Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  “Your visit will not be long,” Zander continued, “but I need to caution you. I advise you not to think about it, after this preliminary phase of our conversation.”

  “Think about what?”

  “About the fact,” he said, with a tinge of reluctance in his voice, “that if you looked up in the sky at this moment, turning your gaze toward the spot where you would expect to find New Earth, you would be looking at a place that no longer exists. Your family and your friends no longer exist. They have been dead for millions of years.”

  Violet felt a sharp wave of terrible grief. Shura, dead? And Kendall? And Rez? And Tin Man? And Jonetta? How—

  “But of course,” Zander went on hastily, “they are not dead. Not really. They still exist. And it’s also true that they don’t exist, that they’ve been dust for a long, long time. Both are correct. Do you know about Schrödinger’s cat?”

  “Duh.” She didn’t mean to sound like a smart-ass, but really. Physics was a required subject in New Earth schools.

  “Good.” Zander hadn’t reacted to her disdainful tone. Maybe his world didn’t do sarcasm. “I downloaded and translated the work of your major thinkers while you were on your way here, and I have to say, that Schrödinger fellow was onto something.

  “The same principle,” he continued, “is at work here. All the people you know back home are alive and dead. And you are there, and you are here, too. Both realities exist simultaneously. Think of it this way: You haven’t left that lab on New Earth at all. The Consciousness Tether brought you here, but only as a prosthetic version of your mind and your will and your personality. As a beam of pure energy. And without having to drag along that annoying, needy appendage known as a body.

  “What makes Tether travel difficult for the individual,” he concluded, “is not the technical or the physiological aspect. It’s the psychological one. It’s the idea that billions of years have gone by, while you have remained static. That millennia have passed for the people of New Earth, but they haven’t passed for you. It’s an uncommonly challenging thought to get used to. So please, don’t look up. Don’t think about distance or time. While you’re here, just be.”

  Violet sucked in a deep breath. How can I be taking a deep breath when I don’t have any friggin’ lungs? she thought, growing a tad frantic.

  And then she let it go—both the breath and the anxiety. Her concern over the incongruity of her situation just wafted away from her like a fever that breaks at the end of a long night.

  From here on out, she needed to be able to talk to Zander without stopping every few seconds to ask herself, How am I doing this? So she’d just do it.

  Moreover, she would accept the fact that she seemed to be floating in a large glass bowl of something warm and nice. It wasn’t specifically wet, but it wasn’t not wet, either. It supported her, but it didn’t feel sticky or gross.

  A crucial question occurred to her. “What if the Consciousness Tether breaks?”

  In a solemn voice, Zander replied, “Either you would die instantly or the second reality—the one in which billions of years have passed and everyone and everything you ever knew has disappeared—would be the only truth. You would be marooned here. You could not go back home because your home would be gone, having dissolved through the long, long fall of the years. The place where you came from would be no more. It disintegrated and became stardust millennia ago.”

  She nodded.

  “Now that you understand,” Zander said, “we can proceed.”

  “I’m still not sure I do.”

  “Understanding is overrated.”

  It took Violet a moment to realize that Zander had made a joke.

  “What I mean,” he added, “is that it’s not necessary to comprehend all these nuances of space and time and the oblivion that waits for all living objects. You are here. We can help each other. But first…”

  She waited.

  A soft, undulating feeling slid over her like a spring rain. Before she knew it, she had arms and legs again, and a midsection, and even a face. A body, in other words. It felt a little odd, as if she’d put on somebody else’s clothes by mistake, and while they generally fit, the sleeves of the tunic were a little short, and the trouser cuffs were a little too long, and the underwear was maybe a bit snug.

  Tunic? Trousers? Panties? Where did these come from?

  Violet tugged at her right sleeve. She moved her shoulders—Hey! I have shoulders again!—and she moved her feet a few times, marching in place.

  Yeah. A body. Cool.

