The Lowest Heaven

URANUS ^{ESTHER SAXEY}

The RMS Carmania stood at dock, serene despite the gull screams and mud stink. Christopher had left me watchdog to three trunks and a brace of hatboxes.

A lad rushed over to earn a tip.

‘Saw yer friend,’ he said, as he loaded the trunks onto a trolley. “Are you two artists?”

I would be leaving England within the hour. A queer impulse prompted me to announce: “No. We are Uranians.”

To my surprise, he grinned.

“What, is that like a Martian? Are you two from another planet?”

It wasn’t even the first time I’d heard this witticism. I began to hate Mr. H.G. Wells.

Being Uranians has led Christopher and me to travel a lot. Never fleeing in disgrace. Not yet. Not quite. Few trips came as near the knuckle as our escape to Paris, ten years ago.

Christopher and I had met at College (Trinity) but we hadn’t been the best of friends, only two of a group. As we lost good men to marriage, we grew more intimate. Not loving, not on my part. Perhaps had he been taller, less hairy, less like an anxious mole… But why would all that matter, you ask, when Uranian love is for the noble disposition? (Plato told Christopher so, and Christopher told me.) At the time, I believed that nobility would shine through in some physical way: graceful movement, sparkling eyes. So I would love my beloved’s mind, but my beloved would also be beautiful. I was insufferable.

Christopher took me out every week for art or opera. He gave me Uranian pamphlets, which I forgot to read, and poetry, which made me melancholy. In his presence I felt, always, that I was failing an examination.

Until one night when he burst into my rooms, hatless and agitated.

“He’ll be arrested this evening!”

We were admirers of Oscar Wilde (you could have known it by our neckties alone). Oscar’s libel case had just taken a disastrous turn.

Christopher cried: “We have to leave England!” He then made the most eloquent plea of his life. His proposal: we take the boat train that night to Paris, to live where laws were more liberal.

I’d been torn between two idols, until that moment. Should I be a witty cynic, like Wilde? Or embrace the world as my brother, and find delight in every drop of dew, like Walt Whitman in his poems? I’d ricocheted between the two approaches, by turns aloof and sentimental. Now, Christopher was pushing me hard towards Whitman-ish optimism: freedom, he said, brotherhood!

While my man packed for me, I mused aloud: “If you think it’s dangerous to stay, perhaps I should warn some of my friends…”

“Oh. Well, we could.” He was right to be sullen, because I was lying. I wasn’t thinking of danger. No, I was thinking: I could burst in on a friend, the same way Christopher had burst in on me. Make the same impassioned speech, steal all Christopher’s best lines. Woo my friend! Win him!

And I would have done it. But there wasn’t one man who stood out above the others. Uranian love is lifelong (said Plato-through-Christopher). So I couldn’t accidentally shackle myself to a dullard. I’d been flitting about and fantasising, dithering over who to honour with my constancy.

The Waterloo platform was white with steam and swarming. Valets crowded the train corridors. Gentlemen sat in silent rows in every compartment, spines stiff with nerves. Nobody spoke. Half the Uranians of London were on the train.

Christopher’s energy was spent, but I was exhilarated by our flight. I wondered: should I make a speech? Brothers! We are travelling together. Once we reach Paris, must we disperse, like droplets in the ocean? Is this the greatest gathering of our kind since Athens? Surely, we should… We must…

I stood in the corridor by an open window, getting my nerve up. I looked into the starry night and told myself that the dark was as homelike and wholesome to me as the day. My brothers were beautiful (although not, I thought, all equally beautiful, and some couples shockingly mismatched). And somewhere up above us was our planet: gorgeous, mysterious Uranus. Pale blue, glowing from within, winding around the sun once every eighty-four years (Chris owned a small book on the subject). Unknowable, remote! My ruling celestial body!

“Everything to your satisfaction, sir?”

He spoke like a steward, but his bottle-green velvet suit put the lie to it.

“One shouldn’t have all one’s satisfactions satisfied,” I spluttered, failing to be Wildean.

His face was sly and his nose was broken. Edward Carpenter, the socialist said (via Christopher) that love may exist most purely between men of different classes. I wondered: who buys this lad’s clothes? Who bought his ticket for this train? His arm pressed mine as the train jolted. It was all very sudden. Were we both under the influence of our heavenly patron?

