From Out of the Dark Page 2

Aboard the Eschaton, feelings ran high. As the ship plunged through vast emptiness, its crew sang songs of conquest and told tales of discovery. They wanted to know the very end and edge of things, where the Great All simply stopped.

  It had been so long since they had last seen even the burnt cinder remnant of a star that most had forgotten about stars altogether. No one bothered even glancing out port holes anymore.

  Around them, the darkness between stars had given way to plain darkness. It was estimated by on-board computers that the Eschaton would encounter a random atom of this or that element, most likely hydrogen, only once in 17.782 millennia, even with its vast drag chutes open to their maximum one light-year span.

  Space-time neared its end.

  Or was it that the Eschaton, good ship and crew, neared the Space-time end?

  Either way, the hull should not have shuddered with impact.

  Thrown from his bunk, sailing and flailing in free fall, Ar snapped awake and hollered. His growl brought answering yells; yes, everyone had felt it. Most had been hurled from their anchorage.

  As Ar caught a pipe and pressed his feet to a bulkhead, he heard a scratching sound, like huge claws moving on the hull exterior. As security commander, Ar called battle stations. He pin-balled around his cabin, grabbing his back pack full of equipment and weapons, checking them quickly, and hoping his team remembered their duties. It had been ages since he had last drilled them in any emergency procedure.

  In the corridor, Ar found chaos. A light flickered, strobing his vision. Sparks flew. Small objects drifted free. Some were sharp or hot. It made moving risky.

  Ar wondered if he should order body armour.

  “Sir,” someone called. It was Ja, blood leaking past a quick plaster bandage on his forehead. “Sir, reporting damage to the bridge, engineering, and--”

  Before Ja finished the gasped report, another impact sounded, this time accompanied by the sound of metal twisting and things smashing.

  Ar braced himself effectively, being near a bulkhead, but Ja was sent smashing hard into a tangle of wire conduits.

  He hit face first and went limp at once.

  His body became another of the drifting objects hampering navigation through the corridors.

  Ar ordered body armour for his team and only three responded. He asked for a sound-off, and got a count of five. Five out of fifteen? He was already down two thirds?

  “Anyone know what happened to the rest of the team?” he asked.

  El responded, voice sad even through the static now crackling through their intercom. “Sir, they’re either wounded or done. So is at least half the main crew. Probably more.”

  “Any idea what is going on?” Ar asked, making his way through the sparks toward the bridge. “Sitrep, now,” he demanded.

  He got no situation report. His com unit went dead.

  He had just entered the elevator to the command level when power cut off. He was essentially trapped in a metal box inside a disabled metal tube of a spacecraft, so far beyond the last outpost that escape meant almost literally nothing.

  Ar thought about the mirror ship. It moved alongside the Eschaton, and was called the Teleos. Its purpose was backup. Each ship backed up the other; redundancy being the logical solution to system failures that would inevitably arise.

  Each ship could accommodate the full complement of crew from both vessels. They could all go back in one ship.

  If one managed to survive.

  Taking out his weapon, Ar, by touch alone, set it from a modified pulse to a constant low drain. Or so he hoped. He’d last practiced recalibrating in the dark back in boot camp, more than a decade back.

  He smiled. Decades meant as little as light-years out there. Might as well use archaic inches and minutes, he thought; history had always fascinated him, on his off time.

  The low drain of energy from his weapon melted the thin metal of the elevator wall. He cut through, squinting against the bright blue-white light the beam made.

  Pushing with his shoulder, feet braced on the far wall, he bent the new door down and left the elevator from above.

  There were no cables; the elevator worked with air pressure only.

  Ar broke open his back pack and donned battle uniform. He also unfolded and put on his helmet, activated it so it stiffened and sucked in an air pad, and turned on its forward lamps. He could see. He put his back pack on, then climbed the shaft using more of his battle gear, this time the covalent bond feature in his gloves and the knees of his suit. Bonding was for walking on the exterior of hulls, but worked fine there, too.

  He came to a door and slapped the emergency button. Nothing happened.

  He used his weapon to pry open the doors enough to slip a hand in. Brute strength pulled open one side.

  Slipping through, he found himself on command level in a corridor full of bodies, some moaning semiconsciously, others limp and drifting. He shoved his way through, catching a slap in the face, ducking a knee, bumping an elbow.

  His helmet lamps sliced through darkness, catching glimpses of familiar faces, some gooey with blood, others peaceful, as if sleeping. The few with worried eyes winced at the light, and then reached toward him.

  “Settle down, we need to ascertain the problem.”

  “We hit something,” someone in the darkness said.

  “Are you sure?” Ar asked. He could not place the voice. “Sounded more to me like something hit us,” he said.

  “It grabbed us,” another voice said, with much more emotion. This voice was strained into a high-pitched squeal of terror.

  Ar ignored that one for now. No use cranking up the hysteria level. It was grim enough, he figured, without adding outright panic to the survival equation.

  Shouldering his way to the end of the corridor, he had to untangle limbs and unwedge three bodies before he could force his way onto the bridge.

  What he saw there brought him to a halt.

  Tentacles.

  Huge ones, at least half as big around as the ship itself.

