To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

Her eyes filmed over with tears, and she blinked, not wanting Sparrow or the doctor to see.

  With the blood he’d collected, Vishal ran still more tests, muttering to himself the whole while. Kira zoned out while listening to his fragmented comments. There was a spot on the opposing wall—a spot shaped like star anise or maybe a dead spider that had been squashed beneath a flat-bottomed glass—and she stared at it, her mind empty.

  …

  With a start, Kira realized that Vishal had fallen silent and that he’d been silent for some time. “What?” she said.

  The doctor looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “I do not know what to make of your xeno.” He made a slight back-and-forth wobble of his head. “It’s like nothing I’ve studied before.”

  “How so?”

  He pushed his stool back from the table. “I would need several months before I could answer that. The organism has…” He hesitated. “It is interacting with your body in ways I don’t understand. It shouldn’t be possible!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it does not use DNA or RNA, yes? Neither do the Jellies, for that matter, but—”

  “Can you tell if they’re related?”

  Vishal waved his hands with frustration. “No, no. If the organism is artificial, as it most assuredly is, then its makers could have built it using whatever arrangement of molecules they wanted, yes? They weren’t limited to their own biology. But that’s not what’s important. Without DNA or RNA, how does your suit know how to interact with your cells? Our chemistry is totally different!”

  “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  “Yes, and—”

  A short beep emanated from the main sickbay console, and then a tinny version of Falconi’s voice came over the speakers: “Hey, Doc, what’s the verdict? You’ve been awfully quiet down there.”

  Vishal grimaced. Then he unlocked the seal around his neck and pulled off his helmet. “I can tell you Ms. Navárez doesn’t have measles, mumps, or rubella. She has healthy blood sugar levels, and although her implants are non-functional, whoever oversaw their installation did a good job of it. Gums look fine. Ears aren’t blocked. What do you expect me to say?”

  “Is she contagious?”

  “She isn’t. I am not so sure about the suit. It sheds dust”—at that Sparrow appeared alarmed—“but the dust seems completely inert. Who can tell, though? I don’t have the tools I need. If only I was back at my old lab.…” Vishal shook his head.

  “Did you ask Gregorovich?”

  The doctor rolled his eyes. “Yes, our blessed ship mind deigned to look at the data. He wasn’t much help, unless you count quoting Tyrollius back at me.”

  “Everything with the suit—”

  An excited squeal interrupted the captain as Runcible trotted into the sickbay. The little brown pig came over to Kira and sniffed her foot, then hurried back to Sparrow and wound between her legs.

  The woman reached down to give Runcible a scratch behind the ears. The pig lifted its snout and almost seemed to be smiling.

  Falconi resumed talking: “Everything with the suit match up with what she said?”

  Vishal spread his hands. “As far as I can tell. Half the time I don’t know if I’m looking at an organic cell, a nanomachine, or some sort of weird hybrid. The molecular structure of the suit seems to change by the second.”

  “Well, are we going to start frothing at the mouth and keel over? Or is it going to kill us in our sleep? That’s what I want to know.”

  Kira shifted uncomfortably, thinking of Alan.

  “It seems … unlikely, at the moment,” said Vishal. “There is nothing in these tests to indicate the xeno is an immediate threat. However, I must warn you, there is no way of being sure with the equipment I have.”

  “Understood,” said Falconi. “Right. Well, I guess we’ll risk it then. I’ve got confidence in you, Doc. Navárez, you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll be changing course to Malpert Station directly. ETA is just under forty-two hours.”

  “Understood. And thank you.”

  He grunted. “Not doing it for you, Navárez.… Sparrow, I know you’re listening. Take our guest to the spare cabin on C-deck. She can stay there for the duration. Best to keep her away from the rest of the passengers.”

  Sparrow straightened off the doorframe. “Yessir.”

  “Oh, and Navárez? You’re welcome to join us in the galley if you want. Dinner is at nineteen hundred sharp.” Then the line went dead.

