But The Stars

by Peter Cawdron

  Dante feels conflicted. What if she’s wrong? What if this really is Angel? The alternative is painful to consider. If this is an imposter, her friend is dead—and that hurts. If not, Dante’s maligned someone that’s only ever been gracious toward her.

  Angel seems unaware of the endless churning within Dante’s tormented thoughts, but the distant look on her face gives her an opening to speak.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Dante isn’t looking at anything. She’s sitting up, staring blindly ahead, lost in thought, but those words cause her to focus on the stars.

  “What do you see in them?” Angel asks, following her gaze.

  The Pleiades drift into view.

  “Hope.”

  The two women sit in silence. Neither speaks. They’re both content—which is strange given the confrontation on the bridge. If Angel is a fake, she’s a damn good one. Dante finds her conviction faltering, but then she remembers the color test. Angel, her Angel, had to ace selection. Back then, anything less would have seen her returned to her unit and she knew it. Having come from the Navy, Angel didn’t want to go back. Mentally, she’d given up one ocean for another—one full of stars. Angel pushed herself hard because she felt she had to compensate for being color blind. Dante can’t ignore that. Her Angel wouldn’t lie, that’s really the crux of the issue. Her Angel would have said something rather than pretend. Her Angel would have never guessed.

  Nothing is as it seems. Reality is a lie. Without knowing it at the time, this is precisely what Dante trained for—to be able to operate with clarity while under duress. Selection was the start, not the end of her training. From there, the focus was on dealing with the unknown, using deductive reasoning to work with what little was known. If only her instructors could see her now. Doubts be damned. Dante’s got to cling to whatever fragments of reality are seeping through from the outside world—and the most apparent point is the crew is not intact. Regardless of what’s happening to her, someone died down there on P4. At least one person among them is fake. The behavioral evidence suggests that’s at least Angel and probably Cap as well. As much as she doesn’t want to, Dante’s got to hold to that conviction.

  One thing that bothers Dante is the veracity of the illusion. Mac was seriously hurt. Now she’s injured. If all this is just a dream, how the fuck does that work? Are these injuries also playing out in whatever bizarre state they’re in within the real world? Are they really hanging from the ceiling in some overgrown version of the medical suite, or is that just another layer within the illusion—something to distract them. Given they can interact with that alternate world, Dante’s not convinced even that’s real. As she was the one that suggested they were actually somehow held upright in medical, perhaps there’s some wish fulfillment in what she saw.

  She touches at the bandages, asking, “How bad?”

  “Jeeves said you had a hematoma and a severe concussion, but no hemorrhaging or adema—is that the right word?”

  “Edema,” Dante replies, wondering how an artificial intelligence can be co-opted into the illusion. Was it really Jeeves? Or is Jeeves just another replica like the Acheron itself? When she spoke to Jeeves, he seemed distant. He wasn’t himself. But then, are any of them in this nightmare? Angel is unaware of the turmoil in Dante’s thought process, which is in itself revealing. These creatures can manipulate their sensory inputs but it seems they can’t read their minds.

  Angel seems concerned as she says, “You were unconscious and vomiting. We were worried.”

  “Were you?”

  Cold, Dante. Damn, that’s cold. But Dante feels she has to stay the course. The cost is too high. If they have been infiltrated, they could lose what little leverage they have left over their captors.

  “Look. I know this is awkward.”

  “Really? You know that?” Dante asks, working herself back against the headboard, determined to sit up properly. She feels indignant. “They left me with you?”

  “And Jeeves,” Angel says, sitting back in her chair, resigning herself to the hostility. Jeeves, though, is conspicuously quiet. Although Dante could call on him and he’d no doubt answer, it seems he wants to remain aloof. Dante’s curious about his observations. She wants to talk to him, but only when she’s alone.

  Angel pauses for a moment before adding, “They didn’t trust me.”

  For a second, Dante’s confused. She does a double-take, blinking and turning her head slightly in disbelief at what she’s hearing.

