The Lowest Heaven (10 page)

“Why’d she go to Alaska?” I asked him. “She never said anything about Alaska.”

He didn’t answer for a moment.

“She likes the cold,” he finally said, and looked at me, his eyes wide and bloodshot behind his glasses. “Leave it alone.”

I walked away from my dad, and up the stairs. I cranked open my bedroom window and looked up at the dark of the mountain.

I’d seen a television program about the explosion of Krakatoa, and in it, there was a fact that haunted me. Rafts made of hardened lava had floated up onto the coast of Africa, even a year later, passengered by skeletons. But maybe those people had been sacrificed to the volcano, and their bones thrown up into the air by the explosion. Maybe Krakatoa had exploded because it didn’t like what it was being fed.

I wondered about my mothers. I wondered about Mr. Loury’s wife. I wondered if there was a hole in the floor of the observatory, and if through it you might be able to see things beneath. I didn’t want to wonder, but I wondered.

Later, I snuck out the window, and into the night. Did I even need to sneak? No one was in charge. No one saw me walking to Mr. Loury’s house. I used my sneaker to open a hole in the top of Mr. Loury’s volcano. After a minute, I used my hands. I was a Krakatoan. I stamped on Mr. Loury’s volcano again, and then put my ear to the ground.

For a long time, I didn’t hear anything.

But then, from far below me, I heard something stamping back, a pounding from the other side of the earth. Then a murmuring. I scratched harder with my hands, shoveling dirt away from the top of the volcano.

A light went on in Mr. Loury’s kitchen, and his screen door opened.

“Hey!” he shouted, but I was gone, sprinting up Palomar, because whatever was in that volcano, I’d heard a sound, a ragged gasp of welcome as I moved the dirt away. And something else had happened too.

I had a piggy bank with thirteen dollars in it. I had three missing mothers. I dodged into the trees, and ran uphill, off the side of the road where he couldn’t follow me. This was my territory. I knew how to run in the woods. He didn’t even try, because he was a grown-up, and he had a car. I heard it start.

Trees leaning in, a no-stars, no-moon night and I thought maybe the sky had been swallowed by the observatory draining the stars into its mouth, sucking the darkness dry. There it was, in front of me, its glowing white snowcone looming against the horizon.

I scraped my hands on my jeans, once, twice, three times, until my palms stung, because from inside Mr. Loury’s volcano, someone’s fingers had reached up and touched mine.

I wasn’t sure about breathing. I could hardly see. One of my knees was skinned. Maybe I was crying. I wanted my dad and I didn’t. I wanted my mothers, even the one I never knew.

There was a set of headlights speeding up the spiral road and the observatory was full of astronomers without wives. Funerals sometimes. Car-crashes and cancer. Other times the wives just went away and no one ever saw them again. This was the way the world worked, I’d imagined, but now I wondered if it really was.

My third mother, I thought and my brain got stuck on it. Katharine, called Kit, who sometimes called me Kit too, and sometimes called me Tool, for toolkit, as in a smaller, more equipped version of herself. But my real name was something else entirely. My dad called me Aulax, after a star. “The Furrow,” that star name meant, and he’d stuck a Mary in as my middle name to make me more human.

The door was unlocked. I skidded in on my heels, and felt along the edge of the room. I knew my way around Palomar. The inside was like nothing, no sky on view, just the telescope stabbing through the sphere, but as I stood there, not hidden, uncertain, the shutters began to open to let the telescope look at the sky.

Mr. Loury’s story was horrible all over my brain.
Look down
, he said in my head,
look underground
, and as I thought it, I felt those cold fingers again, touching my own, gripping my own, and I heard a car stop outside.

No one was visible inside the observatory. I wanted to look toward the center of the Earth. I wanted to find my mothers. I didn’t want to think about Alaska. I didn’t want to think about Pele. I didn’t want to think about who was underneath that dirt in Mr. Loury’s backyard, nor about how far down the dirt went.

I ran to the telescope and slung myself up into its workings. The shutters were open and the sky was there, black. I held my breath and climbed.

Mr. Loury was in the building. I could feel him, making his way around the edge of the circle. The telescope was moving, and I was slipping.

“Kid,” he called. “Hey, buddy. Where’re you at?”

I twisted my knees over the beam at the base of the telescope. I’d always wanted to climb the Hale. It was the biggest telescope in the world. Not in the dark.

