Exceptions to Reality

by Alan Dean Foster

  He started to reply, stopped, and began to wheeze softly. She ought to call somebody, she knew. She ought to summon help. Instead, loathing her deliberate inaction, she stood and watched, silent and hopeful. No such luck. The hospice motile did things with tubes and probes, and in less than a couple of minutes the Old Man was breathing normally again. Shallow, but normal.

  “That was unpleasant.” His eyes met hers. “You really think I’m being unreasonable, Anna Surat? To want, after more than a century and a half, this one last thing? To view beauty that no one else has seen?”

  Her attitude softened. He was working his wiles on her, she knew. A hundred years of practice gives a man certain skills. But she could only be manipulated to a limited degree.

  “No, Mr. Bastrop. It’s not unreasonable to want such a thing. But it is unreasonable to want to see that which does not exist. If you would only—”

  A voice entered the room via an unseen synthetic orifice. “Mr. Gibeon Bastrop. Mr. Gibeon Bastrop, sir!” She recognized Tyrone’s commanding tones. What was he doing awake? Sleeptime was precious to every crewmember, from the lowliest to the Shipmaster. What had wrenched him back to alertness? “Are you awake?”

  She responded for him. “Yes, he’s awake.”

  “Navigator Surat? What are you…? Never mind. Mr. Bastrop, I’m rotating the Seraphim on her axis. Look to your port and viewers.”

  “Why?” The transformation that abruptly overcame the Old Man was astonishing to behold. Suddenly he looked barely a hundred. “What’s happening?”

  “Something—we’re not sure, sir. An energetic trans-mutation of a level—Berkowski and her people are working on an analysis, but the field changes and fluctuations are—”

  The Shipmaster broke off. Perhaps he was too busy to continue. Or perhaps he was simply, like everyone else on board the Seraphim who was at that moment in a position to view the event, too overwhelmed to continue.

  The enormous expanse of the two-story-high port polarized automatically as the twin suns of Delta Avinis revolved into view. Nearby, one of the dead planets that orbited the twin stars took a shadowed, heavily cratered bite out of Void. Anna wondered at the Shipmaster’s words until the second, lesser sun slowly hove into view. Then she pointed and her lips moved slowly.

  “Oh! Look at it. Just look at it!”

  Gibeon Bastrop had displaced the hoverchair forward until it could no longer advance. It was right up against the port, pressing against the thick transparency. Had Bastrop been able to continue, the navigator had no doubt he would have done so, right out into the vacuum of space itself.

  “Look at what, Anna Surat? At that? At the Chauna?”

  Something had materialized between the two suns. Hitherto invisible, the extraordinary ephemeral shape was rapidly becoming visible as it drew energy from the nearest star. One gigantic jet of roiling plasma after another burst from the surface of the smaller sun to be drawn across many AUs into the larger. Each jet was several hundred times the diameter of the Earth, infinitely longer, with an internal temperature rated in the thousands of degrees Celsius.

  And each time a violent, spasming plasma jet erupted between the two stars, a portion of it illuminated the Chauna. The legend of the Cosocagglia was not a wandering planet, or a lost ship of profound dimensions, or a streak of natural phenomena as yet unidentified by science. It was at once something less, and much, much more.

  “My God,” Anna Surat whispered in awe, “it’s alive!”

  There were two wings, each ablaze with lambent energies of wavelengths as yet unidentified. They rippled and flamed across the firmament, faint but unmistakable, like bands of energized nebulae ripped loose from their primary cloud. Nearby stars were clearly visible through them, but they were substantial enough to hold color. With each massive emission from the smaller star, the Chauna partook a little of the enormous energies that were passing between the two suns. The central portion of the event—creature? spirit?—was sleek and slightly less pellucid than the wings. No other features were visible: no limbs, no face, no projections of any kind. No other features were necessary.

  “It looks,” an awestruck Anna observed almost inaudibly, “like a butterfly. But what’s going on? What is it doing?” She had to strain to make out the Old Man’s reply.

