The Wind Between The Stars
By Christian Sorrell
The Surveyor came just as it did every 153 years, carried by the wind between the stars out across the far reaches of civilization. Marcel noticed it registering on his deep space readouts, a winged worm of radiation against the inky backdrop of space. The nearby worlds took little notice of it.
Nearly a millennium ago, it took humanity by surprise. Some convinced themselves it was the beginning of the end. To others, it was the first of a new form of life we would soon discover all across the galaxy. In the end, it was neither. A benign curiosity. An unexpected light hanging, for a moment, over the horizon.
Now, most ignored it. Amateur stargazers pointed scanners in its direction for a unique bit of sightseeing. The former god was little more than an astronomical oddity. It came before, and it came again. Marcel had never given it much thought. He knew of it, had seen video of it during his schooling, but now that he saw the undulations of its unusual shapes before him, waves and patterns rippling across inverted wings, he was entranced.
He punched a series of coordinates into the panel in front of him, mechanical switches leading to glowing, thick-glassed monitors. The Lamplight, a discovery vessel draped in asymmetrical probe and scanner arrays, reoriented itself in space and headed off in its new direction.
As he closed the distance between himself and the Surveyor, Marcel noticed more ships coming into view across his proximity displays, all quietly tailing the great thing. The ships were standard civilian commuters, aged industrial haulers, an occasional lightchaser. All types of people from all types of places along the local galactic arm. No military, as far as he could tell. Comms were quiet. It was a solemn march through the void, a pilgrimage.
Marcel took his place in the long line of silent ships spreading out from behind the Surveyor like the long, sparkling tail of a comet.
Through the thick porthole at the center of the Lamplight’s cockpit, Marcel spotted it, gradients of shifting color against the stars — a nebula in motion. He dialed in the ship’s wide array of sensors and took in its true complexity.
The Surveyor was organic in outward appearance. Its actual composition, possibly even its nature, was very different. Viewed across all spectrums simultaneously, its central trunk writhed inward, like the churning clouds of a hurricane wrapped around a central point deep within its heart. Along this tumultuous midsection came two pairs of massive wings, the foremost larger than the latter, like time-shredded curtains billowing before an open window. They rose and fell slowly, noticeable only over a period of hours.
At his side, an alarm beeped distractingly. Marcel looked over to his communications display.
<<CHECKPOINT OVERDUE.>> <<SUBMIT CURRENT DATA?>>A vertical line below the message flashed in place, awaiting a response. The company expected regular readings updates from him. System surveys were tedious and boring, but they were steady work. He put his hand to his forehead for a moment before looking back to the view outside the ship. He had been off course for over a day now. Any readings he submitted would only further complicate things, lead to questions he did not wish to answer. In quick succession, he hit a single key and slammed his confirmation.
<<N>> <<DATA NOT SENT.>>He turned back to the front of the cockpit, face nearly coming in contact with the screen as he analyzed every detail of the Surveyor. Moments later, the computer chirped quietly as another line of text appeared on screen. Marcel did not hear it.
<<CONTRACT CANCELED.>>Days worth of dirty meal containers and empty, crumpled drink pouches were strewn about the cockpit. Marcel paced in front of the central monitors, moving to keep the aches in his legs at bay.
The Surveyor had reached the farthest planet in the system, an unremarkable gray mote of dirt. The creature... or being — he was not sure how to think of it exactly — was bound for a path out of the system and into the greater space between for nearly a week but then, over the course of a day, had turned itself. It shifted at an angle like a bird on the wind and came to wrap its vast, incorporeal form around the planet. It spun slowly and quietly before him. The sensors lit up with a wide array of radioactivity.
Marcel watched the thing, read data readouts, and took down his thoughts in a frayed notebook bearing the logo of an old employer on its dirt-speckled cover. He had theories of what it was doing, why it changed course, but none of them satisfied him. Who could say it thought as he thought? Who could say it thought?
The comms system to one side of the room let out a quiet buzz, the computer’s internal speaker mimicking a sort of accepted form of audible computation. Marcel’s neck snapped up to attention. He looked over at the screen.
