The Man Who Talked to Suns

by Stephen Andrews

  As the third generation was born, hope replaced desperation. As those small minds and bodies matured, their mothers ate the products of the deep ocean, and imported food too. The young ones were monitored just as carefully as the second generation, for there could be no real certainty until these new children grew. The first reached three months old, healthy and vital, then four months, and six. When the first of the third generation reached his first birthday the entire planet celebrated. They would produce a new generation to keep human life alive on this new world. The few who had advocated and supported this course were vindicated. Theirs would never be a planet teeming with human life; numbers would be limited by the scarcity of food, but they would live and fulfil that most basic of evolutionary urges, the urge to keep their race alive.

  The government and scientists of this world planned for the years ahead. As the children matured they received intensive emotional training. It was the mitigation of risk that prompted such focus and forethought. What if the symptoms resurfaced in the volatile years of puberty? What if an unforeseen personal event triggered some mental cataclysm? On this world, and to this generation, the sum of human learning about emotional self-awareness and control was channelled. This generation grew understanding the emotional landscape that drives us all, in a fashion that few others ever had. And, they survived and thrived. They matured into adulthood and bore life’s triumphs and tragedies with true, honest feeling and the mental fortitude to remain themselves, come what may.

  It was this training, this balance and emotional intelligence that equipped so many of the generations to work alongside other minds — the minds of machines and suns. The people of a world forged in tragedy became the foremost pilots of their kind. They were trusted and revered by ships and those who travelled in them. None had ever failed in the art of persuading a ship safely and exactly to its destination. It was as if the ships saw their souls and knew they were pure, free of guile, subterfuge and ego. At least that was how it had been before the enemies of his kind had struck, and all the pilots were left disabled. Their reputations and professional credibility crushed as surely as the depths of their home world would crush their bodies.

  Chapter 5.

  The guide patch tugged at his consciousness again. He had lost himself in plans and memories, and now it was time to board. Others around him were strolling forwards. He hefted the travel pack on to a shoulder and joined the steady march. Around him the same bone white curving architecture met his eyes. In places engravings depicting travel scenes had been made; a window onto the times of the builders, and an interesting history lesson for those with time to study it. As he walked he felt his velocity slowly increase even though his gait did not. The corridor was helping him and his fellow travellers forward, the floor accelerating as it did in many ports. It was a traditional way of hurrying the passage of sentient cargo without actually asking it to hurry. Some said this small aid predated space travel, although why anyone should be in a hurry to move planetary distances was contested. People had forgotten how big a world seemed when it was the only space a race could navigate.

  The forward movement continued for some time until the pace decreased and the corridor became a perfectly round hall. Now the only movement was that provided by his legs. A large circle glowed faintly on the floor and travellers were progressing inside it. He followed, noting when he crossed the threshold from bone white floor to the translucent blue centre. In a moment he would look up and see the familiar, and a moment of yearning would tug at him. He took a small conscious breath, centred himself and raised his eyes. There through a layer of opaque material, hovering gracefully like a magician’s illusion was the ship. He was underneath it, and it filled his view. The great curved hull obscured all sky. It was close to the ground at this point, waiting for itself to be filled. A section of the hull was open — a circle that perfectly matched the circumference of that he was standing on. As he looked the guide patch gently informed him that there would now be movement and possibly a sense of disorientation. It was the ship talking to him and the other passengers; reassuring them like a mother would reassure a child about to witness something powerful but benevolent.

  And he moved, lifting gently towards the opaque ceiling. It seemed to dissolve and flutter to the corners of vision before ceasing to exist. He passed through where the ceiling had been with no sense of its former presence — another magician’s trick it seemed — up and over lip of the building and towards the ship. For a fleeting moment he could see the distant edge of landscape and sky sandwiched between port and ship. Then he was drifting up and in, the unmistakable shapes of the ship’s interior gliding past as the circle lifted. A few of his fellows gasped, giving away their status as virgin travellers. It was, he had to admit, awe inspiring every time. He had once vowed never to let this experience become familiar and routine no matter how often he repeated it. That vow was not necessary. Such grace and power and precision were always wondrous.

  What he stood on was a part of the ship; a part that had been loaned to the ground. It was an aid to boarding that preserved the unique physics of the ship. The boarding disk never touched ground and ship at the same moment. It never broke that cardinal rule of landing. That most sentient races found the journey on board marvellous was a by-product of the laws of inter-stellar travel.

  They stopped without any sense of momentum. It was a strange weightless feeling; the first disorientation. Then as he remained in place the ship seemed to revolve around him. The movement, almost imperceptible at first, built into a purposeful turning. It was dizzying, and he could see the discomfort on some faces. He knew though, as did they all, that the ship was not moving, it was them. The disk they stood on turned on its axis, but the relative gravity did not change. The ship was moving them, efficiently relocating the disc and its cargo of life within the ship’s massive interior. It deployed forces that suns recognised and people did not. In a moment they slowed and stopped, their heads pointed at the ground and their feet at the sky. They were upside down according to the inhabitants of the world above, and right way up according to their perspective. The ship did not care. It understood the humans’ perspective but did not find it a useful reference. It simply noted that another batch of life had been carefully, safely and perfectly, installed inside itself.

