To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

by Christopher Paolini

  * * *

  Kira woke, confused.

  It was still dark, and for a moment, she knew neither where she was nor how she had gotten there, only that she was falling from a terrible height—

  She yelped and flailed, and her elbow hit the control panel next to the pilot’s seat. The impact jolted her back to full awareness, and she realized she was still on the Valkyrie and that the Bach was still playing.

  “Ando,” she whispered. “How long was I asleep?” In the dark, it was impossible to tell the time.

  “Fourteen hours and eleven minutes.”

  The strange dream still lingered in her mind, eerie and bittersweet. Why did the xeno keep sending her visions? What was it trying to tell her? Dreams or memories—sometimes the difference between the two seemed so small as to be nonexistent.

  … then flesh parted from flesh. Another question occurred to her. Would separating from the xeno kill her? That seemed like one possible interpretation of what the suit had shown her. The thought left a sour taste in her mouth. Surely there had to be a way to rid herself of the creature.

  Kira wondered how much the Soft Blade really understood of what had been happening since she found it.

  Did it realize it had killed her friends? Alan?

  She thought back to the first set of images the xeno had forced upon her: the dying sun with the ruined planets and the belt of debris. Was that where the parasite came from? But something had gone wrong: a cataclysm of some sort. That much made sense, but beyond that, things grew indistinct. The xeno had been joined with a grasper, but whether the graspers had made the xeno (or the Great Beacon) wasn’t clear.

  She shivered. So much had happened in the galaxy that humans were unaware of. Disasters. Battles. Far-flung civilizations. It was daunting to consider.

  A tickle formed in her nose, and she sneezed hard enough to bang her chin against her chest. She sneezed again, and in the dim, red light of the cabin, she saw curls of grey dust drifting away from her, toward the shuttle vents.

  Cautious, she touched her sternum. A thin layer of powder covered her, same as when she’d woken on the Extenuating Circumstances during the grasper attack. She felt underneath herself; no depression had formed. The xeno hadn’t dissolved any part of the chair.

  Kira frowned. On the Extenuating Circumstances, the xeno must have absorbed the decking because it needed part or all of what it contained. Metals, plastics, trace elements, something. Which meant it had—in a sense—been hungry. But now? No depression, but still the dust. Why?

  Ah. That was it. She’d eaten. The dust appeared each time she or the xeno ate. Which meant, the creature was … excreting?

  If so, the unpleasant conclusion was that the parasite had assumed control over her digestive functions and was processing and recycling her waste, disposing of whatever elements it didn’t need. The dust was the alien equivalent of DERPs, the polymer-coated refuse pellets that skinsuits formed out of a user’s feces.

  Kira made a face. She might be wrong—she hoped she was—but she didn’t think so.

  That raised the question of how the suit, how an alien device, could understand her biology well enough to mesh with it. Interfacing with a nervous system was one thing. Interfacing with digestion and other basic biological processes was several orders of magnitude more difficult.

  Certain elements formed the building blocks of most life in the galaxy, but even so, every alien biome had evolved its own language of acids, proteins, and other chemicals. The suit shouldn’t be able to bond with her. That it could indicated the xeno’s makers/originators had a much higher level of tech than she’d initially thought, and if they were the graspers.…

  Of course, it was also possible the suit was just mindlessly carrying out its imperatives, and that it was going to end up poisoning and possibly killing her through some hideous mismatch of chemistry.

  Nothing she could do about it either way.

  Kira still didn’t feel hungry, not yet. And she didn’t have to relieve herself. So she closed her eyes again and allowed her mind to wander back through the dream, picking out details that seemed important, searching for any hints that might help answer her questions.

  “Ando, start audio recording,” she said.

  “Recording.”

  Speaking slowly, carefully, Kira made a full record of the dream, trying to include every piece of information.

  The cradle … The Plaintive Verge … The memories resounded in her like the tone of a far-off gong. But Kira felt the Soft Blade still had more to share with her—that there was a point it was trying to make, a point that had yet to become clear. Maybe if she fell asleep again, it would send her another vision.…

  3.

