by David Mack
Trembling with excitement, Fletcher picked up her writing tablet, which also doubled as the storage and retrieval device for her manuscript. She was about to proffer it to Hernandez, but she hesitated and hugged it to her chest instead. “Do you want to read it?”
“Do I really have a choice? I mean, come on—it’s what, the early sixteenth century? You’ve just written the first modern novel by a human being. I’d say that makes it required reading, from a historical perspective if not a literary one.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Fletcher said, thrusting the writing tablet across the table to Hernandez, who took it and stared at its title page with raised eyebrows.
“Revenge of Chaotica: A Captain Proton Adventure?” Disbelief or disapproval creased Hernandez’s brow. “The first work of long-form modern human prose is an unauthorized space-fantasy sequel? Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Well, since you’ve already decided that you hate it …” She reached across the table to take back the tablet.
Hernandez leaned back and pulled the tablet beyond Fletcher’s grasp. “Hang on,” she said, holding up her free hand. “You’re right, I should read it before I judge it. And I’m honored that you’re letting me be the first to see it.”
“Well, you’re the second, actually,” Fletcher said, feeling sheepish. “I had Johanna proofread it. You know, just for style and spelling and all that.” A slackjawed look from Hernandez made it clear to Fletcher that she’d hit another nerve.
The captain protested, “English isn’t even her first language! Unless you penned your magnum opus in German, I can’t imagine why you’d let her see it before I did.”
“Because I wanted it to be bloody great when you saw it,” Fletcher said sharply. Then, more modestly, she added, “I wanted it to be perfect.”
Then it was Hernandez’s turn to hang her head in shame. “That’s sweet of you,” she said. “I’m sorry if I got all high and mighty on you there.”
“No worries,” Fletcher said, shrugging it off.
“I’ll start reading it tonight,” Hernandez said. She looked at her bowl of vegetable food product and grimaced. “I get the feeling I won’t be sleeping too well, anyway.” She set down the tablet and resumed poking at her dinner. “What are you doing tomorrow night after dinner?”
“Let me check my calendar,” Fletcher deadpanned. “Why?”
“I have something to show you,” Hernandez said. “And Johanna and Sidra, too. I think you’re all gonna love it.”
“What is it?”
Hernandez could barely hide her excitement. “A surprise.”
Fletcher felt a surge of curiosity and dread. “I don’t like surprises.”
“You’ll like this one.”
She looked up at the empty spaces of the void. “We’ll see.”
* * *
“Keep your eyes shut,” Hernandez said as she led her friends through the sublevel passage toward the threshold. “No peeking.”
Fletcher and Metzger walked on either side of Valerian, each of them cupping one hand over the younger woman’s eyes. Metzger whispered to the nervous young redhead, “Relax, Sidra. It’s going to be all right. Breathe.”
Inyx and Edrin stood on either side of the broad portal, awaiting the foursome’s arrival. As they had agreed beforehand with Hernandez, they said nothing as she led the other three women to the edge of the world that lived beneath the city.
“Stop here,” Hernandez said, and the women halted. “Take a deep breath. Hold it.… And on the count of three, let it go and step forward. One. Two. Three.” She backpedaled ahead of them as they passed through the wide, oval doorway. Radiant warmth, a roar of white noise, the cawing of circling birds, and the scent of salt air swept over them as she said, “Open your eyes.”
Metzger and Fletcher did as she’d asked, and they removed their hands from Valerian’s eyes. In contrast to Hernandez’s excited smile of expectation, Fletcher and Metzger reacted with wide-eyed stares of shock. Valerian, on the other hand, shrieked with joy and sprinted forward, across the white-sand beach, toward the frothing breakers that surged in on a high tide.
“Sidra, wait!” cried Metzger, who stumbled forward in belated pursuit, arms futilely outstretched.
Hernandez caught Metzger’s sleeve. “It’s all right, Johanna, she’s safe.” She turned and watched Valerian, who doffed her clothes and waded through the crashing waves before diving headfirst through a churning white breaker.
