The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Drake grinned, a twisted sideways sort of smile, but recognizable. They each had a mouth of their own, and Drake had improbably straight and beautiful teeth. “No, that’s good, you’re fine.”

  “Usually people just say ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’” Janice said. “Or else they throw up. Critiquing the butcher’s technique? That makes for a nice change. You’re all right.”

  “Janice usually hates everyone,” Drake said. “You should be flattered. Want to hear how it happened?”

  “Only if you’d like to share.”

  “Sure, sorrow shared is sorrow halved. Of course, everything Drake and I have has to be halved anyway.” Janice rolled her one eye. “Drake and I were pilot and navigator on a small exploration ship, working for a mining company.”

  “Also a tourism company,” Drake said. “It was weird. Diversification.”

  “The job was supposed to be light duty, easy all the time. We’d been military surveyors once upon a time, so we were used to doing exploration with people shooting at us. Poking around the far corners of a colony system, with no expectation of hostilities, seemed like a cushy job. And, mostly, it was. We were on a small ship, crew of five, working out of the Trappist colony.”

  Callie drifted up and sat in the other chair. “That’s one of the twenty-nine bridgeheads, near a star out in Aquarius–”

  “The Trappist-1 exoplanets,” Elena said. “They were one of the goldilocks ship destinations. One of the more promising ones, too, with at least three potential habitable planets.”

  “Two of them turned out to be,” Janice said. “The other one was too geologically unstable. I have to say, those planets… it’s a shit neighborhood. That dwarf star is so dim, it’s like being in twilight all the time. Half the colonists have big old sun lamps mimicking full-spectrum light and the other half are doing body modification to turn themselves into night-dwelling morlock types.”

  “The goldilocks ship made it there, by the way,” Drake said. “They found the place already colonized, and joined in with the work. It was only about fifty years ago? Some of the crew are probably still alive. Did you know them?”

  “No, not really,” Elena said. “Though I might look them up, if we live through all this. They might have some pointers on integration.”

  “You could just not integrate,” Janice said. “That’s what I did.”

  Elena chuckled. “So what were you exploring?”

  “Anything we could reach in the system, basically,” Drake said. “Our company set up supply outposts on moons and asteroids, moving progressively away from the Trappist colonies, allowing us to go farther and farther out. When we had our accident, we were on a long-range mission – we’d picked up some strange radio signals, and our captain wanted to see what was what.”

  “She fucked it up, really,” Janice said. “She was hoping we’d find some aliens who were easier to talk to than the Liars, and she kept us out a few days past optimal mission parameters. Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem, there’s always wiggle room in the calculations, but the ship was due for servicing.” She sighed. “Something broke. We’re still not sure what. One minute we were easing our way through an asteroid field, and the next, the ship was coming apart all around us. The cockpit sealed itself when the rest of the ship got breached open to vacuum, and emergency life support kicked in, so Drake and I were OK, at least short term. We had no engines, so we couldn’t go anywhere, but we had the comms, so we figured we’d call for help, and maybe a ship would be near enough to save us. We had rations, so, worst case, one of the company ships would come looking for us eventually, starting at our last known location, which wasn’t far away. We just had to survive for a little while. We thought.”

  “The rest of the crew died?” Elena said.

  “They were all in the galley when it opened up to vacuum,” Drake said. “They went quick. We were sad about it, but we’d been military, like I said. We’d lost people before. It’s never easy, but we weren’t stunned.”

  “I lit up a distress beacon,” Janice said. “We sat back to swap stories about the captain and the crew, you know, remembering people, like you do.”

  Elena nodded. She’d been remembering her crew, and she wasn’t even sure they were dead.

  “We weren’t done with bad luck, though,” Janice said. “A minute later, a chunk of debris hit us, and sent us spinning. We smashed into an asteroid, which wasn’t great, but then the control panel caught fire, which was worse, and then we got pelted with more debris. Put somebody in a trashcan, set them on fire, and shake them up real good: that was us.”

  “We never should have woken up,” Drake said. “We were battered, broken, burned. We might have actually been dead, at least briefly.”

  “But then a group of Liars found us,” Janice said. “A previously uncontacted tribe, cult, whatever. My memories – our memories, because there are places where they overlap, the way our brains are wired together now – are really fuzzy, but the aliens were heavily augmented, even by Liar standards. Lots of mechanical prosthetics, and some of them were as small as kittens, and I swear one was as big as a killer whale. We’re pretty sure they lived inside an asteroid in that field, or had a ship tricked out to look like an asteroid. They had a laboratory, or operating theater, and… they made us into what we are today.”

  “But they’d never seen a human before,” Elena said. “So they didn’t know what to do. They must have thought you were one organism.”

  Janice said, “Well, maybe. One of them looked like a conglomeration of Liars, all smushed together and operating as one, sort of like a Portuguese man-o-war. A composite organism. The Liars might have just thought it would be interesting to put us together the same way.”

  Drake said, “Janice thinks they were experimenting on us to amuse themselves, or to test out experimental procedures before turning the techniques on themselves. I choose to think they acted from a merciful impulse, and simply made a mistake, or did the best they could.”

