Best of Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  The skimmer turns, and Efie’s heart lurches. The pilot curses and shouts to her and Rosa‌—‌something about having come too close to the pool, needing to go to a landing strip carved into a field several miles away.

  Efie takes a deep breath, nostrils flared.

  The eddies swirl. Her mind fills with all she left behind and the terror of not knowing whether leaving was worth it, and already she feels like crying.

  * * *

  An hour after getting off the skimmer, Efie struggles up a mountain path behind Rosa, carrying less than a quarter of the equipment that will eventually need to be humped to the pool.

  “Jesus Christ...” she pants. “They couldn’t land us closer?”

  Rosa shakes her head. Gray hair falls in gentle curls across her face, which is kind and old and creased with wrinkles in the deep places like a grandmother’s. One of the things that drew Efie to her in the first place. “Monks wouldn’t‌—‌” she sucks in a deep breath, “‌—‌let them.”

  They stop, packs heavy on their shoulders. Rosa withdraws a pouch of water and squeezes some into her mouth, then hands the pouch to Efie. It’s a cool day, as it tends to be on Belladox. They aren’t all that high in elevation‌—‌just twelve hundred meters up from the sea‌—‌but Belladox is a small world with an atmosphere that, despite being Earthlike, is quite thin. The concentration of oxygen at the temple hovers around half of that at sea level on Earth. Enough to breathe, Efie’s been assured, but it sure doesn’t feel like it when you’re walking up a steep slope.

  A figure appears on the path ahead of them, coming down from a ridge that hides what Efie hopes to God is the pool and the temple, because she’s going to get sent back alone to get the rest of the gear. Kind as Rosa is, she’s the P.I. and Efie the graduate assistant, and there are certain perks to being lead on a project. The approaching figure wears a charcoal-gray robe that wraps around her chest and legs but leaves one bright shoulder bare. Her hair has been shorn so closely it looks like an army of black ants clinging to her scalp, and she wears no shoes.

  “Hello!” she calls. She doesn’t sound out of breath at all; they say the body adjusts. Efie will be here for two years, more than long enough to get used to it. Then she’ll go back into cryo and be shipped to Earth, where she and Rosa will present their initial findings at several conferences, and she’ll spend the rest of her doctoral years analyzing the data.

  Rosa bows slightly at the waist. “Rosa de la Cruz,” she says. “Professor of Exoplanetary Physics. Randall University.”

  The newcomer mirrors her. “Sahila, bhikkuni of the Temple of Uncountable Eddies.” She notices Efie, who’s sucking down water and trying to keep from being dizzy. “And you must be Efie Adnana.”

  Efie nods, because she’s still out of breath.

  “Welcome,” Sahila says. “The temple is only two miles farther.”

  Efie panics; it becomes even harder to breathe, and she discovers tears in her eyes that have no place there. Efie Adnana does not cry when she encounters a challenge.

  Sahila and Rosa talk a little longer. Some creature that sounds like a bird calls out from the crags. A thing like a centipede the size of Efie’s arm scuttles across the path. She breathes. In. Out. Calm down. There’s enough air. You can take it slow. You have two years to study the eddies. Calm. In. Out.

  When Efie and Rosa move on, Sahila makes no offer to help. She just climbs onto a rock near the path, faces the purpling sky, and crosses her legs in lotus pose.

  * * *

  The first readings look like Efie and Rosa expect them to. Efie grins.

  “Just like the request said,” Rosa muses.

  They’re sitting on a patch of hard-packed dirt, about twenty feet from the pool that gives the Temple of Uncountable Eddies its name. The water’s dark green color comes from an algae-like organism that grows within it. The pool’s a few hundred yards wide, nestled between two towering peaks and the knolls where the temple sits. Nobody knows how deep it is, because the monks won’t let anyone measure.

  But it isn’t the pool that Efie and Rosa are there to study.

  It’s the eddies.

  They emit low-intensity radio waves. The monks who settled Belladox discovered them as they moved into Phase II colonization and began looking for nonessential settlement sites. First they built the temple, and then they sent a request for researchers on the junket that makes the forty-eight-year trip between Belladox and Earth. A necessity, because despite several centuries of colonization, no one’s figured out how to effectively transmit data farther than a few light-years.

