The Man Who Talked to Suns

by Stephen Andrews

  Helvyani had sent the most exquisitely crafted armour artefacts sunwards, seeking blessings and explaining the intricate and beautiful systems contained within them. They emphasised that the sunlight reflected from the armour was both an art form, a weapon and a source of life for the wearer. Like children seeking to please a parent, the twelve sentient races offered their finest thoughts on the beauty of their sun-bathed worlds. Look, they said. Look what we did with what you gave us!

  No sun had ever engaged in a conversation about the beauty of worlds, and the Helvyani simply lost their artefacts to the suns melting radiation.

  Suns it seemed did not care for the substance of the little orbs that circulated them. Except in one peculiarly planetary way. They had never lifted a sentient species towards a world that was not habitable by at least one of the races. They had been asked; scientists and wealth-seekers, mystics and colonisers had made such requests, and their ships had remained purposefully suspended in orbit around the world of origin. Conversations were initiated to understand why, and to persuade suns to act as the planetary sentients wished. Decades of messaging had prompted complex and confusing language from suns. Academic argument had raged, as to the precise meaning. The most widely agreed interpretation was that this unanimous act of restriction was a form of solar conservation, protecting gas giants, ice balls and rocky moons from the changing forces of sentient trespass.

  Others argued that the suns’ motivation was not conservation but preservation, pointing to structure in their replies that showed concern for the fragile species that they lifted and moved across the universe. Whatever the reason, suns did not make a path to hostile places. And so those places remained touched by the few who were willing to make interplanetary journeys, taking the weeks and months of sub light speed travel necessary to reach a far flung world in a system with a habitable one. Systems without habitable worlds simply remained untouched by sentient exploration. It was a common joke that the suns of these systems did not want the noisy children of other systems intruding on their peace. Pilots accepted these restrictions without protest. After all they were granted the grace to move to an infinite number of places with more diversity than could be imagined.

  Ansti thought of suns as he submitted to the penetrating embrace of the pilot’s coach. Connecting physically and emotionally to the ship and the vehicle, he felt the strange and empowering sense of multiple beings in a single body. He had placed his doubts to one side, having no time to order his thoughts or explore his feelings. Finding no time to beat a path to the truth he let the focus of his life guide him. Completing a jump offered the deep security of the familiar, and it let him hide from the uncertainties around him. The vehicle was already connecting, and he could feel it teasing him with lurching glimpses of their destination. A part of it was already real on the barrier world, feeling its mass and gravity, developing a sense of the world’s reality. As the vehicle gathered sensory inputs the ship’s potential to exist there grew. The possibility that it was real there and not on the world of the Praveen increased, and a universal law that could not be broken — the law that prevented anything, even a sun, from existing in two places at once — asserted itself. Ansti and the vehicle began to persuade the universe that the ship existed on the barrier world not in their present location.

  Ansti felt new realities tickle his senses. He invited every sensation deep inside him, and focused on it intensely, alert to the possibility that their growing presence would trigger some defensive reaction. He squinted and sniffed and stroked its offerings, searching for clues that the ship’s arrival was being watched. The world offered odd glimpses of itself as its reality wafted in. An overpowering smell of tar dominated for a moment, followed by a swimming, sliding sensation like skating on ice, and then a sudden dense solidity reminded him of the mesas he had navigated. It would eventually coalesce into a whole world that he could understand and navigate he knew, but this translation was harder than the jump to the Praveen world. The barrier world seemed slippery and unsteady. Was that part of its defence?

  Even the vehicle was groping uncertainly for the realness of this place. It did not seem to exist as an entity that could be felt. Ansti wondered if they had found some limitation in the ship/vehicle’s transit capacity. Perhaps there were some jumps that only a sun could make. Whatever the cause, it was taking too long. He felt Tannen flash a worried query at him. They were stationary on the Praveen world, and to military minds stopped was only a short step from dead. Anything could target the great mass of the ship with ease. Trusting the sanctity of Praveen neutrality was not a situation Tannen and Ashur would tolerate for longer than was absolutely necessary. And in their view each moment still was a moment closer to unpleasant confrontation.

