The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Callie nodded, though personally she thought Elena would be more interested than frightened. “Fair enough. When’s your next holy day, anyway?”

  “Just a few days from now. Any idea where we’ll be then? It’s always better if I can spend it with the congregation here.”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but I’ll try not to schedule any medical emergencies while you’re in the throes of your sacred ecstasies.”

  “That’s probably for the best. If you get hurt, Ashok will have to sew you up, and you might end up with a robotic elbow or a flamethrower for a foot.” Stephen took a last look at Elena’s vitals, then headed off for the lower markets of Meditreme Station. His church believed in the use of psychedelic drugs to induce entheogenic and entactogenic states – a sense of connection with the divine, and a sense of connection with other living beings, respectively. Apparently the experience was very moving and meaningful, and could be made even more so in a cuddle pile of co-religionists. Stephen said knowing the feelings were induced chemically didn’t detract from the profundity of the devotions: “Everything we feel is chemicals anyway. Isn’t that miracle enough?”

  His faith didn’t appeal to Callie, though. She felt either apathy or hostility toward almost everyone, and she was happy that way. Every once in a while she met someone she felt connected to, without the necessity of psychedelics. Her gaze fell upon Elena, who was Sleeping Beauty once again, and she looked deliberately away.

  Callie sat on the stool Stephen had vacated and scrolled through her handheld, taking half an hour to catch up on the news in the Tangle. A new colony world had been established near bridgehead twelve; another expedition had vanished without a trace investigating the reclusive settlers beyond bridgehead twenty-nine; another group of Liars claimed to possess technology that could communicate instantaneously even across vast distances, but as usual, “technical problems” made a demonstration impossible; Io was having another doomed referendum on declaring independence from the rest of the Jovian Imperative.

  The only things that really caught her attention were a few comments on the local social network reporting a mass exodus of Liars from Meditreme Station. There were only a hundred or so Liars on the station anyway, most from the same clan or family or tribe, and almost all of them seemed in a sudden hurry to leave, taking off on their own ships or buying passage on others. She thought of the screaming Liar in the hangar, and her guts clenched. They’d brought that artifact onto the station, and the Liars had fled. Even accounting for the basic weird unpredictability of the species, that was too close to cause and effect to ignore. She needed to call Ashok and tell him to stick that box inside an unmanned probe and set it on a course for the sun–

  Her handheld suddenly buzzed with an urgent emergency notification, blanking out her screen, and Ashok’s unlovely face appeared. “Captain, this – sorry, I’m just – I did the thing, with the emulation, the simulation, I plugged in the cube–”

  Elena suddenly groaned and tried to sit up, falling back before she made it halfway. Had the buzzer awakened her?

  Callie rose from the stool, but Elena would keep: the other issue was more potentially existential. “Slow down, Ashok. What is it?” He must have figured it out, whatever deadly secret the cube held, and now he was breaking the bad news that they were all poisoned or irradiated or about to be swallowed by a miniature black hole–

  He took a deep breath. “Captain. This device we found on the Anjou… I think… it seems to be a bridge generator.”

  She frowned. “That little black box can activate a bridge? It’s like a thousand times smaller than the activator they have at the Jupiter bridgehead. That validates our theory about the Anjou finding an undiscovered bridgehead out there in space somewhere. If we can figure out where, that could be valuable information. I still don’t see how the Anjou made it out of the Jovian bridgehead on this side without detection and ended up floating out here with the ice clods, unless there’s some kind of stealth technology–”

  “Cap!” Ashok said – shouted, really. “You don’t understand. Listen. This device isn’t a bridge activator. It doesn’t provide access to existing wormholes. It creates new ones.”

  Callie tried to make sense of that, but her mind resisted. Nobody could make a wormhole, any more than you could make a star. You found a bridge; you opened one; you traversed one. There was no “making.” The bridges had already been made, millions of years ago, either by the Liars or some long-dead race of ancient alien geniuses. “You’re going to have to take me through this at a slow walk, Ashok.”

