Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  They are not spaceships. They are beings. Creatures of deep space, made of altmatter, riding the Antarsa current like me.

  I found this out a few days ago, when the radar screen presented an unusually clear image. A long, sinuous, undulating shape, broadest in the middle and tapered at each end, moved parallel to us. Something waved like a banner from the far end—a tail. It was huge. I held my breath. The visual image showed a barely visible shape, lit only by starlight and the external lights of my ship, but it reminded me just a little of the seagu, that massive, benevolent ocean mammal of the Western Sea.

  It was clearly made of altmatter. Its flattened limbs—fins?—moved in resistance to the Antarsa current, which propelled it forward. There was a purposefulness, an ease with which it swam that was delightful to see. Here was a creature in its element, apparently evolved to travel between the stars on the great Antarsa ocean. I closed my eyes, opened them, and the image was still there. My fingers were shaking.

  How to describe what it meant to me, the company of another living creature, be it one so removed from myself! I had lived with other living beings all my life before this journey. I had played with chatterlings in the great forest near my home, swum with ocean mammals—walroos and seagus, whales, and schools of silverbellies. Even in the high, bare mountains of Himdhara, where life is hardy, scarce and without extravagance, I had made kinship with a mog-bear, with whom I shared a cave for several days during a storm. Nearly always I had traveled with other humans. This was my first journey into the dark, alone. Parin’s biosphere had much to do with maintaining my sanity, but how I had missed the company of other life! I blinked back tears. I took a deep breath and thanked the universe that I had lived to see such a marvel.

  It was an exhilarating moment. It reminded me of my time with Raim, learning to use the sails on his boat on the Western Sea. Wind and current carried us far from the shore, and that wind was in my hair, whipping it about my face, and chapping my lips. Raim was beside me, laughing, rejoicing that I was finally moving the boat like an extension of my own body. Just then a school of whales surfaced, and leaped up into the air as though to observe us. Crashing down into the water, raising a spray that drenched us, they traveled with us, sometimes surging ahead, sometimes matching our speed, their eyes glinting with humor.

  This creature did not seem to have eyes. It must sense the world around it in a different way. I wondered whether it detected my little craft, and what it thought of it. But close on that thought came a new surprise. A fleet, a school, of smaller shapes tumbled past between my ship and the behemoth. They were like small, flattened wheels, perhaps a meter in diameter as far as I could tell, trailing long cords through the current. They moved not in straight, parallel lines, but much more chaotically, like a crowd of excited children moving about every which way as they went toward a common destination.

  As though this spectacle was not wonderful enough, I saw that around me, on either side and above and below, there was life. There were fish shapes, and round shapes, and long, tubular shapes, all moving with some kind of propulsion or undulation. They shimmered the way that altmatter does to the human eye, and some had their own lights, like the fish of the deep sea. These latter ones also had enormous dark spots on their bow end, like eyes. What worlds had birthed these creatures? Had they evolved in a gas cloud, or in the outer atmosphere of some star? They were so fantastic, and yet familiar. Our universe is, we know, mostly made from other kinds of matter than ourselves, but I hadn’t imagined that altmatter could be the basis for life. It occurred to me now that altmatter life might be much more common in the universe than our kind. Space is so big, so empty. We have always assumed it hostile to life, but perhaps that is true only of our kind of life, made of ordinary matter.

  For the next two days I prepared radar clips and visual clips to send home, and watched the play of life around me. I have seen what seem to be feeding frenzies—the behemoth feasted on those wheeled creatures—and I might have witnessed a birth.

