Ride the Star Wind

by Nakamura, Remy

  “Pablo,” she says, “it’s time to go.”

  “I know,” I answer.

  After a moment, she continues, “We’re done here, and the gravity’s too strong. We’re all hurting. Aren’t you?”

  Despite the stabilizers and enhancers built into my suit, twinges jab my back and joints. Really, they were there all along, but more interesting perceptions masked them.

  “I am now,” I sigh. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We join the rest of the crew in the pod. Sometimes, people call it “the vehicle,” but that’s misleading. It doesn’t move itself from one star system to the next. I move it.

  The others take sedatives and put on blindfolds and hearing protectors. It keeps them from getting migraines, nightmares, or worse.

  When everyone’s ready, I chant.

  The thing I invoke quickly regards me. It was already aware of me as it is of everything. Now, though, I’m the focus of its attention. Its consideration could annihilate me like sunlight shining through a magnifying glass to burn an ant, but it holds something back.

  The glowing spheres appear. I could contemplate them as the face of my patron, but that’s not the task at hand nor would it be safe. Instead, I choose to see them as a map.

  A different vista flowers in every globe. A banded gas giant fills the sky of a frozen moon. A nebula floats with a handful of newborn stars burning inside. A force I don’t understand makes magma flow uphill.

  Among the myriad options are those comparatively earthlike planets the astronomers charted, the objectives on the team’s itinerary. In an absolute sense, they’re just as interesting as any other destination. But I’ve visited eight of them already. I still haven’t been to a radically different sort of world.

  Yet I dutifully focus on Destination #9. As I speak the next set of words, a flicker of motion inside one of the spheres catches my eye. I only glance for an instant, but that’s too long. My patron takes my attention for intention.

  The pod rolls. An alarm blares, unsecured items bounce around, and people scream. Despite the tumbling, I manage to look out the nearest porthole.

  A wind full of grit is rolling the pod across cracked red ground. I try to see more, but whirring, the shutter comes down to block excess radiation.

  Although there may be a way to override the automatic safeguard, I don’t know it. I wonder if I can exit the pod. Probably not, but the way it’s crashing and banging, perhaps, it’ll break apart around me.

  Clutching at handholds, Otienno crawls to me. Her forehead is bleeding. She pulls herself close to scream in my face. “Get us out of here!”

  It’s really the sight of her blood that jars me into action. Fortunately, I still have my patron’s attention. It only takes another phrase to shift us to the next planet on the schedule. The pod rolls three more times and, thanks to good design or sheer luck, stops right side up.

  Otienno clings to me in relief. I tell myself I should feel the same way, not frustrated. The alarm falls silent.

  In a minute, Cheong collects himself sufficiently to get up out of his captain’s chair and stamp in my direction. “What the hell, Valdez? What the hell?”

  “Technical difficulties,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “‘Technical difficulties,’” he echoes. “What does that mean?”

  “Honestly, since you haven’t been through the training, I don’t know how to explain. But it won’t happen again.”

  “Screw your promises,” says Roberts, coming with her medical kit in hand. “If we can’t depend on you to take us to the right place first time, every time, you need to jump us back to Earth.”

  “That’s up to the captain,” I say.

  Cheong scowls. “Damage assessments,” he calls.

  One by one, the others report that the pod is still operational. “Lockheed built her tough,” says Kjeldsen. He’s the engineer and proud of the invention he tends.

  “Then we proceed with the mission,” says Cheong. He wants to be one of the heroes who opens the universe for mankind. He’s not going to abort the mission at the first mishap, frightening though it was.

  It’s night, and Cheong decides our first EVA can wait until morning. Once we dim the lights and people start crawling into their bunks, Otienno finds me. Her new bandage glows white against her brown skin.

  “What really happened?” she asks, her voice low.

  “I messed up. I really won’t let it happen again.”

  “Then it wasn’t Yog-Sothoth deciding he’s got better things to do than shuttling us around the galaxy?”

  I sigh. “You know, that’s just the name a few mystics gave it, and when we call it that, it’s like buying into their primitive beliefs. We scare ourselves.”

