Stone Gods (8 page)

March 1774. We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the South East side of the island, but night put a stop to our endeavours.

'Where did these books come from?' I asked, but Handsome just shook his head.

'A repeating world — same old story.'

'What do you mean?'

'You'll hear enough of my theories later,' he said. 'Spike doesn't swallow a word of it.' He paused. 'I taught the crew to read.'

'Handsome is old-fashioned,' said Spike. 'He believes in reading and breeding.'

'Not me,' said Pink. 'I like downloads and womb-free.'

There was a whistle from above, and Handsome was called away to balance the solar sails. I took my chance. 'Spike, why is Handsome on this mission, and not the Central Power Space Force?'

'Handsome believes he has found a way to solve the problem that doesn't involve poison or nuclear pollution. The planet is pristine . . . '

'I was told they're already selling real estate,' said Pink. 'Dinosaurs will depress the house prices.'

'We underestimated the threat,' said Spike. 'Dinosaurs are an early evolutionary species, human beings are a late evolutionary species. We can't cohabit.'

'Y'know, I think that's what's wrong with my marriage,' said Pink.

'He's looking for an asteroid,' said Spike. 'He's going to use a gravity charge to deflect its course to collide with Planet Blue.' Handsome's swashbuckling science was beyond me; it seemed like a pretty dim idea to use space like a bowling alley to knock out the dinosaurs.

'That's not what he has in mind,' said Spike. 'The asteroid won't kill the dinosaurs directly, but indirectly. He's going to create a duststorm of a very particular kind . . . '

I looked at her. Green eyes, dark hair, olive skin. Perfect because she had been designed perfect. Low, gentle voice, intelligent face. If she had been human . . .

I wish she wouldn't read my mind.

It was suppertime. The crew sat round a long table facing plates the size of satellite dishes, spooning meat and vegetables from enormous steaming pans and helping each other to wine from a barrel. They were telling stories, the way all ship crew tell stories.

There's a planet they call Medusa. It's made of rock all right, but the rock has sharded and split so many times that there's nothing solid — just strands of rock, splintered out from the surface like thick plaits of hair. Like snakes. When the sky-winds blow, the rock-strands move, and something about the wind through them makes them sing. It's as if a head is turned away from you, always turned away, and singing through the darkness, dark and lonely, never see her face.

There's a planet called Morpheus. Its atmosphere is dense and heavy, like walking in heat after rain. Anything that flies into its orbit never comes out again. You can see in there the litter of spacecraft and tiny asteroids, and there's a man in a helmet, arms out, drifting through eternity. Get caught there, and you hang for ever, never to wake, an endless dream. The cloud-gas is a narcotic. It's a part of space that sleeps, like a castle in a wood, like an enchantment that missed the magic word. No time, no motion, a world held in waiting.

There's a planet called Echo. It doesn't exist. It's like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty. It comes on the radar, you fly towards it, there's nothing there. Our crew were outside, repairing the craft, and we saw it moving at speed right at us. It passed straight through the ship and through our bodies, and the strange thing that happened was the bleach. It bleached our clothes and hair, and men that had black beards had white. Then it was gone, echoing in another part of the starry sky, always, 'here' and 'here' and 'here', but nowhere. Some call it Hope.

Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found . . .

We found a planet, and it was white like a shroud. The planet was wrapped in its own death. We lowered ourselves through mists like mountains, cragged, formed, shaped, but not solid. Put out your hand and you put it through a ghost. Every solid thing had turned to thick vapour.

We dropped through winds that could not shift the clouds until we reached a land where the air — if it was air — was like paste. We would soon have made porridge out of our lungs if we had breathed it, and burning porridge too, for the place, as white and cold as death, is as hot as rage. The planet is a raging death.

Or it is a thing that has been killed and rages to be dead.

There were forests there — each leafless trunk brittle as charcoal, but not black, white. White weapons in blasted rows, as though some ancient army had rested its spears and never returned.

We moved slant-wise though the blasted spears that dwarfed us. Our boots sank into the white, crumbled rock of the planet's surface. Like cinders it was, cinders burned so hot that every blackness had been bleached out of them. Dig a spadeful, and there was nothing solid beneath. Vapour, crumbled rock, and the trees riddled through like white honeycomb, like some desperate thing had fought for a last hiding-place, and not found it.

There had been oceans on the white planet. We found a sea-floor, ridged and scooped, and shells as brittle as promises, and bones cracked like hope. White, everything white, but not the white of a morning when the sun will pour through it, nor the white of a clean cloth; not the white of a cheese where you can smell the green of the grass that fed the goat, nor the white of a hand that you love.

There is a white that contains all the colours of the world but this white was its mockery. This was the white at the end of the world when nothing is lift, not the past, not the present and, most fearful of all, not the future. There was no future in this bleached and boiled place. Nothing, not wild, not strange, not tiny, not vile, no good thing, no bad, could begin life again here. The world was a white-out. The experiment was done.

We found the ruins of a city, and the ruin of a road that ran to it. A proud place this had been, once upon a time, once upon a time like the words in a fairy tale. The ruins of a city, and it might have been sitting under the sea, for the pressure on the surface of this planet is as great as that half a mile under the sea. The weight of this world is its own despair.

