Gravitas

 © Derek Ivan Webster

Sean eases himself onto the cold plastic of the seat. It's early, by any standard, and his body feels as hard and unresponsive as the controls in front of him. A few tired toggles are flipped before the cockpit finally takes on some semblance of life. Sean reaches out for the long, thin-handled stick. His open fingers hesitate a moment in front of the curved metal instrument.

Am I ready for this? he wonders. Today , of all days, am I ready to take this tractor out to the field?

The engines beneath him rumble to reassuring life. He has no choice but to snatch the controls firmly, and steady the old girl. Just another day on the job, he tells himself. Another check on the time sheet and another miniscule spike to his desperately unstable credit file. Is he ready? You might as well ask if the sun is ready to shine. Nobody gets to decide who they want to be. Not in the end.

It takes him a full ten minutes to idle the tractor back into position, drifting into the exact same spot he'd left off eight hours before. Beneath him he imagines the dead, dark ground is happy for his return. They've come to know each other well over the last six months, he and this wide face of stone. Sean no longer needs the read-outs to tally a composition. The face speaks for itself: dark stony lines of basalt, lightened by just enough olivine to add a marbling character. Ah, but it is the trace of iron-nickel that lends the ground its dull luster. Without that the rock might look angry. There is no mistaking the penetrating wisdom of this face.

For its part, the Face has silently listened to Sean's unfolding story in pieces. Eight hours on, eight hours off, three shifts per day-cycle of the Earth. The concept of a solar day feels awkward this far out from the spinning of the planet, so Sean has taken to measuring time by the number of chances he's had to vent his frustrations to this avid listener. Three conversations every two days. That makes this morning the 278th time he has sat down to update his friend on the happenings back home.

Sean sighs and pushes the release valve for the density shield. The tractor shudders for a moment as its gravity converter kicks in. The invisible bond between machine and rock sets to work. The Man and the Face stare at one another over this field of unavoidable, unalterable gravity.

“She's gone,” Sean begins. “They found her more than a week ago. I guess it took this long to identify what was left.”

The Face knows it best not to comment on this detail.

“They think the initial blast reached her. One of the lucky ones, they said.”

Sean glances up at the nav-screen. The clean blue alignment beacon keeps the tractor's point of gravity at exactly the right place to tug lightly at the massive asteroid beneath it. A Gravity Leech, they call the machine, it is designed to suck velocity off of the space rock in tiny little sips: like a hummingbird drinking from the edge of a lake. Stretched out over months, sometimes even years, a tractor of ample class is just enough to affect the course of a sub-planet. After six-months of conditioning this asteroid, they are hours away from reaching the critical window of its shift.

“The funny thing is,” muses Sean, staring at that blue alignment beacon as if it doesn't remind him of someone else's eyes, “they don't even know who did it. For once nobody's even claimed the bragging rights. I suppose this one wasn't even important enough to have a signature attached.”

The Face maintains its admirable silence.

Sean takes in a long breath, doing his best to steady growing nerves. His real responsibility isn't piloting the tractor. It operates proficiently enough on autopilot, but ever since the near miss of the Archibald comet, three years ago, all missions have restored the throwback element of human touch. After all, beyond all the number crunching and hypothetical print-outs, a human brain should prove invaluable when dealing with the unexpected and often random elements of space. There was just no replacement for human ingenuity.

“I had enough credits saved for a down payment, you know,” Sean can't remember if he's mentioned this detail before. It doesn't matter. It's important enough to repeat. “I'd promised her a place on the moon, and you better believe I was going to give it to her.”

Sean's fingers hover over the curved metal of the hand-lever.

“You know what she said?”

The Face is too polite to admit having heard this more than once before.

“She wasn't too good to live on the Earth. Imagine that. A girl that deserves the stars, and all she wanted was to scratch out a safe little spot in the deepest dregs of the whole system.”

"It's where mankind started , she said, and where he should end up once he figures out how to fix this mess. A heart of gold that girl, but sometimes no more common sense than a child. Don't get me wrong,” he glances down through the spotting window, just to make sure the Face hasn't misunderstood him.

The Face has not.

“She was as smart as a whip when she wanted to be. Just too many soft spots for too many people. People that never deserved it. People that still don't”

Sean's fingers lower a bit, coming to rest atop the long, thin hand-lever. The metal is cold enough to send a shiver up his arm.

“We were going to raise our kids away from that hole. A lunar commute would have given us more time together. It was going to be nice. Maybe not Mars, but nice, you know?”

The Face nods imperceptibly, vibrating along with the tug of the gravity field.