  “It’s feeding, Anna. Though it’s millions of kilometers across, it’s too fragile a structure to pull energy from a star itself. So it waits for one star to move near enough to another, for all that great deep gravity to do the job for it. When it senses what’s going to happen, it places itself between the two and filters what it needs from the fleeting eruptions of plasma, like a great whale feeding on plankton. Neutrinos, cosmic rays, charged particles—who knows what it ingests and what it ignores? How would you, how could you possibly study such an entity? We can only watch and marvel. In the process, it apparently acquires throughout the length and breadth of its otherwise imperceptible substance a little ancillary coloration.”

  “A little!” The tenuous but vast extent of the Chauna was already greater than both suns. She continued to stare—what else could one do?—even as the Seraphim’s instruments methodically registered the immense strength of the repeated solar outbursts while her screens fought to shield her frail, vulnerable, minuscule organic occupants from the effects of all that energy being blasted into space.

  On other worlds, instruments would register the pulsar-like outburst and place it in the accepted category of celestial disturbances. They would not note the presence of a third object drawing upon a tiny portion of the expelled energies. Though of unimaginable size, that object was far too ephemeral to be perceived by distant instruments.

  The feeding of the Chauna was an infrequent event, or it would have been noticed before. The Cosocagglia had noticed it, in their thousands of years of space-faring. Now it was, at last, the turn of humans to do so. The myth had been made real. And it was a discovery that could be shared and supported. The Seraphim’s battery of recorders would see to that.

  When those incredibly attenuated sun-sized wings moved, there was a collective gasp among the crew of the witnessing vessel. Nothing like a Chauna had ever been seen before, and nothing like a Chauna in motion had ever been imagined. It was beyond imagining, past belief, a magnificent violation of established astrophysical doctrine. With that movement, no one questioned any longer if the phenomenon was alive. It was visible for another minute or two, a colossal undulation of energized color rippling against the starfield, a million billion times vaster than any aurora. Then it was gone, the life-sustaining solar energy it had assimilated dispersed throughout its incomprehensibly vast incorporeality.

  For a long time the navigator stood staring out the lofty port, aware she had been witness to one of the greatest sights—if not the greatest sight—the galaxy had yet placed before a captivated humankind. Then she was reminded that her hand was still resting on the sharp shoulder of the man who had made it possible for her to experience the inconceivable wonder. The man who had insisted it was real, that it existed, and that if they persisted long enough and looked hard enough, the tiny wandering creatures called humans might actually be able to descry such a marvel. Who had insisted despite the protests and disapproval of his fellows.

  Suddenly she understood a little of what had made Gibeon Bastrop the singular individual he was. Suddenly she understood something of the source of his remarkable ability and drive and power. It made her wish she could have known the man, and not simply the pitifully weakened and aged husk that presently occupied the motile.

  “You were right, Mr. Bastrop. You were right all along. You and the Cosocagglia. And everyone else was wrong. Mr. Bastrop?” Her hand slid gently along the bony shoulder until it made contact with the leathery neck. The head reacted by falling forward, stopping only when the strong chin made contact with the all-but-exposed sternum. The neck did not pulse against her hand. When she shifted it, no air moved from the open mouth against her palm. She drew her hand ba
ck slowly.

  “You were right,” she repeated. “It was beautiful. As beautiful as you had hoped.

  “And so were you.”

  At Sea

  The juxtaposition of entirely different story ideas is one of the joys of writing. This is especially true of science fiction and fantasy, wherein the writer has access to absolutely anything that can be conjured, no matter how seemingly unrelated. The only rule is that the final result has to make sense as a story. You can mix together all manner of ingredients, but the result has to be something palatable to the mind.

  Grounding fantasy in the real world is always fun. You have the opportunity to upset all manner of perceptual applecarts. If your concept works well, you also enjoy the pleasure of surprising the reader. Sometimes the most disparate notions will come together to produce a viable tale. Once the story is plotted and the rough draft completed, the writer then has the fun of sprinkling it with details, like adding lace and sequins to a dress. The design of women’s earrings, for example, is not something I often find myself having to ponder when putting in those little touches that add verisimilitude to a fantasy. Nor are the minutiae of drug-running, commercial fishing, and Scandinavian mythology.

