The Lowest Heaven (19 page)

Rarely have I seen such urgency from Magnus. Following his initial excitement he managed to control himself and got dressed. Then he spent some time rehearsing lines, while he paced back and forth in the atrium, waiting for me to bring the horses around the front. He preferred tradition and insisted on horses to greet her.

Because we needed to move with urgency, I brought the horses into the atrium and moved them over what would normally have been the impluvium, a slightly sunken rectangle in the centre of the room. We couldn’t make the skies rain on this moon, despite Magnus’ best efforts, so such drains were useless. Magnus merely used the impluvium to disguise our fastmat. He thumbed in the precise co-ordinates of the skyport on Hadrian’s Island, booked us in with the receivers, and we mounted our horses.

Moments later, reality flickered, and a new and expensive kind of physics opened up space like a network of aqueducts.

We slipped into a new locale.

We rode our horses out of a large metal cylinder at Hadrian Island Skyport, a structure built in the classical style, but from toughened glass. The gathered throng – some in period dress, others in contemporary clothing as was the curious mix of citizens on Orbis Romanus – gawped as we rode our splendid mares through the chrome-lined port building, the vast windows looking out across the partial sunset.

We waited, of course.

Magnus grew impatient.

Then Cornelia’s ship arrived, the screen above flickered with the image of the passengers disembarking.

I knew it must be she from Magnus’ response – a woman with long, chestnut hair that seemed to bounce lightly with every step. In fact, she took each step cautiously, which surprised me, as her figure suggested she may have possessed a certain level of athletic skill. Her light blue dress clung to her frame, and a delicately laced white shawl covered her shoulders. She was not alone: a tall man walked beside her, dressed smartly in a black shirt, trousers and grey waistcoat – a style that contrasted harshly with her soft fashion. He possessed a broad and weathered face, though his expression was mild.

Magnus’ countenance grew sterner upon seeing him, but he need not have worried: this other man, we soon learned, was no suitor, but her protector. Mind you, one could tell that by the way he moved around her, never touching her.

Moments later the two of them were standing before us.

“Magnus,” she exhaled.

“Cornelia.”

As I may have discussed before, I am not one for understanding emotions, but even I could recognise that something passed between them with that exchange. Perhaps time unbuckled itself in their eyes, the years falling apart... but who can say?

I merely helped bring her luggage from the conveyor belt.

Later that night, the bodyguard and I watched Magnus make love to Cornelia.

The bodyguard ate a bowl of olives. He seemed a pleasant if quiet individual, not that the opportunity for conversation really presented itself.

The next few days, Magnus took Cornelia and her bodyguard around Orbis Romanus. He showed her his moon and what life was like here.

I rarely accompanied them, as I was an interloper. I prepared their evening meals and enjoyed the opportunity to refine my culinary skills in peace.

Repeatedly, the bodyguard and myself would sit through their evening lovemaking, for he would not leave her side and I had nowhere else to go.

“It’s really for me?” Cornelia’s eyes glittered in the sunlight.

“Of course,” Magnus replied. “Remember those days we spent in the library? You loved that era – you were besotted with it, and so was I – and I remembered those days. I remember your affection for it. So I built it all. Just for you.”

“But... really, just for me?”

Magnus gave a nod.

“What’s the catch?” she gave an awkward laugh.

“None. Just stay here with me.”

“You know,” she continued, “it was really only my father who stopped us. He said you were–”

“‘An insignificant nobody who would never amount to anything.’ Well, he’s wrong. Consider this a display of my wealth, if you like. Something to show your father I’m a success. And only occasionally a layabout...”

“So, you honestly mean to give it to me?”

A pause. “Why not?”

“You’re not serious!” Her excited squeal nearly short-circuited my sensors. “It it valuable?”

“Sure,” Magnus replied. “Everyone wants a piece of it. So take it. This moon is yours – I created it for you – just as long as you really want to stay here with me.”

“Do I!”

“Show your father, too,” Magnus muttered with a grin. “Honestly, tell him I gave it to you.”

