Helen Marshall
Vitale Gallo was an endling, the last of the Venetians, the last of his kind, and the feeling – oh, the feeling was like a kind of settling darkness, twilight – il crepuscolo. A last look at the sun-kissed horizon.
He was born the old-fashioned way in a third-storey piano nobile overlooking the Rio del Trapolin canal, his family’s home for so long. His mamma hadn’t meant for it to happen in that place. She’d intended to evacuate with the others, but his father, a scholar of Dante, was away on conference. A foolish decision, leaving his wife alone, but she was stubborn and had insisted. Still, he had felt misgivings. There were so few left by that point, those who still lived in the city despite the dangers: acqua alta, the creep and crumble of decay.
But she was an architect. She loved the city and wouldn’t leave to join him, loved the thankless job of shoring up her basilicas and bridges, loved caressing the city, brushing her fingers along the roof of the sottoportico, the bas-reliefs and bricks. And Tommaso Gallo loved her. He was a slave to her wishes.
And so he was in Rome when the waters rushed in, swamping her ground floor. The neighbours couldn’t hear her screaming over the sirens. It was faster than she would have thought possible. One moment she was pregnant and fat as a seal, then her ankles were soaked with brine and eleven squeezes later – she counted them, of course she did – eleven squeezes, each worse than the last, and out came her little passerotto.
She swaddled Vitale in a blanket and clutched him close, as a motorboat laden with priceless Tizianos and Tintorettos carried her to terra firma. A treasure, amongst so many fine beautiful things. She always said it was the city wanting one last son for herself.
Gallo inherited two things from his mamma: her love of mathematics and the ghost feel of the city under his feet. He never walked Venice’s piazzas, never stumbled through the Zattere or waved to a little s’ciopon as it ventured out into the lagoon, yet as a child it seemed there was a memory lodged within him: standing under the Dome of the Pentecost, staring up at all of creation arrayed above him in glittering mosaic. Under his feet lay a vast oaken raft, supported on stilts. Larch, alder, pine – they floated a forest, a forest, could you imagine it? – across the lagoon and then they hammered it upside down.
By the time Gallo was two, the last remains of the city had fallen. Houses, churches and palaces: their foundations had rotted away after years of neglect and patchy repairs. Just like that, his pappa said, La Serenissima went from salvation to salvage. It broke his mamma’s heart. They sunk her ashes in the Adriatic where the waters of the lagoon poured out into the sea.
* * *
“Every city has a ghost within her,” Gallo would say in the years that followed, “the ghost of the city she once was and the ghost of all the cities she could have been.” He would know. He carried the ghost of Venice inside him through the bad years as Europe burned and ash choked his lungs, as the vineyards blistered, the Po dried up and waves of yellow fever, flu and hantavirus spread through the crowds of refugees.
During those decades of flood and fire he felt himself drifting – per una selva oscura, lost in the woods, the straight path abandoned. Bombai, Shanghai, Miami. Other cities drowned before the fragile peace took hold and the process of rebuilding began, but it was Venice that haunted him. When he dreamed he saw the gleam of candlelight on mosaic, heard the tinkling sound of a thousand shards of glass falling to the cobblestones, Christ surrounded by a glittering universe of gold. Ageless, beatific, as his mamma was now.
He never married. Never had children himself. How could you, this world being what it was? He devoted himself, not to the work of preservation, but to the work of discovery. He knew so much of the old world was vanishing, but there was a chance, he thought – he dreamed – a chance he might yet build something new.
He attended the Sapienza University of Rome where he studied materials engineering, ceramics and glassblowing. He was not the best of his classmates but he was driven, he worked hard. As he held the mandrel in the flame, he thought of the steady hands of the artisans of Murano and the things they had made, how the lagoon must have been littered with the kaleidoscopic dust of their workings. In Hawaii, as a second wave of disease ravaged the Old World, he climbed through collapsed craters and calderas, testing the peculiar qualities of fine-grained basalt. With his right eye – what he had come to think of as his ghosting eye – he saw columns of red porphyry and pavonazzetto marble, a great dome held aloft. But with his left eye he saw a different vision entirely: he dreamed of a mountain so high it stretched into heaven. And the stars were set about it, winking gold in the darkness. He saw its shoulders clothed with the rays of a distant sun and the fear in his heart quieted.
