The Lowest Heaven (21 page)

“A part of an orchestra.”

“Maybe. But at least I will keep on living, as sound, as one note in a perfect symphony.”

“While mine will fade and die?” Shereen said, wryly. Aliyah touched her face. “I did not mean...” she said.

“I know what you meant.”

Aliyah withdrew her hand. “I don’t want a fight,” she said, softly.

“Then don’t start one.”

They stared at each other in silence across the bed. Then: “I’m sorry,” Shereen said.

“No, I’m –”

Outside a mosque was calling the faithful to prayer; green cockatoos sang to each other across the tall spindly trees; a group of children ran down the corridor chasing a ball; inside the room it was dark; and nothing, for the moment, was resolved.

It was, essentially, a trade dispute.

Though what is trade if not religion, and what is religion if not commerce? It was, perhaps, first and foremost about prestige.

Old tensions rose to the lunar surface...

The Houses were never so crass as to engage in open warfare. A century earlier the so-called Format Wars erupted in Polyport. Who is to say a Three-times-Three is the perfect format, for instance, for a human network? It is linked on a grid. A single unit – a One-times-One – can operate independently when need be, at normal human capacity, but it can also link with two of its sisters, forming a One-times-Three linear triple processor. Those Trips can then link vertically and horizontally to form a grid, a perfect – so they say – unit, a true Sisterhood.

Haifa al-Sahara, or rather the Three-times-Three Sisterhood that had once contained the human once known by that name, argued for the perfection of the form. But others had ambition, and no such faith in the purity of her numbers.

The first Eight-times-Eight had founded the House of Domicile, and others soon followed. The Sisters of the House of Mirth argued the form was too cumbersome, processing ponderous, optimal operations sluggish at best.

And yet the Eight-times-Eights flourished, and the House of Domicile soon encompassed five Sisterhoods, of which it was said that they sometimes joined, in a grid of Five-times-Eight-times-Eight, a massive processing mind occupying some four stories of real estate, only one of which was above ground.

Obviously, the House of Domicile proclaimed its own superiority, and that – naturally – rankled with the House of Mirth, as the oldest and – up to that time – strongest of the newly-risen Houses and Sisterhoods. Then came the Sisterhoods of Odd, the Five-times-Sixes of the House of Forgetting, asymmetrical and strange, and they allied themselves with the House of Domicile’s Eight-times-Eights.

Two factions, then: the three houses of the Three-times-Threes, versus the other two houses and their multiplicity of Sisterhoods.

A century back, the rise of the Houses led to conflicts both within and without; over a period of some twenty years the Houses consolidated, accumulated followers and adherents, and finally rested in an uneasy peace.

That peace was now in danger of breaking, and thus unsettling Titanic society as a whole.

The Houses, therefore, sought a compromise...

It was late at night, in Shereen’s apartment. That special silence that comes with deep night, when even the birds sleep. When I-loops all across and down the city processed slowly, neural networks embedded in a grey mass within a bone skull, billions of neurons firing together into the illusion of an “I”, a “me”, all sinking, momentarily, into a dream or dreamless state, the one akin to hallucination, the other to death.

They had made love; the bedsheets clung to their skin with the sweat. A single candle burned on Shereen’s windowsill. Aliyah said, “The old cell, the One-times-One: her health is better.”

“I see.”

“You are happy?”

Shereen pulled herself up, the light from the candle threw shadows on the wall. “I don’t want you to become one of them,” she said. The words cost her everything. Getting them out at last felt like a revelation. Aliyah laughed, softly. “Do you think I don’t know?”

“Then why do you do it? Do you not love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then
why
?”

“Because I want to. I need to. Because there is more to life than you or me. I want to be a part of something bigger than either of us.”

“But why?” all the pain inside her came out in that voice.

“I don’t know why,” Aliyah said, but gently. That night she was very gentle, even her love-making was filled with care; it contrasted with Shereen’s urgency. “I just know.”

“But they will not take you. Not the Three-times-Threes. Not when they have all their parts –”

“Yes –”

“What?” Shereen said – demanded. Suspicion, hurt, in her eyes.

“I have been going to the House of Domicile,” Aliyah said quietly.

“When?” Shereen’s voice, too, was low. “I did not see you there.”

“I know. I went when you were not working. I did not want to upset you.”

“And now?”

