Polystom (2 page)

But he did love the view. Up here the sky was not the darker blue a ground-dweller saw; it was a rarefied, purified air, a delicate violet-blue, the colour of methylated-spirits. He could stare into the depths for hours at an end. It was almost a process of meditation.

For ten minutes, as his plane pulled away from the world and towards the moon, Stom busied himself. He undid his
harness, and rustled around in the compartment under his seat. His servants had provided him with some food, two flasks of drink (one alcoholic, one not), extra layers of clothing should the cold prove unusually sharp, some books to read. Polystom liked to read poetry, and his servants knew this fact. They also packed a medical basket, including painkillers, and Stom reached for this first. He took out two lenticular pills, and washed them down with one of his flasks of drink. What was it? Some fruit whisky or other. Blackberry whisky, possibly. It didn’t really matter.

The plane droned on.

The flight was necessarily lengthy, but Stom wasn’t in any sort of hurry. He stood up in the cockpit and turned to face the rear of the plane. This brought him within reach of the storage compartment, and this he opened, drawing out of it a thin bundle as long as a man’s height. Resting this upright in the cockpit, Polystom killed the engine and waited for the propellers to slow and stop. Coasting through the violet depths of interplanetary sky Stom’s plane would fly onwards, losing speed in small but inevitable increments until the gravitational tug of his world ceased and eventually reversed his trajectory. But Stom didn’t wait for this; he clambered out of the cockpit and lay over the warm engine casing, pulling free two bolt-catches and unfixing the propeller. This, hot from use, he removed and, turning, shoved it back into the cockpit. He had to wriggle backwards a little to retrieve the parcel, but then he easily untied it, unfolded the bent-up blades once, twice, three times, clicking each component into place. Finally, manoeuvring the enormous spindly thing easily enough in the miniature gravity, he slotted it into place and pushed the bolt-catches home.

Back in the cockpit he folded up the regular props and pushed them into the storage compartment. Then he gunned the engine to life again, and the vast arcs of the high-sky props spun round. Too fragile for use in the thicker air closer to ground, these interplanetary propellers
pulled the plane harder through the ethereal medium that occupied the spaces between worlds. It was a long journey; too long to travel the whole way on take-off-landing props. There was a kick, jerking Stom against the back of his seat, as his plane roared onwards. Up up up!

For a while Stom listened with pleasure to the rapid whish-whish of the propellers, the contented purr of the engine. The speed rose, until he was travelling three times the speed the smaller blades could manage, five times, ten. Then he fine-tuned the direction, positioning the plane a little more precisely so that it was angled at the very heart of the moon. Already the great globe seemed closer. Dusty green and greys on the patched surface swelled minutely before him.

Polystom retrieved the bottle. He ate one of the sandwiches and moistened his throat between bites. Then he finished the blackberry whisky, and lolled in the cockpit for an hour or more, staring out at the blue-violet depths of interplanetary sky. Being cradled in the near-nothingness of space drunk was a peculiar pleasure. Eventually Stom dozed, hushed by the rushing of the air around him.

He woke thirsty, and drank some water. Then he ate another sandwich. With these physical needs addressed, he looked around. The moon directly ahead was conspicuously larger; more detail visible on the cracked and cratered green of its surface. Stom swivelled, kneeling on his seat to give himself a better view of the world he had left behind. His world, the world of Enting, was receding slowly behind him. Most of its arc was visible; clouds draped the mosaic fineness of the ground in intermittent shreds. The stretch of the hemisphere-crossing Great Ocean gleamed dark-blue, with strands of cloud gathered like folds in clothing, or like the ripples in sand at low tide, covering half its surface.

Stom turned again, and played with the engine, gunning it, dethrottling. He pulled to the left, to the right, to check
responsiveness. It was so delightful, the way it responded, the way it fitted together, every component working in mechanical harmony with every other one. It sang in Polystom’s heart.

