Dark Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  Something about his mind didn’t follow a typical pattern. It felt open, malleable. It was easy to precipitate the conversion that would facilitate anipraxia. Ei’Pio began to sift through his surface memories while she waited for the changes to manifest. She wanted to figure out who this was. His childhood memories were unusually pronounced and extraordinarily vivid, but also jumbled and formless—running and laughter and being cradled in another’s arms…

  Suddenly Suparo pulled Ei’Pio’s tendrils of thought deeper, as though he recognized her. Then he reciprocated—sending his own tendrils of thought along the connection between them… seeking to find her… pushing their minds closer… pressing against Ei’Pio’s own mind… seeking to get inside her thoughts. This was without precedent.

  Ei’Pio was suddenly afraid. She pulled back, her limbs trembling. What if he wasn’t sectilian? What if these memories were implants, lures… a trap to ensnare her? What if he was an alien, an infiltrator, who had orchestrated the destruction of her people? Was this an elaborate plot to hijack the ship?

  But then she wondered if it actually mattered. He was another living being.

  For good or ill, she was no longer alone.

  * * *

  Suparo didn’t speak Mensententia—that was immediately clear—but Ei’Pio recognized the thought-language as sectilian, and that reassured her. Over the years Ei’Pio had experienced enough sectilian memories to be able to speak a pidgin version of the language. This new individual’s own language skills seemed to be very limited as well, which was perplexing.

  An image consistently overlaid Suparo’s thoughts. He longed for a woman’s face—a sectilian woman with warm brown eyes and a long sharp nose. Ei’Pio recognized the woman: Biochemistro Palset Benald Teruvah, a lovely woman, a good friend to Ei’Pio and many others on board. Such a terrible loss.

  Ei’Pio froze. Her mantle filled reflexively and her limbs bunched up as though she were poised to flee a predator.

  Now Ei’Pio knew who this was. Not a him or a her, but an ium.

  Slowly, she calmed herself—carefully, so that she wouldn’t transmit her anxiety to this person who needed her so badly.

  Ei’Pio kept her mental voice soft and soothing, like a sectilian mother’s buss on a child’s forehead. “Carindi?”

  The stranger’s emotions swung wildly toward bewilderment, hope, and trepidation. A tiny voice answered, speaking aloud because the child didn’t yet understand. “Mama?”

  Carindi was a child of five standard years.

  Ei’Pio cringed with guilt and shame. Carindi had been wandering alone in the ship, seeking help for weeks.

  * * *

  “What did you learn today, Carindi?” Ei’Pio asked when the child took a break from ius daily studies. At the moment the child was somersaulting along the corridor outside the study chamber. The black armor had taken years of this without a scratch. The same could not be said for the deck plates.

  The child chattered a stream of thoughts at her, as was often the way. Their language difficulties were long in the past. “I’m learning about the mechanics of propulsion. Oh, and scientific classification systems for plants and animals. Also, the use of honorifics. One day soon I will be an engineer and you will call me Machinutorus Carindi Palset Teruvah!”

  “Very good. A full day of learning. It is nearly time for your rest period.”

  Though Ei’Pio had never had contact with sectilian children except through the childhood memories of her former colleagues, she sensed that Carindi was an exceedingly intelligent child and full of curiosity. The child would make a fine Quasador Dux when iad was old enough to assume that role.

  It had been five years since Carindi’s mother had observed the earliest signs of the plague among the crew and placed her precious offspring inside an obsidian suit of power armor. Carindi’s mother had hoped to protect the child from the unknown disease, not realizing the child was already infected. It proved to be a brilliant gambit anyway, because the suit was designed to accommodate a diverse range of body types and to provide extensive medical support in battle. It allowed the child to grow and remain mobile, feeding ium intravenously and keeping the disease and the suit in a constant state of homeostasis, always just barely at bay.

  It allowed Carindi to survive.

