by Calista Skye
Sure, he’s an uncivilized bundle of raw power and danger. But those things just make him that much more magnetic.
I suddenly can’t stand the idea of him leaving.
Not now.
Not yet.
“Juri’ex,” I say quickly. “Do you want to see the inside of this thing? This spaceship?”
6
- Ashlynn -
Just for a second he shows his fangs in what I think is a happy grin.
Then he catches himself and cranes his neck to look up at the huge spaceship. “I suppose there may be secrets to discover inside. Things that are useful for the tribe.”
I nod seriously. “There may. I think there certainly are. For the tribe.”
He smirks, and I think maybe there’s another reason he wants to come with me. Or I may be totally deluded. Why would a freaking superhero like him want to have anything more to do with me? He knows how incompetent I am.
I climb up onto the lower ledge of the spaceship, and Juri’ex follows. We make our way up a sloped part to the flat door, where one of the girls has scrawled Dinosaurs No Entry with soot. I chuckle, feeling much more at home right away. That has to be Sophia.
I place my hand on the panel like Eleanor instructed me, and the door slowly slides to the side. Inside the spaceship there is a little bit of light coming from nowhere in particular. The air is stale, but doesn’t smell exactly bad. More… alien.
I take a step inside. The floor is soft, but hard enough to be nice to walk on.
I turn. “You coming?”
Juri’ex comes inside with obvious reluctance. “It’s like an alien cave.”
“Um… okay. Delyah is probably at the top level. But there are supposed to be elevators we can use.”
“Elevators?”
“Small rooms that can move up and down by magic,” I explain.
“Ah. And level?”
“Floors. You had them on The Island, right? In that tree you lived in?”
“It looked nothing like this.”
“Don’t worry, it’s the same thing. Except completely different.” I walk cautiously through the first corridor. It’s narrow, but the ceiling is so high above it has to give even Juri’ex enough headroom.
Delyah says the spaceship is harmless now, but she has also said that she hasn’t explored more than a small fraction of it. So I’ll be on my guard.
Juri’ex stays six feet behind me, and I think maybe that I swivel my hips a little more than I would if I were alone. It’s been a while since I’ve felt feminine, but in the company of such a bundle of undiluted masculinity I don’t think I have much choice.
It’s very quiet in here. All I can hear is my own breathing and heartbeat, because the floor dampens footsteps very efficiently.
We get to the famous hall with the glass tubes, where the first cavemen were kept for the space voyage to Xren.
“I think the stuff I rubbed on your wounds comes from over there,” I whisper, pointing to the inner part of the large room. “We’ll check it out later, maybe.”
I walk over to the wall where there are more doors. “These are the elevators,” I state with a confidence I don’t feel. And sure enough, one door opens and reveals a small space inside.
I step in, and then I’m pushed up against the opposite wall to give Juri’ex room.
“Is this a room that moves by magic?” he rumbles.
I slap some panels that seem to fit Eleanor’s description. “It’s not really magic. It’s just alien tech.”
He nods knowledgeably. “Ah. Tekk.”
I feel no movement, but the door opens again, and we’re clearly not in the same place as before.
I step out. “The hanging gardens,” I conclude and get back in the elevator. “If we don’t find Delyah higher up, we’ll look for her here.”
I press the panel again, and this time the elevator takes us to the control room at the top of the ship.
“I think this is the end of the line,” I say and step out. Yep, this is so alien and weird it has to be a control room.
“Let’s hope not,” says a voice, and then Delyah comes out from behind an alien wall. “Because I think this is the only line we have.”
I go over and embrace her. “Hiiii! How are you doing here?”
She squeezes me back. “Hi, Ashlynn. Much better now. I’m really glad to see you. I thought I remembered you being a physics major. Oh, it gets lonely. Especially when Brax’tan can’t be here. But he has his hands full in the village.”
“He does.” I take a step back, still holding her hands. Her hair hangs down her back in tight, pitch-black curls and her caramel skin definitely has a pregnant glow to it. “You look so thin!”
She looks down herself. “I guess I get a little lazy about eating. And those hanging gardens do have a lot of fruit, but being there alone to harvest it still kind of creeps me out. We’ve only explored the upper five levels, and there has to be twenty more of them. I see you brought a… guest?”
Yeah, the huge warrior in the room is hard to ignore. “Delyah, this is Warrior Juri’ex. He’s kindly escorted me from the village.”
Juri’ex towers over both of us and touches the handle of his sword in polite greeting. “Greetings, Chief Delyah.”
“Greetings, warrior. It’s just Delyah. I don’t do the ‘chief’ thing.”
I’m always astounded when Delyah speaks cavemanese. She just has no accent at all. My own is pretty good, but sometimes I marvel that the cavemen can understand the Texas twang I can’t seem to lose.
“This alienness is not similar to your own,” Juri’ex observes, indicating the control room. “It is much more alien.”
He’s right. It’s so alien that I can’t imagine what most of these consoles and objects are. I see nothing that resembles chairs or levers or gauges or anything I would expect in a control room. Huge windows or screens going all around the walls of the circular room show the landscape outside, where the sun has now almost disappeared under the horizon.