“You’re upset. We can talk about it in the morning.”

“We can talk about it now.”

Aliyah sighed.

“Why have you been going to the House of Domicile?” That suspicion, again. “You want to join another Sisterhood?”

“Not... exactly.”

“Then what? I don’t –”

“Don’t you?”

It was so quiet in the room. The candle fluttered in invisible wind from outside. “They won’t,” Shereen said. “They can’t.”

Aliyah moved to her; Shereen moved away. “Don’t,” she said.

“They can.
We
can. Shereen –”

“Don’t!”

“It is better that I do this. It is better than conflict. Better than war. We cannot afford it, not again, not so soon. Not the city, not the world. The Houses have too much power, now.”

“It should never have come to that.”

“What would you have instead? Others?”

“People,” Shereen said.

“Oh, grow up, Shereen.” She made as if to push back a lock of hair, then found that, of course, it wasn’t there. There was something innocent, human, about that gesture. At that moment Shereen couldn’t help but love her very much. “And we are people, too.”

“Since when is it we?” Shereen said; but she sounded defeated. “When?” she said.

“Soon.”

“And they agree? Both of them?”

“They agree to try.”

“We would not see each other.”

“No.”

“Would you even know who I was?”

“Of course I would. We would. You would always live on, Shereen. In my – in our – memory. Even when my body and yours are back in the ground, fertilisers of new life in the gardens.”

“Trust you to bring the conversation back to death, and fertiliser?” Shereen tried to laugh; it came out choked. “Were you always so obsessed with death?”

“Not with death but with not dying,” Aliyah said; her body shook, and it took Shereen a moment to realise she was crying.

“Come here,” she said, awkwardly. Aliyah came to her and nestled in Shereen’s arms. Shereen could feel her heart beating, inside the fragile, human frame of her. “Is it really so bad?” she said, but even as she spoke, she knew it was futile; that Aliyah had already decided, decided long ago, perhaps; and that this was simply her choosing of a time to finally say goodbye.

The Initiation and the end of Aliyah’s Novitiate came some two weeks later, at a private ceremony in the House of Forgetting, which was historically the least affiliated – and the weakest – of the Houses. A Three-times-Three from the House of Mirth was there, and an Eight-times-Eight from the House of Domicile. And there, in between them, was Aliyah – dressed in a plain white shift, her head unscarfed and bare, the fine blue veins of filaments running underneath her translucent skin.

Shereen, too, was there – not as a guest, but unobtrusive, cleaning. She saw the Sisterhoods meet, half-heard as they conversed, aware of the high-bandwidth transfer of data around her, and the half-understood words, and subtle signals of physical signs. She daren’t watch too much, there was something in her eyes, it must have been the chemicals in the new cleaning fluid, its smell made it hard for her to breathe.

Aliyah shone brightly, like an angel. Light suffused her, it rose from her skin, from her eyes. The Houses could not fight and so they’d reached a compromise, a way of speaking which was a way of sharing: and a One-times-One became a point linking two networks, became a router and a hub, became a One-times-Eight-times-Eight-times-Three-times-Three, was cleaved in two; and spliced together.

When it was over there was no discernible sign; only the act of both Sisterhoods slowly departing, without words; only their hosts remaining, and the newest Sister, the one who belonged to two Sisterhoods, and had once known Shereen.

Shereen scrubbed the surface of the table, scrubbed it until its wooden surface shone. When she raised her head again even the host Sisters were gone; when she turned back to the surface of the table, she saw Aliyah, momentarily, reflected in it. She turned her head. Aliyah stood there, watching her. Shereen raised her hand. Her fingers brushed Aliyah’s cheek, the skin of her face. Aliyah bore it without words. Her eyes watched Shereen, and yet they didn’t see her. After a moment she inched her head, as if acknowledging, or settling, something. Then she, too, were gone.

There are four Three-times-Three Sisters in the House of Mirth, and five in the House of Heaven and Hell, and two in the House of Shelter. Four plus five plus two Three-by-Threes, and they represent one faction of the city.

There are two Five-time-Six Sisters in the House of Forgetting, and five Eight-by-Eights in the House of Domicile, and they represent a second faction of the city.

