The Kepler Valley

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley, were there?” Thomas asked.

“No,” replied Homer, “that’s been a part of the narrative for, let’s see… about eight months now”.

“Why dragons?”

“Why dragons? Because there needs to be a sense of reality to the promised land, doesn’t there? You can’t just sell a dream and expect people to lap it up.”

“So you added dragons. To make it… more realistic?”

The sarcasm was apparently lost on Homer. “Danger, Thomas! Danger is real! God knows these people have been living with enough danger in their lives. If we told them we were giving them a new home, a new place free of trouble where they could live like princes until the day they die of old age, they’d scoff en masse and we’d be stuck with anarchy again.”

“We’re not stuck with anarchy now?”

“No, though I admit it’s… hanging by a thread.” Homer went silent a while. He seemed to be in thought. The red glow from the wall-sized window of his office cast dark pockets under his eyes and he was for a brief moment Greek marble, thumb and forefinger propping his long chin up in an almost ridiculous philosopher’s pensive.

Thomas stood slowly, ice clinking in the glass in his hand. He went to stand by the other man and drained what was left. “Well, I wouldn’t buy dragons. I’d buy, I don’t know… feral dogs or wolves. Maybe predatory marine life? Even , hey – even carnivorous birds! You know, like vultures or eagles or something like that. Or, what were those flightless birds that used to disembowel people with their feet?”

“Cassowaries?”

“Yes! Cassowaries! Cassowaries in the Valley. Why not? A flightless bird, I can buy. But dragons? I mean, come on Doc, we’re talking wizards and magic and shit. It’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t buy dragons.”

“It’s not our job to buy it, Thomas.” Homer finished his own glass in a quick gulp, tossing his head back dramatically, “it’s our job to sell it.”

Thomas felt the dim pulse of machinery under his feet. A rhythmic droning that was somewhere below human hearing, but which vibrated through the metal and concrete around him, and also inside his skull. It lasted only a few seconds, and then was gone once again. Homer seemed not to notice it.

He set his tumbler down with a clank on the glass desk, and pointed out the window. “Look, Thomas. They’re desperate. “

A few short decades ago, the scene Homer pointed out at would have looked starkly different. A blue sky once lit up a dense green jungle split in half by a healthy, gurgling river that wound its way to a patch of deep blue on the horizon that was the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Clearly visible had been a row of rolling mountains over to the right, and to the left grassy farmland that looked like it stretched on forever. He pictured it in his mind. Something out of an old magazine or a video he’d seen somewhere, certainly. Something cobbled together by his romantic but admittedly unreliable hippocampus, the place where memories began, and ended, and often became something else.

The vision he saw now was a hellscape. A brimstone sky shot forked lightning down onto a wasteland of tree carcasses and bare stone. The mountains, lit up by sheets of intermittent white light, stood like jagged rows of teeth against the black sky. A ragged line of muddy slosh wound its way out to a refuse-choked estuary somewhere on the distant horizon, obscured by a sickly smog. And where once farmland had been, was swamp. Never ending marshes that stunk of salt.

His gaze followed the line of Homer’s outstretched finger. Near the closest of the riverbanks were spots of fire. He could see, in the flashes of white light, gatherings around those fires. People, huddled together to fend off the elements.

“I think they will buy dragons.”

Thomas conceded him that point. “Well, you’re probably right. I don’t think our job will be so hard.”

“Oh, don’t underestimate this, Thomas. Because nor will it be easy. See, we don’t have the facts. I don’t even know if we have a promised land to sell.”

“You don’t?” Thomas was shocked, “ …wow, even I was fooled there.”

“Yes, it’s so far been a successful campaign.” He shrugged modestly.

“So then, no Kepler?”

“Well, see, I don’t know. The eggheads are down in the labs are cooking something up. Whether they’ve just fed us this line of bullshit for the same reason we’re feeding it to them,” he pointed out the window once more, “who can say.”

“So, we’re supposed so sell this. To… them,” Thomas waved his hand at the window, “when we don’t even know what we’re selling?”

Homer snapped his fingers abruptly, and pointed at his own face, “Look at me Thomas! Why do you think you’re here? Honestly, tell me what you think you’re doing here. Do you think I asked you here to whinge about what I already know? To reiterate exactly what I’m saying back to me like a damn parrot? My assistant does that perfectly. He’s a moron.”

Thomas took the question as a rhetorical one. He didn’t answer. He picked up both the empty glasses off the table and took them to the liquor buffet, crystal-stoppered whiskey bottle and a fresh tray of ice atop it. It was methodical to the point of a meditation; ice in the glasses, four cubes each.. stopper out, set aside on the napkin… two thumbs to each glass from the bottle… a slow swirl of each to cool it just below room temperature. He took the cups back to Homer and passed him one.

As he sipped, he felt the machinery whine through the complex once more. Again, not something Thomas could hear, exactly. The soles of his feet picked it up through the floor. In his chest cavity he felt something below a basso. He opened and closed his jaw, feeling a little pop in his inner ear.

Homer lifted his cup and took a very small, very slow sip. “I don’t need any more morons.”

