Cosmic Powers

by John Joseph Adams

  But Pavitra and her crew were still sabotaged. Probably by one of their own crewmates, or by a lover or a family member left behind.

  The remains of that ship still circle the outer rim of the legion, along with the escape pods.

  It was after Pavitra’s failure that people started using the escape pods. They thought they could escape the gravity well, I guess, though where they thought they’d go after that, I don’t know. Maybe they just hoped to cling to a few more cycles of life, to gain themselves more time for a rescue. Maybe the clutch of years they could survive in a pod was more than they expected to live inside the ships.

  When my mother had me, after her mother died, there was still some hope in her generation. But that’s been gone a long time now. Most old people sit in their quarters, waiting for the end.

  I knew, reading about Pavitra, that I was going to learn how to fix ships, and I was going to figure out how to get one out of the Legion. But I was going to do it right. I wouldn’t tell anyone but my sister Malati, because though I was becoming a good engineer by then, she was a lot older than me and already an ace pilot. She was allowed to drive our ship’s only functioning transport on ship-to-ship runs and salvage missions, one of just a dozen people qualified for it.

  Malati and I could do it. If I involved more people than that, it would never work. Someone would get angry. Someone would try and stop us.

  Maybe even the anomaly itself.

  So, I stopped staying up late jumping into the lake. I didn’t go out huffing chemicals with the other kids. I didn’t screw around very much, which was a shame, looking back. Maybe I missed out on some things.

  But I intended to build something better.

  It was out on my third spacewalk, helping a team to gather salvage around a nearby ship now only half-populated, that I saw the ship that I would retrofit.

  Pavitra’s wreck had collided with another derelict floating at the edge of the Legion. If I told people I was studying systems on the derelict, I could easily get access to Pavitra’s old ship and work to retrofit it.

  From the derelict I’d also have a long view into the center of the Legion, and the two dozen ships already in the process of being devoured.

  We didn’t know for sure what had happened on those ships. Rumor had it that the people of our generation were giving birth to strange growing things, like tumors, and they were spreading fast, engulfing ship after ship. But none of those ships it happened to were allied with us, so we had only rumors. We did no trade with them, and many were openly hostile. We offered no aid. The ships that carried the people of the new prophets were only a fraction of the people who made up the Legion. Many followed other gods, or no god at all.

  We simply sat in our sector of the Legion, staring at those transforming ships, as I did from the rim of the derelict, wondering when whatever fate had befallen them would reach us.

  The engines that powered the ships were all closed organic systems, meant to work in symbiosis with the rest of the ship. It was a concept that worked well as long as nothing happened to any other part of the ship, and maybe that’s part of what was wrong with the ships being eaten. That’s the theory I had back then. The closed system made the ships harder to retrofit, but I knew Pavitra had already started that process. Though there was little enough left of her ship, getting out there to work on it every day would be easy. I could cover what I was doing by saying I was just studying it and applying what I learned somewhere else, on some other ship—ours.

  It was a tricky, two-faced balance. I didn’t know if I could pull it off.

  I pitched the idea to my engineering instructor not long after puberty, and though much of the class scoffed at the idea of studying another derelict, the professor did not. I spent long cycles in meetings with engineers and scientists, and then I was given permission to go out on my spacewalk. But I wasn’t to do it alone, they said. They wanted me to take another student. I convinced them Malati was the best person to accompany me.

  And so it started—my attempt to free us all from the death of the Legion.

  The various systems of the ship were never meant to work independently, as I said, which is what made it so miraculous that the anomaly hadn’t stopped the core life-support functions of the ships. Their influence kept us rooted in space—no matter how much fuel we gave the engines, the ships of the Legions never moved. It was another bit of evidence in support of the interdimensional idea—if the bulk of the anomaly existed in some other dimension, then that’s what rooted us here. It was as if some giant beast had thrown out its fingers or tentacles wide, snarled us in them, and fallen back to sleep while we writhed in its grasp.

  The stuff that fueled the engines was a complex brew of engineered organisms that excreted a combustible compound. It was pumped into yet another engineered organism at the center of the ship, an organ we simply called the “engine” though it did not at all resemble anything like the early machines that bore that name in my History of Engineering classes. The engine powered all of the ship’s systems, not just propulsion; it pumped vital heating and cooling fluid to various parts of the ship and kept the complex algae bath that provided our oxygen at the correct temperature. Ours was not a fully sentient ship but a hybrid of living and dead tissue. When I was younger, I had asked if the ships were alive, but the elders all said the ships were no more alive than an organ grown in a vat, like the time my aunt’s heart was replaced by one grown in the medical bay.

  “Is your liver a sentient thing?” my teacher asked when I protested. But when you worked on the ships, you couldn’t help but think of it like a living thing, a tethered animal.

  I spent many cycles working to retrofit Pavitra’s ship. Malati thought I was odd, at first. She laughed when I told her my idea. But as the artificial sun went up and down and progress on the engine took shape, she stopped laughing and started helping on our long forays across the tethers that we’d set up between our ship and the derelict.