  Ei’Pio had experienced enough sectilian memories to know that sectilian children needed to be nurtured. They were supposed to be held and cuddled. But Ei’Pio had never touched the child, had never seen the child’s face except through glass. Ei’Pio longed to give the child that kind of security. She wanted to give Carindi anything and everything iad might need to thrive. The child was all she had left and was her only hope for a future.

  But all Ei’Pio could give Carindi was the mental touch of a loving voice and warm feelings. Ei’Pio breathed water. Carindi breathed air. Water and glass and battle armor stood between them.

  Ei’Pio sighed. The problem would resolve itself in just a few years. They would be able to go home. They would rejoin their people.

  “I’m not tired yet,” Carindi complained. “There’s time for more studies before rest cycle. Ei’Pio? Why do we use all these names?”

  “What names?” Ei’Pio asked. The child’s mind zigged and zagged just like her haphazard somersaulting.

  “Honorifics and all that stuff.”

  “There are many reasons. To differentiate between individuals, primarily. When speaking of others, it makes it easier to note whom one is referring to. It is also a manner of respect. Some names are earned.”

  “No—I mean, why do you and I use them? We know who we’re talking about, right? I know what Ei’ means. It’s the intermediate rank among kuboderan officers, yes? You know I respect you without having to say it. You can feel my emotions.”

  “This is true.”

  “May I call you Pio? As a special endearment? Between only us two?”

  Ei’Pio’s heart contracted. The water around her suddenly felt cold. No one had called her Pio since she’d been brought to the planet Sectilia as an infant. That was so long ago. “Yes, child.”

  “Do my names have any meaning?”

  “Oh, yes! Carindi means ‘little dear one.’ Palset was, of course, your mother’s given name and means ‘sharp as a spear.’ Teruvah was the name of the enclave on Atielle where your mother was born and spent her childhood. The name means ‘rubbing the fruit.’ I am given to understand the people there are famous for cultivating fruits for making fermented beverages.”

  “When I get big will you call me Carindissimo?”

  Ei’Pio’s limbs trembled with laughter. “If you wish.”

  * * *

  When the child slept, Ei’Pio spent her time testing the confines and parameters of the yoke—always looking for a way to circumvent it, work around it or break it—so that they wouldn’t have to wait for Carindi to mature. Ei’Pio found she missed the child during ius sleep cycles. Then the child woke, and it was like coming around the dark side of a planet and bathing in the bright light of a blazing star.

  “Good morning, Pio. Are you feeling well?”

  Ei’Pio let warmth suffuse her mental voice. “Good morning, Machinutorus Carindi Palset Teruvah. I am very fine, thank you. And you?”

  Ei’Pio felt the child rise from bed and go through a morning waking routine as the suit ran its daily diagnostic. Iad moved each limb in turn, to see if any part would be hindered by the infectious agent this day, so that a routine could be planned accordingly.

  After a moment, the data from the suit diagnostic spooled over Ei’Pio’s ocular implant.

  There was blood in the child’s urine.

  Ei’Pio felt a familiar squeeze of panic, then calmed. The suit had limitations. She knew that.

  “First stop is the medical facility today, Carindi.”

  “Pio! I wanted to—”

  “Health first. Always. No arguments.”

  There was an adolescent grumble of discontent, but Carindi dutifully marche
d to the deck transport, and from there to the nearest medical facility.

  Sometimes the suit couldn’t handle everything. Ei’Pio had nearly lost Carindi on several occasions when the suit malfunctioned or needed an upgrade, but they had managed to make it through those terrifying moments. On a regular schedule, and as needed, Carindi visited the diagnostic platform they had modified together—Ei’Pio’s mind guiding Carindi’s nimble fingers inside the power armor—so that the diagnostic equipment would accept Carindi inside the suit and the medical bots would deliver medications and IV nutrition to the suit’s ports. This required writing new macros to force the suit to do things it was never meant to do. And that meant Ei’Pio had to learn new skills. Ship navigators were not ordinarily in the practice of creating code for power armor suits.

