Fiction: The Stylites by Scott Payne

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When the general pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a

lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages

should comment upon their ashes; and, having no old experience of the

duration of their relicks, held no opinion of such after-considerations.

- Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

We were snuggled close in our hammocks, swinging in slow, gentle unison, when Ballard’s voice thundered through the thrumming dark of the sleep barracks: “Any of you lot ever resettle a lost colony before? Strange business, that…”

Ballard must have taken our sleepy silence for encouragement, or at least acquiescence, for he rumbled on with barely a pause: “It’s an odd thing, jaunting down to an abandoned moon and picking things up right where some poor doomed colonist left off hundreds of years ago. The machinery may be a mite outdated, but for the most part it works just the same as it ever did. Interfaces glowing cheerily like they’ve been waiting for you all along, rovers sitting there at the end of tracks perfectly preserved. And the moon itself’s taken no notice of humanity’s absence, of course – nothing’s changed to mark the interval. There’s been not a breath of wind to stir it and no rivers to carve it in all those long years. But you know well the unmarked lifetimes that’ve passed since a soul last set foot there. You can feel it in the marrow of the place, like a very presence of its own.

“Nonetheless you grow used to it. The routine takes over. Touch down, clear out the dreck, make sure everything’s up and running as it should. Eventually you stop taking heed of the piercing quiet, the vast empty spaces. You stop half expecting to look over your shoulder and see some sort of revenant coming for you down one of those endless corridors. You begin to cultivate a species of blindness, and the eeriness starts to bleed away. You just keep your head down, attend to your duties and collect your pay. This blessed change came over me about the time I finished helping to refurbish those gargantuan rusted mining stations out on Themisto.

“But then there was Enceladus. That’s the one place whose recollection keeps me from sleep on long nights like this.

“I was part of the detail sent to scout Enceladus, you see. No one had pestered this particular speck of the System since the Saturnines were cleared out nearly 250 years ago. The Second Contraction, they call that now. Too much turmoil on Earth to keep supplying the gas giant floaters, let alone these far-flung, dependent lunar camps. So there were two possible fates for those unfortunates. Those with working ships handy joined the stampede back to Jupiter or Saturn and prayed there was room enough for them in one of those awful, overcrowded floaters. The rest slowly starved out on whatever moon they had nearly broken their backs trying to dig a home into. No hope for a rescue. Nasty business.

“So here we came two and a half centuries later to see if there’s anything on Enceladus worth restoring. Failing that, we’d just scavenge what we could. Six of us crammed ourselves into a sleek moon-skipper, packed light for a quick recon. Our destination was Parasol. According to the archives, it had been a modest little core-drilling and microbial research station, nestled in one of Enceladus’s great southern scars. Just shy of the main ice spumes. We set out from Saturn with the aim of touching down right on top of Parasol.  

“But plans changed. The cryo-volcanoes were livelier than we’d expected, and our pilot didn’t want to risk getting caught in a white-out. Can hardly blame her. So she cut our arc short and dropped us straight down onto this hard, white plain four klicks out from Parasol. Right where the vapour was starting to turn into these fine little ice needles. Out we hopped, and first thing I did was look straight up. Gorgeous. It felt like I could just reach out my hand and fondle Saturn’s rings, they were so huge and vivid in the sky. But we had no time to linger. The view disappeared as we marched toward Parasol through deepening spray.

“It was slow going, far slower than we’d imagined, tromping up and down these great crusted ridges. Our visibility was shot in all that ice-fall, so we had to stop and regroup every 15 minutes or so just to make sure that we hadn’t lost anybody. We didn’t even realize we were approaching Parasol until we’d stumbled right into the middle of it. And a formidable reception it was.

“Just try to picture it, if you can. We’d been trudging through the endless ice, five hours into a trek we’d been told would take two, bone-weary and nearly blind. Our whole world had narrowed down to the constant tinkling sound of ice falling on our helmets, the steady crunch of our footsteps. Then the spume suddenly relented, and we could finally see beyond our own two feet. And you know what the retreating spray revealed to us?

“Pillars of ice, reaching up into the gloom. Each of them perfectly smooth and straight - no question of them being anything natural. Like pale teeth rising from the moon’s gums. They were scattered about the ice as far as I could see, which admittedly wasn’t much, but with no discernible pattern. We had walked right into a forest of these things.

“I nearly strained my neck looking to the top of those pillars – and that’s where I saw the bodies. Scores of them, each one frozen solid atop their own column. Cross-legged, straight-necked, helmets off - 100 feet in the air. Must’ve been about sixty of them up there, keeping a blind vigil together through the icy fog.

 “None of us wanted to linger under those eyes. We spotted the entrance to the underground station and hightailed our way to it. Broke through with handheld burners. Against all protocol, of course, but we were desperate to get inside. I could hear the ragged breaths of my crewmates through the transmitters – nearly hyperventilating. It’s a wonder none of us scorched ourselves. But we made our way in then sealed the door behind us, only to find another surprise waiting for us.

