The State of The Art

This is our birthplace though, this is what we deserted long ago. This is where we used to live, on balls of dust and rock like this. This is our home town from before we felt the itch of wanderlust, the sticks we inhabited before we ran away from home, the cradle where we were infected with the crazy breath of the place’s vastness like a metal wind inside our love-struck heads; just stumbled on the scale of what’s around and tripped out drunk on starlike possibilities…

I find that I’m staring at the stars, my eyes wide and burning. I shake myself, tear my sight away from the view outside, turn back to the camera.

I look at a group photograph from the orbital. People I knew; friends, lovers, relations, children; all standing in the sunlight of a late summer’s day, outside the main building. Recalled names and faces and voices, smells and touches. Behind them, almost finished, is — as it was then — the new wing. Some of the wood we used to build it still lies in the garden, white and dark brown on the green. Smiles. The smell of sawdust and the feel of pushing a plane; hardened skin on my hands and the sight and sound of the planed wood curling from the blade.

Tears again. How can I help but be sentimental? I didn’t expect all of this, back then. I can’t cope with the distance between us all now, that awful gap of slow years.

I flick through other pictures; general views of the orbital, its fields and towns and seas and mountains. Maybe everything can be seen as a symbol in the end; perhaps with our limited grasp we can’t help but find similarities, talismans… but that inward facing plate of orbital looks false to me now, down here, so far away and lonely. This globe of ordinary, soft, accidental planet seems the cutting edge and the flat knife of twinned adamantine thoroughness, our clever, efficient little orbitals, lacking that fundamental reality.

I wish I could sleep. I want to sleep and forget about everything, but I can’t, tired though I still am. The suit can’t help me there, either. I don’t even remember dreaming, as though that facility, too, is damaged.

Maybe I’m the artificial one, not the suit, which doesn’t try to pretend. People have said I’m cold, which hurt me; which still hurts me. All I can do is feel what I can and tell myself it’s all anyone can ask of me.

I turn over painfully, face away from the treacherous stars. I close my eyes and my mind to their remindful study, and try to sleep.

'Wake up'

I feel very sleepy, the rhythms all wrong, tired again.

'Time to go; come on.'

I come to, rubbing my eyes, breathing through my mouth to get rid of the stale taste in it. The dawn looks cold and perfect, very thin and wide through this inhospitable covering of gas. And the slope is still here, of course.

It’s the suit’s turn to walk, so I can rest on. We redeploy the legs and arms again, the chest deflates. The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.

The suit walks faster than I do. It reckons it is only twenty percent stronger than the average human. Something of a come-down for it. Even having to walk must be galling for it (if it feels galled).

If only the AG worked. We’d do the whole trip in a day. One day.

We stride out over the sloped plain, heading for the edge. The stars disappear slowly, one by one, washed out of the wide skies by the sunlight. The suit gains a little speed as the light falls harder on its trailed photopanels. We stop and squat for a moment, inspecting a discoloured rock; it is just possible, if we find an oxide of some sort… but the stone holds no more trapped oxygen than the rest, and we move on.

'When and if we get back, what will happen to you?'

'Because I’m damaged?' the suit says. 'I imagine they’ll just throw the body away, it’s so badly damaged.'

'You’ll get a new one?'

'Yes, of course.'

'A better one?'

'I expect so.'

'What will they keep? Just the brain?'

'Plus about a metre of secondary column and a few subunits.'

I want us to get there. I want us to be found. I want to live.

We come to the edge of the escarpment about mid-morning. Even though I am not walking I feel very tired and sleepy, and my appetite has disappeared. The view ought to be impressive, but I’m only aware that it’s a long, difficult way down. The escarpment lip is crumbly and dangerous, cut with many runnels and channels, which lower down become steep, shadowy ravines separating sharp-edged ridges and jagged spires. Scree spreads out beyond, far below, in the landscape at the cliff’s foot; it is the colour of old, dried blood.

I am suitably depressed.

We sit on a rock and rest before making our way down. The horizon is very clear and sharp. There are mountains in the far distance, and many broad, shallow channels on the wide plain that lies between the mountains and us.

I don’t feel well. My guts ache continually and breathing deeply hurts too, as though I’ve broken a rib. I think it is just the taste of the recycler’s soup that is putting me off eating, but I’m not certain. There are a few stars in the sky.

'We couldn’t glide down, could we?' I ask the suit. That’s how we got through the atmosphere, after all. The suit used the minuscule amount of AG it had left, and somehow got the tattered photopanel sheet to function as a parachute.

'No. The AG is almost certain to fail completely next time we try it, and the parachute trick… we’d need too much space, too much drop to ensure deployment.'

'We have to climb?'

'We have to climb.'

'All right, we’ll climb.' We get up, approach the edge.

Night again. I am exhausted. So tired, but I cannot sleep. My side is tender to the touch and my head throbs unbearably. It took us the whole afternoon and evening to get down here to the plains, and we both had to work at it. We nearly fell, once. A good hundred-metre drop with just some flakes of slatey stone to hold on to until the suit kicked a foothold. Somehow we made it down without snagging and tearing further the photopanels. More good luck than skill, probably. Every muscle seems to hurt. I’m finding it hard to think straight. All I want to do is twist and turn and try to find a comfortable way to lie.

I don’t know how much of this I can take. This is going to go on for a hundred days or more, and even if the still undiscovered leak doesn’t kill me I feel like I’m going to die of exhaustion. If only they were looking for us. Somebody walking in a suit on a planet sounds hard to find, but shouldn’t be really. The place is barren, homogeneous, dead and motionless. We must be the only movement, the only life, for hundreds of kilometres at least. To our level of technology we ought to stand out like a boulder in the dust, but either they aren’t looking or there’s nobody left to look.

But if the base still exists, they must see us eventually, mustn’t they? The sats can’t spend all their time looking outwards, can they? They must have some provision for spotting enemy landings. Could we have just slipped through? It doesn’t seem possible.

I look at my photographs again. They appear a hundred at a time on the viewer. I press one and it blooms to fill the little screen with its memories.

I rub my head and wonder how long my hair will grow. I have a silly but oddly frightening vision of my hair growing so long it chokes me, filling the helmet and the suit and cutting out the light, finally asphyxiating me. I’ve heard that your hair goes on growing after you die, and your nails too. I wonder that — despite one or two of the photographs, and their associated memories — I haven’t felt sexually aroused yet.