by F P Adriani
And when they had finally decided on something and the Demeter’s nose was finally on the cusp of the cloud’s boundary, I said, “Here goes!”
My eyes were glued to the viewscreen as the front of the Demeter slid into the cloud. It was darker inside than it looked from outside, and it was a creepy darkness inside, not a cozy one.
“What’s going on?” I said. “I thought it would be more colorful in here. Where are all the chaotic motions….”
As if my words had called them to life, there was a sharp shot of something on the viewscreen—a flash of steely gray color and bumpy texture, and it was headed right for the Demeter.
“Gary!” I shouted.
But it was too late for us to react in any other way: whatever the gray form was, it easily slid over the shell of the Demeter and jerked the whole ship to the right in one massive motion.
“Shit! Any damages?” I asked engineering.
“None that I can see,” Karen said fast. “It was more like a gravitational wave of the space here rather than like a matter wave moving separate from the space. The gray wave actually seems to be carrying us now like a surfboard.”
The image on the screen rapidly changed to a state that looked more like the cloud’s exterior. Waves of colorful particles—or what looked like particles—they suddenly appeared and the Demeter lurched again, to the left this time, as if the gray “surfboard” had instantly dropped us somewhere, though this new place didn’t look any different than where we had been, as in: this new place didn’t look any less chaotic.
I sat forward in my chair, my strap pulling across me tighter. “Chen, Steve—has the computer found any non-random motions in the numbers?”
Before Chen could get more than a “no” out, the Demeter jumped again, backwards. I was thrust even more forward in my chair, then back again, and this seeming dance with the sea of space went on for a few minutes more, with no break.
I finally heard Shirley’s moans. When I glanced over my shoulder, she had turned into an extremely pale, shaking form inside her brown chair. “Shirley, are you all right!”
“I shouldn’t have eaten anything earlier,” she mumbled now, one of her arms wrapped across her white shirt, over her stomach.
“We’re all feeling that way,” Gary said, his voice dry and tired.
I turned back around to my panel, feeling my own stomach contents rising too high. “Ugh…we were so worried about the ship, but how long can our bodies last like this? Why aren’t the internal dampers and gravity adjusters helping us reach an equilibrium faster here?”
Steve’s deep voice had a slight shake to it when he responded to me: “I think whatever’s happening, whatever we’re feeling—it’s outside the scope of any of our damping mechanisms; the forces from out there aren’t normal ones. I can’t negate them. I’ve been trying.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m going to start broadcasting my message. Let’s hope I don’t throw up during.”
My fingers frantically worked at my front panel now, trying to find my file with the speech I’d written for Rintu—trying and not succeeding. But, really, I was too stressed-out now to bother with my prepared statement anyway.
I banged open a communications-line, set it for no particular direction, and began talking. “This is Captain Zarro of the Demeter. I’m trying to reach the planet Rintu.”
I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen, but I hoped more than nothing would happen. Unfortunately, exactly nothing happened, except colorful weird shit still kept flying toward the Demeter and away from it, carrying us along or scaring us into trying to move away. But, so far, the ship’s shields had held, and the ship hadn’t gotten anything more than several very shallow gouges in the outer hull, which I still wasn’t crazy about….
Now I said to my crew, “I’m going to try again—where do you think the center of the cloud is, Chen? Can anybody determine that from where we are now? If you can, point our nose in that direction….”
It took my crew a few minutes, but they finally did as I asked. Then I said over the communications-line, “This is the Demeter. I’m Lydia Zarro, the Demeter’s captain. If anyone is there on Rintu, or wherever in this cloud, I just want you to know one thing: I have one of the stones, and I’ve used it.”
An instant after my statement, there was a change outside: a complete cessation of motion on the starboard side of the Demeter. A long, black, tube-looking space suddenly appeared there, and it seemed to extend far into the distance.
My heart was pounding so hard, it was shaking my chest. I pressed a hand there, as if that would quiet my insides. “Gary, are you reading anything about that black area?”
“Yeah. I’m reading a completely docile space. No apparent forces. It looks like heaven compared to this other shit we’re in.”
I grunted, then said to engineering, “Turn toward the opening. This seems to be what we—I came here for.”
We entered the strange void slowly now, and it really was like the complete opposite of the kinetic exterior. Here in the black, there was no motion, there was no light; there was just an endless tunnel, that led to who knew where.
I licked my lips and the others on the bridge flashed me jumpy eyes. They did their job; I did mine. But there wasn’t that much to do, except keep going forward, and then even that became irrelevant when forces—or something—finally began pulling the Demeter down the tunnel.
Then slowly, very slowly, the appearance of the tunnel changed; it brightened into a charcoal gray, then into a silvery gray; then it brightened even more till it finally became a misty, pale gray mixed with an earthy reddish glow, as if we’d just flown into a dust storm on a sunny day.
I frowned. “Great. From dark to light but we still can’t see anything.”
