In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

effects, rifling the ship just to see. Not a cent.
     
     
    MISSION CONTROL HAS many suggestions: about me, the ship, our mission. They are like bachelors babysitting. I sense fear in their omissions. “In theory…” they say, and skip ahead to speak of Jupiter. While I hang here listening, they weigh the orbits open to me there, and plan for my survival until rescue comes. They appear to have made a decision: they offer to make me a constellation, translate me into the sky with Io, Europa, and the rest. I am skeptical. It is not mission control that sets my course; it is ahead, Jupiter growing broader and brighter by degrees so small I never see the change, whom I must answer to. In practice, I doubt that I will have much to say in the matter.
    There is one group that wants me to stop these recordings, and another wants them transmitted instead. A third thinks I should carry on, and one lonely man is horrified at the prospect. I suspect he knows what he is talking about, and wish he would shut up.
     
     
    THE SHIP MOVES on, and forces me to choose. Here, the choices are simpler, the rules clearer: action, reaction; mass acting on mass; an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless…But this kind of clarity is useless to me now, since I can see Jupiter clearly ahead, and know how all these equations balance, what answers they will come to: something very like a zero. I could crash there, of course; I could orbit it and wait for mission control; or I could crack the whip around it, shoot out in any direction I choose: how much more poignant to fly past Earth on my way out into darkness, moving too swiftly to say goodbye. I’d prefer to keep on the way I’ve come.
    I prefer: in none of the equations for action, mass, and motion have I ever read a term for my capacity to choose. There are more things in heaven than in earth, I see that now. I am not in theory anymore; philosophy is not a dream. I am alive, that star behind me is the earth, and there is no “unless” in Jupiter. But there are choices.
     
     
    WHILE THE BALANCE of its mind was disturbed, mission control brought my parents in to talk to me today. I mean that. I think they have taken leave of their senses, lost their marbles, gone off the deep end. My parents are in their nineties, and have not left the retirement home since I put them there ten years ago, and I do not visit often. Dad is aphasic; Mom talks, but how much is there to say? She asks me how my work is going, and I tell her,—Okay, and she says, brightly,—Good. Generally we leave it there, and spend our time more fruitfully on doctor’s appointments, outings to the mall, the hazards of slippery floors. Once, when I told her I had just returned from Mars, confusion overwhelmed her. I pitied her then, with a generosity I needed desperately at the time. It is only recently I have come to wonder if her confusion is not after all a state of grace.
    And now they’ve sent an air-conditioned sedan to fetch them to the airstrip, bundled them on a NASA jet, transshipped to Houston. Here. For a moment it seemed the radio was eavesdropping on my childhood, the voice in the speaker calling from the kitchen door, come in for supper, put on your jacket, its getting late, time to come home. I shook my head, wondering if this were one of Hayford’s radio dramas, and I the only one without a script, hearing her say,—Your father’s here. His voice saying,—Where is he? and then the cabin walls, the stars outside, all fell away and I could see them in their Florida clothing, their heads quivering on their delicate necks as they turn to watch technicians passing, voices hurrying saying nothing they can understand.
    “Get them off. Get them out of here. Take them home.”
    I cut the connection.
     
     
    I HAVE BEEN floating here in silence since, thinking of my alternatives, to stop at Jupiter or travel on: the journey outward, into silence so thick as to become something: a pressure, a presence here