  Today I saw a new creature, twice as long as the behemoth I had first set my eyes upon. It had armor-plating with fissures between the plates, and apparent signs of erosion (how?), as though it was very old. It trailed a cloud of smaller creatures behind it, evidently attendant upon it. Its round hole of a mouth was fringed with a starburst of tentacles. I was musing on the problem of the radar-imaging system’s resolving capacity, wondering what I was missing in terms of smaller-scale life in the life-rich current—when I saw the leviathan’s mouth widen. It was at this point ahead of me and to one side of the ship, so I couldn’t see the mouth, but I inferred it from the way the tentacles fringing the orifice spread out. To my astonishment a great, umbrella-shaped net was flung out from the fringes of the mouth, barely visible to my radar. This net then spread out in front of the creature like a parachute; the creature back-finned vigorously, slowing down so abruptly that a number of other swimmers were caught in the web. Had I not swerved violently, my craft and I would have been among them. The acceleration might have flung me across the chamber and broken some bones, had it not been for the inertial net, which thickened astonishingly fast. (That the ship suffered no great damage is a testament to the engineering skills of the great generation-ship builders of old, my craft being a modified version of one of their shuttles).

  Now that the Ashtan system is nearly upon us, I have a new worry. I don’t know whether the Antarsa current flows through any celestial objects, such as the sun, or a planet, or a moon. If it does, I must manipulate the altmatter sails in time to escape a violent crash. I am afraid something like this might have happened to the altmatter probes that were first launched from Dhara, that stopped sending back radio signals. Or perhaps they were swallowed by some creature.

  Strangely, the current appears to be slowing; this would be a relief if it wasn’t laced with chaotic microflows. I can sense them through the way they make the sails shiver, something I could not have told a few years ago. Sometimes I feel as though I can see the current with some inner eye, almost as though it has acquired a luminosity, a tangibility. I imagine, sometimes, that I can feel it, very faintly, a feather’s touch, a tingling.

  I have a sense of something about to happen.

  What can I say, now, to the dark? How do I explain what I have experienced to my kin on Dhara? What will you make of it, my sister Parin, my brother Raim? What stories will you now tell your children about Mayha, Moon-woman?

  Nothing I once assumed to be true appears to be true.

  As we entered the Ashtan system, the Antarsa current became chaotic on a larger scale. At that point I was not far from the second planet, Ashta, with its two lumpy little moons. Navigation became very difficult, as there were eddies and vortices and strong, dangerous little currents. There is a backwash from Ashta itself, I am convinced. This can only be the case if Ashta has a core of altmatter. Otherwise wouldn’t the Antarsa wind simply blow through it, without becoming so turbulent?

  This is not surprising. On Dhara there must be altmatter within the planet, else how would the devtaru have drawn it up? On Dhara, however, the Antarsa current does not go headlong through the planet, nor is it so wide. There is only a soft breeze through the planet, with the current itself running perhaps two hundred thousand kilometers distant. Here a broad channel of the current rushes through a region occupied by part of Ashta’s orbit, and includes the tiny, uninhabitable inner planet and the sun. Depending on how much altmatter there is in these celestial objects, there is likely to be quite a backflow, and therefore much turbulence. A mountain stream studded with rocks would behave the same way.

  For a long while, I was caught in the rapids. Caught with me were other creatures, altmatter beings of a fantastic variety, swimming valiantly, changing course with an enviable dexterity as the currents demanded. My hands were sore from manipulating the sails, my mind and soul occupied with the challenge of the moment, but the ship’s AI managed to send a message in Old Irthic to Ashta. There was no reply b
ut the now familiar silence.

  I now know why. Or at least, I have a hypothesis. Because I have seen things I can hardly yet comprehend. I will not be landing on Ashta. It is impossible, and not just because of the turbulence.

  This is what I saw: the day side of Ashta, through my telescope, showed continents floating on a gray ocean. There were dark patches like forests, and deserts, and the wrinkles of mountain ranges. I saw also scars, mostly in the equatorial belt, as though the planet had been pelted with enormous boulders. Most dramatically, the edges of the continents seemed to be on fire. There were plumes of smoke, mouths of fire where volcanoes spoke. In the interior, too, the scarred regions were streaked or lined or edged with a deep, red glow, and there were dark, smooth plains, presumably of lava. I imagined the invisible Antarsa current slamming into altmatter deposits deep within the planet, the impact creating internal heat that liquefied rock, which erupted volcanically onto the surface. There must be earthquakes too, on a regular basis, and were there not forests on fire?

