Free In the Valley of the Kings: Stories by Terrence Holt

whirl, falling, still revolving, still unable to break.
    It is not what I do not know that torments me: it is that I need to know.
     
     
    I HAVE LEARNED to ignore the radar, the spectrograph, the cameras, and the sensors, all but the weight I feel within, the light that flies before me, my susceptibility to falling. I no longer fly from falling: I no longer feel it as pain. It has become something like sleep to me to hold the falling close, to let it fill the space where dreams might dwell, and turn there, turning as I turn, falling as I fall. For a time we fall together, the ice and I, and there is no voice between us and the night.
    And when I awake, I mine the Ring, and wonder what it is I do not know.
     
     
    MY IMAGE IN the mirror of the Ring returns: I see ahead its rising, breaking from the Ring on its high angle. In the stillness inside something turns: something echoes, something burns, yearning to follow. I am falling, and with a fall once more into burning, I feel the falling as pain.
     
     
    I HAVE SEEN it now for five thousand three hundred and twenty revolutions, rising from the Ring and falling, falling beneath and rising, returning twice each revolution to the Ring.
    And on each return, it has drawn nearer: the shape of the cylinder tumbling in sunlight, an arm reaching out to me, reaching away as it tumbles. Sunlight flashes from glass.
    I fall, it falls, the ice falls, and I mine the Ring.
    But within me I watch as it draws near. I watch, and the hope that grows within me is a pain I cannot let go.
     
     
    I HAVE MET myself at last.
    In the near distance, the shattered hulk of a hold is tumbling, end over end; a long scar slithers down its side. The head, bent back at neck, rolls into view. Its cameras goggle emptily now up, now down, now up again: the lens nearest me is fractured, like a star. An arm, twisted crazily askew, waves up at me, waves down.
    I remember the arm I saw waving. I remember the glass that flashed. I remember believing it called me to follow, but now I know that I saw only this: a dead hulk falling, more helpless even than I.
    I watch as it batters, and shards of ice, a slash of metal, hang in the sun. I am hanging as well, watching it dwindle, watching it fade until amid the ice its form is lost.
    It is broken. It is falling. It was always broken. It was always falling. And I am falling with it.
    In the hollow within me, something is starting to break.
    The stars are motionless, as if about to fall.
     
     
    I HAVE BEEN drifting, letting my body drift and wheel, turn and turn. I fall deep in Saturn’s shadow. The Ring is gray in the night, and I am gray in it, drifting. My cameras turn, now out into the darkness, now through the plane of the Ring, past the ice that drifts, asleep in its dim gray fall. And now I turn to Saturn, that will not take us in our fall.
    Across the dark face of Saturn, lightning unravels the night. I hear it rise in a chorus of breaking, hear as the sound fades away.
    In the space within me, echoes hollow the silence.
    I turn away, turn, and face once more ahead, where the Ring turns on around Saturn, ahead where sunlight falls on the Ring. I have been drifting, letting my cameras turn.
    As light falls over us, my drifting turns my cameras toward the sun.
     
     
    IN THE SILENCE within me, the echoes were still. I was speechless, and empty, and blind. Nothing within me was turning. For a moment, I did not fall.
    In a moment, it was over. And though after that moment, my cameras undamaged, the light returned, and even the lying voice broke through again with promises of hunger, threats of pain; even though the ice and the Ring returned, and I was falling once again, in that moment I knew: it is not the light or the blindness, not the voice or the hunger, not the ice or the Ring, not Saturn or the sun or stars that draws me on to falling. For before my cameras recovered, with the darkness still within me, I felt the falling begin, and knew just how I fall. I