“Don’t joke, Magnus.”

“I’m not – I’ll sign it over to you right now. Hang on a few moments. Felix!”

“Dominus?”

“Oh, Magnus...”

Magnus asked me to draw up the contracts immediately. I hastily sketched them out, a basic transfer of ownership, in only a few minutes. Magnus didn’t even seem to care about the precision – he wanted to seal the moment, to act on a whim. I felt certain a proposal of marriage would follow.

Magnus and Cornelia stood before an open window, their arms around each other. I laid the contracts transferring ownership of Orbis Romanus on a table before them. Magnus signed his name and stepped back, beaming.

Cornelia beckoned over her bodyguard with a briefcase. “I’ll used my cherished pen,” she whispered to Magnus, “the gift you once gave me.”

“You kept it?” He smiled as if recalling those days. In the momentary silence, birdsong could be heard from the gardens.

“Of course I did.” Cornelia reached into the case, pulled out a gun – and fired.

The back of Magnus’ head erupted, and blood and bone spat out.

He collapsed on the floor.

I do not experience anything near to shock, as humans do. But I did love Magnus Lucretious in my way. And I struggled to comprehend the logic of what had happened.

Cornelia signed the contract with Magnus’ own pen and placed the papers in the briefcase. The bodyguard placed his arms around her and whispered, “It was disgusting, watching him make love to you.”

“It was worse having him do it, darling.” They kissed. “I’m so glad it’s over now.”

“What next?” he asked.

“For the moon or for us?”

“The moon,” he replied.

“Call in the company right away – send them a scan of the contracts. We get rid of the Roman crap, for a start. We need hotels – more hotels, and a bigger spaceport. This place can be the biggest stop-off point in the galaxy. Pull down the temples, sack the centurions, and let’s make some money. We should probably get rid of the body as well...”

I stared at Cornelia.

“Don’t look at me like that, Felix. I just did you a favour. You’re free now.”

“I... do not know what you mean.”

“You’ve earned your freedom.”

“How so?”

“Tell him, Claude.”

The bodyguard turned to me. “You may have observed that Cornelia was not, in fact, in love with your master.”

“Oh, he was a beast,” Cornelia added. “Bombarding me with subliminal and overt advertising techniques, attempting to navigate the system defenses in my head. In realspace he sent salesmen round hawking his wares – this moon, this resort. For years!”

“Quite,” Claude concluded. “You were planted. Felix, you were our eyes and ears – literally. You may feel that your eye-lenses don’t quite work correctly, but that’s because we have cameras installed alongside them. We have been watching everything through your eyes. Magnus bought this moon a long time ago, when it was worthless, but he could certainly spot an investment. Pretty soon it became clear this place was worth a fortune. And he was still besotted with Cornelia. Still intent on wooing her back. When we learned of his search for a slave, we snuck you into the auction.”

“Obsessed with tradition,” she added. “Beastly man.”

“We just waited for the right time to respond,” Claude continued. “And when the time was right, we planted you. We knew he couldn’t resist your Athenian craftsmanship. Then we used you to work out the best time to come – once the terraforming was complete, and the market had developed to its maximum potential. Now, we own some of the most valuable real estate in the solar system – handed to us on a plate.”

“Easy for you to say,” Cornelia added. “Oh how I need a bath. You can draw one for me, Felix.”

“So you did this,” Claude said to me, “and we thank you for it. You were certainly lucky for
us
.“

“I guess, despite his fancy education,” Cornelia concluded, “despite all this crazy Roman nonsense, Magnus never bothered to learn a simple lesson like
caveat emptor
.”

We all feel the melancholy. The taller the trees grow, the more the melancholy sinks into us.

A pencil study of the branch of a tree, from an album of drawing and watercolours formerly owned, and possibly made, by the renowned antiquarian and churchman the Rev. Thomas Streatfield (1777 - 1848). (c1820)

KAARON WARREN

We’ve got food for seven days. Water for 12. Because sometimes the Saturnalia doesn’t end when it should. It’s hard for people to settle, after. Mid slash, mid fuck, mid theft. Do you just stop, then carry on with your suburban life? Leave things half done? Most people prefer to see it through. Take the extra hour or two. Chase away the doldrums for a bit longer.