  4.

  Sparrow popped another bubble of gum. “Okay, ground-pounder, let’s go.”

  Kira didn’t obey at first. She looked at Vishal and said, “Can you forward your results to me, so I can look at them myself?”

  He bobbed his head. “Yes, of course.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for being so thorough.”

  Vishal seemed surprised by her response. Then he bowed slightly and laughed, a quick, melodic sound. “When the risk is dying from an alien infestation, how could I not be thorough?”

  “That’s an excellent point.”

  Then Kira followed Sparrow back out into the corridor. “You have anything in the hold you need to get?” the shorter woman asked.

  Kira shook her head. “I’m good.”

  Together, they proceeded down to the next level of the ship. As they walked, the thrust alert sounded, and the deck seemed to tilt and twist underneath them as the Wallfish reoriented along its new vector.

  “Galley is through there,” said Sparrow, gesturing at a marked door. “Feel free to help yourself if you get hungry. Just don’t. Touch. The. Damn. Chocolate.”

  “That’s been a problem?”

  The woman snorted. “Trig keeps eating it and claiming he didn’t realize the rest of us wanted some.… Here, this is you.” She stopped in front of another door.

  Kira nodded and ducked inside. Behind her, Sparrow stayed in place, watching, until the door swung shut.

  Feeling more like a prisoner than a passenger, Kira surveyed her surroundings. The cabin was half the size of Falconi’s. Bunk and storage locker on one side, sink and mirror, toilet, and desk with a computer display on the other. The walls were brown, like the corridors, and there were just two lights, one on each side: white patches caged with metal bars.

  The handle on the locker stuck when she tried it. She leaned on it, and the door popped open. A thin blue blanket lay folded inside. Nothing else.

  Kira started to remove her jumpsuit and then hesitated. What if Falconi had the cabin under surveillance? After a moment’s thought, she decided she didn’t give a damn. Eighty-eight days and eleven light-years was far too long to have worn the same piece of clothing.

  Feeling something close to relief, Kira unseamed the jumpsuit, pulled her arms free, and stepped out of it. A trickle of dust fell from the cuffed legs.

  She draped the suit over the back of the chair and went to the sink, intending to take a sponge bath. The sight in the mirror stopped her.

  Even on the Valkyrie, Kira had never been able to see herself properly, only partial glimpses, dark and ghostlike on the glassy surfaces of the displays. She hadn’t really cared; she just had to look down to get a good idea of what the Soft Blade had done to her.

  But now, seeing herself reflected nearly in whole, it struck her just how much the alien organism had changed and … infested her, occupying what no one else had any right to occupy, not even a child, if ever she had a child. Her face and body were thinner than she remembered, too thin—a consequence of so many weeks spent at half rations—but that itself didn’t bother her.

  All she could look at was the suit. The shiny, black, fibrous suit that clung to her like a layer of shrink-wrapped polymer. It looked as if her skin and fascia had been stripped away to expose a gruesome anatomy chart of muscles.

  Kira ran a hand over the strange shape of her bare scalp. Her breath caught and a tight knot formed in her gut. She felt as if she were going to be sick. S
he stared, and she hated what she saw, but she couldn’t bring herself to look away. The surface of the Soft Blade grew rough as it echoed her emotions.

  Who could find her attractive now … the way Alan had? Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

  She felt ugly.

  Disfigured.

  Outcast.

  And there was no one to comfort her.

  Kira took a shuddering breath, reining in her emotions. She’d grieved and would continue to grieve, but there was no changing the past, and dissolving into a sobbing mess wasn’t going to do her any good.

  All was not lost. There was a way forward now: a hope, if however slight.

  Forcing her gaze away from the mirror, she used the cloth by the sink to wash herself and then retreated to the bed and crawled under the blanket. There, in the filtered gloom, she again worked on forcing the Soft Blade to retreat from a patch of skin (this time the fingers of her left hand).