  That the forests were there at all spoke of a kinder past. Perhaps the Antarsa current had changed course in recent geological time? Now Ashta was a planet in the process of being destroyed, if the current didn’t push it out of orbit first. I had never seen a more terrible sight.

  But as we got closer, I saw much more to wonder at. The radar picked up something thousands of kilometers in front of the planet.

  It first appeared as a roughly rectangular shadow or smear, very faint, that later resolved into a great array—a fine mesh of some kind, reminiscent of the net of the altmatter creature who nearly ate us. But this was on a massive scale, stretching across much of my view of the planet. Studded within it at regular intervals were lumps that I couldn’t quite resolve—knots or nodes of some kind? No, too irregular. The net seemed to be held in place by beings, crafts or devices (I couldn’t tell the difference at this distance) at corners and along the perimeter so that the whole thing sailed along with the planet. Its relative indifference to the chaotic Antarsa current indicated it was made of ordinary matter. Getting closer, I found that the lumps were creatures caught in the net, struggling. There was an air of great purpose and deliberation in the movements of smaller objects about the net—these craft, if that is what they were, appeared to buzz about, inspecting a catch here, a catch there, perhaps repairing tears in the net. It might have been my imagination but the creatures became still once the busy little craft went to them.

  I went as close to the net as I dared. I had already folded the altmatter wings to decrease the effect of the current, although the eddies were so turbulent that this did not help as much as it should have, and my ship shuddered as a consequence. I switched to fusion power and edged toward the net. I wanted to see if the busy little objects—the fishermen—were spacecraft or creatures, but at the same time I didn’t want to be swept into the net. One can’t make an offer of kinship unless the two parties begin on a more-or-less equal footing. From what I hoped was a safe distance, I saw a drama unfold.

  A behemoth was caught in the net. As it struggled, it tore holes in the material. One of the busy little fishercraft immediately went for it. Arms (or grappling hooks?) emerged from the craft and tried to engage the behemoth, but the creature was too large and too strong. A few lashes of the powerful tail, and it had pulled free, swimming off in the current—but the little craft-like object or creature broke up. From within it came all kinds of debris, some of it clearly made out of ordinary matter because it was impervious to the chaotic churning of the Antarsa and only influenced by gravity. These bits had clean, smooth trajectories. Flailing and struggling in the current, however, were three long, slender creatures with fins and a bifurcated tail. Were these the pilots of the craft, or parasites within the belly of a beast? The inexorable currents drew them to the net. I wanted to linger, to see whether they would be rescued or immobilized—two of the busy craft went immediately toward them—but I was already too close and I did not want to subject my ship to more shuddering. So I powered away in a wide arc.

  I made for the night side of the planet. I was hoping for lights, indicating a settlement, perhaps, but the night side was dark, except for the fires of volcanoes and lava beds. Whatever beings had engineered the enormous net had left no trace of their presence on the planet—perhaps, if they had once lived there, they had abandoned it.

  My kin were clearly not on this planet. The generation ship must have come here and found that the constant bombardment of the planet by altmatter creatures made it a poor candidate for a home. I hoped that they would have escaped the net, if the net had been there at the time. It was possible, too, that they had come here and settled, and when, as I thought, the Antarsa current shifted and slammed through Ashta, they perished. I felt great sadness, because I had hoped, dreamed, that I would find them here, settled comfortably in the niches and spaces of this world. I had imagined talking to them in the Old Irthic that I had been practicing, until I learned their languages. Instead I had to send a message home that they were not here after all.

  Where had they gone? Manda had told me that the old generation ships were programmed for at least three destinations. Wherever they had gone, they had not thought it worthwhile to send us a message. Perhaps something had gone wrong en route. I shivered. None of the options implied anything good for our lost kin.

