The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  “Tomorrow we will go to a place I know, where the devtaru was fruiting moon-pods last I came,” she told us. “If the devtaru wishes, perhaps we will see a launch!”

  I had seen the usual fruiting pods of a devtaru during our journey inside it, but never the legendary moon-pods. This devtaru was too young to make anything but small, empty moon-pods, but it would be a sight worth seeing. My heart was full. I wanted so much to be kin to such a being! Like Moon-woman, whose story Parin began to tell in the soft darkness.

  There was a girl once, who sat in stillness seeking kinship with a devtaru for a hundred years. Potter-ants built a dwelling around her, and wind-arounds made a green tangle around that, so no rain or wind could trouble her. Flitters brought her crystals of sap and placed them between her lips so she knew neither hunger or thirst. She saw the devtaru and its beings, and it observed her with its thousand eyes, and at last they made kinship.

  She lived within its forest, among its roots and trunks, and learned its moods and sensed its large, slow thoughts. She became familiar with the creatures who lived in its shelter, the moon-eyes and the dream-flitters, and the floating glow-worms, and the angler-birds with their lures of light. Then one day a moon-eye led her to a place within the devtaru forest where she found a large pod attached to the top of a trunk. The pod was just about as tall as she was and just about as wide in the middle, and it was covered over with a shimmering patina, so that she had to blink to make sure it was actually there. It pointed away from her toward the moon in the sky as though it yearned to break free, and it quivered gently as though caught in a breeze, although no breeze blew. The trunk glowed and patterns formed and dissolved on its surface, and the girl knew she had to climb right up to the pod.

  And she did. She found that the pod’s lips weren’t closed as yet, and inside it was empty of seed. Within it there were little creatures, buzzwings and a grumpworm or two, and some leafy, mossy debris. She felt a great shudder from the trunk so climbed down hastily, just in time, because the trunk contracted, and the pod shot with a great noise into the sky. As it did, the trunk split and the girl fell down.

  She walked for days through the forest and at last found the pod. It lay in a clump of bushes, already half-covered by leaves and branches from a storm. It made her wonder why the devtaru had bothered to send an empty pod into the air at all.

  Now I’ve said she lived with the devtaru for a hundred years. When she was old, and the devtaru even older, something changed. The devtaru’s leaves had been falling for a decade or more, and now she could see that its long arc of life was ending. The moon-eyes and the other creatures left the shelter of the devtaru but the girl couldn’t bear to do so. The devtaru produced one last enormous moon-pod. The girl, now an old woman, crawled into the pod before its lips closed, and felt around her the creatures who were also stowaways, and felt also the smooth, shiny hard seed, half her size, larger than the seeds in the normal seed-pods. She had decided she could not bear to watch the tree die, and she would let it take her away to her final destination.

  The pod grew and grew, and the old woman fell asleep inside it. Then one day the time came. She could sense a tensing in the limbs and sinews of the devtaru, preparing for the launch, but this time there came to her faintly a strange slight smell of burning. The lips of the pod closed completely, and if it hadn’t been for the stowaways making air to breathe, she would have suffocated. Off she went into the sky.

  Now there was a sister of this old woman who came to see her from time to time, and she was watching from a hilltop not far from the devtaru. She liked to look at the stars through a telescope, so she was known as Sister Three-Eyes. She saw the great pod quiver and align with the now risen moon. Tendrils of smoke emerged from the crevices of the tree. Then the pod launched.

  There was a noise like a clap of thunder, and the devtaru shattered. As it did, it began to burn from its deep internal fires, slowly and magnificently. What a death! But Sister Three-Eyes soon turned her attention from the dying devtaru and trained her telescope on the pod, because she wanted to know where it landed.

  To her surprise, it didn’t land. It went higher and higher, and soon it was a speck she could barely see. Just before she lost sight of it, she saw it move into a low orbit, and then, suddenly, the pod changed its mind and made straight for the moon.

