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After he was kissed goodnight, the ravens flew August into darkness, into a day dimmed by another eclipse and then lit up again as the Earth and the moon and the sun moved beyond each other’s lines. Yet for the first time they did not land, and August experienced the eclipse from Muninn’s back, high above the surface of the Earth. He was not afraid of falling, even though the air was damp and cold and the iron feathers wet under his fingers. Muninn never let him fall, and the air was crisp and thin and made him dizzy, a little, and that led to giddiness and to lack of worry.
“There is no need to land today,” said Muninn. “I have brought you up for observation, and you are not the only observer.” She wheeled around, August clutching at her back and his legs hanging down, and before them was a balloon without a ceiling above it. In the balloon was a man with a worried expression on his face, who did not see them in the air before him, who did not see Huginn perched on the side of the basket.
“It doesn’t seem like a very nice day for ballooning,” said August, and his teeth chattered with little clinks like ice.
“The eclipse was today, so he couldn’t wait for a better one,” said Muninn. “He did get a very good view, though.”
“Then why’s he so upset?” The man was talking to himself in a language that August couldn’t understand, but he had the same expression on his face that Mum did when she was trying to hang curtains and August was fairly sure that he was swearing.
“Dmitri is not a balloonist. He is more concerned with elements and tables, with chemicals and vodka. He has never been in a balloon before, and he does not know how to operate it.”
“What’s he doing up here if he doesn’t know how to get down?” said August, horrified.
“I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Muninn replied. “There was meant to be another man with him, but the balloon wasn’t taking off so Dmitri started getting rid of weight. Suitcase, sand, stool... out it all went, along with the pilot.”
August couldn’t help it: he burst into giggles. It just seemed so ridiculous, and the more he considered his position the more ridiculous it was. High and invisible on an iron bird, his hair wet with drizzle and his fingers cramping with cold and the light new come back from darkness and then haze–and before him, a bearded man in riding boots, balanced on the slippery edge of a balloon cabin and tugging ropes at random.
“I’m so glad you find it entertaining,” said Muninn.
“Don’t you?” said August, still giggling and dizzy at heights.
“I have only Dmitri’s memories of this event,” said Muninn. “They are not particularly amusing ones.”
“Mine are,” said August, and he felt the iron body beneath him inflate briefly, as if the raven were silently huffing at him, and then his experiences became her own as memory went from one into the other, from source to certainty and recording.
“He does look silly, I suppose,” said Muninn. “You are very good at silly.”
“Come on,” said August. “I’d never go flying without a pilot.”
“Please. That’s all you do,” said Muninn. “All of you, every day. Didn’t you listen to your father? You launch yourselves out into the world and there is no plan for you, no place you know for landing, and you have no idea how to get yourselves down. You make it up as you go along, and sometimes the balloon crashes and sometimes it doesn’t and it’s mostly down to luck either way, but you scramble into it every time, just floating through your lives and pulling on ropes to see what happens, to see what you can make yourselves do.”
“Don’t you?” said August.
“I used to,” said Muninn, and her wings beat hard beneath him. “When I was younger.”
“Maybe it’s time to start doing it again,” said August.
“I have been trying,” said Muninn.
AUGUST 20, 1977
CAPE CANAVERAL, U.S.A.
The ravens had brought him to a space centre, and August sat, huddled in his blanket, one small boy in a crowd of excited people who didn’t see him, who were all looking away and outward. Muninn sat with him.
“Why is called number two if it went first?” said August. “You’d think it would be Voyager 1.”
“Voyager 1 is the faster,” said Muninn. “It will pass Voyager 2, in time. But this Voyager will go out among the stars, out where no probe has been, and it will see Jupiter and Saturn. It will see Uranus and Neptune... and because of it we will see them as well.”
“Even me,” said August, who had seen the photos, who had been born after their transmission and who would see no more. He wanted to be excited even so, but he was nearly always cold now, even on summer days, and his seat was hard. It made his bones ache.
“You have seen many things that others have not seen,” Muninn acknowledged.
