to go higher. Go up, Moses. He had a vision of himself climbing and climbing until he reached the summit of some snow-clenched mountaintop at the very heart of the world from which the whole planet—or at least this whole hemisphere—would be visible. Like Mount Purgatory, he thought, from Dante. As if he had anything to do with Dante! Another godlike figure from the golden age.
Vins didn’t creep away as Murphy had done. He prepared a pack, some supplies, some tools, a couple of scientific instruments. Then he woke the other two up. He told them what he wanted to do; and they sat, looking stupidly at him from under their overhanging foreheads, and didn’t say anything. “You sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asked. He felt an obscure and disabling fear deep inside him, a terror that if he stayed at the crash site, he’d slide into torpor, and that would be the end of him. He had to get out and away. He had to move.
“Do what you like,” said Sinclair.
“It makes no sense to me,” said Edwards, “to go marching off without any sort of objective. Shouldn’t you have an objective? As a scientist?’
“My objective is to explore. What’s more scientific than exploration?”
Edwards looked at him, blinked, looked again. “We should stay here,” he said, slowly. He turned to look at the buckled ship. “We should mend the ship.”
“We should,” agreed Vins. “But we don’t. You
notice
that? There’s something here that’s rendering us idle. Idleness doesn’t suit us.”
Sinclair laughed at this. “Let him go,” he said, stretching himself on a broad boulder with a westward-facing facet to warm himself in the new sunlight. “He’s the hairiest of us all.”
Vins winced at this insult. “Don’t be like that. What is this, school?”
“It’s true,” said Sinclair. “Murphy was the hairiest, but he’s gone God-knows-where. You’re the hairiest now, and you’ll go, and good riddance. Go after Murphy. Go pick fleas from his pelt. I’m the smoothest of the lot of you and I’ll stay here and
thank
you.”
“I’m not going after Murphy, I’m going higher into the highlands.”
“Go where you like.”
Edwards wouldn’t meet Vins’ gaze, so Vins shouldered his pack and marched off, striding westward into the setting sun. He could feel Sinclair’s eyes boring into his back as he went; Sinclair just lounging there like a lazy great ape, watching him go. The hairiest indeed!
Then Vins had a second thought. He wanted to get up high, didn’t he? He could lift himself clean off the ground.
It took a surprising amount of courage to turn about and stomp back down to the ship again. Sinclair was still there on his rock, watching him with lazy insolence. Edwards had taken off his shoes and climbed to the top of the wreckage, clinging to the dew-wet surface with his toes and the palms of his feet. He was gazing east, down, away.