There is a bridge between them, now. An understanding, and cargo continues to come and go through Polyphemus Port. And Shereen who is a one, and will one day be zero, continues to work in the House of Mirth, and in the House of Domicile, and she watches the Sisters on their silent comings and goings; and she wonders, sometimes, of what could have been, and of what didn’t; but to do that is, after all, only human.

I qualied at the prospect of the void between the planets. Would it be cold or fiery? In a perpectual storm?

Detail of “Urania’s Mirror”: one of 32 cards illustrating the heavens for the latitude of London. The cards are hand-coloured and show the constellations. Each star is pricked out in the centre, and due to the tissue paper backing, the light shines through when the card is held up. (c1825)

ESTHER SAXEY

The
RMS Carmania
stood at dock, serene despite the gull screams and mud stink. Christopher had left me watchdog to three trunks and a brace of hatboxes.

A lad rushed over to earn a tip.

‘Saw yer friend,’ he said, as he loaded the trunks onto a trolley. “Are you two artists?”

I would be leaving England within the hour. A queer impulse prompted me to announce: “No. We are Uranians.”

To my surprise, he grinned.

“What, is that like a Martian? Are you two from another planet?”

It wasn’t even the first time I’d heard this witticism. I began to hate Mr. H.G. Wells.

Being Uranians has led Christopher and me to travel a lot. Never fleeing in disgrace. Not yet. Not quite. Few trips came as near the knuckle as our escape to Paris, ten years ago.

Christopher and I had met at College (Trinity) but we hadn’t been the best of friends, only two of a group. As we lost good men to marriage, we grew more intimate. Not loving, not on my part. Perhaps had he been taller, less hairy, less like an anxious mole... But why would all that matter, you ask, when Uranian love is for the noble disposition? (Plato told Christopher so, and Christopher told me.) At the time, I believed that nobility would shine through in some physical way: graceful movement, sparkling eyes. So I would love my beloved’s mind, but my beloved would also be beautiful. I was insufferable.

Christopher took me out every week for art or opera. He gave me Uranian pamphlets, which I forgot to read, and poetry, which made me melancholy. In his presence I felt, always, that I was failing an examination.

Until one night when he burst into my rooms, hatless and agitated.

“He’ll be arrested this evening!”

We were admirers of Oscar Wilde (you could have known it by our neckties alone). Oscar’s libel case had just taken a disastrous turn.

Christopher cried: “We have to leave England!” He then made the most eloquent plea of his life. His proposal: we take the boat train that night to Paris, to live where laws were more liberal.

I’d been torn between two idols, until that moment. Should I be a witty cynic, like Wilde? Or embrace the world as my brother, and find delight in every drop of dew, like Walt Whitman in his poems? I’d ricocheted between the two approaches, by turns aloof and sentimental. Now, Christopher was pushing me hard towards Whitman-ish optimism: freedom, he said, brotherhood!

While my man packed for me, I mused aloud: “If you think it’s dangerous to stay, perhaps I should warn some of my friends...”

“Oh. Well, we
could
.” He was right to be sullen, because I was lying. I wasn’t thinking of danger. No, I was thinking: I could burst in on a friend, the same way Christopher had burst in on me. Make the same impassioned speech, steal all Christopher’s best lines. Woo my friend! Win him!

And I would have done it. But there wasn’t one man who stood out above the others. Uranian love is lifelong (said Plato-through-Christopher). So I couldn’t accidentally shackle myself to a dullard. I’d been flitting about and fantasising, dithering over who to honour with my constancy.

The Waterloo platform was white with steam and swarming. Valets crowded the train corridors. Gentlemen sat in silent rows in every compartment, spines stiff with nerves. Nobody spoke. Half the Uranians of London were on the train.

Christopher’s energy was spent, but I was exhilarated by our flight. I wondered: should I make a speech?
Brothers! We are travelling together. Once we reach Paris, must we disperse, like droplets in the ocean? Is this the greatest gathering of our kind since Athens? Surely, we should... We must...

I stood in the corridor by an open window, getting my nerve up. I looked into the starry night and told myself that the dark was as homelike and wholesome to me as the day. My brothers were beautiful (although not, I thought, all equally beautiful, and some couples shockingly mismatched). And somewhere up above us was our planet: gorgeous, mysterious Uranus. Pale blue, glowing from within, winding around the sun once every eighty-four years (Chris owned a small book on the subject). Unknowable, remote! My ruling celestial body!

“Everything to your satisfaction, sir?”