“Sir,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”

The last trace of my cynicism boiled away. I gave my passionate assent.

He pulled back and smirked. “That’s handy to know,” he said, and hopped off up the corridor, to boast to his chums.

I crept back to my compartment. I didn’t make a speech to my fellow travellers.

On the ferry to France, I felt my purpose renewed. My lustful body was lost property. In Paris, I would be pure. No more self-deception. No more frittering my time looking for noble minds at tennis clubs. I’d been a terrible Uranian◦– we should be scholars, but I’d never stuck to any kind of study. I turned to Christopher.

“I didn’t bring anything to read. Do you…?”

I wondered if he would produce A Problem in Greek Ethics and the deck would ring with cries of recognition. But he pulled out a slim tome from the Theosophists. I winced at the opening sentence: Kâmaloka as it is called in Sanskrit… But then the tone altered. The author was speaking of something termed the astral plane. He assured me that the astral plane was absolutely real. As real as Charing Cross. I missed Charing Cross already. I was persuaded of his common sense.

I read about the astral body, a thing apart from the fleshly body. The concept gripped me. (Of course it did: I had more-or-less eloped with a man I didn’t desire, and I wished to be so spiritual that his hairy hands wouldn’t distress me.)

I read that my astral body could fly through the air, if I desired it. No, if I put my mind to it.

At our Parisian hotel Christopher slept. In my room, I prepared to make a further, audacious journey.

The book on astral travel had frustratingly little in the way of instruction. I lay on my bed, conscious of my sweating back. The boy from the train drifted into my mind, and I pushed him away. I pushed away all fleshly things◦– I pushed myself out of my body.

I left. I lifted. It had worked. I hovered.

I feared to look down on my own fleshly body, so I passed on, up, through the ceiling of the hotel room. I was naked. I was naked of myself, without a body. I wasn’t cold. I could hear, faintly, the horses and the music of the Paris street. But my only crisp sense was sight. I saw Paris◦– a glittering mosaic. I took it in at a glance and then looked up to the stars. Could I go up, I thought, until the lights of the stars and the lights of Paris were of equal size, constellations above and below me?

How to move? Against what could I push? Should I flap my arms? I had no arms. I saw the moon. I thought: there! And leapt.

Such a pace would have made my stomach sick but I had no stomach. I was gleeful at my lightness and speed. Nevertheless, I quailed at the prospect of the void between the planets. I’d forgotten most of what I’d read in Christopher’s small book. Would it be cold or fiery? In a perpetual storm? It was calm as a millpond and almost empty. Dust, small rocks, passed through me.

The pockmarked face of the moon grew closer, whiter. I thought the surface would become less stark, but it remained without colour, and without grey shades; it was all white planes and black shadows. I was dazzled◦– I blinked◦– I did not blink, having no eyelids. Then why was I dazzled, having no eyes? I found that if I opened every part of myself to perception, I could see-perceive with other-eyes, and look straight at the sheets of lava, shiny as a japanned table, which had previously blinded me.

No living world, this. No greenery in the crevices and crevasses (and no plants of other colours, either, Mr Wells). Severity everywhere in form as well as palette: sharp lava fragments piled like spillikins. I saw soundless avalanches rush down from the summits of volcanoes. I tried to listen with other-ears, and heard instead a great growling, like arguments shouted between nations.

Some of the lava and stones of this uninhabited land resembled ramparts and amphitheatres. I thought it an unsettling coincidence. Then I couldn’t be sure: soaring over one plane, I saw beneath me a shape like a fortress, perched over a riverbed. I thought I saw arches, pillars, fallen columns, an aqueduct, even? But perhaps they were spat out by the thousand local Etnas, or whittled by lunar hurricanes.

I longed to know but I found I couldn’t stoop or stop. I was exhausted. As soon as my efforts slackened, I felt, attached to me, a sort of silver cord that I somehow knew connected me to my fleshly body. It tugged me like the kind hand of a good friend on my shoulder: Come along, old boy, you’ve had enough.

I flew home. The moon was plucked from me, dwindled, became a coin in the sky.

The silver cord hauled me in. A good thing, too, I thought, as I approached the rooftops of Paris: I’d not remembered where in the city I was lodged.