But not everything is alien. Delyah has made herself at home here, and she has scribbled notes and figures on many of the surfaces. Drying laundry hangs on a clothesline strung between two higher alien items, and there’s a heap of skins and furs that has to be her bedroom.
“It was built by aliens who were indeed different from both you and me,” Delyah confirms. “I am trying to understand how everything works here.”
“So that you can go back to your home planet.”
Delyah tilts her head to the side. “So that we’ll have the option of doing that.”
I unpack some food from my sack and hand it to her, placing the water pouch on a nearby console. “Not all the girls are sure they’ll go home even if they can, Juri’ex. Delyah, a few things happened at the tribe lately. First of all, Phoebe returned with a caveman and his five friends in tow…”
Delyah wolfs down a good amount of the dried stew and drinks a lot of water while I tell her about Phoebe and Rax’tar and the two dragon shifters, Zahak and Maretriok, who are now stuck on a small island in the newly discovered Seatree Ocean. And about the Actual Ocean. It takes me a good while, and by the end of it Delyah is staring out at the darkening landscape.
“Okay,” she says. “The dragons being shifters who are stuck in their human form until they can collect hoards might be good news for us. We should make sure they can’t collect those hoards. And yeah, we better make damn sure they won’t find anything from Earth. The last thing we want is our home planet being attacked by dragons. I think Earth would seem to them a much more valuable target. We can’t let them know it even exists.”
My hand automatically goes to my pocket and squeezes the soft thing in there. I want to change the subject. “Eleanor said you wanted to see a physicist. I’m the only physics major in the village. But I haven’t graduated, and I spend most… I mean, I spent most of my time working on other people’s experiments and projects. I honestly don’t think I’ll be of much use.”
> “Uh-huh. The thing is that I feel everything in this ship comes down to physics. Especially the propulsion system. And that’s the key to making it work.”
“This whole ship?”
Delyah hoists herself backwards onto a console by the window. “Have a seat.”
I join her there, dangling our legs with our backs to the landscape. Juri’ex wanders around the control room, looking at things but being very careful not to touch them.
Delyah munches on another piece of dried stew. “I don’t think we even want this whole ship to fly. It’s too badly broken to fly in space. But the aliens – I call them the Ex because they don’t exist anymore and so much is unknown about them, as in X – had planned for the cavemen to get off this planet by using a smaller ship on one of the lower levels here. That’s the ship I want to get to work.”
I scratch my chin. “So, it doesn’t work? Or we just don’t know how?”
She shrugs. “I think it’s fully functional. And I think I can make sense of the controls. But I don’t think it has its own power supply. It’s complicated. The smaller ship is a part of this large one and shares its power. I think of it as the big ship being pregnant. Like, the smaller one has an umbilical cord that gives it power and who knows what else.”
“You want to get it to give birth to the smaller one? In a way?”
She smiles, unconsciously stroking her round belly. “In a way. But we need it to be a live birth. So we can use the small spaceship for ourselves.”
“Where do I come in? Or rather, where would a good physicist come in?”
“Ashlynn, do you know anything about relativity?”
I groan. “Oh God. Relativity? Einstein and all that? Shit. No. I mean, I know a little bit. I guess. Kind of. It’s not been my focus. I’m into particles. Quantum stuff? But don’t ask about that, either. I was never much good.”
“Uh-huh. Can you at least tell me this: is it possible for something to move faster than light? Isn’t that relativity?”
“Well, yeah. It follows from the Special Theory of Relativity. When an object approaches the speed of light, its mass and size approaches infinity. Division by zero. Accelerating beyond that becomes an absurdity. It’s one of the best proven laws of nature. It goes for very small particles, too. Atoms and such. As long as they have mass. You’d need infinite energy to approach that speed. Three hundred thousand kilometers per second in a vacuum. On the other hand, massless particles always travel at that speed. Like photons. Light, essentially. Hence ‘the speed of light’? It’s also the speed of gravity. Gravitational waves. Or gravitons, which have still not been confirmed. People sometimes think they’ve observed something moving faster than that. Like, if you sweep a laser across a distant object, the red dot on that object may seem to move faster than light. But no matter is actually moving. Or they might argue that if you have a really long iron rod and you push on one end, that push will instantaneously be felt on the other end, a million miles away. But it won’t. The push will travel along the rod as a compression wave at the same speed as sound in iron. It’s nowhere near the speed of light. Nothing can break the speed of light.”
The room goes very quiet, and Delyah is giving me a weird look.
I self-consciously scratch my nose. “What?”
“So, when you say you don’t know anything about the speed of light, what you mean is that you know everything about it?”
“No, not everything. This isn’t much. Just a little. Super basic.”
She holds my gaze, and her cocoa-colored eyes are hard. “See, when you said ‘no’, I thought you really didn’t know anything and I should just send you back to the village. But you were just bullshitting me.”