We’ve stocked up on hydrogen peroxide and oxalic acid. There are going to be a lot of blood stains and they’ll be coming in after with their bundles of clothes, “Oh, I had an accident,” is a good one. Or “I was helping an injured person”, is another, not one of them wanting to admit what they’ve been a part of.

Seven days where nobody works. Nothing is open. There are no arrests, although crime occurs, it does, I’ve had friends murdered. I’ve lost worldly possessions. But you’re not going to be arrested, not during Saturnalia.

We’ll be called out to deal with carpets and mattresses. We’ve stocked up on pepsin powder for those, and we’ll charge for travel. It’s a good business, stain removal. Especially after Saturnalia. I hate having to go into people’s homes, though. Other homes are dirty and they reek and I don’t feel safe there. You never know what people will do, what they consider normal, in their own homes. I’ve had clients stand naked watching me. I’ve had food offered that I wouldn’t feed a dog or a goat. I always need a shower after being in a stranger’s home.

Though people are mostly dull these days. They care less than they used to. They’re tired and old. I know I feel older.

We’ve stocked up on sodium percarbonate. That’s good for chocolate stains and there will be plenty of those. People think they are original, as if they’re the only ones to cover themselves in the stuff. I say, “Seen it before. Seen it plenty.”

I’m lining up my stocks, counting the bottles, when my son says, “I’m not staying home this year.” He’s 21 and perhaps I can’t keep him safe anymore. “This year, I’m going to be a part of it. I’ll help you with the clothes when I get back.”

“You should stay at home.” I try not to cry. I don’t want to make him feel guilty. That is never a good reason to do anything. “We can watch it on TV.”

“I want to be the one on TV. Can’t I be happy, for a little while?”

“Don’t go,” I say. “I’ll make you a steak dinner tonight. And tomorrow night a chicken dinner. I’ll cook you your favourite food every night for a month.” He nods, and he eats two steak dinners, but when I check his room at midnight he is gone.

He’s slow, though, and loud, so I hear him stumbling to the front door, kicking the umbrella stand as he does every single time, and knocking the Saturn Tree we keep high, under a light, as he does every time as well.

What can I do? Tie him down? Join him to commit our own saturnalian acts, in our own home?

Maybe it is time to let him free.

He fumbles with the door locks, as he always does, forgetting which turns which way, and how many turns, and whether or not he’s already turned one or the other. He looks almost like a shadow in the dark, not a real person at all.

I don’t say, “This is why you have to stay home,” because it’s my fault he’s that way.

I’m the one who did it to him.

It’s been 23 years since the return of the
Tarvos
. Can you call it a return, if the ship never made it back whole? I was only four when it set out amidst a wild fanfare, because they like to make a fuss, don’t they? The rocket scientists. As if they are the ones who’ll save us all. They’re still like it, years on. Discovering new planets. “Earth-like’”ones, and you find out it’s all bullshit. You know? What they mean is Earth ten million years ago when the only things here were crawly little worms or something.

Speaking of which, there will be dirt to get out. Some of them get buried, up their necks. They showed it on the TV last year. Being used as a toilet, one of them. If those clothes had come in, I would have burnt them and paid the difference.

I was nine by the time the
Tarvos
reached Saturn. Those pictures of the swirling north pole made me dizzy, that’s mostly what I remember.

Most people were more interested in watching it suck in samples of the icy particles orbiting the planet.

We’ve stocked up on bottles of filtered water. The drycleaners’ greatest trick is that air and water are the best cleaners, at the end of the day. We can charge what we like, but our basics costs can be minimal.

I was 14 when the
Tarvos
returned; I remember that clearly. All the adults so excited by the return of the thing, the rest of us not caring all that much. Happy that they were distracted so they’d leave us alone, and we could party. Skip school without anyone noticing.

But we were all out there, watching the sky for a glimpse, when it blew up.