  “Wait? If they didn’t trust you, why did they leave you with me?”

  “It was Vichy’s suggestion.”

  “Vichy?”

  Is Angel lying? She could be, but then she’s here with Dante. Where the hell is Vichy? Dante’s upset. She squeezes her eyes shut for a second, wanting to block out everything else, struggling to concentrate. Her fingers touch at the bridge of her nose, relieving the pressure for but a moment.

  Angel looks at the floor, unable to make eye contact. Dante feels the swell of anger rising in her veins. Just how well do these creatures understand body language? If they’re trying to make her believe Angel’s sincere, it’s a valiant effort, but Dante’s unmoved. She feels she owes her dead friend a debt. She has to figure out what actually happened on P4. As for Vichy, she cannot fathom how he could abandon her like this.

  Angel tries to explain. “Vichy pointed out the futility of our position. He said, if they want us dead, nothing we do in here will make any difference.”

  “You’d have killed us already,” Dante says, following the logic.

  “Not me,” Angel replies. “I don’t want you dead.”

  Dante feels hurt by the realization Vichy has forsaken her. That’s out of character for him. Damn it, Vee. Why did you leave me with her?

  “So what do you want?” Dante asks. Her question is defensive, trying to shift the focus away from herself, wanting to change the subject.

  That particular question, though, takes Angel by surprise. She looks horrified. For a brief fraction of a second, she’s flustered. “Me? I—ah. I guess I want things to be the way they were before.”

  To Dante, that’s not an answer. Before when? As a human, Angel would mean before they arrived in orbit around P4. As an alien, she means before she was outed, back when Angel was unquestionably accepted as part of the crew, but why? What are these creatures trying to accomplish? Dante squints wanting to decipher Angel’s true intent.

  “But the others. You said they didn’t trust you. To do what?”

  “They went to Zoe’s cabin,” Angel replies. “They’re all down there. Naz thinks it might be a doorway between realities.”

  “Is it?”

  Angel shrugs.

  “You can drop the façade,” Dante says. “No one trusts you. Not them. Not me. We know what you really are. What I want to know is why?”

  Angel ignores her, turning and looking out the window as she asks, “What do you think of them?” She’s obviously curious as to what Dante sees in the stars.

  To these creatures, distant stars are simply pinpoints of light. The idea of constellations must be foreign to them. It makes no sense to think of stars as having any meaning. To anyone that’s not native to Earth, the idea that an arbitrary assortment of stars somehow depicts snakes, lions, a cup or a sextant, men, women or twins is absurd. For Dante, it confirms her suspicions about her friend. Angel’s dead.

  Whatever these alien creatures are, they don’t see a ram or a bull or the great hunter Orion because there is no actual form to the stars. There are no shapes in the sky. The constellations have only ever existed in the deepest recesses of the human mind. They were contrived to assist with navigation and the passing of the seasons, commemorating folklore and superstitions. Even modern humans struggle to understand the shapes devised by ancient cultures as none of them are apparent.

  To intelligent creatures from some other world, the constellations aren’t even stick figures. There’s no connect-the-dots shape to be
found. Squinting doesn’t help. The constellations arose out of oral history, as legends written in the sky.

  Even among humanity, there’s no agreement on the various shapes. Somewhat ironically, the constellations are entirely alien to people from different cultures. The Aborigines thought of Orion as two brothers fishing in a canoe, while the Hindus saw dogs chasing a deer. The Lakota Indians thought of Orion as a bison charging across the grassy plains. It’s no wonder Angel struggles to understand what Dante sees in the chaotic splatter of distant stars. There are no borders, no lines of demarcation, no natural groupings. Often, the constellations, as depicted by the Greeks, overlap each other, intruding into one another’s imaginary forms. As a child, Dante found that maddening. Now, that confusion is refreshing. The constellations are indecipherable to an alien intelligence. There’s no algorithm that can make sense of them, no brute-force calculation that can reveal their secrets. To these creatures, they’re meaningless. To Dante, they’re a symbol of defiance, a bastion of strength, her last hope for refuge. Far from being meaningless, to Dante, the constellations are a connection with Earth.

