The Lowest Heaven (3 page)

Are you horrified? You should not be. This is the state of being that Mercury demands of us.

Glove puppet ghost, part of a Punch and Judy belonging to puppeteer Peter Butchard (1909 - 2009). This puppet is used for the play’s “look behind you” moment, as the audience sees the ghost who is out of sight of Punch.

ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

When at last his ship had escaped Mercury’s gravitational pull and aligned itself for the long cruise back to Jupiter space, Oleg unstrapped from his launch couch and floated through the cabin until he reached the aft stowage rack where he had slotted the artwork. It had been a fight against temptation, not opening the box until now, but he had promised himself that he would not do so until he had reached space. Perhaps it was unwise to open it at all, and certainly before he surrended it to his Jovian masters. But he had been given no special instructions in the matter.

The box was light, almost too light, as if it contained no more than air or packing. Was it a last trick on the world, he wondered? An empty container? A box full of high-grade vacuum?

He would have to open it to know.

The container was an unprepossessing object. It was a plain white in colour. Its upper third was hinged and secured by a simple metal clasp. It was the kind of thing, he reflected, in which one might recieve a hat or perhaps a new space helmet.

The clasp released easily under his fingers. He hinged open the top of the box. Immediately beneath the lid lay, as anticipated, a wadding of packaging. He plucked the cottony material away, until a harder form began to reveal itself. It was the upper part of a rough-textured sphere. It was beautifully shaded and coloured – a warm grey, relieved by blue and gold mottling and the circles and sprays of fine white cratering. The polar region glittered with tiny embedded diamonds, signifying motherlodes of frozen water, locked in shadowed craters for mindless aeons.

Well, of course. It was a globe. The clue had been there in the title all along.

A Map of Mercury.

He had come in with high expectations – unrealistically high, perhaps.

The artists kept the place clean. Being cyborgs they could tolerate both the lit and unlit faces of the slow-turning world, but they moved anyway – camping and then travelling on, endlessly. Except for their artforms, littering the crust like Ozymandis heads, they left no trace of themselves. On airless Mercury the shadows of these things clawed out to the limit of the world’s curvature.

From orbit he had locked onto their moving caravan. It had only been a little distance ahead of the terminator, the dividing margin between day and night.

“Hello,” he declared cheerfully. “I have come from Jupiter. I would like permission to land and speak with Rhawn.”

“This is the Cyborg Artistic Collective,” came back the reply. “Thank you for your interest, but your request to speak with Rhawn is declined.”

Oleg smiled, for this was nothing more or less than he had anticipated. “I’d still like to land. Is that possible?”

“Do you have tradeable goods?”

“Yes, and I’d also like to barter for fuel. I can set my ship down a little ahead of your caravan and cross the remaining ground on foot.”

“That is acceptable,” the voice said eventually. “One of us will meet you. Bring your tradeables.”

He lowered on thrust until his little ship pinned itself to the face of Mercury like a brooch. Once down, it flicked a parasol across itself and began to cool down.

Oleg emerged from an airlock in a bulky spacesuit patterned with active mirror facets and fanlike cooling vanes. He went around to the back of the ship and unpacked two scuttling chrome spiders. The robots helped him unload the tradeable goods from the ship’s belly hatch. Then he orientated himself and set off for the caravan, with the spiders following.

Here the Mercurean terrain was as flat as a salt lake. The caravan was a huge, raggedy thing composed of many travelling elements. Some as small as a person – some, indeed, were cyborgs jogging next to the procession – while others were as big as mansions or beached spacecraft. The larger structures were made up of a bits of scavenged vehicle, fuel tank and pressure module, cut-and-shut into rococo dwellings. Sails, banners and penants whipped high into the airless black. On one platform travelled the huge, lacy outline of a two hundred metre high stallion. Inside the horse’s geodesic chest cavity, tiny figures worked with nova-bright welding torches. Another form, equally tall, was a naked human woman balancing on one leg. She had her arms cantilevered out for balance, one ahead and one behind. Jammed into her torso at odd, disruptive angles were repurposed cargo modules.

One of the cyborgs broke from the pack and jogged out to meet him. Beneath its knees, the cyborg’s legs were springy prosthetics that sent it metres into the sky with each stride.