“So don’t be greedy, is that what you’re saying?” said August, with a thin little smile, and Muninn settled her feathers primly and said nothing.
The people around them had brought popcorn, some of them, and sandwiches and apple juice. One family was eating hot dogs, and August eyed them as if with the memory of hunger. He had liked hot dogs, once. And candy apples, and popcorn. Popcorn with lots of butter and salt, and plain popcorn for making strings at Christmas. Mostly he liked to hear the sound of it bursting in the pan, and the warm scent of caramelised sugar that April would sometimes mix into hers. It had smelled wonderful then, and it smelled wonderful now, but the smell was all he could appreciate. Eating seemed too much trouble, somehow, and he was never hungry anymore, but he could sit and breathe in the wonderful smells and the excitement that was beginning to be infectious, and he could watch the rocket being made ready before him, about to go up into space and beyond what anyone knew.
“It’s the sparrow again,” he said suddenly, thinking of Caroline in her garden, thinking of the telescope and of Huginn croaking out the name of a man dead for a thousand years and more. Thinking of the story that Muninn had told him, of the sparrow flying through a bright hall and back out into darkness.
“Except this time the hall is all dark,” he said.
“Not completely,” said Muninn. “There are stars in that hall, billions of them. Voyager–both Voyagers–will travel alongside those lights.”
“But space is very big,” said August. “And the lights are very little. Maybe the only time Voyager will always be in the light again is if someone finds it and takes it home.”
“It will be a different home than the place where it began,” said Muninn. “It will be going out to strangers and strange places. There may be nothing familiar to it–no road maps, no friendly hands.”
“What if it never finds anyone?” said August. “What if it flies forever? What if the dark hall goes on and on?”
“Then we may never know it,” said Muninn. “But that is not the important thing. What’s important is that the attempt is made–that you have tried, all of you, to reach out, to want to meet something more than yourselves, to talk with them and be friendly.”
“That’s why the record’s with it,” said August, remembering the gold plated disc sent out with the probe, sent out to find other life and to tell about Earth’s own.
“Yes,” said Muninn. “The Golden Record. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d rather stay and watch, if that’s alright,” said August, huddled into his blanket. “I always wanted to see a rocket go up. I thought, once, that one day I might be on one. I thought it might be fun to be an astronaut. To travel through space.”
“You have travelled through space,” said Muninn. “The planet you walk upon travels, and you travel with it. And on your travels you look for others who can understand you, for others who could be friends.”
August laughed, picturing himself with antennae for arms, with a satellite dish for a face, zooming back and forth and taking photographs of everyone around him. “She dressed me up like one, once,” he said. “April, I mean. I don’t remember it. There was a cost
ume party when I was little, for her birthday. I’ve seen the photos. She was an astronaut, wrapped about with tin foil and with Mum’s old motorcycle helmet on. But I was too small to wear a helmet so she dressed me up as a probe so that she could take me with her. I looked so stupid. But I wasn’t Voyager.”
“You could have been. You have a Record too, you know,” said Muninn. “To go with the celebration and the exploration. You are also sending out your Record, uncertain.”
August frowned. There had been experimental treatments, clinical trials. His DNA had been sequenced. None of it had cured him. None of it had made him better. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. This was supposed to be a happy time, he didn’t say, wanting more than anything to let himself forget for a moment, to be caught up in the excitement of the people around him, to share this moment in their lives.
But Muninn was iron, and she could not forget. “Those results mean something,” she said. “Not to you, perhaps. But one day to someone else. They will learn from them and learn from you, and perhaps you will make a friend of them, though the space between you is long and dark.”
“I’d rather know,” said August. “If the doctors learn anything from me that can help someone else one day, I’m glad. But I’d rather see the helping.”
“The scientists who worked on Voyager might rather see the finding,” said Muninn. “They do not know if it will ever happen. They just hope that it will.”
“And that’s enough for them?” said August.
Muninn flicked her wings, tossed her head at the launch pad. “Does that look like not-enough to you?” she said.
“No,” said August, smiling, and for a moment he imagined himself as one of the scientists, imagined himself with them, and hopeful. It made him feel warm inside.