Fletcher pivoted in a slow circle, taking in the scene. High, white cliffs rose behind them, and wind-sculpted towers of limestone ascended majestically from the teal sea, bleached fingers poking up from the deep, some as close as a few dozen meters from shore. Farther out, almost halfway to the horizon, stood jagged islands of gray rock dotted with gnarled, anorexic trees.
“Where are we?” Fletcher asked, sounding wary.
“In a special chamber beneath the city,” Hernandez said. “Inyx and Edrin built it for us.”
Valerian had shed the last of her clothing, some of which floated behind her as she propelled herself away from shore with a choppy crawl stroke that had once been well practiced.
Shaking her head, Metzger said, “I don’t understand.”
“When they told me we might be in deep space for several more decades, I told them I couldn’t take that—and I didn’t think any of you could, either,” Hernandez said. “They thought we only needed artificial sunlight, because it’s all we ever asked for. Once I explained that we need a planetary—”
“No,” Metzger interrupted, “I don’t understand how they built us an ocean.”
Before Hernandez could explain, Fletcher cut in, “It’s some kind of high-tech simulation, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Hernandez said. “Holographic, I think. I don’t really get all the technical details, but it has something to do with force fields and optical illusions.”
Twenty meters from shore, Valerian switched to a backstroke as she crested a rising swell of blue-green water, and she paddled easily into the trough behind it.
On the beach, Fletcher looked back at the white stone cliffs and asked, “Where’s the bloody exit?”
Stunned, Hernandez replied, “What? You’re leaving?”
“Tell the Caeliar they can keep this, whatever it is,” Fletcher said. She started running her hands over the chalky cliff face. “What do I have to do, say ‘open sesame’?”
A moment later, Metzger joined Fletcher’s search.
“Johanna!” Hernandez protested. “You, too?”
Metzger looked back at her and scowled. “This is a trick, Erika. And you’re falling for it.”
She began to suspect her friends were crazy. “What’re you talking about? Exactly how is this a trick?”
Fletcher gave up probing the cliff and turned back toward Hernandez. “Don’t be so thick, Erika. I know a gilded cage when I see one.” Metzger abandoned her own search and stood by Fletcher in solidarity as the XO continued, “It might look like home, but it’s not.”
“No one ever said it was,” Hernandez said, frustrated with Fletcher’s accusatory manner. “So it’s a gilded cage. So what? Endless night was turning us all into basket cases, Ronnie, and you know it. We need this.”
“I don’t,” Fletcher said, folding her arms.
Holding out her arms, Hernandez replied, “Don’t you? Smell that air, Ronnie. Feel the sand under your feet. Listen to the wind and the water. Who cares if it isn’t real? What difference does it make that we’re still prisoners? Would you really rather be an inmate in that dark, gray box we’ve been living in? Or would you rather serve your time in the tropics?”
Fletcher laughed, but it was a mean-spirited chortle. “You just don’t get it,” she said. “It’s not about whether it’s real. It’s about them wanting us to be happy as prisoners.”
“You’re right,” Hernandez said. “I don’t get it. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking
about surrender, Erika. That’s what accepting gifts from them would be. A bunk to sleep on, basic nutrition, clean water, sanitation—those are basics any prisoner ought to expect. I can take those and feel like I’m not letting them do me any favors. The solar therapy was pushing it, but Johanna made it a doctor’s order, so that’s that.” She kneeled and picked up a handful of sand that spilled between her fingers. “But this? This is a gift, from them, with a big shiny bow on top. Living in here would be a lot easier; I know that. But it would also be the same as telling them, ‘I give up.’ And if I give them that last ounce of my pride, I’ll have nothing left.” She opened her hand and turned it to let the last grains of sand fall back onto the illusory beach. “I won’t give them that, Erika. Not now. Not ever.” She squinted into the bright blue dome of the sky. “Not even for this.”
* * *
A ball of fire, red as an ember, lay in Hernandez’s wrinkled palm. Gray ghosts condensed above it. In their serpentine motions and changes, Hernandez read the star system’s life story.