I was about to add something else when a strange, wind-like sound came over the communicator—and then a voice, a normal voice, a human voice, probably a woman’s voice. The voice’s vibrations were authoritative and husky, and slightly accented as it said, “Captain Zarro, turn off all of your engines. We will pull you in.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
“We are The Keepers Of The Tasui. A smaller number of us are humans who came here to Rintu; we now represent The Keepers to other humans, the few times we’ve let them in here.”
I couldn’t help the dryness in my tone now. “I feel honored that I’m one of them, but, to be honest, I’m not happy to be here. Who are the Tasui, and how are you talking to us? There’s no indication on my panel of anything incoming.”
There was a long pause. Then: “Demeter, you must completely shut down your beam engine—we’re reading a minute flux of curon particles.”
From inside engineering still, Steve said to the woman, “It’s never an instantaneous shut-down—but how the hell did you read the flux? I can barely sense it on this end, and I only see it now because I looked for it after you pointed it out.”
Just like the Keeper people hadn’t responded to my last question, they also didn’t respond to Steve’s question.
I felt annoyed, but I didn’t get a chance to express that because the woman said, “In sixty-five seconds, you will begin traveling over Pruveria, the capital of Rintu. Shortly after, we will pull you onto an elevated platform. Do not attempt to leave your ship until we say you can.”
“Bossy,” I mumbled, my eyes on the viewscreen again, which view rapidly changed from earthy red to bright red, then to bright orange—and such a shocking orange that at first I thought there was something wrong with the bridge viewscreen. “Yikes,” I said as I yanked my eyes from the view. “That orange is extremely bright.”
“It is because of the sun and Rintu’s atmospheric composition,” the woman said. “We will provide you with special glasses when you get here.”
“I just thought of something: how the hell do you even have sunlight when the sun here’s outside the cloud?”
There was no reply.
I sighed, glancing over my shoulder at Gary, who
shrugged at me, then added a small warm smile, then finally shook his head. He looked cute standing there and apparently feeling as confused as I felt….
I turned back to the viewscreen; the density of the planet’s atmosphere had decreased, visually at least. I magnified the view, and the misty orangeness soon began dissipating even more, revealing huge, black spires that towered over mottled red ground below. Dots of orange light glistened on the hexagonal and rectangular black columns as they rose high over the red earth and over each other, almost as if they were in a contest to see which one could reach the stars first. One by one they were stacked, well into the distance.
“Wow…that’s an incredible view,” Shirley said from behind me, and I nodded fast without turning to look at her. “How were they able to lay the buildings in the way they did? There’s barely any ground between many of them. I think they look crystalline, as if they’ve been twinning!”
I hoped the woman from Rintu would jump in and give Shirley more information, but there was no reply from the Rintu end.
I glanced over my shoulder toward Gary again. “What are your readings showing?”
“The buildings are mostly made of a compound neither I nor the computer recognize,” Gary said. “But there’s some onyx mixed in and lumenite. At least some of the orange glow apparently isn’t sunlight but is a luminescence.”
“That sounds familiar,” I mumbled.
The women’s voice came into the Demeter again, and I sat up straighter in my seat as I listened to her. “You will be landing on a red platform in less than a minute. You won’t have to do anything; your landing will be soft. Remain inside till I contact you again.”
Now I asked her, “Shouldn’t we put down the landing gear?”
“If you like, but it isn’t necessary.”
“Just put it down, Chen,” I said.
His head jerked a nod at me.
Up ahead on the viewscreen, a large red platform suspended between two relatively short black columns came into view; the Demeter was pulled in that direction till it was finally over the platform. I realized then that the landing area was a lot bigger than I’d originally thought; the red plane actually connected more than two columns.
The Demeter slowly touched down, then slid along the platform, but I still felt nervous: what if we kept going, right over the edge? Though we didn’t seem to be in the highest part of the city, we were still quite high….
“Captain?” Steve said from down in engineering, and, considering the cautious rumble of his deep voice, he must have been thinking the same thing I had been.
“If we don’t stop soon, just start braking,” I said fast.
“I’m going to in about ten seconds,” Chen said.
“We’ll count down,” Gary added.
“Ten,” I said. “Nine—”
The view outside suddenly stilled because the Demeter had finally stopped.
I unstrapped from my chair and stood. I turned around to face the others and clicked on the intercom for ship-wide. “This is the captain. Apparently, we’ll be invited outside and to—to somewhere. Whoever wants to go, get ready. Also remember that we’re guests here, and there is no known protocol. Just let me do most of the talking.”
*
A few moments later, I was rushing through my ship, toward my cabin. When I got there, I opened my safe and pulled out the stone.
My heart was dancing around too hard as I paused to stare down at the stone. It was still so beautiful, and I still hated to part with it….
No turning back now. This had to be done.
*
Only a few of my crew wound up wanting to leave the ship, which was actually a good thing because the kind of reception we would get from the Rintu people still wasn’t clear. Plus, things still always needed to be done on the ship to keep it functioning…or not.
I was walking toward my bridge when Karen contacted me over my belt communicator. “Lydia, we’ve got a major problem on the ship—it happened all at once: all ability to store, record and read data is now gone. We can’t get any scanning, recording or logging device or computer terminals to work on this issue. Everything’s reading no power or a black screen then.”