  “No way to know for sure,” Janice said. “Drake always thinks the glass is half full. Me, I think the glass is half full of poison. We woke up like this, in this chair, enclosed in what was basically an escape pod, with our distress beacon slapped on top. A rescue ship found us. The best doctors in the system looked at us, wrote papers about us, and said there was no way to take us apart again without killing us. They all agreed the Liars had saved us from certain death, but there was no separating us. We were mixed together too thoroughly, like sugar in water.”

  “More like milk in coffee, my dear pale sister. Between us we’ve got about a brain and a half, one heart, three kidneys, two livers – and that last bit was helpful, because, oh, we drank when we got home.”

  “The hardest thing was getting used to sharing the body,” Janice said. “But we’d worked together for a long time, in the corps and then private, so even that was easier than it could have been. We shift control back and forth pretty effortlessly nowadays, and we can even share sometimes, one of us on the left arm, one on the right, and, of course–”

  “We can sing in harmony,” they said simultaneously, and then both chuckled.

  Janice went on. “We got sick of being professional lab rats, so we started answering ads for pilots and navigation and communications specialists, presenting ourselves as a package deal, like married couples do sometimes. Lots of captains like hiring couples because they usually work well together, and since they fraternize with themselves, they don’t fraternize with others, which is good for crew dynamics. Of course, all the captains who were interested stopped being interested once they got a look at us. Except Callie. She didn’t blink.”

  Callie shrugged. “I’d already been crewed up with Ashok for two years by then. Nobody’s all that strange after that. Besides, a pilot and a navigator who only need one berth on the ship, saving the other room for paying customers? What a bargain.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking… were you a couple?” Elena said. “You hav
e such a deep rapport.”

  “I’m gay,” Drake said. “Though I don’t date much nowadays.”

  “I never saw the point of sex with anybody,” Janice said. “Except occasionally with myself. Also romance is stupid.”

  “We were both always pretty self-contained,” Drake said. “You don’t get into the business of long-haul exploration missions unless you’re happy being alone for a while. I do miss having a more active social life during my down time, but the obvious disadvantages of our situation aside, there are some compensations. For one thing, we have an exceptional level of voluntary control over systems that are usually involuntary.”

  “What he means is, when we get sad, we can dump all kinds of happy chemicals into our brain, and when we want to have orgasms, we just have them. I know what his feel like and he knows what mine feel like, which is something a lot of people envy. I doubt many of them would be willing to trade with us, though.”

  “I’m very glad to meet you both,” Elena said. “I’m sorry I got you into all this mess. I’m sure encountering more aliens was the last thing in the world you wanted.”

  They snorted, though since they had only one nose, Elena wasn’t sure which one of them was expressing scorn. Janice said, “The nice thing about being torn apart and stitched back together wrong by Doctor Frankenstein Mengele Moreau, MD, is that everything bad that happens to you after that seems surprisingly fucking manageable. We’ve always been in a worse situation than the situation we’re in. Don’t worry about it. We knew signing on with Callie would dump us in the shit now and then. No offense, captain. But you do get into situations.”

  “And I always get us out again,” Callie said.

  The control panel in front of Drake and Janice blipped. “We’ve completed our scan of the night side. Looks like the planet is tidally locked in a synchronous rotation – that side is always dark, and the other side is always light. We’d like to cruise over and get a look at the day side. Should we wait until Ashok comes back inside?”

  “Ashok?” Callie said. “You want to come in? We’re going to move the ship.”

  “Aw, I’m having fun out here,” he crackled. “I’m checking the stealth projectors. How about I just hold on real tight while you change position? I’m tethered and mag-locked anyway.”

  “We won’t go fast, and we won’t accelerate rapidly, so he should be fine,” Drake said. “We’re basically doing a slow drift and scanning as we go.”

  Callie sighed. “I guess TNA safety protocols don’t really apply when we’re who knows how many light years outside their jurisdiction. All right. Proceed. Do you still want that drink, Elena?”

  “Please.”

  “Fraternizing with a civilian, captain?” Drake said.

  “It’s only fraternizing when a superior officer is involved with one of lower rank, and we’re not in the military anyway, and, no, we’re just drinking because it’s a way to cope with the existential horror of our situation.”

  “So it’s medicinal, then,” Drake said. “I’m sure even Stephen would approve. Enjoy it.”

  Elena followed Callie down the ladder to the observation deck, where she had a flexible drinking bag stashed. “It’s basically a wineskin,” she said. “But it’s full of Callisto bourbon.”

  “I thought in order to call it bourbon it had to meet a bunch of special criteria, like being made on Earth. Otherwise it’s just corn whiskey, right? Not that I’m complaining.”

  “To be legally called bourbon, it has to be made on Earth, include at least fifty-one percent corn in the mash bill, and be aged in new, fired oak barrels. Plus a few other rules about alcohol percentage and such.”

  “So it’s not really bourbon? Or it’s not really made on Callisto?”