  Finally, the day came when I had the last bit of retrofitted printed parts I needed to fire up Pavitra’s old ship.

  I sweated heavily in the suit I wore as I went hand over hand out on the tether to the derelict. Malati was already far ahead of me. We’d argued about something petty back on the ship, and she was ignoring me. She seemed much more graceful outside the ship than in it, but I was the opposite. The blackness beyond terrified me. I did every walk like this far too fast, to the point that my instructors often chided me about the need for caution over speed.

  So, I don’t know why I hesitated that day. You get used to junk flying around the Legion. Our gravity well was still active; it was all that held us together, and we thanked God for that after, but it also meant it was difficult for anything to escape the core. Things could be cast out but never truly discarded.

  I saw the piece of junk catch the light from the heart of the Legion before it struck. A sharp glint, nothing more. It zipped by so fast, I barely had time to register it. You forget how fast things are moving around you when you’re making the slow, arduous crawl between ships.

  The aged piece of dead tech hurtled past me. It snapped the tether. The frayed end of the tether hit me in the face. I let go, grabbing at my face, fearful of a suit breach. I didn’t realize I’d slid off the tether until I pulled my hands away, and by then I was already a hundred yards away from Malati, pinwheeling away from her at a constant speed. She had wrapped her hands around the broken tether. I could not see the expression on her face so far away.

  I flailed, trying to see where I was headed. A knife of fear cut through my heart. I realized I wasn’t spinning toward the Legion but away from it. Reason told me I hadn’t been thrown with enough force to escape the Legion’s gravity, but reason did not quell my quaking fear as I tumbled between two great ships, signing for help as I careened past them.

  They might not get to me in time, but Malati could send a shuttle out after me. If my air didn’t run out, if I didn’t careen into one of the ships, if . . .<
br />
  And that’s when I realized that there was no safe passage between those ships.

  Both ships were cut through by the anomaly. It was a broad, disc-shaped plain there, like a bladed saw that split both ships—and I was headed toward the center of it.

  I cried out. I came closer and closer, powerless to stop myself. I saw the distorted reflection of my suit in the anomaly’s shimmering face. A ghost suit without a body in it. To the anomaly, I was already dead.

  Where did we go when we went through the anomaly? Where had my mother gone? Where had all the instruments gone? Where would I go?

  “Please help me,” I said aloud, and I must have been saying it to God, or maybe the anomaly itself, or maybe both, if they were indeed one and the same. “Please,” I said.

  I kicked and waved my arms, instinctive, knowing it wasn’t going to help, knowing movement meant little in vacuum.

  I collided with the anomaly.

  Bright white light burst across my vision.

  I screamed. I remember screaming.

  I wondered if my mother had screamed.

  * * * *

  I woke in a warm, pale blue room.

  Our medical officer, Jandai, stared down at me from within a heavy medical grade suit.

  “Do you know where you are?” she asked.

  “. . . Jagvani Station?” I said.

  “And who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Kariz Bhavaja,” I said.

  She nodded ever so slightly, lips pressed firm. I tried to figure out what that meant.

  “What happened to me?” I said.

  “To hear the witnesses on the Goravna and Arashakti tell it, you passed through the anomaly,” she said.

  “I’m not . . . this isn’t the other side?”

  She raised her brows. “It’s not the afterlife, if that’s what you’re asking. But you’ll see that soon enough when you’re pissing through your catheter,” she said.

  “But . . . no one comes out the other side of the anomaly alive,” I said.

  “Some do,” she said. “But they . . . bring things with them.”

  “Is there something wrong with me?”

  The pursing of the lips again. Then, “You’re under medical watch for a few days.”

  “Quarantine?”

  She nodded.

  Quarantine lasted for ten sleep cycles. I asked about Malati, and Jandai said she was shaken but fine. Malati came to visit me early in the quarantine, and we spoke softly through the protective film around my quarters.

  “I think we should stop,” she said.

  “You want to die here, in the Legion?” I said.

  She could not answer that.

  So, I counted my days in quarantine, which nobody in my generation likes to do, but sometimes you can’t help it.

  On the tenth one, I already knew something was wrong long before Jandai came back. At night, I had felt something stirring in my chest. And on the tenth morning, when I woke, I had a lump in my chest where one had not been before.

  “We’ve detected something,” Jandai said, and I did not let her finish.

  “Get it out,” I said.

  “It’s a living thing,” she said. “Protocol is not to remove it until we understand what it is.”

  “Are you insane?” I said. “You know what it is! It’s one of those things; it’s—”

  “We can’t confirm it’s what’s been reported on the other ships,” Jandai said.

  “It’s a parasite! It will kill me!”

  “We have no evidence of that,” she said. “The science council has recommended that we wait and see. We have a very strict policy about how we handle alien life.”

  “This is insane,” I said again, as if by saying it, I could make her understand it. But she was resistant.

  “You can’t legally keep me in quarantine any longer than ten cycles,” I said. “You have to get rid of it or release me. I’ll call an advocate.”