  Compared with before, it felt as if the Soft Blade better understood what she was trying to accomplish. The effort required was more manageable, and there were moments when the sense of struggle vanished and she and xeno were working in harmony. Those moments encouraged her, and Kira pushed even harder as a result.

  The Soft Blade retreated from her nails with a sticky, peeling sound. It halted at the first joint of each finger, and try as she might, Kira couldn’t coax it past.

  She reset.

  Three more times Kira willed the suit to expose her fingers, and three more times it responded to her satisfaction. With each success, she felt the neural links between her and the suit deepening, becoming increasingly efficient.

  She tried elsewhere on her body, and there too the Soft Blade obeyed her commands, though some areas were more challenging than others. To free herself entirely of the xeno would require more strength than she could muster, but Kira wasn’t disappointed. She was still learning to communicate with the xeno, and the fact that freedom might just be possible—if even only as a distant prospect—kindled such a sense of lightness within her, she grinned with an idiot’s delight into the blanket.

  Ridding herself of the Soft Blade wouldn’t solve all her problems (the UMC and the League would still want her for observation, and without the suit she’d be completely at their mercy), but it would solve the biggest one and clear the way for her to someday—somehow!—have a normal life again.

  Once more she willed the Soft Blade to retract. Holding it in place was like trying to hold two magnets face-to-face with the same polarity. At one point, a noise on the other side of the room caught her attention, and a thin spike stabbed out from her hand, pierced the blanket, and struck the desk (she could feel it, same as an extended finger).

  “Shit,” Kira muttered. Had anyone seen that? With a struggle, she convinced the Soft Blade to reabsorb the spike. She looked out at the desk; the spike had left a long scratch on the top.

  When she could no longer maintain her concentration, Kira abandoned her experiments and went to the desk. She pulled up the built-in display, linked it to her overlays, and scanned the files Vishal had messaged her.

  It was her first time getting to see actual test results from the xeno. And they were fascinating.

  The material of the suit consisted of three basic components. One, nanoassemblers, which were responsible for shaping and reshaping both the xeno and surrounding material, though where the assemblers drew their power wasn’t obvious. Two, dendriform filaments that extended throughout every part of the suit and which displayed consistent patterns of activity that seemed to indicate the organism was acting as a massively interconnected processor (whether or not it was alive in the traditional sense was hard to determine, but it certainly wasn’t dead). And three, an enormously complex polymeric molecule, copies of which Vishal had found attached to nearly every assembler, as well as the dendriform substrate.

  Like so many things regarding the xeno, the purpose of the molecule was a mystery. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the repair or construction of the suit. The length of the molecule meant it contained an enormous amount of potential information—at least two orders of magnitude more than base-human DNA—but as yet, there was no way to determine what use, if any, the information was supposed to have.

  There was a chance, Kira thought, that the only real function of the xeno was to protect and pass on the molecule. Not that that told her very much. From a biological point of view, the same was true with humans and DNA, and humans were capable of far more than just propagation.

  Kira went over the results four times before she was satisfied she’d committed them to memory. Vishal was right: to learn more about the xeno would require better equipment.

  Maybe the Entropists could help.… She filed away the thought for future consideration. Malpert would be the place to approach the Entropists about examining the xeno, if indeed she decided to.

  Then Kira returned to the news and started to dig into the research concerning the Jellies’ biology, eager to bring herself up to date with the current literature. It, too, was fascinating stuff: all sorts of things could be inferred from the aliens’ genome. They were omnivores, for one, and large chunks of their DNA-equivalent seemed to have been custom-coded (natural processes never produced such clean sequences).

  Nothing in the Jellies’ biology resembled what Vishal had found in the xeno. Nothing seemed to indicate a shared biological heritage. That in and of itself didn’t mean anything. Kira knew of more than a few human-made artificial organisms (mostly single-celled creations) that contained no obvious chemical link to Earth-derived life. So it didn’t mean anything … but it was suggestive.

