The Starry Rift

by James Tiptree Jr

  She has a guilty twinge as she sees it go. Isn’t it her duty to go nearer back to Base and read the whole thing? Could the men be in some kind of trouble where every minim counts? But they sounded green, only maybe a little tired. And she understands it’s their routine to send a pipe after every stop. If some of those corrections are important, she could never read them straight, her voice would give out. Better they have Boney’s own report.

  She turns back to figuring out her course and finds she was fibbing; she has indeed made up her mind. She’ll just go to the planet BK were headed for and see if she can find them there. Maybe they got too sick to move on, maybe they found another alien race they got involved with. Maybe their ship’s in trouble... Any number of reasons they could be late, and she might be helpful. And now she knows enough about the pipes to know that they can’t be sent from a planet’s surface. Only from above atmosphere. So if Boney and Ko can’t lift, they can’t message for help—by pipe, at least.

  She’s half talking this line of reasoning out to herself as she works on the holocharts. Defining and marking in a brand-new course for the computer is far more work than she’d realized; the school problems she had done must have been chosen for easy natural corridors. “Oh, gods... I’ve got to erase again, there’s an asteroid path there. Help! I’ll never get off this beacon at this rate—explorers must have spent half their time mapping!”

  As she mutters, she becomes aware of something like an odd little echo in the ship. She looks around; the cabin is tightly packed with shiny cases of supplies. “Got my acoustics all buggered up,” she mutters. That must be it. But there seem to be a peculiar delay; for example, she hears the word “Help!” so tiny clear that she actually spends a few minim searching the nearby racks. Could a talking animal pet or something have got in at Far Base? Oh, the poor creature. Unless she can somehow get it in cold-sleep it’ll die.

  But nothing more happens, and she decides it’s just the new acoustical reflections. And at last she achieves a good, safe three-leg course to that system at eighteen-ten north. She’s pretty sure an expert could pick out a shorter, elegant, two-leg line, but she doesn’t want to risk being waked up by some unforeseen obstacle. So she picks routes lined by well-corrected red dwarfs and other barely visible sky-features. These charts are living history, she thinks. Not like the anonymous holos back home, where everything is checked a hundred times a year, and they only give you trip-strips. In those charts she can read the actual hands of the old explorers. That man Ponz, for instance, he must have spent a lot of time working around the route to the yellow suns, before he landed on thirty-twenty and crashed and died... But she’s dawdling now. She stacks the marked cassettes in order in her computer take-up and clicks the first one in. To the unknown, at last!

  She readies her sleep-chest and hops in. As she relaxes, she notices she still has a strange sensation of being accompanied by something or someone. “Maybe because I’m sort of one of the company of space, now,” she tells herself romantically, and visualizes a future chart with a small “CC” correction. Hah! She laughs aloud, drowsily, in the darkness, feeling great. An almost physical rosy glow envelops her as she sinks to dreamless statis.

  She can take off thus unconscious amid pathless space with no real fear of getting lost and being unable to return, because of a marvelously simple little gadget carried by all jump-ships—a time-lapse recorder in the vessel’s tail, which clicks on unceasingly, recording the star-scene behind. It’s accelerated by motion in the field, and slows to resting state when the field is static. So, whenever the pilot wishes to retrace his route, he has only to take out the appropriate cassette and put it up front in his guidance computer. The computer will hunt until it duplicates the starfield sequences of the outward path, thus bringing the ship infallibly, if somewhat slowly, back along the course it came.

  She wakes and jumps out to see a really new star-scene—a great sprawl of radiant golden suns against a very dark arm of Rift. The closest star of the group, she finds, is eighteen-ten north, just as she’s calculated! The drive has cut off at the margin of its near gravity field; it will be a long thrust-drive in.

  Excitement like a sunrise is flooding her. She’s made it! Her first solo jump!

