J Batt: Onliest

Composed 2970

Between the stars, there are no seasons. Shadows of dead worlds drift in the void, but there is no laughter. Perhaps small nebulae, lit with their own faint fires, float without aim, but there are no voices. In the vast gulf—a gap far larger than the human mind can comprehend—perhaps wonders wait to be discovered. But not life.

Life does not spread through the cosmic distances. It roots itself on the microscopic worlds that hug the warm stars.

Life is a coward. It never ventures far from the blanket of the solar winds, and the dusting of magnetism that sparks the skies above its head.

Between the stars, there is only loneliness. And in time, madness.

This is a fact as constant as the tick of hydrogen spinning in its singular electron shell. Unalterable. Between the stars is death, and only fools aim to cross it.

The great starship Olorun launched, with its own teeming masses, toward another sun. Between the stars, beyond that border, loneliness gripped it. And then madness.

Its builders had conquered the interstellar challenges: food, energy, propulsion, habitat, radiation, laundry, medicine, and more. They were ignorant of life’s desperate pull back inward, back to the star that birthed it. Remember, life is a coward.

Olorun launched as the pinnacle of human achievement. The builders utilized every known advancement in the construction of the behemoth starship. It roared out of the Sol system like a dragon in rage.

Kapteyn’s Star lay ahead as its target. The red dwarf hung nearly thirteen light years from Sol. It was bright enough to be viewed by children looking through telescopes, yet the star itself was a visitor to our galaxy. Torn from the Omega Centauri cluster millennia ago, it was a much cooler star than Sol, burning nearly 3500 kelvin less.

Rolling in orbit around Kapteyn’s Star were two super-Earths: Kapteyn-b and Kapteyn-c, named Àpáàdì and Òkè respectively. Àpáàdì was five times the size of Earth, and it orbited Kapteyn’s Star every forty-eight days. Òkè was seven times the size of Earth. The system was ancient, possibly over eleven billion years old. They are worlds twice the age of Sol itself. In millennia past, the just-waking beasts upon their surfaces could look up at night and see Sol wink into existence, forming from the clouds of stellar matter.

Òkè was cold. Dead as the grave. A world that wished to sleep away the eons before it. It stayed silent, and its ghost would not even venture forth to haunt.

Quite different from Òkè, the closer brother, Àpáàdì, was a gray marble with blue veins of running water coursing across its shattered surface. There are oceans of water, but they are coursing under forested surfaces. The word “temperate” crept into scientific reviews of the globe. Tempered. A calming, beckoning world.

Why go to such a different place? It circled in the habitable zone—a range of space around each star where the requirements for life are apt to flourish—and was the closest star to Earth with such a find. Odd, alien, and enchanting.

Àpáàdì called to the new life around Earth. “Come to me, you young ones. Beings such as you once stepped from my oceans. They have long since left, but I am still here, waiting. My forests wait for your children to run barefoot through them. My clouds wait for your eyes to marvel at them. Swim in my seas. Bring life to my ancient shell. Come.”

And life called to life. Deep called to deep.

Truly deep inside the human heart, that call echoed. Humanity heard it. A magnetic pull twisted their heads to that part of the sky, and the builders gazed across the gulf.

The twinkling of stars was a cruel joke. They appeared close enough to pluck from the sky. The phantasmic darkness between Earth and distant suns was vanquished. All to make us leap across the gap.

When we recognize the danger, it’s often far too late. We were out from the shore, unable to swim back. The dark fathoms circle. There was no foundation. Nothing below. Nothing above. Alone. Alone. Alone.

These were the thoughts that haunted the crew of Olorun as it breached the interstellar medium. Who heard them first amongst the thousands in that metal hull? The Captain? Or a young child? A worker deep in the lower levels, close to the hull, close to the thin barrier between life and death, his hand pressed against the metal, feeling the pulse of the void? When did the maddening reminders encroach? Perhaps someone foolishly reading Lovecraft late at night? Who first opened the doors to the madness of truth?

It did not matter. The uncontainable fact of the void would’ve encroached upon them somehow.

Don’t make the mistake of comparing the space between stars to the simple exercise of circling the globe or navigating to the Moon or Mars. On the red soil, on the peak of Olympus Mons, the warmth of Sol can still be felt on your skin. The tug of gravity is still there, although, in such a minuscule degree it goes unnoticed. The dunes of Mars gaze upon the oceans of Earth. It is a risky trip but still within the neighborhood. Help is just a call away.

Out here, where Sol and Kapteyn’s Star are just dots in the peripheral, loneliness was real for the first time.

A thousand Earths—a million Earths—could careen through this frozen vacuum without touching. In a gulf so immense, madness was nature.

Olorun blazed into the gulf and tore into the insanity between the stars.

Across the roiling space between stars, the generation starship Olorun lumbered, and deep in its spinning, cavernous hull, a girl lazed.

Under the light of a false sun, against the gentle current of the great river Lokun, a tiger named Eku swam like a god and, stretched out on the great cat’s back, her limbs dipping below the water, lay Syn, the young queen of the abandoned starship. Her clothes, forgotten fabrics gathered from empty homes, rested strewn on the bank. Her skin, already dark as the tiger’s own stripes, soaked up the faux sunlight.

Above them both, watching them laze in the warm afternoon, floated a white porcelain, oblong-shaped bot named Blip.

“There’re demons below the mirror,” Syn whispered, her eyes shut and her feet bobbing across the waves as Eku paddled from side to side. Each word was hung onto as if wanting to be a song.

“Stop it,” Blip spoke in his nasal tone. His white shell displayed a blue pixelated face. A series of blue lights arranged in two circles provided him eyes, a thin line for a mouth, and, when needed to emote, a pair of eyebrows. Right now, his mouth turned down in a visible frown, and he rolled his eyes.

“Maybe the river has no bottom. Maybe there’s a kingdom below. Maybe they’re just waiting for us to sleep, and they’ll swim up to steal us away.” She opened one eye—just a sliver—to glimpse Blip’s reaction.