  Ansti was getting tense and he could feel his own focus shifting inwards, self-doubt clouding his exploration. He focused back on the possibilities, letting his consciousness flow with the vehicle. It was there — where it should be — on the barrier world, groping to find new realities. Ansti urged it on, and in the very moment he was trying to help it focus and build on its contact, he felt it let go.

  The shock hit him hard. Like a man losing grip on a cliff edge, he reeled and gasped and hunted for something to hold. But it was gone. The barrier world was suddenly as remote as any other object in the universe. The vehicle had given up. Tannen had seen it on his monitors, and sun-shit, he was sure Ashur would be seeing it too. Ansti was thinking of possible explanations and defences when his sense of balance lurched and he felt himself expand and accelerate away from the target world. The vehicle had decided a new approach was needed. It moved itself away from the planned drop point to feel more of the world. It moved up and away from the surface and let its senses unfold, and as it did it took Ansti with him; a captive rider on a run away. Ansti felt the familiar sense of revulsion and recoil hit his mind. His body could not do this, and his mind could barely comprehend it. Again he struggled to let himself accept the impossible, to calm a mind that perceived something it should not.

  The vehicle raced outward and expanded its senses exponentially. It continued to feed Ansti the full shocking revelations of sight and momentum, until the world was an orb in his vision, and his vision had expanded to encompass the detail of it all. He could feel his jaw clenched tight as he fought the impossible swarm of sensory input that the vehicle provided. It did not lose detail as it moved away, it gained it; each moment bringing vast new quantities of data. Ansti’s mind squirmed and tried again to recoil from the magnitude of understanding it was gaining. He was beginning to truly understand the limits of human mental capacity. The vehicle could trace the trajectory of trillions upon trillions of dust mites and identify every one. A human mind could not. Ansti felt his mind running out of capacity. It was being burnt out, used up, clogged with the entire essence of this place. Tannen was somewhere, flashing concern again and again, a tiny pinprick of information in an entire world of insight.

  Then it stopped. The movement ceased, the input calmed and Ansti felt the vehicle fold its senses into a smaller packet. The reality of their target unfolded in front of him. It was beautiful, and immediately obvious why they had struggled to make it real. The larger mass was a dark orb, planet sized and devoid of any light or features. It seemed to absorb light. Its presence a shadow cast against the stars-cape behind. There was no apparent atmosphere, no geology, no tides or shifting gases. It possessed mass, and gravity, and it lacked all other features. It was a perfect lightless globe, devoid of colour or texture, its surface like polished glass. Ansti felt it and guessed it had to be a Helvyani empathy hex creating this dark perfection. Only they would know how. Only they would wish to do it. Their craft left nothing for a mind to grasp, and nothing for aggressive senses to target.

  The blackness was a canvass on which the beauty of the place was painted. In contrast to the rich, perfect darkness, smaller, bright orbs circled the planet. Objects the size of small moons drifted impossibly close and in numbers tha
t would have caused calamity in a system not machined by Helvyani witchery. The combined gravity of the moons and the world should have sent the whole edifice colliding, but here they colluded to remain apart even as each object yearned to fall into the other.

  Each moon-sized orb glowed with intricate patterns of light, colours shifting in a slow dance, moving at the speed of clouds drifting fast, and glowing as if lit from within. The moons reflected light from each other and none from the world. But some light did flow out; it arced in streamers away from each moon and made contact with the world to end at a point on the surface. The radius and length of each arc adjusted itself as the moons moved, so none ever touched the other. Electric colours extended out and in again like the corona of a sun, and moving with a watchmaker's precision. Ansti held his breath and marvelled at the beauty. His mind drew parallels; a giant firework exploding in a pitch black sky. The enemy created beauty in defence. Perhaps that too was part of the defence.