  “I’ve run the simulation a dozen times, and unless I’m suddenly terrible at my job, I’m telling you: this machine can make new bridges. We don’t have to enter or emerge from any of the twenty-nine known bridgeheads. This device can open a new wormhole bridge, from anywhere, to anywhere – assuming I can figure out the coordinate system it uses, anyway. So far I’m only able to simulate random openings, though they all lead to points within the Milky Way. That’s how the Anjou made it back to our solar system: they just opened a bridge from wherever they were and passed through and emerged in Trans-Neptunian space, exactly where we found them floating.”

  Callie sat back down, mind spinning like a reaction wheel. The bridges were like subway lines on Earth and Luna and Mars. You got on at a particular stop, and got off at another stop, and that was it. There was no stopping in between stations. You couldn’t just hop off wherever you wanted. If Ashok was right, they could… What? Make their own stations? They could go anywhere?

  The discovery of bridge technology had revolutionized humanity’s relationship with the universe. If this greasy black cube worked the way Ashok thought, then that relationship was about to be transformed again. To be able to go anywhere…

  “Check it again,” she said.

  “I checked it–”

  “Again. Get the ship’s computer to look over your work too. This isn’t something we can afford to be wrong about. If there’s a group of Liars somewhere out there with this kind of technology? This is huge, Ashok.” Callie had never fantasized about having eighty-foot-high statues of herself erected in her honor, but if she could give this kind of tech to her bosses at the Trans-Neptunian Authority, she might have to get used to the idea.

  Assuming they didn’t all die. “Ashok, all the Liars fled the station, right after you showed Paolo that device. Why would they be so afraid of it?”

  “Well, I mean… the box opens wormholes. It would be really bad to open a wormhole here. If I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had the box plugged into the White Raven for real instead of in a simulation… Sudden breaches in space time are bad for Liars and other living things.”

  She imagined a wormhole opening in the center of Meditreme Station, and shuddered. That notion of a black hole devouring them all wasn’t so far off. “Get that thing off the station, Ashok. Put the box in the canoe and send it out remotely, as far as you can. Tell the port authority you just want to test the canoe’s controls.”

  “Aw, cap, it’s not like I’m going to accidentally push the wrong button. The bridge generator doesn’t even have buttons–”

  “For all we know that thing has a countdown clock ticking away in its heart. Put it into the canoe. We’ll pick it up later. We can discuss whether we want to risk our own lives, as a crew – I’m not risking the whole station.”

  “Oh captain, my captain,” Ashok said, which was his usual way of indicating he’d obey and order even though he didn’t like it. Callie cut their connection.

  Elena groaned and made another attempt to rise. This time she lurched completely upright in bed and stared at the far wall without seeming to see it. “I remember.” Her voice sounded rough and sand-scoured. “I remember what we found. The station. The creatures.”

  “We know what the Liars did to your ship.” Callie’s voice didn’t shake. All those years of captaining and testing the iron of her will against smugglers and fugitives and pirates were paying off
now. “The changes they made. This technology… it’s like nothing we’ve seen before. The Liars you met must be far more advanced than–”

  “They weren’t Liars.” Elena’s voice was cold and without inflection, her facial expression that of a corpse freshly laid out on a slab. “They weren’t anything like the creatures you described. Child-sized octopuses? No. The aliens we found were something else. Something… bigger.” She moved her head slowly and met Callie’s eyes. Those flashes of bleakness Callie had seen in Elena before were mere shadows. This was a black hole. “Something terrible.”

  She took a deep breath, and told Callie what she remembered.

  Chapter Six

  Elena was the last of her crew to wake. Uzoma was there when Elena’s pod slid open and she sat up, gasping, a cocktail of strange drugs coursing through her, making everything shimmer and effervesce at the edges. She thought of grizzly bears, and how they awoke from hibernation, hungry and furious and dripping with ice. An alarm howled shrilly elsewhere in the ship but then abruptly cut off, and Elena’s ears rang with silence.