  Especially not in the same story…

  “Hoy, Cruz—there are five horses on the stern!”

  Sandino was a big man with a squinched puss and huge arms the color of aged bratwurst. Right now his expression was slowly subsiding into his face, like a backstreet into a Florida sinkhole, swallowing his features whole. It was left to his voice, which had the consistency of toxic cheese-whip, to convey his confusion.

  Although he was onboard a modern longline fishing boat, Cruz did not know much about fishing. This did not matter, because he did not care much about fishing. Boats, however, were something else. Boats could go where planes and cars could not. As far as fishing boats were concerned, the best thing about them was that they stank. The big swordfish boat reeked of blood, guts, fish oil, and sea bottom. This made it perfect for Cruz’s purpose. This was his ninth run on the Mary Anne, and there was no reason to believe it would be any less successful than the previous eight. No one suspected she carried any cargo beyond the limp mass of dead billfish in her hold. No one suspected that one particular dead swordfish contained twenty million dollars’ worth of pure top-grade Bolivian cocaine that did not normally form part of a billfish’s diet. Compressed and packed into dozens of waterproof, odor-proof, break-proof packages, this highly inhalable product of the Andean hinterland fit neatly into the honored fish’s hollowed-out body cavity.

  Cruz did know enough to realize that the presence of five horses on the stern of the Mary Anne, 120 miles out from Providence, Rhode Island, was not in accord with normal commercial fishing procedure. Even if the horses had been dumped at sea, they could not have climbed aboard. Since he had not heard the metallic bang-and-rattle of the big winch that was used to haul in the longlines, they could not somehow have been lifted aboard.

  It occurred to Cruz that Sandino might be enjoying a joke at his expense. A single hard stare was enough to put that possibility to rest. There was a lot of meat on Sandino, but not much of it was gray matter. Nor was it the sort of gag that Truque or Weatherford would concoct. Lowenstein—now, he was different. The computer and communications expert was clever. Cruz’s brows furrowed. Too clever to come up with a dumb line about horses on the stern.

  “I don’t have time for stupid shit now, Sandino. We’ll be having to look out for Coast Guard soon.”

  Cruz turned back to the thick port glass that looked out over the foredeck of the Mary Anne. Sullen and silent as they always were in the presence of their unwanted passengers, the crew of the fishing boat went about the business of securing their vessel for the night. They didn’t like Cruz and his unpleasant companions; did not like the way they comported themselves while onboard. Didn’t like the way they hectored and taunted Captain Red and his son David. Did not like the way they acted as if they owned the Mary Anne. Why the captain tolerated their presence on so many trips even his closest friends did not know. But when asked about it, Red just stared off into the distance and mumbled something about old obligations, and told the questioners to carry on. Because they loved Red, and because he always found swordfish and made them money, the crew ground their teeth and held their peace.

  “Nice cloud cover,” Cruz declared conversationally to Gunnar “Red” Larson as he peered up at the night sky. “Fog would be better.”

  “For you. Not for me.” Larson kept his gnarled fisherman’s hands on the ship’s wheel and his eyes straight ahead. He strove to focus only on his instruments: the radar, the GPS, the depth finder, and the weather scan. Most of the devices arrayed across the broad, glowing console he could ignore, knowing as he did the way back to the Mary Anne’s home berth the way a puffin knows its flight path back to the North Sea cliffs of its birth. He hated the wiry, soft-talking son-of-a-bitch standing next to him. Hated the man’s face, his manner, his clothing, the smelly Indonesian clove cigarettes he chain-smoked, and his friends. Most of all, he hated Cruz’s business.

  No, he told himself as the ulcer-sparked pain that would not go away spasmed his gut and made him wince imperceptibly. There was one more thing he hated: the old gambling debt that had put him in bondage to Cruz more than six years ago. The debt he could not seem to satisfy. The debt from which he had begun to fear he would never emerge.