He refixed the throttle fully out, settled back in his seat, dozed again. On waking he scanned the sky in all directions; left and right, up and down, before and behind. Away to the fore and several miles below he picked out the shape of a balloon-boat, pen-shaped, bringing in some cargo from another world. Strictly speaking, planes were supposed to give balloon-boats a wide berth, but Stom disregarded the rule; of course it didn’t apply to him. He flipped off the catch and heaved the stick forward. The plane tipped forward, and within ten minutes the finger-sized balloon-boat was as big as a cathedral. A half-mile-long dark-green bladder of attenuated gas and storage compartments, piled above and below with towers to which were appended rank upon rank of mighty propellers. The passenger cabin, as big as the south wing of Stom’s own house, looked like a slug upon a giant marrow, nestling underneath. Polystom flew over the structure, coming close enough to see a steep-jack clinging to one engine carrying out some repair or other, and then circled round to sweep under it, where he could make out the faces of passengers in the observation globe. He waved, half-frantic with the excitement, but nobody returned the gesture.

These two vessels, tiny biplane and giant balloon-boat, in the violet sky between earth and moon, and nothing else. Stom circled for a while, until he finally provoked a response from the pilot, a blue-uniformed figure just visible in the wide porthole at the front of the command cabin. As Stom flew across the balloon-boat’s line of flight for the fourth time the miniature figure of the captain flapped his arm angrily, waving him away. Stom cheerily waved back, and then pulled the stick towards his body and flew up, over the vessel’s back, and away. He repositioned his plane
so that it was aimed once more at the centre of the moon and flew straight on.

He saw little else on his flight, and took to reading one of his books. Once, several hours later, he caught a glimpse of a skywhal, drifting mouth-open on a trajectory that took it behind the moon. It was unusual to see one of the great beasts so close in to a planetary body, and Stom wondered excitedly whether it was going to beach itself. But, on closer examination, it was a small creature, its fronds little developed, and so was almost certainly still a youngster, still exploring, not yet settled into one of the great cometary orbits that mature skywhals preferred, away from the gravitational disturbances of planets.

Stom flew on.

He regretted, now, having finished off his whisky so quickly. He was sober again and a drink would have been very pleasant. He tried to concentrate on his book but kept nodding off. He dozed, half awake, half asleep.

Hours later the moon had grown until it filled most of the sky. Stom could make out features in its enormous face; lakes, canals, mountain ranges like trails of crushed nuts; broad patches of algal green, very sharply coloured in the eternal light of interplanetary spaces. There were narrower strips of cultivation, darker green. The desert areas, grey-silver, scattered a paler albedo across the great landscape. Three seas were evident, each of them, Stom knew from experience, no more than a few feet deep, though many tens of miles wide. His uncle Cleonicles lived on the shores of one of them, the Lake of Dreams, the
Lacus Somniorum
, as it was rather fancifully called. A sludgy pond stretched miles wide, too shallow and treacly with algae even to swim in. But Cleonicles’ house was pleasant enough; not as large as so famous or senior a man deserved, Stom thought, and too much filled with machines and artefacts, but pleasant nonetheless. Four-legged birds, stork-boars, polopped their quiet way through the shallow waters, dotting the green sea
out to the horizon; trees grew to spectacular height and slenderness in the lesser lunar gravity; vegetable worms crawled sullenly across the lawn. Some of Polystom’s happiest days had been spent sitting in a comfortable chair on his uncle’s lawn, overlooking the stagnant Lake of Dreams, chatting earnestly away whilst his uncle nodded and hummed. Cleonicles was a peaceful man, in this respect resembling his dead brother, Stom’s father. He was not as silent a person as Stom’s father had been, but neither was he the sort of person to monopolise the conversation. Stom had visited the moon many times since his father’s death. He regarded it as something of a sanctuary.

Polystom’s father had been dead four years, his co-father almost as long.

Polystom had married after his father’s death, but the marriage had not prospered. The looked-for solace had not materialised. Stom had spent months in mourning for it. He lived alone now, often lonely and with a distant sense of something amiss in his life. To speak of the woe that is in marriage!