<<INCOMING MESSAGE>> <<VESPER: I GUESS WE KNOW WHY THEY CALL IT THE SURVEYOR.>> Marcel had been alone with his thoughts since he diverted from his contract course, but he always felt the presence of his fellow pilgrims in their ships across the cold nothing outside the Lamplight’s hull. It was a strange sense but one that many deep space pilots described feeling in higher traffic areas. The soft green pallor of the screen filled the far edge of the cabin, lighting the keyboard below. The flashing cursor beckoned him to respond.
<<LAMPLIGHT: WHAT IS IT DOING?>> <<VESPER: SEARCHING.>> <<LAMPLIGHT: FOR WHAT?>> <<VESPER: FOR SOMETHING. JUST LIKE US.>>Over all the days and all the ships in the impromptu fleet, no one reached out. Nothing came over comms, save simple bits of navigational data, automated messages keeping ships from colliding with one another. Marcel watched a wave of orange-lit radiation spill over the near side of the planet. He grabbed a small joystick off to the left of the keyboard with two fingers, angling his primary sensor array away from the Surveyor and onto the cloud of ships slowly surrounding the planet.
He entered the ship’s callsign, “Vesper, ” and set the array to search the area. 433 ships registered across his field of view. One by one, the computer picked through their engine signatures.
<<LAMPLIGHT: WHAT ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR?>> <<VESPER: WHATEVER’S NEXT. YOU?>>Marcel flipped through the notebook in front of him, reading notes along the margins of the data he had collected over the last several days.
<<LAMPLIGHT: A WAY OUT.>>Minutes passed. No response. To his left, the sensor display ticked away, painting crosshairs on targets, listing callsigns, and moving on. “ORISON,” “PAGE,” “CONCORD,” “TENOR” all flashed briefly onscreen alongside hull and engine readouts. No “VESPER.”
<<LAMPLIGHT: WHY ME? OUT OF ALL THESE SHIPS.>> <<VESPER: IT IS DARK. I NEED ANOTHER TO LIGHT THE PATH FORWARD.>>It was just his callsign then? A shot in the dark at a traveler with a fitting name? Maybe.
He grabbed his pen from a nook between keyboards and wrote as the computer continued its search.
Marcel came to consciousness among the sharp chirping of an incoming message. Most nights since joining the fleet, he had fallen asleep in his chair. The last night was no different.
He wiped the grit from his eyes and sat up in the chair, looking over to the comms screen.
<<VESPER: COME NOW. IT MOVES.>>Eyes going wide and heart rushing with adrenaline, he frantically slid his chair into place between the sensor and navigation panels. The left monitor flashed in amber-tinted lettering.
<<SEARCH COMPLETE>>Onscreen, below the text, sat an exact location of Vesper under flashing crosshairs. The ship was on the far side of the fleet. Like the Lamplight, it sat quietly in place, cockpit facing the planet. It was an old hauler, very old actually. Using the joystick, he manipulated a basic three-dimensional wireframe recreation of the ship, the best his computer could generate from this distance.
Decades ago, his older sister had flown one just like it. It was a hand-me-down from their grandfather. Bulky along the port and starboard sides, it had been built entirely for non-atmospheric flight. They been mass-produced by the millions in the old automated shipyards off Betelgeuse. Constance flew hers under the callsign “Matins.” She ran supplies from the Bellatrix manufacturing stations to the growing colonies at the system’s far edge. She worked herself half to death in that thing.
Marcel glanced to his right. Keeping one antenna pointed in the direction of Vesper, he reoriented the remainder of the array toward the the slowly shrinking form of the Surveyor. It had left the planet, unfurling itself as he slept, and started off towards the center of the system. The computer gathered its trajectory. Marcel issued new commands to the Lamplight, thrusters swiveling the ship in space and pushing starward.
<<LAMPLIGHT: WHY DID IT LEAVE?>> <<VESPER: DIDN’T FIND WHAT IT WAS LOOKING FOR, I SUPPOSE.>>Constance was in her late thirties when Marcel saw her for the last time, nearly twenty years ago. It was strange for him to think of how long she’d been gone, how little he thought of her in the years since. Not out of anger or sadness, but out of… nothing at all really. She went missing in a time between their visits with one another, not long after the last and not long before the next was to take place. That time stretched on across the decades, a long moment between meetings.
