Forbidden Planets (32 page)
And Tobin Crowder, boy, he’s a guy who makes you crave the sameness of habit.
I wish I’d never gone into space.
Dammit. Almost had the line. It occurred to me to address Tobin within the framework of this letter (memoir? apologia? testimony?) but I’m not sure I want to do that because I’m not sure I want him to respond. Also, I couldn’t be sure whether he was responding or whether my expectation of his response would fool me into thinking he had.
The first day:
All of the readings and samples and spectrographic analyses don’t make a bit of difference to the butterflies in your stomach when you first inhale the atmosphere of an alien world. And all of the warnings about possible toxins and allergens just can’t stop you from bending to smell a flower. I remember doing both of those things, and I remember a flower looking slightly more like a jack-in-the-pulpit after I smelled it than it had before; and I remember Tobin actually weeping, sunlight on his face, the hum of bees in the air. The memory has such intensity that often I think those tears were in my own eyes. All of us were like that for the first couple of days. The place was too good to be true.
Even then, the planet had its eye on Tobin. He had the starkest and most naked emotions for it to prey on, amplify, and finally absorb and reflect. It must have been a wonderful toy, this planet, if you were serene and happy.
Although it might be said that the planet made itself serene and happy by making wonderful toys of us.
The truth is, when I say
Tobin
and I say
the planet
, I’m no longer sure where the meanings of the two diverge. Further complicating things, I’m also unsure where I end and everything else begins. Often I feel as if when I talk about Tobin, I’m talking about myself. Usually that’s about when I lose my train of thought.
Tobin
and I say
the planet
, I’m no longer sure where the meanings of the two diverge. Further complicating things, I’m also unsure where I end and everything else begins. Often I feel as if when I talk about Tobin, I’m talking about myself. Usually that’s about when I lose my train of thought.
Okay, I’ll say it: Eden.
It’s naïve, it’s incredulous, it’s all of those things that you shouldn’t be when you’re in the business of exploration . . . but on the other hand, I think part of the explorer’s temperament must include a sort of innocence. A desire for the new, to be experienced without prejudgment. Explorers must be part child.
Eden. A few days after we landed, when we’d gotten the MC—what we called the quonset hut officially known as Mission Central—set up and we’d started to establish a routine, Vicki Singh found orange trees growing a few hundred meters from our camp, on the shores of a lake. We all went to look at them, and with the strangest expression on his face, Tobin said, “I dreamed about oranges last night. God, I hated to wake up from that dream.”
Against all regulations and common sense, we ate them. They were wonderful.
We figured out that someone had been there before us. There were no artifacts, no oddly geometric shapes in the jungle hinting at traces of lost civilizations . . . nothing like that. We speculated about nanotechnology, about engineering on a scale we couldn’t contemplate, about the possibility that a fantastic accident of evolution had steered the course of events here in a direction incomprehensible to us. Whatever the cause, the conclusion was inescapable. The planet wanted to please us, and nothing wants to please without being trained in that desire.
Looking back, I think that’s where the jealousy really began. All of us, I think, wanted not only for the planet to please us, but for none of the other members of the team to know that’s what we wanted. When Sean Nishiyama caught salmon in the lake, we all pretended we didn’t know that he must have wanted those salmon to be there; when our communications equipment started to pick up snatches of radio broadcasts from Earth, we all entered into an unspoken agreement that we would not ask whose nostalgia had created them. And so on.
Tobin and I were reconfiguring the software for the telescope left on the orbiter, about a month after we landed. Out of the blue, he said to me, “It’s as if they re-created the entire planet as a tool. What might that kind of tool amplify?”
I said to him, “What wouldn’t it amplify?”
And I kept to myself the question of whether, if everything was amplified, anything was meaningfully changed. In this swamp of wish fulfilment, self-identification becomes a kind of compartmentalization. To understand yourself in a world where you can give your desires form and breath, you divide yourself into the parts that want those things and the parts that still yearn for your former—that is, nonmalleable—reality. You hold those parts of yourself at a distance. You imagine others to possess qualities that you dislike about yourself, and use that imagination as an excuse to dislike them; and you imagine that by banishing them you are purifying yourself of those objectionable qualities.
None of which changed the fact that we were all still just ourselves.
Well, perhaps not. The other secret I kept was that my singular desire was for the planet to make me like Tobin Crowder. I wanted to be him, if only because of the way this Eden responded to him, the way he was so fully at home there.
It was something from Shakespeare. God, isn’t it always something from Shakespeare?
Why would Tobin have been quoting Shakespeare? In our team, I was the one prone to embarrassingly artsy quotation. Maybe he’d heard the line from me . . . which makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t remember it.
The fact that the mission fell apart wasn’t his fault. It would have happened sooner without him around, I think, because for quite a while he absorbed the interest that otherwise might have found its way to the more vulnerable among us. Did I say Tobin was crazy? That’s a tricky word. He was strong willed, that’s for sure, and utterly unlike the rest of us. I think he’s going to give me enough rope to hang myself here, so I might as well jump and say that he destroyed the mission, but that if he hadn’t, someone—something—else would have. And a lot sooner.
He bought us time.
Me, he’s still buying time.
