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

with me. As weight surrounds a mass, so silence would fill the air around me, falling in, rising from blood rustling in my ears to become a whisper, a word spoken, a cry, the roar of burning and finally the crash of everything that falls. Beyond Pluto, silence would be more than absence of speech: even zero has meaning, but what is zero taken to an infinite power? And on what fingers do I count it? Though I could hear the singing of the spheres, see colors off the spectrum, touch nothing: how could I tell? and whom?
    I reach up and touch my ears: they are cool. I try to trace their infoldings with my finger, picture the pattern there, but my mind won’t follow: pinna, auricle, these words drift through my thoughts, and I don’t know where I learned them, or how they might help me in the silence beyond Jupiter. I only know that between cool flesh and colder vacuum, I will have my hands full. I am Jupiter-bound.
    But by how long a chain?
     
     
    STERN AND PETERSON left in that order, on successive days. The initiative was Stern’s. We did not talk much in the days following the burn. At first, I attributed this to simple shock, and fear for our survival. Conversation seemed at first a burden, then a risk. But just as we no longer sensed our new velocity once acceleration ceased, so our increased risk became a piece with the fears we’d shared since liftoff and before. Still we found it hard to talk, even to meet each others’ eyes: as if the sudden return to free fall, the leap from acceleration to silence, had shaken something loose and left us trying to remember how to talk.
    Stern started mumbling after a week, odd things, as if he thought we wouldn’t hear: “elucidate,” “supernal,” “ineluctable.” He prowled like a pregnant cat, carrying objects to and from the hold: I remember his back receding through the hatch, shoulders hunched and holding something precious: a hand-vacuum, binoculars, a hair-dryer. On a Monday I heard him mutter “Terra matter,” and on a Tuesday he was gone. He left in the lander, leaving us its portable seismometer and a set of digging tools, a deeper silence, and then the voice of mission control, advising us of a change of plans.
    He left at night. The whine of servomotors woke me and Peterson to wonder why the hold had opened, and where was Stern, and then, befuddled, why the hold-hatch was dogged: through the deadlight we saw nothing, then stars burning in vacuum, and we understood, slowly, why the hatch wouldn’t open, why we were locked in, and as we floated there, feeling like children at a bedroom door, Peterson croaked “Wait”—to Stern, to himself or no one—concussion echoed through our hands, knees, noses, whatever touched metal, and the hold was filled with fog, swirling, clearing: empty.
    We tracked Stern by the light of his main engine until he faded in the stars, and then by radar. He dropped rapidly astern, but before we lost him we learned his trajectory. He would fall into the sun sometime in May.
    Naturally Peterson was hurt. He and Stern had trained together, shared Naval Academy ties and a series of backyard barbecues in Houston, of which there is still a Polaroid taped over the galley microwave: two men, two women, the men wearing dark glasses, the women with the loopy shut-eyed look that comes from too much sun and a fast shutter. Their arms are mostly hidden: here and there a hand appears, disjointed beside someone’s neck. There is no indication who took the picture, but in my imagination I am the photographer, and I think this prevents my tearing it up. I am surprised Peterson did not take it with him: it was Stern’s second wife, but Peterson’s first.
     
     
    JUPITER WAS ACTIVE on the decameter band this afternoon, crackling and hissing like a witch and her cauldron. I piped it back into the hold all day while I worked there on one of the instrument packages. I have been dreaming again, a nightmare in which I am unable to awake. This makes the