The Cold Winds Of Heaven

by Rupert Goodwins

Copyright (c) 1991

To the tower, then. It's time. I can remember everything about that day, even those words. It was a beautiful evening, and the three of us had spent the afternoon talking and quarreling, drowsing in the warm summer of the Greenland veldt. Even then, we felt the cool shadow of our friend, the fourth of us, who sat, mute and alone, beneath a tree. Always with us, as we have always been together; but now he was his own statue, a supple monument to remind the three that remained. We had been together for five years before he became thus, an artist whose passion for infinite madness was so soon rewarded.

I walked over to the tree, and bent over to hold his hand. He blinked, and I crouched down beside him, putting my head next to his, aligning, looking where he looked. Then we stood up, silently, slowly, his hand holding tight as he caught sight through my eyes. I matched him pace for steady pace, holding my head as he held his. The tower was a kilometer distant, towards the sea's edge, and we looked at the delicate black-web bowl that pointed at the sky, ready for the night.

As we walked towards it, watching our friends running ahead, getting to the tower while we were still ten minutes away, I wondered what he really saw, whether he was still wandering the chaotic caverns of the old machines. If he wasn't, did he see us as friends still, who kept him close and part of the old team, took him with us wherever, played and talked to him?

Sometimes, I thought he must hate us for so constantly taunting him, now and again making him hear our shouts and chatter and laughter like today, reminding him what he has lost. And then for me to hold hands like this, linking our illicit links, and looking for him. What it must be to see the world so fitfully, and always through someone else's eyes, a spectator alone. I cannot look at him when we are so linked. I could not, as I could never let myself kiss him.

We got to the tower, and as we climbed the first step he let go my hand and walked inside quickly, without hesitation. He knew his way around; we might have built it together but it was always his observatory. He'd all but lived here, amongst the old machines, and one day he'd all but died. I stood there alone, looking at the grey wood walls of the tower against the deep blue evening sky, against the darkening grass and trees, remembering things perhaps I ought not.

Then I went in, and climbed to the observing room. The other two were already busy, lost in the joy of working the machines, letting them talk to each other and out towards the old satellites that still drew their dutiful paths in the sky above. Tonight was special; across the globe fully half the world was listening to our broadcast, ten million souls linked by the distant sea of the ionosphere above us. Ancestor radio; so long ago the only link between the distances, now the one gift of the machines we cannot give back. Tonight, it reclaims a little more of its old glory and we justify a little more of the faith we had in ourselves a millennium ago.

None of us understood those days, for all we talked about them; we couldn't see our mistakes when they were five years from killing us but sent our devices a thousand years into the future. What were we trying to do?

When they sent that starprobe away from Earth, the books say, it was one of the terrible times. There was furious argument about such a wasteful action, when even they could feel their great shining world shaking itself apart. Yet, in the dark and lonely centuries that followed, the mission survived. Even when the last man walked away, he made sure the computers still ran and the starprobe kept its course.

Then we came along, the four of us, young and bored and full of devilish intrigue. The machinery had not been forgotten, but it was left alone. At first, nobody minded as we tinkered and built, but then we found the links. Those were as forbidden as fire, the old laws ignored purely because nobody thought any remained. Some did; we found them, and the machine that built them into us. One morning we took it in turns to lay down in the coffin and emerge, half an hour later, with wire in our veins and new cold life in our heads.

Oh, it was tremendous. The smooth machines woke under our hands, the black slabs that we'd never understood. We understand them now and the things that live within them; brilliant minds, playful, pleading, offering all the knowledge and beauty of the old days, so compelling and satisfying and so dangerous. That these things were toys, pastimes, given to children, is unbelievable; perhaps if we could understand that, we would know so much more.

Perhaps that's what he knows, perhaps that's what he found and couldn't let go. He'd not left the machines alone, particularly when he found the music. We'd always thought he'd be a good composer, but, with the machines, he went far beyond; he used them to amplify his designs and produce music that had us in awe. It frightened us, but he seemed so confident, so positive, so blissfully enthralled.

Then we came into the observatory, ten days after we'd got the links, to find him, apparently asleep, holding on to one of the smooth machines. We woke him up: his eyes opened and he seemed about to say something. Nothing happened. The machines couldn't help; they said he was blind and deaf, but about his mind they said they didn't know. Of course, the families were horrified; we had our links removed and took such punishment as they gave us, but mostly they left us alone.