  “Are we there?” Elena said.

  Uzoma’s impassive face gave nothing away. “No. We have encountered an… anomaly. A structure.”

  The drugs that jumpstarted Elena’s cognition spared her from any dull moment of incomprehension. “An alien structure?”

  Uzoma sniffed. They were a physicist and, more importantly, an empiricist. Their only god was data. “I draw no conclusions. Perhaps the structure is of human origin. We have no idea what might have changed in terms of Earthly technology during our voyage. We have been traveling for nearly five hundred years. It is possible humankind developed sufficiently advanced modes of space travel to reach this part of the galaxy before we did.”

  “Aren’t we going something like ten percent the speed of light? How did we encounter anything without being vaporized by the impact?”

  “I… do not know. We stopped, and abruptly, but without damage to the Anjou. I can only theorize that some technological force capable of manipulating inertia was involved.”

  Elena took that in, then put it aside for the moment, because there were more pressing concerns. “Where are the others?”

  “Gathered in the cargo hold. The alarms woke Robin, who tasked me to wake the rest of you. You were the last.”

  Elena undid the straps in the pod and gave herself a little push, floating up out of the chamber, then shoved off toward the door leading to the corridor.

  The Anjou wasn’t exactly roomy – it was mostly engines and cargo and cold storage – but the rest of the crew were squeezed in near the biological samples, all floating in a cluster around something unseen.

  “It’s fucking aliens.” Bristles of wild blond hair stuck up all over Hans’s head. “You think people made that thing?”

  “May I see?” Elena said.

  Sebastien (oh, Sebastien) looked up and raised one wry eyebrow, but it was Ibn who moved aside, letting her take his place so she could see the oversized tablet in Robin’s hands. Robin was the oldest of them, her hair unapologetically gray and short, on her third career (finance, environmental law, ecological engineering). She was officially their captain, though there wasn’t much captaining to do. Usually. “What do you think, Elena?” she said.

  The screen displayed a high-res image of an organic-looking structure made of crisscrossing branches and tubes and tunnels and arches, floating silvery-gray against the blackness of space. “It looks like a cast of the interior structure of a rat’s lung,” she said.

  “Ever see one of those sculptures people make by filling an anthill with molten lead and then digging it up after the metal solidifies, so it’s a three-dimensional map of tunnels laid out by bug-logic?” Hans gestured at the screen. “Those sculptures look just like that. Except that thing is as big as a city.”

  Think how big the bugs must be, Elena thought. (It was a thought that made her shudder later, when she remembered it to Callie.)

  There was nothing in the image to provide a sense of scale, so Elena said, “A city? Are we talking Milwaukee or are we talking London?”

  Robin zoomed in on one of the tubular branches. “That bit there? Is the size of a skyscraper, maybe eighty stories high. This thing is an astonishing feat of engineering. It must be hundreds of miles of tunnels – assuming those things are tunnels.” She glared at Hans. “But we don’t know that it’s alien. We knew there was a chance, on a five-century voyage, that technology on Earth would outpace us and make us obsolete.”

  “Earth is long gone,” Hans said. “Before we left, we’d gone so far past the tipping point nothing could save us but an act of God, and I’m an atheist – sorry, Ibn.”

  “It is not my place to forgive you,” Ibn said. “While I do not share your pessimism about our homeworld, I agree with your assessment. If humans made this object… they are so different from the humans we knew that I fear we would not recognize them as our kin.”

  “Right,” Elena said. “So when do we go over there and take a look?”

  “We’re still considering our options,” Robin said.

  “What, are we just going to fly away? Call this an unscheduled pit stop and get back on the space-road? Is that even an option?”