  And with the mental joy is still that physical glow, so strong it puzzles her for a minim. Physical, definitely; it’s kind of like the buzz of self-stimulation, but without the stickly-sickly feeling that usually gives her. Their phys. ed. teacher, who’d showed them how to relieve sex tension, said that the negative quality would go away, but Coati hasn’t bothered with all that very much. Now she thinks that this shows that sheer excitement can activate sex, as the teacher said. “Ah, go away,” she mutters impatiently. She’s got to start thrust-drive and run on in to where the planets could be.

  As soon as she’s started, she turns to the scope to check. Planets—yes! One—two—four—and there it is! Blue green and white even at this distance! Boney and Ko had said it tested highly terraform. It looks it all right, thinks Coati, who had seen only holos of antique Earth. She wonders briefly what the missing nonterraform part could be; irregularities of climate, absence of some major life-forms? It doesn’t matter—anything over 75 percent means livable without protective gear, air and water present and good. She’ll be able to get out and explore in the greatest comfort—on a world! But are Boney and Ko already there?

  When she gets into orbital distance from the planet, she must run a standard search pattern around it. All Federation ships have radar-responsive gear to help locate them. But her little ship doesn’t have a real Federation search-scope. She’ll have to use her eyes and fly much too narrow a course. This could be tedious; she sighs.

  She finds herself crossing her legs and wiggling and scratching herself idly. Really, this sex overflow is too much! The mental part is fairly calm, though, almost like real happiness. Nice. Only distracting... And, as she leans back to start waiting out the run in, she feels again that sense of presence in the ship. Company, companionship. Is she going a little nutters? “Calm down,” she tells herself firmly.

  A minim of dead silence... into which a tiny, tiny voice says distinctly:

  “Hello... hello? Please don’t be frightened. Hello?”

  It’s coming from somewhere behind and above her.

  Coati whirls, peers up and around, everywhere, seeing nothing new.

  “Wh-where are you?” she demands. “Who are you, in here?”

  “I am a very small being. You saved my life. Please don’t be frightened of me. Hello?”

  “Hello,” Coati replies slowly, peering around hard. Still she sees nothing. And the voice is still behind her when she turns. She doesn’t feel frightened at all, just intensely excited and curious.

  “What do you mean, I saved your life?”

  “I was clinging to the outside of that artifact you call a message. I would have died soon.”

  “Well, good.” But now Coati a bit frightened. When the voice spoke, she definitely detected movement in her own larynx and tongue—as if she’s speaking the words herself. Gods—she is going nutters, she’s hallucinating! “I’m talking to myself!”

  “No, no,” the voice—her voice—reassures her. “You are correct—I am using your speech apparatus. Please forgive me, I have none of my own that you could hear.”

  Coati digests this dubiously. If this is an hallucination, it’s really complex. She’s never done anything like this before. Could it be real, some kind of alien telekinesis?

  “But where are you? Why don’t you come out and show yourself?”

  “I can’t. I will explain. Please promise me you won’t be frightened. I have damaged nothing and I will leave any time you desire.”

  Coati suddenly gets an idea and eyes the computer sharply. In fantasy shows she’s seen holos about alien minds taking over computers. So far as she knows, it’s never happened in reality. But maybe—

  “Are you in my computer?”

  “Your computer?
” Incredibly, the voice gives what might almost be a giggle. “In a way, yes. I told you I am very, very small. I am in, in empty places, in your head.” Quickly, it adds, “You aren’t frightened, please? I can go out any time. But then we can’t speak.”

  “In my head!” Coati exclaims. For some reason she, too, feels like laughing, she knows she should be making some more serious response, but all she can think of is that this is why her sinuses feel stuffy. “How did you get in my head?”

  “When you rescued me. I was incapable of thought. We have a primitive tropism to enter a body and make our way to the head. When I came to myself, I was here. You see, on my home, we live in the brains of our host-animals. In fact, we are their brains.”

  “You went through my body? Oh—from that place on my arm?”