Snap! I woke breathless and chilled. In my murky brown bedroom, the memory of that austere landscape was like a slap. It had been the most terrific experience of my life.

“Sounds like Verne,” Christopher said, ripping open a pastry.

“Like what?”

“That story by Jules Verne. Griffiths read it to us, at a picnic at college. In translation, of course.”

I nodded. I blew across a bowl of hot chocolate. I was enjoying, supremely, being back in my body. Knowing it as only one of my bodies. It took me a while to think through the implications of Christopher’s suggestion.

“Without eyes…” I began.

“What?” I’d interrupted him.

“Sorry◦– without my eyes, when I was travelling, I was perceiving through some other sense.”

“And?”

“I was perceiving things too far from my own experience for me to understand them. So I translated them into familiar forms. Perhaps with practice, I could see more truly…”

“I expect you were lucid dreaming!” he cried. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a dream state…”

“One travels in a dream state?”

He rolled his eyes.

“One thinks one travels. You make things up, you direct your imagination while you’re asleep.”

He was impressed how much I’d controlled my dream state, how far I had pulled the wool over my own eyes. He urged me to “travel” again.

But there were other things to occupy me. We had to find a flat, Paris demanded to be explored. And my cynical Wildean side sneered: really? Cities in space? Moon-men? Who are you, to explore the stars? Until the memory of my trip crumpled my chest like the end of a love affair.

I never had a firm opinion as to whether Christopher or I was right. But I didn’t travel again.

After a year, he was calling himself Christophe. I slunk back, treacherously, to England. “Oscar isn’t even released from prison, yet!” objected Christopher. But I missed Charing Cross. Christopher had made friends with French men, but I hadn’t: my sense of universal brotherhood had ebbed, and I couldn’t manage the vowels.

I thought, often, whether it would have been different if I’d made my speech on the train. If I’d allowed sincerity to conquer cynicism. I became, without meaning to, cold and distant. I was on a fixed path, unable to intersect with warmer men.

Christopher forgave me enough to take me, once or twice a year, on a trip. Each expedition had a fraction of the exhilaration of our Parisian exile: trunks packed, the funnel of a boat steaming. We looked for communities of Uranians in Sweden, India, Turkey, and (endlessly) Greece. My feelings of guilt towards my friend were as hefty as my luggage.

So now, as we found our cabins on the Carmania setting out for America, I bowed the knee to him again.

“I’ve forgotten to bring anything to read. Could I borrow something from your excellent little library?”

He drew out a pile of books. Amazingly, amongst them was the volume from our French trip, on astral travel. For sentimental reasons?

Once more, the book drew me in. I went to my bed as eagerly as a bridegroom. I would slip the bonds of earth. I would touch the face of heaven.

It wasn’t my wrath at Mr. Wells alone that set my destination. I knew◦– I believed◦– that I had once travelled to the moon. I could reach, surely, for our nearest planet?

A moment of hyperawareness. My itching nose. The crisp sheets.

Then, up! This time, I was flying in daylight. The ship underneath me was a white toy on a blue sea, and when I climbed◦– and I did so confidently◦– the stars came out. Towards the great white face of the moon and past it. Its dark side was the first thing that really frightened me: craters the size of countries, with shadows so dark that I hallucinated things that squirmed and sparkled.

I marshalled all I remembered from Christopher’s small book and located the Red Planet. A red dot like a hot star. I set my course towards it and leaped.

And Wells was wrong! He was wrong entirely. I didn’t even need to get close enough to see the surface of the planet before I knew he was mistaken. The red of Mars wasn’t caused by a weed, or any kind of plant. Instead, it was◦– as far as I could tell◦– a property of dust. A hot and howling crimson mist, caused by ceaseless sandstorms. Like the haunted landscapes in the largest rubies: demon-chasms, their walls collapsing in, but never filling them, as debris is always boiling up out of them.

I sought a quieter spot: the long canals of Mars. I swooped down and hid in their cool, geometric shelter.

And there were others there with me.

They were near to my shape, seeming to be seated in a ring, but on no visible ledges or stones. I thought them inhabitants of Mars, at first. They were not tripod machines, nor had they oily tentacles◦– they were beautiful! Then I saw, trailing behind them, the silver thread that could take each of them home (so much more flimsy than it felt when embedded in one’s own guts). Then I knew them to be thoughtforms, visitors like myself, gathered here. Possibly they lived too far apart on Earth to meet through ordinary means, or perhaps they wanted secrecy. I drew close and, under the howling of the storms, I heard them speak faintly to one another.