  Nor were they ordinarily medical practitioners. Yet Ei’Pio personally oversaw everything, from screening medications to be sure they were free of viral, bacterial, or unknown nanoscale agents to optimizing the child’s liquid diet for every life stage.

  And she was always looking for another way to get them home. Carindi deserved better than this. Engineers and Medical Masters on Sectilia, Atielle, or any of the colonies would be better equipped to cure Carindi of the affliction so that the child could have a better quality of life than Ei’Pio and Oblignatus could provide.

  * * *

  The child giggled. “No, Pio, not Olonus Septua. That’s a gravid planet, not a barren one.”

  “You aren’t supposed to give me hints, child!”

  Carindi gasped for breath, wheezing with mirth. “Well, you’re terrible at this game. You need the help!”

  “Am I really?” Ei’Pio pretended to be affronted. She’d figured out the correct answer three questions before, but Carindi enjoyed it when she drew these games out—and truth be told, Ei’Pio loved the feeling of the child’s laughter. It was infectious. It lifted her ever-present worry for a short time.

  Children were easy to please and such a joy. A small part of her resented that she had never known children before now. In some ways, this felt like a golden time in her life, despite the bomb ticking inside the star they orbited.

  Carindi was wandering the empty corridors of the ship aimlessly, drumming the fingers of ius suit against the dark walls. “Guess again, Pio.”

  “The moon of Columnus Quince?”

  The child roared with laughter until it turned into coughing. The coughing went on too long.

  Ei’Pio sobered.

  When the coughing fit eased, Carindi slumped to the decking and asked, “Pio, when we break free of the star, where would you like to go? Assume that you could go anywhere in the universe.”

  She’d heard this question often. It meant that Carindi was feeling lonely and restless. Ei’Pio sent a soothing blanket of thought over the child’s mind.

  “I would take you home to Atielle, of course.” That’s what she always told the child. “Where would you like to go, Carindi? To Valetria? To see the Parida Quasar? Or Sieden’s Rings?” These were all astronomical sights the child had studied recently.

  “I would like to go to your home world, Pio.”

  That was a new answer. She found it puzzling. “Why would you want that?”

  “You are my family now. I want to meet your family. I want you to be free to swim in an ocean.”

  Ei’Pio’s mantle pulsed nervously, out of rhythm. Carindi spoke of something forbidden. “You know that can never happen.”

  “Why not? I know the location of your home world is supposed to be a big secret, but we can figure it out. We can find it. I know we can.”

  “That isn’t the point. I’m sectilian now. My people wouldn’t recognize me as one of their own. I don’t even speak their language.”

  They wouldn’t recognize her as being the same species, either. In this artificial and optimized environment, Ei’Pio had grown far larger than any wild kuboderan could ever dream of. Her body was augmented with multiple cybernetic implants that would look alien to them. They would more than likely kill her on sight. The sectilian kuboderans had always been told that the kuboderans of their home world were not only wild, but savage.

  “But they speak Mensententia, surely.”

  Ei’Pio faltered. “Yes, I’m sure they do.”

  “Do you remember it? What it was like?”

  Ei’Pio gifted the child with a memory of floating free in a vast watery world. The bright warm shallows and the cool dark depths. Then, on a whim, she showed Carindi her memory of being born. She could still see the cave where her mother had kept them clean and blown water across them gently with her funnel to keep them well oxygenated, though the earliest memories were all softly tinted by the nearly transparent membrane of an egg sac.

  It had been quiet and safe there. The moment when her egg sac became fragile and her first tentacle burst out into the larger world, everything changed forever.

  There was the last sight of her mother, still tending to the unhatched. The swarms of age-mates from many mothers mixing indiscriminately as they stretched out their limbs for the very first time, bobbing, floating—winking their distress in bright flashes of color—and scattering, swept away in the current without any control.

  “This is what life is like sometimes, Carindi. Sometimes we have no control over our circumstances.” She stopped the flow of the memory before it could reach the point when she would watch in horror as some of her age-mates were consumed by larger predators. There was no sense in upsetting the child.