Since then, we've stayed here. Ten years. The others didn't replace their links, but I did and he did, and, with a careful, patient learning, I fixed it so that, now and again, he could hear, and, once in a while, I could let him see. I didn't care to use the links other than that, twice since then he's placed his hands on the mission controls and sat, silent as always, feeling the links out into space.

It didn't take long after the accident for the story to spread; our occasional shortwave transmissions, politely reporting the progress of the starprobe as it neared its destination, became more and more popular. First, it was just youngsters, probably because we were perverse heroes due to the terrible things we'd done, but in a quiet world not used to novelty we provided a certain fascination. Lately, we'd started giving talks about the mission and its history as well as charting its course, and, once or twice, we'd even had a visitor.

Now we were alone; tonight, a hundred years ago, the starprobe could have tugged itself into orbit around a far planet, unfurled its banners and started to pass back what it found to the ghosts of its makers. It might not; it might not have survived the long dark years. We wouldn't know until tonight, us and half the world.

Out in space, the relay satellites waited, holding their positions in the tracery of electrons like fat spiders waiting in a shining web, binding the Great Net. I know that whatever that is, it works like our black dish on the tower, but stretches across millions of kilometers of emptiness, sifting the ceaseless storm of star-born radio. Somewhere in that is the thin whisper from the starprobe, a hundred light years away, and somehow it's caught and held and passed back to us mundane humans. A gift.

We sat in the dark observatory, watching the screens. We took it in turns to give the commentary; he sat in his old chair, hands once again on the smooth machine as if the last ten years were just a daydream. We didn't mention him on air; we never had.

The time came, and for a second, two, there was nothing. Then, the screens lit, and our starprobe slowly awoke. We'd stopped reminding the audience that this had all happened a century ago; for us, for everyone, it was happening now.

It was a white planet. Cold and huge, bigger than Earth but still a rock, glazed with gas. We saw great drifts of brilliant cloud lit by its distant sun, smooth yet streaked with golden lines. It was placid, so far away from the warmth of the star that only a few huge whorls marked its weather.

The starprobe swung around, crossing into night. It was still practicing its ancient senses, and the cameras faded and brightened as it struggled to focus on the planet below. As it passed the terminator, the weatherlines mixed and curdled; something was happening there, but we had to wait hours before we could see it again. All the time we described what we saw, what the other readings were, and made wild guesses.

Then it came again, and this time the machinery was ready. A thousand pictures taken in a hundred different ways, at every wavelength and every depth. As the probe went into daylight, we began to understand. It was snow, boiling up from vast fields as the starlight warmed it and cooling out as it fell into night. An eternal blizzard: the first snowstorm on Earth in seven centuries.

The starprobe, so long ago, felt with other senses. What snow it was, cold chemicals that held the hint that once, an age ago, there had been life on the planet. It was no more than a hint; of something that had passed long before our rich and lively solar system had itself cooled like a snowflake out of the void.

Four times the starprobe let go tiny passengers, probes that drifted slowly down into the bleak sky below, tunnelling and tasting as they fell through the layers of cloud. We caught our first flake; big as a peacock's tail and lighter than a sparrow's feather. It was a beautiful thing, complex and fragile; it melted as the cameras tracked up and down. On top were crystal facets, clear layers that might almost have been water ice, reflecting the light from the probe; they were set in a mass of sparkling needles that oozed and combined as we watched. Beneath were regular patterns, faint colours, but they too vanished before we could see them properly.

As the probes descended, they caught marvelous sights; linked spirals of a thousand big flakes breaking up, recombining. One shattered into a flurry of tiny, glinting particles which scattered like fragments of a glass as it hits the floor; it was far away, and that was all we saw.

It was already thirty-six hours since we started, and I was wondering how much longer we could go on for. On the screens, the vast structure of the snowstorms was charted, as varied as a slice through a billion years of rock but dynamic, shifting, a most precise and random dance.

"Listen!"

We looked at each other, then at where he sat. He was motionless, hands still on the machine, but there was no doubt that he'd spoken. I ran over, and shook his shoulder; nothing. Then, from the speakers set into the roof, came a blast of noise, not pure like a waterfall, not distinct like birdsong, but as loud and insistent as both.