  The vehicle communicated directly with him. This was indeed a defence. It surmised that beneath the black sheen a world existed, protected by the Helvyani hex from any unwanted intrusion, and furthermore the circling moons covered jump points from which ships might attract the local star’s attention. In short there was no footing here on which to gain purchase. Just as an incoming ship would find its ingress points blocked, so anything attempting to leave the system had its egress thwarted. Ansti asked the vehicle for solutions. They were not limited by a sun’s perceptions of the options. Find another one he willed. The answer was clear and ironically one he had given himself to another question — we can’t go where suns have not created a path. The paths here all lead through the moons or the planet. All are closed to us. We cannot go.

  Sun-shit. Ansti finally conceded to Tannen’s urgent requests to jump or clarify the protocol. He saw Tannen turn pale as he briefed him. They had expected weapons, not barriers, and they had believed their own propaganda about the omnipotence of the ship/vehicle. They had not anticipated a jump task it could not complete. Ashur made himself known.

  “Stand down,” he said “Conference in the bridge. Ten minutes, all planning staff and Ansti.”

  Ansti began the process of removing himself physically and emotionally from the ship/vehicle. Ten minutes was barely enough, and the processes would be uncomfortable on many levels when undertaken this quickly. Ashur knew it of course. He was punishing Ansti for failure.

  Ansti stumbled into the room as others gathered. He was still unsteady on his legs and red welts covered his skin where sensors had been removed too fast. One eye would not focus properly and the old wound in his ankle was throbbing. His mind still groped for the ship/vehicle’s inputs and was confused to find none.

  “So, what happened?”

  Ashur started with no preamble or pleasantries, before everyone was seated. Tannen and Ansti looked at each other and Tannen gestured at Ansti. Suns-shine-dark, they expected him to explain this? He felt a prickle of injustice, and then reminded himself that no-one else on board had the faintest idea what could go wrong with a jump. The fact that he had never experienced a failed jump before was weak defence that he did not offer.

  “It’s protected” Ansti started in a low controlled voice, determined not to appear as if he felt himself at fault. “The vehicle thinks it is a Helvyani empathy hex.” Ansti saw a few faces look blank or quizzical. “The Helvyani are very good at persuading objects to be something they are not, and then letting the rest of the universe unwittingly collude in the trick. It’s why it is called an empathy hex; we have empathy with what the object wants to be. In this case a planetary surface with no features circled by moons that prohibit entry or exit on any plausible jump solution for the next system.” Ansti smiled, “It’s quite elegant.”

  Ashur scowled at this, and interjected. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to me this looks like an ugly failure followed by a quick death. Can we see it?”

  A junior officer closed his eyes for a second and the system appeared in the room, fed in from the vehicle’s memory, in three dimensional detail.

  Conversation stopped as the small assembly took in the darkness and light, the form and the movement. Each saw it through the lens of their own aesthetic values, and all experienced mesmerising beauty. It was an empathy hex of extraordinary power. It penetrated hearts and minds for a few moments before it flicked off. People shuffled and blinked and regained control over slack jaws, one wiping a dribble of mucus from the corner of her mouth.

  Ashur broke the silence. “It’s strong. But we are stronger. How do we persuade it to be a platform for our jump?”

  The silence returned. Someone asked why they did not simply jump into the system in orbit around the world, and Ashur snorted in derision.

  “Possibly because every defensive sensor in that system is tuned to just such an eventuality. It is how any uncleared ship would arrive. Possibly because it would trigger a warning jump to Tash-eh Hruun faster than you can think, and possibly because even if we jumped in we could not jump out without contact with a moon. Do you think they might have weapons concentrated on the moons?”

  The questioner glowed red with embarrassment and said no more.