  Angel points, pretending to be friendly, trying to draw an explanation out of her. “I mean, look at them. The stars. They’re stunning. That’s all we ever really are, right? Stardust. Essentially, we’re all the same. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Carbon. Just a bunch of wet chemistry moderating sodium ion pathways.”

  Nice try, Dante thinks. Ordinarily, she’d jump at such a discussion, but not with some inhuman creature impersonating her friend.

  “So why do this?” Dante asks, aware she’s gaining insights into an alien mind from this interaction.

  Angel asks, “Why did you travel eighty-eight light years from home?”

  You.

  Dante knows that one word is the closest she’s going to get to an admission from Angel. Not we. You. Humans. Angel’s not the only one that can be coy. Both of them are probing, looking to gain insights, vying for information, wanting to learn about the other. As long as Angel feels she’s in control of the conversation, Dante can manipulate her to gain an advantage. From what Dante can tell, these creatures think humanity traveled here to fulfill some destiny—perhaps they’ve confused the conversation she had earlier with Benson about the meaning and presence of the constellations. There’s no one star called Orion. That must have confused them. Deep within the data banks of the Acheron lie all the star names and designations, but not the constellations, as they’re meaningless in terms of astronomy. The irony is, astrological star signs aren’t signs at all, they carry no more meaning than burnt toast or a stain on the wall, and yet somehow, the human mind crafts images out of them all.

  Seeing the constellations this far out from Earth reveals a failing in their simulation—a detail that’s been overlooked, or perhaps inadvertently mapped from the combination of memories and expectations of the crew as the aliens sought to create the perfect illusion. Dante’s convinced they haven’t noticed this discrepancy, probably because they haven’t been able to isolate what she or the others actually see in the stars. If the past is anything to go by, as soon as they realize their mistake, they’ll update the illusion and she’ll lose her only remaining touch point with sanity.

  Dante says, “We wanted to explore—to find life.”

  “And we did.”

  “Did we?” Dante asks, noting Angel’s reverted to the inclusive pronoun. “Or were we found?”

  Angel smiles, shaking her head, not wanting to join Dante’s game.

  “And you?” Dante asks. Her question might sound casual, but it’s calculated. Did these creatures originate on P4? Up until now, she and the others have assumed that, but there’s no reason to believe it. By leaving the rest of the question unspoken and casually linking it to Angel’s original comment, Dante’s fishing for information.

  Angel’s eyes narrow. Seems she doesn’t want to play fair, but the lack of an answer is revealing in itself. If these creatures originated on P4, why dance around the issue?

  Dante feels alone. Where’s Vichy when she really needs him? Why wouldn’t Mags stay with her at least?

  In that moment, Dante understands something profound about her friends. There’s no way Vichy would leave her alone with Angel if he thought she’d be in danger. This was deliberate. Vichy wanted Dante to interrogate Angel. He probably talked Mags into it. Vichy would have deliberately separated Angel and Cap. Angel may think the reason was to isolate her while the rest of the crew investigated Zoe’s cabin, but as information slowly leaks out of their conversation in medical, Dante comes to understand Vichy’s motivation. Just as she’s working Angel over, she’s sure Vichy’s tackling Cap, slowly chipping away at his armor. By isolating the two aliens from each other, there’s the possibility discrepancies will arise, and that will tell them something about the nature of where they are. Already, Dante’s convinced Angel’s committed to being in this quasi-physical location. Although this is only a simulation, she seems to share the isolation Dante feels in the medical suite. It seems these creatures have physical limitations within the simulation.

  The look on Angel’s face suggests she’s starting to realize this conversation was a mistake.

  Dante plays it cool, determined to keep this tactical advantage in play. Damn. She can’t wait to compare notes with the others.

  “What do you want from me?” Angel asks, clearly feeling frustrated.

  “To be free.”

