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*click*
(Stereotypical springtime sounds, birds tweeting, wind rustling leaves, the chatter of voices just out of earshot.)
Martin: Eep!
Jon: They’re like dandelions, aren’t they? But someone’s likely to trip if they keep manifesting in the middle of the walking paths like that.
Martin: *Chuckles* Someone indeed. I will speak to one of Day’s spiderlings, for all the good it will do.
Jon: Every time someone trips and falls on campus, it’s a snack for the nearest Vast apprentice. Sherpa Tshering insists that it teaches the kids to look where they’re going. (There’s a faint scraping sound, as of a tape recorder on a paved walkway). Let’s just move this one aside, there.
Martin: Happy anniversary, by the way.
Jon: Our anniversary isn’t for a couple of months, Martin.
Martin: Not that one. The anniversary of your apotheosis, so to speak. Do you know that as of today you have served the Eye for longer than Jonah Magnus?
Jon: *Sighs* No wonder I’m tired. Ah, here we are then.
(The sound of a door opening)
Jon: This is supposed to be quite the Story. I had hoped to take it directly from the Quixote’s Seeker, but she’s laid up in hospital.
Martin: Will she be all right?
Jon: They all will. Do mind if I sit in physically, Anthologist? I may have questions.
(the sound of chairs being moved about)
Martin: Of course—if you don’t think it will make the Navigator too nervous.
Jon: She can afford a little nervousness, and it’s not like it will affect the quality of the Story. I think we’re ready. Let her in, Martin.
(door opens, footsteps, a sharp stop at the end. A woman’s voice, sharp, professional, perhaps a little too crisp.)
Sky: Sky Mackenzie-Vast, Navigator of the seeker ship Quixote, reporting for Story and debrief.
Jon: At ease, Navigator Sky. Do have a seat. You’ve had quite the trip this time out, haven’t you?
Sky: Yes, Keeper of the Watch.
Jon: Call me Jon. And here’s Martin with our tea and biscuits. When you’re ready, Martin will give a brief introduction, and then you can jump right in.
Martin: So you’re aware, it’s very likely that, after this, I’ll be popping by your dreamspace from time to time. The process of giving and receiving Stories creates a lasting connection.
Sky and Jon, at the same moment: (Sky): I’m married, I know. (Jon): She’s married, she knows.
Martin: All right, all right. Are you ready?
Sky: I’m ready, Anthologist.
Martin: It’s Martin, really. Story of Sky Mackenzie-Vast, Navigator on the Seeker ship Quixote, regarding initial encounter with Kepler 1649-c. Story given directly by the Navigator. And so it begins:
Sky: The Seeker ship Quixote is tasked with searching for inhabited planets within five hundred light years of Earth. Quixote has a crew of four, including my life partner Fugue Al-Sayani-Spiral, who serves as pilot, our engineer Handy Soisson-Corpus, and our Captain Hypatia Bretton-Eye.
The Quixote’s mission is to assess star systems deemed likely to harbor intelligent life. Our targets are selected by high-level avatars of Eye and Web at the Space Exploration Hub in White Plains, New Mexico. In our travels so far, we have encountered fourteen dead worlds with no surviving intelligent life. Fourteen planets covered in nothing but moss and worms, or films of bacterial slime. Only one world we have scouted has successfully driven the Entities out of their space—and since its discovery, no Seeker ship has returned, in hopes of keeping that world uncontaminated.
The four of us set up for transit to Kepler 1649-c from low-Earth orbit as usual. It’s easier for Fugue and me to start transit as close to Earth as we can, so we can access the powers of the Entities we embody more directly. It’s quite beautiful up there. Seeing the Earth from above, nestled in the strands of the Web, with each intersection of the strands holding a brilliant emerald Eye. Hypatia says seeing it with her own eyes is so much more, well, real than seeing it secondhand through her patron. You should arrange to go at least once if you haven’t been. With Earth at our back, we could see the faint haze of the Veil of the Lonely protecting the world from the Hunters-Between-Stars. Hypatia commed ground control from the crow’s nest to request passage through the Veil.
There was a short delay while the message was relayed to its intended recipient, and a longer one while the Lonely avatar on the ground arose from their contemplation. Forsaken drew back the Veil and the stars shone through. I checked to see that Fugue was ready for transit. “Always,” he intoned, with his theremin voice warbling eerily through the cockpit, then he reached out with hands made of refracted music and pulled.