  The inside of a ship was a place of wonder, and each was unique. Ships contributed to their own design; minds active before bodies, exactly for the purpose of growing. Each ship was a creation of itself and collaboration with others, forged from the beginning to live in transit, to travel and host. In this part of this ship the lighting was low like dawn or dusk. He was now strolling towards his berth, the guide patch insinuating directions. The corridor he walked was narrow and tall and clearly designed to move life of many kinds — the scale and proportions were not entirely human. To his left a transparent section of wall gave sight into a liquid filled corridor running parallel to his gas filled environment. The liquid light created a feeling like that in an aquarium. As he moved he glimpsed a fellow and very alien traveller. The Architue moved gracefully past him, traversing the liquid filled corridor using jets and tentacles. Behind it trailed a beautiful, seemingly endless trail of delicate fronds and luminescent points of light, tiny tenders darting amongst them. The sheer volume and radiance indicated this was an elder-breeder-confidant. Such aquatic beauty reminded him again of home, and the mission that would unite him first with his kind and, one day, with his world.

  He reached a subtle junction, the liquid corridor branching one way and down while his path branched another and up. His berth was ahead, and as he neared it the guide patch opened the door. He was a few paces from entering when a familiar figure drifted into view. He noticed the dress first, the tell-tale weighty rust-red design and heavy embroidered patterns flashing the planetary origins of its wearer. She was not on the boarding disk that had brought him on board, and had clearly been guided here through a different part of the ship. Yet here she was a
gain in his field of view for the third time in as many weeks.

  Suspicion stirred in him, and tumbled into an edge of paranoia. He calmed and re-assured it, persuaded it back into its place in his psyche. Perhaps later it might be useful, but not here and not now. He needed sensory attention and mental focus, not the emotional drive of instant action. The ship held many thousands of passengers, but even so it was a closed environment and coincidence was possible he reasoned. He lowered the travel pack and pretended to fumble for an item. It delayed his entry plausibly and long enough for her to close on her berth, exactly next to his; coincidences and coincidences. Now they were neighbours. He looked up as she neared, and was taken with her striking features. Her head was shaved, her eyes not one colour but concentric circles of green and orange and blue, and the dress covered her feet. She seemed to glide. Her posture too was proper, some might say regal. She could have been any age above puberty.

  As she neared, he greeted her in a language he thought she would know. She stopped and turned, her whole body swivelling as if the vertebrae of her neck and spine were fused. She smiled and greeted him cordially in another tongue.

  “I recognise you” he offered in the same language, his guide patch feeding him the right words as he thought of the meaning he wished to convey.

  She smiled faintly and replied that she had seen him in the lounge. She wished him a pleasant journey and asked for his indulgence. She needed rest and would retire to her berth. He wished her a pleasant voyage in return, and watched her enter, the door closing soundlessly behind her. The subtle questions he had prepared remained unspoken. Any insights gathered were now recorded by the guide patch to be watched later at his leisure. Somehow he felt no reassurance from this clandestine cordiality, at least not yet.

  He hefted the travel pack and entered his own cabin, a list of questions fogging his consciousness. The cabin was small and well equipped; a balanced mixture of comfort and necessity. At the centre of the room was a large reclined contour seat. It exuded from the floor, and it would be where he rested when the ship jumped. Behind the seat and through a large window he saw his largest possession; the vehicle had been stowed and packed securely in its own room. It gleamed slightly under the lights, and it was a comfort to see it.

  The voyage itself would be made in hours. It would only seem like days. Humans, and indeed most other planetary species, reacted to the few moments a ship spent in transit. Time slowed but senses did not. These few drops of time in nowhere took on a dream like quality, and all who travelled experienced it. People could not sleep through the experience. The ship would not allow it. In the early days people had tried to avoid these peculiar sensations by sleeping, and many had emerged with their minds damaged. Human brains it seemed needed to be aware in order to transit. No one could explain why, but it was true. People emerged from transit with the mind they took into it, if, and only if, they stayed awake. His new neighbour had offered the perfect excuse for privacy. Accepting the need to rest before departure was a protocol that no traveller would breach.

  He started to settle in, stowing some items and ordering refreshments. He tried the seat, and via the guide patch willed it to conform to his body shape and his preferred level of firmness. Feeling it move under him and then settle with a satisfying absence of bumps or hard spots, he got up and sipped at a hot drink that had just arrived. He thought again of his neighbour and linked the guide patch to a section of wall. The wall became a screen ready to project any image he wished, and, via the ship, access entertainment, knowledge and society. Pictures of her flashed and zoomed in, her face enlarged many times like some dictator’s attempt to awe a population.