  “I cannot understand this,” he said aloud, in a completely calm and rational tone that he at once recognized as madness. He clamped down on himself, suppressing a giddy giggle.

  Moving to the control panel for exterior visuals, he flipped through various views, then thought to request a link to the Teleos. A screen flickered on, stitched with static, blurry, and full of random motion. Sound was no better, but he heard a voice asking, over and over, if anyone was there.

  “Eschaton reporting,” he said, keying a mike. He gave a quick assessment of the dead and wounded.

  “Basically,” he summed up, “we are dead in the water.”

  “Water?” the voice wanted to know.

  “Sorry, old expression.” His history buff status wasn’t known on board the Teleos, so they weren’t used to his archaic references.

  “We are inert,” he said. “Request assistance.”

  “Do you realize it has got you in its grip?” the voice asked, as a face blurred and distorted on the screen.

  He could see that, yes. Looked like a squid, or octopus, except for the spikes, and the metal plate scales or whatever they were. Putting together images from the various exterior cameras did him little good. Ar could not envision the thing.

  “Can we try EM?” came he voice.

  Electro Magnetism? Ar wondered. What did they have in mind? Then again, what did it matter? Anything was better than the current situation, was it not?

  He said, “Yes, please try EM.”

  “Insulate remaining crew,” came the command, and for an instant Ar wondered what was meant. Then he remembered an old emergency drill, in which touching metal could get you killed.

  He pressed the universal intercom button and said, “Attention, all personnel, get away from all metal, repeat, do not touch any metal until I sound an all-clear.”

  He then indicated they were ready, and the Teleos, after a c
ount down from seven, jolted the thing holding the Eschaton.

  At once the ship shook and groaned, slamming its contents in several directions at once.

  The scent of fried meat permeated the ship.

  Ar himself, prepared for the jolt, still drifted inadvertently into a metal bulkhead and received an electric sting. It did not render him unconscious, but hurt enough to make him curse out loud. He heard many yelps through the intercom.

  Crew were coming to, joining the living.

  “Emergency stations,” he called. Probably needless, but protocol kicked in.

  Back at the com panel, he asked Teleos for a sitrep. They told him, their signal clearer now, that the squid thing had retreated into darkness and was not there anymore.

  “Damage reports,” Ar called. “Repair crews prepare for EVA.”

  He decided to go out with one of the repair crews, to assess the damage for himself. It was his right, as security commander. Anything affecting the Eschaton was his business.

 

  They got the breaches in the Eschaton’s hull repaired. They also sorted dead from injured and ended up with three quarters of their crew still with them. With the help of the drag chutes, they recovered ninety-nine percent of the debris that had floated off from the attack.

  Once the Eschaton was squared away, Ar opened up a discussion with Qe, security commander for the Teleos. “What,” he asked, “could possibly have happened?”

  “A huge squid thing came out of the dark and grabbed your ship,” Qe said.

  Ar did not buy it. “That is what it looked like,” he said. “But what was it, really?”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know, but it is completely empty out here. We are near the end of the Great All. Huge things like that would have nothing to sustain them. They do not make sense.”

  Qe agreed, but asked again what Ar thought it was.

  Ar had a theory, but first he asked Qe to check among the full Teleos crew. He wanted to know if they had watched any entertainments in the days leading up to the attack.

  Turned out many had viewed a popular entertainment called TENTACLE ATTACK. It was based on an ancient Japanese tentacle hentai epic, UON-JE, as interpreted by a neo-slasher reclaimant director who wanted to bring some horror into the humour, or vice versa. The particulars did not much matter to Ar. What counted was many of the crew on board the Teleos had absorbed images of huge tentacles doing wild things to giggling girls and stranded spacecraft.

  Speaking with Qe after discovering this, Ar said, “I think they projected these images into reality.”

  Qe was familiar with this theory. It was, in fact, one of the things their explorations were to determine, if possible: Whether the world we experience as reality arises from collective thought.

  Qe scoffed, though. “I just do not believe in that.”

  “Maybe it is not a matter of belief,” Ar retorted.

  “How did we not see huge naked women, then?” Qe asked.

  It was a good question and a telling point. Too many other questions arose, and Ar admitted he had no idea, really.

  The discussion extended to the crew and philosophy became a popular pastime for a while.

 

  The infestation was noticed several weeks ship time after the tentacle attack.

  Crew members of the Eschaton -- but, strangely, not the Teleos -- began reporting tiny crawling things. First, they were glimpsed out of the corners of their eyes. Then they were found on clothes, in food, and finally in the electronics.

  When some were captured and examined, they proved to be tiny versions of the tentacled thing that had grabbed the ship. Rumours of eggs ran rampant. The thing had somehow seeded the ship, and the tiny things were its babies.

  They looked like a tesseract with tentacles, the number varying from a low of five to a high no one dared say, perhaps into the thousands.

  Studying the problem, Ar decided it was not a case of projected subconscious terrors. These were real, as had been the huge one. Damage proved that.

  And then no one could find any of the tiny tentacled things. They were simply not there anymore. Without recordings of them, the crew would not be able to convince anyone else they existed.