Thomas waited a few moments before he spoke. “Well, I don’t know what you need. I don’t even know why I’m here. I got told yesterday I had clearance. I got a suite in the Complex last night. And now here I am, today, drinking heirloom whiskey with the last man with a PhD on Earth.”

The other man coughed halfway through another sip. “Not true! Some of the boys downstairs have PhDs. They’re scientists. Actually they all have PhDs.”

“But they’re not doctors of philosophy though, are they?”

“No. No, I guess they are not.”

Thomas walked back to his chair, and sat down once more. “So then, Mr Descartes. Mr… Foucault. Tell me what the hell I’m doing here.”

Homer looked at him sharply, frowning. Thomas half expected him to walk out in a huff… he didn’t know philosophers at all, but history told him they had a habit of tantrums. For a solid half-minute, Homer just stood there, regarding him quietly, swirling the ice around in his tumbler of whiskey.

“Okay,” he said finally, placing his glass down on the desk. He opened the top draw and pulled out a fist-sized sheaf of paper and tossed it at Thomas, who scrambled to catch it with his free hand. “Look at that.”

He did. He straightened out the economy-size manuscript and read the cover page. It read “Kepler 22b – The New Home for Humanity”. He scratched his head, “Doc, I already know the brief”.

“Yes, Thomas. You got the cliff notes.”

“The what?”

“Nevermind. You know the narrative. The basic concepts anyway… ‘New home for all. Jump through a wormhole to a planet six hundred light years away. So much open space. Sun, snow, mountains. Farmland. Farmable animals. Science outposts dating back fifty years. Beaches. Jungles. Mountains. And dragons in the god damn Valley’.” He opened his palms in a shrug, “you got the brief.”

“Yeah, I read the dossier. I know what my job is. I know I have to sell this crap to a bunch of fools. But that doesn’t answer my question. Why am I here. Why me? Get yourself a showrunner or a magazine columnist, I’m sure there’s a couple of those left.”

“Actually, there’s not.”

“Okay, then… a botanist or anthropologist. Or – or a documentary script writer. Jesus, even a science fiction novelist?”, Thomas threw his hands up, exasperated.

“No scientists left other than the astrophysicists downstairs these days. Most of the doco crews all got aboard the Rapture propaganda train before Italy was hit with a nuke. I think some worldwide suicide cult finished the rest of them off. We’re out of touch with anyone else that might be of any help.”

Thomas put his head in his palms, and rubbed his eyes in exasperation until he saw stars “Homer… I’m a fantasy writer. Once upon a time, I wrote books for fucking kids.”

“Exactly!” the old man shouted, “exactly!”

“What? What do you mean, ‘exactly!’” Thomas threw his hands into the air.

Homer took a deep breath, and let it out. He sat down in his office chair and rolled over to where Thomas was sitting. “Look, Thomas. You once captured the hearts of a generation. You sold an imaginary world to a people that needed to forget. Look out there.” He pointed once again out the window. “These people need to forget the here and now. They need something to latch onto. This –“ he patted the manuscript in Thomas’ lap, “this is what they need.”

Thomas sat back up. He looked at the heavy bundle of paper in his hands. Slowly, grudgingly he decided to open it.

Day One, it read, the Exodus.

The men and women reach the terminus of Kepler, fifty thousand strong. The last remnants of humanity from a dying world, blessed with a new home given to them by the science their fathers once knew. Six hundred light years from home, they step out onto the plains of a new world. A world filled with mystery, and hope. New country. New creatures and lands to explore. A bold new land to be feared and conquered. Into the Valley, the odyssey.

“Homer.”

“Thomas?”

“Why can it not just be a new world to settle. Like the colonists did in the days of wooden ships. Why does it have to be magic and dragons? Can we not just have a do over of the gold rush, or the industrial age maybe?”

“Look outside, Thomas. Think about it. Wait… let me fill your glass.”

Homer went to the buffet and poured the last few drops from the crystal bottle into Thomas’ cup. He handed it back. “The stupidest notion that human beings ever had, was that they could control the world around them. Look outside, Thomas. We never held a candle to nature. That was the biggest fantasy of all, ironically. We never knew how to control ourselves, let alone the world around us. The smartest of us thought we could put a leash on the natural forces that be. We thought we could temper Mother Earth. Boy were we wrong.

“Now, I don’t know what these idiots downstairs are doing. It feels like witchcraft at this point. I feel their machines through the walls every day. If they keep going then this complex will start to fall apart. Last I heard they were getting their power from the Earth’s mantle. ‘Exploratory thermodynamic energy harvesting’ I think is what they called it. But whatever comes out the other end of their meddling… if it is a new home. We need to narrate it. It is wild country. Untameable. And I think, at the end of the day, you’re the only one that can do that, Thomas.

“So Kepler it is, for better or for worse. Real, or a dream. You have a part to play here. Lead us to the promised land. It probably doesn’t exist but Thomas, imagine if it does! You’re cursed to be a herald or a false prophet.”

“No pressure.”

“No pressure.”