In the night sky Mars hung above him, red and shining like a ruby.
And then he was mezzo del cammin, thirty-five, midway upon the journey of life, when a grey-haired man appeared at his doorstep. Gallo knew him at once for what he was, a bureaucrat, yes, but a visionary, a fellow Venetian, the author of the ca me ligo manifesto: a guide for the future. And the Caigoist carried with him interagency budgets, policy briefs, and firm political commitments. He had his own dreams of the heavens. He took Gallo aside, said to him, “Build us a city of knowledge and we will set it among the stars. Build us a place to house our thinkers, our scientists, the mystics of our brave new world.”
“Why now?” he asked, and the other only smiled.
“We lived through death, and now what remains but the search for life?”
Gallo had nothing to say to this. He would think on it. But already the decision had been made in his mind, for what else had he been preparing himself all those days? Why else had he mastered the mystery of lithography and substrate if not for this? A new world?
Mars Station Alpha, ffut! What a name! Can you imagine?
No. He would name her the San Marco. He knew she needed a ghost inside her if she was ever truly going to live.
Even from the start, Vitale Gallo knew she would need to be beautiful, she would need to be grand. When the Caigoist had come to him, the engineer had said as much.
“If I build you this place,” he had said, “we must ask not only how will we make this, but how will we make this beautiful?” He had always thought that if anything would save them it would be beauty.
And was there any city in the world more beautiful – more impossible – than Venice? “She should have been named Il Fantasma,” his pappa claimed. After all, didn’t she accrete around a corpse herself, the pirated body of the blessed Evangelist? Whatever they said, Venice had never been as serene as she seemed to the outside world. She was beautiful, yes, but she was also strange and disturbing, disorienting, snatched out of history.
An impossible city – now a corpse herself, drowned, abandoned to the sludge and slime that birthed her and cradled her for so long. What better ghost to revivify for that marvellous, impossible project?
And so the station San Marco was to become a place of wonder. She would have her own apses and gleaming cupolas, built from graphene and titanium foams, basalt and iron oxide. Her own calli and sestieri, her own rii – canals – filled with a rich broth of cyanobacteria that would keep them breathing, keep them alive. Gallo built her slantwise and askew as Venice had been, so that as her inhabitants moved from piazza to portego they would feel uneasy, they would feel the echo of Venice.
* * *
He went with them, of course, he had made sure it was necessary. The San Marco held secrets – she had to, surely they understood! Such a thing could not simply be built and handed over to another! – and as its architect it was necessary for him to mind them.
And so he left his pappa, his only living family, and travelled for six months through the darkness aboard a ship called the Xantho with a crew of twelve. Physicists, astronomers, engineers, biologists – dreamers all in their own way, survivors like him, through the hard days of almost-collapse.
He worked and he slept and he dreamed of the sound of water rushing past, dreamed the wake stretching behind him, ripples of gravity and force. He thought he would see stars, of course, but the light of the sun was too blindingly brilliant. As he stared out into the distance, the universe seemed to blossom like an immense white rose. He saw things no other human had seen with the naked eye. He saw, as the poet said, gathered and bound by Love into one volume, all things that are separate and scattered through the universe, sustanze e accidenti e lor costume quasi conflati insieme, substance and accident and disposition, as if unified. He tried to write of it to his pappa, who he knew would understand: the Gallos had always been subject to their passions, stubborn and proud.
Then they set down upon the red planet and there were no words at all, nothing he could say, nothing at all to explain it, that feeling of sinking his feet into the soil on an alien world. The softness of dust, his body pressing into a surface that seemed to engulf him. Like her namesake, the San Marco perched along the ancient waterways where millions of years ago a geyser of heat had burst through the crust, spilling out ice and glorious brine.
Yet it too was a site of ancient disaster, its molten core a dynamo gone still, without which its precious gases had been flung into space. Gallo found himself weeping: moisture drained away, recycled, fed back to him as pure as springwater.
That night, they sat with their thighs touching the regolith bricks of Dorsoduro as the rii pulsed and plashed around them, and they told each other ghost stories.