  “I’ve been given instruction to release you,” she said, “but you’ll be monitored.”

  This shocked me. I couldn’t understand how they could permit me to leave the medical bay with some alien thing in me, but then I started laughing, because of course the alien things were already here, they were all around us, they had cut into our ships a generation before, and now my mother’s generation was just using me as some test tube to see what happened next.

  They sent me home with painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and I lay in bed with my hands over my chest. I swore I could feel the thing growing inside of me. I must have dozed, but when I woke, I had terrible heartburn and spent half an hour vomiting bile.

  I stumbled out onto the balcony overlooking the great garden at the center of the ship and stared down into the lake, and then up at the shimmering anomaly that bisected it and our ship. I understood my mother’s compulsion to jump into it then. I wanted to tear open my chest and get the thing out, but no one wanted to help me.

  Was that why she had really jumped into the anomaly? Had it done this to her, too? And if it had, where had she come out again? Had they hidden her from me because she was contaminated afterward like I was? I closed my eyes and imagined those other ships, the half-eaten ruin of them. Rumor had it the first few had removed these organisms, but they clung to the ship instead and ate everything around them, devouring it like some fungus. If it stayed inside of me, it would eat me too, and then the ship. The prophets had to know this. Why were they permitting me to walk around?

  It wasn’t going to last, I knew. So, I went out to finish what I’d started. I found Malati in our quarters. She had the parts we had carried with us.

  “We go again,” I said. “We make it work this time. We aren’t coming back.”

  “Are you mad?” she said.

  “I know why it won’t let us leave,” I said, rubbing the thing on my chest. “The engines are alive. It thinks they are, anyway. I think the anomaly sees them as kin of some kind. It thinks we’ve enslaved them.”

  “That’s a strange stretch,” Marita said.

  I knew I shouldn’t have said it aloud to her. “I don’t think it was always us who was sabotaging the ships that tried to get away. I think the anomaly made us do it, the same way it convinced the prophets to let me go from quarantine.”

  “If all we’re doing is what they want, then we have no free will,” Marita said. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Some of us do,” I said. “I just don’t know which.”

  “Is that why we’re going?”

  “They’ll stop us soon,” I said. “This isn’t going to last.”

  We took the shuttle this time, because Malati had access. I would deal with whatever the consequences were. But not Malati. Malati was going to be safe, far away from here.

  It took two more sleep cycles to get Pavitra’s wreck up and running.

  “Why haven’t they come for the shuttle?” Malati asked as I powered up the great monster of an engine.

  “You should get settled in the back,” I said. “I’ll deal with them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going with you,” I said. “If I go, and that planet’s already inhabited by someone who came after us . . . I’ll have brought this thing there. I can’t let this thing leave the Legion.”

  “I’m not spending all that time alone! I’ll be an old woman when I get there. Don’t you dare. I’m not doing it. We didn’t go through all this just for you to stay.”

  “They want me to go,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The prophets. That’s why they didn’t take it out,” I said. “I don’t think we have a will of our own anymore, Malati. Not all of us. I think the anomaly is affecting their judgment. It wants me to leave the Legion with this thing.”

  “That’s mad.”

  “A lot of things are mad,” I said. “But you won’t have to be alone. I’ve fitted the rear with escape pods. They’ll keep you in stasis for most of the journey. I’ll sho
w you how to use them. Switch out once, when the first reaches the end of its cycle, and you’ll be there before you know it.”

  “I can’t do this alone,” Malati said. “First Mother, then you—”

  “You won’t be alone,” I said. “The fate of the whole Legion goes with you.”

  She firmed her mouth, then, though unshed tears made her eyes glassy.

  I powered up the ship, and I put Malati in deep stasis in one of the escape pods I had hauled off the derelict and fitted into Pavitra’s ship. The second waited nearby. I didn’t know if she could last the cycles of rest she would have to be awake in between, but if she didn’t, then everything that remained of us would die out here. Or maybe, I thought, gazing out the port window at the growing tangles of fibrous matter eating the ships at the core—we would be transformed.

  I kicked on the engines and set them on autopilot with a long timer. When I popped free of the ship and into the transport, the growing lump in my chest throbbed. My head ached. I piloted the transport away, quickly, and sat back to watch.

  I half expected the ship to explode. I watched it power up and jump forward. It heaved toward the edge of the Legion like a shot. I held my breath as it cleared the gravity well.

  Then the blue burn of the cruising thrusters, the intricate combination of organic fuels that burned so hot it powered the ship at near-lightspeed, blazed brightly. I’d only ever seen those thrusters chemically burn in vain, shown to us in recordings of the first few attempts they had made to free the Jagvani, so we’d know what it would look like if it ever worked again. But ours never got us anywhere. We were tethered in place.

  Pavitra’s ship broke away from the Legion.

  I watched it for a long, long time. Long after it was even a speck in my field of vision. Behind me, the artificial sun at the core of the Legion came up and bathed us all in orange light.