“Look,” said Muninn. “They are about to begin. Do you see it, August?”
All attention was focused upon the launch pad. The crowd around him was silent, straining with anticipation, and August held his breath. He was excited, and a little frightened. Strange, he thought, to be so. He knew this mission was successful, knew it from his place in the future, and yet...
An explosion of burning cloud engulfed the launch vehicle, until only its nose was visible, and then the great machine began to move. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster it lifted off the Earth and streaked into the sky, streaked out into the solar system and possibility.
Huginn flew with it, a dark, distant shape obscured at first by the billows on the launch pad. But as the rocket rose through the air, August could make out Huginn racing up beside it, the sun glinting off his iron wings–and then he was too high to see, and gone.
“How far up will he go?” said August, but he had to repeat himself because the crowd around him was cheering then in celebration–calling and applauding and so loud he nearly had to put his thin little hands over his ears. He wanted to jump up himself, to whoop and cheer with them, but it was hard to move quickly now, and it took too much breath to shout.
“You don’t need to worry about him,” said Muninn. “He’ll come down when he’s ready. There’s no people up there, and no ideas to draw him on–he’s bound to the Earth, and the people on it. I wonder, sometimes, what will happen when you humans move out to the stars. Perhaps Huginn will go with you then. Perhaps I will.”
“But not now?”
“No,” said Muninn. “Not now.”
“You’ve got things to do, still,” said August, and it wasn’t a question.
“I am still making my own Record,” said Muninn.
AUGUST 21, 1609
VENICE, ITALY
The ravens had brought him to a tower, high above the city, and August was just tall enough to look down out of the windows, to see the dome of the Basilica beneath him, the Square of St. Mark, and the lagoon with all the little islands.
“Muninn,” he said. “Look at the boats! There’s so many of them...”
“I see them,” said Muninn. “They are batellas and galleys and gondolas; a way to travel for those without wings.”
“Are we here to ride them?” said August, and Muninn shook her feathered head.
“No,” she said. She was perched on the ledge of the window he looked out from, and Huginn was on the other side, sleepy in the sun and with his head tucked under a wing. “I have brought you here to see them, and to see other things so doing.”
“I could see them better close up,” said August. “We are very high, here.” But the bell tower was solid around him, and he was not afraid of falling.
“You will get a better look soon enough,” said Muninn. “Galileo is about to be here, and he is bringing his telescope with him to show to the leaders of Venice. He will show them many things.”
“Are they going to see a comet too?” said August.
“No,” said Muninn. “He did not bring them here for comets, nor did I bring you to see them, or even to see the telescope. You have seen those before. I have brought you here to see what comes with him.”
And August turned to see a procession of men come up the stairs, led by the Doge of Venice and by Galileo. And Galileo drew the men towards the open windows, where they could look down over the city as August had looked down, and it was there that he set up his telescope.
“It’s a lot smaller than Caroline’s,” said August. Galileo’s telescope was made of tin, and the outside of it was decorated with red satin. Huginn had come awake again and hopped towards the group, rubbing his big blunt head up against the shiny material as if he were a cat, almost. Then he flew onto Galileo’s shoulder and perched there, nipping gently at his ear.
“How does he not notice?” said August, trying not to giggle. “Doesn’t he feel him sitting there?”
“Thought is a weighty thing,” said Muninn. “A weight that Galileo is used to. He has carried it all his life, carried it longer and heavier than most, and he has not yet felt the burden of it.”
August watched as Galileo displayed the telescope to the Doge and his companions, watched as they each put their eye to one end of the scope and marvelled. They saw ships out off the Venetian coast before their eyes could see them unaided. They saw people coming in and out of a church on a nearby island, and passengers getting out of gondolas along the Grand Canal. August saw them too, when he was able to sneak between the bodies and put his own eye to the glass, to see the tiny oars and the little prows. Huginn flapped his wings at him when he lingered, and made as if to run down Galileo’s arm and give August his own peck about the ear, if a peck that was less gentle and more censorious.