  “Okay,” Zander said. “Let’s go.”

  Violet blinked. The man who’d just spoken was standing beside her. He had a body, too, and—um, thank God—he was fully clothed. He was a medium-sized young man with wispy blond hair and a pale, sharply angled face from which a pair of bright green eyes looked out. It took her a moment to realize that there was someone behind him. A smaller young man stepped out from Zander’s shadow. He had wavy, shoulder-length brown hair that fell in crinkled folds around a dark smudge of a face. Violet couldn’t make out any specific features. It was as if the features—mouth, eyes, nose—were waiting for a signal to arrange themselves. Both hands rested in the pockets of his gray tunic. He glanced at Violet, and then his gaze went straight to the ground.

  “And this,” Zander said, “is Sonnet. My Emotive. I am sorry to say he won’t be able to greet you back. He hasn’t learned your language yet.”

  “I sort of assumed he’d be—I mean, she’d be—female.”

  “Would you prefer that?” Zander asked.

  “No. I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, it doesn’t matter.” Violet was confused.

  “Not a problem. Sonnet?”

  In the second it took for Violet’s eyes to go from Zander to Sonnet, Sonnet’s features resolved. It was clear now that Sonnet was female. Violet wasn’t sure how she could tell—nothing had really changed—but a slightly different energy emanated from Sonnet now.

  “From perusing your records,” Zander said, “I can see that gender makes a great difference in your world. It’s irrelevant here. But I assure you, whether female or male, Sonnet is happy to make your acquaintance. I know that, of course, because she’s me. And I’m her.”

  Violet nodded. “I know.” She didn’t know how she knew, but she did; there was an obviousness to the fact of Zander and Sonnet that made their duality seem like just another part of the landscape.

  The landscape.

  She looked around. There was a landscape now. Where had all this come from?

  They stood in a narrow, grass-floored valley surrounded on all sides by rocky outcroppings, some gray, some rusty red, some black. Beyond that, the craggy, snow-jacketed peaks of a massive mountain range were barely visible. The sky was white. No clouds, no birds.

  It seemed to Violet more like a page torn out of a book of dreams than an actual place.

  And maybe that’s what it was. Maybe Zander was simply projecting some random geographical details that would seem familiar to her, elements he’d picked up in his recent study of New Earth and of Shura’s paintings. He’d get around to adding trees and birds and lakes later if he had the time.

  Why not show her the place for real?

  Maybe he thought she couldn’t handle that, couldn’t absorb the true nature of his planet. Who said other environments would necessarily come in a recognizable form? As trees, streams, clouds, soil?

  “Where’s everybody else?” she asked.

  “Like Sonnet, they’re a little afraid of you. They asked me to be your host. They know you are helping me with Fusion, and they eagerly await the time when I pass along what I learn. We all must go through it.”

  Fusion.

  Never mind that the name of their crucial ritual sounds like a band at Redshift.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m pretty harmless, except when I’m mad, but okay.”

  Zander raised his hands, palms up. “Our time is short. Let us get right to the point. Please tell me.
How do you live with both? With all that you know and all that you feel? It seems … too much.”

  “Well, it is. A lot of the time, it is. It’s way too much.”

  “What do you do?”

  She’d known this question was coming. And she knew what she wanted to say, but it was so peculiar that she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to say it.

  “Listen, Zander, my friends would think I’m absolutely nuts for what I’m about to tell you.”

  “‘Nuts’?” Apparently some portions of slang were still unknown to him.

  “Yeah. Crazy. Unhinged.” Violet grinned. “But you know what? I don’t care. The real reason I wanted to make the trip, even though my friends all thought they were better qualified—and frankly, they probably are—is because of the idea I’m going to tell you about right now. Maybe it will help you figure out what to do with emotions.”

  He waited. There was no curiosity in his face. Curiosity, Violet realized, was an emotion. If Sonnet were visible—she’d ducked back behind Zander—doubtless her face would show keen anticipation.