  The junket arrived at Earth fifty years ago, just as Efie was starting her Ph.D. at Randall, and Rosa cobbled together some grant money so they could study the eddies. Rosa’s husband was about to embark on a research trip, and she wanted to do a project of her own rather than go into cryo and wait for him to return. Their daughter was struggling to fit into her school anyway, and she jumped at the chance to skip ahead a couple of generations and try again. She’ll be waiting for them when they get back.

  Efie will have no one to welcome her, except a few other graduate students gone on projects of similar length.

  She turns to watch the eddies. They’re beautiful little things, swirling like emerald galaxies. When Belladox’s bright-white sun is directly overhead, bathing the planet in light that seems more fluorescent than natural, they sparkle.

  No one local has studied the eddies, at least not scientifically, in the hundred years since the request for researchers went out. The monks and novices spend an awful lot of time watching them, though.

  Efie turns back to her screen and examines the waveforms generated by the eddies. They remind her of an illustration in a paper she proofread for a friend, but she can’t quite remember what it represented.

  Anna, who published that paper, will have a teaching position somewhere by now. Be in the prime of her career, a tenured professor. Neurologists don’t have to leave Earth to make a name for themselves.

  Efie takes a deep breath of the Belladox air, but it doesn’t calm her like it should. She still panics sometimes from the lack of oxygen, though her headaches are becoming less frequent.

  “Need a beer?” Rosa opens a can of the local brew, which is made with genetically adapted hops and tastes more like piss than lager.

  Efie takes it and frowns. “Stuff makes me drunk too fast. And it tastes like shit.”

  Rosa laughs and sits next to her. “You’re thinking about home. It’s traditional to drink when you’re in your first week and thinking about home.”

  Efie smiles sheepishly. Rosa cracks open another beer, and they tap the cans together.

  “To Earth,” Rosa says.

  “To Earth,” Efie echoes. She can’t suppress a flutter of excitement at being initiated. The P.I. toasts the good things about the time you’re missing at home, and you toast the things you’re sad about. Good to get the emotions out, they say. It’s a rough life, skipping decades traveling in cryo. Try to handle it alone and you’ll burn out. Have to embrace the weird, lean in to the exoplanetary research community, because it’s all that will be anything close to constant in your life.

  “To the university, and the fact that Michelle fucking Goodman won’t be president anymore when we get back,” Rosa says.

  “To friends who have moved on to bigger and better things.”

  “To two years on a planet with fantastic sunsets, scenery that Thomas Cole would’ve fallen on his knees to paint, and a fascinating study subject.”

  “To having no clue what Earth is going to look like in half a century.”

  “To returning to Jon and Abla, Spinner and Mai Le, Dr. Ato and Esi‌—‌and to swapping some incredible stories with them.”

  The can wobbles in Efie’s hand. “To Yawo.”

  Rosa clears her throat and drinks. Efie follows suit. The beer’s cold at least, but it still tastes like shit.

  “You miss her, huh?”

  Efie nods.
Yawo is her cat. Was her cat. Yawo will be dead now. Will never quirk her head and chirp at her in the morning, or pounce on her feet when she’s trying to study, or chase cockroaches in circles in her shitty apartment. Efie bawled like a baby after leaving her with Anna.

  Rosa gently squeezes Efie’s shoulder. Doesn’t say, “Oh, you’ll get another one,” like her labmates did. Doesn’t look away in shame because her pets were frozen and will be waiting for her when she gets back. Just accepts the grief and takes another sip of beer.

  So Efie does the same. What else is there to do?

  * * *

  “Sadness,” Efie breathes. “Jesus Christ, it’s sadness.”

  Rosa, seated in a folding chair in front of a monitor and studying the same waveforms Efie’s looking at, raises an eyebrow. The eddies have been putting out more radiation than usual. One of them has just stopped, as happens from time to time. The average lifespan of an individual eddy is only about two weeks.

  “Rosa, it’s sadness.”

  “You just said that. What do you mean?”