  Why had it again been limited to the Eschaton? Ar wondered. He was sitting in his cabin, at his table, sipping a cup of something warm, when, as if crawling out of the table top itself, one of the tentacled things appeared. This one was about the size of his fist, and, before he could jump back or shout in surprise, it spoke to him.

  “WE ARE OF THE PARDON,” it said.

  His brilliant first-contact words were, “What? Huh?”

  “WE HAVE BEEN TO A SCALE OF WRONGNESS, PRESENTINGLY,” it said.

  He wondered if it meant to say, they asked pardon for having come at the wrong scale. He said, “Welcome.”

  “YES,” the thing said at once, tentacles wriggling.

  As with the tiny ones they had studied, Ar found he could not look directly at the tesseract body at the centre of the waving tentacles. This one had over a dozen; they were hard to count because they never stopped moving.

  “TO A PURPOSE YOU COME WITHIN OUR SELVES,” it said.

  Hoping he got it right, Ar said, “We come to find out what lies at the end of Space-time.”

  Much wiggling of tentacles and the thing blinked out and flashed in again, this time slightly bigger. Its voice piped in a slightly lower register as it said, “OUR PLACE IS OF ONE ALL OVER, TO KEEP A BOUNDARY TOWARD REPAIR.”

  They kept things in repair all over, Ar thought. “Why,” he asked aloud, “do you come to us now?”

  It vibrated -- Ar felt it through the deck -- and slid closer to him, still waving its anemone-like appendages. “TO FIND ENDING MEANS A CEASEMENT, STOPPAGE OF ALL FOR ONE, INSIDE WHAT SPACES TIMES KNOWN UNKNOWN FINDINGS.”

  That one confused Ar, but he puzzled it out. He also thought to switch on his log recorder, so he would have some kind of record of this bizarre conversation.

  “Do you mean,” he asked finally, “that, if we find the end of space-time, we will cease to be?”

  “YES,” it piped, with much waving. “ALWAYS IF REAL IS INTO POTENTIAL, DAMAGE IS THE FINAL STASIS.”

  “We might damage space-time, if we probe too far?”

  “YES,” it piped. “TO THE LESS ONE HAS OF EVER, ONE TO THE NEARNESS WITH MANY NO MORE FIXING.”

  Ar stared, trying to figure that one out. “You cannot fix it if we break space-time?”

  “YES,” it piped.

  Ar began to wonder if it understood what yes meant. Would it say that no matter what he said? He asked, “So we need to kill you all and steal your gold?”

  Its tentacles flopped down and it said nothing for a few seconds. “ALL IS GOLD TO NOTHING, WITHOUT A FASTER NON ENTITY.”

  That, Ar thought, had seemed like a no. He asked, “We should turn back?”

  “YES,” it piped, its tentacles again flailing. “GUARDIAN AS FOR WITH US MANY, TO THE GOOD OF WITH AND OF MOST GOOD YES YES.”

  “You are the guardian of space-time, and it is for the good of the many you turn us away?”

  “YES,” it squeaked.

  It seemed, Ar thought, to be shrinking, subtly but definitely getting smaller in all dimensions.

  Before it vanished back into the table’s surface, it squealed one last cryptic message. “LIFE FOR FORMS ON MOSTLY ALWAYS TOGETHER, TO LASTING IMAGE FOREVER.”

  Ar, stunned at what had just happened, hoped that meant something positive for every sentient being in existence. Rising from his chair, he wobbled and had to sit down again for a few moments, to catch his breath. Then he drifted to the portal and went to inform the captain, the scientists, and anyone else who wanted to hear.

  They watched the recorded encounter, picking up where Ar asked if they would cease to be if they kept going. History buff that he was, he thought back to Columbus,
and the idea of sailing off the edge of the world. Maybe it was not so silly a fear, after all.

  All seemed reasonably explained as a hallucination, layered and complex but unreal, until the dead crew members showed up alive and normal and with no memory of having been dead, and no sign of injury or decay. One that happened, it was generally conceded that something incredible was going on. The tentacled guardians of the end of Space-time had given them back a life, and that was enough. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  More than enough?

 

  Ar, soon after this eerie return from the dead, found the following passage in his own voyage journal; had he, too, been dead? He recalled no such thing, yet here was this journal entry. It was in his own voice yet no memory of what he had put down into words came to him.

  This is what it said:

  Slower, colder, darker. Love in the time of entropy has found me.

  The sky is in the water and the water is in the sky. Mountains are coming out of the water through the frost lines. The sun is shrunken and the wind expanded. We walk the reflections with our eyes cast aside in case there are really wolves anymore.

  There aren’t, though. There are barely people. Animals are long since faded memories and grim stories. We are each other’s pets now. There is nothing to eat, not even snow. Not even smoke to smell makes it easier for us.

  Eating each other does not fill. Eating is not one of our habits. Why our senses work no one knows. Some call it a subtle torture. A few say it’s a delusion of memory.

  As the dark shimmers, our march takes us even closer to nowhere. All places are reducing to zero now. Soon there won’t be a where to be. Entropy demands it. Slower, colder, darker: that is our goal.

  Our fear is that we will still experience after there is nothing left to stimulate senses. What then? Can we continue to exist in nothingness? It is close now. We feel it as a kind of mental chill. It ices our thoughts. It makes our hopes brittle and our terrors sharp-edged.