“They seem happy with it,” said August, retreating to a safe distance and back beside Muninn, watching the telescope again ringed round with Venetians.
“The Senate rewarded Galileo for his work, and for his instrument,” said Muninn. “They thought it would be useful. They did not think that he would ever use it for more than ships.”
“He did though, didn’t he,” said August.
“Yes,” said Muninn.
“Of course he did! April’s telescope, the one she lets me borrow... I use that for more than stars. You can’t see them during the day, and sometimes I get bored.”
“I know you’ve looked through your neighbour’s window,” said Muninn, and August blushed.
“I wasn’t trying to be rude,” he said, “or see anything bad. But she was making biscuits, the yummy ones she brings over sometimes, and she won’t tell me how they’re made. She says it’s a secret. I thought if I could watch her make them I’d know.”
“She wouldn’t like you looking at things you’re not supposed to,” said Muninn.
“I wouldn’t have told her I looked,” said August. “She could still have had her secret, if I kept mine.”
“If you kept it,” said Muninn. “Some people do not keep secrets well. They find things out and share them with the whole world. That is what Galileo did, when he pointed his telescope at the sky and saw things other people said he wasn’t supposed
to.”
“I know,” said August. “They put him on trial, didn’t they? And made him say he was wrong even though he knew he was right.”
“These are the bargains we make,” said Muninn, who remembered the judges and the bowed head and the renunciation, who remembered the showing of the instruments, the threats of torture and death. “If he hadn’t they might have burned him alive,” she said, and August, who remembered burning, shuddered even though the day was warm and the bell tower open to little breezes. “Instead he died under house arrest–but that gave him some time longer in which to study and to learn. He was not so very unhappy, when he could forget the support he could not say, forget the bargain that he did.”
“It’s still not fair,” said August, seeing how excited Galileo was, how he worked and hopped about, how happy he was to show and to share what he had learned, and how that would soon enough be over. “It’s not fair.”
“But that is life,” said Muninn. “The consequences of what you see here today are inevitable. Even if Galileo had never used his telescope to look at the stars, others would have. And they would have seen in his place that the face of the moon is not perfect, that the morning star is sometimes crescent, and that Jupiter has moons. Once the instrument was created, it would never not be used.”
“You’re saying there was no escape for him,” said August. “That he was going to be tried no matter what. That he was always going to lose.”
“Is that not the human function?” said Muninn. “To address the inevitable? Once an action is taken, or an event occurs, there are always consequences. Look at you, August. You were born, and you are going to die. It is your own inevitability.”
“It’s not the same thing,” said August.
“Is it not?” said Muninn. “I thought, once, that all the world would end in Judgement, as Galileo was judged, if more fairly. Of course, I was very young at the time.”
August was surprised at that. “Were you ever young, Muninn?” he said. “Really young, like me?”
“Oh yes,” said Muninn. “Oh, yes. And I grew older, and then older still, and I learned stories about more than judgement. One of those was about the world ending, again, in a great battle between gods and giants and men.”
“Who won?” said August.
“Nobody won,” Muninn replied. “Nobody ever does. It was a wolf age, that story, and one of darkness and drowning. But it was inevitable in its ending, a certain coming that could not be gainsayed.”
“How did they know?” said August, sceptical. “How did they know it couldn’t be stopped if they tried?”
“A prophet told them,” said Muninn. “A wise woman, a völva. In that story she could see ahead, as Galileo will learn to see ahead in his.”
“I don’t understand,” said August.
“Look at him,” said Muninn, and August turned again to see Galileo at his telescope, at his demonstrations. “When Galileo looks through that telescope now, he can see ships and sailors and churchgoers. Soon he will see stars, and the surface of the moon. One day, not so very far from now, he will stand before another group of churchgoers who have come to judge of him, and he will see in his telescope another starry messenger: his future and his death.”
“But he doesn’t die,” said August. “They don’t kill him.”
“Of course he dies,” said Muninn. “He stands still for a little while, that’s all. He doesn’t escape his death. Still it moves, still it comes towards him. It is an inevitable as consequence or Ragnarök.”