Sean lets his gaze slice sideways for the first time, out through the cockpit window. He seizes on the view dominated by an enormous spherical swirl of dirty blue and gray. The planet looks like a marble just dug out of the gutter: all the makings for a real beauty, but so long drowned in a layer of sewage filth that you're forced to throw it back. Sean can see the stink of the place. What land is still left above the Great Tides is bloated and sagging: a dead body swarming with the legion of maggots and blowflies that humanity has become.

“They did it to her,” Sean can't keep the anger from his voice any longer. “All of them. With their incessant, cowardly wars and their faith in nothing but the winning of an argument.”

He slowly turns his eyes back down upon the Face that floats beneath him. Calm, controlled, filled with certainty. No matter how many times he tries to explain, it's clear the Face will never be able to understand what humankind has done to itself. The Face has survived hiccups in time that span the entire existence of life on earth. It has seen planets folded into existence and moons torn apart in a single whisper of solar wind. But it has never felt the tread of a human foot. And for that one small lacking, as great and deep and wise as it might be, it cannot understand what Sean is about to do.

Sean takes firm hold of the hand-lever and pulls it straight back. The tractor lurches, its auxiliary engines firing in an unexpected direction and its whole frame issuing an immediate and shuddering complaint.

The clear blue alignment beacon begins to flash. The flashing turns orange and then red as the nav-screen displays the tractor's dangerous drift off the prescribed course.

“Don't worry,” Sean speaks to the sudden tension he can feel in the Face, “I'm just putting you back where you belong.”

Alarms should be sounding, disturbed voices crackling over intercoms: words quickly morphing from confusion, to annoyance, to anger, and finally coming to rest on fear. But Sean has the speakers turned off. He disabled them, along with the remote overrides, during the last eight-hour shift. While he was supposed to be sleeping. Not long after he'd received the video message from Dawn's parents.

Sean reaches out to kill the gravity converter. The tractors engines can't take much more strain, and, besides, he's already rotated the Face enough to block his view of the Earth. The engines go dead, the lights turn low and Sean once again hovers quietly above his ancient friend.

What could we expect? After all she married a Cauc, didn't she? And a garbage man to boot. That was the day she died to us. This was just putting a nail in the coffin.

The words of Dawn's father burn hot in Sean's head, but he can't quite bring himself to let them go. They're too crude, too detestable to share with the Face. They're a part of an ugliness that the face has no interest in. An ugliness that doesn't belong.

With a blow from his elbow, Sean breaks open the red, glass panel beside him. This is a final contingency, only to be used if a velocity shift reaches absolute failure. The Gravity Leech is designed to function, in emergency only, as a terminal impact device. One huge thrust of mass and acceleration that can strike with enough force to dislodge a small moon from orbit or send an arcing comet sizzling off in a safer direction.

Sean begins to type the pass-code into the exposed panel. He is much more than a garbage man. It is his code. This was his responsibility. He finishes typing in Dawn's birth date.

“Are we ready for this?” he asks the Face.

The Face is solemn, but offers no alternative.

“I can't wait for you to meet her,” he tells the Face.

“I'm coming home,” he tells his wife.

And then he pushes the final key.

The tractor strikes the Face with such a blinding impact that Sean's reality is swept immediately off the table and into the bottomless wastebasket of space.

It is only Sean's body that remains, discarded like a crumpled tissue, laying at the edge of the Face's massive new crater.

The Face continues on, wholly unperturbed by its return to primary trajectory. In front of it the dirty marble spins in motion. After six months of alterations they are again back on a shared track. It will take another few weeks but this formal introduction is now set in the stars.

Many months before, over one of their first conversations, Sean described what happened the last time a body as large as the Face struck the Earth. How the dinosaurs had given way to the hungry little mammals that skittered within their shadows. How the whole of a living world had been transformed.

The Face knows none of this, of course. It feels no pain: neither from the gaping wound recently inflicted on its surface, nor for the story of the little creature that inflicted that wound. The Face feels only the ever-growing pull of the planet in front of it. It feels the gravity of the situation, and it reacts appropriately.

Soon they will become one, this Planet and this Face. And the Face will share with the Planet its silent perfection. It will cure the Planet of its sickness, its rot. Its humanity.

Together they will share a final and lasting peace.

  Raised in a tiny Alaskan fishing village, educated at Yale University, Derek Ivan Webster is a writer that appreciates a good contrast.  A victim of the freelance lifestyle, it is only his sage wife and precious/precocious little girls that keep him sane.  Read more at his blog.