  Belatedly, she realized that hiding the ugliness might have been a mistake. Carindi was enraptured. “What a beautiful world!”

  “You couldn’t survive there. You breathe air.”

  “Don’t be silly, Pio. I’ll be in the suit. It’s made for surviving in space. Underwater would be a cinch.”

  Another terrible reminder that Carindi might never leave the suit. Ei’Pio’s mantle squeezed painfully. It was so unnatural. So wrong. She should have figured out how to free ium by now. She had failed.

  Carindi caught the tail of the thought, though Ei’Pio had tried to hide it.

  “I don’t hate the suit. I love the suit. It keeps me alive. I love you too, Pio. If you don’t want to go to your home world, we can go to another water world.”

  It wasn’t true, she knew. The child detested the suit and wanted freedom more than anything else. But it was kind of ium to say.

  “I love you too, child.”

  * * *

  When the red dwarf exhausted its supply of carbon, Ei’Pio noted the beginning of neon fusion with no small amount of dread. Based on her calculations, there was less than a year left before neon, oxygen, and silicon fusion would be complete. Without any other fuel sources, the star would begin to fuse iron, which would take mere minutes to exhaust. Once the iron core reached a specific mass, it would crash in on itself and send out a cosmic shockwave that would obliterate the ship as the star went supernova.

  Ei’Pio still had not found a way around the yoke.

  Carindi had to be an adult in order to receive the command-and-control engram set and take control of the ship. The computer would not install it in a child. Iad had to be confirmed as an adult documented citizen, which could only be done by automated systems in the medical facility and only upon full puberty.

  Ei’Pio could find no way around it.

  Most sectilian children underwent puberty and declared their gender to their community in the eleventh or twelfth year. But it was Carindi’s seventeenth standard year, and there was still no sign of pubescent change in the child.

  Ei’Pio began to devote all of her free time to studying sectilian anatomy and physiology, focusing specifically on endocrinology. She reached Medical Master levels of knowledge, but she was no closer to solving the mystery of Carindi’s delayed biological development. What was missing from Carindi’s daily macro- and micro-biotic intake that was precluding puberty?

  Ei’Pio insisted on more extensive scanning and analysis
, but the only conclusion she could draw was that Carindi was underweight. So she changed Carindi’s liquid diet to be more calorically rich.

  She also judiciously implemented a regimen of exogenous hormone therapy. Such artificial interventions were frowned upon among sectilians, so there were no precedents to follow. She had no way of knowing how much to apply to the child’s system. She started with tiny amounts of bio-identical hormones tailored for the child’s congenital sex for simplicity’s sake, because Carindi had never developed a gender preference.

  Carindi was indifferent to these experiments. Iad didn’t seem to be interested in choosing a gender, and to some extent that made sense. The child retained few memories of gendered sectilians. Gender was a remote concept to ium.

  From a biological standpoint, there was no reason for the child’s body to change. There was no counterpart with whom to mate or share a life.

  Did a sectilian child need adults or age-mates within their environment to trigger puberty? Perhaps it was that absence that was the true problem.

  Ei’Pio gradually increased the dosage of the exogenous hormone infusion until the child began to endure negative side effects. The hormones made the child’s moods more volatile and triggered massive headaches and constant fatigue. Carindi didn’t like taking them.

  Despite this, Carindi still displayed no signs of impending puberty. Eventually Ei’Pio accepted that it was unlikely that puberty could be induced in this manner and stepped the dose back down to a level that was more tolerable to ium.

  Carindi had chosen another tactic to deal with their situation. From the age of eight standard years, the child had become a voracious consumer of educational materials, leaping far and away ahead of most children of the same age. Studying and testing filled ius every waking hour, and iad achieved a mechanical engineering degree by the age of twelve standard years. Then iad went on to study computer languages and electrical engineering. Carindi was determined to subvert the yoke and give direct control of the ship to Ei’Pio.