  So she found that the devtaru’s last and final moon-pod is truly destined for the moon. Which is why the devtaru’s children grow on the moon, although they do not make such enormous pods as they do on Dhara. The lunar forest and the purple scrublands and the creatures that live there and make the air to breathe are all gifts of the devtaru, the only being known to spread its seed to another world.

  As to what happened to Moon-woman—who knows? When the next generation found a way to get to the moon in shuttles, they looked for her in the forests and the grassy plains. They did not find her. Some say she could not have survived the journey. Others say that she did survive it, and she wandered through the lunar forests content that she had found a place among the children of the devtaru, and died a peaceful death there. These people named the moon Roshna, after her, as it is still called today. Her sister thought she saw a light burning or flashing on the moon some months after Moon-woman left, but who can be sure? There are those that believe that Moon-woman went further, that she found a way to launch her moon-pod into the space beyond the moon, and that she sails there still along the unknown currents of the seas of space and time.

  Parin had always told this story well, but listening to it under the devtaru, in that companionable darkness, made it come alive. I wondered whether Moon-woman was, indeed, sailing the void between the stars at this moment, offering kinship to beings stranger than we could imagine. Looking at a small patch of starry sky visible between the leaves above me, I shivered with longing.

  We never got to see a pod launch on that trip. But even now I can remember Parin’s young voice, the words held in the air as if by magic, the breathing of the others beside me, the feel of the tree’s skin glowing gently like a cooling ember.

  The story anticipates the discovery of the Antarsa, of course. That I had a small role to play in it is a source of both pain and pleasure, because it happened when I first realized that Vik and I were growing apart from one another.

  I have been torn between excitement of a most profound sort, and a misery of an extremely mundane sort. The excitement first: there have been several flickering images on the radar. It is clear now that there are others around me, keeping their distance—spaceships from the Ashtan system? Our long lost cousins? I sent a transmission in Old Irthic to them, but there is no reply. Only silence. Silence can mean so many things, from “I don’t see you,” to “I don’t want to see you.” There is a possibility that these are ships from other human-inhabited worlds, but it would be strange that they would not have made contact with us on Dhara.

  My other thought is that the occupants of these ships may be aliens who simply cannot understand my message, or know it to be a message. This is even more exciting. It also makes me apprehensive, because I don’t know their intent. They appear in and out of range, moving at about the same average speed as my craft. Are they curious? Are they escorting me, studying me, wondering if I am an enemy? All I can do is to practice what I did in the great forest: stillness. Stillness while moving at more than 50% of the speed of light—I wonder what my aunt Visith would say to that! Do nothing, says her no-nonsense voice in my memory. Wait and observe, and let yourself be observed.

  That I have been doing.

  The misery is that I have a message from Vik. Sent years ago of course, but there it is: he is grateful for the pendant I tossed him when I left, and he has found a new partner, a fellow historian at Ship University, a woman called Mallow. When I first got his message I just stared at it. A sense of deep abandonment welled up inside me; my loneliness, which I had tried to befriend, loomed larger than mountains. Of course I had expected this—even if I had stayed
on Dhara, there would have been no going back to Vik—but I felt resentful of his meticulous observation of correct behavior. Yes, it is a graceful thing to do, to tell a former long-term partner when you have found a new love—but I would never come back, never find a new love, someone to hold—there was no need to let me know. Except it would make Vik feel better, that he had done the right thing. He had not thought about me, and it hurt. For once Parin’s little biosphere did not assuage my pain. I couldn’t even go outside and run up a mountain or two. Instead I swam from chamber to chamber through the inertial webbing, if only to feel the web break and re-form as I went through it, my tears floating in the air around me like a misty halo, attaching to the gossamer threads like raindrops. There was nowhere to go. After I had calmed down I tethered myself to the porthole and stared into the night, and thought of what it had been like.