  Uzoma said, “We are approximately a hundred years short of our expected arrival at Gliese 3293 C. Most of our fuel is gone, and it would take weeks of constant acceleration to return to our maximum survivable velocity. The ship was not designed to stop and start again, so the possibility of catastrophic system failure is increased.” They paused. “The issue is moot, however. We are locked out of most of the ship’s systems.”

  “Our shit got hacked,” Hans said bluntly.

  “We have to check this thing out.” Sebastien had drifted away from the cluster to float somehow elegantly against a bank of biological samples, and Elena felt her usual flutter of lust at the sight of him. Long and lean and sweet-tempered, he was an expert in social psychology and urban planning, and was also a competent software engineer. Everyone on this ship had multiple specialties. Elena did biology, chemistry, and agriculture: the wet stuff. Sebastien had been her best friend during their training, showing genuine interest in her work, sitting up late at night with her talking about what they were giving up to go on this journey, and he’d inspired her with his grand visions: they were going to save humanity, create a new and more equal society, take advantage of this grand chance of a do-over to do things right.

  They’d stayed up late the night before their departure, talking about the wonder and possibility of life under another star, and only a sense of professionalism had kept Elena from doing more than gazing at him hungrily. They hadn’t made any explicit plans or promises, both too aware they might not even survive the journey, but they’d agreed to continue their conversations and friendship when they reached their destination. Elena had certainly fantasized that when they woke up, they would explore their relationship further, in the light of a new sun, and maybe even consummate that relationship on a new world. Their first time could be the first time for the whole planet. That appealed to her secret romantic side more than she liked to admit.

  She hadn’t expected to wake up here, now, in such strange circumstances – but it was still a thrill to see him.

  Sebastien gestured toward the great void outside. “Either our very advanced descendants built that structure, or we’re about to make first contact with aliens.”

  “We might die,” Robin said. “Just making that clear.”

  Elena stopped looking at Sebastien and started looking at the problem. “The probability of our survival was always low. The entire Goldilocks project is based on an r strategy, not a K one, after all.”

  Hans raised one of his bushy eyebrows. “Come again?”

  “There are two contrasting survival strategies for life.” That was an oversimplification, but Elena had spent enough time as a professor that she could embrace oversimplification for illustrative purposes. “Creatures t
hat adhere to a K strategy, like humans, have very few offspring, and invest a lot of resources in making sure those offspring survive. The other option is the r strategy – think rats or spiders. They have lots of offspring, with minimal parental involvement, but there are so many, some of them will probably survive.”

  “Scatter your seeds, and though some will find only stony soil, and die, others will find fertile soil, and thrive,” Ibn said. “As in the Christian parable of the sower.”

  “I thought that was a science fiction novel,” Hans muttered.

  Elena ignored him. “Right. We’re the seeds, scattered on the wind. Most of us will fall on worthless rocks, but a few will land where they can grow. The odds were always against us. Even if we reach our destination, it might be uninhabitable for any number of reasons.” She nodded her head toward the viewscreen. “But this… it’s a sure thing. It’s huge, it’s important, and it’s right here. We can explore it, and if it’s alien, we can send a message back to Earth, and do a definitive service for our people.”

  Hans made a sour face. “Ha. There’s no Earth left to get the message, and it would take forever to get there anyway.”

  Uzoma shook their head. “Not forever. Not even an appreciable fraction of forever. We could aim a tight beam–”

  “All right,” Robin said. “This isn’t a democracy, and mission-critical decisions are delegated to me, but this is beyond anything we ever expected to have to deal with, so, all in favor of sending a small exploratory–”

  “The ship is moving toward the station.” Uzoma inclined their head toward the screen. “Or else the station is moving toward us, but that seems less likely.”

  “Moving how?” Robin jabbed at the screen. “We are moving, very slowly, just a few meters per second, but we’re not generating any thrust, and there’s not… there’s no tow line, there’s no, I don’t know, tractor beam…”