"Listen," he said again. "They're talking. Radio."

He shuddered, and smiled. We looked at the screens; he was listening to the broad spectrum radio on the starprobe. We'd ignored it. The pictures were so beautiful, and the maps we drew so interesting, that we hadn't even known it was there.

"I can tune this," he said, "It's all in layers"

The noise shifted; now a pattern of crashes, like slow waves on a beach heard from a distance, now a swiftly rising arpeggio that slipped in and out of time with the waves and was repeated and varied in a mass of variations, faint, loud, slower, faster, always with purpose.

"They're talking... about stars... they're watching them..."

I tried to pull one of his hands away, worried. He stiffened, and held on with an animal strength. I looked at the others, and stood back. Nobody was talking on the radio; across the world the sounds of that ancient planet were playing.

"It's beautiful! I know what they're looking at..." He turned and looked at me; I knew he couldn't see the room, but I nearly screamed with shock; his face, so long slack and lifeless, was transformed, his eyes alight with an almost heavenly glee.

"Lover-- listen to me" he said. "I'm nearly at the edge. I'm not going to break the link. They watch the stars too. They know so much. They know about the starprobe. They thought they were alone and now they're... oh, listen!"

The noise grew clearer. I recognized a spark of music, an echo of his glorious days, but it went beyond that. It was a symphony, perfect, that grew and flowered as unerringly as a rose. We stood there and listened, hardly breathing, caught in the theme, so much his style but carrying a message; vast, majestic, alive.

Beneath the starprobe, the snowflakes formed and were aware. They caught the light of the stars, and passed the news of each tiny snatch of distant light amongst themselves. A compound eye across quarter of the planet, formed in near-darkness, away from the blinding burn of the sun. They drifted down, changed, reformed, carrying the information, analyzing, perceiving. Each snowflake died in hours, yet the snowstorm lived and thought for ever, watching the universe.

The music changed. It was not for ever. It knew how random it was, and how it would perish when the sun got a little brighter or a little colder. It could see such things, it knew so well how a star grew old when its one sure sense was an eye of such power. It thought, for so long, that it was alone.

The music changed. The starprobe had arrived. Whoever sent you, the snowstorm said, if you are still alive, you have a companion now. Please talk to me before I end. We must. If you understand me, come.

We understood through the music, a performance of virtuoso improvisation that left no room for doubt, that convinced utterly.

Come.

Then, he gasped aloud. The music vanished, for a moment the cacophony returned, then a thunderclap of pure, raw, unfeeling noise. We should have been watching the screens, but the music took us over so completely that we hadn't been aware of anything else. A hundred years away, the starprobe crossed the terminator into light, and the edge of the snowstorm was caught in a burning line of chaos. The scream of the tearing apart was carried into the observatory, into the machines, into the link.

He was dead.

We cannot know, now, whether what he told us was true. It's unthinkable to anyone who heard the music that he couldn't have believed it, but whether he was right nobody can say. The starprobe is still there; we have all the data we want but none of the insight. What he did, what he thought, is lost.

But we're coming. Perhaps we needed to rest and brood on our mistakes, perhaps we're wrong now to start again on a road that is so dangerous. I think we know enough, just about, to watch ourselves. This time. Some of us are working on the links, trying to find out what part of his music was genius, what part repeatable. Some of us are reaching out, prodding at those long hundred years between us and the planet; there are ways, we think, to make those years a blink of an eye, ways that the old people would never have thought of.

And now we understand what we must do again. We're coming.

Rupert Goodwins is a computer programmer and journalist manque who lives and works in East London. He shares a small house with a large collection of paperbacks, old radios and more odd junk than can possibly be healthy for a young lad. Somewhere amid the 1950s' military surplus Geiger counters lurk a wife, a sister and a small child called Richard, although sightings have been sporadic.

Writing SF has stopped seeming like a good idea and threatens to become an obsession. Nothing published yet, apart from a couple of novellas for the Weird Dreams and Wreckers computer games. Currently working on a theory of reverse karmachronism, which he hopes will allow him to be reincarnated as Philip K. Dick the next time 1928 comes around.

rupertg@cix.compulink.co.uk