ARC: Under Nameless Stars

by Christian Schoon

  At once, her field of view ignited into a shattering of light, then a shifting aura spangled with dancing, geometric shapes. The light scintillated with a ghostly display of multicolored arcing flashes that expanded and contracted. Then came a rush of unnamable emotion, not her own, but also clearly recognized by Zenn as an “otherness” she’d sensed once before, in exactly the same way, long ago, when she was nine – on the day her mother perished.

  Yes. She’d felt it even then, though she’d not known it – the mind of an Indra. But Zenn had no time to dwell on this thought – the Indra’s sense of urgency was too powerful to ignore, too filled with fear and uncertainty to allow any of Zenn’s own thinking to intrude. Then, this river of emotion was overwhelmed by an even more insistent sensation: a ferocious, needle-sharp burning that seemed to radiate from the center of her brain. No, not hers: from the Indra’s brain. The pain intensified, almost too much to bear – and then the sensation ebbed and vanished, and she was alone again inside her own head, realized she was again seeing the control room and those in it, breathing the chilly air, weaving on her feet.

  “Novice? Novice Scarlett?” The Captain was speaking to her, a bony claw holding her by one arm.

  “It’s… I’m OK.” But the aftermath of the feeling still constricted her stomach, made her vision blur in and out of focus. “I think it was the Indra,” she told them, not sure she believed her own words, but unable to deny what had just happened to her.

  The Groom strode over to her, speaking sharply. “My Indra? What do you mean?”

  “The Indra. I think… it’s awake, coming this way.”

  The Captain bobbed his head apologetically at the Groom.

  “The girl means you no disrespect, Groom Treth. I’m sure she must be under some sort of strain. Or illness, perhaps.” The Captain dipped his head down to Zenn’s level. “The Indra won’t awaken until Groom Treth makes interface contact. There are many call-and-response interactions to perform before that happens. It all proceeds by a routine that cannot be altered or–”

  The Captain was cut off by a sudden, strange vibration in the air. With two quick steps, the Groom was at the bank of read-out screens on the wall.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said, scanning the displays.

  “Treth?” the Captain said.

  “She is moving! This is not right.” She went to her command chair, lay back in it and instructed it to reattach to the interface suit. The wires and tubing extended from their receptacles like a nest of striking vipers, plugging themselves into the suit. “The thing we saw, moving in the chamber. It has attached itself to my Indra. It is… interfering with her.”

  “Zenn Scarlett,” Jules bent close to look into Zenn’s eyes. “Are you healthy and in the pink again?”

  Before she could answer, a booming, sub-bass note rose from the floor plates beneath their feet, from the walls surrounding them. As it grew in volume, it added higher notes, a chorus of unearthly keening, not coming from the air around them but seeming to vibrate from within them. Zenn covered her ears, but Jules seemed simply awestruck, swaying on his legs, transfixed by the rising sound.

  “She’s moving into the chamber,” Fane called out, standing at the viewing window. Through the window, Zenn saw something stirring in the chamber, and she moved to get a better view. Several long, filamentous strands emerged from the cave-like opening at the far end. The strands elongated, changed shape, vanished from sight, reappeared and stretched out again, as if feeling their way across the surfaces of the chamber. Zenn knew these fleshy appendages were the Indra’s primary sensing barbels. Able to perceive its environment in the full electromagnetic spectrum, the Indra used its facial appendages to sense the universe on multiple levels. And the barbels didn’t just test the physical objects around the Indra, but slipped in and out of existence, vanishing in a mesmerizing, prismatic display of light as they penetrated the skin of this universe to touch the other nine unseen, tightly curled alternate dimensions of quantum space.

  More of the Indra’s body now began to emerge from the metal warren. Zenn’s pulse quickened as she watched the creature rise from the darkness. The gargantuan scaled head emerged, almost fifty feet long, shimmering with the surreal electric light-show of extradimensional energy that streamed around and through it.

