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

I took with me some pieces of the broken altmatter wing. They confirmed that the inside of the cave was a relatively still place, where the Antarsa currents were small. By waving one piece of wing in front of the statue, and using another piece on the other side as a detector, I determined after a lot of effort that the statue was made of ordinary matter except from the neck upward, where it was altmatter or some kind of composite. This meant that my kin had made this statue after they had been here a while, after they had discovered altmatter. I stared again at the statue, the woman with the ecstatic face, the upraised eyes. She saw something I could not yet see. I wondered again how she had come to be placed here, in a nameless cave on a battered moon of Ashta.

I am now moving away from Ashta, on a relatively smooth current of the great Antarsa ocean. I am convinced now that I can sense the Antarsa, although it blows through me as though I am nothing. I can tell, for instance, that I am out of the worst of the chaotic turbulence. I can only hope that I’ve caught the same current I was on before I entered the Ashtan system—it is likely that the current splits into many branches here. I will be completely at its mercy soon, since I do not have much fuel left for the fusion engines. I also must conserve my food supplies, which means that after this message I will enter the cryochamber once more—a thought that does not delight me.

At last I have relinquished control of the altmatter sails to the ship’s computer. I woke from several hours of sleep to see, on the radar screen, images of the altmatter creatures sailing with me. Unlike me, they all seem to know where they are going. Here their numbers have dropped, but I notice now a host of smaller replicas of the behemoths, and the wheel-like creatures, and I wonder if the Ashtan system is some kind of cosmic spawning ground. I wish very much to offer kinship to these creatures. I already miss the little fish in their cave on the moon. That has given me hope that although we are made of very different kinds of matter, we can make a bridge of understanding between us. Life, after all, should transcend mere chemistry, or so I hope.

I have sent many messages home. In a few years my dear ones will read them and wonder. The young people I will never see, children of my kin-sisters and kin-brothers, will ask the adults with wide eyes about their aunt Mayha, Moon-woman, who forever travels the skies. But I have one faint hope. Out on the Western sea, Raim once told me that the great ocean currents, the conveyor belts, are all loops. It seems to me that it is likely, if our universe is finite, that the Antarsa currents are also closed loops. If I have chosen the right branch, this current might well loop back toward Dhara. Who knows how long that will take—perhaps my descendants will find only that this little craft is a coffin—but the hope persists, however slight, that I might once again see the blue skies, the great forest of my home, and tell the devtaru of my travels.

One casualty of my crash-landing on the moon is that Parin’s biosphere is broken. I am trying to see if some of the mosses and sugarworts can still survive, but the waterbagman broke up, and for a while I found tiny red worms suspended in the air, some dead, others dying. There was one still captured in a sphere of water, which I placed in a container, but it is lonely, I think. I am trying to find out what kind of nutrients it needs to stay alive. This has been a very disturbing thing, to be left without Parin’s last gift to me, a living piece of my world.

I stare at my hands, so chapped and callused. I think of the hands of the stone woman. An idea has been forming in my mind, an idea so preposterous that it can’t possibly be true. And yet, the universe is preposterous. Think, my kin, about this fact: that ordinary matter is rare in the universe, and that in at least two planets, Dhara and Ashta, there is altmatter deep within. Think about the possibility that altmatter is the dominant form of matter in the universe, and that its properties are such that altmatter life can exist in the apparent emptiness between the stars. Our universe then is not inimical to life, but rich with it. Think about the stone woman in a cave on the irregular little moon that circumnavigates Ashta. Is it possible that there is some symbolism in the fact that she is made of both matter and altmatter? Is it possible that the generation ship of my ancestors did not really leave the system, that instead my kin stayed and adapted more radically than any other group of humans? Imagine the possibility that the fate of all matter is to become altmatter, that as the most primitive and ancient form of substance, ordinary matter evolves naturally and over time to a newer form, adapted to life in the great, subtle ocean that is the Antarsa. Suppose there is a way to accelerate this natural change, and that my kin discovered this process. Confronted with an unstable home world, they adapted themselves to the extent that we cannot even recognize each other. Those slim figures I saw, thrown out of the ruins of the little spacecraft after its epic battle with the behemoth—could they once have been human?

How can anyone know? These are only wild conjectures, and what my kin on Dhara will make of it, I don’t know. It depresses me to think that I never found a way to make kinship with the creatures monitoring the vast net. If there had been a circumstance in which I could have met them on a more equal footing than predator and prey, I would have liked to try. If my ideas are correct and they were once human, do they remember that? Do they return to the little moon with its cave-shrine, and stare at the statue? At least I have this much hope: that given my encounter with the tiny fish-like creatures of the cave, there is some chance that lifeforms composed of ordinary matter can make kinship with their more numerous kin.

My hands are still my hands. But I fancy I can feel, very subtly, the Antarsa wind blowing through my body. This has happened more frequently of late, so I wonder if it can be attributed solely to my imagination. Is it possible that my years-long immersion in the Antarsa current is beginning to effect a slow change? Perhaps my increased perception of the tangibility of the Antarsa is a measure of my own slow conversion, from ancient, ordinary matter to the new kind. What will remain of me, if that happens? I am only certain of one thing, or as certain as I can be in a universe so infinitely surprising: that the love of my kin, and the forests and seas and mountains of Dhara, will have some heft, some weight, in making me whoever I will be.

Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her latest novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad , from Tor Books, and a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless , from John Joseph Adams Books. The sequel, The Wild Dead , will be out in 2018. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of eighty short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com .

Professional fingers pried open Mitchell’s left eyelid, and white light blinded him. The process repeated on the right. He winced and turned his head to escape. The grip released him.