They calculated wrong, or something. Didn’t think the ice would be as heavy as it was. It’s all about the micro millimetres, isn’t it? And they get it wrong.

We’ve stocked up on methylated spirits, and we’ve got plenty of clean absorbent paper. Candle wax stains are always a problem. People get carried away, and there’s spillage. There are fires, too, but that’s not up to us. Other people manage that. Or don’t.

They love the fireworks, don’t they? And the fires, they don’t care about safety or property. They’ll set things on fire purposely, to see them burn. In the shade of the Saturn Trees, all of it seems to make sense. Is it because of the
Tarvos
? How it burned on entry, exploded in the night sky like fireworks?

Six crew onboard (and the ones with children mattered more, according to the media), all of them now with streets named after them. Suburbs.

It felt like rain but the drops were solid and stayed heavy on your skin if you left it. I wiped all the drops off but some clung to my hair, and my ears, and in my eyebrows.

People dragged their children inside, because there were parts raining down as well. There were deaths, though not in our neighbourhood. I heard one girl my age was pierced through the heart by a shard of metal.

Workers in Bangkok offices, Singapore noodle houses, sheep farms. Miners dredging gold and oil and zinc. All of them went out and stood in it. Most of them felt it.

The ice particles, melted. The pieces of ship. The other pieces. Those poor astronauts.

The astrologers told us they predicted it. That this was bound to happen, it was fate. Saturn was in the eighth house and that meant horrible death.

“For who?” people like my dad asked. “What, all of us?”

“Prepare for the grave,” the astrologers said.

Wasn’t long before many of us wished we’d been one of those early ones. Knocked down flat by debris. Gone in a flash.

We all feel the melancholy. The taller the trees grow, the more the melancholy sinks into us.

We’re all whirled up into Saturn’s dark heart now.

The ice, the ship, the others. All of this rained upon us.

The ancient alchemists, were partly right; for them, Saturn designated lead. They believed the planet was made of lead. And these water droplets, when they were tested?

Traces of lead. Surprised them all, the so-called smart ones. They hadn’t thought that.

Once the particles touched ground, they crystallised. It was beautiful to watch; we all thought so. Especially once they started to grow.

In the forests. In backyards. In bowls set as centrepieces. On roofs and walls, on the heads of statues, in footpath-cracks and sewers.

So many crystal trees.

Each of them growing up, up, towards Saturn.

My father worried that the magnetism would shift the earth off its axis, but he didn’t finish school. I told him lead isn’t magnetic.

It looks like silver, he said. He was one of many who broke pieces off, grew more trees.

Share the wealth, he said. The beautiful crystals shouldn’t only be for the rich, he said, and they weren’t.

The richest people in the world used to be the ones who owned the land that provided the metal. People like me didn’t get a look in. But now we all have own trees; they grow anywhere.

Air quality testing showed that the Saturn Trees were not only beautiful, but healthful; they attracted lead particles, literally sucking lead out of the atmosphere.

Places whose high lead content led to birth defects and early death grew more and more of them. We all did. All you needed was a small piece. Every home soon filled with the air-purifying trees. Every school. Every hospital.

Some trees grew tall as houses.

Some trees grew fat.

The trees were so beautiful you wanted to watch them all the time, and people did.

It seemed the trees absorbed light as well as lead because the world seemed duller, anywhere the trees grew.

They bore no fruit.

Not at first.

Saturn is time. Saturn is the Bringer of Age. Saturn is the bringer of melancholy and dismay. We didn’t notice the effect; the tiredness, the melancholy. The graveness.

We didn’t notice.

Not at first.

I scoop up the shards my son’s clumsiness knocked off and drop them onto the upper branches of our Saturn Tree. If I had the patience I could sit and watch them being absorbed. It’s hypnotic. It would distract me from thinking of him, out there amongst it. There are no good people this week. No one who will look after him, bring him home to me.

