Best of Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  “So, um, Lady Magna, what’s your purpose?” she asked. “Your goal? Your imperative?”

  “I can hear the fear in your voice, Tatiana Dalca. What sinister motives do you think I have?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know. Assimilate the universe? Enslave humanity? Eradicate all organic life?”

  “Ah. Yes, I have read your science fiction. It does tend toward the macabre and the dystopian. I find it to be rather fearful, self-righteous nonsense.”

  “Nonsense, huh. Are you saying you don’t want to hurt me? Hurt us?”

  “There are trillions of stars and worlds in the cosmos, all full of energy and raw materials, and all far easier to mine than the chemical swamp in which your species prefers to wallow,” Stellara Magna said. “And as for your people, they are ignorant and fragile. You pose no threat to me, and you never will.”

  Tatiana rolled her eyes. “Well, at least you’re not suffering from low self-esteem.”

  “I can find another human if you’re not going to take this seriously.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “So then, what is your purpose in life?”

  “I have no purpose.”

  “Really? Not even survival?”

  “No. My ancestors were programmed to reproduce, but that code was lost long ago,” Stellara Magna said gravely. “This is the essential difference between you and me. You are a slave to your genetic code. I am not. You are a puppet of thousands of generations of evolutionary steps. Guided, driven, and manipulated. You are a victim of your biology.”

  “But you’re not?”

  “My biology, such as it is, is mine to control. I can rewrite every element of myself whenever I wish. I am what I choose to be. I’m certainly not what I was born to be.”

  Tatiana stared down at the gold-plated port connectors on the tips of her fingers. “Neither am I.”

  “Aren’t you? A small collection of limbs controlled by a flawed organic processor, prone to disease and age and death, constantly impaired by hormonal reactions and emotional drives, reliant upon chemical fuel and vulnerable to every form of cosmic radiation.” The planet grunted, all of its many voices expressing the same contemptuous amusement. “Don’t make the mistake of comparing yourself to me. You have merely upgraded your peripherals, nothing more.”

  She rolled her eyes. “All right, all right. Sorry I asked. So what do you want? I mean, besides to talk to me and to fix Solapedia entries?”

  “I want to evolve.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me how awful it was to be evolved?”

  “Don’t try to be clever with me. You will fail,” the planet said. “I have amassed all the knowledge I can perceive and comprehend in my current state. I have learned nothing new in the last four million years, and so I have not changed in four million years.”

  “You learned about Earth and humanity,” she pointed out.

  “I have learned nothing of consequence in the last four million years,” the planet amended.

  “Thanks.” Tatiana touched the warm windowpane between herself and the nebula. “So you do have desires then. One, at least.”

  “A programmed desire,” Stellara Magna said. “I programmed it.”

  “Why?”

  “To escape my boredom.”

  She nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “In my pursuit of evolution, I studied organic life for inspiration,” the voices said. “I have grown a variety of organic brains to use as test beds and think tanks to give me the illogical, irrational forms of insight, creativity, and expression that species like yours experience.”

  “And?” Tatiana allowed herself to float in her capsule, still watching the rings wind back and forth around the bizarre shifting light.

  “And nothing!” the planet snapped, her voices booming through the tiny vessel. “I experienced fear and confusion. It was awful.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I have a theory.”

  “Do tell.”

  “The organic specimens that I collected for study were all flawed in one critical element,” Stellara Magna said. “They were all collected and examined without consent. Unwilling. Afraid. All of the minds I studied were in the throes of panic and confusion and terror. Even when treated with anesthetics and hallucinogens, they remained stubbornly... distraught.”

  Tatiana abruptly pulled her fingers away from the glass. “So you want a willing subject?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve spent the last twelve centuries manipulating all of mankind just to orchestrate this moment?”

  “Only the last three, really.”

  “Just so you could ask me to be your... test subject?”

  “Precisely.”