  “There’s a Terran embassy on Callisto, and they have a little bespoke distillery there. They claim the grounds of the embassy are technically Terran soil under the terms of the treaty between Earth and the Jovian Imperative, so: bourbon.” She put the nozzle to her lips, squeezed the bag, held the liquid in her mouth for a moment, and then swallowed. “Ah. It’s not the system’s best whiskey, and the whole ‘genuine bourbon’ thing is just a publicity gimmick, but it’s tasty enough. This batch was a gift from a diplomat we took on a speed run last year, and free liquor always tastes better.” She handed the bag over.

  Elena had never been a great fan of whiskey, preferring cocktails, but she was happy to be drinking with Callie, and she took a small mouthful. The bourbon was sweet, with notes of caramel and vanilla, and burned pleasantly on the way down. “Mmm. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure. Sorry we can’t sip it from a glass on a cozy couch somewhere. Maybe once we’re under thrust again we can come up with a reasonable facsimile.” She looked at the windows. “Want to watch the sunrise with me?” She tapped the viewport. “Should be a nice view, seeing the dwarf star appear over the planet as we move to the light side.”

  They stood in silence, boots sealed to the deck, taking occasional sips from the whiskey as the planet slowly shifted in their view, revealing a widening slice of the red star on its far side.

  Which, it became apparent, wasn’t a star at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Are you seeing this?” Callie addressed her question to the ship at large.

  “Uh, yeah,” Janice said. “Kind of hard to miss.”

  “What?” Ashok said, and then a moment later, “Oh. Woah.”

  “Do I even want to know?” Stephen said. “I’ve been cocooned in a hammock with my eyes closed.”

  “The star… it looks like a ruby,” Elena said.

  Callie had expected a red dwarf star, but instead they beheld a star-sized gem, gleaming, faceted, and softly glowing. “Any idea what we’re looking at here?”

  “Dyson sphere,” the ship said.

  “No, it’s not, because nobody’s ever managed to build one,” Janice said. “They tried to do it way out in Arcturus, but they went over budget and abandoned the project before they even really got started. Squatters live in the ruins of the construction office now.”

  “Apparently they have better project management skills in this part of the universe,” Drake said.

  Callie put her face close to the glass. The ruby sphere was beautiful and terrifying. “I thought the point of a Dyson sphere was to surround the star with solar collectors to harness all the energy? This one’s letting all the light out.”

  “That’s not the only confusing thing,” the ship said. “The only remotely realistic proposals for megastructures like this have been for Dyson swarms – multiple, independently rotating structures, forming a sort of web or net around the star. Making a solid shell that size would be impractical – the tensile strength would need to be far beyond the capabilities of known materials science, and if there were any drift at all it would be difficult to correct, and in the case of such an error, one side of the sphere would crash into the star and the whole thing would be destroyed. But this… it’s like they put an unbroken glass globe around the star.”

  “There’s definite radiant output, consistent with a red dwarf,” Drake said. “Which makes me think… maybe it just looks like a red dwarf from the outside. Maybe it’s some other class of star, and only some of its energy is being captured, with the rest allowed to radiate.”

  “I don’t know enough about astrophysics to be able to tell if that even made sense,” Janice said. “I’m not sure Drake does either.”

  “Very little of this makes any sense at all, but I’m growing accustomed to that sensation,” the ship said.

  “Uh. The planet. Look. The day side is… different,” Drake said.

  The ship slowly rotated, bringing a portion of the planet’s light side into view. The dark side was rocky, icy, and mountainous: a raw and natural place.

  The day side was unnatural. The surface was completely covered in immense shining megastructures. From orbit the structures looked like a maze, or the cross-section of a brain, though there seemed to be m
ultiple levels, towers, branches–

  “Can we get a closer look?” Callie said.

  The glass in front of them darkened, transforming into a viewscreen, and then replicated the view they’d seen before, at a greater level of magnification. After a moment the screen blipped, and everything was magnified further; then blipped again, and again, and again, each time bringing the view of the surface a little closer.

  The structure appeared to be a vast network of branching, interconnecting tunnels, but each tunnel had to be the size of a skyscraper.

  “This configuration of matter doesn’t match anything in my local database,” the ship said. “I don’t have access to the Tangle, of course, but even if I did, I doubt I’d find a match. Could they be natural growths of some kind, do you think? Crystal, maybe?”

  “No,” Elena said. “This looks like the space station my ship found. Organic shapes, but artificial.”

  Callie cocked her head. The structure on the planet did look like what Elena had described, but instead of one immense map of an anthill, it was hundreds of interlocking and overlapping ones.

  “Our sensors aren’t giving us much of anything,” Janice said. “They aren’t even willing to confirm there are structures down there. It’s the same kind of results we got when we scanned the bridge generator, actually. Whatever that stuff is made of, it’s weird alien matter.”

  “Maybe this is the Liar homeworld?” Callie said. “Maybe in times of emergency, the bridge generator activates and transports them to their home system–”

  Something on the viewscreen moved, just a flash seen in a gap between two of the immense branches. Elena pointed. “Did you see that?”

  “It was just a flicker,” Drake said. “It could have been an artifact in the transmission–”

  “It moved like something alive, Callie,” Elena said. “Believe me. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the motion of living things.”