Without armour of a kind, anyone would be crushed. Without oxygen, no one here can breathe at all. Without fireproof clothing, you would be charred as the rest of what was once life.

And yet there was once life here, naked and free and optimistic.

We walked through the sunken city, and into the Crypt of the planet, and there we found a thing that amazed us. Like an elephant's graveyard, the Crypt was stacked with the carcasses of planes and cars that continually melted in the intense heat and then reformed into their old shapes, or shapes more bizarre, as the cars grew wings, and the planes compressed into wheelless boxes with upturned tails.

Such heat without fire is hard to imagine, but this was the inferno, where a civilization has taken its sacrifices and piled them to some eyeless god, but too late. The sacrifice was not accepted. The planet burned.

The men cheered and banged the table, and Rufus barked.

'Is that a true story?' I said.

'Stories are always true,' said Handsome. 'It's the facts that mislead.'

Later, when the men had eaten, and we were alone, I spoke to Spike about the white planet. She pulled up some images from her database. There it was, bright as life, radiating the sky. How could it be dead?

She said, 'The strange thing about Planet White is that it shares the sun of Planet Blue. When we first found it we thought it would be viable for us, but investigation shows that life flourished there light years away from now, and that life was destroyed, or that life destroyed itself, which seems the only possible explanation. It is too near the sun now, that is true, and it has an atmosphere that is ninety-seven per cent carbon dioxide. It has become a greenhouse planet, but a cruel one, sheltering nothing. It no longer has water, though it is likely that water was once abundant.'

'And what about the Crypt?'

'I have seen the images. Call it a traveller's tale.'

'Is it a traveller's tale?'

She shrugged. 'Imagine it — walking through the whited-out world, fitted deep inside a thermal compression suit, like diving gear but built to withstand both pressure and intolerable heat. The petrified forest is there — carbonized tree remains, held in the heat, we don't know how, like a memory.

'And then there are oceanic indicators, yes, and then there is what might have been a city, yes, and what might have been a road, yes, but as unfathomable as those boiling explosions that form our own undersea worlds. And there is what those who have seen it call the Crypt.

'It is a landfill site, thousands of miles deep, and high, and filled with something that does not disappear, though it should. Those who have seen it are terrified and will swear that what they see are the twisted, destroyed shapes of planes and cars, more than could be counted, molten but not melted.'

'What else could it be?'

 
'A mirage. The heat is searing. White-hot clouds cover everything. For a moment, the clouds part. A man sees something he thinks he recognizes from another life. Does he recognize it or does he invent it?'

'What do you think?'

'I do not know.'

'But what do you think?'

'I'll tell you what I think,' said Captain Handsome, coming into the room and throwing himself on the bench, his head in Spike's lap, 'and I'll tell it the way any sailor would — through a story, an old old story this one, handed down from the ships to the space-ships.'

Handsome said:

There was a young man with a hot temper. He was not all bad, but he was reckless, and he drank more than he should, and spent more than he could, and gave a ring to more women than one, and gambled himself into a corner so tight an ant couldn't turn round in it. One night, in despair, and desperate with worry, he got into a fight outside a bar, and killed a man.

Mad with fear and remorse, for he was more hot-tempered than wicked, and stupid when he could have been wise, he locked himself into his filthy bare attic room and took the revolver that had killed his enemy, loaded it, cocked it and prepared to blast himself to pieces.

In the few moments before he pulled the trigger, he said, 'if I had known that all that I have done would bring me to this, I would have led a very different life. If I could live my life again, I would not be here, with the trigger in my hand and the barrel at my head.'

His good angel was sitting by him and, feeling pity for the young man, the angel flew to Heaven and interceded on his behalf.

Then in all his six-winged glory, the angel appeared before the terrified boy, and granted him his wish. 'In full knowledge of what you have become, go back and begin again.'

And suddenly, the young man had another chance.

For a time, all went well. He was sober, upright, true, thrifty. Then one night he passed a bar, and it seemed familiar to him, and he went in and gambled all he had, and he met a woman and told her he had no wife, and he stole from his employer, and spent all he could.

And his debts mounted with his despair, and he decided to gamble everything on one last throw of the dice. This time, as the wheel spun and slowed, his chance would be on the black, not the red. This time, he would win.

The ball fell in the fateful place, as it must. The young man had lost.

He ran outside, but the men followed him, and in a brawl with the bar owner, he shot him dead, and found himself alone and hunted in a filthy attic room.

He took out his revolver. He primed it. He said, 'If I'd known that I could do such a thing again, I would never have risked it. I would have lived a different life. If I had known where my actions would lead me ... ' And his angel came, and sat by him, and took pity on him once again, and interceded for him, and ...

And years passed, and the young man was doing well until he came to a bar that seemed familiar to him . . .

Bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again. Bar, bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again ... angel, bar, ball, bullets ...

Handsome sat up, leaning on one arm. 'The only intelligent life in the Universe. The only life in the Universe. Solitary, privileged, spinning alone on our red planet, the strangest serendipity of chance and good luck? Look out of the window. These burned-out rocks aren't all accidents of space. Humans or humanoids, or bionoids or mutants or ETS, who can say? but some life-form, capable like ours of developing, and, like all things that are capable of development, capable of destruction too.'

'Are you saying that the white planet ... '

'Was where we used to live.'