“This isn’t a place for little girls,” he said, and his voice was closer than I’d thought he was. “They’re going to look at the roots of the world tonight.”

Where were the rest of the astronomers? Where was my dad, for that matter? He was supposed to be here. Nobody was in charge, I reminded myself.

I tied my shirtsleeves to the beam, because I felt the telescope moving. There was a sound, a squealing shudder, which I took for the roof shutters opening further, but when I arched my neck to try to look around the side of the telescope, I couldn’t see anything.

I looked down. There was light below me, and the telescope rotated toward it, my fingers slipping on the metal as we tilted backward. I was not inside the telescope, could not see whatever it was they were seeing there in the cage, but whatever they were looking at, whatever it was they were trying to see, it was in the wrong direction.

“You aren’t here,” Mr. Loury said, from directly below me, and I could tell he was looking up at me, trying to reach me, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

“I belong here. My dad works here, and you’re trespassing. You got fired,” I told him, clinging to the beam. I didn’t care about quiet any more. I wanted someone to hear me, and yet, somehow, I didn’t scream for help.

“I tried to tell you,” Mr. Loury said. “The stars are gone and all of them are gone with them. They want boys, and that’s all. She doesn’t want me anymore.”

The telescope completed its tilt, flipping me so that I faced down, and I saw what the open shutters looked into, what I was dangling over.

There was lava below us, a crater full of it, glowing orange and red, and in the lava there were women, stretching their fingers to touch the metal of the telescope, pressing their nails into it.

I saw the incandescent roots of the world, and the way the women were tangled in them, their mouths open, a deafening murmur like wind tearing trees. I saw Mr. Loury’s wife, the Kodachrome version of her, her white skin and bright hair, her eyes big and black-rimmed with fake lashes. The sunglasses she always wore were missing. She was naked, her long arms savaged and blistered, her ribs skinny and her hipbones sticking out. Come here, she mouthed, and her lipstick was perfect. Other mothers were there too, and I knew them.

I’d been to their funerals and gone to school with their abandoned children. I’d seen the X’s where they weren’t. I saw all the dead women in the center of the earth, and then I saw them reach up toward where I dangled.

I saw my third mother, and she saw me.

Somewhere I heard a door slam, a shout, and Mr. Loury, just for an instant, was silhouetted against all that light and fire.

Then, like the Krakatoans, the astronomer’s wives were gone, and my mother was gone, and all that was left were black skeletons, ashes floating on rafts of darkness, lists of dead stars. I heard myself screaming.

The asbestos-tiled floor of the observatory appeared beneath my cheek, and my head appeared on top of my body, sharp pain and dull ache at once, and there was my dad, kneeling beside me, his eyes still bloodshot.

“Can you move?” he asked me. “Is anything broken?”

I could move. Nothing was broken. The roof rotated and where the sky had been dark, it was now all stars and Milky Way. I stood up, bruised, and tried to figure out where my feet were. My dad had me by the arm, and he was moving me out of there, faster than I wanted to move. I looked back at the telescope, and I could feel everything getting taken away from me, forever, and all at once.

My dad carried me to the car, fastened my seatbelt, and drove me down the spiral road, and to the hospital. He told the nurses I’d fallen from something high, and they looked into my eyes and agreed that I was looking out at the world through a concussion. They showed me my pupils in a handmirror, one big, one tiny, Martian moons in an eclipse, or the sun trying to shine through a sky full of ash.

I put my face into a crisp white shoulder and cried there, but when I lifted my head, I was done, and no one asked.

Mr. Loury’s abandoned house and its volcano got paved over when they redid the spiral road in the late 70’s.

My dad drowned in 1984, on a trip to the South Pacific, diving into an underwater cave and failing to equalize his pressure, but he was an old man by then and hadn’t been in touch with me in a long time. There were no more mothers.

The astronomers at Palomar kept finding supernovae and charting galaxies, but the largest telescope in the world was surpassed in size in the early 90’s. The last time I drove there, up the spiral road and to the tourist center, it was daylight, and the only person I saw was not an astronomer, but a painter pulleying himself around the walls, rolling white paint slowly over the dome.

When I tried to ask him a question, he shrugged and turned back to his job, pulling himself along the dome, hand over hand.