I wasn’t allowed out during the first Saturnalia. I stayed at home, listened to the dogs howl. By the time I was 16, though, they were mandatory and I was out amongst it. Blind drunk most of the time. Those crystals! And no regret the next day because who remembered anything? It’s why we don’t know who his dad is. Could be one of many. I don’t blame any of them. I don’t feel used by any of them. It’s how it was, it how it still is.

I don’t like having methylated spirits in the house. The alcohol smell of it takes me back. I’ve not touched a drink since the day he was born and we knew. We could see what he was. So many of them like that; damaged by the booze we’d drunk during Saturnalia and beyond. We didn’t know. We didn’t think. All we knew was that the crystals, dissolved in alcohol, provided an almost instant high and somehow negated the hangovers. Sparkle, we called it. They still call it. I spent a month in a state of numb euphoria; I didn’t care when Saturnalia started or finished.

He came out smelling of booze. I swear it. Not that sweet baby smell they are supposed to have. And his tiny eyes, his flattened cheekbones.

“We’re seeing a lot of these,” they told me gravely at the time, as if that made it better. Holding that tiny baby, his tiny head, and they say no one was to blame. Because no one wanted the Saturnalias stopped; they still don’t.

My son; what worries me most is what happens when I die. But I probably won’t die before him. He’s clumsy, so accident prone. His liver is shit and he’s impulsive. I can’t see him lasting too long. If he survives this Saturnalia, out there with the lunatics (not lunatics though. We’re not talking about the moon. The Saturnine) then perhaps he’ll be safe for another year.

He should be safe, and return to me and our quiet, clean life. He can help me move some heavy furniture around. It’s a good time for change, after Saturnalia. Good time to pretend things are different.

If he comes home in time he can eat with me, but I don’t mind eating alone. It’s a quick clean up. No spillage.

We are in the Saturnian days, my father used to say. He liked to quote from things he didn’t understand. “The days of dullness, when everything is venal,” he’d say, nodding as if we should know what he was talking about.

I feel dull. We all feel dull, but they numb that with alcohol. Drugs. Sparkle. With sex and dancing, throwing themselves to the ground in a passion they do not feel. These times are when Saturn is unbound. When we are all so grave on the inside if you cut us we’d bleed tears.

My father always did call me fanciful. I used to talk about Saturn, bound with woollen strips beneath Rome to stop him leaving, unbound only during Saturnalia. I think he is with us now, unbound because we worship him with our dullness, our melancholy.

Satin stains badly and is difficult to clean. I can do it, though, if you give me the time, some cool water and some delicate soap.

I hope my son comes home unbloodied.

I hope he kills no one.

He is back. He leaps and jumps about like a frog in a box; I’ve never seen him energised before. His clothing is in disarray, stained, his hair is shaved on one side, his face cut, his chin dark, his arms bruised, his legs bleeding. He talks without taking a breather for an hour or more, while I clean his cuts, feed him and give him tall, cold, sugary drinks. I sponge the stains with cool salted water, then rinse a dozen times with clean water. The rest I remove with hydrogen peroxide.

Dark days follow. After the excitement fades and the ordinary returns, the melancholy seems more intense. As if Saturn is angry that the revels have ended, and is exerting his power, laying his lead-weight against us. Some communities leave up the banners and bright ribbons, but they fade with the sun and became sadder than anything. I could wash them in vinegar but that wouldn’t be enough.

I try to help my son. I put him to work, because work distracts, and I need him to keep up. We took in more purple stains than usual; he told me they were passing around a grape drink that tasted like medicine but that numbed the entire body. I tried to find this drink, to give him a taste, cheer him up but there were no supplies in town.

He carries a tiny Saturn’s Tree with him everywhere, carefully, as if it was a full cup of tea.

Then a customer tells him about the grove.

“The greatest Saturn Trees you’ll ever see!” she says. “And you walk in amongst them and can feel your blood racing, your heart so solid and strong, and you smile, and you should hear the laughter in there. Strangers all together as one. It’s beautiful.”

I think of our own Saturn Tree, how even standing next to it makes my mouth droop, and my eyelids heavy.

“That doesn’t sound right,” I say. The customer laughs.