In Between the Stars

by A. A. Ripley

  ‘I am now dead. I must be, for you to watch this,’ he said, his features full of artificial peace.

  ‘I am, or was, Third Thinker Bold. They called me something else and were right. I was Jumbob the Very Very Insane. I… we found this place when I went through the wormhole. We were the first to travel that way. We found this place and studied it. The human that was with me is gone now. Took the ship and the piece. The piece is like a black, black disc. We found many, but only one is needed. He took them both and left me. Left me here. I can’t go back now. No way to get back.’

  He paused, as though he was all out of breath. His face tensed for a brief moment, as if he was considering what words to choose next.

  ‘This station hangs between two stars and collects energy from both. A lot of energy drawn from the fusion – heat and radiation. The station is not a station. The whole station is a machine, a machine to break the universe. To build the universe back, piece by piece. Dangerous in wrong hands and in right hands too. The machine is off now. It is dormant and safe. Don’t turn it on. Leave it alone. Go home. Forget. If you turned it on – turn it off. I had time, I found the off switch. Here is everything: maps, notes, passages, guides. Follow it to the off switch and turn it off. I don’t know any other way to stop it. I… I earned the name they gave me. But I dared to wear it. I am Jumbob the Very Very Insane. Farewell.’

  The ki-jirai disappeared. For a brief moment the display went black, while it switched active programs. Then it lit up again, this time displaying a map. In the middle, there was a round marker, blinking steadily. A silver line led from the tip of the marker into the labyrinthine map of the alien station. Inan took a few steps towards the wall and the marker on the map moved. Inan pondered over his words for a while. Now she could understand how Cochrane knew the way. The other human, was it him? Inan shook her head; it couldn’t have been. Whoever had delivered the black disc into the hands of the pirates was still unknown.

  She silently thanked Jumbob for this gift, knowing that it would help her to get back. She could now help Hijinks and Alan. Stop Cochrane! Save the universe! That last thought was so ridiculous that it made her laugh out loud. But what else could she do but follow Jumbob’s instructions and turn everything off, before any damage could be done?

  Guided by Jumbob’s maps, she moved forward, past the makeshift camp. Finally, she spotted a door-like shape.

  She had to cover her eyes when she passed the threshold, her pupils adjusting painfully after being in half-dark for so long. Her heat vision faded abruptly.

  When she opened them again she was standing on the walkway enclosed in latticed ribs no thicker than her horn. Beyond it, there were more curved walkways going in all directions, suspended above and below her. She noticed movement and turned her head. Through the walkway running parallel to her own, a gaggle of quadrupeds marched onward, their tiny legs clicking on the metallic floor. They looked the same as the one that had greeted them at the gate to the pillared hall, but even smaller. What were those? Robotic caretakers? Part of some vital system? Automatic replacement parts? Inan couldn’t tell.

  She walked along briskly, keeping one eye on the map marker. She wanted to run, to find the switch instantly. Each moment she spent here, Cochrane was free to put his plan in motion. But she could not run blindly, she had to put faith in the map and the foreseeing mind of the long-dead scientist.

  She entered a long walkway suspended above a spherical chamber. She was high above the floor and from her vantage point she could see a large sphere on the dais in the middle of the room. Inan looked closely, and she noticed that its shape fluctuated a bit, as though the sphere was surrounded by a body of water suspended in mid-air. The sphere itself was perfectly black, like the disc, and seemed to be bobbing gently up and down, as if it was moved by an invisible current. It didn’t seem to be connected to anything in the room, almost as though it was out of place. It was as alien to this place as Inan was. Then she knew that she was now looking at the heart of the Actuality Regulator. From her perch high above the floor, she could see the humans enter the room, dragging Alan and Hijinks in with them.

