But The Stars

by Peter Cawdron

  Mags comes to a halt before Dante and it’s only then Dante realizes the best part of a minute has transpired since Mags addressed her. She’s waiting for a reply. Mags must think Dante’s a space cadet. Angel’s carrying a small white box. It’s nondescript, leaving Dante wondering about its contents, but she snaps herself back to reality.

  “Hey,” she says, gesturing to the two women. “It’s good to see you guys.” She pats the seat beside her, inviting them to join her.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Mac,” Angel says, cutting straight to the heart of the unspoken issue bugging them all. “He was a good man.”

  “He was,” Dante replies, staring into her coffee.

  “There was nothing more you could have done,” Mags says.

  “I know. It just sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Angel says in a solemn voice.

  Mags asks, “What happened to Coe-Voy?”

  “Transferred,” Dante replies. “Don’t know where. Just don’t care anymore.”

  Mags nods.

  Angel says, “That fucker will probably get promoted.”

  “Probably,” Dante replies, agreeing with her.

  “Did you see the vid on P4?” Mags asks as she takes her seat.

  Dante shakes her head.

  Mags touches at a thin computing sheet wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet and brings up a glowing three-dimensional image. P4 is resplendent with its twin host stars off to one side, bathing the planet in a cold light, leaving half of the alien world lost in the shadows.

  Flashes of light erupt from the night side of the planet, glowing for upwards of thirty seconds before fading. Several of the impacts are so bright the image is washed out. When the view returns, vast waves can be seen rippling through the atmosphere, curving around the planet, swamping entire mountain ranges and sweeping over them like waves at the beach.

  “Kinetic bombardment,” Mags says. “They’re dropping asteroids on them, sterilizing the planet. Nothing is left down there. Nothing. Not even microbes.”

  Dante’s subdued. Just when it looks like the attack is over, the planet is peppered with buckshot lighting up the dark side yet again, reaching around to puncture the dawn. Dozens of asteroids slam into the frozen surface, punching beneath the ice and deep into the mantle. Ejecta rises out of the atmosphere before plunging back in a fiery wake. On the daylight side of P4, the pristine white snow and ice has been blackened. In some places, the bedrock is visible. Fractures have opened, exposing the molten upper mantle running along various fault lines. Steam billows into the thin atmosphere. An eerie red glow is visible through the growing haze.

  Angel says, “We’ve won.”

  “Have we?” Dante asks, turning her head sideways and staring at them in disbelief, still mourning the loss of the Acheron and her crew. “What exactly have we won?”

  “We destroyed them. We wiped them out.”

  Dante’s heart is heavy. It feels as though she’s back on P4, struggling through the depths of the burning base, about to plunge into the darkness again. “And that’s cause for celebration?” she asks.

  “I don’t understand you,” Mags says. “They’re gone. They’re dead. I thought you’d be happy.”

  Dante hangs her head. For a moment, trembling hands are all she sees—not the blades of grass beneath the seat, not the remnants of her coffee sloshing around in her cup, not the crew strolling past or the long shadows cast within the atrium. Even the pebbles beneath her shoes go out of focus as tears cloud her eyes.

  “Hey,” Mags says, reaching over and taking one of her hands. “It’s okay. It’s over.”

  “It’s just—I don’t get it.”

  As the lights around them fade, the birds fall silent, settling in the branches for yet another artificially imposed night. Mags is quiet. Angel leans forward, placing her elbows on her knees and resting her head in her hands. It seems she understands there are some things people need to work through for themselves. Dante struggles to articulate her thinking.

  “We’re all children of the stars... I know. I know it sounds clichèd. Just another pious platitude, something to engrave on a plaque and hang above the sink in the bathroom, but here we are, and so are they, or they were. For all our differences, we both originated from the thin, wispy dust swirling between the stars.”

  Dante laughs at herself, lifting her head, trying to stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks. “God, I sound like you, Angel.”