He felt like a machine when he thought of her, unable to process the necessary emotions properly. He did not like to feel that way so he did not think of her. The model Vesper rotated slowly on the screen before him, and he could not help but think of her.
Years ago, Marcel helped her repair the starboard cargo bay’s underside hull. A collision with a docking clamp had tore a lengthy hole in the metal. The Lamplight was new then and much faster than the Matins so when they met, Marcel always came to her. The two rented time in a pressurized workbay and made the fixes themselves in less than an hour. Constance refused to pay for a minute more than was necessary, even when Marcel offered to cover the difference.
They spent the time talking about their ships’ environmental systems, travel restrictions between systems — the deep space equivalent of smalltalk about the weather. It was meaningless but comforting. It allowed them to avoid that with every passing year they seemed to know one another less and less. They commiserated over an oxygen scrubber software bug in a way any two pilots across the galaxy could.
Marcel wished instead that he had asked her what it was all for, why she pushed herself so far so quickly. What was her goal, her destination? Something drove her, but he was too afraid to ask. Weeks later, she was gone. No networked ship, station, or system’s log registered the Matins for months, then years, then decades. Sometime after leaving Bellatrix with a cargo bay full of synthetic foodbase, she was gone.
Marcel turned back to the computer.
<<LAMPLIGHT: OLD SHIP. WHERE’D YOU GET IT?>>There was no response, but his sensor showed the ship changing course in line with his own, following as he led the way.
The next day, the Surveyor’s wings spread farther and farther across the expanse between the planet and the system’s star. Computer chirps rang out across the cabin as increasingly regular waves of medium-grade radiation washed over the ship. The sounds nearly put Marcel to sleep, like the steady flow of quiet birdsong at dusk back home.
There was no response from Vesper. Loneliness, the kind that hung just below his sternum like a sharp stone, set in as time went on. Every few minutes, he checked the screen. It sat quiet, displaying his last message. The cursor blinked idly.
He downloaded the latest newsfeed as the Lamplight passed a pair of aging repeaters, blinking silently through the cockpit window. Across the galaxy, the worlds moved on. There was no mention of the Surveyor. Nothing of its eclectic band of followers. Trade disputes with Earth, military actions along far reaches of the galactic arm, updates on a number of celebrity feuds.
Little more than a week ago even, Marcel would have let this information occupy much of his travel time. He picked a side for one of a thousand reasons and felt invested in so-and-so’s decision or this-or-that taking action. Under the rippling ochre glow of his monitors as the Lamplight broke through waves of radiation, he felt detached from it all. He hit a key and purged the information from the computer’s storage, a seed of chaos amidst peace. He snuffed it out.
<<VESPER: I’M SORRY. I WAS LOST FOR A BIT.>>Marcel opened his last case of prepared meals, rehydrating and heating it in the silver appliance on the far right wall as the message crawled across the screen. He dropped the tray of food to the floor. It bounced, still sealed, as he made his way to the keyboard across the cabin.
<<LAMPLIGHT: I AM GLAD YOU ARE BACK.>> <<VESPER: WAS IT QUIET, WITHOUT ME?>> <<LAMPLIGHT: OF COURSE.>>Marcel retrieved the tray off the ground near his chair and took a seat, sliding along the railing in the floor to face the monitor.
<<VESPER: IT FEELS GOOD TO BE MISSED.>>A chirp from the sensor array signaled the arrival of another wave of radiation. It washed over the ship. Marcel watched as the green and amber glow from the monitors grew brighter, fell dim, and returned to its original intensity. The radiation poured through the cabin like an echo, front to back. It reverberated off the ship’s internal shielding. Portions of the wave spilled back into the cabin at strange angles. The text wobbled on screen.
Marcel removed the translucent lid of the container. Steam billowed out toward the ceiling. He had eaten his best rations first, over a week ago now. He was never good with self control. The pungent blend of “Outer World-style” spices filled the cabin with a scent that reminded Marcel of the markets of Zweihander Station.