  Cochrane stepped up to the dais and approached the sphere. He held up the black disc in his hand and slowly, gently, let it touch the liquid. The moment the disc made contact with the surface it jumped out of his fingers and plunged inside. The sphere fragmented. It was no longer a solid object, but rather a collection of small parts floating freely. Inan could see now that those objects were all black discs, identical to the one Cochrane had. For a moment they stood still, like a petrified shoal of fish. Then, all at once, they rushed toward the centre. A split second later, the black sphere was back again, floating in the liquid envelope.

  Inan realised that she could not let herself waste any more time. The marker on the electronic map was pointing forward, straight through the walkway and towards the other end of the central chamber. But there was no walkway before her, only a jumble of twisted cables, shining coldly with reflected light from below. They stretched all the way above the black sphere, like a net torn by deep-sea beasts, moored to the remains of the walkway at both ends.

  She tried not to look down below where the pirates gathered around their captain. She tried to close her ears to their voices, forget about their presence. There was an obstacle to traverse. Somewhere, in the back of her head, there was an alarming thought that what she was trying to accomplish was not only foolish, it was certain death. Inan closed her eyes and took a breath. It had to be done. She had to reach the emergency shut-down.

  The cables creaked under her weight, as though protesting the intrusion. Inan froze. She was sure the pirates underneath her must have heard the noise and would shoot her down. But their attention was turned to Cochrane.

  ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the sphere, ‘awaits justice. The means to fix all wrongs done to our species. No longer will the Core Races be quashing us with unfair treaties and extorted “war reparations”. He turned his face to the machine as he continued, ‘This is the Actuality Regulator. An ancient technology that in dilettante alien hands was the source of the total annihilation of their inferior species. But this will not happen to us. We will not be marginalised. This machine will give us what we want. What we need – our rightful place in the galaxy.’

  The Actuality Regulator was moving, reacting to Cochrane’s words. The sphere fragmented again. The swarm of black discs parted, holding up the liquid on both sides as if it was inviting the human inside. Cochrane stepped inside and the black cloud and the discs closed the entrance behind him. He never stopped speaking as he started to operate the machine from within. The sphere pulsed in rhythm with his voice, swelling and shrinking. The black discs disappeared, replaced with an envelope of prismatic light swirling like the surface of a soap bubble. Some strange transformation was taking place inside. A sequence of events was being calculated, like the algorithm of a program that was to rewrite the universe from the smallest molecule to the hearts of the stars themselves.

  Inan forced herself to avert her eyes. If she was to stop him, she had to concentrate on getting to the other side. She knelt down and touched the cables. She crawled, trying to keep her frantically-beating heart from jumping out of her chest. Inan did her best to ignore the silent tornado of colours beneath her, and the torrential stream of words from Cochrane who was engulfed in it. She pushed forward. Inan could now see the shut-down switch – a simple panel with a depression in the centre. It was not that far, but it seemed to her miles away, on the other side of the abyss.

  The submerged sphere started rotating below her. Inan could feel the vibrations picked up by the net of cables. They were shuddering like leaves under rain. She tightened her grip, fighting to keep her balance.

  Against her better judgement she looked down. She couldn’t see Cochrane inside the sphere that was now spinning rapidly, blending the colours into a milky-white envelope. Her hand slipped. />
  For a brief moment she was hanging, suspended by the crook of her elbow and her tail, swinging her legs hopelessly in the void.

  Slowly, as if in a dream, she managed to grasp the cables with her other hand. Then, about a million years later, she managed to extend her legs and tail, entwining them with the cables. She hung now like the most pathetic rat in the universe, with her back to the floor a couple of storeys below.

  She wished Hijinks were here instead of her. She would traverse the gap without a second thought, surefooted and swift. But Hijinks was below her, surrounded by humans, and Inan was here instead.

  There was no more time for stray thoughts. She had to move before she lost her grip. One hand after another and a push with her legs. One hand after another and a push with her legs. She inched forward.

  She crawled up onto the switch platform, like a dead-tired swimmer dragging itself onto the rocky shore. The emergency shut-down was in her grasp.