I stood there a while, watching him spackling the fine cracks all over the surface, the ones that stretched up from the gravel and all the way to the top of the dome itself. The observatory was getting old. I bent down, and put my ear to the ground, but there was nothing to hear. When I stood up, the painter was looking at me.

He reached into the pocket of his overalls, and tossed me a small white rock. Later that night, in my hotel room, I soaked it in alcohol. Underneath the paint, the rock was black and porous, but that was all.

We regret the loss of you, for although we know how to subsist without you, yet we do not know why.

Slide, formerly from the collection of the British Astronomical Association, showing a total solar eclipse – when the disk of the Sun is fully obscured by the Moon. (c1900)

ADAM ROBERT

My Commission

In all respects aiming at brevity, I here set down the account of the cruize I undertook to the Moon, afterwards returning again to this, our world, in the years of our Lord, 1726 & 27. There is (as is well known) littel enough in the Moon to justify the expence of crewing and leasing a vessel; save only that it is upon the Moon that the Patiens make their habitation, and as such some do go in hopes of obtaining or otherwise laying hands upon any and all devices or vessels of their design. Howsoever rarely this is achiev’d, and with what poor returns upon the market here is well known, for perhaps one in every four items brought back to our world is of any use to us at all, and the main amount of such chattel merely reproduces what is already in the possession of mankind, where such novelties most often prove impossible for the wits of men to decipher.

So was I sworn by the First Lord Commissioner, the Earl of
Berkeley
Viscount
Dursley
, during the early days of the late war between Spain and Peru; for at time of war was the urge to uncover such Arms as may be secreted amongst the machinery of the Patiens, tho’ never yet accomplished. It is known now (forall that I was bound with oaths of secrecy at that time) that His Majesty’s Own Ambassadors were treating with Brasilia and Peru, and that the Americas were eager to have a European allie in their struggle against the Spaniards. To that end, and to ease such discussion with proof of our intent in stopping Spain from locating any
Weapons
such as may or may not have been available in the Sky-lands. I was Commission’d to make my way thither, and funds were furnished upon the Stock of
Sir George Oxenden,
Bart, and
Sir John Jennings,
who became Certificated Gentleman with shares of 20/100 apiece in any prize we might win. But this manner of voyage is so different to admiralty work, and plunder so rare to come by, that their shares were in turn underwritten by His Majesty’s Office of Swedish Finance.

My Lords approach’d me, I do not doubt, on account of my experience going thither into the tallest hights, and having previously publish’d
Round the World by Way of the Attenuat’d Hights
, published at Mr.
Crowther’s
, 1717, I do commend this account to my present readers. As to the obtaining of the vessel, I shall here say littel; for it is well known that most of the Patien devices with useful function reside in private hands, for all that the Crown urges its Subjects to sell them to the State. There being in divers hands four devices for Communication over Vast distance, none of which I have ever seen; and upwards of two dozen devices for elevating vessels to the greatest hight; yet these latter have yet to be prov’d, for only when the Vessel so uplifted has left the thickness of Earthly ayr below it may it be in any fashion steer’d, such that the creation of craft that may Fly about the Skies of this world has not been accomplish’d. Yet the Chinese claim they have modify’d such a Vessel, as we may very well expect it shoud be possible to do; or else (as in the present wars)
Craft
must fly up to the Attenuat’d Hights in order to come back down again in another place. There was but one device found useful for applying
Heat
via a wand of some metallick quality, and it the only Patiens-ware ever seiz’d by the Crown, upon the Royal Warrant, and taken to the Royal Armouries where its mysteries were not exhum’d and (as I heard) it was spoyl’d by those who examin’d it and now rests mere junk.