My face turned red. “That can’t be,” I said. But I knew it probably could be.
I rushed onto my bridge, which was empty now; my three bridge companions from before all wanted to leave the ship and had decided, at my urging, to change their clothing to more formal attire, which I had done too; a dressy purple blouse covered my torso, and a long, black, satiny skirt over black boots covered my bottom half. My skirt shimmied along my legs as I quickly moved toward my chair.
“Captain?” came Karen’s voice again over my belt communicator.
“I’m here,” I said to her, but over my bridge intercom now.
I glanced at my front panel, did some finger-work there—and confirmed what Karen had said. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her—far from it. I didn’t trust the equipment on here, the set-up, the situation.
I straightened and said loudly, “This is Captain Zarro again to The Keepers. Have you done something to my ship? We can’t use any of our recording equipment, and why are our databases down?”
That same voice from before now said, “I am Kostas. You will not be allowed to record and research anything while you are on Rintu.”
“And what about our minds? They record too.”
“We will discuss that later,” Kostas said, and I could tell by the brusque way she’d spoken that the conversation was over from her end.
But that didn’t mean I had to comply. “You know, our needing to use recording equipment isn’t about you crowd. It helps us operate the ship and find problems by looking over its history! I am here at personal risk to me and my crew. You could at least discuss things with me before you do them. So far, I’m not impressed with the high-handed way you crowd do things.”
I didn’t expect a response, and I didn’t get one.
Nevertheless, I felt a jolt of anger move through me, especially because it was very clear now that I no longer had control over my own ship.
*
A little later, my crew and I got another verbal message from Kostas, saying we could leave the Demeter, which hatch we should leave from, and where we should stand once we’d left.
“These people are control freaks,” I said as I moved toward my ship’s cargo bay. Gary, Shirley, Chen and Geena were beside me. We were on our way to pick up May.
“How are you doing?” I said to her when I finally reached her desk area, where she was sitting behind her large computer monitor.
“I’m all right, Captain. But—” she passed a hand across her forehead, her dark eyes rolling nervously as she stood up “—what about my work? I can’t access some things now! I was in the middle of doing some calculations on the expected mass loss after the Keron dropoff, but then we suddenly lost recording power. We’ll have to go container-to-container and add up the amount of mass listed by the suppliers, which sometimes isn’t correct. I’ve lost our own measurement records!”
I waved a careless hand and took her bare forearm in my other hand, gently urging her away from her desk. “We’ll worry about that later. We’re all equally screwed here on that score. Geena’s left Bill and Brayburn to hand-calculate an overdue tally of the dry-pantry’s enormous stock—and how much pasta and sauce to make later. By the time they’re done with their work, maybe we’ll be lucky if we’re served a forkful each of pasta tonight.”
I heard Gary laughing from behind me. I jerked my head over my shoulder to smile at him—and admire him. He was in a beautiful royal-blue shirt and black pants, and he’d brushed his brown hair till it curled in thick waves around his face. He looked great. I wanted to say so to him, but now wasn’t the right time….
“Here goes,” I said as I walked out the cargo-bay hatch and down the Demeter’s ramp. I finally hit the red platform floor; it was very shiny, yet, curiously, it wasn’t slippery—which
made sense because the Demeter would have had difficulty being pulled to such a quick stop on it. There must have been some non-frictional force—a field or some unknown type of force emanating from inside the red material—that was keeping everything upright and clinging to it, including my booted feet.
I walked toward the shiny, black, column-like building that was perpendicular to the Demeter’s ramp; Kostas had indicated that my crew and I should walk that way, and doing that now brought us closer to one of the platform’s side edges.
I could see out and across and beyond, to far in the distance, to the planet’s misty horizon. According to the Demeter’s computer records, before the expansion of the gravity cloud, Rintu used to be a flat, featureless, yellowy colored place, but now it was just gorgeous—especially the juxtaposition of the tall, glowing dark buildings with the pockets of larger areas of bright red earth in the distance, and then that brilliant orange atmosphere….
I suddenly remembered what Kostas had said about eyeglasses. Yet the atmosphere now didn’t seem as bright as it had seemed on my bridge viewscreen.
I said that out loud to my crew beside me, but I heard Kostas reply, “There is a field here on the platform that’s keeping us partly indoors. If we ventured away from these structures, the atmosphere would become brighter.”
My head had jerked toward where her voice seemed to have come from: the large black doors at the bottom of that black building were open now, and a bunch of people in orange clothing were walking through the doorway and stepping onto the red platform.
One person among them was wearing a long, hooded, orange robe, which looked serene and stately; the rest of the Rintu people were wearing utilitarian-looking orange jumpsuits and carrying what seemed to be glowing electronic devices.
“They look like monks about as much as we do,” I mumbled to my crew.
“We are workers,” Kostas said, and because the Rintu people were closer now, I could see who her voice had come from: one of the people in the orange jumpsuits. Above her orange-covered shoulders, her crown of hair was dark, thick and wavy, and her tall form walked in a very alert yet somehow graceful way.