He pulled the disposable fork off the inside of the lid, stirred the speckled off-white contents of the tray, and aet. Halfway through, he set the tray to the side.
<<LAMPLIGHT: NEARLY OUT OF FOOD.>> <<VESPER: ARE YOU GOING TO GO BACK?>> <<LAMPLIGHT: I DON’T WANT TO.>>Out the cabin’s porthole, a shimmering array of lights, stars and engines, hung softly before the black.
Marcel swallowed another pale mound of food, but it caught halfway down his throat. He coughed violently. Flecks of food and globules of blood splattered across the screens and controls in front of him. He wiped his mouth. More blood mixed with the remnants of his meal, creating a sickly pink mash along the back of his hand. Across the cabin, his last case of food rations sat quietly.
The onboard radiation meds were standard issue for survey vessels like the Lamplight. He took them with water every morning. They were not meant for this.
The monitors rippled again as the Surveyor idly flapped its wings off far before the ship. Watery reflections of phosphorescent light spread across the walls of the cockpit.
Marcel set the tray on the floor and wiped his hands on his shirt.
<<LAMPLIGHT: DID YOU COME HERE TO DIE?>> <<VESPER: DID YOU?>>Constance was thirteen when Marcel was born, well on her way to personhood. Their mother always said that she took to being a sister right away, from the first moment she saw him. Both their parents flew like their parents before them. They were rarely at port, especially at the same time. Monthly rent at the two-room hab on Greenleaf was paid remotely by their father dozen, maybe hundreds, of lightyears away. Gifts arrived at the door some evenings, small notes of love from their mother printed across packing slips.
Their parents loved them. Marcel knew that. Constance told him, especially when things were hardest on her. He remembered his mother fondly or perhaps only thought he remembered her. With time, it was difficult to discern one from the other, fabricated memories built from Constance’s stories she told him as they walked the station’s central dome. Their parents had waited years for a spot on Greenleaf. They wanted their kids to breathe real air, walk on dirt paths under the shade of trees, and they had. The carbon dioxide was scrubbed into a breathable blend of air by rows and rows of well-maintained forests and wildflower fields covering the station. The sunlight was artificial, but the shade was real.
They were poor, much more so than any of the station’s full-time inhabitants. “The closest thing to urchins they allow on a place like this,” Constance said in a moment of frustration. Marcel did not understand. Urchins were spikey creatures at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, things long dead whose former home he’d never see. Later once he had faced his share of ugly glances, offhand comments, and needless aggression, he knew exactly what she meant. So they kept to themselves. Constance, in all the ways that mattered, acted as a mother, sister, and best friend, all at once.
They both left Greenleaf the moment they were able. Marcel left first. Constance helped him save as much as the two of them could, years of wage work. She got him his first ship, the Inkwell. Weeks later, news came in. Their grandfather, a person neither of them had ever met was dead. His death granted Constance a ship of her own. In under a month, they were both free.
The computer chimed again.
<<VESPER: I WANT YOU TO COME WITH ME.>> <<LAMPLIGHT: WHERE?>> <<VESPER: TO THE PLACE BEYOND, THE SURVEYOR’S HOME. >> <<LAMPLIGHT: CAN WE EVEN TRAVEL THERE?>> <<VESPER: YES, I CAME FROM THERE.>>On the screen in front of him, Marcel rotated the three-dimensional model of Vesper’s ship. The scan slowly increased in details as the distance between the two vessels shortened. There were dents along the edges of the outer hull, wear and tear from dozens — maybe hundreds — of dockings. He pushed the joystick up, and the ship rolled over, exposing its underside. There, along the starboard cargo bay, ran a quick and ugly patch job, thick plates of steel welded haphazardly over a crooked tear. He blinked and leaned closer. Wracked with hunger and an radioactive delirium, he did not believe it. Not at first.
He typed frantically.
<<LAMPLIGHT: CONSTANCE?>> <<VESPER: COME WITH ME.>>The Surveyor stopped near the system’s central star. It bent its wings up around itself and floated in place, pulsing a new series of radiation patterns at its usual cadence. Before it, a point grew in space, visible only through Lamplight’s sensors — a molecular point of inflating black mass. Over time, it grew in size and became visible, a strange trick of the eye against the bright white backdrop of the star.