At any rate, the Guild that attends to building and caulking the Vessels, and the Guild that has possession of the Propulse, and the Guild that attends to Ayr, and the Guild that possesses the Royal Patent for provisioning such cruizes, all stand off from all, such that bringing together a crew is a tiresome business. It might benefit the Commonwealth of all Northward European peoples, under His Gracious Majesty’s rule, were they but encouraged to allign their commerce. On this occasion it requir’d a threeweek’s tedious use of my time to provision and construct the Vessel, which I named the
Cometes Georgius;
most of which labour was in having my men running from office to office along the
Dover
roads. At fine, the Vessel was readied: it being if pyramidic shape the better to cleave through the ayr close to our world; builded of alternate layers of wood, well caulked with plastick’d tarr, and sheets of the new India-rubber, to preserve the atmosphear within. A number of balons of ayr must be carried thither, each twice the size of the Vessel itself; and I know that the Americans, when they ascend, begin the cruize by heating the ayr within and so are lifted on the first stage, although the Propulse-device of the Patiens must soon be engag’d. We had no such unnecessary complexness about our Voyaging, and the balon lay alongside us, ty’d with cord to the base and link’d via a spiggot-tube. The ayr being so precious a commodity limits the size of the crew; one man per Guild and myself being four in all; or else the number of balons tow’d behind must needs become troublesome. Dobrée took twenty with him on his supraplanetary, hoping to replenish them at journey’s end, but was compell’d to return on the same supply and thereby perished the majority of his crew. It has been found, since then, that the seeding the interior with green vegetation goes some way toward avoiding the parching of the lungs, tho’ Dobrée knew nothing of that. My crew was roster’d as follows:

Captain, my self
Gabriel Cano, Ayr
Eberhard Christian Kindermann, Pilot
James Moulville, Purser

As for the Propulse itself, it is a manner of seven-tine starr’d structure, of weight equivalent to a small cannon but spread thin, and constructed not of metal, altho’ it is of a substance akin to metal. As to the operation of this device, it is easy enough to deduce it, for all that the Guild pretends it is of passing secrecy and difficulty; for each of the tines may be operated independent, or in any combination, by the scraping of a blade or rod along the groove in each, as I have often observ’d the
Pilota
doing; and in truth it was only my respect for the terms of the Royal Guild Charter, and my own Commission, and not any insufficiency in my own skill, that prevented me kicking the Pilot (a fellow given to insolence of address when speaking to me, by name
Kindermann
, out of Prussia) off the Vessel. When in the lower ayr, all seven tines are needful at their greatest power, in order to keep the Vessel steady; and attempts to steer the course in amongst the turbulence below the clouds will like as not cause it to o’ertopple and crash. But above the lower ayr the matter of the atmosphear becoming so difuse, the tines may be individually activated to propell the vessel this way or that.

We set off first from
Kent
on a clear day, 12th June, 1726; and were delay’d at once, for the of our three balons one was indifferently ty’d to the
Cometes
, such that the cord broke and the balon fell away. This involv’d us in delay and expense, for, 1, the balon went into the English Canal and bobb’d, for all that I know, to
France;
and, 2, tho’ I instruct’d the pilot to descend immediately, yet he contin’d the ascent until he was perswaded cross-winds had become negligible, and only thence reverse the direction of travel; such that we set down again some thirty leagues away from our departing point. The
Cometes
having to be carried across the country, and a new balon obtained and fill’d and other sundry annoyances requir’d a further three days and near-enough £80 of extraneous expence. But we set off again, the 15th June, and had no further difficulty in quitting the Earth’s thicker ayr altogether. The experience of this flight is not unpleasing, for the motion in the lower ayr being slow’d by the need to drag our balons behind us, is neither precipitous nor startling; yet in the upper ayr the lack of obstruction to our passage means that we shoot faster and faster, as a Cannon-bullet. It is a three-night journey to reach the Moon, and the days in that place are night in all respects. Some take candles with them, but I prefer to preserve our supply of breathable and subsist on such sunlight as the portholes inmit. The road is clear; for altho’ others have affirmed the existence of rubble and other obstacles in the way, causing annoyance and worse to the fabrick of any vessel, I have not found it so. The most remarkable thing at first is that the people swim and and turn like fish in a tank, by whatsoever strange Magnetick or Nimphidic power of the high sky. Yet
Custom
works so strongly upon us that tho’ we find ourselves amaz’d at the first, yet soon we become us’d and even bored with the facility.

The higher sky is so capacious, and the passage rapid, it is near impossible to observe whate’er other Vessels are traversing the distance between Earth and the Moon; although I am perswaded that the Chinese and the Peruvians both make more frequent cruizes thither and back than is generally suppos’d. For the Peruvian Cristal House must be supply’d with ayr, that cannot be found except upon the Earth. And whilst the means by which the Patiens’s devices are fuell’d or power’d or do otherwise draw their means of subsistence is entirely unknown, we are in no ways restrict’d by the need to supply such fuel, or to any degree incommoded from making as many voyages as we chuse; and it is only the necessity of bringing along ayr, water and victuals for the crew that acts as any restriction upon travelling as far and often as we might wish. I do believe the Americans ply the distance on a continual round, such that their Cristal House lose nothing in the cleanness of its atmosphear, and afterwards had occasion to confirm.