  He looked at her features. In many ways they were childlike; the proportions and fleshiness mimicking a doll or infant. The eyes were startling and fashionable; the dress when examined under magnification was a natural vegetable fibre that seemed to be still living. She was interesting, and, it seemed, genuine. He had been taught to look for the micro-clues that gave away hunters grown to find and kill. She had none of them, no signs of body parts subtly enhanced to become deadly weapons, or the inhuman perfectness of the enemies’ vat grown killers. The hairs on her cheeks were of random length, the pore structure on her skin was as it should be, and there were visible blood vessels in her eyes. There appeared to be nothing to fear, either that or she had been exquisitely grown and nurtured to the point where her camouflage was inseparable from reality. She could be simply a human being travelling, or an assassin, or both, or something else entirely. He could not tell.

  Music flicked on; his whim translated into command. The soulful, accented, trembling voice of a singer he had grown to admire filled the cabin. The songs were of mysterious defeat and longing. They seemed written for him when he was fleeing, and they had reached deep into his pain, comforting him with their piercing pathos; he did not suffer alone, they had said. Now he could listen and remember those feelings, but they were channelled, as he had been taught, into will and determination. If she was a nemesis, let her come. He would be ready, here or later. He glanced at the vehicle packed and sealed next door. It was small and sleek, built to move fast and turn faster. There was no protection from the elements because none was needed. His clothing would provide that, making the extra weight of cockpit or cabin redundant, and improving the power to weight ratio. He fitted into it in a prone position. It had of course been adapted for his body shape and mass and its simple mind was attuned to his. And, it was armed, at least potentially. His will could release the nano engineers that already held blueprints for weapons of defence and attack. Armament would be grown on arrival. There was nothing here now to betray this little vehicle’s true purpose. He had his tricks too.

  He passed hours listening, revising, wondering and planning, until the texture and colour of the walls around him moved from smooth blueness to deeply patterned ochre; the ship signalling that jump departure would be soon. He declined the ship’s offer of instruction on the protocols of travel, as any seasoned traveller would. Instead he went to the bathroom, sipped some water and moved to the seat. Settling himself in he ran through a mental exercise that kept him relaxed but alert. The ship must have climbed to the exosphere already he guessed. Upward progress was made without the slightest hint of momentum or direction being felt by its passengers, but the millions of tons of atmospheric gas displaced could not simply be ignored, even by a ship. Its mass and volume was such that the climb was necessarily slow.

  The ship was fully alive now, fulfilling its purpose and functioning as it should; using physics that felt intrinsically right to it. The pilot was synched, and feeling the absolute focus that accompanied each pre-jump manoeuvre. The negotiation with the local sun was done, using the accelerated language developed over centuries to speed passage. The pilot would be glowing with achievement and pride. For a second or two s/he would radiate like a star, at one with the universe and harnessing the mighty power of a sun to control the massive ship. Such power and connection with the scale of the galaxy! Some said that this moment was the closest any human could feel to their divinities.

  The ship announced that they would transit shortly. It advised passengers to take seats and medication if it was required. He shifted a little, searching for the most relaxed posture. The chair, sensing the changes, adjusted too. Together they found the sweet spot and the physical sensation of contact was replaced by one more akin to floating. He positioned a drinking tube close to his mouth and selected a new story to view, asking his story patch to start it in the moments after transit. He was ready, as he had been many times before. In another life this routine would have been accompanied by immersion in the ship’s systems, a deep locking of minds that initiated and then closed the sun’s movement advice. It would have been him glowing inside. This time he had only to relax body and keep mind alert. He missed piloting like a man misses a lover. As he did so the sensations of transit began to touch his senses.

  For him it always started with a fogging
. A veil was pulled over sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. There was a disconnection between what he knew he should sense and what his nerves transmitted to his brain. The odd shift in sensory perception was accompanied by extreme clarity of thought. It was as if his mind, unable to fully recognise the world outside, set about ordering the world inside. Other travellers experienced something similar, and it was not just people who reported this shift. All races capable of describing thought and feeling in ways humans could relate to shared these sensations. Suns had described why this happened and how, but no other species had been able to understand the concepts involved. Most had now stopped trying and simply accepted the strange dislocation. It was a small price to pay for conquering infinity.

  Time slowed and he could feel it taking on new properties. The dream like state swept over him, and he waited for the inevitable drowning panic that surged into his consciousness at jump. His mind rebelled against this new, alien reality; we do not belong here, this is wrong, it would protest. He did not fear it. He knew exactly how to tame it and remove the panic. As expected it came in an instant and he dealt with it in an instant. With that little test passed he relaxed and waited for the story patch to start. The wait would occupy moments that stretched and slowed as if time was constrained like a man wading through thick liquid. In another environment it could proceed more quickly, but here it had to move to different laws.

  Transit passed this way, and patience was an asset. The story he experienced unfolding was a welcome distraction. It had barely started when there was another something seeking his attention. At first he thought it a defect in the story, the audio somehow corrupted. Then it became clearer and louder; a sound from somewhere else. It was a low hum, growing slowly in intensity. Odd that; the rooms were perfectly sound proofed. He toyed with the idea of getting up and seeking out the noise that was becoming an irritation, but moving in the slow-time of transit was a frustrating and dangerous affair. Simply walking required total concentration. None of the body’s motor controls operated as the mind expected them too. Even after hundreds of jumps he would still walk like an infant with the attendant risks of falls and collisions.