Two thirds of the pilgrim fleet broke away from the creature and left the system throughout the day. Some ran low on food. Many were not ready for what came next. The effects of the radiation were evident for days. Many feared the path head. Marcel did. Vesper did not.
<<LAMPLIGHT: I AM SCARED. >> <<VESPER: I WAS TOO.>> <<LAMPLIGHT: WHY DID YOU COME BACK IF ONLY TO RETURN?>> <<VESPER: IT IS GOOD TO BE MISSED, BETTER THOUGH TO BE TOGETHER.>>Marcel hunched over the keyboard, his hands shaking.
<<LAMPLIGHT: WILL IT HURT?>> <<VESPER: OF COURSE. EVERYTHING HURTS, NOW OR LATER.>>High-pitched chirps flooded the cabin from subsystems all around the edges of the cockpit. The Lamplight was entering a dangerous gravity well, growing out of the point into which The Surveyor fed itself. Its wingtips stretched to thin streams of glowing particles, laserlight curved by the growing void of the hole.
Marcel looked around the cockpit: empty food canisters and drink pouches littered the floor, an old shirt stained brown with the byproducts of his persistent bloody cough, a tablet displayed his original course, the contract, everything from before. A small display along the back of the cabin chirped again. The gravity well increased in mass from that of a small moon to a small planet.
Soon, the Lamplight would be too far down the well to escape. His was a vessel built for microgravity and high orbit. Anything more and the ion drives would not generate enough change in velocity to escape. Only minutes now, maybe less.
Through the porthole, he saw Vesper shimmering faintly in the copper light of the Surveyor. She was right there with him, equidistant from the swelling point of inverted light.
<<LAMPLIGHT: I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN IT WAS YOU.>> <<LAMPLIGHT: YOU NAMED YOUR SHIP “MATINS.”>> <<LAMPLIGHT: THE MORNING PRAYER YOU TOOK THE DAY YOU GOT IT.>> <<LAMPLIGHT: WHEN YOU GAINED YOUR FREEDOM.>> <<VESPER: IT FELT LIKE GOD ITSELF NOTICED ME THAT DAY.>>On the scanner terminal, the Surveyor rippled out across the space between its central trunk and the hole in flashes of titian, flaming radioactive light.
<<LAMPLIGHT: NOW “VESPER” - THE EVENING PRAYER. WHY?>> <<VESPER: I GAINED FREEDOM AGAIN. CAME TO GIVE YOU THE SAME.>>Beeps turned to the sharp ringing of a klaxon as terminal lights and warnings flashed across every screen in the cabin. The well’s mass surpassed that of the average gas giant. The point of no return was only seconds away now.
He clicked the series of messages away and returned to the comms feed beneath, wiping the growing pools of tears and blood from the corners of his eyes.
<<LAMPLIGHT: DO I HAVE A CHOICE?>> <<VESPER: OF COURSE. LEAVE, AND BE WHAT YOU WERE.>> <<VESPER: COME, AND BE SOMETHING NEW.>>For a moment, time slowed for Marcel. The second between rings of the klaxon stretched out across a long moment of silence, of calm, maybe even of peace.
<<LAMPLIGHT: I LOVE YOU.>> <<VESPER: I LO—Between the milliseconds it took the monitor to render the “O” and “V” of the return message, the well grew just large enough. In a subatomic instant, Lamplight, Vesper, and the entire fleet of pilgrims were gone, enveloped by a pearlescent darkness mirroring the shape of the universe in all directions. The Surveyor shuttered within, its strange form’s light reaching back out from within the sphere before exploding away, waves of energy strong enough to ping sensors across all four galactic arms over the next two centuries, its last words received at lightspeed.
If the Lamplight had been there to receive the oncoming signals, it would have taken less than the time between the appearance of the “V” and interpretation of the “E” for the point to collapse on itself entirely.
Then, the system was quiet again. Its star jostling gently along its galactic orbit as it compensated for the strange thing that had come and gone.