  How it is we remain coherent and distinct to each other we do not know. How it is we keep going when there is nowhere left to go, no reason to go anywhere, we do not know. Discussing it used to take our attention. Now we learn trance or Zen emptiness. Time passes, or it does not. We cannot tell.

  Marking the changes in our world, such that remains, is our only way of gauging how much is left. Presuming it all ends when places cease keeps us from madness. Unless we are mad already, as some believe.

  Locality shifts to nonlocality upon the heat death of the universe. So our smart ones insist. Those like me do not know even what that is supposed to mean. It doesn’t matter, really. Whatever there is to experience, these senses of mine will meld with it, even if it is literally nothingness.

  Being and nothingness makes for philosophy. Trouble is, philosophy does not heal or help. No comfort can be found in words and ideas. Only dreads inhabit our notions. We try not to have any. We flee our own thoughts.

  When I say wolves, as I did earlier, that is what I mean.

  How it came down to us no one remembers if ever any of us knew. It’s questionable. There are thirteen of us trudging through this wasteland of water and sky and frost and wind. We find no others. We stay together because parting makes no difference.

  I have wandered from the group. Each of us has. It leads only back to the group. Without a sense of time it makes no difference. So we talk, if that is what we do. Communication is linear and incremental. Each word adds a sound to the silence inside us. Each syllable pushes the umbra of being into the light of failing space-time.

  There are considerations of comfort. An example is the one who walks near me often. I experience a she. She is not I, and I am not she. We are apart somehow in all this, but near enough. That counts as companionship I think.

  Sometimes I love her. My passion waxes and wanes. I direct affection and concern her way. It is never returned. What she sends to me is simple presence. She receives what I give but there is no echo, no returned warmth.

  Intention is the key when focusing will. As winds clash and our senses swirl there must be intent. With no goal intent is difficult to maintain, so I focus on her. She who is near me. She becomes what I want.

  Developing a desire after however long it has been -- have I ever had one? -- proves nearly impossible. To be with her or to be apart from her is the same. And yet the idea of her in my mind provides a faint outside goal.

  Reaching her may give me more. We walk endless tracts of a wilderness that begins to unravel. Place gives way to singularity and design fades to mere pattern, then to a jumble of accident and chaos. Still we remain coherent. We sense each other.

  Once there were others, we know that. We remember rain and trees and crowds of people. We remember wolves and elk and bear and fish. We know of birds, lichen, molds, and germs. We recall teeming cities and lovely parks, a planet like paradise. Sad apes caper in our minds. Wild beasts and inglorious failures of nerve when it came to ourselves.

  Oddly, there is no frustration. We have only existence and this miniscule hint of place. Vague outlines of matter offer ghosts of form. Wisps of shape taunt our memories. Still we stay whole, as whole as ever perhaps.

  We have all asked why. We have asked ourselves, each other, and the nothingness around us. Projecting personality does no good. Pretending sentience surrounding us makes no difference.

  Are we catchers or the caught? Are we of this, or is it of us? Do our senses stimulate our surroundings? Or are we encompassing what we think of as our world?

  We are always slower, colder, and darker. We are never quite stopped, never entirely frozen solid, never darkness itself.

  Perhaps that is life’s curse. Like Zeno’s paradox, life must go on with always a bit more to be sliced. Always another increment. Always a fraction more possible. Always another half.

  Finding the half makes us whole, perhaps.

  She is near and I am here and that is all I know.

 

  It seemed to Ar like a warped vision of earth in the grip of entropy, with so little left even love became impossible. He began searching the ship, analysing its systems, in obsessive detail and made a discovery. It turned out a secret level of security blanketed the ship, one Ar had not been briefed on, and the ship had recorded the entire encounter, from the very start, automatically. For once, Ar was happy to let his outrage at this violation of privacy slide. In a spacecraft, privacy is largely a delusion, anyway, he knew. Anything that affected any of them, affected all of them, and they all learned that fairly quickly, in such close quarters.

  They decided with a collective vote to become permanently lost, so as not to tempt others to follow them.

  The captain recited a ceremony brought from home, took some visuals, and ejected the beacon Eschaton had carried. The Teleos ejected its beacon, too, and thus the end of Space-time was marked for navigation -- in theory, and in only one direction from the arbitrarily-chosen Reality Core, but still marked.

  By people.

  It was conquest and discovery, and on the long, long way back, the crew sang songs of victory and wealth, knowing their relativity envelope would bring them back only a psychological week after they’d left home, to adoring families who would be proud and happy and welcoming.

  For Ar, it was as good a result as was possible, given the limitations. What kept nagging at him was the notion of scale, but he understood enough about himself to let it drop, once his arms went around his wife and daughter again.

  What did you bring me, daddy? his daughter, Ej, asked.

  This, he said, hugging her again.

 

  By the time their signals ceased, it became obvious they had gone mad long before the end, and this was considered something of a mercy, because no humanoid mind could face infinite nothingness, or a totality of stasis, and remain unshattered. Or so it was said, among experts.

  Most had forgotten about them, truth to tell.

