The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Elena peered in at the gleaming pods arrayed inside, tubes snaking out of them and up to the ceiling. “These people live on Ganymede. They can look up through the domes and see Jupiter looming in the sky above them. But they still want to play in imaginary worlds?”

  “If you grew up in the Imperative, Jupiter isn’t that exciting – it’s just the big swirly thing in the sky. Wherever you are is normal, and people like to get away from the familiar. Me, if I get tired of where I am, I get on a ship and actually go someplace else, but not everyone is built that way.” She paused. “Poor bastards.”

  Elena chuckled as they walked on. “I shouldn’t judge. I spent some time in the Hypnos on Glauketas, though mostly in educational immersives meant for children, soaking up a few centuries of history. I was never big on games, though back in my day, you couldn’t actually mistake them for reality – even the best virtual reality couldn’t pass for real life.”

  “I thought in your day people kicked cans and rolled wooden hoops down the street with a stick and whittled for fun?”

  Elena nodded solemnly. “Sometimes, on special occasions, we had bear baiting.”

  When Stephen got in touch to tell them he’d finished shopping and was on his way back, they returned to the White Raven. Stephen arrived a bit later and found them in the galley. He took off a backpack, presumably full of drugs, and frowned at them. “I met up with some members of my church, to make sure Ibn and Robin and Uzoma were being taken care of – they’re fine. But we started talking about other things, and I mentioned the Taliesen system, and there’s troubling news from the congregation on Owain.”

  “Were some of the lost surveyors members of the church?”

  Stephen nodded. “Yes, a few – and the church sent their own mission to search for the missing congregants, without success. In fact, the searchers never came back, either.”

  Callie frowned. “When was this?”

  “The news is fresh through the bridge from the Taliesen system. They went missing no more than a week ago, apparently.”

  “Huh. This is sounding less and less like a series of bad accidents, and more and more like coordinated enemy action.”

  Stephen nodded. “There’s something else, maybe unrelated, but… Last year, a member of the church went on a month-long solo trip in a small ship, traveling in the void, taking various sacraments and plunging deep into his inner self.”

  “In my day, people just did peyote in the desert for a few days,” Elena said.

  “Outer space is the greatest desert of all,” Stephen said. “He had a vision, on the far outskirts of the system, where there’s an extensive asteroid belt, apparently. He said he saw an asteroid, quote, ‘turning to dust and nothingness, devoured by the dark.’ He found this vision profoundly disturbing, and the ship’s life-support systems detected his distress, sedated him, and returned him home early.”

  “Bad trip,” Callie said. “In a couple of senses.”

  “Oh, yes. Those sacraments can cause hallucinations, of course, and it could have simply been a case of shifting shadows, but when the congregants went missing… they disappeared near the same place where he had his vision. When he heard about the missing people, he said, ‘What if the darkness devoured them, too?’” Stephen shuddered.

  “Don’t worry,” Callie said. “If there’s darkness out there, we’ll bring the light.”

  The voyage back to Glauketas was quieter, and somehow melancholy, with so many fewer people on the ship. At least Callie didn’t see any more shimmers. Maybe it had just been stress-related anxiety. When they were within real-time communication distance, Callie opened a voice channel. “Ashok! How’s my asteroid?”

  “Still drifting in the endless dark, cap. You almost home?”

  “I am. Why?”

  “Lantern’s back. Let me put her on.”

  Lantern spoke into Callie’s ear. “Callie, the elders have agreed to send me to Taliesen to investigate the disappearance of our sect there. Ashok tells me humans have been disappearing too? That’s troubling. It’s hard to believe the situations are coincidental.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Callie said.

  “Are you leaving to investigate soon?”

  “Sooner than soon. We’re basically just coming back to get the White Raven and pick up the rest of my crew. Are you calling me to bum a ride?”

  “I thought you might like the opportunity to beg abjectly for my expert assistance on your mission,” Lantern said.

  “This is my groveling voice,” Callie said.

  Chapter 10

  The White Raven floated just beyond the orbit of Jupiter’s moons, waiting in a line of ships to pass through the bridge to the Taliesen system. They had a specific time for departure, a “bridge window,” but there were always small delays that sometimes added up to big ones. Unfortunately, if you showed up late, the Jovian Imperative’s Bridge Authority would auction off your spot to last-minute travelers on standby, so you had to join the queue on time, even if you ended up motionless for a long delay.

  Elena and Lantern, the two people (at least, the two conscious people) on the ship with no specific responsibilities, were in the observation deck, looking out the high, curved windows at the other ships. There were bulky gas transport freighters that were little more than clusters of tanks with engines on one end and cockpits on the other; large passenger vessels that looked like apartment buildings uprooted from Earth and set adrift in space; and smaller ships that moved like minnows among whales, some sleek and gleaming and pointlessly aerodynamic, others ramshackle and patched with sealant and panels that didn’t match the rest of the hull in color. There were even a couple of starfish-shaped Liar vessels. Ship upon ship full of emigrants, merchants, politicians, dreamers, fugitives, scientists, and more, all waiting to pass through the bridge to one of the twenty-seven other systems accessible through it.