“One-point-three billion years old,” she said while Inyx stood behind her and listened. “Rich in actinides, very rare for a system this old.” A long and especially complex symbol split and snaked in a double helix around her index finger. “All the building blocks for unbihexium-310.” A short parade of simple glyphs traveled up the side of her left hand. “No terrestrial planets, only gas giants. Forty-eight natural satellites, including one rich in lead-208. All but one exhibit profound geological instability. The only stable one is a cold hunk of silicon and carbon at the edge of the system.”
Inyx asked with the quiet satisfaction of a proud teacher, “What about life-forms?”
“None,” she said, studying the slow unspooling of smoky sigils. “Not even cosmozoans. I’m guessing the heavier elements made this system a bit rich for their tastes.”
“Recommendation?”
A turn of her index finger set the crimson sphere spinning in her cupped hand as she gave it a push back into the virtual heavens of the Star Chamber. “Unsuitable for colonization, but it’s rich in the elements you’ve been looking for. You should exploit this system for resources while colonizing another.” She pointed up at a brilliant yellow-orange dot near the red orb she’d just released. “Have we looked at that one?”
“It’s on the short list, as you would say.” Inyx reached up and summoned the bright spot down to Hernandez’s waiting hands. “I thought I might let you do the honors.”
She placed her hands on either side of the warm-hued star’s miniaturized doppelganger and puffed a small breath across it. A misty stream of data curled upward from it like smoke from a snuffed taper. Her eyes widened at the tale it told. “K2V main sequence star, mean temperature 4,890 degrees Kelvin. Seven planets, four terrestrial, two in the habitable zone, one at optimal distance. No sign of cosmozoan activity.”
“Hardly surprising,” Inyx said. “It’s rather far from the nearest OB cluster. In fact, I’d daresay it’s remote from most everything in this sector.” He passed his undulating tendrils over the glowing orb in her hands and changed the image to a blue-green world streaked with white. It turned slowly before her. “Tell me about its third planet,” he said.
“Minshara-class,” she replied, reading more grayish-white Caeliar runes as they formed above the tiny globe. “Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. Gravity is ninety-eight percent of Erigol-normal. No artificial satellites, no radio emissions. No sign of industrial pollutants in the oceans or atmosphere. No evidence of synthetic electrical power generation on the surface. Geothermal activity is minimal, but it still has a molten iron core.” She was almost giddy as she looked up at Inyx. “It’s perfect.”
“Perhaps,” Inyx said. “We’ll still need to survey the surface to make certain there are no sentient life-forms there. If there are, we mustn’t interfere with their habitat.”
“Of course,” Hernandez said. “You know, I have to admit: On the one hand, it makes me happy to find out so many Minshara-class worlds are populated by sentient species. But I have to wonder why so many of the races we’ve found have been humanoid. Even some of the more exotic ones we’ve seen have been bipedal and demonstrated bilateral symmetry.”
“The result of an ancient bit of genetic interference,” Inyx said. “I’ll tell you about it someday, after Axion is settled and secure.” Before she could pester him for details, he looked away. When he turned back, he said, “I’ve petitioned the Quorum for a survey of that world. Efforts are under way.”
She released the planet, which floated languidly back into the darkness above. “I want to join the survey,” she said.
“It’s not a literal visit to the world’s surface,” Inyx said. “We’ll use a number of subspace apertures to make undetected inspections of the planet, from its core to its oceans to its highest elevations. Noninvasive scans will be made of any life-forms we encounter.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Not long,” Inyx said. “No more than two of your years.”
Once upon a time, she might have laughed at the Caeliar’s conception of human time scales. Now she just swallowed her sarcastic remarks and moved on. “I presume we’ll keep looking for new candidate systems while the survey is conducted?”
“Yes,” Inyx said, “though we can stop for today, if you’re feeling fatigued.”
Her eyes itched as though they’d been rubbed with sand, but she lied, “I’m fine. What’s next?”