  Zander, though, was interested in what Violet had to say. He was interested because it was related to survival, and survival was advantageous. In the last few minutes, she’d figured out how to read him.

  “Okay,” Violet said, plunging in. “I told you I took physics, right? In school? Well, I’m not supersmart. Not like Rez or Kendall or Shura. But sometimes it’s not about being brilliant. Sometimes being brilliant can be a hindrance to understanding if the understanding needs to come from emotions instead of just brainpower.

  “Physicists have been trying for centuries to figure out a single theory that will unite everything. In fact, that’s what they call it—a TOE, or theory of everything. Right now, we’ve got one theory that works for ginormous things—things like stars and planets—and another theory that works for tiny things. Things smaller than atoms. Things in the quantum universe. But what unites the two? Lately, I’ve been thinking maybe it’s … emotion. Maybe emotions are a unique form of energy. One that we’ve never gotten to the bottom of. Because nobody’s considered it as just that—as an energy source in the universe. We still just think about emotions as love and hate and fear and greed and all the rest of it. Not as fuel. Which they are.”

  Zander considered her words. “Perhaps. How will that help us, though, when we Fuse?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never mastered it myself. I’ve never been able to move past my emotions; they always get me into trouble. In fact, I’m not sure why you’re so hell-bent on changing your system. I don’t know why you want to have both the emotions and the intellect in a single individual. I mean, if I could do that—if I could split myself in half, with one side of me doing the thinking and the other side handling all the feelings—I’d sign up in a heartbeat. I’d do it.”

  Zander’s voice was grave. “I was not exaggerating when I first communicated with you and your friends. We have stopped progressing. Our civilization has come to a standstill. The status quo is not working. At this rate, your world will catch up with us in a few hundred million years.”

  “Wow. Unthinkable.” Violet smiled. She couldn’t tell whether or not he understood her sarcasm. Didn’t matter.

  “Hence our determination to Fuse.” He touched his fingertips to his forehead like a man with a nasty headache. Violet realized he was thinking. Thinking ferociously hard. “Fuel,” he said, saying the word out loud as if he were calculating the probability of her thesis being correct. “Emotions as fuel.”

  “Yeah. And that’s why the Intercept was more than just a technology. More than just a device. Kendall’s invention tapped into the very core of the universe, extracting the greatest power source ever known—the greatest power source that ever could be known.” She took a breath. “At first, we didn’t know what to do with the Intercept. As you’ve seen, our civilization is still a work in progress. We’re way behind yours. And so we did the wrong thing. We turned the Intercept into something small. Just a way to control citizens. Like a better gun or a bigger jail. And then we corrected our mistake.”

  Sheepishly, she added, “I guess you could say we overcorrected. Because we shut the whole thing down. And that wasn’t right, either. The Intercept needs to exist. When you found Rachel’s chip, you realized what emotions could do. All the possibilities. All the amazing, astonishing things that emotions can create.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  Violet’s reply came in a flash. “That’s just it, Zander. I don’t know those things.”

  “Then how—?”

  “I feel them.”

  His face changed several times as ideas moved through his mind. It was, Violet thought, a little like watching the sea creatures moving through the water in the aquarium in Mendeleev Crossing.

  “So feeling has a kind of intelligence behind it, too,” Zander said.

  “Yeah. I guess that’s a good way to put it.” She pondered. “And it works the other way, too. Thinking has passion in it.” She ticked off examples for him: Rez’s love for computers. Shura’s devotion to creating vaccines and paintings. Kendall’s excitement when he was working to reduce crime on New Earth. Tin Man’s diligence in helping him. And the way she felt when she was looking for her true calling and not just doing what other people thought she should do, because of who her father was.

  “Fusion will not be painful, then?” Zander asked. “Some of our Emotives are worried. Sonnet is terribly frightened. I can tell her that it will be smooth and easy, yes?”