He spoke like a steward, but his bottle-green velvet suit put the lie to it.

“One shouldn’t have all one’s satisfactions satisfied,” I spluttered, failing to be Wildean.

His face was sly and his nose was broken. Edward Carpenter, the socialist said (via Christopher) that love may exist most purely between men of different classes. I wondered: who buys this lad’s clothes? Who bought his ticket for this train? His arm pressed mine as the train jolted. It was all very sudden. Were we both under the influence of our heavenly patron?

“Sir,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”

The last trace of my cynicism boiled away. I gave my passionate assent.

He pulled back and smirked. “That’s handy to know,” he said, and hopped off up the corridor, to boast to his chums.

I crept back to my compartment. I didn’t make a speech to my fellow travellers.

On the ferry to France, I felt my purpose renewed. My lustful body was lost property. In Paris, I would be pure. No more self-deception. No more frittering my time looking for noble minds at tennis clubs. I’d been a terrible Uranian – we should be scholars, but I’d never stuck to any kind of study. I turned to Christopher.

“I didn’t bring anything to read. Do you...?”

I wondered if he would produce
A Problem in Greek Ethics
and the deck would ring with cries of recognition. But he pulled out a slim tome from the Theosophists. I winced at the opening sentence:
Kâmaloka as it is called in Sanskrit...
But then the tone altered. The author was speaking of something termed the
astral plane
. He assured me that the astral plane was absolutely
real
. As real as Charing Cross. I missed Charing Cross already. I was persuaded of his common sense.

I read about the astral body, a thing apart from the fleshly body. The concept gripped me. (Of course it did: I had more-or-less eloped with a man I didn’t desire, and I wished to be so spiritual that his hairy hands wouldn’t distress me.)

I read that my astral body could fly through the air, if I desired it. No, if I put my
mind
to it.

At our Parisian hotel Christopher slept. In my room, I prepared to make a further, audacious journey.

The book on astral travel had frustratingly little in the way of instruction. I lay on my bed, conscious of my sweating back. The boy from the train drifted into my mind, and I pushed him away. I pushed away all fleshly things – I pushed myself out of my body.

I left. I lifted. It had worked. I hovered.

I feared to look down on my own fleshly body, so I passed on, up, through the ceiling of the hotel room. I was naked. I was naked of
myself
, without a body. I wasn’t cold. I could hear, faintly, the horses and the music of the Paris street. But my only crisp sense was sight. I saw Paris – a glittering mosaic. I took it in at a glance and then looked up to the stars. Could I go up, I thought, until the lights of the stars and the lights of Paris were of equal size, constellations above and below me?

How to move? Against what could I push? Should I flap my arms? I had no arms. I saw the moon. I thought: there! And leapt.

Such a pace would have made my stomach sick but I had no stomach. I was gleeful at my lightness and speed. Nevertheless, I quailed at the prospect of the void between the planets. I’d forgotten most of what I’d read in Christopher’s small book. Would it be cold or fiery? In a perpetual storm? It was calm as a millpond and almost empty. Dust, small rocks, passed through me.

The pockmarked face of the moon grew closer, whiter. I thought the surface would become less stark, but it remained without colour, and without grey shades; it was all white planes and black shadows. I was dazzled – I blinked – I did not blink, having no eyelids. Then why was I dazzled, having no eyes? I found that if I opened every part of myself to perception, I could see-perceive with other-eyes, and look straight at the sheets of lava, shiny as a japanned table, which had previously blinded me.

No living world, this. No greenery in the crevices and crevasses (and no plants of other colours, either, Mr Wells). Severity everywhere in form as well as palette: sharp lava fragments piled like spillikins. I saw soundless avalanches rush down from the summits of volcanoes. I tried to listen with other-ears, and heard instead a great growling, like arguments shouted between nations.

Some of the lava and stones of this uninhabited land resembled ramparts and amphitheatres. I thought it an unsettling coincidence. Then I couldn’t be sure: soaring over one plane, I saw beneath me a shape like a fortress, perched over a riverbed. I thought I saw arches, pillars, fallen columns, an aqueduct, even? But perhaps they were spat out by the thousand local Etnas, or whittled by lunar hurricanes.

