Read Online Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jeanette Winterson
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crumbled rock, and the trees riddled through like white honeycomb, like some desperate thing had fought for a last hiding-place, and not found it.
There had been oceans on the white planet. We found a sea-floor, ridged and scooped, and shells as brittle as promises, and bones cracked like hope. White, everything white, but not the white of a morning when the sun will pour through it, nor the white of a clean cloth; not the white of a cheese where you can smell the green of the grass that fed the goat, nor the white of a hand that you love.
There is a white that contains all the colours of the world but this white was its mockery. This was the white at the end of the world when nothing is lift, not the past, not the present and, most fearful of all, not the future. There was no future in this bleached and boiled place. Nothing, not wild, not strange, not tiny, not vile, no good thing, no bad, could begin life again here. The world was a white-out. The experiment was done.
We found the ruins of a city, and the ruin of a road that ran to it. A proud place this had been, once upon a time, once upon a time like the words in a fairy tale. The ruins of a city, and it might have been sitting under the sea, for the pressure on the surface of this planet is as great as that half a mile under the sea. The weight of this world is its own despair.
Without armour of a kind, anyone would be crushed. Without oxygen, no one here can breathe at all. Without fireproof clothing, you would be charred as the rest of what was once life.
And yet there was once life here, naked and free and optimistic.
We walked through the sunken city, and into the Crypt of the planet, and there we found a thing that amazed us. Like an elephant's graveyard, the Crypt was stacked with the carcasses of planes and cars that continually melted in the intense heat and then reformed into their old shapes, or shapes more bizarre, as the cars grew wings, and the planes compressed into wheelless boxes with upturned tails.
Such heat without fire is hard to imagine, but this was the inferno, where a civilization has taken its sacrifices and piled them to some eyeless god, but too late. The sacrifice was not accepted. The planet burned.
The men cheered and banged the table, and Rufus barked.
'Is that a true story?' I said.
'Stories are always true,' said Handsome. 'It's the facts that mislead.'
Later, when the men had eaten, and we were alone, I spoke to Spike about the white planet. She pulled up some images from her database. There it was, bright as life, radiating the sky. How could it be dead?
She said, 'The strange thing about Planet White is that it shares the sun of Planet Blue. When we first found it we thought it would be viable for us, but investigation shows that life flourished there light years away from now, and that life was destroyed, or that life destroyed itself, which seems the only possible explanation. It is too near the sun now, that is true, and it has an atmosphere that is ninety-seven per cent carbon dioxide. It has become a greenhouse planet, but a cruel one, sheltering nothing. It no longer has water, though it is likely that water was once abundant.'
'And what about the Crypt?'
'I have seen the images. Call it a traveller's tale.'
'Is it a traveller's tale?'
She shrugged. 'Imagine it — walking through the whited-out world, fitted deep inside a thermal compression suit, like diving gear but built to withstand both pressure and intolerable heat. The petrified forest is there — carbonized tree remains, held in the heat, we don't know how, like a memory.
'And then there are oceanic indicators, yes, and then there is what might have been a city, yes, and what might have been a road, yes, but as unfathomable as those boiling explosions that form our own undersea worlds. And there is what those who have seen it call the Crypt.
'It is a landfill site, thousands of miles deep, and high, and filled with something that does not disappear,
There had been oceans on the white planet. We found a sea-floor, ridged and scooped, and shells as brittle as promises, and bones cracked like hope. White, everything white, but not the white of a morning when the sun will pour through it, nor the white of a clean cloth; not the white of a cheese where you can smell the green of the grass that fed the goat, nor the white of a hand that you love.
There is a white that contains all the colours of the world but this white was its mockery. This was the white at the end of the world when nothing is lift, not the past, not the present and, most fearful of all, not the future. There was no future in this bleached and boiled place. Nothing, not wild, not strange, not tiny, not vile, no good thing, no bad, could begin life again here. The world was a white-out. The experiment was done.
We found the ruins of a city, and the ruin of a road that ran to it. A proud place this had been, once upon a time, once upon a time like the words in a fairy tale. The ruins of a city, and it might have been sitting under the sea, for the pressure on the surface of this planet is as great as that half a mile under the sea. The weight of this world is its own despair.
Without armour of a kind, anyone would be crushed. Without oxygen, no one here can breathe at all. Without fireproof clothing, you would be charred as the rest of what was once life.
And yet there was once life here, naked and free and optimistic.
We walked through the sunken city, and into the Crypt of the planet, and there we found a thing that amazed us. Like an elephant's graveyard, the Crypt was stacked with the carcasses of planes and cars that continually melted in the intense heat and then reformed into their old shapes, or shapes more bizarre, as the cars grew wings, and the planes compressed into wheelless boxes with upturned tails.
Such heat without fire is hard to imagine, but this was the inferno, where a civilization has taken its sacrifices and piled them to some eyeless god, but too late. The sacrifice was not accepted. The planet burned.
The men cheered and banged the table, and Rufus barked.
'Is that a true story?' I said.
'Stories are always true,' said Handsome. 'It's the facts that mislead.'
Later, when the men had eaten, and we were alone, I spoke to Spike about the white planet. She pulled up some images from her database. There it was, bright as life, radiating the sky. How could it be dead?
She said, 'The strange thing about Planet White is that it shares the sun of Planet Blue. When we first found it we thought it would be viable for us, but investigation shows that life flourished there light years away from now, and that life was destroyed, or that life destroyed itself, which seems the only possible explanation. It is too near the sun now, that is true, and it has an atmosphere that is ninety-seven per cent carbon dioxide. It has become a greenhouse planet, but a cruel one, sheltering nothing. It no longer has water, though it is likely that water was once abundant.'
'And what about the Crypt?'
'I have seen the images. Call it a traveller's tale.'
'Is it a traveller's tale?'
She shrugged. 'Imagine it — walking through the whited-out world, fitted deep inside a thermal compression suit, like diving gear but built to withstand both pressure and intolerable heat. The petrified forest is there — carbonized tree remains, held in the heat, we don't know how, like a memory.
'And then there are oceanic indicators, yes, and then there is what might have been a city, yes, and what might have been a road, yes, but as unfathomable as those boiling explosions that form our own undersea worlds. And there is what those who have seen it call the Crypt.
'It is a landfill site, thousands of miles deep, and high, and filled with something that does not disappear,
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