Gradually Tobin grew distant. The team saw him less often; his work went unfinished. He’d never been gregarious—we had that in common—but once the planet started responding to him, he began to reinvent himself, and his new identity had nothing to do with the rest of us. The team gave him space, assuming that he was working through a more or less standard version of the disaffection we’d been trained to expect as a result of the long voyage. All of us felt it to one degree or another. I felt it more than most, I think. I too found it hard to get my work done, hard to eat meals in the company of the rest of the team, hard to file my reports on time—hard, in short, to do anything but go out and bask in the suffusing desire of the planet to make me happy.
Who could resist that?
It was inevitable that we should begin to compete for the planet’s attentions—inevitable, too, that Tobin would win.
I forget the name of this place, which I know directly contradicts what I told you about being able to remember everything before we got here, since obviously I knew the name of the place before setting foot on it. Tough. Maybe the name is squirreled away back down one of the neural pathways blocked off with whatever the synaptic version of construction cones is, but I can’t get to it.
Think I’m lying yet? You just wait.
Sometimes I look at what I’ve written and don’t recognize the person who wrote it. I hate sentence fragments.
When things got bad, by which I mean when all of us became certain that we could no longer trust the evidence of our senses—except when that evidence implied that someone was dead, in which case sensory input was generally pretty reliable—but what I was saying was that when things got bad, one of the startling things was the lack of event.
Take the survey team. I mean, someone already did, but you get the figure of speech. There wasn’t any monster or any explosion or anything. One minute they were doing what they had always done, in a place that was unfamiliar but not overtly dangerous . . . and the next minute the planet just wasn’t that way anymore.
The thing about Tobin was that he was born to be a leader, and on our mission he never got the chance until there was nothing left to lead and nowhere to lead anything to. I don’t blame him for being angry about this. He thinks he could have saved us, and he’s probably right. He understood sooner than the rest of us what was happening, and if we had gotten out of his way the mission might have been saved.
That was never going to happen, though. Everyone else wanted to feel what Tobin was feeling, and it’s perfectly natural that he would have wanted to protect what he thought was his. I would have done the same thing.
And in any case, something has been saved. Just not everything, and when in life do you ever get to save everything?
The beauty of this place doesn’t make it valuable or salutary; the polluted sunsets of Oil Age Earth were also beautiful. But there is a species of tree here (“tree”—I speak in analogs here rather than exact correspondence with terrestrial taxonomies) with leaves that dangle low and catch the sunlight at a particular angle during certain times of the year. The luminescent green is like nothing on Earth, except perhaps the glow of fireflies. There is a species of insect that dances in patterns on the still waters and releases a chemical that mimics the scent of a flower favored by a particular hummingbird. Here as on Earth, hummingbirds are disoriented by water and tend to fly down into it and drown; these dancing insects then converge on the dead hummingbird to feed. I do not know why they dance while emitting their scent.
I wonder how much of our idea of beauty—I mean, the hardwired part of it, since some of it must be hardwired—derives from the fact that in the natural world, things that are striking in color or pattern often are that way because they are dangerous.
In other words, are dangerous things beautiful because they are dangerous? I think they are, at least some of them, at least part of the time, but I don’t mean those qualifiers as a way of going back on my original statement. There is a correspondence. Anyone who has spent time here would know that.
In a way, what happened—is still happening—to Tobin is beautiful. And in a way, perhaps, it is a sunset in a polluted sky.
All tools are amplifiers, he said to me once—I think during the course of the telescope conversation—and then admitted that he was quoting a well-known scientific canard. Somebody’s Law.
Ah, shit. Never mind. Laws. I can’t remember anything that’s important. If I could remember that last thing he said, I’d be able to put it all together.
When I think about Shakespeare, I think about how so many of his late plays—
Pericles
,
The Tempest
,
The Winter’s Tale
—involve dangerous voyages, with isolation on the other side for a character we love. And I wonder if the man himself, having retired to idyllic Stratford after his tumultuous London life, was feeling as if he had undergone a perilous journey away from the vitality of his prime years and into the isolation of his past.
Pericles
,
The Tempest
,
The Winter’s Tale
—involve dangerous voyages, with isolation on the other side for a character we love. And I wonder if the man himself, having retired to idyllic Stratford after his tumultuous London life, was feeling as if he had undergone a perilous journey away from the vitality of his prime years and into the isolation of his past.
He, too, perhaps, knew better than to trust an idyll.
Then again, if there is a little of Shakespeare in all of his plays, you can’t find all of him in any of them. Before I became an astronomer, I went to graduate school in literature; I know about the biographical fallacy. Mostly when I think about Shakespeare, it’s because I’m trying to remember Tobin’s line. Something about responsibility. I feel that if I could remember it, I would know for sure whose fault all of this was.
Oh. Example. Well, a survey team went out to confirm a possible reading about an amount of pitchblende. I don’t remember the details, and I am not by trade a geologist; my field is astronomy, and my function on the mission was to catalog and investigate nearby stellar bodies in better detail than was possible from Earth. This is not what I was doing when the survey team went out.
Their first collective hallucination—for so they thought it at the time—involved a sudden failure of their ability to see the color blue. This wasn’t like orange trees or salmon, but things of this nature had happened before as well. I, in fact, was supposed to be working on the problem of whether astrophysical phenomena could be responsible for the momentary elision of a portion of the visible spectrum. What I was doing at the moment when the first distress call came in from Sean Nishiyama, our geologist, had nothing to do with optics, or astronomy. I was chipping paint from around one of the displays on the housing of a generator. How the paint got there, I never found out, and the problem was driven from my mind by the vibration of the distress signal. I ran back into the MC (was that the last time I was inside?) and answered Sean’s call.
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