  “Nope. Trust me, you’re going to be a mess at first. You’re going to be sad and crazy and happy and weird. You’re going to have to do what I did when they sent me here on the Tether. I had to let go. And just ride the ride.”

  “Ride the ride.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There is no shortcut? No way to get through the parts that cause the sadness? And just keep the good parts?”

  “No shortcuts.” A picture flashed in her mind: Neptunia Nodes, all lined up on the bar at Redshift in their fancy little glasses. And the nights she’d mowed down the row of drinks, trying to dull the pain of whatever was troubling her at the time: an argument with her dad, or her unrequited love for Kendall, or—later—her failing detective agency, or letting down the people who’d told her she would be a great senator. Or, or, or.

  “Well,” Violet admitted, “there are shortcuts, but they don’t really work. They seem like they do, short term, but no. No shortcuts.”

  She sensed that he was sorting it out, sifting through what she had said, and getting input from Sonnet along the way. She could feel the energy going back and forth between them, between Thinker and Emotive.

  “All right,” Zander said. “We have to hurry. You must go back to New Earth right away.”

  Alarmed, Violet looked around. Had she missed an active volcano or an imminent tsunami? “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Your friend who is searching for the star. He doesn’t have much time.”

  “You mean Rez.”

  “Yes. The New Earth orbit is deteriorating much more quickly than he has projected. He must find a new planet right away. I wish it could be here, but that is not possible. You cannot breathe our air. Our gravity would instantly crush the bodies of your population. Your deaths would occur within seconds. And living inside a Consciousness Tether is unacceptably limiting.”

  “Wow. Okay, then.”

  “I apologize for not warning your friend sooner. But I only comprehended the urgency myself in the last few seconds.”

  “What?”

  “I have now completed my review of his calculations. It is a highly complex problem; the variables are almost infinite. But now I have factored in all the probabilities. I was working on it while we talked.”

  You’re quite the little multitasker, she thought.

  A flickering light appeared in the sky, gradually resolving itself into recognizable shapes: the skyline of New Earth. Violet r
ealized that Zander was showing her a time-lapse projection of what the immediate future held for New Earth.

  With a sickening lurch, the buildings began to buckle. The ground split apart, making wide gashes that swallowed trees and cars and shrieking people. Fires broke out as energy-generating facilities were crushed. Explosions were frequent and catastrophic.

  The angle of the projection changed. Now the perspective was from farther away, looking back at New Earth from a distance. The magnificent civilization created atop the crumbling old one was now crumbling itself—and not gradually as Old Earth had done over centuries, but rapidly.

  In seconds.

  Violet watched. She felt disbelief, and then horror, and then fear, and then something beyond even fear: the cold, all-consuming terror of watching everything she had ever known and loved sink to ash right before her eyes.

  “How long?” she whispered to Zander. She hadn’t meant to whisper; her voice just wouldn’t get any louder.

  “Weeks. At the most. My original projections were wrong. I failed to account for the arrival of a massive blast of solar wind that will require an exponential acceleration of the heavy magnets used to maintain your orbit. That, in turn, changes all the calculations.”

  “So there’s no hope.”

  “For New Earth’s survival? No.”

  “Oh my God.” She was overwhelmed by the enormity of the news. She felt sick, and for a fleeting moment, was afraid she might throw up.

  Can you puke if you don’t have a stomach?

  She was about to find out.

  “However,” Zander said.

  Violet perked up. The nausea slid away.

  “I believe,” he continued, “that I’ve found a potential site for New Earth. At least a star with a very plausible planet. One with an atmosphere that can sustain your population, along with copious raw materials. I believe you could transfer your population there within the time frame—before catastrophe strikes, that is.”

  “Great. So give me the coordinates so I can pass them along to Rez and—”

  Suddenly, Violet felt as if someone had grabbed her lungs and ripped them out of her chest and thrust them between two heavy boulders. Her lungs were being pulverized.