“So there was no point for him,” said August. “For anyone, is that what you’re saying? That you can’t do anything to fight it.”
“Of course you can try to fight it,” said Muninn. “You are fighting now, aren’t you? Through all the days of August.”
“And you’re saying that’s not enough,” said August. It was not a question.
“No,” said Muninn. “I’m saying to take your victories where you can.”
AUGUST 22, 1984
NARIOKOTOME, KENYA
August blinked at the sunlight. “I’m so warm,” he said. “It’s nice. I hardly ever feel warm now. It makes me sleepy.”
“You will not want to sleep through this,” said Muninn. They were sitting on a boulder, with August’s blanket under them to soften the stone and although the rock was on sloping ground the small rise behind gave no shade and the heat beat down upon them.
“We could have waited in the camp,” said August. It was not far away, set up under thorn trees and palms, and if it still looked warm there then at least it would be cooler than the mass of black rocks and pebbles where they rested, or the sandy floor at the bottom of the slope that was getting too hot to walk on if one had feet that had never been toughened to it. “I should have brought my slippers.”
“Stop complaining,” said Muninn. “Do you see him complain?” And she indicated the man below, bent and hunched over the ground, sifting and sorting and brushing, his dark face a study in concentration and his fingers gentle in the earth. Huginn had wedged himself beside the man, right up close to his knees, and August couldn’t understand how he wasn’t knocked aside as the man worked, but the raven bobbed and weaved his way around obstruction.
“What’s he looking for?” said August.
“His name is Kamoya,” said Muninn. “And he is looking for fossils. He has found many before, but he is about to find another. It is the most important fossil he will ever find.”
There was a brief moment of stillness then as Kamoya paused, his body silent, unmoving. And then he was moving, and Huginn too, as Kamoya dug a dark fragment out of the earth and Huginn’s beak was pressed up against his hands, pecking at the dirt between fingers, and then there was a little curved piece of bone, no bigger than August’s palm, and Kamoya held it up to the light and grinned while Huginn cawed in triumph.
“What is it?” said August again, leaning so far over his boulder that Muninn was obliged to take a fold of his pyjamas in her big blunt beak and haul him back from overbalancing.
“It is a piece of bone,” she said, when August was sitting still and safely again. “A very old bone, taken from the skull of a boy who has been dead a very long time.”
“A boy?” said August. “Like me?”
“Like and yet unlike,” said Muninn. “About your age, certainly, although the fix is not exact. Not Homo sapiens, though. He is too old for that, and too early. He is another member of your genus, and so related. If you were to look him up, your books today would refer to him as ergaster.”
“Is that his name, Ergaster?” said August.
“That is a classification, not a name,” said Muninn. “Call him Turkana, if you wish. It was the name that was given him from this place, from the Lake that rests nearby.”
“I like Ergaster better,” said August. It reminded him of his own name. They seemed to fit together, belonging as they did to two boys who would die young and in such different places. Ergaster would not have spent his life in bed, or being taken to hospitals for beads and blood tests. He would have found August’s life amazing, a strange story and a frightening one, perhaps, and he could have shown August his own strange life so that August could be amazed and frightened in turn. Two boys. He was sure that they could have found something in common.
“How long ago did he live?” said August.
“One and a half million years since,” said Muninn, placid, and her wings flexed as if remembering long soaring and flights far beyond.
“That’s... a very long time,” said August. He looked at Kamoya, who was still brushing carefully at the skull fragment in his hand, the bone as dark as rocks. “How did he even see it against them?” he said, half to himself and wondering. “And how can he tell what it is, that it’s even a boy at all?”
“He is careful and lucky both,” said Muninn. “And he is good at his job, very good, and he has practiced much, taken great care. It is no easy thing to be a fossil hunter, to pick meaning out of fragment
s and emptiness.”
“But it’s only a piece of bone,” said August. “Just a little piece.”
“Yet he can tell that it is hominid, and from the head,” said Muninn. “And it is not the only little piece that he will find, and he will soon have help.”