  “What happened to Marcus Rawlik was scary.”

  “I suppose. But once he proved the consciousness real, his successors discovered how to open gates safely.”

  “But not how the physics work, or what Yog . . . the consciousness truly is, or even why it’s willing to help us. You’re the one who communes with it. Do you have any idea?”

  I shrug. “It’s everywhere and everywhen. So vast and powerful that obliging us is no more difficult than not obliging us. It grants our petitions in the same sense that you grant permission to the bacteria in your intestines to go on doing what they do.”

  She chuckles. “That metaphor’s not very flattering to mankind.”

  “Maybe you’ll like my other hypothesis better. The entity sees, and it knows. That’s what it is. When we open a gate, we’re trying do the same thing, and it approves.”

  She nods. “Kindred spirits. Although for us, there’s more to it. We want to find planets we can colonize.”

  “Right.” I hadn’t exactly forgotten the practical objective of the mission, but I also hadn’t thought of it in days.

  “Thanks for sharing.” She squeezes my shoulder. “We should get some sleep.” She crosses the compartment and folds down her bunk from the wall.

  Two worlds farther along, Roberts finds purple algae in a pond. Everyone’s excited, including me. I stare at the stuff for hours—in the water where it grows and through the microscope when the biologists take a break.

  When Cheong declares it’s time to move on, one of the glowing spheres shows me the algae world millions of years in the future. Violet and indigo jungles clothe the land, and shaggy behemoths wander among the trees. It’s all just a wish away if I choose to go.

  Instead, I shift the pod to the next world on the itinerary, and if people notice me scowling afterward, they don’t comment. They’ve been looking at me differently ever since I nearly got us all killed and, except for Otienno, seem to be deciding it’s just as well to leave me alone.

  The leap after that, we land in a snowfield dotted with hot springs and geysers. One of the latter sprays into the air every minute or so, and for lack of a better spectacle, I watch it erupt over and over again.

  It turns out there are trace elements in the atmosphere that would kill a human being over time, so after just a few days, the expedition is ready to move on. I face the shining spheres. One moment, they look like bunches of grapes, the next, they move in a way that’s indefinable but makes me think of bubbles rising to the top of a boiling pot.

  Refusing to focus on anything else, I fix my will on the next stop on our route. I gasp because I see creatures. Naturally, I’ve scrutinized this particular destination before, but apparently, I never looked at the right patch of ground at the right moment.

  At rest, the organisms look like headless, rough-hewn statues of gaunt horses or greyhounds, except with too many spindly legs haphazardly arranged around their bodies. When they’re ready to move, ripples of sheen run down them as their substance softens. Then they stretch like chewing gum, and eyes and mouths open in their flanks.

  Half a dozen of them are holding down another. A long wound bisects much of its length, and they pick out pieces of its steaming insides and eat them.

  I rattle
off the incantation. The pod jumps to a low spot surrounded by slopes of long, tiger-striped grasses. I let go of the patron, or possibly, he dismisses me.

  I scurry to Otienno and pull her hearing protectors off. “We found them!” I cry. “Animals!”

  Her dark eyes open wide. “You’re kidding! Tell me! No, wait a second, and tell everybody!”

  I all but tremble with impatience as the crew works through the safety protocols involved with opening the pod in a new environment. Once we’re ready, I lead them up the rise to the east. But when we reach the expanse of rolling grassland at the top of the slope, the creatures are nowhere to be seen.

  “Are you sure this is the spot?” Otienno asks.

  “Looking at what the entity shows me isn’t like looking down from a plane,” I answer, “but yeah, pretty sure.”

  “Then the animals moved on,” says Cheong. “Maybe, we can pick up their trail.”

  We try, but if the creatures left tracks, the knee-high grass hides them. I turn to Cheong to suggest spreading out in a search pattern. A shape rears up behind him and reaches with newly formed extremities resembling lobster claws.

  I hadn’t realized the creatures could flatten themselves to hide in the grass or grow pincers. Rapt, I wait to see what happens next.