First went Protheroe, who spoke of the hilltop near where she had been raised near the town of Tywyn. As the heat of an unbearable August scorched the fields, it had revealed the green shadows of barrows, old trenches dug by forgotten Celts. Some nights as a child she could hear her Bronze Age ancestors, trading salt, slaves, gold and furs, the lyrical whisper of their long-dead voices.
Then next went the biologist, a dark-haired half-Sámi named Vassiliev, who said he had tracked herds of mammoths on the Siberian tundra. Except they weren’t mammoths, of course, but African elephants, reconstituted and adapted. Scientists had set them masquerading in the shaggy cloaks of their brethren, like the patrons of some long-lost Pleistocene carnivale. He had seen an eerie frightened look in the eyes of one elderly bull, as if he were remembering the savannahs and grasslands his ancestors had known, as if he were seeking signs of the route to his graveyard: the place their bones lay white and gleaming beneath the balsam trees.
That evening the dust rose up like fog, and the sun – a pale disc – set in a haze of glacial blue. Vassiliev came to him, his eyes nearly black in the gloom, his laugh biting, his lips urgent as they sought out Gallo’s own. Afterwards, he left again, his body outlined against a palette of ultramarine and cochineal reds, careful to leave no trace of his visit.
In the morning he would analyse samples and tend to the cyanobacteria that flowed through the station’s rii, tethering them to life. It gave Gallo a peculiar source of joy to see such conscientiousness for what he had made.
There was no need to hide, of course. Others among the crew had laid their affections bare. It was to be expected. But with Vassiliev whatever it was lay shallower than even affection. The fear of contamination obsessed him.
He stared at the green lather that filled the channels. “If this stuff gets out,” he said, “who knows what will happen? We think we know but we don’t. That’s the problem with being the first. You don’t know anything, do you?” He brooded over the microgravity, stress responses in low-shear environments – the potential for disaster. “It could live, maybe even out there. What if we’ve come all this way only to infect this place with our own pathogens?”
But in the bad days Gallo had learned there was always a chance of misfortune, some yawning chasm that might open up beneath you. You could love something and lose it anyway.
When the weather was clear, they would go on hikes together into the foothills of the mountain, its grooves and pits streaked black with a rich saline wash. Vassiliev had a steady, wolfish gait, even in his suit. On Earth he had been a long-distance runner and these climbs, he claimed, gave him the only opportunity to properly stretch his muscles. They traversed up rust-red buttes to find mesas of gypsum that sparkled like broken glass, hunting in vain for fossil life. They never found it.
“We will,” Vassiliev would say afterward, supremely confident, “it’s only a matter of time.”
He could be patient, Gallo saw, and methodical. Sometimes he would draw stark, straight lines in the soil, his own kind of offering.
It was only as he reached the end of his scheduled six months that he began to show signs of frustration.
“I can’t stand it,” he raged privately. “There is nothing for us here. There never was. Even at Vostok Station, where you’d freeze your balls off in twenty seconds, still you find something.” His eyes were wide, his skin pale and trembling. “I thought, well, it would be wonderful but instead it is so lonely. They cannot understand how lonely it is. The only thing worse than being haunted is learning even the ghosts are dead. There’s no one to talk to.”
* * *
Soon after, Vassiliev left. They all did. All except Gallo.
His pappa had sent him a message. Another tragedy: some new virus had reached his retirement community in Oslo, unpredictable but deadly. He waved his hand. “Don’t worry, my son,” said Tommaso Gallo. “As the poet said, our fate cannot be taken from us. It is a gift.”
The next message was worse, his breathing laboured. His liver and kidneys were failing.
They could not speak, of course, not even at the end. The distance was too far, their messages syncopated by the time lag.
“Wherever I go,” he murmured, “I will have your shining eyes to guide me. And hers too, mia stella.”
There were no further messages. His father fell into a coma from which he was not expected to wake.
But by then, the graphene hull of the San Marco had begun to show signs of stress. To be expected. One could only design speculatively. An engineer’s experience was needed, Gallo told them, so of course he would stay to oversee the repairs. There was nothing left for him back on Earth.
* * *
The next biologist was Rojas, who followed the routes Vassiliev had mapped and surveyed them, extended them, made her own fresh trails to the foot of the sulphate mountain.
“Come with me,” she said to Gallo. “You’ve been out there. We’ll go together.”