  Efie runs a hand over her head. “Back home I had a friend who was trying to transmit emotions using radio and an Emotive cap. She put a graphic of the sadness waveform in her paper. This is it.”

  Rosa leans back and frowns, staring over the monitor at the eddies. “Coincidence.”

  Efie nods. “Probably, yeah. But what a weird one.”

  Behind Rosa, Sahila and a dozen other monks are sitting cross-legged, watching the eddies. On the other side of the pool, a tree has just burst into clouds of vibrant purple, yellow, and red flowers. The blossoms of a tree closer by cover the dirt beneath Efie’s feet. She takes a deep breath.

  “Rosa,” she says, “what if it’s not?”

  * * *

  Efie can’t sleep. She paces the darkness by the pool. Belladox has no moon, but a gentle phosphorescence from the algae in the water gives off enough light to see by. She and Rosa have dug the paper she half-remembered out of a database and verified what she saw. They’ve followed her friend’s methods and modeled waveforms for some of the strongest emotions. Joy. Love. Jealousy. Loneliness. Satisfaction.

  They’ve been able to isolate all of them in the radiation given off by the eddies.

  Efie rubs the gooshflesh on her arms; it’s cold at night by the pool.

  What if they’re sentient? she asked Rosa that afternoon.

  Rosa looked back at her with what Efie thinks of as her serious face. Rosa takes joy in her work, but only after it’s done. Only after the science is solid and everything has been tested and retested and vetted by her peers. Until then, the more important a project becomes, the less pleasure she seems to take in it.

  “There are protocols,” Efie mimics Rosa’s reply, “and we follow them from here on out, just in case.”

  She looks at the eddies. One of them is dying. She watched it slow down as she ate a dinner of pears in simple syrup and rice. It won’t be long before it stops spinning and fades away. When she looks at the waveforms the next morning, she’ll see sadness, over and over again. She knows it.

  She feels as if she can hear the eddies crying.

  * * *

  “Absolutely not,” Rosa says. She’s just come out of the shower and is drying her hair and eating a breakfast of rice gruel. “Efie, you don’t understand how important this is. We don’t make first contact with new sentient species, at least not on purpose. All we do is verify they can feel and back away. A team of xenonegotiators from the U.H.N.P. will show up and handle contact. Do things right, we spend the rest of our careers basking in the glory of this moment. Fuck it up and we go to jail, or worse.”

  “They’re dying,” Efie mutters. “And we’re just sitting here watching it happen.”

  “That’s what living things do‌—‌if these eddies even qualify as living, let alone sentient, which we haven’t verified yet. We can’t stop it, Efie.” She runs a hand through her hair. “Christ, I wish I’d brought someone older.”

  The rebuke stings. Efie’s twenty-one in terms of lived years, the baby of the department. Smart and talented, everybody agrees, but naive. Photographic memory. Identified as talented in science and math at a young age. Plucked out of foster care and run through the best schools on government grants. She has to stay ahead though, has to exceed her targets every year or the government might dump her, and she has nothing to fall back on and nowhere to go. Rosa, who has Jon to lean on now and had her parents before that, doesn’t understand. Efie’s labmates, including Mai Le whose parents were rich enough to freeze her fucking cat when she went off-planet, don’t either.

  “I understand,” Efie says very slowly. “The New Reykjavik incident.”

  Rosa nods. “Bingo.”

  New Reykjavik was the first human settlement destroyed by an alien culture. The settlers found preindustrial natives at the beginning of Phase I colonization. There were no protocols in place, so they approached them, thinking they could sort things out.

  When the colony junket returned to New Reykjavik ten years later, it found nothing but satellite histories and the wreckage of a brutal war. Shortly thereafter, the first-contact protocols were developed and put in place. Rosa had just begun teaching when the New Reykjavik ship returned with the news, and it scarred her. Several exoplanetists she’d known had been at the colony.

  Rosa wraps her hair up into a ponytail and sighs. “I’m sorry I said that, Efie. But this is a big deal. You have to listen to me.”

  Efie nods sullenly. Behind her, another eddy is dying, and the sadness is everywhere.