  Otienno screams, “Watch out!” Because encountering dangerous life forms has always been a possibility, we go armed outside the pod, and her carbine thunders and punches a hole through the animal.

  Cheong jerks around and shoots from the hip. He blasts away another chunk of the creature, and it falls.

  Undeterred, the rest of the pack leap up and charge. Everyone fires, me included. But I can’t bring myself to aim even at the beast lunging at me with serrated hook-like extremities extended. Kjeldsen shoots it before it can reach me.

  When the last of the creatures drops, Cheong turns to me. “Well,” he pants, “you called it. You said they might be aggressive.” From his lack of animosity, it’s clear he doesn’t realize I was content to watch while the animal seized him.

  No one realizes I’m crying, either. My faceplate hides it.

  I tell myself this can’t have been the only pack. I’ll have another chance to marvel at the creatures.

  But I don’t. In the weeks that follow, we never find signs of another such group or any other animal bigger than a flea.

  The survey completed, I jump the pod to another bleak world. Then another. But when it’s time to shift to the planet after that, I glimpse one of the headless things in the luminous sphere.

  I’m too elated to question my good fortune. But my companions do. When I make the jump and share the news, Roberts says, “You’re not going to find the same organism on two different planets light-years apart.”

  “Parallel evolution,” Kjeldsen says, whereupon Roberts rolls her eyes at the engineer weighing in on exobiology.

  “Probably not really,” Otienno says. “But I’m guessing Valdez caught a glimpse of something that at least looks a bit like the animals we found before.”

  “Could be,” I answer. I still feel like I know what I saw, but I also realize that Roberts’s skepticism makes sense. “Anyway, I guarantee you there’s some kind of big animal outside.”

  “Then, let’s go find it,” says Cheong.

  In one respect, the new world proves to resemble the planet of the tiger grass. It has ferns the size of trees, boulder-sized masses of mold, and other vegetation, but no teeming diversity of highly evolved animal life. Perhaps, humans don’t understand nature as well as we imagine.

  The breeze rustles the fronds of the ferns and, passing through holes in the fungus, makes it whistle. Visible even by daylight, meteors burn overhead. We explorers prowl with carbines at the ready.

  Otienno says, “I see one!” She points.

  The animal’s fifty yards away and half hidden behind a fern, but to me, it looks exactly like the creatures we encountered before.

  “Take cover,” Cheong says. “We’ll observe from here. Kjeldsen, get some video.”

  We study the animal for five minutes as it petrifies when it finishes moving and ripples back to rubbery flesh when it wants to wander some more. Then it whirls and charges us. The front of it sprouts many-jointed arms with spiky balls on the ends.

  “Shit!” says Cheong. He shoulders his carbine, and the others follow his lead. The ragged barrage staggers the onrushing animal and knocks it down.

  What a waste. It’s all but unbearable to once again stand surrounded by my boring familiar kind while something exotic lies dead before us.

  “Damn it,” says Roberts. She wanted to go on watching a living specimen, too, and a moment later, we get our wish.

  Three more creatures emerge from the mass of ferns that defines the limit of our vision. But the new ones wear bands of some black material. They carry long, jagged metallic rods, and they lope toward the body of their fellow.

  “Well,” Otienno breathes, “now, we know how you find the same organism on two different planets.”

  “The first ones were naked like animals,” Kjeldsen says. “They acted like animals.” He sounds like a child complaining that a playmate cheated in a game.

  “We have to fix this,” Cheong says. He sets down his gun, stands up, and waves his hands. “Hello! We’re peaceful! This was a terrible misunderstanding!”

  One of the aliens beckons him forward. He advances half the distance, and with the simultaneity of a drill team, all three aim their rods at him. The implements shimmer and whine, and Cheong drops to his knees. I glimpse the spattered gore painting the inside of his faceplate as he pitches forward.

  Kjeldsen fires, and the rest of the crew do, too. But the new aliens don’t appear to feel it. My hunch is that the black harnesses protect them.