The ship corkscrewed into the Spiral’s tunnels, and as usual, it took my full attention to keep from being dragged into dead ends or pathways leading into less-than-habitable dimensions. The Great Empty called me forward, tempered by the tight grip of Fugue’s hand in mine. We followed the Seeker’s map to the target system. I sheltered Fugue from the infinities of the void, and he navigated the twisting corridors that link the worlds of the galaxy. His galaxy, or at least his patron’s, he likes to say, pointing to its spiral shape as evidence.
His galaxy it might be, but it nestles like a spray of baby’s breath in the Great Empty that belongs to my dear Vast. Time stretched, the ship creaked under the strain of moving through impossible spaces, and we shot, still spinning, into the space near a world tidally locked to a little red dwarf in the constellation Cygnus. It took us some time, minutes or perhaps hours but not days, to come back to ourselves after a three hundred light-year jump. Once we emerged in base reality, we checked in with Hypatia and Handy.
Handy responded first with a block of text on my screen. HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE. Handy can operate a keyboard as well or better than any of us. I’m pretty sure he insists on block caps to distance himself from the rest of the crew’s outwardly human appearance, though it’s possible he just does it because he knows it annoys Hypatia. “You don’t need to shout,” I told him. “How’s the ship?”
GIVE ME TIME TO FEEL IT OUT
Hypatia chimed in from the crow’s nest, “Collecting preliminary data.” The data rolled in, temperature, atmospheric composition, radioactivity. The data points changed from moment to moment in a way that base physics doesn’t allow, which meant a world with active Entities warping reality around them. A Changed world.
Beside me, Fugue pouted. “I’m hungry. Can we go in closer? The population’s response to our presence ought to top me off.”
“You’re always hungry after a transit. Give our Seeker a chance to skim the planet before we get too close,” I told him.
“Party pooper,” he groaned in kazoo.
“Overgrown child,” I teased.
“As well I should be.” Fugue fidgeted in his seat, spilling paisley eddies into the air and down onto his seat to join others already etched into the plastic and metal. I remember thinking that Handy would need to replace that chair sometime soon.
Which reminded me to tap the link to ship operations. “Handy, how’s the ship holding up?”
TRANSIT SMOOTH AS MY ASS
“Do you even have an ass?” I asked him. Joking cuts the tension and I will not apologize for it.
WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW?
The alarms went off about that time. They’re very loud and the lights flash both red and yellow so we can see them through the distortions Fugue throws off when he’s nervous or excited. Hypatia shouted over the comlink from the crow’s nest, “Hostile entities, go, go go!”
Fugue wrung his hands hard enough to start dropping fingers. “I don’t know if I—“
“Just a billion klicks or so,” I reassured him, “we don’t have to make it all the way home.”
Fugue, who isn’t very good at following orders, opened his swirling mouth on a whine when the ship lurched sideways and started to accelerate toward the planet. As it did, I could feel a pull that wasn’t just gravity, just enough skewed from the Vast to feel wrong-shaped in my brain, grabbing at me. Fugue started to melt into the floor.
I have always had a greater affinity for the Vastness of space than the Depths of the ocean—the Deep feels to me more like a manifestation of the Buried. I felt water on my skin, lukewarm and thicker than it ought to be. It covered my face and I felt pulled downward into violet water. Down and down and down, where I would drown with salt and acid burning my eyes and my lungs. Whatever controlled the manifestation of this entity was stronger than I was.
But I was smarter. Like all of us, human-born or otherwise, I’ve been mastering Fear since I was a toddler—and the inhabitants of this Nightmare world clearly had not. The Buried thrives on struggle. Its nemesis is stillness. I called to mind the stillness of the Great Empty, the Void between the galaxies, dark and still and quiet. When the illusion faltered enough to allow me to sense my real surroundings behind the threat of drowning, I dragged myself free. Hypatia was shouting from the crow's nest about antlions.
Fugue screamed, hooked me into his domain, and pulled the whole ship a quarter turn out of reality. I pushed out ahead to feel my way forward into a safe, neutral, empty patch of space devoid of anything larger than a bacterium. If we hadn’t trained for years together, we’d never have managed to get the ship to a safe distance before the planetary Entities got hold of us and the ship again. I could feel Fugue’s music straining beside me, see it in the splitting and reforming spirals digging into the structure of the ship, into our bodies, worming their way into space itself, filling the Void with ripples. It hurt more than I thought I had nerves to be hurt. A part of me feared that the ship would tear itself into fragments and we would exist in agony until the stars burned out. When the Fear takes hold, the instinct is to deny and contain it, but that would rob us of the power we needed to escape—so I let it take me, holding back only a scrap of myself to aim the ship into the emptiness between worlds.
