In the Shadow of the Stars
by J. F. Sebastian
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
When the airlock finally opened in the perfect silence of the void, Rhea faced the infinite depths of space for the first time in her life. After eleven years locked away within the cloister-world of the orphanage, after months spent working deep within the hull of the Thanaku, there she was: a runaway teenager on the edge of space.
But as she pulled herself out of the hatch, feeling dizzy as the star field seemed to fall away from her, what she saw was nothing like the crystal-like twinkle of the Galatea constellation. All around the ship, billions of suns were shining steadily, far dimmer than she had imagined. It was a deepness of unblinking, cold and distant lights that instantly reminded her of one of Dalu Furije’s most haunting poems:
An infinite sea of indifferent, shining diatoms
In the depths of the deathless darkness,
Dim bioluminescence of all things past.
Rhea took a deep breath and reminded herself that she was supposed to savour this moment and not file it deep within her I-memory as she had been taught to do. But she couldn’t help feeling vague, unexpected tremors of sadness and loneliness beneath the surface of her willfully dulled emotions.
My first time in space... Among the stars... She thought, trying to find her own poetry in that moment.
She briefly closed her eyes and thought about the nights, back on Vör when, alone, she had sneaked out from under the warden’s polished eye to look at stars and constellations, her body oblivious to the Aethon’s icy touch. As far as she could remember, they had been calling to her, carrying her beyond the dormitory’s whitewashed walls, beyond the planet’s raggedy trees and howling peaks and to the rest of the Universe, to what she imagined was a better life.
Why can’t I feel anything?
Breathing as slowly as she could, Rhea tried to dig deeper within herself to find a twinkle of positivity, but all she was conscious of was her own body’s discomfort: the beads of sweat slowly drenching the inside of her suit, the communication cap that kept sliding off her scaly skull, and an itch that she couldn’t scratch on the side of her neck.
She took a deep breath and clenched her jaw. Come on, Rhea.
“You okay over there?” Jer suddenly said through the I-Link, his deep, warm voice dissipating it all.
Her eyes caught some movement on her right and she saw that the Thanaku’s engineer was waiting for her, his huge, complex suit like a piece of the ship’s machinery. “Time to go,” he said, pointing towards the front of the ship.
Embarrassed, Rhea opened her empathic receptors and netted whiffs of patience and understanding coming off of him.
“Yeah, sorry,” she replied, feeling reassured.
Then, without a word, without a sound, Jer started to shuffle along the hull. Rhea followed him. She knew that the diverse crew of the Thanaku had already accepted her, yet she couldn’t help thinking that she needed to prove herself to them, to show them that, even though she only had two arms and two legs, she could still make herself useful inside as well as outside the ship.
She heard Captain Abaktas clear his throat, and she shivered slightly as she imagined how the slits on his throat must have quivered as he was about to speak. Despite her self-control, she still had trouble accepting how different the other crewmembers were, for diversity was not something she had been introduced to at the orphanage. But as alien as the captain was to her, she didn’t need her receptors to detect slight boredom and a sliver of impatience.
“Rhea?” he said in a wet, raspy voice that seemed uncomfortably close to her ears.
“Yes, Captain?”
“I know your kind only have two arms and two exceptionally useless legs, but today you have a relatively simple job to do. Just remember your training and you’ll be fine.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t let you down,” Rhea replied.
Walking along the hull, all she could see were the various feeds pulsating on her faceplate and nothing beyond but blunt, undefined shapes against the dim starry background. Her first primal instinct was to turn on the suit’s lights to recover her sense of space but, since Jer had not turned his on, she hesitated. Hands thrusted slightly forward, she tried to remember the general features of the ship, a vaguely ovoid minesweeper topped with radar domes and damaged starshine panels, but it didn’t help. She started to feel increasingly alone and lost in an ever-expanding void.
She stopped walking, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then, focusing on the rush of anxiety she could feel rising within her, she started to chant one of the sacred sounds she had been taught on Vör. Thankfully, nobody interrupted her through the I-link, and she was able to center herself in the moment and in the task at hand again. Come on, you can do this! Remember your training, she thought.
“Jer? I can’t see you,” she said into the I-link.
“Over here,” Jer said as he turned on and waved one of his wrist lights from about twenty feet away.
“Thank you for waiting,” she said, trying to sound grateful.
“No problem. You can turn your lights on, you know.”
“Oh, okay. Since you didn’t turn yours on, I thought—”
“I can see fine without them.”
“Oh, yes... right,” she said, flicking the switch, hoping to cast away the immensity of space she could feel all around them. But even in the pale, hesitant light, there was nothing to see but vague, convex shapes that still meant nothing to her.