“Welcome, Oleg,” said a synthetic voice. “We spoke earlier. I am Gris. Have you been to Mercury before?”

“No, this is my first time. Thank you for allowing me to land.”

“That is a very impressive suit,” Gris said. “I imagine it could keep you alive for quite a while?”

“Not as long as yours, I’d wager,” Oleg said.

“Ah, but we don’t think of our suits as
suits
.” Gris touched a fist to its chest, in a kind of salute. “This is my skin, now and forever. I’m wired into it on a profound sensory level – full haptic and proprioceptive integration. I don’t just
live
in it – it’s part of me. I trust that doesn’t unsettle you?”

“If it did, I’d be the wrong person to come to Mercury. And definitely the wrong person to speak to the Cyborg Artistic Collective.”

Gris’s suit – or skin, if that was the proper way to think of it – was a mechanical integument giving little hint of the organic contents within. The armour was multicoloured and baroquely patterned. Gris’s helmet had become a beak-faced gargoyle, with multiple cameras wedged into its eye-sockets. There was no glass or visor.

“I know you’ve come a long away,” Gris said. “But you mustn’t take Rhawn’s disinterest personally.”

They walked under the Sun. In Oleg’s view it had no business being
that big
or
that bright
. The intensity of its illumination, averaged over an orbit, was a hundred times stronger than he was normally used to. That bloated inflamed Sun was an affront to his sensibilities. It would be very good to be on his way from Mercury, back to the civilised polities of Jovian Space.

But not without the thing he had come for.

“Rhawn’s star has risen,” he observed.

“It makes no difference to her. Mercury is her home now. The sooner people accept that, the happier everyone will be. Are those your tradeables?”

“It’s not much, I know. But there are some rare alloys and composites in there, which you may find of value.”

When they were at the caravan cyborgs were waiting to pick through his offerings. A value would be placed on the items, which Oleg was free to accept or decline.

“You can come aboard,” Gris said casually. “We have provision for guests, if you wish to get out of the suit. It will take a little while to give you a value for your goods, so you may as well.”

“Thank you,” Oleg agreed.

Gris brought him to one of the sliding, sledge-like platforms. They vaulted up onto a catwalk, then found an airlock leading into the side of a chequered structure made from an old fuel tank. Oleg satisfied himself by just removing the helmet and gloves, placing them next to him on a kind of combination sofa and padded mattress. Gris, squatting on the other side of a table, had removed no part of its suit except the spring extensions of its legs, presently racked by the door. Now it busied itself pouring herbal infusions into little alloy cups.

“Were you an artist before you came here?” Oleg asked, to be making conversation.

“Not at all. In fact I came to trade, just like you. My spaceship needed some repairs, so my stay turned from days into weeks. I had no intention of becoming part of the Collective.”

“Were you… like this?”

“Cyborgized, you mean? No, not at all. A few simple implants, but they don’t really count.” The goggled face was inscrutable, even as it decanted tea into a little receptacle on the end of its beaklike mandible. “It was a difficult decision to stay, but one that in hindsight was almost inevitable. There’s nowhere like this anywhere else in the system, Oleg – nowhere as simultaneously lawless and civilised. Around Jupiter, you’re bound up in rigid hierarchies of wealth and power. Here we have no money, no legal apparatus, no government.”

“But to become what you are now… that can’t have been something you took lightly.”

“There’s no going back,” Gris admitted. “The crossing – that’s what we call it – is far too thorough for that. I sold my skin to the flesh banks around Venus! But the benefits are incalculable. On Mars, they’re remaking the world to fit people. Here, we’re doing something much nobler: remaking ourselves to fit Mercury.”

“And was Rhawn already here, when you were transformed?”

“Ah,” Gris said, with a miff of disappointment. “Back to that now, are we?”

“I’ve been sent to make contact. My masters will be very disappointed in me if I fail.”

“Masters,” Gris dismissed. “Why would you ever work for someone, if you had a choice?”

“I had no choice.”

“Then I am afraid you had best prepare to disappoint your masters.”

