by Scott Azmus
She stared at the shimmer. As with any silly cartoon character’s disappearance behind a tree or some other object clearly too narrow for proper concealment, the outbound foragers swept through the crystalline interface as though into some extra, hidden dimension.
Stella Clara shuddered as a sea-going vessel might when tossed by heavy swells.
“Careful!” She had very nearly touched the anomaly.
Then: should I?
What if?
Seriously. How bad could it be?
As cool as river water, the shimmer betrayed no solid surface. There came a tingling, an inexplicable flood of euphoria and a sense of tidal acceleration. As if a passing star had taken her in its grip, Noémie dropped sideways while somehow taking a sharp little twist to the right.
Instantaneously: sultry air carried the scent of grit and mineral-rich soil. Water misted, trickled and pooled. Gravel crunched underfoot and, ahead of her, a carefully tended path cut through woody plants and blooming shrubs. Passing around her, foraging honeybees ignored most of the ornamentals and multicolored blooms to, instead, converge on a series of raised beds.
Two thoughts. One: she was no longer on board Stella Clara. Two: was the gravity feeling a bit…irregular? Finding herself driven in a sliding motion as though tripping over this or that undercutting reality, a headache swelled behind her eyes.
Too much ultraviolet?
The whisk and whisper of passing foliage, soft across her forearms, came quickly and sharply to the ear before dissipating. She snapped a twig. The report lingered in the air for an unnatural moment before being entirely consumed. Why would the unseen walls abhor the least shard of echo?
Ornamental grasses quivered with the ebb and flow of artificial breezes. A vine-covered trellis scaled up to become an elevated portico. White flowers clustered on compact bushes less than half a meter tall. As bees hovered, bloom-to-bloom, Noémie inhaled a fragrance reminiscent of lemon peel and salted caramel. Young plants strained toward the light. Mature plants clutched bright red, conical peppers.
Cupping moist soil, she inhaled a rich, organic odor before allowing bits and fragments to sift between her fingers. Loamy, sandy soil. Neutral to weakly alkaline.
Who could have planted such a lovely garden?
Feeling watched and conscience-stricken at her intrusion, she looked over her shoulder. There, like a fluff of windswept seed, a single point of garnet brilliance danced and mingled with her bees. Then, as if responding to her attention, the dazzling mote swirled around a plant stem before breaking free to examine her.
Orbiting at the height of her shoulders, the bead generated a dark, pinpoint upwelling that stretched to belt its circumference. Constricting, the fresh equator severed the bead in two. Separating, one sparkling glimmer moved in the horizontal while its companion fell toward the footpath. As each bead angled through this and that extra-spatial direction, a Noémie-sized door beckoned.
If she had not grown up in a generation ship of significant volume, the next compartment’s expansiveness would have been both intellectually and emotionally stunning. As smooth and as glossy as the surface of a becalmed sea, the deck panels returned an inverted image of three towering viewports. The pillars separating the great, reverse-raked slabs of glass or cut crystal were as thick as she was tall.
Outside, nebular mists cradled dazzling knots of actinic brilliance. Here and there relieved by swells of red-velvet radiance, the void—coal-black and primordial—churned as though alive. Interlaced symbols—curling, writhing, blushing, strobing—moved against the stellar backdrop.
Snowflakes, she thought. Spilling across diamonds.
Overlaid on a star cluster and kitty-corner to a swell of nebulosity, octagons of varied luminescence relayed real-time images from throughout a vessel of gigantic proportion. Centrally located, an arched podium supported the only visible control interface. Even as she noted its lack of view screen, Noémie understood that—to the vessel’s designers—the full extent of the exterior universe might actually work just as well.
The deck jostled much as it had aboard Stella Clara. Shadows shifted. Unfamiliar constellations cut acute angles across the panorama. Judging by the relative motion of distant stars, the great vessel was pivoting port-to-starboard. A familiar zip of motion caught her attention. One of the monitors had shifted to detail a perspective of her bees.