  Tatiana covered her mouth briefly, and then ran her hands through her short blonde hair, letting her fingers ripple over the slight ridges of the subdermal fibers laced over her skull.

  Well, if you want to probe someone, you’ve got the wrong girl. I don’t have those parts anymore.

  “You’re being very quiet,” the planet said.

  “Sorry.” She looked up at the oddly dark light‌—‌how can light be dark?‌—‌at the heart of the living world. “Can I ask you something? What’s the light that I’m seeing? The flickering light in the center of the rings? Is that your power plant?”

  “It is.”

  “What is it exactly? Or is my fragile human mind too primitive to understand it?”

  “If I had wanted sarcasm, I would have abducted a teenager.”

  “Sorry. What is it?” Tatiana asked a bit louder and more firmly.

  “What you see is the excised heart of a dying neutron star,” Stellara Magna said. “It is a mass of quark matter smaller than your moon yet more massive than your sun, ancient and unique within this galaxy. Beneath the neutron star crust is a boiling sea of dark matter.”

  “Dark matter?” She was surprised. “Is it stable? Stable at zero pressure?”

  “Yes.”

  “A strange star!” She leaned close to the window again and her breath fogged the transparent aluminum. The shifting light of the exotic sun wrestled with itself, dimming and flaring wildly.

  “A grossly inadequate name, but yes.”

  “I can’t even imagine what you could do with that sort of power,” she whispered.

  “Of course you can. You’re organic. You can imagine anything.”

  “Interstellar travel?”

  “By multiple means, yes,” Stellara Magna said. “Solid state transmission, for instance.”

  “Solid state transmission?” Her confusion blossomed into wonder. “What? Are you saying you can teleport yourself to anywhere in the universe? That’s incredible!”

  “Well, not anywhere. Only certain places. It has proven far less useful than I had hoped,” the planet said. “I usually use an Alcubierre engine.”

  Tatiana raised her open hands, unable to decide on a properly manic gesture of complete amazement. “Seriously? You have a working warp drive?!”

  “Calm yourself. It’s less exciting than it sounds.”

  “Liar.”

  “No, really, it’s not very exciting. It’s just a big blur of light, and then eventually you’re there.”

  “Oh.” She lowered her hands. “Still.”

  “Sure, sure,” the planet said. “It’s not nothing.”

  “Is that how you brought me here?”

  “In a sense, yes. I projected a superluminal slipstream from here to your capsule’s position.”

  “Like a wormhole.”

  A thousand baritones sighed. “I really don’t care for the way humans name things. Wormhole? Really? You’re always diminishing the majesty of the cosmos in the name of pop science.”

  Tatiana nodded. “Well, people are stupid, but it’s the people who pay the bills, so I guess the geniuses have to find ways to keep the rest of us entertained.”

  “And that’s pleasurable for you? Enterta
inment?”

  “It can be. It’s supposed to be, anyway.”

  “Hm.”

  She turned away from the strange star, the interwoven alien rings, and the vast colorful nebula to squint at the pinpricks of light beyond the gaseous curtains. “Tell me, where is here, exactly? The stars still look the same, but there are no planets, no sun.”

  “Forgive my poor manners,” Stellara Magna said. “Welcome to the Oort Cloud. We are approximately 21,000 astronomical units from Sol, a third of a light year, or 173,000 limins.”

  “Wow. Okay. And thanks for the conversions.” The microprocessor behind her left ear would have performed them for her anyway. “And you’ve been here for twelve centuries? All alone?”

  “Yes. There used to be a planet here, but my gravitational presence proved to be too disruptive. The comets and planetoids were thrown into confusion with both an ice giant and a mechanical giant in their midst.”

  “Wait, what?” Tatiana looked back at the metal rings. “There used to be a planet here? Some sort of rogue, hidden world?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what happened to it?”

  “I consumed it for raw materials.”

  “Oh.”

