Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

So we learned each other for two beautiful months. During our time together I forgot stars and space and the Antarsa—there was only her slow, unfurling self, body and mind, every part an enchantment. I would have wanted to partner with her, had I stayed on planet. Now that I was far away, I could only remember and weep. She never sent me messages, though her brother did. I think it was hard for her and perhaps she thought it would be hard for me.

Dear darkness, help me keep my equilibrium. Here I am, in a universe so full of marvels and mysteries, and I mourn the loss of my already lost loves as though I was still young and callow. What a fool I am!

I shall keep stillness, and feed no more that envious, treacherous god within, the god of a heart bereft.

Vik has rarely ventured from Ship University. He’s one of those people who likes to put down roots and ponder how we got here. The past is his country. Ship University is a good place for him.

It is housed inside the generation ship that brought my people to Dhara so long ago. The ship lies in a hollow made for it in the sandy plains near a lake. It contains the records of my people’s history and of the home planet, and the cryo-chambers are now laboratories. The shuttle bays are experimental stations, and cabins are classrooms. In the forests or the sea, the mountains or the desert, it is hard to believe that we have the technology we do. “Have high tech, live low tech,” has been a guiding principle of the Kinships. That is how we have lived so well on our world.

Ship University’s sky scholars were the first to study the flight of devtaru pods. Vik’s friend Manda, a sky scholar of repute, told me how the mystery deepened as the early scholars tracked the moon-pods with increasingly powerful telescopes. I can see Manda now, slender fingers brushing back her untidy brown hair, her eyes alight. I was visiting Vik after wandering for a month through the Bahagan desert, and it had become clear to me that there was a wall between us. I felt then the first hint of the ending to come. I think Vik sensed it too. He sat next to me, looking restive, while Manda talked. She showed us a holo of a devtaru moon-pod launching from a century ago.

Despite my misery, I found myself fascinated. There was the tiny pod, dwarfed by the curve of Dhara, apparently going into low orbit. The moon wasn’t in the picture, which was to scale, but we were informed that the planet, the pod and the moon formed a more or less straight line through their centers. In its orbit around the planet, the pod began to tremble abruptly, like a leaf floating on a stream disturbed by a random eddy. Then it swung loose from its orbit and made straight for the moon. It traveled with such astonishing rapidity that all we could see was a silver streak. Then the scene cut to the moon and the pod approaching it, swinging past it a few times, slowing gradually until at last it made a rough landing in the southern forest. There was a bloom of light, a brief fire where it hit, then the film stopped.

“This was taken by Kaushai, back about a century ago. All this time there have only been speculations as to how the devtaru pods get to the moon, why they suddenly change course from low orbit to the trajectory you saw. The pods themselves have no means of propulsion. There is nothing in the void of space between the planet Dhara and the moon. The first probes that were sent to duplicate the orbit of the pods suffered no strange perturbations, nor were they drawn toward the moon. The devtaru pods apparently violate fundamental laws of nature: that momentum and energy must be conserved.”

I knew something of all this, of course. But I had never seen the holo before. It was quite amazing. I felt Vik stir beside me—he looked just as entranced, and when my gaze met his, as miserable as I.

Yet it was a chance remark I made on that visit that set the sky scholars on the right track.

I go back to that time in my imagination. Vik and I are both starting to realize that our paths are too different to allow for us to be together, although it will be quite some time before we have the courage to say so to each other. So the golden afternoon, and our togetherness, have acquired a deep, sad sweetness. We join Manda and her friends for a walk around the lake. They have been talking all day about the mystery of the devtaru pods, telling us how they spent years camping by a certain devtaru, watching it, getting to know it, asking it to share its secret. Now some of them feel as though the devtaru has communicated with them already, that they already know what the secret is, but it is buried deep inside them and needs some kind of stimulus, or reminder, a magic word or phrase to bring it into consciousness.

After evening sets in we find ourselves tired and hungry—we have walked a long way and the stars are beginning to come out in a pale pink sky. We are at a place where a small river empties into the lake, making an intricate delta of rivulets. We are wishing we had a boat to get to the shore from which we ventured, where the bulk of Ship looms, its many windows lit. The air is full of the trembling cries of glitterwings. I am speechless with emotion, with the thought that the end of our partnership is as close as the other shore. Vik is silent beside me. Just as we are talking about boats, I find the remains of one at the bottom of a rivulet. It is full of holes—in fact, most of it has rotted away, but for the frame. It lies indifferently in place as the water rushes through the holes.

“If this boat were solid,” I say, “and the current strong enough, it would move. It would carry us home.”

A pointless, inconsequential remark. But Manda stares at me, understanding awakening in her face.

She told me later that my remark was the thing she needed to unwrap the gift the devtaru had already given them. What had been one of the saddest evenings of my life was the moment when she and her colleagues solved the mystery of the devtaru pods. Two days later Manda spoke to a gathering of hundreds.

“Imagine an ocean that washes all of space and time. Like the water ocean, it has currents and turbulences. But its substance is invisible to us, as we are invisible—or transparent—to it.

“This is not so strange an idea. As the neutrinos wash through ordinary matter, through you and me, as though we weren’t there, as water washes through the broken boat with the holes in it, so the subtle ocean—the Antarsa, named by our poet Thora—washes through planets and stars, plants and people, as though we did not exist.

“We don’t know whether the Antarsa is made up of neutrinos or something else. We suspect it is something as yet unknown, because too much is known about neutrinos, which can be caught by ordinary matter if the net is both deep and dense.

“Now imagine a form of matter that is not ordinary matter. This, too, is not strange, because we know that what we call ordinary matter is rather rare in the universe. There are other forms of matter that make up the bulk of the cosmos. One of these forms, what we are calling the altmatter, is opaque to the Antarsa. So if you place a piece of altmatter in an Antarsa current, it will move.

“The pods, of course, have to be made in part of altmatter. How the devtaru acquires it we don’t know; maybe it draws it up from deep underground, mingles or combines it with ordinary matter, and forms the pods that are meant to go into space.”

That was so long ago, that moment of revelation. Some years later, experimenters took the discarded moon-pods that are empty of seed, the ones that the devtaru shoot out for practice when they are young, to make the first altmatter probes. And now I am here.

Here I am, working the sails in the navigation chamber. I’ve done enough waiting. I am steering my craft as close to the edge of the current as I dare, as slowly as it needs to go so that changes in speed won’t tear it apart. I want to get closer to my mysterious companions.