  The Indra’s seahorse-like face was now fully visible. Instead of eyes, its long, narrow skull bore three matching sets of slits – its energy detectors. Along the plated muzzle and all down the tapering jaw, dozens of sensor barbels waved like a kelp forest in a rushing tide. Now, slowly, the rest of the lithe, seven hundred-foot body flowed into the immense chamber, coiling and uncoiling, its beaded coat of vermillion and bronze-colored scales glinting like burnished armor in the room’s widely spaced spotlights. It was the body of a fantastical, muscular snake, but thicker and flattened, tapering to a mace-like tip spiked with the flexible, thirty-foot spines it used to anchor itself in its warren.

  Once the Indra had coiled its entire body into the chamber, the facial barbels all began to throb with a single, purposeful rhythm, vanishing, reappearing, vanishing again in unison. The heavy, almost hypnotic cadence of low-frequency sound that filled the control room was matched by the ripples of flashing light that skipped across the Indra’s head and body – the same rainbow lightshow Zenn had seen when the Indra first reached out to touch her mind.

  “She is starting to pulse,” the Groom shouted, waving her hands at a newly risen row of translucent virt-screens that wheeled up into the air around her head.

  “How can that be?” the Captain yelled back, stepping to the thick window. “You haven’t visualized the coordinates. Or initialized the antineutrino stream. She’ll be tunneling blind.”

  The room vibrated more strongly, shaking until they could all barely remain standing. A few seconds more, and Zenn and Jules both had to lean against the wall to keep their feet, while the Captain and Fane gripped the railing in front of the viewing window. In her chair, Treth pulled a swingaway control panel in around her. From it, another flock of Virt-screens materialized in the air. Her hands shot back and forth between the screens.

  “Can you stop her?” the Captain shouted.

  “I cannot. She is being… directed somehow.”

  The Groom summoned another screen, ran her hands over the control surface that appeared, then looked up at the ceiling. She poked at the screen once more, and again watched the ceiling expectantly. Nothing happened.

  “The blast shield is not responding.”

  “We’ve got to leave. Now,” the Captain yelled at Zenn and Jules, herding them toward the door.

  “No,” Treth called to them. “She is about to tunnel. I cannot be sure of the damping field. You’ll never reach the passenger levels in time. Fane. Safe room.”

  The Groom’s free hand stabbed at another screen and a circular panel on the far wall irised open like an oversized camera shutter.

  “In there. Move, now,” Fane yelled, pointing.

  Zenn staggered to the opening and went through. It was a space the size of a small closet with padded benches and harnesses.

  “Emergency safe-room,” Fane said as they ducked in. “Shielded. We will be protected here. Strap yourselves in.”

  The room was equipped for four human-size occupants, so it was only just large enough to contain Zenn, the Captain, Fane and a walksuited dolphin. Treth made no move to join them. “The threshold…” Treth shouted from the control room. “It’s opening!”

  The door to the safe room began to iris shut, and Zenn had one final glimpse of Treth as the Groom activated her suit’s body-scrim. The scrim unit emitted a flash of bright blue light that instantaneously spread out from the suit’s belt until it covered the Groom in what looked like a shape-hugging second skin of gleaming, translucent light. The scrim was all that stood between Treth and the colossal shockwave of radiation and electromagnetic forces generated by an Indra in full dimension-splitting mode.

  “She is beginn
ing to tunnel,” Treth shouted. “Hold on!”

  FOURTEEN

  Treth’s words were the last thing Zenn heard before the fast-rising sound and vibration merged into an avalanche of invisible force hammering at her body, pressing her backward against the seat as if she’d been hit by a wall of some heavy fluid. Then the unmistakable sensations surged over her once more – the warmth, the tingling pinpricks on her skin, the feeling of being out of synch with her own body and mind. It was happening again…

  The next moment she was touching, being touched, by the otherness she’d felt before: it could only be the mind of the Indra. Yes. Now, there was cold on her skin-not-her-skin, the sting of frozen, airless space on armored scales. Visions rose before her-eyes-its-eyes, flashes of a huge, vaulted space – the Indra chamber, seen in gray, photonegative hues – ultraviolet vision? And now something else. Pain, fear, something burning, attacking, but not from outside, from inside its head. The pain flared in her-own-not-her-own head, blazed between her temples. It was tiny but fierce, this attacker. And it wanted more than to attack and harm. It wanted… control.