  Silence reigned again. Fear of rebuke by Ashur compounded by the puzzlement they all felt suppressed speculation. Some scratched at devices, looking for data, and some had a glazed look, clearly communing with the ship’s library in a search of answers. Ashur simply starred at Ansti, as if he expected an answer from no other quarter. It unsettled Ansti, because, in fact, he had an answer, but he was loathed to offer it. He’d wondered about it since extracting himself from the pilot’s couch. He suspected a solution lay not with themselves but with those who lived in the spaces they must traverse. He suspected those that accompanied every jump into and out of that system knew how to move through it undetected and unaided. He suspected the par-born would know what they must do. He also suspected that persuading them to assist might be a harder task than undoing the hex.

  Ansti still did not wish to share his par-born encounters, so he concocted a lie to give purchase to the option he wanted.

  “I can get us in under the hex” he declared.

  Eyes turned on him with expressions of doubt or relief. Only Ashur’s expression did not change as Ansti delivered his startling news.

  “I can use the ‘surface’ of the world as a reference and drop us below it. Once we are under we can explore and find a jump point out. There must be points to Tash-eh Hruun; that’s what they are concealing.”

  The room held its breath and one or two of the planners shuffled uncomfortably, realising the risks and flaws in Ansti’s proposal. They looked at Ashur, expecting withering sarcasm or a rebuke. None came, but a question did.

  “What’s under there. Ansti?”

  Ashur purred the question everyone else had been asking themselves. Ansti knew there was no answer that he could give, but he sowed doubt.

  “There must be something. It’s protected. No race hides something worthless, and the Helvyani and Tash-eh have gone to a good deal of trouble to hide something. Listen, I can drop us just under the hex, probably in the atmosphere of a habitable planet. It must be habitable or suns would not create a path. The jump solution must be in then out, just like any other system. This world is protected but it is not magical. Universal laws must still apply. We jump under the hex, use the vehicle to reconnoitre the jump out and go as fast as we can. If we are attacked we fight, we expected that much anyway.”

  The doubters looked at Ashur, waiting for him to point out that there may be only solid rock or ice under the hex, that one of the moons might be habitable not the world, that the Helvyani hex might prevent entry under it or exit from below it, that the planet below may be riddled with hair trigger Tash-eh weapons, or that once under the hex, perhaps even the vehicle would lose its contact with the universe and be blinded to the way out. Ashur simply looked at Ansti, his expression blank. He locked eyes with Ansti and bo
red his gaze deep into Ansti’s soul. Ansti held it, fighting to keep his expression level and open, to avoid the muscle ticks or micro expressions that he knew would betray him. Ashur rose from his seat and looked at each of the planning group in turn. The tension was palpable, and it seemed as if the quiet, heavy moments lasted a life-time. Finally Ashur broke the silence, his words surprisingly devoid of rhetoric in this most dramatic of moments.

  “OK, Ansti, let’s give it a try.”

  Ashur pushed his chair back and rose to leave. Ansti was startled by the lack of debate, but one person had the courage to attempt a challenge. A voice asked Ashur to wait and declared the plan suicidal. Ashur did not turn, he waved a hand over his shoulder to dismiss the man and left the room, his orders still penetrating the consciousness of the assembled planners. The challenger was standing, arms straight and palms pressed against the table screen that they had met around. He flicked a raging glance at Ansti, and expressed his opinion of the idea. In response Ansti exaggerated his piloting prowess and implied that he had sensed life under the hex. The man clearly did not believe him, but Ansti was the only pilot on board and they had little choice but to trust him. He followed Ashur’s example and rose to leave. Debate would serve no purpose, and Ansti did not want to be tested and exposed. Only success would save them all now, and Ansti pinned his hopes on a new encounter with the race that seemed drawn to him.

  Ansti was back in the pilot’s couch shortly after, patching in and synching with the ship again. His body had barely recovered from being un-gently sucked out of the couch earlier, and the process of reconnecting was unusually uncomfortable. He endured it without the painkillers that would have reduced the discomfort but taken the edge off his senses. Ansti wanted to feel everything this jump. He was going to attempt something that few, if any, had achieved before; a meeting with par-born in transit, instigated by a human.