  After that, time grew indistinct. It seemed to move both faster and slower. Faster because great swathes of it passed without Kira noticing while she was asleep or in the hazy twilight between slumber and wakefulness. Slower because the hours she was awake were all the same. She listened to the endless cycle of Bach, she contemplated the data she’d gathered on Adra—trying to determine if or how it related to the xeno—and she dwelled in the happier recesses of her memories. And nothing changed, nothing but her breathing and the flow of blood in her veins and the dulled movement of her mind.

  She ate little, and the less she ate, the less she felt like doing. A vast calmness settled over her, and her body felt increasingly distant and insubstantial, as if it were a holo projection. The few times she left the pilot’s seat, she found she had neither the will nor the energy to exert herself.

  Her stretches of wakefulness grew shorter and shorter, until she spent most of her time drifting in and out of awareness, never quite sure if she had slept or not. Sometimes she received snatches of images from the Soft Blade—impressionistic bursts of color and sound—but the xeno didn’t share with her another memory like the one of the Plaintive Verge.

  Once, Kira noticed that the hum of the Markov Drive had ceased. She lifted her head out of the thermal blankets wrapped around her and saw a smattering of stars outside the cockpit windows, and she realized that the shuttle had dropped out of FTL in order to cool down.

  When she looked again, some time later, the stars had vanished.

  If the shuttle returned to normal space at any other time, she missed it.

  As little as she ate, the store of ration packs still continued to dwindle. The dust the suit expelled gathered in a soft bed around her body—molding to her form and cupping it like dense foam—or else drifted away from her in delicate threads toward the intake vents along the ceiling.

  And then one day, there were no more ration packs.

  She stared at the empty drawer, barely able to process the sight. Then she returned to the pilot’s seat and strapped herself down and took a long, slow breath, the air cold in her throat and lungs. She didn’t know how many days she’d been in the shuttle, and she didn’t know how many days were left. Ando could have told her, but she didn’t want to know.

  Either she was going to make it or she wasn’t. Numbers wouldn’t change that. Besides, she was afraid she would lose the strength to continue if he told her. The only way out was through; worrying about the duration of the trip would just make the journey more miserable.

  Now came the hard part: no more food. For a moment, she thought of the cryo tubes at the back of the shuttle—and of Orso’s offer—but as before, her mind rebelled against the idea. She would rather starve than resort to eating another person. Maybe her stance would change as she wasted away, but Kira felt certain it wouldn’t.

  From a bottle she’d stashed by her head, she took a pill of melatonin, chewed it up, and swallowed. Sleep, more than ever, was her friend. As long as she could sleep, she wouldn’t need to eat. She just hoped she would wake up again.…

  Then her mind grew increasingly fuzzy, and she fell into oblivion.

  4.

  Hunger came, as she knew it would, sharp and grinding, like a clawed monster tearing at her gut. The pain ro
se and fell, as regular as the tide, and each tide was higher than the last. Her mouth watered, and she bit her lip, thoughts of food tormenting her.

  She had expected as much, and she was prepared for worse.

  Instead, the hunger stopped.

  It stopped and it didn’t return. Her body grew cold, and she felt hollowed out, as if her navel were wedded to her spine.

  Thule, she thought, offering up one last prayer to the god of spacers.

  And then she slept and woke no more, and she dreamed slow dreams of strange planets with strange skies and of spiral fractals that flowered in forgotten spaces.

  And all was silent, and all was dark.

  PART TWO

  SUBLIMARE

  I stood over her on the ladder, a faint snow touching my cheeks, and surveyed her universe.… a world where even a spider refuses to lie down and die if a rope can still be spun on to a star.… Here was something that ought to be passed on to those who will fight our final freezing battle with the void. I thought of setting it down carefully as a message to the future: In the days of the frost seek a minor sun.

  —LOREN EISELEY

  CHAPTER I

  AWAKENING

  1.