&
nbsp; Those waiting at home never heard directly from the Eschaton or the Teleos again in their lifetimes, after that last reported hug. A few generations later it was concluded that they had probably ceased to exist as they passed the still point at the end of space-time. Essentially, their atoms achieved infinite separation and the arrow of time ceased its flight for them, as their consciousness hit the stasis wall.

  Unless, of course, everything looped back on itself in a closed system, in which case they were safe in the past, tracing out their lives along a new timeline and perhaps unaware of being pioneers of a parallel world.

 

  Years, a wrinkle in space/time later, or before, or elsewhen, a ship was sent (was it again?) to seek them, failing that to explore. It roamed almost randomly, and then was ordered to set up and construct a base from which to continue deeper probe missions. Incrementally colonizing was the new approach to finding the end of the all.

  The crews began to build a new outpost for mankind, only to be attacked by salvage pirates from the Lesser Principalities. That crew would stumble on Eschaton’s crew in the form of what came to be called the photon ghosts of Nebus Omega.

 

  Becalmed in the sea of starless darkness surrounding Nebus Omega, the ship glinted with residual energy bursts of sky-blue and lavender so pale it was almost pink. Legran bit his lower lip and tossed another sealer panel to Micals. “Looks like a unisex toy, pink and blue.”

  “Some places I know,” Micals said, “the babies got no sex ‘til they’re like what we’d call teenagers.” Saying this, he touched the crotch of his suit awkwardly with a thick-gloved hand. “Those tweeners, we call ‘em sure can jiggle.”

  Legran nodded, untwisting a seal valve and depressurizing one of the release hatches for a quick test. He felt the release as vibration through his suit and nodded, satisfied. “I know. Been in those crèche towns, man. Can get pretty wild at First Mating.”

  The two worked methodically, chatted idly...

  ...and died instantly when a Luxon Migrater-class Cargo Vessel shaved in too close, having used the still-pulsing scout ship as a pink/blue beacon.

  The men were crushed by the pressure wave, jellied inside suits made to withstand several times the psi but not able to handle the acoustic transfer of being right up against vibrating metal.

  Records show that, as a result, neither the conversation about crèche communities nor the construction of the Habitat, which the scout ship had birthed, ever got completed. The Habitat they’d been building fell like a metal egg with a bite out of it into Nebus Omega’s gravity well and was soon just a frozen afterimage in the black hole’s event horizon.

  Meanwhile the cargo ship, massing out at seventy-eight times the scout ship, entered a circular orbit. It locked metal hurlant aimers onto its erstwhile beacon.

 

  “Don’t shoot,” said Commander Morton, Gary L., late of Her Majesty’s Secret Service and serving now as unofficial privateer for the Lesser Principalities. He held up a hand, palm forward. His signal stopped the gunner from unleashing scrap metal in a molten torrent at the scout ship, which drifted inert, twitching with its residual energy.

  “Must’ve really blown when we phased in, huh?”

  Morton shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. Hull’s intact; scans confirm only a few small breaches.”

  His first officer, Jailer Fyness, gave a sigh. “Hardly worth the nudge, though.”

  The plan had been to disable the personnel on board the scout ship, then attach small chemical rockets to push it back toward the Lesser Principalities, where snaggers would catch and salvage it. Of course it would be marked by Morton’s molecular code so they’d know whose account to credit.

  “It’s something, and that’s better than nothing. Get your thumb out and a team over there.”

  “Got them suiting up now, Sir.”

  “And you? You’re not going with them?” Morton scowled at Fyness until the shorter man pushed off and drifted the hell out of there. It was an act of annoyance rather than the fact of it, but the truth was, his first officer wasn’t doing so well anymore with the niceties. Morton made a mental note to keep an eye out for any accidents that might conveniently befall Fyness.

  Salvage and pirating were dangerous businesses, after all.

 

  “They were setting up a habitat, meaning they were going to observe Nebus Omega. Why?”

  This entry in Morton’s spoken journal left him uneasy as he reviewed it. He could hear the stress in his voice. He made sure his hand-coded journal was neutral, factual, and dry, knowing it would be boiled down and analysed far quicker. Voice was handy but took too long to review.

  That he kept such logs and journals at all bespoke the faith Morton held in orderly living. It was the only way he’d found to keep out the chaos.

  Yawning, he switched his bunk mate on and had himself a cuddle before setting the sonics to snooze. Dreamless sleep held him in its warm palm this time, a relief from the nightmares of blood, famine, and betrayal he’d been having the past few weeks.

 

  “They’re hailing us, the scout ship. You awake?”

  Morton shook himself and sat up. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Be on the bridge in a few minutes.”

  He got up and skipped the ion shower. Getting into his paint was hindered when he ran out of the red, but purple was an acceptable backup, so that crisis didn’t scatter him.

  On the bridge, quiet chaos reigned as the scout ship tried to manoeuvre out from under their guns and its captain, a narrow man with silvery hair and one mechanical arm, tried to negotiate from a position of strength no one believed he had, least of all him.

  “Political theatre for the bosses.”

  “Owners, Sir.” Fyness was none the worse for his EVA. He looked almost chipper. “Happy to report the boosters in place and all hands returned safe.”

  “So I see. Check the rations, would you? If we have to blast these idiots I might want to scramble a team to fetch me back their fresh fruits or whatever.”