Oleg smiled and sipped at his tea. It was quite sweet, although not as warm as he would have liked. He presumed that Gris still had enough of a digestive tract to process fluids. “Rhawn’s early work, what she did before she came here, was just too original and unsettling to fit into anyone’s existing critical framework. They wanted her to be something she was not – more like the artists they already valued. In time, of course, they began to realise her worth. Her stock began to rise. But by then Rhawn had joined your Collective.”

“None of this is disputed, Oleg. But Rhawn has had her crossing – become one of us. She has no interest in your world of investors and speculators, of critics and reputations.”

“Nonetheless, my masters have a final offer. I would be remiss if I did not try everything in my power to bring it to Rhawn’s attention.”

“Forget dangling money before her.”

“It isn’t money.” Oleg, knowing he had the momentary advantage, continued to sip his tea. “They know that wouldn’t work. What they are offering, what they have secured, is something money almost couldn’t buy – not without all the right connections, anyway. A private moon, a place of her own – the space to work unobstructed, with limitless resources. More than that, she’ll have the attentions of the system’s best surgeons. Their retro-transformative capabilities are easily sufficient to undo her crossing, if that’s what she desires.”

“I assure you it would not be.”

“When she completed the crossing,” Oleg said patiently, “she would have surrendered to the total impossibility of ever undoing that work. But the landscape has changed! The economics of her reputation now allow what was forbidden. She must be informed of this.”

“She’ll say no.”

“Then let her! All I request – all my masters ask of me – is that Rhawn gives me her answer in person. Will you allow me that, Gris? Will you let me meet with Rhawn, just the once?”

Gris took its time answering. Oleg speculated that some dialogue might be taking place beyond his immediate ken, Gris communing with its fellow artists, perhaps even Rhawn herself. Perhaps they were working out the best way to give him a brush-off. The Collective needed to trade with outsiders, so they would not want to be too brusque. Equally, they were obviously very protective of their most feted member.

But at length Gris said: “There is a difficulty.”

Oleg stirred on his mattress. The suit was starting to chafe – it was not built for lounging around in. “What sort? I’m here, aren’t I? Why can’t I have a moment with Rhawn? Is she unwell?”

“No,” Gris answered carefully. “Rhawn is perfectly well. But she is not here.”

“I don’t understand. She can’t have left Mercury – no one would have missed that. And the Collective is all there is. Has she gone off on her own?”

“Not exactly. But you are wrong in one matter. The Collective is not all that there is. Or at least, it isn’t any more. There has been …” And now Oleg had the sense that Gris was choosing its words with particular care, and not a small measure of distaste, as if it found the whole business painful. “A division within our ranks. The formation of a second caravan. A breakaway movement, springing from within the Collective.”

Oleg listened intently. His masters either knew nothing of this, or they had failed to brief him adequately. “When, what, how?”

“It would probably be easier if I showed you,” Gris said.

Soon the caravan had fallen behind them, receding over the horizon until even the stallion and the balancing woman were lost. Their shadows, Oleg noticed, were slowly lengthening, stretching ahead of the fast little surface vehicle Gris had commandeered. Mercury was a small world and they were covering ground very rapidly, pushing the Sun toward the horizon. Beyond, but closer by the moment, was the transition zone of the terminator and the extreme cold of the unlit face. He thought of his delicate little ship, how far he was from it now, how totally at the mercy of his cyborg host.

“Tell me about Rhawn.”

“There’s not much to say. She was always restless – in her art and her soul. It’s what brought her to Mercury. She found contentment with us, for a while. But always there was that need to push against her own limits, to break out of existing formalisms. It was only a matter of time before she attached herself to the Totalists.”

“The breakaway movement?”

“Of course.”

“You said they’d formed a second caravan. Do they move around Mercury, the same way you do?”

“Most of the time. They’re camped now.”

“What’s so special about them, that Rhawn had to leave the rest of you? Aren’t you radical enough?”

“They are purists. Extremists, if you will. We have accepted extensive physiological alteration to adapt to life on the Playa. It enables us to work almost without restriction, to submit ourselves to the act of artistic creation. But even we have limits.”

“Really?”

“Our bodies and minds are still hampered by the design compromises of biology. In the Totalists’ view, that makes us inefficient and in need of radical improvement.”