  The panel felt cool, the recess formed to accommodate a hand that was completely different from her own. Inan wondered if it would even react to her touch. She saw a red shadow pass once through the mechanism, the recess flashing briefly.

  Nothing happened.

  Frantically, she touched the panel again and again. What was she doing wrong? The panel remained as it was before. No more lights, just the dull sheen of an alien alloy.

  She was trying to come up with an idea of what to do next when something changed. Cochrane stopped speaking. A second later, Inan heard a scream. It was short, bloodcurdling. A last howl out of a dying breath.

  The sphere shimmered and bulged, finally spitting out what was once a pirate captain. The force of the ejection propelled him towards the wall, where he now lay unmoving.

  Horrified, Inan stared at the body. From here it looked like a toy that had been mistreated by a teething hatchling, mangled and nearly unrecognisable.

  A commotion erupted down below, shouts and footsteps and shooting. Then it was quiet again. The humans ran, leaving what was left of their leader.

  Using a small spiral walkway on the side, Inan ran down to floor level. She started towards Alan and Hijinks, but she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. It was subtle, like the shadow of a cloud over a bright sky. Inan looked over her shoulder at the sphere. As if hypnotised, Inan watched the milky surface. The sphere ceased its undulating movement. The whiteness parted like a gossamer curtain made of the most delicate fabric. It was held up by smoky tendrils. Inan felt as though it was inviting her inside.

  The tendrils writhed like impatient tentacles. It seemed to Inan as if they were hurrying her, urging her to act. Somehow she felt that whatever Cochrane had started could not be undone that easily.

  The first step she took almost against her will. As she stepped inside the sphere, she heard Alan and Hijinks calling her name, begging her not to go inside.

  There was nothing surrounding her, not the blackness that lies between the stars or the midnight-coloured softness of a planetary night. It was just white space with no colour or texture or sound. Inan stood in the middle of it, unsure what should she do now.

  A smudge appeared on the noxious whiteness. It inflated, like a bubble filled with dark liquid, and grew until it was as tall as Inan. Something moved within it. Inan peered inside and saw…

  …a galaxy filled with battleships, huge Goliath-type warships, just like Napoleon Bonaparte, patrolling the trade routes. They hung ominously over planets, and turned moons to dust. In every corner of the known universe planets fell under troops deployed from them. The cities burned, showered with planetary bombardments. All around the universe, the sentient species were fighting human invaders. They were fighting and losing.

  She tried to concentrate, to stop the wave of rising chaos, but instead she saw Middlelink – its dome cracked, its shipyards spewing spaceships armed to the teeth, its civilian population drafted into forced labour. Human soldiers occupied every free space on the station, a vast army like a moving nest of insects, ready to march at a moment’s notice. The station was a staging area, a brief stop in the ever-marching conquest.

  The surface of Confidence was crawling with fully-automated combine harvesters, their tireless crawl leaving the stalks of sand chives bound and prepared for processing. The robotic plants cooking them under pressure and turning the protein into bars, efficiently and with no protest. The bars that fed the war machine, keeping human troops marching to the edges of the known universe.

  Finally – her own homeworld, the Skoss House complex, abandoned and overgrown, turned into a shelter for wildlife that dwelled amongst its crumbling walls. Not a solitary izara in sight for miles and miles with no end. The nursery – abandoned. The orchards – uncultivated. The pools – dried out.

  Inan turned her head, yet she had no power to banish these visions in front of her eyes or from the centre of her being that shrank away with dread. Was that what was to become of the galaxy? She stood in the middle of the most powerful machine in the universe, one that could make and break worlds; was there no way to change what the mad human had orchestrated?

  Another vision floated from beneath her and formed a vista in front of her eyes. She looked closer into the galaxy, the stars shimmering peacefully. There was Inan’s homeworld again, the complex busy with domestic activity; males tending to the ripening soft fruit, females at their consoles overseeing household operations, hatchlings playing in their nursery. Matriarch Salrran was commanding a small army of assistants from the comfort of her quarters. It was as if warmth had returned to the air around Inan.