One of the things which all Arkship officers had to come to terms with, was the possibility that someone back home might—with the advent of new technology—actually outrace them to their destination. The ship’s Standard Organization and Regulations Manual (SORM) actually contained protocols for rendezvous. (As it did for the dismissal of junior officers.) And yet, nothing before her held true to anything even vaguely representative of human scale. As the ship completed its turn, a wedge of scarlet brilliance swept the compartment.
Noémie advanced two soft paces. Cheek to glass, she was finally able to discern the vessel’s general configuration. The great bulk of it ran in a great, upright hoop which then supported a circumstellar shell that had to span, conservatively, 200 solar diameters. Radial shafts of adamantine brilliance connected hoop-to-sphere. Here and there, the hoop held portions of asymmetry that may have represented new construction or recent damage.
Her mouth went dry.
Pale aquamarine and shot through with auroral curtains and coronal mists, the sphere further enclosed a reddish orb not less than one-sixth of its diameter. The star—My God! That thing has to be a star!—was not simply “red.” The color was vivid. A sooty, ruddy orange like that of a burning coal.
Despite an undercurrent of seething fright, Noémie moved to the podium and gripped its edge for support. Before she could isolate or give coherent thought to any one question, a series of line spectra painted the view. Chemical models appeared: carbon and carbon monoxide. Cyanogen, methylidyne and zirconium oxide. These aliens, these people, had captured a carbon star! A late-type red giant whose atmosphere contained excessive amounts of carbon.
Also distantly visible as a dazzling, ruby scatter: a score of similarly burdened vessels looked to be converging on a thick bulge of swirling nebulosity. Some of the captive stars visibly throbbed as though barely checking a desire to burst nova.
Could these stars, could this vessel, be the unseen mass her ship had run aground upon? If these captive stars were unstable, what danger might that spell for Stella Clara?
A bevy of white-knuckle scenarios filled her thoughts.
Stop! Just stop!
Do not hyperventilate. Instead: think.
Just think!
What was the single most important thing she should be doing?
She had to warn someone! She had to get back, and she had to hope that someone, even someone as dim as Dunaway, might heed her warning!
Drawing on her true talent as a watchstander, she examined the vessel’s controls. One device seemed to monitor the texture and flow of an energy-fluid permeating local space. Another gadget revealed the distribution of hot gasses and plasma within a long list of stellar interiors. Scintillations of virtual particles came and went as if by their own volition.
An odor that Noémie normally associated with arcing current permeated the air while a spill of bright, molten glass surged from the aft bulkhead. Pausing briefly—indecisively?—it curled a right angle before driving upward and straight on through the solid ceiling.
“What,” she asked of herself, “was that?”
A lingering haze of heavy, animal fragrance made her eyes water. Fighting the urge to sneeze, she held all emotion in check as the forward viewport snapped opaque with frost. Slipping to the deck, curling and coalescing, the sheen of frost took on the shape of a conic solid.
An automated device? One of the crew? Sensing a measure of regard within the milky iridescence, Noémie said, “Hello? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wander in here or trespass. And I have to get back. It’s just that my bees—”
A glass-on-glass
stridulation delivered a wheezing exhalation that barely penetrated the air. Animal, vegetable or mineral?
The hovering, garnet bead returned and a cold, measuring tickle swept her body. Gradually building a map of her every blood vessel and nerve cluster, a swath of viewport rapidly compared her natural symmetry to a succession of, mostly hideous, alien beings.
As the final layers of her body scan stratified into place, additional blobs of molten material splashed from unseen apertures in the austere, M.C. Escher architecture. A communal squeal erupted amongst the new arrivals. While conveying little meaning to her ears, the varied pitch and tenor of each sibilance brought a sense of annoyed impatience.
The beings, constructs or aliens, indefinite in number, swept around her with fluid, confident motions much like those she used when tending her bees. Inspired, Noémie pushed toward the viewport. Opening her arms to take in the deep perspective, she attempted to simulate the clash of probabilities whereby Stella Clara had become entangled with something traveling beneath the dimensional horizon of the, yes, subjectively-named “real universe.”