“You see, I was used to finding a certain amount of chaos, scattered wreckage and the like, when I first scoped out the interior of an abandoned colony. It’s to be expected. But we found Parasol clean and tidy as new. Bedsheets were tucked into bedframes, clothes folded neatly in cupboards. They even scrubbed the damn dishes before they went out and died together.

“I nearly tore that base apart looking for some explanation, and I found exactly none. The database was running just fine, but all the logs had been cleared. There were no letters, no notes. Not a whit of graffiti in the bathroom stalls, and believe me, I checked for even that. Whatever message these colonists wanted to send, they said it with their bodies, out there on top of those pillars.  

“Why the hell’d they do it? It would’ve been no trifling labour sculpting those things into being from the ice. You don’t embark on a project like that without some purpose. Every monument bears some meaning from its maker. My first notion was that it must’ve been some great symbolic reaching toward the sky. They got as close as they could to Saturn, to sanctuary, by setting themselves up there. But I was disabused of this theory soon afterward.

“We would’ve missed it if one of us hadn’t noticed a hump in the ice about 50 metres outside Parasol. Just a slight discrepancy in elevation, but we figured it was worth checking out. So we sent in some burrowing drones. They found a goddamned ship under there. One of those old, helium-fueled shuttles. It was an antique and a little dinged-up besides, but still operational. Plenty of fuel in the tanks. You know what that means? These fools could’ve left at any time, made a run for Saturn. They had a clear shot at life. But instead they buried their ship under ice before they buried themselves in the sky.  

“So I ask again, why’d they do it? Why die on Enceladus when they had the means to make their escape? And why die like this, turning themselves into some grim statuary rising from the ice?  

“For it couldn’t have been a painless death. That was plain from their faces. Not long after we found the ship, I decided I needed to see one of these poor gargoyles close up. I could’ve used a hover-pack or just sent a drone, but that didn’t sit right with me. I wanted to know what it felt like climbing one of those towers, as the colonists must’ve done in their final moments. So I strapped on my ice-cramps and hauled myself up the nearest pillar. It wasn’t easy work. Took me the better part of 20 minutes, and my suit was half filled with sweat by the time I made it to the top.

“And there she was, right above me. Staring straight into the spume. The dead colonist’s head was fully exposed to the freezing void, like all the others. It’s minus 200 degrees Celcius on Enceladus. She wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds after she took off her helmet. There it lay neatly in her lap, underneath her gloved hands.  

“I looked a good long while into that woman’s still, grandmotherly face. She had a peculiar expression. Eyes wide, lips pursed tight as though she was trying to suppress some outburst. Almost like she was trying not to laugh at a dirty joke she didn’t quite approve of. I’ll never forget it. It took me a few minutes before I could piece it together. She must’ve been trying hard to compose her features while she died, but a grimace attending great pain was just beginning to break through. She spent those final, agonizing seconds of her life trying to leave a serene corpse - don’t ask me why - and she didn’t quite manage it.

“I scraped back down that pillar with little to show for my exploit, just more of the same questions. Did they expect their bodies to be found? Is that what they wanted? If so, was this ghastly exhibition meant to be a welcome? A warning? Some flamboyant expression of memento mori? Or perhaps they didn’t foresee any of us mourners at all and took to the pillars simply to satisfy some unspoken need of their own. Maybe they couldn’t bear to disappear into the anonymous white beneath their feet. Or did they find something out there on Enceladus they figured needed watching, even in death? I couldn’t fathom it then and can’t fathom it now.

“In the end we cut the operation short and filed a false report to the Recovery Board. My suggestion, and it didn’t take much to convince my crewmates, even though we’d be foregoing a hefty bonus. Parasol’s unrecoverable, we wrote: presumed buried in accumulated and solidified ice-fall from the cryo-volcanoes. Recommend aborting further recovery efforts. It must’ve seemed plausible enough, because no one’s been back there ever since, so far as I know. We’ve left the moon entire to the dead. They’re out there still, and there they’ll remain. Forever watching...   

“So that was Enceladus.”

Ballard fell silent for a moment. I was certain that his account had come to an end at last. But then he cleared his throat and croaked out his afterword in his now tired, worn voice:

“That’s twice now we’ve rolled across just about the whole System, cocksure and beastly proud of our own cleverness, only to recede all the way back to Earth because we left the taps running at home. Maybe this time we’ll actually hold what we take. I have a feeling we will. Just look at us now, a shipful of innocents on our way to sully untouched Neptune.

“But who’s to say what we’ll find there? And who knows what we’ll leave behind.”

Ballard quieted, for good this time. No one said a word in answer. We drifted off to sleep in the comfortable, warm silence, all but one of us.

Scott Payne is a lawyer and now attempted dilettante from British Columbia, Canada.