They had come to Mars to plan war.

last raid of the campaign, guys

need to synchronise

hell yes

mcneill sets up a bombardment

doing it already

ellis, you send in your divisions to draw the initial attack

why mine

because we all had heavier losses than you last time

yeah, because I’m not an idiot

I had thought war would sound grander.

we agreed it already, ellis

your divisions soak up the hits

ellis you agreed

ellis?

bathroom break

The form that had just spoken melted into translucence

every time

has he got some kind of medical condition

we’ll miss our window

Which of these tired youngsters was the general? Perhaps they were all civil servants. I moved closer. The translucent one became more substantial again.

I’m back but my visuals are weird, anyone else?

ours are fine

your machine’s pathetic, ellis

I can see right down the valley to the encampment

well I’ve got some crappy space theme or a desert maybe

so have I, now

it’s really cheap-ass

One of the men of war turned and noticed me.

someone else just checked in

did you invite him?

god no

it’s a closed group, isn’t it? who invited him?

he’s the one messing up the visuals

this is supposed to be a private room

they’re never secure

jesus get the mods to lock him out

and throw up some earthworks while we’re waiting

A wall of Martian rock reared up in front of my feet. But it had no substance, and I stepped through it.

jesus

The men of war threw their weapons at me. Bombs flew, bullets whizzed through me. When their objects failed to touch me, they sent other, uncanny attacks. They blasted out their knowledge of past atrocities and it crumbled my bones. Like a disorientating cloud, I was surrounded by their indifference to suffering. I stumbled back.

But I also instinctively sent a scathing retaliation: flying barbs, then acid drops falling from the Martian clouds. I saw them flinch.

“I mean you no harm!” I called. Could men of war understand such a sentiment? The sound of my voice sent them into new confusion.

where’s he coming in from

tell the mods to block his account

can’t see who his provider is

this is a nightmare

we could change channel?

why should we have to go anywhere?

tell the mods to push him on

call off the raid?

we’ll miss our window!

we’ve missed it, we’re screwed

The men turned to steam. Their walls and bombs and clouds faded with them.

And my silver cord pulled me back, because someone was shaking my physical body, hard.

Whipped back through thousands of miles of space. It felt like the air was sucked out of my lungs, but I had none.

I opened my eyes and saw a crinkled face, bending down into my own. A hairy hand on my chest, shaking me.

“Oh, thank the Lord, I thought you’d died.” Christopher sat with a thump on the bed next to my feet. “Did you take a sleeping draught?”

I found my mouth and tongue where I’d left them. “Sorry. I sleep deeply, these days.” Should I tell him where I’d been? I couldn’t stand him dismissing me again. “Where are we, please?”

“Fifty miles out of Liverpool into the Irish Sea. Heading for the Atlantic.” His frown had lifted. He’d become more accustomed to exile than to England. We were both going to strange lands, but he was also heading home.

Later that night, as I approached Mars for the second time, I wasn’t alone.

“Christopher!”

He flew next to me, wearing a vivid blue necktie I’d never seen in the flesh.

I was delighted◦– vindicated! I wondered how I’d brought him along. But his substance was different from mine, and different from the warmongers on Mars: crisper, brighter. Had he been here before?

“Oh, I’m not Christopher.” He said it with absolute assurance, in his usual nasal voice. It was as eerie as if he’d said: “I’m dead, of course.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a mod, actually.”

“A what?”

“A guide. Keeping the channels secure.”

He made a little dip in the air and took my hand to tow me along. His hand felt warm.

“I don’t…”

“I’m just steering you away from where you’re not supposed to be.” He smiled away my uncertainty. “Come on, I know this place better than you.”

“Why do you look like my friend?”

“I don’t look any way in particular. You’re making me look like this.”

Of course! The explanation I’d given Christopher, years ago◦– that my mind was interpreting what I could see. “Because you’re the last person I saw? Or because I think of you as my guide?” I’d always been a passive traveller. It was Christopher who booked the tickets and read aloud from the Baedeker.