Gesticulating frantically, whistling, hissing, fingers snaps punctuating voiced zooms, crashes and explosive decompressions, she conveyed the limited scenarios left to Stella Clara should these beings detonate even one of their stellar cargoes.
In reply: silence. Another waft of leathery, animal scent.
Feeling like an idiot, she reversed herself and desperately pantomimed some shift or alteration of ship’s controls. Anything, really, that might help Stella Clara break free.
Ripples coruscated each form. Joining, merging, effectively sharing a common surface, standing waves appeared. Conjoined, the alien mass extended a pseudopod of sorts. Warm, but not uncomfortably so, the contact seemed especially interested in investigating the contrast in textures between her clothes, her chin and cheeks and the arrow straight part in her hair.
Left to right. Up, down. Forward to back, plus an extra perpendicular displacement: a nested model of her facial features, skull, and brain morphed into view. Hanging in the air, a snapshot of neural and synaptic activity knit together.
Bursts of brilliance and lyric song thrust aside her every defense. A current of pulsating pressure pushed unease toward disorientation. Vision swam as though she had drifted to the bottom of a rippling pool and was gazing up at a scurrying zigzag of stellar dazzle.
Even as a hungry, grasping curiosity slithered amongst her thoughts, she sensed that the mental probe was not at all meant to mistreat. Around her, the scene became a kaleidoscopic wash of images from within Stella Clara. Terraced rice fields. Sealed storage bays. Private gardens. The nuclear heart of her main drive. A medical bay. A man and a woman in the prefatory acts of lovemaking. The petals of a flower.
Her bees had not found the only point of dimensional exchange within Stella Clara. And from this side, each portal looked less a standing crystal and more like a vertical vortex of luminous, clear twine.
A heavy, animal scent assaulted her lungs. Recoiling, fighting to disregard a premonition of nausea, she pushed back. What the hell was the happening to her? What purpose, what goal could such blatant scrutiny—
Threaded with impatience, a wave of agonizing pain cut short her query. Her brain was either too big for her skull or was trying to forcefully set sail. Pain throbbed with each heartbeat such that she wanted to apply direct pressure to specific parts of her head and neck to relieve it.
Left temple. Base of her skull. Eye sockets.
Her thoughts made unwilled connections. Her fingers tingled. Her arms grew heavy and numbness spread across her ribcage.
Images shifted back along her personal timeline. There she was dining in the junior officer’s mess. Plain yogurt, thin oatcakes, and a half tomato, broiled, with cheese on top. A rasher of bacon, baked beans and a single egg. Via data slab, she had exchanged the usual back and forth with the engineering officer of the watch. Stella Clara was still accelerating toward her destination. The chief engineer had ordered several evaporators offline for maintenance. A work party had pulled one of the gas turbine generators to replace worn sound suppressors. No casualty control drills until well into the next afternoon.
As the probe continued, her bloodstream chilled to slush. Icicle cold knifed jaw to temple. Vertigo and a throbbing haze of confusion made her focus on the images at hand. Arriving early, as per usual, she had checked in with the astrogation watch for a position update before advancing to the command deck. Nothing special in the captain’s night orders.
She had just exchanged formal salutes with the off-going watch when the deck plates tried to slip out from under her. Stella Clara had lurched, bow up before swerving hard to port.
“Escape vector, plus Z-axis now! Full emergency thrust! Damage control parties to their repair lockers! Captain to the bridge!”
Sparks? Electrical fire? Negative. Dust stung her eyes and rasped her throat. Carbon-centric spectra lines spilled across each sensor feed. Trying to sound calm now, “All crew to casualty control stations. Passengers to shelter. Full hull breach protocols.”
A second, much harder lurch punched Stella Clara into a brief pirouette. And then...full stop. Rotation normal. No possible headway.
