Dust and skeletons

The Silver Whisper showed us the world.

As the sun and moon rolled overhead, we soared across every kind of terrain. We sped across a range of snowy peaks where two continents crashed into each other, over an ancient city, long silvery seascapes, patches of steaming marshland. We looked down on shambolic blankets of houses tossed in heaps around large cities, trailing into thin clusters as the countryside took over. We slipped through wrinkled canyons, over gushing rivers, and across grasslands bowed by the wind. We saw woods, cracked deserts, salt flats, twisted jungles and neat bays lined with the glittering towers of expired super-cities.

Each landscape could have been the surface of its own planet. Over every horizon a new face of the earth was revealed—broken and beautiful, peaceful and perilous—and I realised then the many outlandish faces of Man were but miniature reflections of those very outlands.

The final horizon of our journey had arrived and we were approaching the ragged valley where the Silver Whisper had first come crashing down. Gideon was the one who noticed the reading on the screen. The number of kilometres left to travel clicked to less than thirty, a short stretch from our destination.

There was a small farmhouse on a square of pasture to the left of us, which might have been the house of Jai-Li’s unremembered family. I saw the route the young girl must have taken back to the pod. As I tried to imagine her down there, I felt something well within me—a sense that Gideon and I had become a part of that lore, of everything we’d heard. We were flying among the words of a story, into the realm of myth, a modest Holy Land only we had been allowed to know.

As the kilometres on the screen dropped to zero the Silver Whisper floated down and circled in the air above the rocky earth. We were hovering directly above the spot where the pod had once crashed, the only detail of interest in an otherwise unremarkable location. The pod lowered slowly, setting up a gentle rustling in the nearby brush and scattered trees. Small rocks and pebbles clattered in their places. We touched the ground and the whirring of the engine subsided and then stopped completely.

On either side, jagged cliff-faces extended upwards. The arid land was hot and unforgiving, and the trusses of dull green plants crawling up through the gaps between the rocks alluded to a long, waterless history.

Gideon grabbed our bags from under the seats as the side of the pod opened. The warm desert air rushed into the cool interior. I shouldered my rucksack and stepped out. I scrambled down a pile of dusty rocks with Gideon close behind me. When we were about twenty metres from the pod the door retreated into the body of the pod, closing seamlessly.

“Where do we go from here?” Gideon asked. I stopped and looked up and down the valley. I’d seen the farmhouse as we’d flown in, which meant the tower was most likely in the opposite direction. That was as much as I could deduce.

“There. I think,” I said, pointing towards the narrowing walls of steep mountainside before us. “I want to say I’m sure, but …”

Gideon did not hesitate, and began to walk in the direction I had suggested, placing one careful foot in front of the next on the bed of loose rocks.

“There isn’t a sure thing left, Mr. Kayle,” he said, pushing on confidently as if he’d seen a large arrow painted on the side of the mountain. “I’m quite sure about that.”

I followed him, over rocks that crackled and clapped beneath our feet. As we walked away, I looked back over my shoulder once more to pay my last respects to the vessel. The metallic bubble had served us well. It sat easily in its spot, catching the blue sky and orange cliffs, as if holding on to a memory of its own. It was finally ready to take Jai-Li and her child to the temple. It was her story that had allowed us to get to where we were. I would never forget that. But it was Shen—the one who had ingeniously intertwined our paths—who deserved more than our gratitude.

We owed it to him to go on.

He deserved an ending.

We hiked our way through the rocky gorge, along the flat, winding scar of a long-dried river. We’d been walking for a couple of hours and the scorching weather was doing us no favours. We drank small quantities of water frequently, to stave off dehydration. We passed the skulls and skeletons of small and large animals, reminding us of an all too likely outcome. Gideon’s face was impassive. Either he was feeling no fear or he was able to control his emotions perfectly. I was faring less well. Each hot breath and sip of warm water did nothing to replenish me. I said nothing but could not help feeling we were marching towards our deaths. Any time now and we’d fall to our knees beneath the blue sky, defeated by the heat. We’d become two more fossils—two more dusty warnings for anyone foolish enough to pass.

“Gideon, I need to rest a moment.”

Gideon stopped. He tilted his face to the sky and blinked at the sun. I took a seat on a rock and pulled up my shirt to wipe the sweat from my face. Gideon grabbed a bottle of water and gave it to me. I threw back my neck and sipped, but held back from drinking more than I should. The water barely seemed to touch my throat, vaporising at the back of my mouth.

Big black birds circled overhead, waiting for our bottles to empty and our bodies to collapse under us—waiting to feast on the soft meat of our sunken eyes and swollen tongues. They’d seen this before. They knew how it ended, and perhaps even how long it would take to end. They circled in front of the sun, speckling the earth in moving shadows.

Gideon sat down next to me and had a sip of water. He dragged his forearm over his face and put the bottle back in the bag.

“I’m glad you’re here, Gideon,” I said. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“Neither could I, Mr. Kayle. We should go. Let’s keep walking.”

Gideon lent a hand to lift me from the rock. He cupped a hand on my shoulder and then turned and navigated his way over the rocks. The birds broke their formation and flew towards the turn in the valley, perhaps towards something freshly dead beneath the murderous sun. We followed their lead.

As we walked, the shadows of the valley shifted, the day bled away. Once the sun went down, the temperature would drop drastically and we’d suffer the night.

Finally, the valley tapered and we had to climb over a pile of enormous boulders. We rounded a bend and the valley came to an abrupt end. Past the exit to the gorge there was a flat expanse of brown desert sand. Gideon and I stood atop a boulder and stared out.

“There,” Gideon said, pointing. “Do you see that?”

I could see it perfectly. At the edge of the horizon, a colossal black structure wavered through a mirage of heat. It was a man-made craft, the largest astromining ship ever built, the size of a small town. We were staring at Chang’e 11.

“We need a single day to get to it,” Gideon said. “There’s no point going now. Come the night, we’d be stuck in the middle of the desert. For now, we should find a place in the mountain to camp. We need shelter and water. More than that, we need to prepare ourselves, Mr. Kayle—our bodies and our minds. The desert does not forgive fools.”