  * * *

  Sahila watches the young scientist watch the waters. Efie looks troubled. Her mentor has not been available to her, not as she was when they arrived. Whispers have gone through the temple‌—‌the eddies are alive, the youngest novices say, not understanding that of course the eddies are alive, that everything is alive and nothing is, that in time they will shed their illusions and embrace that truth.

  Now the young scientist is crying. It’s time to speak.

  “Good evening,” Sahi says.

  Efie turns around, hurriedly wiping tears from her cheeks. “Good evening. I’m sorry, I‌—‌”

  Sahi shakes her head and smiles, much as the monk who showed her the path to enlightenment once did (Still does, she reminds herself, gently rebuking the voice of the past for its intrusion). “You need not apologize.”

  The wind skips over the crags and shakes blossoms loose from one of the trees on the shore of the pool. They drop onto the water, are sucked into one of the eddies and lost.

  “You are suffering, Efie Adnana, are you not?”

  Efie’s smile looks forced. “I think that’s obvious.”

  Sahi sits and folds her legs into lotus position. Truthfully, it has never done much for her, but it presents an image that is an aid to teaching. “You are afraid that others are suffering.”

  “The eddies, yes.” Efie does not sit. She crosses her arms over her chest.

  “Do you know why we study them?”

  Efie’s attention shifts. This is a mystery that has perplexed her, one that engages the part of her mind that seeks puzzles and their solutions. And that is good.

  “We study them because they die, Efie.”

  Efie’s face twists. She is probably unaware of it, but her mouth turns up at one corner and down at the other, while her eyes squint in disgust.

  “As do you,” Sahi continues. “It was sadness you first detected, was it not?”

  Efie deflates a little. She has no answer for the contradiction.

  “Death and suffering are two of only a few great constants in life, Efie Adnana. There is much to be gained by observing and accepting them.”

  Efie shakes her head.

  “We have an Emotive cap, here at the temple,” Sahi says. She rises. The eddies are swirling, the trees whispering against the crags. Eventually they all will die‌—‌the eddies, the trees, the mountains, Sahila, Efie, Rosa. They are kin in th
at. Brief aberrations in the skein of light that forms the universe. A pool of uncountable eddies.

  “It can be placed at your disposal, should you desire to use it. It has helped others here in the past.”

  * * *

  Efie’s hands shake. The cap is warm beneath her fingers, a soft black cloth covering a network of metal mesh that sends magnetic pulses through the skull and stimulates emotion centers in the brain. Rosa sleeps in her tent nearby. She hasn’t had a beer or smiled in days. Is probably being tormented by nightmares about New Reykjavik.

  Deep breaths. Efie sits near the edge of the pool. After months in the thin air of Belladox, she can get enough oxygen into her blood to slow her heart and settle her mind.

  The sky is clear. There’s little light pollution in this region of Belladox, and the stars speckle the sky like dirt on the surface of an eggshell. Nothing like what Efie grew up with. Nothing like anything that can be seen from Earth.

  And yet they’re the same stars. Somewhere out there is Sol and around it Earth, reflecting light that hit it just over a decade after she left. If she could find it, and if the light was bright enough, she would be able to turn an impossibly powerful telescope on it and find Yawo rubbing against Anna’s legs on a balcony somewhere, whining for food. Maybe thinking of her, wondering where the nice human who found her and fed her and loved her for a while went.

  Another eddy is dying.

  This one seems important. It has lived longer than most‌—‌twenty-four days‌—‌and the pool is radiating more actively than usual. Efie watched the waveforms after Rosa went to sleep, recorded the sadness, the loneliness. There is so little she understands.

  A few monks are awake. A light’s on in the temple, and someone softly chants a mantra within.

  Rosa’s words war with Sahi’s. Strictly speaking, Efie isn’t breaking the protocols by tuning the cap to reproduce the emotions of the eddies‌—‌that’s still passive, still just monitoring‌—‌but Rosa will be furious nevertheless. She’s guilty of bad science, of tainting her results by becoming emotionally invested, of getting too close to her subjects. Courses in xenosociology are part of an exoplanetary physics graduate degree, and she’s aware of the academic distance she’s supposed to cultivate.