  Fyness saluted with the faintest glimmer of sarcasm on his unshaven face and drifted off to do as told.

  Meanwhile Morton checked the read-outs and decided a summary of the scout ship captain’s demands was unnecessary. No one seriously believed anyone else cared.

  “Open a link for me to talk to him,” Morton said. When the little man appeared on the hologram stage, and the light came on indicating a reciprocal link, Moron cleared his throat. “We’re here now. You can stand down, Cap’n.”

  “The fuck I will, we claimed this with an official notice of exploitation under the First Contact Resolu…”

  “Look, just stop it, okay? This talk we’re having is about whether your remaining crew gets to live long enough to see home port again, or not. I emphasize the ‘or not’ because this is free space and there is no law.”

  “You have any idea what’s here?”

  “Your ship’s what interests me. We lost the Habitat Sphere when we shaved in, and I’ll catch hell for that. It was our prime target for salvage.”

  “For piracy. You’re from the LPs, right?”

  “You know that, come on. Have the common courtesy to speak to me man to man.”

  “We are on a mission to find the End of the All. Nebus Omega is--”

  “A black hole, I know. Isolated, no stars in the general quadrant. Free space. No laws. I don’t care about your religious quest to find the end to end all endings, or the edge, or whatever you fanatics from the Ocular Cluster call it.”

  “No, listen. It’s inhabited.”

  For a nanosecond or so Morton’s skin wanted to ripple, or shiver, or just register a drop in temperature, but that silly impulse passed quickly enough when his overt thinking told him how ridiculous was the notion of a black hole with inhabitants. “What are they, photon ghosts?” he sneered.

  A pause showed the scout ship’s captain frowning, then nodding. �
��You know, that’s not a half-bad name for it.”

  “For what?” Morton was having none of this nonsense.
“I’m transferring some files. Consult them, analyse them, do what you want, then get back to me. Just remember, we have initiated contact with them. They are in touch with my people, not yours.”

  “They? Look, Capt...”

  But the scout’s captain had broken the link.

  “Son of a bitch. Com, did you receive files?”

  “Aye, sir. Looks like 44 of them, sir.”

  “Access them to my cabin only, code NG. First shirt? I don’t want to be disturbed for a while, understood?”

  Morton didn’t wait for Fyness’s sarcasm this time but pushed off and sailed through the hatch, banging his left elbow on the bulkhead and cursing at the welcome pain.

 

  They communicated in images by arranging photons frozen in the black hole’s event horizon, somehow exploiting parallax to focus said images for the scout ship alone. It was akin to direct laser communications, which didn’t have sidereal leak, didn’t have sideband frequencies that could be unjammed, and were not susceptible to tapping. If interrupted, the beams were compromised and discounted. There was no way to eavesdrop on such communications, not yet.

  They know our culture well, Morton realized. What got him was an image of a woman in a bikini. She was shapely and curved in the right places and if it weren’t for her somewhat concave nose and bulbous eyes, she would have been attractive.

  In human terms, they’d come as close to a bull’s-eye as possible without actually scoring one. Morton knew that it was hard enough for one human culture to appreciate another’s well enough to find hot buttons to exploit in advertising. Here was a life form -- no, intelligence form, we don’t know they’re alive in any biological sense -- that did it apparently sight unseen.

  Had they been studying human transmissions for centuries or had they done this quick-and-dirty analysis of what appeals to us in the incredibly brief time since the discovery of Nebus Omega?

  Morton finally felt the cold chills as he drafted a terse emergency memo to be short-beamed at once to the LPs, where all hell would break loose as they scrambled to position themselves to open up trade ahead of the scout ship’s claim. Wouldn’t do to have the Neo-Empire gaining such a profitable advantage.

  Morton downloaded, after he sent the memo, a dram of his personal allotment of genuine single malt scotch. He sipped some of it, and then downed the rest when his hands refused to stop shaking.

 

  “You have to kill them. Surely you see that.”

  Morton looked away from the eagerness in Fyness’s eyes. “We can take them prisoner.”

  “Every second they continue to live gives them a chance to wreck this chance for us, Sir. And by what authority would you arrest and hold them? We’re privateers; the LPs would have to declare war with the Old Sol System for that to happen legally. Surely the Ocular Cluster crazies have already lodged complaints with the Alliance.”

  “I’m not a murderer. I will not commit genocide.”

  “This is political, Sir. Where’s the murder in expedience? They got in our way. Not our fault, any more than, what, a small animal getting in front of a ground car.”

  “They’re people, like us. Well, sentient beings at least.”

  “Are they? I thought they’re the enemy. They’re crazies. Oracular Clusterfucks. They believe in finding the end of all things, the edge of reality. We’re just trying to make a living. Are we going to let the crazies block us? Look, if you can’t do this, I can. I’ll give the order. It’ll be my responsibility.”

  Morton saw the eagerness flash into lust. He knew Fyness wanted this, saw it as a way to advance his career, be a big hero among the Machiavellians.

  Sliding open an old-fashioned drawer hidden just under one side of his desk, Morton removed the particle beam wand and with it sliced an X-shape into Fyness’s chest. Watching the man bubble, blister, and bleed gave him only one qualm, and it spasmed through him like a quick puke before going on stage.