  She looked at Middlelink again; the multi-coloured crowds milling about, the great dome shining as usual, the shipyards full of differently-shaped spaceships patiently waiting their turn for repairs, the connected spaceport busy with the exchange of goods and passengers in every shape, of every species.

  Confidence however, was silent. No matter how carefully she watched, Inan couldn’t find the spaceport or the city they had visited. There were no roads, no buildings anywhere on the face of the planet. Nothing but meadows of wild-growing sand chives, moved by the dusty wind.

  Inan paused. The sight of Confidence so empty had awoken a suspicion in her heart, a suspicion that she couldn’t admit to herself just yet. She focused her sight back on Middlelink and watched the crowds once again – the creatures of all manner and shape, busy with matters of their own. She watched the corridors and promenades and terraces, the sky-bridges and buildings, the shops and restaurants and places of business. She recognised bodies and faces of hundreds of species: ki-jirai, cani, ao, frewa, and so many, many others. But not a human among them. She tried to remember the name of the human homeworld. Earth, was it? She tried to look there too and she saw a planet, lush with blue, like a piece of polished sodalite interrupted with white streaks of clouds. She looked closer and saw its surface, green and filled with plants that shared the place with a throng of strange beasts, some quadruped, some feathered, some dwelling below the oceanic waves and some floating between the soft-feathered air currents. But there was no human to be found on this beautiful world, as though the ancestors of the species were never born to begin with.

  One was Cochrane’s dream, but a nightmare, chilling to the bone to anyone with a healthy soul. The other is gaping with silent absence, the death of an entire species that would go unnoticed and unmourned.

  ‘Is that all?’ called Inan, to the machine. ‘Is there nothing else you can show me? Only two ends? Humans rule over the galaxy or no humans at all? I hate those! I refuse to choose either one!’ Something moved to her right. Inan looked as the mist produced a frame of vibrating wisps. A third vista formed in front of her. Inan concentrated, trying to see the picture inside it.

  It was blank, or at least, Inan couldn’t see anything in the clouds of white mist. No movement, no vision, no reality that was different from the universe known to her. Inan cou
ldn’t tell what it would mean if she chose this one; would the universe stop existing altogether? The empty vista blinked, the picture turned semi-transparent. Beyond the confines of the Actuality Regulator a frozen scene was captured in mid-motion. Hijinks was caught struggling with her bonds, Alan still trying to rush to her aid, his face disfigured with shock and worry. Inan turned around to look again at the two animated vistas – two contenders for the fate of the galaxy. Then she looked at the third one – the unknown one, the uncertain one. The one she could not say for sure wouldn’t end reality as they knew it.

  ‘No,’ she said finally to the human-controlled universe. She would not let that one exist. The millions of sentient species did not deserve such a fate.

  ‘No,’ she said to the galaxy with humanity erased. What person would she be if she chose this one? A true and irredeemable Codex-breaker, worse than a genocidal monster. Humans were not all Cochrane or Lisbeth or Maude or Ure. One of them she called friend. And she chose to believe there were more, even though she didn’t know them yet.

  Without a word more, she leaned toward the vista full of quivering mist and embraced the uncertain shapes within.

  The darkness was soft and inviting, a true respite after the harsh, billowing whiteness and the chaotic multiple-choices in the fabric of the universe. Inan settled on its edge, resting as a bird rests on its perch before trans-oceanic flight. Just a moment, a heartbeat, before it plunges into a long journey.

  ‘Inan!’ called a voice through the darkness. Endless years passed between now and the time the voice called again. ‘Inan, please! Please don’t die!’

  Die? There was no death on the edge of the darkness, just some deserved rest.

  ‘Third Hijinks Inan, wake up! Wake up and run!’