  “There’s the bridgehead.” Lantern gestured with a pseudopod. An array of cylindrical buoys hung in empty space, thirty-six of them all glowing red, arranged in a circle easily a couple of kilometers apart. “The gate itself is invisible when it’s inactive – the buoys are there to mark the position of the bridgehead. You don’t want your ship parked in the middle of that space when the bridge opens.”

  Elena nodded. She’d seen what happened to a ship when a wormhole opened up in the middle of it. The ships didn’t fare well.

  As they watched, the buoys flashed from red to yellow, and then to green, and the space the buoys surrounded darkened as the stars that had been visible through the “circle” a moment before suddenly vanished from sight. The darkness within appeared to thicken, tendrils of inky blackness reaching out, and the small ship at the front of the queue was surrounded by the darkness, then snatched into the bridge. The darkness rippled for a moment, then dissolved, and the stars were visible again. The buoys flashed back to red.

  Elena shook her head, awed. “It’s so much bigger than the bridges the White Raven makes.”

  Lantern rippled a pseudopod in a way that Elena knew conveyed assent and affirmation. “Your bridge generator is portable, and meant to transport a single vessel. These fixed bridges are different – each one is linked to a celestial body, and follows that body in its orbit, maintaining a constant relative position. These bridges were used to send entire Axiom armadas to systems at once, in order to subjugate, overwhelm, and exterminate – or to transport equipment for larger projects. The bridgeheads were left in place as threats and promises, before the Axiom empire crumbled. Now they are ruins. Useful ruins, though.”

  “Why is there a bridge near Jupiter anyway? The Axiom never came to this system, did they? They don’t even know humans exist as a species, or they’d turn over in their sleep long enough to exterminate us.”

  Lantern crossed two pseudopods: the equivalent of a shrug. “The records are incomplete, but there are rumors of a pre-human race of ocean-dwelling sapient creatures on Earth that the Axiom may have abducted en masse, or killed by
raising the temperature of the ocean enough to disrupt their reproductive cycle, or sterilized by chemical means. There are regions of deep space that are more thoroughly explored than Earth’s oceans are, so there may be all sorts of secrets hidden in the depths. Or maybe there was some other reason the Axiom wanted to visit this place, millions of years ago. Many of the records are garbled, or lost.”

  “The Liars – sorry, the Free – only shared the location of twenty-nine bridges with humans, but there are more, right?”

  Lantern fluttered partial agreement. “There are hundreds. We only told humans about ones that were deemed to open a safe distance from any Axiom projects. It’s better if the humans never suspect there are more gates. We feared that humans would experiment with different radio frequencies and forms of radiation and manage to open bridges to new locations, but fortunately the combinations are so complex and specific that the odds of a human stumbling on one that works by accident is small. The various port authorities in the colony systems discourage such experimentation anyway.”

  They swayed as the White Raven put on some thrust, moving closer to the bridge. A couple of other ships heading to the Taliesen system moved up with them. They were second in line – almost there. The White Raven’s crew was on official business, so they couldn’t just use their own bridge generator to travel, without leading to a lot of questions about how they’d traversed light years of distance so quickly without leaving a trace. Literally all extra-system travel from the Sol system went through the Jupiter gate: that was what made the Jovian Imperative so powerful. They took a toll from every ship that passed through, ostensibly to pay for security and traffic control and so on, but really just because they could. Elena supposed that was the way of the world, even when “the world” comprised nearly thirty systems scattered randomly across the galaxy.

  The buoys flashed, turning from red to yellow to green as the Bridge Authority bombarded the bridgehead with the specific forms of radiation that caused it to open a path to another system. The ship ahead of them, an immense passenger vessel, slowly moved into the inky tendrils of the gate and vanished. The buoys turned red again.

  The Raven and its cohort moved closer. “Here we go,” Elena murmured, then waited the long moments for the lights to change and the empty space to thicken. The tendrils of the gate reached out, surrounding them, like the grasping tentacles of some undersea abomination.

  The journey was surprisingly unexciting. Everything went black, and though there was a sensation of movement, it wasn’t particularly dramatic. “That’s it?” Elena said, and after twenty-one seconds, they emerged into a new star field, close by a large asteroid with a domed facility clinging to its side like a tumor: the Taliesen system’s Bridge Authority. The system’s star, which seemed to Elena a paler orb than the one back home, was bright enough that the observation deck’s windows darkened several shades to compensate. A dot was just visible in the distance: Owain, presumably.

  “That’s it,” Lantern said.

  “Weird,” Elena said. “When we go through our bridge, there’s a tunnel, and there are lights – it’s clearly a created passageway, something built on purpose, not just a boring trip through the dark. Though now that I think about it, going through a tunnel where the lights have all burned out, or been switched off, is kind of creepy.” She pressed up close against the windows, looking at the distant speck she took to be Owain. Another planet, inhabited by humans, so far across the galaxy from her homeworld that it would have taken a goldilocks ship ten thousand years to reach it. These people had achieved the dream of her bygone age: they were out there, making lives among the stars. Tears started to well up in her eyes.