  Morton said, very quietly, “I’m not a murderer.”

  As Fyness fell he wondered if that were true anymore.

  “Send a Bos’n and medic to my cabin, there’s been an accident,” he said into the intercom.

  He guessed he was probably not yet a murderer, in the strictest sense, but he also knew it would catch up with him eventually.

 

  “These photon beings, or whatever they are, offer trade. Trade the likes to transform worlds. I’m telling you, there’s enough to go around regardless of ideological differences. Many times over.”

  Morton regarded the hologram of the scout ship’s captain, a man named Neibauer, and tugged his lower lip. “What can they trade? Nothing comes out of a black hole but energy.”

  “We can tap that as usual, but they’re offering information. Think what they’ve absorbed over the millennia of sentient space. They are amazing.”

  Ah, one of those, Morton thought, recognizing the term “sentient space” from the one Historical Mind Society meeting he’d attended years ago, out of curiosity about the Ocular movement and, more to the point, to get closer to a young woman. They believed intelligent species proliferating in space/time actually rendered space/time itself intelligent. Thus, finding the end of the end, or the edge, meant finding the Life/Death point, as they called it. The singularity from which all flowed, into which all flowed.

  Morton framed his next words carefully. “You must be glad to have found these, uh, photon ghosts. I mean, they tend to confirm HistMind and Ocular doctrine don’t they?” A stiffening of Neibauer’s features showed displeasure at what might be mockery. “Personal beliefs don’t enter into this, nor do the political. It does not matter if one is Ocular or Principality.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure they don’t. After all, how do I know this isn’t a ploy on your part?”

  “You can record images yourself from them.”

  “So far, no we can’t. Nothing. It’s a basic black hole, suitable for energy capture. That’s all.”

  Neibauer demurred. “Hardly just that. I’ll request they focus on you, so you can receive images too.”

  “How can we know this isn’t originating from you somehow, though? You see?”

  “Just wait, the content will convince you.”

  “You mean the content you didn’t see fit to include in the less-than-convincing files you transferred to us?” Morton bristled, wondering how the man, faced with fairly certain obliteration, could hold back key things that might ease the pressure.

  Again Neibauer blinked off. An instant later Comm reported incoming signals, like laser but tighter if that were possible. “Really layered, too, sir. I mean, this stuff is dense.”

  The snippet proffered by Nebus Omega lasted twelve point six seconds and, when on-board computers finally unravelled it, came in at over one million images, each one comprised of so many bytes that it strained their software to display it.

  The chills started in Morton again. No known technology could do that with data or information.

 

  “If it’s a scam, and I fall for it, I’m history’s goat.”

  “I doubt you’d feel it, after they behead you, sir.”

  Morton glared at Fyness’s replacement’s bluntness but didn’t say anything back. He almost missed Fyness’s sarcasm. “When you’re right, you’re right.” This young Stephens would go far.

  “A benefit of beheading.”

  Morton was about to open his mouth to let some stray thought or other out when a bos’n’s mate third class burst into the officer’s lounge, itself an unprecedented breach of protocol on that ship, and shouted, “Mutiny, sir; you have to do something quick. They’re on the bridge.”

 

  Like all Commanders, Morton carried a transmitter that, if switched on with the right code, would activate the gut-bombs every able body on-board h
ad to swallow in order to continue working for the Lesser Principalities. These prevented mutiny; any rebellion en-masse resulted in one of the officers using his code and killing the enlisted men. Usually also themselves, in suicides of failure’s shame.

  The little pills all who spaced choked down lodged in their small intestines and would, if triggered, explode, sending toxins through the body to kill slowly if the explosive charge detonating didn’t do the trick.

 

  “Who’s on the bridge, bos’n?”

  The young man’s face contorted as if he’d been punched. “Not sure what they are, sir. Like watery or wavery, only air, cobwebs and stuff; I don’t know.”

  “Make sense, damn it.” Morton shoved past the kid and used the handrails to speed himself down the corridor toward the bridge. Over his shoulder he told Stephens to check engineering, make sure it was still in ship’s hands.

  As he rushed to see if his presence could save things from total anarchy a fraction of his mind was boggled that the intelligences from the black hole could apparently project images not only into the ship, but onto the bridge. Did they understand the significance of the bridge?

  Had to, he told himself. Too much of a coincidence otherwise. So where, he wondered, did mutiny come in?

  “Hurry up, Stephens,” he yelled, but of course his new First Officer was long out of earshot.

 

  How had he let it get so far out of control so quickly? Morton wondered, frozen in the hatchway gaping into the bridge, where a scene from a farce was enacting itself without a script.

  Several of the officers were cowering, one shrieking and two others just crying outright. One was swiping at one of the intruders, ineffectually; it looked like trying to chop smoke with an axe, except that he was using a cable torn from a wall unit. The motions were mechanical, almost as if controlled.

  The ghosts were vaguely humanoid, with a torso and head at the top and limbs. Some had more than the usual four limbs, some had disproportionate heads, and some seemed to be fragmented, parts of whole people. Not that they were people. They had no faces, for one thing. Some of them were hard to focus on; other details sprang out in relief, such as the pulsing gaps oozing a white smoke in the belly of one.