  Angel shakes her head, but she’s smiling. After a few seconds, she says, “I don’t get you, Dee. You were never free. None of us ever were.”

  Dante has to give Angel credit for trying as her comment takes Dante off-guard. She needs a few seconds to process her own thoughts.

  “What does it mean to be free?” Angel asks. “In its raw essence, it means being free to choose, right?”

  In the quiet of the empty medical bay, with the lights low and the environmental controls set to mimic night in support of human circadian rhythms, Dante relaxes. There’s only so long she can keep her guard raised. She’s hurt. She’s sore. She’s tired. She doesn’t want to fight. This looks and sounds like Angel. Perhaps it is. Maybe Dante’s made a mistake. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  “We’re free to choose,” Dante says, engaging with the conversation instead of wrestling with every word.

  Angel says, “You can’t choose between options you don’t know about—things you don’t understand. If I ask you to choose the best song ever written, you can only select from those you’ve heard, those you remember, so it’s not really a choice, it’s a narrow, limited selection.”

  Dante nods. Makes sense.

  “Now, if I remind you of a song. Perhaps if I subtly influence you. Maybe I hum the tune before our conversation, or I talk about the band over lunch. What then? Have you really chosen for yourself? Or have you been corralled? Politicians do this all the time.”

  “Pick songs?” Dante asks, feigning innocence.

  Angel laughs, which is surprising. Comedy is highly subjective—not only between cultures but over time. Things that were funny to the Romans don’t even elicit a smile from modern audiences. Jokes in one culture rarely translate to another. What are the odds of humor transcending species originating on different planets? And again, Dante finds doubts creeping in.

  Angel’s oblivious to the machinations of Dante’s weary mind.

  “In physics, we describe choices as a closed system, where all the variables are present, but there are no closed systems. Everything is open. Everything is interconnected. There’s no freewill because nothing is free. We accept this at a physical level, knowing the atoms in our bodies are gravitationally bound to every other atom everywhere else within the entire universe, regardless of how distant, but then we contradict ourselves. Oh, I’m free because I feel free, because I want to be free. Honestly, it’s delusional—laughable.”

  “That’s a very bleak outlook on life,” Dante says.

  “It’s a bleak universe,” Ange
l replies.

  Dante is perplexed by Angel. If she’s an alien, these creatures have some seriously nihilistic beliefs.

  “I feel like life is different.”

  Angel is brutal, destroying Dante’s position with a single word uttered barely above a whisper. “Feel?”

  “Okay, now you sound like Mac.”

  “I like Mac.”

  “There has to be something more to life,” Dante says.

  “Does there?” Angel asks. “Why?”

  “Because, even in astrophysics, things become more than the sum of their parts.”

  Dante’s determined to redeem her position using ideas that will appeal to Angel.

  She says, “Stars are more than hydrogen. They become something greater than just their constituent parts.”

  Angel nods in agreement so Dante presses forward.

  “Complexity introduces new factors. As life evolved, evolution selected for consciousness as a way of dealing with overwhelming complexity, giving us a choice.”

  Angel smiles. She seems to appreciate Dante’s position, but she clearly doesn’t agree.

  “We like to flatter ourselves,” Angel says, “We like to think we’re free. But freedom is an illusion.”

  “This,” Dante replies, pointing at her own legs hidden beneath the blankets. “This right here is an illusion, but I’m real.”

  “It’s all an illusion,” Angel says. “It always has been. I mean, think about the audacity of our lives. We’re junk. We’re the scraps of nuclear material that escaped from a dying star billions of years ago. When all else fell into the core, collapsing to form a neutron star or the eternal darkness of a black hole, these tiny molecules that make up my body somehow escaped.”

  She rolls her hands over, looking at her fingers as she speaks.

  “You’ve seen photos of a supernova, right? We’re that thin shell blown off into space. Eons pass and we have the arrogance to claim ourselves as somehow different from an asteroid or a moon, even though we share the same elements. We’re special. We’re alive, we say, as though we’re something other than physical, something other than a tiny assortment of scorched atoms.”