  “You sound like Vee,” Angel says, offering a slight laugh as consolation.

  “I miss him,” Dante says, appreciating the way Angel’s referring to her Vichy and not the imposter.

  Mags hangs her head, saying, “Me too.”

  Dante wipes her eyes with the back of her hands.

  “Life shouldn’t be like this.”

  “I really don’t get you,” Mags says. It’s not a criticism. She’s trying to understand. Dante, though, is feeling rather than thinking. Emotions swell within her like a storm on the sea, lifting the waves and battering boats at anchor in the harbor. With everything she’s been through, victory is bitter. She’s lost too much. Reality is cruel.

  “We’re alive,” Angel says, trying to lift her spirits.

  Dante replies, “We were all alive. Us and them. So why fight? Life shouldn’t be the cause of death. For intelligent creatures, we sure are stupid.”

  Her comment is as much a rebuke of Coe-Voy as it is of the alien attack on the Acheron and humanity’s retaliation against P4. Mags squeezes Dante’s hand, gently playing with her fingers, searching for comfort, looking for assurance. For Dante, there’s an awakening. Finally, she feels she understands.

  “Think of the stars,” she says, allowing her eyes to drift toward the glass dome. “Think about what stars are.”

  “The stars?” Mags asks, not making the connection.

  “What are stars?”

  In a typical response, Angel replies in a manner that is both technically correct and precise, saying, “Matter radiating energy.”

  “And what is life?” Dante asks. This time, Angel’s quiet so Dante says what she’s thinking. “Life is the inverse—the opposite—the exact reverse of that process. It’s matter absorbing energy.”

  Angel nods but doesn’t seem convinced. Mags is quiet.

  Dante says, “Whether it’s us or them, everyone’s looking for some supernatural, metaphysical explanation for what life is and how it came to be, but I think the answer is deceptively simple. Atoms use energy to form molecules.”

  She breathes deeply, trying to condense decades of thinking and reasoning into a few short sentences, hoping they’re coherent.

  “Molecules distribute energy the only way they can, by forming more and more complex combinations. And that’s what life is—billions of years spent rearranging and redistributing energy, forming ever more complex molecules until those individual molecules form chains containing hundreds of billions of atoms.”

  “DNA,” Mags says.

  Dante nods. “In this way, the raging furnace that is the heart of a star has teased out life on Earth—and on P4. It’s taken eons, but here we are. And what do we do? What do they do?”

  Angel completes her thought. “We kill each other.”

  Dante forces a smile. “Crazy, huh? Benson knew. Benson understood. I think that’s why, even when he could see them, he never tried to fight them.”

  “God, I miss him,” Angel says.

  “Me too,” Dante replies.

  Mags says, “I guess we’re all aliens, right? It’s just a matter of perspective.”

  “Yep,” Angel says.

  “I really miss Benson,” Dante says, longing for his charismatic smile and borderline insanity. Even before the attack, he always brightened her day.

  No one replies. Their silent agreement is enough.

  Angel stares at her hands, flexing her fingers and examining them closely. “You know what’s really strange?”

  “What?” Dante asks.r />
  “I’ve never been one for believing in the soul, but after what happened to us, I do wonder.”

  “What do you mean?” Mags asks.

  “I lost my arms. Both of them. But they weren’t really gone. I mean, they were gone physically, but it was like I could still feel them, like I could wiggle my fingers, like they were still there only they were invisible.”

  “Phantom limbs,” Dante says. She’s tempted to point out that this is a well-established medical phenomenon, but she’s sure Angel already knows that and she suspects this isn’t quite the point Angel’s making.

  Angel rolls her hands over in front of her, looking carefully at her wrist and fingers.

  “What was really weird was how I felt when I got them back. I know these guys have advanced bio-engineering techniques and all, but it seemed like my hands were never gone. They were always there, they were just missing something, like missing a pair of gloves. When these guys regrew them, it wasn’t like I had new hands, more like my ethereal hands were back in their old gloves. I’m not sure if that makes any sense.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Dante says. “We’re ghosts in a biological machine.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Mags says. “Who am I really? I’m conscious, but I can’t explain what that means or why I happen to be me.”

