“LOOK,” SAID SPIKE.
Below us is a pair of tall triangular towers built of girders. A metal track
makes a circle between them, and sitting on the track is an open ironwork
structure, with wheels that turn what it supports: a giant white
deep-scooped dish.
I slithered my way down the slope until I was near it. It was rusted, not
maintained. There were leaves silting up the wheels, and birds nesting in
the ironwork. I brushed the black tarnish off a plaque – 1957 –
preinformation, predigital, Cold War, computers the size of wardrobes and
not half as good at containing things. Eisenhower was President of America,
where 80 per cent of Black people were still disenfranchised, in spite of
the Civil Rights Act, passed that year. Bulganin was leader of the Soviet
Union, busy sending a dog into space. In Britain, Harold Macmillan, the man
from the publishing firm, steered a nation as far from space as a planet can
be. Most homes in Britain had no fridge, no phone, no car, and housewives
did the washing on Mondays in a dolly-tub with a mangle. How could anything
so near be so far away?
Around us was the open field, and to one side a long, low hut with a tin roof.
I went towards it and peered in through the window. There was a desk,
surrounded by what looked like metal wardrobes with little portholes, a
black control box, with dusty, domed, unlit lights on the top of it, and a
jacket thrown over the chair. A mug of half-drunk tea or coffee sat by a pad
and pencil. Everything was under cobwebs.
I tried the door. It opened. The pad on the desk was heavily jotted with
frequencies and tiny equations. Otherwise the room was empty.
I felt in the pocket of the jacket. There was a wallet containing a crisp
ten-shilling note, and a small black notebook. I flicked through it.
21 January 1960: Picked up an unknown signal.
2 February 1960: Signal again, identical code and length.
21 March 1960: Signal appears to be repeating. Bouncing off Moon?
The book was filled with these notes. I hesitated, then slipped it into my
backpack. I left the wallet and the money, went out, carefully closed the
door and walked over to the dish.
“Climb up,” said Spike. It wasn’t difficult: the ironwork was sturdy and
gracious, built before too much functionalism made working objects into ugly
objects.
I had Spike in the sling, and climbed, finding foot-rests, and hand-hauls,
pulling myself up the peeling painted structure until we came to a gantry
and a vertical ladder.
I shook the ladder. It seemed sound enough. Up we went, higher, higher, hand
over hand, body straight as a sailor’s, on to the first deck.
Now the wind was blowing, gently making music through the rusted holes in the
metal, using it like a whistle.
Another bridge, and what looked like an observation cabin. I put my hand on
it, and it swung gently, backwards and forwards, like a fairground car.
Up again, the noise of my climbing now echoing off the underside of the dish,
like banging a tin kettle with a stick. Every step bounced, as though there
were many of us, climbing, climbing, iron boots on iron steps.
I reached a further ladder, its lower rungs missing, and I had to use my arms
to pull myself up, kicking on the slippy sides. Then I was up, six rungs
left, and through a trapdoor that opened straight into the lowest point of
the dish – where a marble would roll, if you had a marble and if you rolled
it.
We were in the dish of a disused radio telescope.
I scrambled out, short of breath, grabbing a frayed rope hooked from the rim
to the base of the receiver antenna. The white surface of the dish was
breaking up in places, but it was polar-blinding, and impossible to feel the
distance or the scale. The parabola and the whiteness distorted my spatial
sense, and I pulled myself a little way further up the sloping side and sat
down.
Wind. Silence. I felt as though as I was in the cup of some giant creature,
long extinct. Or a creature that had moved glacier-slow over the land and at
last come to a stop here, and slowly fallen asleep, in a deep trance of
millennia, waiting to wake again, for the Sun, for some other star, to stir
it from unknown dreams. What were the signals this creature had received,
and were they gone now, fainter and fainter, fading like a voice losing
strength?
Are we alone in the Universe? And if we are, was it always so? Will it always
be so? Does longing, flung out, some day find another voice?
I think all my life I’ve been calling you, across time. Steadily sending the
signal, sure that, one day, you will hear.
The wind skimmed the edge of the bowl like a man’s thumb on a hollow drum. The
sound was eerie, unworldly, as much like a cry as a note.
It was beginning to get dark, and the stars, light years away, were spread
over the dish like a cloth to cover it.
I thought I might stay there for ever. Why not? I was slightly hypnotised,
like an Alpine climber, part altitude, part snowblindness.
I was losing my clear boundaries. All I had to do was pull myself up on the
rope to the rim and step off into the star-stretched Universe. Then I would
be free. It was movement that startled me out of the slide-state into dream.
Not movement I could see, movement I could feel, under me, powerful and
hardly perceptible. I held on to the rope to get my balance.
“The dish is tipping,” said Spike.
“It can’t be – it’s disused. There’s no motor, no driver, no control.” I had
altitude sickness, and some inner-ear problem – that was what it was. I
moved to start the climb back down the ladder, and then I realised that it
was true: the dish was tipping.
Now it seemed as though the inside of the dish was scooped like some gigantic
prehistoric flower, with a stamen the size of a tree, and I was whatever
insect was resting inside but I couldn’t fly to keep my balance. All I could
do was to hold on.
The dish was not just tipping, it was turning. I could hear the great rusted
wheels grinding round the clogged-up rails. It was dark now, and we were
stark and white in the darkness, like an earthbound moon.
By watching the angle of the antenna I could see that we had tipped as much as
forty-five degrees. Then the dish halted.
“There’s a signal,” said Spike.
“From what? A satellite? A star? Another radio telescope?”
“I don’t know,” said Spike. “It’s not a code I recognise. I can’t decipher it.
Take me on to the receiver.”
“I can’t do that.” “Yes, you can. There is an inspection ladder. It won’t be
hard to climb it now it isn’t vertical. I want to be closer.”
So I did. I slung her over me in the dark, and climbed up on to the receiver
itself, hanging out like a gangman on a crane, balanced over the fearful
white drop and, after that, certain death. Here I am, back against the wind
and the night, holding Spike’s head in front of me like an offering, but I
don’t know to what god.
“It’s repeating,” said Spike. “The same message, repeating.”
“What do you think it is?” “Wherever it’s coming from, it’s been set like an
echo. It might be a test from some other astro station.”
“Does it match this?” I said. I got out the notebook and showed Spike some of
the unintelligible (to me) code.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s not all there, but yes, it appears to be the same
thing.”
“Then it’s been repeating since at least 1960.”
“It may only repeat at intervals.”
“Can you analyse it from the Mainframe?'
“If I had a connection, which I don’t.”
“We should go down.” “Billie, I think it is something very strange, very old,
and at the same time in front of us.”
“What do you mean, in front of us?”
“I think that whoever or whatever is sending or has sent this signal is able
to reach us in a way that is in advance of anything we are yet capable of.”
“You think it’s from the future?”
“No, I don’t, and that is what is strange. I think it is from the past.”
© Jeanette Winterson 2007.
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The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson
Hamish Hamilton, £16.99; 224pp