I can feel my eyes widen in shock. “I’m sorry, I really thought…”
She takes my hand. “Girl. We can’t afford to not know who we are. We’re stranded on a fucking alien planet. We don’t have the luxury of being down on ourselves. Ashlynn, you don’t have the luxury of not trusting yourself. Not here. Not now. Yeah, I know it takes some responsibility off your shoulders if you pretend not to be any good. I did that too, in the beginning. I would shrug and play all stupid and quiet, letting Sophia and Aurora make decisions while I studied the cave paintings. Sometimes, I only pretended to study them. If something bad was going down and I knew the girls would ask me what to do, I tried to escape that. But that was fucking weak. We need all of us. We need all of us to take responsibility. To do our best. To know that we’re good. And Ashlynn, you are good. You are every bit as good as any one of us. We all know it. Only you don’t. Which is weird. Because you’re the one needs to know it the most.”
She can stare me down just as good as Juri’ex. Or close to it, anyway.
“Trust yourself.” She lets go of my hand and comes in close for a tight hug that lasts for a good while.
“Okay,” I sniff into her bony shoulder, clumsily wiping sudden tears.
Juri’ex ducks out from behind a console, glaring turquoise daggers at Delyah’s back. He must have heard my sniffle. I smile a fake smile to tell him that it’s all right, and he relaxes fractionally.
“That’s my girl.” Delyah squeezes me once and disengages, still holding me with one hand.
I wipe my nose. “Well, I trust myself to be right about this: You have to eat more. You’re too skinny for a pregnant woman.”
She lays her head back in hearty laughter. “See, you’re learning. And yeah. You’re right. I will.”
I dab the heel of my hand at my eyes. “God, you can be intense.”
She squeezes my wrist like we do on Xren. “Sorry. It’s just, it feels like we don’t have much time. You say two dragons are already here.”
“Yeah. I see your point.”
“So to recap: it is theoretically impossible for a particle to move faster than light?”
I think hard. “Okay, let me be more specific. It’s not theoretically impossible. It wouldn’t break any laws of nature for something to just move faster than light. Only approaching and accelerating past the speed of light is impossible. But if the particle came into existence already traveling faster than light, then yeah. It is hypothetically possible. With the word hypothetically in italics, underlined three times and with a footnote that says ‘girl, just forget about it’. Nothing like that has ever been observed, and we don’t expect to see it. But because it’s not totally ruled out, again hypothetically, there is a name for it: the tachyon.”
Delyah frowns. “A tachyon is something that moves faster than the speed of light?”
“A particle that moves faster than light, yes.”
“I thought that was just Star Trek technobabble.”
I shrug. “It probably is. But Star Trek didn’t invent the tachyon. From the Greek word tachy, meaning fast. Not only does it travel faster than light, it always must. It can’t break the speed of light from above, so to speak. It can’t slow down below that. If it existed. That would be just as impossible as accelerating to lightspeed and then beyond. Division by zero again.”
“All right. So a particle that is born already moving faster than light is possible. I think that’s very interesting. Because, Ashlynn: we did move faster than light when we were brought here in the Plood flying saucer.”
I look out at Xren, where the only light now comes from the moon Yrf. This is absolutely not Earth, and clearly not in our solar system. Seven light years away, at least. “I guess we must have. Speaking as a physicist, it is extremely unlikely. Bordering on impossible. But we all remember every minute of those shitty couple of hours. And we didn’t age any. Yeah, it did happen. We moved faster than light back then. We did. Somehow.”
Delyah lays her head back and stares at the ceiling, deep in thought. “So, what would it look like? The tachyon, I mean. How would you know it was there?”
I stare out into the darkness outside the alien window. This is like an exam question. What does a tachyon look like? Not a question I thought I would ever get asked. And ten minu
tes ago, I would have giggled and said that I have no idea. Now, I will give the best answer I can.
“I think it’s easier,” I say slowly, trying to see it in my mind, “if we imagine a tachyon the size of a baseball. Not a particle. Just easier to picture. Okay, it travels faster than light. So you couldn’t see it coming. You would only see it leaving after it passed you.”
This is the reason why I picked physics. I have some kind of intuition for it, a feeling for how things will work. It was by far my favorite topic in high school. But then it turns out that college physics is all math and hardly any intuition. Math was never really my thing. And I never trusted my intuition enough to make it count.
I imagine a baseball travelling faster than light, just like Einstein thought about riding on a light beam back in the day when he was figuring out the universe.
I close my eyes, wanting to go deeper into it. “But you would see it leaving in two directions at once. It would seem to travel away from you in both directions – the way it came and the way it’s going. I don’t think it would look like a ball. It would be extremely distorted. And there would have to be redshift. It would look blue the way it was coming and red the way it was going. I actually think it would look really scary. I mean, so weird it might drive you crazy. It would be unlike anything you’d ever seen before.”
7
The mere thought of it makes me dizzy.
“This is good,” Delyah says. “What else?”
I take some time to just breathe. “Let me think about it for a while. I don’t know how helpful it is. Might be too weird.”
Delyah sends me a mysterious smile. “How about you go down to the fifth level of the hanging gardens, and then follow the twigs? Then tell me what you think. Bring your caveman hunk. He makes me nervous the way he looks at me.”