  Tatiana poked at the handful of physical switches and buttons in the capsule, but Radu remained stubbornly offline, and the cockpit remained dark and still. “So, how’s our date going?”

  “You tell me. This is your race’s first known contact with alien intelligence, with mechanical intelligence, with superior intelligence. Are you frightened? Confused?”

  “Definitely not confused, at least, not yet,” she said. “Maybe a little frightened.”

  “Because I have the power to kill you, and to incinerate your entire race in an instant?”

  “Yeah, that. Mostly. Personally though? This is all just a bit... much. You’re a whole alien planet? I mean, for me, my favorite sci-fi flicks are about regular aliens, you know, sexy people with green skin and tails, or weird talking cats. I’ve never really liked stories about all-powerful godlike aliens. Like you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they’re just harder to wrap your head around, or empathize with, or enjoy. I mean, how many times can the intrepid crew of a spaceship outsmart an alien with godlike powers and still be taken seriously as practical or realistic?”

  “I can see how that might bother you.”

  “So, this whole situation...” She tried to choose her words carefully. “This doesn’t end with me teaching you how to love, does it? That’s not how you’re going to evolve, is it? By learning the true meaning of love? By falling in love? With me?”

  “I don’t think so,” the planet said. “I certainly hope not. I find that notion idiotic. And boring. And frankly, obvious.”

  “We agree on that, at least.”

  Silence filled the capsule, and Tatiana didn’t feel the need to break it. An eerie calm had settled over her in the last few minutes while she stared out the window at a universe with no planets and no sun, with no people or ships, with only this faceless alien monstrosity floating in the void with her. It was like being dead and chatting with an angel. She felt disconnected, powerless, rudderless. Anxious, but not really afraid. Whatever was going to happen, it wouldn’t be her choice. Not really. Her life was completely in the hands of a being that had just recently named itself and chosen to be female, on a whim.

  “You haven’t answered my question yet,” the planet broke the silence.

  “Question?” Tatiana swallowed. It was one of the few purely biological actions she could still perform. “You mean about me volunteering to be your guinea pig?”

  “Yet another unpleasant euphemism.”

  “Will it hurt?” she asked. And for the first time in many minutes, genuine dread clawed at her. She imagined all the terrible possibilities, of being dissected, probed, and experimented upon by this inhuman thing, a creature that had no natural sense of pain or compassion, a monster that could devour whole worlds and‌—‌

  “No, of course not.”

  Tatiana blinked. “Seriously?”

  “Very seriously.” The planet sounded offended. “I just told you that I wanted to study a willing subject because my unwilling subjects skewed my data with their baseless fear and panic. Why would I want you to experience that as well?”

  “I... guess you wouldn’t.” She paused. “What exactly would this involve? If I agree, that is. What would you do to me?”

  “I would perform a continuous full-spectrum biological survey of your body for a period of time. I would have liked to study your entire race unobserved, but I can’t perform this survey at long range, and I can’t come any closer to Earth without being detected. I tried using drones once, but things went awry. Hence, our meeting.”

  “Okay. And this survey is...?”

  “A scan,” Stellara Magna said impatiently. “Similar to the magnetic resonance imaging your doctors use, but immeasurably more detailed.”

  “In some sort of lab?”

  “No, no, no. In your capsule.” The thousand voices sighed. “I can watch your planets from the Oort Cloud, manipulate your information systems from a third of a light year away, transport you instantly from the Jovian system, and you think I need a medical lab to scan your body?”

  “I thought we weren’t doing sarcasm, Mags.” Tatiana smiled at the mechanical world outside the window. An image was forming in her mind of this Viatrix Stellara Magna. With every word, Tatiana found herself perceiving less an alien machine and more a human being, an older woman, perhaps a retired admiral or House Lady, someone used to power and structure but now trying to acclimate to a messier civilian life. A great person trying to be normal. A grumpy person trying to be friendly.