  All were naked.

  Some were, nevertheless, in rags.

  They floated, they loomed at this or that terrified person, and they put out some kind of energy; Morton felt it. And his head began filling with horrific images; his own death featured strongly along with the dismemberment of his loved ones, the destruction of his home world, and the obliteration of anything he held dear.

  He didn’t scream for someone to make them stop, the way his pilot trainee was doing, but he wanted to.

 

  Just as Morton forced himself to enter the bridge and bellow for everyone to take their places at once, it stopped. Instant silence in his head, immediate reduction of screaming and shrieking to a quiet set of sobs.

  The holostage flickered and Neibauer appeared. “You see?”

  “If this is your weapon--”

  “It’s not a weapon. They’re just showing you their displeasure. They can make us miserable.”

  They can haunt us, literally, Morton thought.

  Aloud he asked, “What is it they want, then? You’ve dealt with them longer. Have they made demands?”

  Neibauer laughed. “You won’t believe it.”

  “Try me, damn it.”

  For an instant the hologram of Neibauer stood motionless, head lowered as if in thought. Then the shoulders shook. Perhaps he was crying, over there in his doomed little scout ship. But then he lifted his face, and showed that he was laughing. “What do they want, you ask?”
“That’s what I want to know, yeah.” Morton shuddered, knowing he didn’t want a repeat of those images in his head, so vivid, so violent, and so appalling. What they made him feel was worse than even witnessing his teammate’s burn when the engine blew on the race around Procyon VII. He gagged.

  “What do they want, you want to know?” A giggle.

  “Damn it, tell me. What is wrong with you?”

  And, through laughter, Neibauer said “What you might call, well, world peace.” And he collapsed into laughter.

 

  Neibauer asked for permission to come aboard for a face-to-face talk, and Morton granted it.

  Once ensconced with single malt scotch and scones for both, Neibauer leaned forward in his harness and said, “There’s a third alternative.”

  “Always is. Expatiate.”

  “One, we tell what we’ve found. Let things happen and hope for the best. Two, we lie about it, keep things to ourselves as much as we can, and try to work a compromise.”

  “So what’s the third?”

  Neibauer smiled. “We forget all about it. Report this black hole as old and not worth bothering with. Chart it as a dead loss and hope no one else comes poking around for a good long time. We skate with our lives and sanity.”

  “You think They will let us do that?”

  Neibauer’s shrug was worthy of a Pope.

  “I’ll have to think this over; I’ll let you know.”

  “Fair enough, but that’s my vote. Forget it all.”

  They toasted each other’s health, each with reservations, and Niebauer returned to the scout ship.

 

  We behave ourselves, Morton thought, and get access to a storehouse of knowledge and information such as we cannot conceive, or we misbehave and suffer horrific nightmares day and night. We cease war and we stop using our minds and machines for harming other intelligences, including ourselves, or we experience the worst losses we can imagine, and then some, over and over, feeling them emotionally with the intensity of heightened awareness, as punishment.

  Paradise or Hell? It should be an easy choice, yet had never been, and mankind had more often opted for Hell.

  Morton tried dozens of times to draft a report covering this, then gave up. He and Neibauer talked some more, via secure comm link, becoming almost fast friends from having to face something so outré together with no one else to consult.

  Morton decided to lie, finally. No use trying to shape or carve the truth into something the Princes or Oculist visionaries would swallow. He would claim the scout ship phased away before they shaved in and that they found nothing there at Nebus Omega worth bothering with. That threw the ball into Neibauer’s lap. If the scout Captain leaked the truth it would fall on him to suffer the consequences of political upheaval and career suicide. It was somewhat Machiavellian but Morton washed his hands of the problem with no qualms. After all, it hadn’t been he who’d opened a dialogue with this bizarre new-found sentience.

  He knew his lie wouldn’t hold up for long. Inevitably crew would talk or some other scout ship would show up, following the beacon of energy every black hole promised. Habitats would be built and inflated. New cluster worlds would start.

  He understood this as inevitable, but he also knew, with a certainty that surprised him, that he didn’t want to be the one who brought a vengeful god, or its equivalent, back to the Lesser Principalities. If the Oculists ducked this fate, too, well, so be it, and by the time Nebus Omega’s weird intelligences were rediscovered he’d be long dead, safely out of harm’s way, a life well-lived without nightmares.

  “We’re just not ready yet,” he told his journal, speaking for mankind without so much as a blink of shame.

 

  Neibauer’s ship was late getting back to home port but amended its report to the Oculist ministry to say that Nebus Omega was not worth pursuing for various technical reasons.

  Morton’s ship returned a few weeks later, having done some further scavenging and privateering, to confirm Neibauer’s conclusion, which by then had been reported by spies to the Lesser Principalities.

  Neither captain referenced the Eschaton’s fate from so many otherwhen’s ago.

  Neither crew experienced an
y bad images once they left the vicinity of the black hole. If any told what they’d experienced, they weren’t believed. Drunkenness has its virtues when it comes to covering up the bizarre truth.

  It was always like that with ghost stories.

 

  Hope

  Tony Shillitoe

  “Hope is a waking dream.”

  ― Aristotle