“It could be that. Or perhaps you’re anxious? You’ve picked something comforting.” He sounded embarrassed for me. “It really all depends on your settings.”

We sailed over a waterfall of asteroids. Christopher’s new necktie glowed in the reflected light of Mars. I was amazed that I’d remembered so many details of him as to make this charming waxwork.

“So do you have any relation to my friend? Are any parts of you him?”

“Well, what parts were you interested in?”

Flying together loosened my tongue. Nothing ventured! Although, perhaps, in this confusing cosmology, nothing could be gained. Could he answer a question to which I didn’t know the answer?

“I’d wondered if you’re happier, these days◦– and how we stand…”

He laughed again. “How thoughtful!” If I was imagining him, was I mocking myself? “No time to talk, though. You’re being bumped over to the next channel.”

“I don’t…”

Ahead of us reared a clean, silver planet, white caps at its poles.

“One of the recreational channels. Have a good time there.”

Morning star, evening star, bright beautiful planet. I somehow knew it would be more hospitable to life than Mars. More fecund.

“It won’t be like the last channel,” Christopher confirmed. “You can talk to anyone who takes your fancy, there.”

“There’ll be people?”

“Plenty of people.”

“Venus-ians?” I shuddered slightly at the nomenclature of the dread Wells.

“Travellers. Like yourself.”

“Will you stay and speak to them?”

He shook his head. “Don’t think that would even work. I’m just moving you over. I’d best head off.”

Venus was thick like soup with heat.

A cluster of figures stood not far from me. Again, wholly astral creatures. I extended my◦– interest? Sight? Soul?◦– to them. Several were women, the first naked women I’d ever seen and more naked than they could be in the flesh. But we were beyond reserve or modesty.

They turned on me. Their lust washed over me. The heat of it bubbled and blistered me. I was eyed up without eyes, handled without hands.

“Ladies!” I responded, to prevent a misunderstanding. “I do not desire you!”

The soupy heat of Venus grew chilly.

“I mean no offense! I am a disciple of another love, in which the female has no part!”

I was spat out. They turned their backs-not-backs on me. It was exactly like being cut at a party. As I made further protests, I was astonished to hear them refer to me as an arsehole, a complete cock, and other epithets.

My anger took form. I was more adept than the last time I’d tried it, on Mars; walls flew up around me, almost before I knew I was their architect. The women exploded the walls by flooding them with lava. I sprouted a pillar from the ground beneath me to lift me above the red flow, and I rained grey fog all over my opponents. The lava around their legs coagulated into greyish rock. I was quite merciless, scrutinising their agonised coils, reminiscent of those who perished at Pompeii.

Their thoughtforms reached out to drag me down. I streaked away in disgust at myself and them.

The airs above Venus were far cooler than the surface. I became aware of other fliers, an escort surrounding me. Their forms were minimal, their greetings like chirping or cooing.

hullo!

who are you!

I introduced myself and asked, in wonder, who they were.

just mods!

“Like that vision of Christopher? But you don’t look…”

who’s Christopher?

just here to keep the channel friendly!

had reports about you

losing us custom!

terms of service!

who’s your account provider?

A friendly hailstorm. A floating conscience, almost. How could I have been so violent, so cruel? I had been contaminated by Venusian feelings, of the body rather than the mind. I apologised profusely for my behaviour.

no problem!

where you coming in from?

“Earth,” I said. Their giggles were icicles.

don’t know your way around the channels!

not the right place at all

you’d rather be with the boys!

are we right? we’re right!

try another channel!

They sprang away across space and I knew what they referred to, where I needed to go.

The luminous pale blue planet. My namesake. Far out away from the sun, but it might shed its own light (Christopher’s small book told me), and it might also be heated from within. I’d always hoped its colour was the blue of a year-round Spring sky.

Could I get there?

But fear prevented me, and I let the silver cord pull me back. Snap!

I had to hunt Christopher all over the ship before I found him in a bar with a crowd of other passengers, chattering in German and drinking Schnaps. I thought it unfair he hadn’t told me his friends would be aboard, but then I realised he’d only met them that morning. I sat on the edge of the group. An Englishman with a walrus moustache enthused about how there would soon be larger and better ships than this mammoth transatlantic liner. I, dizzy from another kind of travel, could not share his excitement.