  “I think, therefore I am,” Angel says.

  Dante pauses before saying, “Perhaps it’s more accurate to turn that phrase around—I am, therefore I think, I feel, I laugh and I love.”

  To which Angel adds, “And sometimes, I cry.”

  “I do,” Dante says, nodding at that sentiment.

  Although it seems like the three of them are sitting still on a park bench, their sense of place and permanence is an illusion and as the Empyrean turns, the spoke from some other section falls across the atrium, casting shadows over the darkened interior.

  “Do you ever wonder about all this?” Mags asks.

  “If this is real?” Dante replies, understanding implicitly what she means. “Yeah, I wonder.”

  “Me too,” Angel says. “It’s that whole memory thing, isn’t it? We’re selective in what we remember and how well we remember it. Everything seemed so vivid at the time, but now I’m not so sure, and yet here we are.”

  “And then there’s time,” Dante says.

  “Oh yeah,” Mags replies. “The more time that passes, the more the Acheron seems like a dream.”

  “Do you remember the membranes?” Dante asks.

  “What were they?” Angel asks.

  “Mistakes,” Dante replies. “Holes in the cage. Gaps in the fence.”

  “And you think they fixed that?” Mags asks.

  “But we escaped,” Angel says. “That was real. We were rescued, right?”

  “I think so,” Dante replies, but doubts creep through and she follows up with, “I sure as hell hope so.”

  “If we didn’t,” Mags says. “If all this has just been yet another experiment, another trial, another attempt to bleed us for information, to learn more about us…”

  Mags can’t bring herself to finish her sentence and Dante can’t bring herself to reply. She simply shakes her head, clenching her lips, not wanting to commit to an answer.

  Mags looks away. Her eyes drift, unable to settle, revealing a glimpse of the torment she feels. Angel stares at the rocks on the ground.

  “If this is another illusion,” Angel says, “I’m glad we’re in it together.”

  Dante nods, appreciating their friendship. “What is reality anyway? Is it ever anything more than a shared experience?”

  Angel says, “Reality is overrated. This whole wide universe is nothing more than a bunch of excitations in various quantum fields briefly materializing as particles rather than energy. Reality has always been an illusion. Nothing’s really present once you exclude the electromagnetic force. Most of what makes us up is empty space anyway.”

  Dante says, “Oh, my God that’s a mouthful.”

  “What? Did I get something wrong?” Angel asks.

  “You’re asking us?” Mags replies.

  The three women laugh at their grief. Having lost most of their crew, their spaceship and even their position in time, it seems only appropriate to inject some humor.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Angel says, picking up the box from where she rested it on the seat beside her. “Happy birthday.”

  “Birthday?” Dante says, recoiling at the notion.

  Birthdays seem so ordinary, so incongruous with all they’ve been through. Do people in this era even celebrate birthdays? How do they measure years without being in orbit around Sol? Is a year just some arbitrary measurement of what are already arbitrary days? As hundreds of years have passed along with numerous generations, do they now look back in bewilderment at such archaic notions in the same way Dante used to wonder about the Babylonian notion of 24 hours in a day or 60 minutes in an hour?

  “Do you want some cake?” Angel asks, breaking Dante’s train of thought.

  “No,” Dante says, only that’s a reflex response rather than a measured one. It just seems wrong to enjoy life when so much has been lost.

  “You’re still thinking about what happened on the Acheron, huh?” Mags pauses. “If it’s any consolation, I thought you were one of them.”

  That brings a grin to Dante’s face.

  “So did I,” Angel says, removing the lid and revealing a cake with white icing on top. There are three glasses and a bottle. Angel pours some champagne and hands out the glasses, saying, “To us.”