  I decided I would attempt a moon landing. The moons did not seem to be made of altmatter as far as I could tell. The moon over the dark side was in the planet’s wake, where there should be fewer eddies and undertows. So I brought my craft (still on fusion power) into orbit around the moon.

  That was when it happened—a totally unexpected undertow caught the folded altmatter wings in the navigation chamber at just the right angle. I had at that moment cut speed from the fusion engines, preparatory to making an approach, so the undertow caught me by surprise. Before I knew it we were flung head-on toward the moon.

  As I saw the moon’s battered surface loom larger and larger, I thought of you, dear kin. I thought my moment had come. You would wonder at Mayha’s silence, and hypothesize various endings to her story. I couldn’t let that happen to you. Quicker than thought, I powered the fusion engines to brake my craft. I made a crash-landing, bumping along the uneven ground, over and over, until at last we were still. I felt the slight tug of the moon’s gravity. The inertial web retracted slowly—I winced as it pulled strands of my hair with it. I was shaking, weak from shock. How slowly the silence impressed upon me as I lay in my craft!

  Then the ship’s AI began to speak. The fusion engine was intact, but one of the altmatter wings was broken. There was some damage to the outside of the ship, and the AI was already launching a repair swarm that clambered insect-like over the cracked and fissured shell. Anchoring cables had dug in and secured us to the surface of the moon. There was a spare wing stored within the navigation chamber, but it would take a long time to shape and match it to the old one. Then I would have to remove the broken wing and put in the new one, and adjust the rigging to the right tension. Working with altmatter meant that as I turned a wing this way or that, it would pick up a current or two and tumble out of my hand, and blow about the chamber. After a while I decided I needed to restore my mental equilibrium to the extent possible under such circumstances. So I did what I would do at home: after suiting up, I went for a walk.

  Walking on the moon was both exhilarating and terrifying. To be outside my little home after years! I could spread my arms, move my legs, go somewhere I hadn’t been before. There was the great bulk of the planet ahead of me, dominating my field of vision, dark and mysterious, streaked with fires, limned with light. The moon seemed to be a fragile thing in comparison, and I had to fight the feeling that I would fall away from it and on to the smoking, burning planet. I had to step lightly, gingerly, so that the ground would not push me away too hard. I walked half-way around it and found myself at the edge of a deep crater.

  Lowering myself down to it was easy
in the low gravity. At the bottom it was very dark. My suit lights picked out an opening—a hollow—a cave! I stepped into it, curious, and found a marvel.

  The cave was filled with luminous fish-like creatures, each about as long as my finger. They circled around on tiny, invisible currents, so I guessed they were made of altmatter. As I stared at them in wonder, a few darted up to me, hovering over my visor. I stood very still. To make kinship with a fellow living being, however remote, was a great thing after my long incarceration. I was inspected and found harmless, and thereafter left alone. I stood in the dark of the cave, my ears filled with the sound of my own breathing, and fervently thanked the universe for this small encounter.

  As I turned to leave, I had a terrible shock. My suit lights had fallen on somebody—a human, sitting silently on a piece of rock against the wall of the cave, watching me.

  No, it was not a person—it was a sculpture. Fashioned in stone of a different kind, a paler shade than the material of the moon, it had clearly been brought here. I went up to it, my heart still thumping. It was the statue of a woman, sitting on a rock cut to resemble the prow of a boat or ship. There was a long pole in her hands, and she looked at me with obsidian eyes, her face showing a kind of ethereal joy. I thought she might be one of the old gods of our ancestors, perhaps a goddess for travelers. I touched the rock with my gloved hand, moved beyond tears. Why had my kin left this symbol here? Perhaps they had tried to make a home on Ashta, and failing, had left the statue as a mark of their presence.

  I spent three days on the moon. I repaired the wing, a task more difficult than I can relate here (Raim will find a better description in my technical journal) and went back to the cave many times to renew kinship with the fish-like creatures and to see again the statue of the woman. The last time, I conducted an experiment.