The
Moon
appears at first in the porthole no larger than it does from the ground upon our own
Mundus
; and a full day may pass before any increase in dimension be observ’d; but by the third day it is large enough to make out the structures upon it, and by the fifth it fills the view. Here the Pilot reverses the action of the Propulse, which caus’d the fabrick of the
Cometes
to tremble and groan like to fly apart, and occasion’d us all grave anxiety; and also our balons, from being dragged behind, did swallow around us, and obstruct’d our vision from portholes, which was by no means conducive to good navigation. But the celerity of passage must be quench’d; and after a ten-minute of complaining it settled again. By wagging the Vessel from side to side, Kindermann clear’d one porthole, and from this was looked out upon the Selenic landscape.

There being no ayr in that place, nothing prevents a craft with access to a Patiens’ device from moving about the sky at leisure, and we made a road for ourselves according to my instructions, passing over a number of large Crateric and Ridged features. The face of the Moon being familiar to all, and the location of all structures well-mapp’d, there was no difficulty in navigating over the surface of it. Shortly thereafter we pass’d over one of the habitations of the Patiens, not far from the Crater nam’d
Blenheim
by us, but
Sancta Maria
by other nations. We could see the spread of structures, radiating out from a hub, and lit at all points by those same ever-burning lanterns two samples of which have fall’n into the hands of the Turques, as I hear it. We all clustered about the porthole and looked down to see the Patiens themselves; from the prospect of altitude reduc’d even more to insectile seeming, hurrying in and out of their houses on their incomprehensible tasks. They paid us no heed, save only one of their aerial machines, or as some assert their birds (though it looks unlike any bird) that flew up and about us and then flew away.

Soon we approach’d the Cristal House of the Peruvians; for it is but a roof’d-over Crater three leagues S.S.W of the Great Copernick Crater that is familiar to any who have cast their eye upon the Moon. My thought was: should the Spaniards ever obtain a Propulse and build a Vessel, it would present them no challenge at all to find the House and break its roof, whereby all its ayr would be lost and the crops within kill’d. We made a pass low over the structure, and admir’d its shine in the unhaz’d sunlight very much; and once passed we saw men at work on the other side of the glass tending their vegetation; and we saw also the pier, or pavement, construct’d alongside for the reception of their own ships. Shadows upon the Moon are drawn tight as draughtsman’s lines, and very stark and clear; and the light is such as not like to be forgotten. And here I instructed the pilot to set the
Cometes
down. It landed with some commotion, for we missed the pavement, and landed on the desart soil nearby; and moreover the landing near tipped us aside, at the which I was wrathful with Kindermann. Shortly thereafter we pass’d over one of the habitations of the Patiens Kindermann the while spoke to me very insolent, and assur’d me he had power to blacklist me from further trade with his Guild, if I thought to treat him as a slave or remitted the slightest courteous usage. I reminded him of the great sums I had defray’d, and bade him only do his job. At this Cano and Mulville took the Pilot’s side, and we endur’d an ill mood in that craft whilst awaiting the Pervuians.

They came at last, after the dust had settled; and in truth it sifted but slowly to the ground; for weight on the Moon is less than on our world. For it is the efficacy of the various worlds to cast their charm upon men in divers ways; such that to stand upon 1 planet is to be made from stone, and upon another into cork. It is accordingly a different matter entire to stand upon the Moon as it is upon the Earth; in the former place the substance of that world causeth the body to become buoyant almost to the current of floating into the ayr; yet to return again to the Earth is to become heavy again, with a sense of sinkage of body and spirit both. As to how this effect is form’d, opinion is divided, some adhering to the French school of
Des Cart,
some to the English of Viscount
Coldstream
and some the German of
Neuton
. Some affirm (and I do myself believe) that the Earth, as the site of the sin of Adam, was endued with weightiness as a portion of its especial curse; and that other planets surrounding the sun being free of such taint are all lighter worlds; as we can see of Jupitter, the most large; for that none have yet voyaged thither, yet it is plain that to look through a Prospective glass is to see a world, as the poet says,