The governing captain ignored her as Commander Dunaway gripped her by the throat and rammed her spine into the aft bulkhead. Screaming into her face from a distance of mere centimeters, he—
Anger swelled in her heart. These alien bastards had cost her all of the rank and privilege that she had built up throughout an early career of dedicated resolve! Pushing back against their continued mental assault, she caught fragments of pattern and dynamic refrain. In their song, the alien or aliens confronting her had to be simultaneously responding to the wishes of some higher authority!
Following the subtext, tempo and harmony of this writhing, twisting outside monophony, she was suddenly greeted by a vast sense of indifference. Searing, burning sunbeams crossed her central line of sight. A vice-like grip enveloped her body and an amazing volcanic pressure built within her core. Again, she felt critically inspected. And yet, here she found a deeper, more resolute exchange of information. Indifference gave way to concern. The song veered and changed. The duet between the aliens, true-flesh or constructs—how could she ever be sure?—and their captive and dying star (seriously?) became a one-way blast of authoritarian direction.
Her headache faded. The wide space around her fully reappeared. Though feeling completely bruised, battered and drained, Noémie also found room for a hint of invigoration. Through whatever back-channel “discussion” or whatever that had just occurred, the guilt she had carried ever since Stella Clara’s grounding seemed a thing of the past.
A sheen of rainbow moiré swept alien flesh.
Concentrating, focusing on an image of Stella Clara breaking free, Noémie carefully settled her open palm on a patch of empty translucence. Shivering, blushing and finally forming a shallow concavity beneath her touch, the alien or aliens allowed a trill of song. Instantly, the great ship began to gyrate around its stellar center.
Once again, the bright red bead appeared. Sectioning, it formed another portal convenient to her form. Just beyond, the hum of busy honeybees became a lure. And yet, the shimmer of light beyond them, Noémie’s only point of contact between this world and hers, appeared to be fading. And this she knew with certainty: the alien vessel had now veered well away from Stella Clara.
Hands trembling, tears of gratitude and great relief welling, she wanted to call, “Thank you! Thank you!” but could not force the phrase past her lips. As the aliens separated, Noémie staggered toward the botanical garden. Brushing bees from the small white blossoms, she urged, “Go home! Shoo! Shoo! Go back home!”
How many bees would she lose? And should that really be a consideration just now? The portal had dimmed to a soft pastel. Awash in sudden irritation—why couldn’t they give her a couple extra heartbeats to—
That’s it! The only way to retrieve
her bees was to anger them. And why not return with a prize? Thrusting her hands into the soil, gathering plants, roots and all, Noémie gritted her teeth and hummed the song that stars had been singing all along. Did the aliens sing to the stars? Do the many stars give voice in answer?
With agitated bees swarming, some stinging, some ramming her and leaving pollen silhouettes upon her clothes, Noémie let the portal grip her.
And take her home.
Preface: Backspin
I wrote this silly little piece the morning after rushing our son, Erick, to the emergency room. If Erick wasn’t a nuclear power plant operator (currently stationed on board the USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23)), he would probably be a professional Ultimate Frisbee player.
He was home on leave and—while racing to snag a Frisbee out of the air during a local pick-up game—experienced a head-on collision. (It took a while for him to mend, but he’s just fine now.)
This story records an incident that might have happened simultaneously in a nearby, parallel dimension.
Backspin
Wearing a skirt suit reminiscent of an indigo bunting, the brunette has a natural tan and wears violet eyeliner where he might expect Maybelline vivid ebony or L’Oréal true teal. Her name tag reads “Caroline” and she was probably a Miss Wisconsin candidate or runner-up.
“What,” asks Dr. Flettner, “have you got to show me?”
“Just DaVinci corps’ latest breakthrough in medical diagnosis and patient admission screening! Dangle Drones!”
“We can’t have drones flying around the clinic! That’s all we need. Propellers slicing fingers. Cutting ears. Shredding bulletin boards. Did I mention slicing fingers?”
“But these drones don’t have propellers! Let me show you.”
She rolls a small valise to the counter and draws out a base station the size of a brick. Colorful tangles nest in teaspoon-shaped wells.
“Number one,” says Caroline. “Deploy.”