  A muffled boom sounded, loud enough to penetrate even the deepest of sleep.

  Then clanks and clatters, followed by a rush of cold and a flare of light, bright and searching. Voices echoed, distant and garbled but discernibly human.

  Some small part of Kira’s mind noticed. A primal, instinctual part that drove her toward wakefulness, urging her to open her eyes—open her eyes!—before it was too late.

  She struggled to move, but her body refused to respond. She floated inside herself, trapped by her flesh and unable to control it.

  Then she felt herself inhale, and sensation flooded back to her. The sounds seemed to double in volume and clarity, as if she’d removed a set of earplugs. Her skin tingled as the suit’s mask crawled back from her face, and she gasped and opened her eyes.

  A blinding light swung across her, and she winced.

  “Holy shit! She’s alive!” A man’s voice. Young, overeager.

  “Don’t touch her. Call the doctor.” A woman’s voice. Flat, calm.

  No … not the doctor, Kira thought.

  The light stayed focused on her. She tried to cover her eyes, but a foil blanket stopped her hand. It was wrapped tight across her chest and neck. When had she done that?

  A woman’s face swam into view, huge and pale, like a cratered moon. “Can you hear me? Who are you? Are you hurt?”

  “Wh—” Kira’s vocal cords refused to cooperate. All she could produce was an inarticulate rasp. She struggled to free herself from the foil blanket, but it refused to give. She slumped back, dizzy and exhausted. What … where…?

  The silhouette of a man blocked the light for a moment, and she heard him say, with a distinct accent: “Here then, let me see.”

  “Aish,” said the woman as she moved aside.

  Then fingers, warm, thin fingers, were touching Kira on the arms and sides and around her jaw, and then she was being pulled out of the pilot’s seat.

  “Whoa. Look at that skinsuit!” exclaimed the younger man.

  “Looking is for later. Help me take her to sickbay.”

  More hands touched her, and they turned her so her head pointed toward the airlock. She made a feeble attempt to right herself, and the doctor—she assumed it was the doctor—said, “No, no. Rest now. You mustn’t move.”

  Kira slipped in and out of awareness as she floated through the airlock … down a white, accordion pressure tube … then a brown corridor illuminated by scuffed lightstrips … and finally a small room lined with drawers and equipment; was that a medibot along the wall?…

  2.

  A jolt of acceleration returned Kira to full consciousness. For the first time in weeks, a sensation of weight, blessed weight, settled over her.

  She blinked and looked around, feeling alert, if weak.

  She was lying on an angled bed with a strap secured across her hips to keep her from floating or falling off. A sheet was pulled up beneath her chin (she was still wearing her jumpsuit). Lightstrips glowed overhead, and there was a medibot mounted to the ceiling. The sight reminded her of waking up in the sickbay on Adra.…

  But no, this was different. Unlike at the survey base, the room was tiny, barely more than a closet.

  Sitting on the edge of a metal sink was a young man. The same one she’d heard earlier? He was thin and gangly, and the sleeves of his olive jumpsuit were rolled back to expose sinewy forearms. His pant legs were rolled up as well. Striped socks showed red between cuff and shoe. He looked to be in his late teens, but it was hard to tell exactly.

  Between her and the kid stood a tall, dark-skinned man. The doctor, she guessed, based off the stethoscope draped around his neck. His hands were long and restless, fingers darting fish-like with quick intent. Instead of a jumpsuit, he wore a slate-blue turtleneck and matching slacks.

  Neither outfit was a standard uniform. The two definitely weren’t military. And they weren’t Hydrotek personnel. Independent contractors, then, or freelancers, which confused her. If she wasn’t on the gas-mining station, where was she?

  The doctor noticed her looking. “Ah, Ms., you’re awake.” He cocked his head, his large, round eyes serious. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not—” Kira’s voice came out in a harsh croak. She stopped, coughed, and then tried again. “Not too bad.” To her astonishment, it was the truth. She was stiff and sore, but everything seemed to be in working order. Better, in some cases; her senses felt sharper than normal. She wondered if the suit had integrated itself even further into her nervous system during the trip.