  “Yes, I must have done. I have only vague, primitive memories. You see, we are really so small. We live in what I think you call intermolecular, maybe interatomic spaces. Our passage doesn’t injure anything. To me, your body is as open and porous as your landscape is to you. I didn’t realize there was so much large-scale solidity around until I saw it through your eyes! Then when you went cold, I came to myself and learned my way around, and deciphered the speech centers. 1 had a long, long, time. It was... lonely. I didn’t know if you would ever awaken...”

  “Yeah...” Coati thinks this over. She’s pretty sure she couldn’t imagine all this. It must be real But all she can think of to say is, “You’re using my eyes, too?”

  “I’ve tapped into the optic nerve, at the second juncture. Very delicately, I assure you. And to your auditory channels. It’s one of the first things we do, a primitive program. And we make the host feel happy, to keep from frightening. You do feel happy, don’t you?”

  “Happy?... Hey, are you doing that? Listen, if that’s you, you’re overdoing it! I don’t want to feel quite so ‘happy,’ as you call it. Can you turn it down?”

  “You don’t? Oh, I am sorry. Please wait—my movements are slow.”

  Coati waits, thinking so furiously about everything at once that her mind is a chaos. Presently there comes a marked decrease in the distracting physical glow. More than all the rest, this serves to convince her of the reality of her new inhabitant.

  “Can you read my mind?” she asks slowly.

  “Only when you form words,” her own voice replies. “Subvocalizing, I think you call it. I used all that long cold time tracing out your vocabulary and language. We have a primitive drive to communication. Perhaps all life-forms have.”

  ‘.‘Acquiring a whole language from a static, sleeping brain is quite a feat,” says Coati thoughtfully. She is beginning to feel a distinct difference in her voice when the alien is using it; it seems higher, tighter—and she hears herself using words that she knows only from reading, not habitual use.

  “Yes. Luckily I had so much time. But I was so dismayed and depressed when it seemed you’d never awaken. All that work would be for nothing. I am so happy to find you alive! Not just for the work, but for—for life... Oh, and I have had one chance to practice with your species before. But your brain is quite different.”

  However flustered and overwhelmed by the novelty of all this, Coati isn’t stupid. The words about “home” and “hosts” are making a connection with Boney and Ko’s report.

  “Did the two men who sent that message you were riding on visit your home planet? They were two Humans—that’s what I am—in a ship bigger than this.”

  “Oh, yes! I was one of those who took turns being with them! And I was visiting one of them when they left...” The voice seems to check itself. “Your brain is really very different.”

  “Thanks,” says Coati inanely. “I’ve heard those two men—those two Humans—weren’t regarded as exactly bright.”

  “ ‘Bright’? Ah, yes... We performed some repairs, but we couldn’t do much.”

  Coati’s chaotic thoughts coalesce. What she’s sitting here chatting with is an alien—an alien who is possibly deadly, very likely dangerous, who has invaded her head.

  “You’re a brain parasite!” she cries loudly. “You’re an intelligent brain parasite, using my eyes to see with and my ears to hear with, and talking through my mouth as if I were a zombie—and for all I know you’re taking over my whole brain!”

  “Oh, please! P-please!” She hears her own voice tremble. “I can leave at any moment—is that what you wish? And I damage nothing—nothing at all. I use very little energy. In fact, I have cleared away some debris in your main blood supply tube, so there is more than ample for us both. I only need a few components from time to time. But I can withdraw right now. It would be a slow process, because I’ve become more deeply enmeshed and my mentor isn’t here to direct me. But if that’s what you want, I shall start at once, leaving just as I came... Maybe—n-now that I’m refreshed, I could survive longer, clinging to your ship.”

  The pathos affects Coati; the timbre of the voice calls up the image of a tiny, sad, frightened creature shivering in the cold prison of space.

  “We’ll decide about that later,” she says somewhat gruffly. “Meanwhile, I have your word of honor you aren’t messing up my brain?”

  “Indeed not,” her own voice whispers back indignantly. “It is a beautiful brain.”

  “But what do you want? Where are you trying to go?”

  “Now I want only to go home. I thought, if I could reach some central Human place, we could find someone who would carry me back to my home planet Nolian, and my proper host.”