  Kira read until early afternoon, and then she broke for a quick visit to the galley, where she made herself some chell and grabbed a meal pack from a cupboard. She didn’t feel comfortable eating any of the fresh food in the ship’s cooler; that stuff was rare and expensive in space. It would be bad manners to chow it down without permission, even if the sight of an orange had started her mouth watering.

  Upon her return to the cabin, she found a message waiting for her:

  The spaces around your answers invite inspection, meatbag. What things did you leave unsaid? I wonder, yes I do. Tell me this at least, ere you deprive us of your shedding presence: What are you really, O Infested One? – Gregorovich

  Kira pursed her lips. She didn’t want to answer. Trying to win a battle of wits with a ship mind was a fool’s game, but pissing him off would be far more stupid.

  I’m alone and afraid. What are you? – Kira

  It was a calculated risk. If she allowed herself to appear more vulnerable to him—and Gregorovich was most definitely a him—then maybe she could distract him. It was worth a shot.

  To her surprise, the ship mind didn’t answer.

  She continued to read. Not long afterward, the Wallfish went zero-g and then performed a skew-flip before starting to decelerate toward Malpert Station. As always, the weightlessness left Kira with the taste of bile in her mouth and a renewed sense of appreciation for gravity, simulated or otherwise.

  When it was nearly 1900, she closed down her overlays, pulled on her jumpsuit, and decided to risk venturing out to face the crew at dinner.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  5.

  The hum of conversation in the galley stopped the moment Kira entered. She paused in the doorway while the crew looked at her and she at them.

  The captain was sitting at the near table with one leg pulled up against his chest and his arm resting on his knee while he spooned food into his mouth. Across from him was Nielsen, stiff and straight-backed as always.

  At the far table sat the doctor and one of the largest women Kira had ever seen. She wasn’t fat, just wide and thick, with bones and joints nearly a third bigger than those of most men. Each of her fingers was the equivalent of two of Kira’s, and her face was flat and round, with enormous cheekbones.

  Kira recognized the face as the on
e she’d seen upon waking in the shuttle, and she instantly identified the woman as a former denizen of Shin-Zar. She could hardly be mistaken for anything else.

  It was unusual to see a Zarian in the League. Theirs was the one colony that insisted on staying independent (at no small cost in ships and lives). During her time with the company, Kira had only worked with a few people from Shin-Zar—all men—at different postings. To a person they’d been tough, reliable, and as expected, strong as hell. They’d also been able to drink a staggering amount, far more than their size would seem to indicate. That had been one of the first lessons Kira had learned working on mining rigs: don’t try to drink a Zarian under the table. It was a fast way to end up in sickbay with alcohol poisoning.

  On an intellectual level, Kira understood why the colonists had gene-hacked themselves—they wouldn’t have survived in Shin-Zar’s high-g environment otherwise—but she’d never really gotten used to how different they looked. It hadn’t bothered Shyrene, her roommate during corporate training. She’d kept a picture of a pop star from Shin-Zar projected on the wall of their apartment.

  Like most Zarians, the woman in the Wallfish galley was of Asian descent. Korean no doubt, as Koreans made up the majority of immigrants to Shin-Zar (that much Kira remembered from her class on the history of the seven colonies). She wore a rumpled jumpsuit, patched on the knees and elbows and stained with grease along the arms. The shape of her face made her age impossible for Kira to guess; she might have been in her early twenties or she might have been almost forty.

  Trig was sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter, chewing on another of his seemingly endless supply of ration bars. And ladling out meatballs from a pot on the stove was Sparrow, still in the same outfit as before. The cat, Mr. Fuzzypants, rubbed against her ankles, meowing piteously.

  A delicious, savory smell suffused the air.

  “Well, you going to come in or not?” Falconi asked. His words broke the spell, and motion and conversation resumed.

  Kira wondered if the rest of the crew knew about the Soft Blade. Her question was answered as she made her way to the back and Trig said, “So that skinsuit was actually made by aliens?”