  After Vik I had taken no lovers for a while, until I met Laharis. She was a woman of the Western Sea. I’d been working with Raim on the ocean, learning to sail an ordinary boat before I learned the ways of the Antarsa. We had been out for several days, and had returned with a hold full of fish, and salt in our hair, our skin chapped. Raim and I developed a deep love and camaraderie, but we were not drawn to each other in any other way. It was when I was staying at their kinhouse, watching the rain fall in grey sheets on the ocean, that his sister came up to me. The others were away bringing in the last catch. Laharis and I had talked for long hours and we had both sensed a connection, but the construction of the altmatter wings from the discarded moon-pods of the devtaru had taken up my time. Now she slid a hand up my arm, leaned close to me. Her hair was very fine, a silver cascade, and her smooth grey cheek was warm. Her long, slanted eyes, with the nictitating membranes that still startled me, shone with humor. She breathed in my ear. “Contrary to stereotype,” she whispered, “we Sea folk don’t taste like salt. Would you care to find out?”

  So we learned each other for two beautiful months. During our time together I forgot stars and space and the Antarsa—there was only her slow, unfurling self, body and mind, every part an enchantment. I would have wanted to partner with her, had I stayed on planet. Now that I was far away, I could only remember and weep. She never sent me messages, though her brother did. I think it was hard for her and perhaps she thought it would be hard for me.

  Dear darkness, help me keep my equilibrium. Here I am, in a universe so full of marvels and mysteries, and I mourn the loss of my already lost loves as though I was still young and callow. What a fool I am!

  I shall keep stillness, and feed no more that envious, treacherous god within, the god of a heart bereft.

  Vik has rarely ventured from Ship University. He’s one of those people who likes to put down roots and ponder how we got here. The past is his country. Ship University is a good place for him.

  It is housed inside the generation ship that brought my people to Dhara so long ago. The ship lies in a hollow made for it in the sandy plains near a lake. It contains the records of my people’s history and of the home planet, and the cryo-chambers are now laboratories. The shuttle bays are experimental stations, and cabins are classrooms. In the forests or the sea, the mountains or the desert, it is hard to believe that we have the technology we do. “Have high tech, live low tech,” has been a guiding principle of the Kinships. That is how we have lived so well on our world.

  Ship University’s sky scholars were the first to study the flight of devtaru pods. Vik’s friend Manda, a sky scholar of repute, told me how the mystery deepened as the early scholars tracked the moon-pods with increasingly powerful telescopes. I can see Manda now, slender fingers brushing back her untidy brown hair, her eyes alight. I was visiting Vik after wandering for a month through the Bahagan desert, and it had become clear to me that there was a wall between us. I felt then the first hint of the ending to come. I think Vik sensed it too. He sat next to me, looking restive, while Manda talked. She showed us a holo of a devtaru moon-pod launching from a century ago.

  Despite my misery, I found myself fascinated. There was the tiny pod, dwarfed by the curve of Dhara, apparently going into low orbit. The moon wasn’t in the picture, which was to scale, but we were informed that the planet, the pod and the moon formed a more or less straight line through their centers. In its orbit around the planet, the pod began to tremble abruptly, like a leaf floating on a stream disturbed by a random eddy. Then it swung loose from its orbit and made straight for the moon. It traveled with such astonishing rapidity that all we could see was a silver streak. Then the scene cut to the moon and the pod approaching it, swinging past it a few times, slowing gradually until at last it made a rough landing in the southern forest. There was a bloom of light, a brief fire where it hit, then the film stopped.

  “This was taken by Kaushai, back about a century ago. All this time there have only been speculations as to how the devtaru pods get to the moon, why they suddenly change course from low orbit to the trajectory you saw. The pods themselves have no means of propulsion. There is nothing in the void of space between the planet Dhara and the moon. The first probes that were sent to duplicate the orbit of the pods suffered no strange perturbations, nor were they drawn toward the moon. The devtaru pods apparently violate fundamental laws of nature: that momentum and energy must be conserved.”

  I knew something of all this, of course. But I had never seen the holo before. It was quite amazing. I felt Vik stir beside me—he looked just as entranced, and when my gaze met his, as miserable as I.

  Yet it was a chance remark I made on that visit that set the sky scholars on the right track.