  Then, with a single electric spasm, it was over. The vision before Zenn, the sensations engulfing her, drowning her, were gone. Also gone out like a guttering spark was the consciousness that had shared her own thoughts. This sudden absence was a physical pain to her, a void that she inexplicably found terrible to be without, unforgivable to part with. Nothing had ever been so close to her. Nothing could be. Now Zenn was alone, more alone than she had ever been, as if ejected into the lightless, mindless emptiness of space beyond the reach of any living being. A sound intruded into the frightful death-black silence that surrounded her. It was faint but familiar, the sound of the distant place from which she’d been swept.

  “Zenn Scarlett, can you hear me speaking?” It was Jules’s voice. She was coming back, falling down, or rising up, from wherever she had gone, returning to herself to land with a shudder in her own body. How small it now seemed, this body of moist, heated flesh and brittle bone; what a tiny, fragile thing to carry one through the merciless universe and all its worlds.

  She opened her eyes. Jules’s face was close to hers, and there was a smell that at first she couldn’t place. Then it came to her, and she smiled weakly. Tuna fish breath.

  The safe room was quiet now, the sudden stillness broken only by the muffled sound of alarm tones bleating in the distance. The Captain was already out in the pilot room, speaking to the Groom.

  “Novice? Are you well?” It was Fane. He was in front of her, bending over, his hands on his knees as he looked into her eyes.

  “Are you? Well? You are healthy and in the pink?” Jules asked.

  She nodded yes.

  “You are sure? You did not seem so just then,” Fane said, frowning.

  “Yes, I’m fine now. It’s just… something that happens to me sometimes. Like a fainting spell.” She didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want him to think… what? That she was sick? Crazy? “Really. It’s nothing.” She attempted a smile.

  Satisfied, Fane went to join Treth and the Captain.

  “We tunneled unexpectedly. Just like that,” Jules said. “The Captain states it should not have taken place as it did. He was unhappy with it. But I found it exciting – thrilling to be exact. Were you not thrilled?”

  “Jules… it’s getting worse,” she said, keeping her voice low, her words slurring as she fought to regain herself. “Whatever’s happening to me.”

  “Oh. Your linking. Of course, just now. It was with the Indra?” The dolphin looked down. “I am sorry. I have been self-centered and insensitive to your problem. Worse, you say. How is it worse?”

  “Stronger, scarier, every time it happens,” Zenn said. Her brain was unwilling to think properly, and she fumbled unsuccessfully with the buckle on her safety harness. Jules reached over and pushed the release button, freeing her. “Every time now, it’s getting harder and harder to come back. It’s almost more than I can manage. And there was something else this time.”

  “What was it?”

  “The first time this ever happened, the first time I linked with an animal–” Zenn struggled to remember, fought to make herself relive that terrible day “–I thought it was at the cloister, when Katie fell into the well pit and I got her out. It wasn’t then. I know now the first time was on the starship, the one where my mother… where she went into the Indra.” She looked up at the dolphin. “I know now that it was the Indra I felt, for just a second. That’s when this all started. But why then? Why me?”

  Jules sat quietly for a moment. “I am sorry for your distress,” he said finally. “But I have no ready solution. Perhaps you will understand. With time.”

  “Yeah,” she sniffed, telling herself to get a grip; this was no time to act like a little girl. “Maybe.”

  She rose unsteadily to her feet and stepped out into the pilot room.

  “…So, you’re telling me we just survived an uninitialized tunnel event?” the Captain was saying to the Groom. “Treth, what is going on?”

  “She is gone,” the Groom said flatly, staring through the thick glass of the chamber viewing window.

  “The Indra? She went back into the warren?” The Captain raised and tilted his head, trying to see into the chamber’s shadows.

  “No,” the Groom said. “She is not in the warren. My stonehorse is not aboard this ship. The thing that burned its way into the chamber; it forced her to tunnel, made her push the Helen here – and then it took her.”