She was different to Vassiliev, warmer in every way. She loved to laugh. She told dirty jokes and whenever she caught him lost in thought, the black cloud upon him, she would grin, tell him, “Never shit more than you eat, get me?”
He walked through his grief, tried to feed his soul with wonder.
They picked their way through gleaming deserts of opaline silica and there Rojas told him about her abuela who had combed the Atacama searching for bone shards of Pinochet’s disappeared. She grew near-sighted with squinting and yet once, Rojas said, the old woman had happened upon a femur twice as tall as she was, the remnant of some lost lizard that would have eclipsed any known today if it were true. But afterward her abuela had told no one, and wherever that grave lay, it lay there still and undisturbed. She could not bear for them to touch it.
“We laugh, we die. Mostly we vanish,” she said with a shrug. “But not all, never everything. There were worlds and worlds that lived before ours. Nothing begins and nothing ends. It will be the same here, you’ll see. We’ll find it.”
Gallo said nothing to that. When he looked out at the cracked landscape he heard Vassiliev’s words in his ears and a terrible loneliness came over him.
“You’re a strange one.” Rojas elbowed him with a laugh when the two of them returned to the station. “The San Marco? It’s like naming a place after Pompeii. It seems like a bad sign. Were you cursing us?”
She meant it as a joke but it made him cross himself nonetheless.
Another cycle passed. The dust storms of spring gave way to summer. Bands of lead-white clouds capped the distant volcanos, and the polar caps began to recede. But no brine flowed into the chasma. The waterways were stark and hardpan, barren.
Then it was Rojas packing her things for the long trip home: she went gamely enough, tucking away the picture of her abuela. She had hoped to find traces of tube worms or algae, but she too was leaving empty-handed. The only life she found was the life they had brought with them: microbial contaminants, hitchhikers on their spacesuits.
“Ah well,” she said philosophically, “if not me, then another. Treat them kindly, Gallo. No more brooding, get me? It’s not good out here.”
He had volunteered for another tour, of course. What was there left for him back home? No mother, no father, no sisters or brothers. He was the last of his line, but what even did that matter? Besides, there were fears of another pandemic.
“Don’t worry,” said Rojas with a wink. “The women of my family are indestructible. It’s the men I fear for.”
* * *
The supply ferry arrived and departed, but amongst the new crew no one wanted to tell ghost stories. The third biologist was an Algerian named Hadj. She had little time for Gallo and eyed his beautiful rii with a look of distaste.
“The system isn’t performing the way it ought to,” she said angrily during one of their morning sessions. “These channels are leaking, you didn’t see? It’s dangerous. We don’t know – really – how these organisms will mature in this environment.”
She left others to take up the surveying. “If I don’t rebalance this nutrient feed, we could be dead before the Xantho returns.”
It was more than that, though, Gallo could tell. She hated the higgledy-piggledy lines of the San Marco, its rises and falls, its peculiar curves. The city he had loved haunted her.
She went to the officers above him, offered her own solution: advance their plans to construct a second base, this one simpler, streamlined, practical and elegant. Wasn’t the graphene hull already showing signs of stress? They knew so much more than they did when the San Marco had first been designed. And the technology was changing so quickly, there were advances that could be incorporated, nanocomposites that would be tougher, more flexible, better suited to the harsh Martian environment.
Hadj was young, a wunderkind, barely thirty years old. She patted Gallo, almost kindly. “Wouldn’t you like to go home soon, jaddi? Haven’t you had enough?”
He volunteered for a surveying mission. Several of the new crew were having trouble with space sickness, muscle atrophy and the readjustment to gravity, so he agreed to go out alone. He was practically a native by now and he knew the area better than anyone.
That afternoon he put on his suit and headed out along the old trails he had charted with Vassiliev. The path was harder than he remembered but his anger spurred him onward.
He reached the first peak. Vassiliev’s scratches were still etched in the regolith. Nothing had disturbed them, nor would it. Time moved slowly here. Only wind and sunlight, not the creep of green spreading its tendrils, forcing change upon the world.
Below he saw a swirl of dust kicking up, the last of the spring storms. He forced himself onward. “I just need to get above it,” he radioed back. Only static on the line. Never mind.