  The doctor frowned. He seemed the anxious type. “That’s most surprising, Ms. Your core temperature was exceedingly low.” He held up a hypo. “It is necessary to take blood so—”

  “No!” said Kira, more forcefully than she intended. She couldn’t afford to let the doctor examine her or he’d realize what the Soft Blade was. “I don’t want any blood tests.”

  She pulled back the sheet, unclipped the strap holding her down, and slid off the bed.

  The moment her feet hit the deck, her knees buckled and she toppled forward. She would have face-planted if the doctor hadn’t sprung over and caught her. “Not to worry, Ms. I have you. I have you.” He lifted her back onto the bed.

  Across the room, the kid pulled a ration bar from his pocket and started to gnaw on it.

  Kira raised a hand, and the doctor backed off. “I’m fine. I can do it. Just give me a moment.”

  He eyed her, his expression speculative. “How long were you in zero-g, Ms.?”

  She didn’t answer but lowered herself to the floor again. This time her legs held, although she kept a hand on the bed to steady herself. She was surprised (and pleased) by how well her muscles worked. They had barely atrophied, if at all. Second by second, she could feel strength returning to her limbs.

  “About eleven weeks,” she said.

  The doctor’s thick eyebrows climbed upward. “And how long since you last ate?”

  Kira did a quick internal check. She was hungry, but not unbearably so. She ought to have been starving. More to the point, she ought to have been starved. She’d expected to arrive at 61 Cygni too weak to stand.

  The Soft Blade had to be responsible. Somehow it must have put her into hibernation.

  “I don’t remember.… A couple of days.”

  “Not fun,” the kid muttered through a mouthful of food. Definitely the same voice she’d heard on the Valkyrie.

  The doctor glanced back at him. “You have more of those rations, yes? Give one to our guest here.”

  The kid produced another bar from one of his pockets and tossed it to Kira. She caught it, tore open the foil, and took a bite. The rations tasted good: banana-chocolate-something-or-other. Her stomach rumbled audibly as she swallowed.

  The doctor opened a drawer
and handed her a silvery pouch full of liquid. “Here, when you are finished, drink this. It will replenish your electrolytes and provide you with much-needed nutrients.”

  Kira made a grateful sound. She scarfed down the last of the bar and then drank the contents of the pouch. It had an earthy, slightly metallic taste, like iron-tinged syrup.

  Then the doctor raised the hypo again. “Now, I really must insist on taking a blood sample, Ms. I need to check—”

  “Look, where am I? Who are you?”

  Taking another bite, the kid said, “You’re on the SLV Wallfish.”

  The doctor looked irritated by the interruption. “Indeed. My name is Vishal, and this is—”

  “I’m Trig,” said the kid, and slapped himself on the chest.

  “Okay,” said Kira, still confused. SLV, that was a civilian ship designation. “But—”

  “What’s your name?” asked Trig, jerking his chin toward her.

  Without thinking, Kira said, “Ensign Kaminski.” They’d discover her real name easily enough if they started checking records, but her first instinct was to play things cautiously until she understood the situation better. She could always claim she’d gotten confused from lack of food. “Are we close to Tsiolkovsky?”

  Vishal seemed taken aback. “Close to … No, not at all, Ms. Kaminski.”

  “That’s all the way on the other side of Sixty-One Cygni,” said the kid. He gulped down the last of his bar.

  “Huh?” said Kira, disbelieving.

  The doctor bobbed his head. “Yes, yes, Ms. Kaminski. Your ship lost power after you returned to normal space, and you were coasting across the whole of the system. If we hadn’t rescued you, who knows how long you might have drifted?”

  “What day is it?” Kira asked, suddenly concerned. The doctor and the kid looked at her strangely, and she knew what they were thinking; Why didn’t she just check the date on her overlays? “My implants aren’t working. What day is it?”