  I go back to that time in my imagination. Vik and I are both starting to realize that our paths are too different to allow for us to be together, although it will be quite some time before we have the courage to say so to each other. So the golden afternoon, and our togetherness, have acquired a deep, sad sweetness. We join Manda and her friends for a walk around the lake. They have been talking all day about the mystery of the devtaru pods, telling us how they spent years camping by a certain devtaru, watching it, getting to know it, asking it to share its secret. Now some of them feel as though the devtaru has communicated with them already, that they already know what the secret is, but it is buried deep inside them and needs some kind of stimulus, or reminder, a magic word or phrase to bring it into consciousness.

  After evening sets in we find ourselves tired and hungry—we have walked a long way and the stars are beginning to come out in a pale pink sky. We are at a place where a small river empties into the lake, making an intricate delta of rivulets. We are wishing we had a boat to get to the shore from which we ventured, where the bulk of Ship looms, its many windows lit. The air is full of the trembling cries of glitterwings. I am speechless with emotion, with the thought that the end of our partnership is as close as the other shore. Vik is silent beside me. Just as we are talking about boats, I find the remains of one at the bottom of a rivulet. It is full of holes—in fact, most of it has rotted away, but for the frame. It lies indifferently in place as the water rushes through the holes.

  “If this boat were solid,” I say, “and the current strong enough, it would move. It would carry us home.”

  A pointless, inconsequential remark. But Manda stares at me, understanding awakening in her face.

  She told me later that my remark was the thing she needed to unwrap the gift the devtaru had already given them. What had been one of the saddest evenings of my life was the moment when she and her colleagues solved the mystery of the devtaru pods. Two days later Manda spoke to a gathering of hundreds.

  “Imagine an ocean that washes all of space and time. Like the water ocean, it has currents and turbulences. But its substance is invisible to us, as we are invisible—or transparent—to it.

  “This is not so strange an idea. As the neutrinos wash through ordinary matter, through you and me, as though we weren’t there, as water washes through the broken boat with the holes in it, so the subtle ocean—the Antarsa
, named by our poet Thora—washes through planets and stars, plants and people, as though we did not exist.

  “We don’t know whether the Antarsa is made up of neutrinos or something else. We suspect it is something as yet unknown, because too much is known about neutrinos, which can be caught by ordinary matter if the net is both deep and dense.

  “Now imagine a form of matter that is not ordinary matter. This, too, is not strange, because we know that what we call ordinary matter is rather rare in the universe. There are other forms of matter that make up the bulk of the cosmos. One of these forms, what we are calling the altmatter, is opaque to the Antarsa. So if you place a piece of altmatter in an Antarsa current, it will move.

  “The pods, of course, have to be made in part of altmatter. How the devtaru acquires it we don’t know; maybe it draws it up from deep underground, mingles or combines it with ordinary matter, and forms the pods that are meant to go into space.”

  That was so long ago, that moment of revelation. Some years later, experimenters took the discarded moon-pods that are empty of seed, the ones that the devtaru shoot out for practice when they are young, to make the first altmatter probes. And now I am here.

  Here I am, working the sails in the navigation chamber. I’ve done enough waiting. I am steering my craft as close to the edge of the current as I dare, as slowly as it needs to go so that changes in speed won’t tear it apart. I want to get closer to my mysterious companions.

  The shapes on the radar flicker in and out with increasing frequency now. Some are shaped like fat pods, but some appear vaguely oblong smudges. I want to see a pod ride by with Moon-woman in it, waving. If that happens, I will extend a grappling hook, gently as I can, and bring the moon-pod close to me so she can crawl into my little craft and share a tube of tea. But no, there is no likelihood of moon-pods being this far away from Dhara. After all, the Ashtan system is a few months away. The star is discernibly a round yellow eye, no longer a point, and the planets around it, including Ashta, appear disk-like as well, although I need my telescope to clearly see them. I can just see Ashta’s polar ice caps. It is far from my spaceship at the moment, but when I enter the system it should be at a point in its orbit that brings it close to my trajectory. I have to be careful that the Antarsa current does not pass directly through the planet, because I will simply crash into it, then. I am anticipating some delicate maneuvering, and there is no time like this moment to practice.