  All three extraterrestrials point their weapons at Kjeldsen. He throws himself flat, but it doesn’t help. Something bursts inside his helmet violently enough to breach the seal securing it to the rest of the spacesuit. Air hisses out.

  Still firing, the other humans fall back. I don’t. When I believed the aliens were predators like wolves or lions, that was enough to make them splendid. Now that I recognize them for sapient, star-faring beings, they’re sublime.

  They advance as the crew retreats. They kill Bryce, the geologist, and orient on me. I drop my rifle in the feeble hope the gesture persuades them to forbear. I don’t want to die, but I’d rather live a final second contemplating them than turn away.

  Otienno rushes to my side and fires. Her round finds a gap in whatever it is that shields the aliens, and the closest reels back and collapses with a steaming hole among the three limbs wielding the rod.

  Pulling on my arm, Otienno yells, “Run!” When that doesn’t work, she smacks the side of my helmet with her rifle hard enough to rattle the head inside it. The jolt breaks me free of my fascination—well, not really, but enough to make me remember how a crew member ought to behave.

  We run after the others. Nobody else drops. Maybe the aliens stopped chasing us. Maybe Otienno’s lucky shot made them wary.

  We pile into the pod and check to see who’s gone and who remains. Otienno is now the ranking officer.

  “Get ready to jump,” she says. People scramble to exchange their helmets for the gear that protects them from seeing and hearing the entity.

  Otienno doesn’t. She won’t make herself helpless now that she’s responsible for everyone else, even if it means perceiving something that could damage her mind. I respect that in a murky sort of way.

  “Where are we jumping?” I ask.

  She looks at me as if it’s a stupid question. “Earth!”

  The least enticing of destinations. Still, I set about following the order. When the glowing spheres start dripping and drifting out of empty air, Otienno flinches and turns away to look out a porthole.

  I sift for Earth among the myriad globes. It can take time to pinpoint a particular world, especially if I don’t really want to go.

  �
��We have to jump now!” Otienno cries.

  I wonder what she is seeing, and one of the spheres shows me. A ship comes flying over the tree-sized ferns. I don’t know how. I can’t see any means of propulsion, and nothing about it is aerodynamic. It’s made of cubes and tetrahedrons that slide around one another in a cloud of shimmering haze. Crooked protrusions jut from the underside like the legs of a hovering insect, and, two and three at a time, they aim themselves at the pod.

  “I haven’t found Earth yet,” I say.

  “Go anywhere!” Otienno shouts.

  I spot the world with the purple algae and chant us there. Afterward, the consciousness recedes, but its attention lingers.

  “Thank God,” Otienno says, running a trembling hand over her close-cropped hair. “Thank God.”

  I try to share her relief, but it’s useless.

  Sensing the jump is over, crewmembers pull off their blindfolds and hearing protectors. Some look shaky and sweaty. Roberts swallows repeatedly in an effort not to vomit. They really needed the sedatives as well as external defenses.

  “Oh, no,” Otienno groans.

  I hurry to the porthole beside hers. The shimmering ship is flying toward us over the snow. Geysers erupt at the touch of its shadow.

  I can’t tell if, like me, the aliens invoke the entity to shift from world to world or use a different method. Nor can I imagine how they follow us so swiftly and surely. The mystery is enthralling.

  “Jump!” Otienno cries. “But not to Earth! We can’t risk leading them there!”

  I invite my patron back into the pod. People wail and cringe. I choose a rocky world with two pale crescent moons hanging in its greenish daytime sky. A second later, we’re there.

  A second after that, our pursuers are, too.

  I shift back to the planet with the striped grass, and the alien ship sticks with us. I go to the moon orbiting the gas giant, and as the radiation shutters drop, the other vessel bursts into view.

  After three more jumps, a second ship joins the chase. This one is nothing like the first. It’s streamlined and symmetrical with a dozen external devices resembling talons opening and closing individually to accomplish some enigmatic purpose. The third is different again and doesn’t look like a solid object at all. It’s like one of those computer animations that spiral at the viewer, perpetually on the verge of drilling out of the screen.