I saw that Christopher had become more and more interesting over his ten year in exile, while I’d stagnated. Had he made peace with being a Uranian? Perhaps brotherly love was enough for him, the brief, intense connections that form between travellers. Maybe he was never tempted. Maybe he frolicked nightly with his chess opponents. I didn’t think he was still grubbing around in Whitman’s poems looking for a solution. Unlike me.

Eventually, I had drunk enough that my friend had to help me to my cabin and my bed. He poured me a glass of water. I was melancholy and I had to concentrate to remember that this Christopher hadn’t steered me across the void. I’d never held his hand.

“Are you alright? Do you need the ship’s doctor?”

“It’s not that.”

He was the spit and image of my celestial guide. My heart poured out of me despite myself.

“Christopher, if you have a great longing for a◦– thing, a feeling of great kinship with this thing, and then you realise that it might actually be possible to see it, to feel…”

“What thing?”

But I could not speak the name of my planet. He would think me ridiculous, again. Or he’d enthusiastically tell me to dream, again, for dreaming was all I’d done. I tried to describe my dilemma in less specific terms.

“Chris, is it normal to feel wary◦– to not even know if you should try to approach…”

I suddenly feared that he might misunderstand me, and think I was declaring a long-overdue love. Then his raised eyebrow deflated that notion. I blustered on.

“Because what if it’s not the answer? What if you’re stuck with being lonely, and not at ease, and it’s not because you have any particular connection to◦– this thing. What if it’s nothing to do with…?”

He smiled and turned down my cabin light. We were used to helping one another when worse for wear. He wasn’t waiting for my revelation; he had given up on loving me, years ago. But, I realised, I had not given up the idea that he loved me. He’d go back to his deck friends as soon as I fell asleep. I closed my eyes.

Brave again in the dark, I decided to tell him. I murmured:

“I still want to. I want it. I want to touch…”

My knuckles struck the cabin wall. My hand had been foraging about without my volition.

Christopher had already gone.

Later, I went back, drunker, to the deck. I shouted: “The female has no part!” Christopher’s friends stared at me. Christopher helped me to bed, again.

It was no hardship, the following morning, to leave my body.

As soon as I was moving among the planets, my companions from Venus re-joined me.

you again!

we lost you!

we like you!

can’t let you back in there though

sorry!

Their feather-light push speeded me on. And I heard-without-ears the voices of my warmonger foes:

my view’s gone fuzzy

it’s him again

call in the supermod

have him shut down

Christopher appeared, for a brief moment, in the air before me, waving his arms in warning. Overtaking him was something like a flock of carnivorous birds, or a rock fall that twisted in space to chase me. They called to one another in a grating crackle.

how is he moving across the damn channels

can’t cut him off through his provider

provider’s unclear

I sped on but the missiles dogged me. I raced them; they were hard put to keep up with me. I only need to outpace them for a little longer! We swung together around the enormous bulk of Jupiter, dodged between the rings of Saturn. I was out of breath, I had no breath, they were shouting behind me.

wandering all over

not a user, it can’t be

only an error

clean it up

The blue planet came into sight. I knew at once that I’d been right◦– that it was a warm planet, a perpetual spring morning.

I went lower and dropped through the blue.

The planet wasn’t featureless at all. There was a wood, a great greenwood, moss paths dusted with pollen.

where is it now

there, in that empty channel

looks busy in there

it’s coming from him

he’s populating the place

There was dew on the grass, and I delighted in it, and the dark in among the trees was homelike and wholesome.

we should lock him in

cut the account off from the machine

just disconnect it

lock him in there

yeah try it

And in a clearing of the woods was a college quad and the quad was the agora of Greece, and a crowd of young men smiled to see me come to join their conversation. My college friends, unencumbered by wives and children, stood with other men I had not yet met.

I felt pain all through me. The hideous mod-birds were above me, tearing at my silver rope with metal teeth. I knew they wanted to stop me from travelling. If I hurried, I could still use the rope, still let it pull me, and I might manage to get home.

I didn’t want to go home. I’d come home. Christopher would understand. I took up the tight-stretched silver cord in my hands, near to my not-body, and wrapped it neatly around each not-fist. It would only take one quick –

locked him in

done it

Snap!