As she came close to the looming shape of the engineer, Rhea realized that he was close to the edge of the ship, looking at something port side.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Turn off your lights, and keep your faceplate feed to a minimum.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Rhea then fumbled with her suit until all sources of light were shut down, and then she looked up. What she saw hanging right in front of them, standing in front of a faded canvas of pale stars, looked like a hole punched into a two-dimensional sky, around which gravity squeezed and distorted the rays of a million distant suns.
A black hole.
Even though Rhea had seen pictures, she had always preferred to imagine them as turbulent spheres of purples and blues, surrounded by a radiant ring of gas and dust.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Jer said.
“Yes, it’s... strange.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Well, I imagined something more imposing. This looks more like an optical illusion.”
“Are you looking at it in visible light?”
“Yes, why?”
“Try switching to the infrared.”
“Okay.”
As soon as Rhea made the change, her faceplate instantly placed the Thanaku on the edge of a gigantic accretion disk, glowing like coal around a half-moon of perfect blackness. She suddenly felt small and insignificant.
“Wow, I-I d-didn’t think...” she blurted out, feeling a rare tingle of surprise.
“Impressive enough?”
“Yes.”
Rhea was taken aback as she received a faint, sour trickle of fear-suffused awe coming from the engineer.
“So many things elude the naked eye. Never forget that. Especially out here. There are two universes. One is visible and the other—”
“Fun fact,” Abaktas interrupted, his voice still raspy and wet, “because of a black hole’s gravitational pull, time passes more slowly the closer we get to it.”
Rhea and Jer said nothing, waiting for the punch line.
“But where I’m standing, time hasn’t slowed down and you guys are starting to waste mine.”
Rhea saw Jer shrug inside his bulky suit. As everywhere in the universe, space was not for poets or dreamers but, as she had slowly come to realize, a place of business and deadlines.
“Okay, Cap’, let’s get to it. Where’s the debris field?”
“Under your feet, at a 45 degrees angle. More or less. I’ll rotate the Thanaku. Hold on to your boots.”
The universe shifted around them, as if it were spinning around the minesweeper’s axis. Rhea, momentarily unbalanced, grabbed a piece of Jer’s suit. Slowly, the black hole and its colossal disk reached the ship’s zenith and came to a stop. Losing all sense of direction, Rhea felt her head spin but forced herself to let go of the engineer.
“Feeling better, kid?” Jer asked.
“Mmmm... Not so much...”
“Take the time you need.”
A few seconds passed until the captain broke the relative silence of their I-Link, his voice getting noticeably more phlegmy.
“All right, check the visual feeds. The wreck should be right in front of you.”
Flicking through the various wavelengths, Rhea saw distant stars and nebulae dance in front of her, changing colors and shapes, from splashes of crude greens, reds, and white to luminous blurs and ghostly blues.
“So do we know who sent the distress call?” Jer asked.
“Hard to tell. There are many wrecks out here. Our beloved Katu picked up the beacon’s signal, but it was not able to clearly identify its ID source. According to its report, it’s ancient technology,” Abaktas said.
“An ancient wreck?” Rhea said.
“Yeah.”
“And then you say we are wasting your time? Come on, Cap... Are we that broke that we need to scrape old ship from a place like this?” Jer said.
His fear, Rhea sensed, was starting to cover him like a shiny, slick aura.
“Well, we might still find some interesting stuff: some of those fanatics were very, very rich. And they brought all their stuff with them to... you know,”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Black holes are safe, Jer.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Can I ask what this is about?” Rhea suddenly asked.
“Jer here doesn’t like black holes because most of the wrecks we can hope to find belonged to crazies who killed themselves, and each other, to go through what they believed to be gateways to a parallel universe. He believes it’s bad luck to hang around so much carnage and superstition,” Abaktas said, before starting to cough.
“I thought you knew me better than that, Cap’,” Jer commented after a short moment of silence.
“I do, I’m just not used to seeing you back out of something.”
“I’m not. I’m just being prudent.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not having any strange readings down here. Everything appears normal.”
“All right, you’re the captain.”
“Thanks for reminding me. Okay, sending you both the updated radar reading of the wreck zone. That should make things easier,” he said, before coughing again.
Just as the infrared had transformed an empty space into a colossal disk, the radar feed sent a precise grid-mapping of the wreck. From an ominous and mysterious wasteland, everything now looked like a computerized three-dimensional map of grids and pixels, among which floated, in various colors, the coarse-textured, 3-D representations of the wreck’s limbs and innards.
“Jer, look after the kid, okay?”
“I knew you’d end up caring about her, Cap’.”
“Yeah, I need someone small enough to clean the ship’s sewage pipes.”
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by J. F. Sebastian