And so he came again to the moon. Picking out the horned shape of the Lacus Somniorum, away on the right-hand border of the moon, Polystom swung his plane’s trajectory away from its dead-centre targeting. The gravity of the satellite was strong enough now to render the larger props redundant, and Stom spent several minutes changing them for the regular blades. Then he pulled into a shallower and still shallower approach as the moon swelled to encompass almost half the sky. Finally, as he had done many times before, he saw the curve of the Lunar Mount to his left, and set a course for a notch in the horizon that had opened up before him. The air grew warmer, and Stom turned off his flying suit, unbuttoned his jacket. His scarf sank slowly as it rediscovered weight, until it was draped in his lap. Soon enough the Lake of Dreams unfurled beneath him, glisteningly green and dotted with stork-boars. He
passed over his uncle’s house, circled round, and dropped easily down to land on the back lawn. The plane rolled, slowed, shuddered to a halt.

He had taken off his helmet and goggles and was clambering out of the cockpit before the engine had even started slowing; servants scurried towards him, and behind them he could make out the genial shape of his uncle waving his stick in greeting.

Cleonicles, Polystom’s uncle, was at this time perhaps the most famous scientist in all the System. For long years he had worked on the celebrated Computational Device, the enormous valve-and-crystal machine that could undertake all manner of mathematical operations on a fantastic scale and with fantastic speed. He had been one of the party of three (this was many years ago, in his youth) responsible for initiating the project, his own, and later other patrons’ money boosting construction of ground-based and later free-floating devices, vast scaffolds of electrical connection. The newsbooks called it the Greatest Work of Man, or sometimes the Summation of Human Knowledge.

Polystom, who knew his uncle as a genial old man with threads of white in his grey beard, had come late to knowledge of his uncle’s celebrity.
Fame
, he realised belatedly, was something different from breeding, although of course his uncle was amongst the best bred in the System. This was something
else
, the young Polystom had realised with a jolt. His uncle, his pleasant-faced old uncle, was revered not just for what he was, but for
what he had done
. Understanding this marked, in an understated way, a revolution in the young fellow’s thinking. He had been thirteen years old, and visiting Cleonicles on the moon in the company of his father. To stave off boredom on the flight, being too young to take the controls himself, he had read one of his father’s discarded newsbooks, the
News Volume
for November. It was mostly given over to ecstatic reporting of the latest
incarnation of the Computational Device, one larger than all the previous ones put together. The name Cleonicles appeared on every page, and towards the back of the book there was a lengthy word-portrait of him.

Latterly, Professor Cleonicles has withdrawn himself from the grander designs of the Computational Device committee; he lives now in ‘splendid isolation’, if we may be permitted to borrow a metaphorical phrase from the Political Military, on the moon of Enting, ‘to be near my close family’ he has announced. He devotes himself now to that arcane branch of scientific knowledge, star-research. ‘I find the very notion of these superb, barren mountains of fire hanging in nothingness – literally nothingness! – to be poetic and engaging to the highest degree,’ the Professor has said
.

All through that visit, taking wine-lees tea on the lawn of his uncle’s house, looking over the Lacus Somniorum, Polystom had been too excited to sit still. Had his co-father been there he would have been rebuked for fidgeting, but his father was too placid to care, and his uncle smiled his understanding smile.

‘They called the Computational Device the great achievement of humanity!’ young Polystom had said. ‘And
you
invented it!’

‘Hardly, my boy,’ said Cleonicles. ‘There were three of us in the initial team, and many more helped turn our rough-ready theories into the practice of the CDs themselves.’

‘They’re building the biggest Computational Device of all!’ Polystom had gushed. ‘It said so in the newsbook!’

‘They’ve built it,’ said Cleonicles, pouring his brother some more tea. ‘Now they’re just fine-tuning it. There are experiments, for which the machine was designed. Actually, they’ve run into a spot of trouble.’

Polystom’s father, the elder Polystom, sighed and smiled
as he lifted the cup to his mouth, as if to imply that trouble and error were inevitabilities in this System of theirs.

‘Why did you leave that project, uncle?’ Polystom asked earnestly. ‘How could you leave something so exciting?’

One of the things that Stom loved about his uncle was that he never shirked or side-stepped a question. He always answered directly. ‘Partly because the nuts-and-cogs of Computational Devicery aren’t as exciting as they sound to young ears like yours. Partly because I had disagreements with the others on my team.’