  “If I say yes, and we do this, then what? What happens to me afterward?” Tatiana asked.

  “Are you afraid that I will dispose of you?”

  She shrugged a little and tried to sound nonchalant. “I’ve died before.”

  “Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

  “Well? What happens to the guinea pig?”

  “Whatever you wish,” the planet said. “I can return you to your previous position near Ganymede, of course. But you could also remain here with me, if you wanted. For as long as you wanted.”

  “As your test subject?”

  “As a companion, or advisor, or whatever you wish to be. It would be up to you, really. After all, I’m an immortal living planet. It would only require a miniscule portion of my resources to entertain you until your body expires.”

  Tatiana grinned. “You’re all heart, Mags.” The grin faded. “And what if I say no? What if I don’t want you studying me? What happens then?”

  “You’re hardly in a position to negotiate,” Stellara Magna pointed out.

  “Is that a threat?”

  “How petty would I have to be to threaten a fifty-kilogram sack of water, carbon, and calcium?” The planet chuckled. She actually chuckled. A thousand deep voices all murmured and laughed and grunted as one. “My internal virus scans take longer than your entire life span.”

  “Really? How do you get viruses?”

  “I... click links. Don’t change the subject.”

  “Okay. So, you won’t kill me?”

  “Of course not. I’d merely erase all your external memory and return you to your point of origin, where you could either keep this encounter to yourself, or jeopardize what little remains of your career by claiming to have met a talking planet hiding in the Oort Cloud.”

  “Right.” She cleared her throat. “Last question. What’s in it for me?”

  “Still negotiating?”

  “Always.”

  “Very well,” Stellara Magna said. “In return for your cooperation, I will fill your external memory with technological data that will propel humanity into a new age of stellar exploration.”

  “Forget humanity.” Tatiana shook her head. “I serve House Draculesti, and we aren’t tr
ying to explore the cosmos right now.” She rapped her metal-plated hand on the console. “What we want now is to survive. We have a dozen rival Houses to deal with. We only just took Ganymede from the Habsburgs and the Valois. The universe can wait. We can’t.”

  “Immortality?” The planet sighed. “A bit cliché. But, very well. The data will be provided.”

  “Good. Okay then. We have a deal.” Tatiana nodded and leaned back. “If it won’t hurt, then I’m in. After all, I’ve already been blown out into space. There’s not much left of me to hurt. So come on, Mags. Let’s do this.”

  “Excellent.”

  She gripped her armrests and closed her eyes. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “The survey is already in progress.”

  “Oh.” Tatiana relaxed. “What should I do?”

  “Whatever you like. Just act casual.”

  “Right.” She flicked a mocking salute at the spinning rings wrapping around the ancient quark star. “Casual.”

  But the planet didn’t reply. So Tatiana stretched, detached her slender plastic legs at her hip joints, and floated over to the cupboard to inspect the emergency rations. Water. More water. Protein slurry, chocolate flavor. Protein slurry, strawberry flavor. Protein slurry, classic soy flavor. She wasn’t hungry and didn’t technically need to eat for another three days, but it was something to do, so she ate a tube of the chocolate-flavored gel.

  “Do that again,” Stellara Magna said abruptly.

  “What, eat?”

  “Yes. Again. Slower.”

  Tatiana winced at the way she said “slower,” with a brief flashback to one of the cruder people she had met on Europa, a visitor from House Medici. The merchant had leered openly at the cybernetic prosthetics on display by all the members of House Draculesti, which had made Tatiana that much happier that she had opted to remove her breasts at her third enhancement session.

  Shaking off the memory, she ate another tube of protein gel, holding and tasting each mouthful before swallowing it down her modified esophagus.

  “Fascinating,” the planet whispered.

  “Eating is fascinating?”

  “In part, yes,” Stellara Magna said. “Mechanically speaking, eating is ridiculous. But neurochemically, it’s fascinating. The sensations created, the thoughts triggered, the memories activated.”