Huginn gave a satisfied croak then, and just a moment before Kamoya rose the raven clambered onto his shoulder and was carried all unnoticed back to camp, his head held at a jaunty angle that mirrored Kamoya’s happy expression. The man looked, August thought, as Caroline had looked when she lifted her face from the telescope: a look of wonder and discovery that connected through centuries and continents.
“Where’s he going?” said August. “He’s not leaving, is he?”
“Quite the opposite,” said Muninn. “He has gone to call his employer and his friend, and in the coming weeks the crews here will continue his work, for what Kamoya has found is the first fragment of the most complete skeleton of an early human that has yet been found. It is an extraordinary discovery, the find of a lifetime.”
“Ergaster,” said August.
“Yes,” said Muninn.
“I wish I could stay and see all of it,” said August, knowing that he could not. He had both a day for himself and little more than a week, and neither would be enough.
“You have seen the beginning of it,” said Muninn. “The spark. It is from such small things that science is made, that the universe is so understood. Little things, one above the other and scattered as the boy is scattered. They will find him, even so, and lay him out: vertebrae and scapulae and skull, tibia and fibula and the ribs that held his heart in place.”
“It’s so strange,” said August. “That he’s here, still. I mean, if you had told him, if you had asked him, that he would be here a million years later... what would he have said? How could he have pictured it?”
“He could not have pictured it,” said Muninn. “It would all have looked different to him. Not just the land, for that has changed about his bones in the time he has been gone. But the life that he had–that too would look different, and ephemeral. Do you know what ephemeral means, August? It means something that does not last.”
That August understood. His life was shorter than most, and everyone he knew would move beyond him, on and on, but they would move beyond for decades, perhaps, and then all of them–everyone who knew him–would be dead. But compared to one and a half million years those decades were short, and the confusion made him feel very small. It was as if the decades he would miss did not actually matter. It was as if they were almost nothing.
“Muninn,” said August, “Do you remember him?”
“I do.”
“If he had pictured it, would you know?”
“I would.”
“And he didn’t.”
“No,” said Muninn. “He had quite enough else to think about.”
There was a pause. “I’m not going to be a fossil, am I?” said August, with some trepidation. He didn’t know whether to be anxious or sorry. He found he did not quite like the thought of being poked at and dug up and arranged after death. His body had been displayed and prodded enough beforehand–and yet, and yet. It would make a change to have people excited about him being dead, instead of just plain sad.
“Probably not,” said Muninn, and although her voice was grave there was an undertone to it, a lighter note within the croaking that made it sound as if she were trying not to laugh. “Most people aren’t. Does that make you sorry?”
“I don’t know,” said August.
“That,” said Muninn, “is not the worst answer in the world.”
“I wouldn’t have minded being a fossil hunter, though,” said August, and beside him Muninn closed her eyes to the sun, as if she were dreaming and the dreams were pleasant.
AUGUST 23, 1966
ROBLEDO DE CHAVELA, SPAIN
August had had a bad night. There had been alarms and hurried footsteps and oxygen, and all his family beside his bed and waiting. Not that he had known, for there had also been pain, and the amount of medicine necessary to blunt that pain had dulled his senses and sent him dreams of stillness and shallows that had been hard to wake from.
“There you are,” said April, when he opened his eyes late in the morning, and if his were sticky from sleep hers had dark circles around them, and the lashes were wet. “Were you just going to sleep the day away? You always were the lazy one...”
“April,” said August. Everything was fuzzy, and too bright, and he could understand that she was teasing him but he could not understand why. The knowledge hovered before him and out of reach. “Birds,” he said. “I’m so sleepy, April. Tell the birds...”
“He’s only half-awake,” he heard, and it was another voice–it sounded like Mum, but his eyes were too heavy to open. “He must be dreaming.”
August shook his head on the pillow. His tongue was too big in his mouth, and dry. He tried to speak, tried to tell them he wasn’t dreaming, that the ravens were coming for him, but he couldn’t force his mouth to make the words. And then April was there with him, closer than before, and he felt her lips brush his ear and her hands squeezing his. “It’s alright, August,” she said. “I’ll tell them. Don’t worry about your birds. I’ll tell them.”