  “Took her? Took her where?” The Captain’s voice rose to a squeaking high note. His head now began bobbing rapidly in sync with the voice, and his chest feathers fluffed out, then lay flat and then fluffed again. “Where would she…” Head up. “…go? Indras don’t…” Head down. “…abandon their chambers.” Head up again. “She’d be exposed. She couldn’t survive without… There must be an instrument malfunction.”

  Ignoring this suggestion, the Groom now whirled to face Zenn.

  “How did you know?” The Procyoni’s voice was harsh. “You knew she was awake, moving. How? Speak, girl.”

  “I don’t know how.” The Groom’s ferocious anger drilled into her, hunting an answer she didn’t have. “I get this feeling from animals sometimes. They connect with me.”

  “How? Some sorcery?” The Groom stepped over to her. “Are you a thought-caster?”

  “No. It’s not that. I don’t even believe in… I’m not reading their minds. It’s something else.” Once again, Zenn was exasperated, unable to explain what was happening to her. “I don’t know what it is. I just knew the Indra was awake.”

  “And what do you feel now?” the Groom said, so close Zenn could feel the heated air flowing up out of the open neckhole of the interface suit.

  “I feel… normal. But that’s just how it happens. One moment it’s like I’m in touch with the animal, and then it’s gone. I don’t have any control over when this happens to me – whatever it is. It just happens.”

  “Treth…” The Captain had been punching at his sleeve-screen, but with no result. Now he went to the intercom on the wall. It produced only crackling static. “Intraship coms are all down. I have to get up to the bridge.”

  He went to the door control panel once more. This time, it responded.

  “Treth, I’ll let you know the system’s status as soon as I can access the day logs. I’ll need your report on… what happened here. Soon as you can manage.”

  Treth didn’t speak but leaned her forehead against the glass of the observation window, eyes on the empty chamber.

  “Novice Scarlett, Guest Vancouver, if you’ll come with me, we’ll get you back to your cabins.” The Captain spoke as he manually keyed in the codes to the outer door leading to the lev-car beyond. Zenn looked back to see that Fane had moved to stand beside Treth. The Sacrist raised one hand as if to comfort the Groom. But he stopped in mid-reach and dropped his hand to his side.

  A minute later, Zenn, Jules an
d the Captain stepped from the lev-car into the Helen’s passenger area. The Captain tried the nearest wall-comm. There was only more static. The corridor was empty, and the low illumination of the emergency lighting made it look ominous. The next intercom was also useless. But by the time they had made three more stops at decks 3, and 6 – all equally deserted – it dawned on Zenn that the intercoms were the least of their problems.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked. “Where are the passengers and crew?”

  “I don’t know yet,” the Captain said. “We’ll find out more when I can access the logs on the bridge. Until then, you both stay with me.”

  They moved on through the silent ship, down echoing passageways, past vast, empty halls and activity areas. Occasionally, they would find a piece of clothing or a single abandoned shoe lying in the corridor. There were uneaten meals on the tables of the dining rooms. They met no one.

  At last, rising through the ship past deck after vacant deck, they reached the bridge. The door opened and they entered a multi-level room filled with rows of control panels, numerous empty chairs and dozens of wall-mounted view screens, all seething with ghostly static.

  “Can you say what has happened to us and this ship?” Jules asked the Captain.

  “I am about to try and find out.” The Captain went to a console and called up a series of virt-screens. After a few seconds, the Virt-screens flickered to life and began to display various graphs, meters and views of the interior and exterior of the ship.

  Jules walked across the room to examine one of the wall monitors, and Zenn joined him. Any other time, the view it displayed would have struck her as beautiful, with the entire sweep of the starship’s bow visible. Beyond the ship, arcing gracefully up across the view at some distance, a giant translucent nebula threw up huge columns of dust, gas and plasma, lit in delicate hues of blue and red from unseen stars within. Zenn attempted to orient herself, but the constellations she was seeing looked like none she’d ever witnessed in the Martian sky.