I longed to know but I found I couldn’t stoop or stop. I was exhausted. As soon as my efforts slackened, I felt, attached to me, a sort of silver cord that I somehow knew connected me to my fleshly body. It tugged me like the kind hand of a good friend on my shoulder:
Come along, old boy, you’ve had enough.

I flew home. The moon was plucked from me, dwindled, became a coin in the sky.

The silver cord hauled me in. A good thing, too, I thought, as I approached the rooftops of Paris: I’d not remembered where in the city I was lodged.

Snap! I woke breathless and chilled. In my murky brown bedroom, the memory of that austere landscape was like a slap. It had been the most terrific experience of my life.

“Sounds like Verne,” Christopher said, ripping open a pastry.

“Like what?”

“That story by Jules Verne. Griffiths read it to us, at a picnic at college. In translation, of course.”

I nodded. I blew across a bowl of hot chocolate. I was enjoying, supremely, being back in my body. Knowing it as only one of my bodies. It took me a while to think through the implications of Christopher’s suggestion.

“Without eyes...” I began.

“What?” I’d interrupted him.

“Sorry – without my eyes, when I was travelling, I was perceiving through some other sense.”

“And?”

“I was perceiving things too far from my own experience for me to understand them. So I translated them into familiar forms. Perhaps with practice, I could see more truly...”

“I expect you were lucid dreaming!” he cried. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a dream state...”

“One travels in a dream state?”

He rolled his eyes.

“One
thinks
one travels. You make things up, you direct your imagination while you’re asleep.”

He was impressed how much I’d controlled my dream state, how far I had pulled the wool over my own eyes. He urged me to “travel” again.

But there were other things to occupy me. We had to find a flat, Paris demanded to be explored. And my cynical Wildean side sneered: really? Cities in space? Moon-men? Who are you, to explore the stars? Until the memory of my trip crumpled my chest like the end of a love affair.

I never had a firm opinion as to whether Christopher or I was right. But I didn’t travel again.

After a year, he was calling himself Christophe. I slunk back, treacherously, to England. “Oscar isn’t even released from prison, yet!” objected Christopher. But I missed Charing Cross. Christopher had made friends with French men, but I hadn’t: my sense of universal brotherhood had ebbed, and I couldn’t manage the vowels.

I thought, often, whether it would have been different if I’d made my speech on the train. If I’d allowed sincerity to conquer cynicism. I became, without meaning to, cold and distant. I was on a fixed path, unable to intersect with warmer men.

Christopher forgave me enough to take me, once or twice a year, on a trip. Each expedition had a fraction of the exhilaration of our Parisian exile: trunks packed, the funnel of a boat steaming. We looked for communities of Uranians in Sweden, India, Turkey, and (endlessly) Greece. My feelings of guilt towards my friend were as hefty as my luggage.

So now, as we found our cabins on the
Carmania
setting out for America, I bowed the knee to him again.

“I’ve forgotten to bring anything to read. Could I borrow something from your excellent little library?”

He drew out a pile of books. Amazingly, amongst them was the volume from our French trip, on astral travel. For sentimental reasons?

Once more, the book drew me in. I went to my bed as eagerly as a bridegroom. I would slip the bonds of earth. I would touch the face of heaven.

It wasn’t my wrath at Mr. Wells alone that set my destination. I knew – I believed – that I had once travelled to the moon. I could reach, surely, for our nearest planet?

A moment of hyperawareness. My itching nose. The crisp sheets.

Then, up! This time, I was flying in daylight. The ship underneath me was a white toy on a blue sea, and when I climbed – and I did so confidently – the stars came out. Towards the great white face of the moon and past it. Its dark side was the first thing that really frightened me: craters the size of countries, with shadows so dark that I hallucinated things that squirmed and sparkled.

I marshalled all I remembered from Christopher’s small book and located the Red Planet. A red dot like a hot star. I set my course towards it and leaped.

And Wells was wrong! He was wrong entirely. I didn’t even need to get close enough to see the surface of the planet before I knew he was mistaken. The red of Mars wasn’t caused by a weed, or any kind of plant. Instead, it was – as far as I could tell – a property of dust. A hot and howling crimson mist, caused by ceaseless sandstorms. Like the haunted landscapes in the largest rubies: demon-chasms, their walls collapsing in, but never filling them, as debris is always boiling up out of them.

I sought a quieter spot: the long canals of Mars. I swooped down and hid in their cool, geometric shelter.