He reached up, and a bluish-white fireball the size of a grape answered his call and floated down to Hernandez. It came to a gradual stop in front of her, and she interpreted its fleeting dance of wispy pictograms. When she’d finished and released it, Inyx remarked, “I have been meaning to commend you for the way you’ve mastered our written language.”
“All it took was time,” she said. “And I had plenty of it.”
He gestured for her to follow him as he moved toward the nearest exit from the Star Chamber, and she walked beside him. “I don’t think you appreciate how special your achievement is,” he said. “You are the first non-Caeliar to learn our language in more than eighty thousand years.”
She responded with a veiled accusation. “Did you ever give anyone else the chance?”
“Well … no, not as such,” Inyx said.
“Then I can’t feel that impressed with myself.”
He turned his bulbous head just enough to glance down at her. “You seem to be learning some of our other abilities, as well,” he said.
Unable to discern what he was talking about, she furrowed her brow in confusion. “What other abilities?”
“Transmogrification,” he said. “Your changes in form.”
“Okay, you’ve lost me.”
He waved his arm in a slow arc, and a metallic pinpoint formed in the air ahead of them. They stopped and watched as it grew, flattened, and expanded into an immaculate silver mirror that hovered before them. Gesturing at their reflections, Inyx said, “Your change has been quite gradual, but it’s no less impressive for its subtlety.”
It was the same face she saw in her own mirror every morning now. Her face was wrinkled and marked by dark brown age spots, and her once mostly black hair had long since turned a leaden gray. Her cheeks sagged beside her chin, under which drooped a small waddle of loose flesh. A stroke of genetic good fortune had preserved her eyesight all these decades, and though her eyes now were sunken within age-darkened sockets, they were the only part of her that still resembled the woman she had been when she had come to Axion a lifetime ago.
“Inyx, are you talking about the changes I’ve gone through since I came to Axion? The deterioration of my skin, the fading of my hair, the compression of my spine?”
“Of course,” Inyx said.
She sighed because she was too tired to actually get angry anymore. “It’s not a conscious shape-change,” she explained. “It’s just cellular breakdown. Or, as my people like to say, it’s called getting old.”
Hernandez detoured around the mirror and continued toward the exit. Inyx loped along and caught up to her. She scowled at him. “If you need a hobby, stick to sculpture,” she said. “’Cause you’re definitely not cut out for comedy.”
* * *
Johanna Metzger held Sidra Valerian’s hand and walked with her onto the beach that wasn’t really a beach but was real enough for the younger woman’s daily escape from reality. A long time ago, it had been Valerian who’d needed the reassurance of contact, the steady guidance from the bleak confines of their quarters to this blinding, sunlit lie.
Age had taken its toll on them both since then. Valerian’s fiery red hair had faded to a dull rusty hue flecked with gray, and Metzger’s own gray crew cut had turned bone-white and now spilled far beneath her shoulder blades. It was Valerian, the silent athlete, the mute woman-child, who supported Metzger now. Frail and doddering, the elderly Swiss doctor could barely see. To her, the world had become little more than soft-edged shapes and blurs of color, washes of light and darkness, elusive shades and specters. She relied on Valerian to escort her through the labyrinth of Axion’s streets each day, to and from this refuge.
They crossed the threshold, and the false sun warmed her skin and reduced her world to a red glare through her closed eyelids. With wordless tenderness, Valerian touched Metzger’s face, then released her hand. Beyond the wall of white noise, Metzger heard her surrogate daughter’s soft steps in the sand, then the splash as Valerian plunged headlong into the crashing surf for another day of aquatic reverie.
Swimming was all Valerian did anymore; it was all she had done for as long as Metzger could remember. Once, the Scotswoman had been young and beautiful. Now she was age-worn, like Fletcher and Hernandez, and the extra time that Valerian spent in the glow of the Caeliar’s artificial tropical sun had blemished her once-milky skin with a million brown freckles and several dark spots that Metzger was certain would eventually become malignant melanomas. And she never spoke. She had been silent for so long that Metzger no longer remembered her voice.