Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

There were two wings, each ablaze with lambent energies of wavelengths as yet unidentified. They rippled and flamed across the firmament, faint but unmistakable, like bands of energized nebulae ripped loose from their primary cloud. Nearby stars were clearly visible through them, but they were substantial enough to hold color. With each massive emission from the smaller star, the Chauna partook a little of the enormous energies that were passing between the two suns. The central portion of the event—creature? spirit?—was sleek and slightly less pellucid than the wings. No other features were visible: no limbs, no face, no projections of any kind. No other features were necessary.

“It looks,” an awestruck Anna observed almost inaudibly, “like a butterfly. But what’s going on? What is it doing?” She had to strain to make out the Old Man’s reply.

“It’s feeding, Anna. Though it’s millions of kilometers across, it’s too fragile a structure to pull energy from a star itself. So it waits for one star to move near enough to another, for all that great deep gravity to do the job for it. When it senses what’s going to happen, it places itself between the two and filters what it needs from the fleeting eruptions of plasma, like a great whale feeding on plankton. Neutrinos, cosmic rays, charged particles—who knows what it ingests and what it ignores? How would you, how could you possibly study such an entity? We can only watch and marvel. In the process, it apparently acquires throughout the length and breadth of its otherwise imperceptible substance a little ancillary coloration.”

“A little!” The tenuous but vast extent of the Chauna was already greater than both suns. She continued to stare—what else could one do?—even as the Seraphim ’s instruments methodically registered the immense strength of the repeated solar outbursts while her screens fought to shield her frail, vulnerable, minuscule organic occupants from the effects of all that energy being blasted into space.

On other worlds, instruments would register the pulsar-like outburst and place it in the accepted category of celestial disturbances. They would not note the presence of a third object drawing upon a tiny portion of the expelled energies. Though of unimaginable size, that object was far too ephemeral to be perceived by distant instruments.

The feeding of the Chauna was an infrequent event, or it would have been noticed before. The Cosocagglia had noticed it, in their thousands of years of space-faring. Now it was, at last, the turn of humans to do so. The myth had been made real. And it was a discovery that could be shared and supported. The Seraphim ’s battery of recorders would see to that.

When those incredibly attenuated sun-sized wings moved, there was a collective gasp among the crew of the witnessing vessel. Nothing like a Chauna had ever been seen before, and nothing like a Chauna in motion had ever been imagined. It was beyond imagining, past belief, a magnificent violation of established astrophysical doctrine. With that movement, no one questioned any longer if the phenomenon was alive. It was visible for another minute or two, a colossal undulation of energized color rippling against the starfield, a million billion times vaster than any aurora. Then it was gone, the life-sustaining solar energy it had assimilated dispersed throughout its incomprehensibly vast incorporeality.

For a long time the navigator stood staring out the lofty port, aware she had been witness to one of the greatest sights—if not the greatest sight—the galaxy had yet placed before a captivated humankind. Then she was reminded that her hand was still resting on the sharp shoulder of the man who had made it possible for her to experience the inconceivable wonder. The man who had insisted it was real, that it existed, and that if they persisted long enough and looked hard enough, the tiny wandering creatures called humans might actually be able to descry such a marvel. Who had insisted despite the protests and disapproval of his fellows.

Suddenly she understood a little of what had made Gibeon Bastrop the singular individual he was. Suddenly she understood something of the source of his remarkable ability and drive and power. It made her wish she could have known the man, and not simply the pitifully weakened and aged husk that presently occupied the motile.

“You were right, Mr. Bastrop. You were right all along. You and the Cosocagglia. And everyone else was wrong. Mr. Bastrop?” Her hand slid gently along the bony shoulder until it made contact with the leathery neck. The head reacted by falling forward, stopping only when the strong chin made contact with the all-but-exposed sternum. The neck did not pulse against her hand. When she shifted it, no air moved from the open mouth against her palm. She drew her hand back slowly.

“You were right,” she repeated. “It was beautiful. As beautiful as you had hoped.

“And so were you.”

At Sea

The juxtaposition of entirely different story ideas is one of the joys of writing. This is especially true of science fiction and fantasy, wherein the writer has access to absolutely anything that can be conjured, no matter how seemingly unrelated. The only rule is that the final result has to make sense as a story. You can mix together all manner of ingredients, but the result has to be something palatable to the mind.

Grounding fantasy in the real world is always fun. You have the opportunity to upset all manner of perceptual applecarts. If your concept works well, you also enjoy the pleasure of surprising the reader. Sometimes the most disparate notions will come together to produce a viable tale. Once the story is plotted and the rough draft completed, the writer then has the fun of sprinkling it with details, like adding lace and sequins to a dress. The design of women’s earrings, for example, is not something I often find myself having to ponder when putting in those little touches that add verisimilitude to a fantasy. Nor are the minutiae of drug-running, commercial fishing, and Scandinavian mythology.

Especially not in the same story…

“Hoy, Cruz—thereare five horses on the stern!”

Sandino was a big man with a squinched puss and huge arms the color of aged bratwurst. Right now his expression was slowly subsiding into his face, like a backstreet into a Florida sinkhole, swallowing his features whole. It was left to his voice, which had the consistency of toxic cheese-whip, to convey his confusion.

Although he was onboard a modern longline fishing boat, Cruz did not know much about fishing. This did not matter, because he did not care much about fishing. Boats, however, were something else. Boats could go where planes and cars could not. As far as fishing boats were concerned, the best thing about them was that they stank. The big swordfish boat reeked of blood, guts, fish oil, and sea bottom. This made it perfect for Cruz’s purpose. This was his ninth run on the Mary Anne, and there was no reason to believe it would be any less successful than the previous eight. No one suspected she carried any cargo beyond the limp mass of dead billfish in her hold. No one suspected that one particular dead swordfish contained twenty million dollars’ worth of pure top-grade Bolivian cocaine that did not normally form part of a billfish’s diet. Compressed and packed into dozens of waterproof, odor-proof, break-proof packages, this highly inhalable product of the Andean hinterland fit neatly into the honored fish’s hollowed-out body cavity.

Cruz did know enough to realize that the presence of five horses on the stern of the Mary Anne, 120 miles out from Providence, Rhode Island, was not in accord with normal commercial fishing procedure. Even if the horses had been dumped at sea, they could not have climbed aboard. Since he had not heard the metallic bang-and-rattle of the big winch that was used to haul in the longlines, they could not somehow have been lifted aboard.