For two days he climbed. On the third he reached the top of the ridge. Out of breath, he allowed himself to sit. By now the dust was clearing again but he kept his radio off anyway. He found he enjoyed the silence.
In the distance, the San Marco gleamed like a mollusc shell, Egyptian blue stretching to dull madder. Her cupolas were limned with gold. She was beautiful. But with his ghost eye he saw only wreckage. They would take what they could of the San Marco and cannibalise it. Soon dust would fill her exposed skeleton. She would lie like a derelict Roman galley among the sand dunes.
He thought then about his mother, who had loved her city and watched it vanish. And his pappa too, who had watched his own evening star fade, leaving him with a squalling infant. For a time there had been no room for poetry, no room for anything but the coiling weight of love, born of loneliness and need. And then, miraculously, he had begun to whisper the old words – nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, again and again – during the long stretches of night when sleep was impossible. There was grief, there was always grief, but there was also the child who needed to be fed and no one to do it but Tommaso. That was how you survived, lurching from moment to moment, crisis to crisis, giving what you could, the things you intended and the things you carried with you, unknowing. Praying only for those grey-blue eyes to open, for some glancing light to shine within them. To be seen, to be known for a moment.
He and his pappa had returned to Venice when he was twelve years old. The lagoon was treacherous, but Tommaso Gallo had rented a little boat and taken them out, guiding them through the Rio del Trapolin, his son gazing down through clear, bottle-green water on a makeshift reef of rubble, concrete and wooden pilings that had accreted below them, sheltering oysters, squid and mussels. Now shoals of silvery fish darted through the wreckage while overhead cormorants swooped and divebombed into the waves.
“Haven’t you had enough?” Hadj had asked him. Perhaps he had. He didn’t know what it meant to be alive without his pappa. But what he had built wasn’t enough, it wasn’t the bastion against history he had supposed it might be.
He took his samples and prepared to leave.
* * *
The route down was perilous in its own way. He had to go slowly, his muscles burning and his breath short. Another three days back. He thought about remaining where he was. He wanted to lie down and sleep.
But down he went, down to whatever was coming. But when Gallo finally stumbled through the airlock, exhausted and aching, he found Dorsoduro abandoned and the calli leading outward sealed.
He tried the radio. “What happened?” For a long while no one answered. Then:
“Stay where you are.” It was Hadj. Her voice was desperate.
“What is it?”
“We thought we had taken enough precautions,” she said. “On the Xantho. We thought…we thought…but we didn’t know the virus could lie dormant. Not for so long. Six months.”
He saw the shape of a hand through the porthole. She was on the other side of the airlock. He could see her profile, the curve of her lips, her chin.
“You should stay in your suit.” A tiny gasp. “Not that it would matter, probably. They won’t be able to send another ship for months. Probably it’s too late for you.”
“Where are the others?”
She laughed a harsh, brittle laugh.
“Sick bay. Albescu is dead, O’Neill too. No one else is answering.” He could tell she was frightened. It had been like that with his classmates. The brightest of them could be so very fragile. The peculiarity of their talents meant they had seldom faced challenges that could not be overcome with the mind alone. Some things could not be reasoned with, only endured. His generation, his pappa’s, those who had survived the bad years, knew that. It had only ever been luck. The ones like Hadj did not understand the nature of misfortune.
He stayed with her through the night, on the other side of the calle. She was feverish. There was a hope for some time it might break. She drifted between bouts of lucidity, sharing her plans for the new station. If only, when all this is over…
“I shouldn’t say.” She coughed badly. “The Caigoists and your design. Pure fancy, heh? Oh, jaddi. I thought I was the last. I’m glad you’re here. Thought I was going to die alone.” Then she was speaking to someone else, someone he couldn’t see or hear.
Then quiet. Was she sleeping? Gallo didn’t know. He tried again to reach the others but the radio remained stubbornly silent. He was the last.
He was afraid then as he had never been before. This was a place that did not know his name, did not care, had no filth or romance of its own. It wasn’t like going to another country. Country was a human invention.
But. What were his choices? The scrubbers might maintain his oxygen levels. There was food enough. Maybe. Six months. Could he do it? He thought he could. He would try.
* * *
He woke to the sound of Vassiliev laughing at him.