  Three years ago he had stumbled drunkenly out of Portuga’s Bar and Grill on Sixth Street, his arm around David’s shoulder, and on a quiet night in the middle of the river park, had broken down and confessed all to his only son. David, fine young college-educated boy that he was, had listened in stony but sympathetic silence while he waited for his tough-as-hooks father to stop sobbing. Then he had proposed that Red immediately repeat the story to the police. The old man had violently demurred. He knew people like Cruz, he explained. Had known them most of his life. Lock up Cruz and his minions, and others of his filthy kind would take vengeance. Not out of any love for Cruz, who after all was a sly and successful competitor, but as a warning to others. To keep their mouths shut. To pay their debts.

  Besides, old man Larson had mumbled, it was only one or two trips a year. Just one or two trips. Meet the courier boat in the open Atlantic, transfer the noisome illegal cargo, stuff it in a conscripted sacrificial swordfish, and it was done. No violence, no confrontations. At the wharf, that one fish would be purchased by a certain buyer from New York, and that was the end of it. Year after year. Soon the debt would be paid, he had assured a dubious David. Soon they would be free of Cruz and his grinning, scornful face. Soon, soon…

  Was soon, Red Larson reflected as he stared resolutely out the port at his sulking crew and the gathering night, ever to come?

  “Fog is better for you,” he repeated. “Not for me. I am responsible for the boat.”

  Puffing on one of his sweet, execrable cigarettes, Cruz looked away and tittered. “‘Horses on the stern.’ You’d think Lowenstein, that squeaky little nerd asshole, could come up with something better.”

  Unconsciously Larson looked away from the black water athwart the bow and over at his noxious passenger. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “I know what he is talking about. The brigand is insulting our mounts.”

  Uttered in a most distinctively steely feminine voice, the observation was bizarre enough. Turning simultaneously there on the bridge of the Mary Anne, the sight that Cruz and his sulky captive captain beheld was stranger still. But not, a captivated Cruz reflected, in any way unpleasant. So taken was he by the unexpected vision that he barely gave a thought to the notion that it might somehow be connected to the putative presence of multiple horses on the stern.

  Crowding onto the bridge were five of the most simply stunning, utterly gorgeous women Cruz or Larson or Nick Panopolous, who was standing with his mouth open at the far side of the chart table, had ever seen. All of them were blond. Startlingly blo
nd, except for one scintillating redhead, and all had eyes of electric blue, save for two who flashed green, the redhead among them. Variously attired, none was dressed for open-ocean deep-sea fishing. Common to all of them, though visible more on some than on others, was scarlet underwear. One wore a severe off-the-shoulder black dress suitable for performance with a symphony orchestra. She was carrying a violin case. Despite this, her appearance was no more incongruous than that of her four companions. Lost in the rear of the crowd, though not unhappily so, was a visibly dazzled David Larson.

  “Hi, Dad,” the young fisherman called out. “I’d like you to make the acquaintance of some new friends of mine.”

  Before a flabbergasted Red Larson could reply, the suddenly animated Cruz stepped forward. “It is lovely to meet you all, senoritas. Though I have no idea how you come to be here, on this miserable boat in the middle of the open ocean, I gladly welcome you aboard.” He leered unashamedly at the nearest woman. She wore a comfortable brown business suit, practical flats, and stood five-nine, maybe five-ten. She was also the shortest member of the group. “I assure you I was not intentionally insulting your mounts. Though I am always available to such charming company to discuss matters of mounting.”

  Pushing past him without a word, the blonde confronted the bewildered captain. Hands on hips, she looked him slowly up and down, leaned forward to peer deep into his eyes, reached out to take several of the thinning hairs atop his head and rub them between thumb and forefinger, all the while sniffing at him with a nose that was as pert and perfect as the rest of her. She smelled, old man Larson decided, of wild honey and expensive leather, of crisp fresh air and slow-warmed Cognac. Married for thirty-six years to the same woman, he nonetheless felt dizzy in the presence of this impossibly flawless golden goddess.

  “Do not be alarmed,” she told him forthrightly. “My name is Herfjötur.”

  “Say what, girl?” Even though she was facing away from him, Cruz continued to stare at her, and not at the back of her head.