  “To all us aliens,” Mags says.

  Reluctantly, Dante agrees, charging her glass and saying, “To the three of us.”

  They drink a little too quickly. For Dante, the aftertaste of her coffee mars the flavor of the champagne, but she appreciates the gesture.

  Angel starts cutting the cake, resting the box on her lap and saying, “It’s one and a half kilos, you know. I had them measure it precisely.”

  Dante laughs. Angel knows her too well, understanding precisely what she needs to break through the gloom.

  “What’s so funny?” Mags asks.

  “I was a premature baby. Born at thirty weeks.”

  “So?” she asks.

  “53 ounces,” Dante replies.

  “One and a half kilos,” Angel says, cutting several slices with a knife from inside the box. She hands a piece to Mags, who passes it on to Dante.

  “Nice touch,” Mags says.

  “Astonishing, isn’t it?” Angel says. “To think we all started out so small.”

  “We’re still small,” Dante says, taking a bite of the cake. It’s been baked with carrot and walnut with a vanilla crème fraîche icing on top, making it a little bitter but moist.

  Angel says, “So much complexity packed into such a tiny space.” Dante is genuinely unsure whether she’s talking about the cake or her as a baby.

  Mags laughs. “Even before we touched down on P4, I was sure one of you was an alien.”

  Dante snorts. She doesn’t mean to. She’s not sure quite what her response is supposed to be, but it comes out as something between a laugh and an objection.

  “You weirdo,” Mags says, which makes Dante love her all the more.

  “That’s all any of us ever are,” Angel says. “Weirdos.”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Mags replies, pointing at herself. “Don’t include me in your merry little band. As hard as it might be to believe, some of us are normal.”

  “Nominal,” Angel counters, enjoying the banter. “There’s no norm as such as there are no rules!”

  Mags, though, doesn’t want to concede that point, so she says, “For the two of you, there should be.”

  Dante laughs, appreciating the friendship she’s found among the stars.

  Angel asks, “Did either of you tell them about what happened down there on—”

  “No,” Dante says, cutting her off.

  “I’ll never tell,” Mags says. “Never.”<
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  “Do you really think they got them?” Angel asks. “All of them?”

  “Oh, they’ll be mopping them up for years,” Mags replies. “But they hit the nest. They got them alright.”

  “Did they?” Dante asks, only her question seems distant. It’s a contradiction. Within seconds, it’s lost in the passage of time, condemning the confidence Mags has in the orbital strike. In Dante’s mind, there are no assurances. No one responds to her. They all know. Regardless of whether they’re on Earth, in orbit around P4 or four hundred years into the future, confidence is the great illusion.

  Dante lifts her eyes, looking beyond the glass dome. In the darkness, her mind wanders free, no longer held captive by the constraints of life onboard the Empyrean. She’s able to see her life as a waypoint—neither the beginning nor the end, just somewhere in between. She’s a bunch of atoms bound together briefly during their astonishing transit through this vast, broad universe. They’re on loan. They’re hers for but a moment.

  “All we ever really have is now,” she says. “We think there’s something more. Money. Fame. Whatever, but there isn’t. There’s just now.”

  In the tiny pinpricks of light visible beyond the dome, Dante sees something familiar, something reassuring, but the meaning escapes her. Dante feels a sense of longing and nostalgia, but she’s unsure why. The stars are pretty, shining like diamonds. The stars have always been there for her—constant and sure. Maybe it’s their distance that calls to her or perhaps it’s the promise they hold for life being renewed in yet another generation of stars, planets, comets, asteroids and just maybe other living beings.

  The stars rage against the eternal night, burning at over a million degrees, and yet they’re so far away they’re reduced to mere specks in the pitch black sky, humbled into being little more than pinpricks of light. Dante looks for the constellations, only her memory has grown vague. The stars before her could make any shape she wants. There was something about the stars, something that helped her through the darkness, something that gave her hope, but she’s not sure what.