  Callie’s voice boomed over the PA. “We’re here. We’ll go to Owain to check in with the company liaison, and then we’ll go investigate the disturbance.” She paused. “Or lack of a disturbance. The anomaly. Whatever.”

  “I can’t believe she doesn’t sound more wonderstruck,” Elena muttered, looking out the viewport. “We just traveled through a wormhole to another inhabited solar system. This is objectively amazing.”

  “Those native to this time view traversing bridges as akin to commuting on those… trains you had in your century. The ones underground,” Lantern said.

  “Subways,” Elena said.

  “Yes. Remember, the bridges were in use longer than any of the crew has been alive. Familiarity can make anything routine.” She paused. “I do not mind routine. I suspect we’ll have plenty of opportunities to be surprised in the future.”

  “This part at least gets to involve wonder, and not terror,” Elena said. “I’m going to enjoy that while it lasts.”

  The trip to Owain was going to take a while, even with the Tanzer drive on full thrust, because the planet was at almost the farthest point in its yearly orbit from the bridgehead. No one knew why the gate was tethered to an asteroid of no particular distinction, but then, no one knew how it was tethered, either; the builders of the wormhole bridges had done things their own way for their own reasons with their own methods. Fortunately, the asteroid was never all that far away from the planet – they didn’t have to travel for a month like Ibn and Robin would to reach their colony world – but it was going to take a few days. At least they could afford to use fuel profligately now, since they were on the Almajara Corporation’s payroll.

  Callie hit the gym with more regularity than usual on the trip, working the resistance bands hard, because it had been a while since she’d been down a real gravity well, and Owain was a hair over a full G. Even Stephen joined in for occasional workouts, though he grumbled that he had adaptive medications that could give temporary boosts to muscle performance, and the side effects weren’t that harmful when used sparingly. Ashok was content with his mechanical augmentations – he could bound around in multiple Gs with aplomb – and Lantern found it all baffling, since her particular offshoot of Liar physiology got by just fine with nothing but isometric exercises.

  Elena loved working out, though, taking obvious joy in movement and the endorphin rush of a hard workout. For Callie, exercise was more like checking the air filters or keeping the reaction wheels lubricated: dull, but necessary in order to maintain functionality. Watching Elena sweat in her workout gear did improve the whole gym experience, though. One morning when they were alone, working out on machines across from one another, Elena broke the companionable silence. “I hope it’s OK if I’m objectifying you a little right now.”

  Callie chuckled from within her tangle of straps. “And here I was under the impression you loved me solely for my mind.”

  “Your mind is good. The housing for your mind is also a factor.” Elena puffed a sweat-sticky strand of hair off her forehead. “How long will we be on the planet, before we have to zoom off into the dark?”

  “A day or two, probably. Almajara Corp will put us up.”

  “Almajara.” Callie thought the word sounded pretty in Elena’s mouth. There was probably no such thing as a “twenty-second-century accent,” but Elena had it anyway: her vowels were softer and more rounded than Callie was used to. “Is that Spanish?”

  “Spanish, sure, but it’s also Arabic, or close enough. Two words that happen to sound sort of the same – false cognates. In Arabic the word means ‘galaxy.’ In Spanish it means, like, a cultivated field? Or, more specifically, a field that’s been freshly fertilized – I used to tell Michael he worked for the Spreading Bullshit Through the Galaxy Corporation.” Elena laughed, and Callie grinned. “Michael’s great-great-whatever grandfather was from the Barcelona flotilla, and his great-great-great grandmother was from a vertical city in the Emirates, and when the couple founded the company together they wanted to choose a name that would reflect their two cultures. There’s a whole speech the personnel resources directors give new hires, about how the company is devoted to growth across the galaxy. Basically, it’s a bilingual pun.”

  “Ha. Personnel resources, huh? In my day that was called human resources, but I gue
ss when you might hire the occasional Liar, the whole ‘human’ thing could come across as insensitive. This living-in-the-future situation still takes some getting used to.”

  Callie strained against the bands, bringing her wrists and elbows together slowly. “You’ll figure it out. As well as anyone does, anyway. One nice thing about living in a galaxy where you can jump from one solar system to another in twenty-one seconds is that most people have a high tolerance for strangeness. A million subcultures have bloomed, and if you do something really strange by local standards, people will just shrug and figure that kind of thing is normal in your system. Don’t break any laws and you’ll be fine.”

  “What kind of subcultures does Owain have?”

  Callie grunted through another rep, then let the straps drop. “Owain has a reputation as a haven for philosophical types and artists. The very first charter colonists, who spearheaded the terraforming effort, came from a now-defunct religion that preached the importance of abstinence and… who remembers? The holiness of cruciferous vegetables or something. The abstinence is what did them in – conversion rates weren’t high enough to keep them going when they weren’t raising their own children in the faith, such as it was. When the sect dissolved, their claims were sold off for cheap, because living on a half-terraformed world isn’t exactly easy. Various other utopians and artist collectives snatched them up – people with more vision than money, you know? Now that the planet is actually habitable, it’s attracting more mainstream sorts of colonists, but it’s still got, I don’t know…”