The ship dropped abruptly into base reality, shedding improbabilities as it went. I tried to ask Hypatia if we were out of range, but the words bounced around inside Fugue’s mirrored domain and before I knew what was happening, I fell into it. I saw eight dimensions, nine, ten, eleven. My skin slid off and folded itself neatly over an old-fashioned stand mirror. It smelled like Bach. I couldn’t remember how to breathe. Fugue had been pushed too far, starved himself in his jump and I, by being closest to hand, had become food. I screamed capsaicin and purple before I dissolved.
I came around to the feel of Fugue’s wobbly fingers slapping gingerly at my face. “I couldn’t stop myself,” Fugue said, tears streaming out of his eyes to collect in electron orbitals around his face.
I spoke quickly to stop him from trying to apologize or make excuses. “What are the rules?”
He mumbled, “I don’t know, I don’t like rules, they’re sticky.”
“Look in your pocket.”
He rummaged around in his pockets, hampered by the fact that new ones kept manifesting in his clothes, until he pulled out the paper. “Fugue is food for Sky in an emergency. Sky is food for Fugue in an emergency.” The rules had to be written extra simply so he would understand them when the hold of the Spiral was strongest.
“You did good, Fugue,” I told him. “You saved the team.”
He sniffled. “You found the safe space for us.”
“That’s my job.” I heard the tapping of a hundred fingernails on the ladder leading from the crow’s nest. Handy flowed toward us, cradling Hypatia in dozens of hands. Our Seeker had Handy’s carpetlike body wrapped around her like a comforter. He reared up beside me to sign his worry with long fingers tipped with needle-sharp claws, each one meticulously painted.
Hypatia’s eyes closed, a few at a time until only her human eyes rested on us. “The Buried rules down there—or something very like it. I caught glimpses of other members of Barker’s Twenty: The Hunt, the Machine, the Eye of course, it tried to pull me into its domain. The people there live underground. I think they might be a bit like centipedes in their natural form. They’re definitely in the Nightmare stage of the Change.”
It would make sense that a civilization around a red dwarf would live underground. The frequent solar flares would be a radiation hazard, and even with the planet’s thick atmosphere to moderate its temperature, the night side of the planet ran a good fifty degrees Celsius colder than the day side—at least when base physics applied. “Any chance they’ll work their way out of it?”
“I don’t Know. All I got was snippets, plus what the instruments could give me, and I didn’t want to stay long enough to find out more. We’ll make our report to Watcher and Weaver and they’ll decide what can be done.”
And now we’re here. The four of us would like to volunteer to be part of any intervention team you decide to send in. We’ve all seen a lot of awful things out there, so many worlds that didn’t survive Becoming. I can’t stop thinking about it. We need to go back. I need to go back.
Story Ends.
Jon: Thank you. We’ve already received a written Statement from Handy Soisson-Corpus and we’ll be talking to your Seeker shortly. If you have any brief questions for us we can take those now, but after that strict trauma mitigation protocols apply.
Martin: He means, take your medication, spend a minimum of one hour on neuro reorganization therapy, and get in touch with your patron.
Sky: Will do, Keeper. Will we be going back there?
Jon: Both the Council of Avatars and the secular government will have to weigh in on that before a decision is made. But for what it’s worth, I certainly hope that something can be done for them. You’re dismissed, Navigator Mackenzie-Sky.
Sky: Thank you, Keeper. Jon.
(A door opens and closes.)
Martin: What do you really think, Jon?
Jon: We tried to keep the Fears confined to one universe. Given that we haven’t found a single world with intelligent life that escaped developing them, it probably wouldn't have mattered. These Fears are not ours. We’re not responsible for their occurance.
Martin: But Jon, we can’t just—
Jon: Of course we can’t. But it will be a hard sell, especially with the secular government. And I don’t want Day pulling any strings to influence the debate, either. For now, we push to send a recon team to get a better idea of what’s going on down there. I don’t Know whether we can help them find a way through, but I believe we should try.
Martin: Just—I hope it doesn’t take too long.
*click*