“There’s nothing out here, Gallo.” He pressed his cold lips against the engineer’s. “It’s only a matter of time now.”
The engineer was sweating badly and there was a sharp, cramping pain in his stomach.
“Don’t shit more than you eat,” said Rojas. They were ganging up on him. He tried to push himself up but his muscles were still aching from the hike.
“Hadj?” he muttered over the radio. No one answered him.
Rojas was grinning now and making a rude gesture. “You’re dying, amigo,” she said. Vassiliev looked away. He had never been one to linger on goodbyes.
“Maybe,” grunted Gallo.
“No maybes about it.”
“Has anyone said you can be a real cow sometimes?”
She snorted and patted his hand with affection. “Only everyone I’ve ever known.”
He struggled again to stand. Managed to get to his knees before the bile rushed out of him, splattering the inside of his helmet. He gagged, popped the seal, and threw it aside. Wiped the vomit away as best he could.
“She said not to do that,” said Vassiliev pointedly. “Keep your suit on.”
“Nothing for it,” Gallo replied. He felt better breathing the station’s air. He pulled himself to the airlock, peered through the porthole. He could make out Hadj’s crumpled body on the other side. It looked so much smaller now. Her expression had calmed. Her lips were grey-blue.
He overrode the security measures and opened the door, stumbled through the sottoportico and upward along the calle. His fingers traced the stark angles of a cross. Santa Croce. He almost laughed. Hadj had been right. Pure fancy, all of it, but why not? Why not?
Her eyes were dark, nearly black, fringed with long delicate lashes. He ran his fingers over the lids lightly, letting them close. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…” he whispered. There were no other sounds, only his breathing and the rasp of the fluid in the rio that ran alongside the corridor. A thick green light shone through, leaking out of the channels he had designed. The calle stank of vegetation, a smell so earthy and foreign to the station it took him a moment to recall what it was. When had he last smelled something besides metallic recycled air?
Well. She had been right about that too.
He didn’t think. He slammed his fist against the rio channel until a starburst glittered in the glass. He did it again and again. It shouldn’t have broken, it should have been stronger than that, but it seemed everything was failing him now. He heard the tinkling of shards falling, a rush of thickened green.
“Why did you do it?” Vassiliev asked. “Like she said. Pure fancy.”
“Because…” said Gallo. He couldn’t finish the thought. He saw in his mind sunlight on the canals. The same colour in pictures of the cathedral, columns of Thessaly green marble. It had always been this way, he thought. Nothing was ever only itself. Everything was twinned and mirrored, everything repeated time and again. A city wrapped around a corpse. Il Fantasma. It had to be that way, otherwise, what? Otherwise, nothing. Otherwise, the red planet. A dead planet. Otherwise a place so ancient and unchanged that even the ghosts were dead.
Then he was on his back, staring through the viewport in the roof of the cupola. He had insisted on these, one in every sesterieri, so that they might look up, see all of creation arrayed above them. The stars glittering in the Heavens, and Earth among them, brighter than the others, with the moon shining nearby.
“Why?” murmured Rojas this time.
“Isn’t this what you wanted? All of you?”
Gallo’s eyelids fluttered.
Under his spine lay the hard regolith bricks, bricks he had fashioned from the substance of an alien world. Amazing. Vassiliev was standing over him, and Rojas too. There were no ghosts here, so he had brought his own. The ghosts of men and women, the ghost of his home. If the planet truly was dead, maybe he could bring it life. Who knew what might happen given time, given centuries and centuries?
Now the light of the new day was radiating through them, through him too. He understood now: his body was more than just a body. It was its own little s’ciopon. It was carbon and water, it was heat, energy, spirit, substance and accident and disposition, unified. And he felt his desire and will, turning like a wheel, driven by that same power that moved the sun in its circuit, the stars as well, everything spinning, glittering, traced with glory.
Vassiliev had been wrong. They weren’t alone on the planet. They weren’t ever alone. All they needed they carried with them, wherever they went.
He felt rapturous. “It’s out there,” he whispered to Rojas and Vassiliev. To his father. To Hadj and the others, to all the dead he carried with him. “I can see it moving.”
Then a brackish taste filled his mouth as the foaming green waters rushed in around him.