  “But why did you leave Boney and Ko and go with that message pipe in the first place?”

  “Oh—I had then no idea how big the empty spaces are, I thought it would be like a long trip out-of-body at home. Brrr-rr! There’s so much I don’t know. Can you tell that I am a quite young being? I have not at all finished my instructions. My mentors tell me I am foolish, or foolhardy. I—I wanted adventure!” The little voice sounds suddenly quite strong and positive. “I still do, but I see I must be better prepared.”

  “Hmm. Hey, can you tell I’m young, too? I guess that makes two of us. I guess I’m out here looking for adventure, too.”

  “You do understand!”

  “Yeah.” Coati grins, sighs. “Well, I can carry you back to FedBase, and I’m sure they’ll be sending parties to your planet soon. It’s a First Contact for us, you know; that’s what we call meeting a new non-Human race. We know about fifty so far, but no one just like you. So I’m certain people will be going.”

  “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much.”

  Coati feels a surge of physical pleasure, an urge—

  “Hey! You’re doing that again! Stop it.”

  “Oh, I am sorry.” The glow fades. “It’s a primitive response to gratitude. To give pleasure. You see, our normal hosts are quite mindless, they can be thanked only by physical sensation.”

  “I see.” Pondering this, Coati sees something else, too.

  “I suppose you could make them feel pain, too, to punish them, if they did something you didn’t like?”

  “I suppose so... But we don’t like pain, it chums up the delicate brain. That’s some of the lessons I haven’t had yet. 1 only had to once, when my host was playing too near a dangerous cliff. And then I soothed it with pleasure right after it moved back. We use it only in emergencies, if the host threatens to harm itself, rare things like that... Or, wait, I remember, if the host gets into what you call a fight... You can see it’s complicated.”

  ”I see,” Coati repeats. Uneasily, she realizes that this young alien passenger might have more control over her than was exactly neat. But it seems to be so well meaning, to have no intent at all to harm her. She relaxes, unable to suppress a twinge of wonder whether her easy emotional acceptance of its presence in—whew! her brain —might not be a feeling partly engineered by the alien. Maybe the really neat thing to do would be to ask her passenger to withdraw, right now. Could she fix some comfortable place for it to stay outside her? Maybe she�
�ll do that, when they get a bit closer to FedBase.

  Meanwhile, what about her plan for visiting the planet Boney and Ko were headed for? If she could pick up a trace of them, it would be a real help to FedBase. And wouldn’t it be a shame to come all this way out without taking a look?

  That argument with herself is soon over. And her young appetite is making itself felt. She picks out a ration snack and starts to set the drive course for the planets, explaining between munches what she plans to do before return to FedBase. Her passenger raises no objection to this delay.

  “I am so grateful, so grateful you would think to deliver me,” her voice says with some difficulty around the cheese bites.

  As Coati opens the cold-keeper, a flash of gold attracts her attention. It’s more of that gold dust, clinging to the chilly surface. She bats it away, and some floats to her face.

  “By the way, what is this stuff? It came in the message pipe, with you. Can you see it? Hey, it’s on my legs, too.” She extends one.

  “Yes,” her “different” voice replies. “They are seeds.”

  She’s getting used to this weird dialogue with herself. It reminds her of a show she saw, where a ventriloquist animated a dummy. I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy, she chuckles to herself. Only I’m the ventriloquist, too.

  “What kind of seeds, of what?” she asks aloud.

  “Ours.” There’s a sound, or feeling, like a sigh, as if a troubling thought had passed. Then her voice says more briskly, “Wait, I forgot. I should release a chemical to keep them off you. They are attracted to—to the pheromones of life.”

  “I didn’t know I knew those words,” Coati tells her invisible companion. “I guess you were really into my vocabulary while I slept.”

  “Oh, yes. I labored.”

  A moment later Coati feels a slight flush prickling her skin. Is this the “chemical”? Before she can feel alarmed, it passes. And she sees that the floating dust, or seeds, have fallen away from her as if repelled by a charge.