Star's Blood & Star's Fire

[StarSeekerVDS]

22nd September, 3989

The Deep, near Beta Sagittae

She did not swim, for there was no water in this Deep. Nor did she fly, for there was no air. There was only light within the darkness, forever and infinite Light and Darkness. There was not even she, nor her thoughts, nor even the time in which thoughts could flow. Even the distant stars were timeless, and they were one with the Light and with her. She could abide here forever—and indeed did so. Every instant was eternity. She was home.

Time passed.

"Return," a quiet but insistent voice called from the Shallows, and she did so. With less practice, she would have felt regret or frustration from having been brought back to normal consciousness, but she felt glorious, dazzling Nothing still within her, fading into the sharp-edged shadows and lights of the Shallows. In this case the Shallows manifested as the interior of a starship. She found herself in a hold lit by candles dancing with the golden-red color of cool stars, surrounded by metallic surfaces reflecting these lights over and over, a galaxy that was, for a moment, as beautiful and complex as that outside the ship, out in the Deep.

"Xa," The voice called her name, and she focused on the source: an old man sitting calmly in lotus with a book in his hand. He remained calm even when a sudden tremor passed through the ship, and remained sitting in lotus even when the tremor became a terrible shaking and Xa was thrown out of her own balanced position and several of the candles fell over, spilling wax on the deck. As Xa righted herself and struggled back to a seated position the upset candles blazed with increased light, and then winked out.

The trembling subsided and the old man bowed his head as warning chimes, gentle but irresistible, intruded on the candlelit space. The voice of the main computer overrode the chimes. "Warning: gravitational disturbance detected; drives forced into emergency shutdown. Warning: slipstream field collapsing to Alpha band. Prepare for turbulence and drag effects. Warning: Fatalities on board. Disciple Ziik and Disciple Ref. Warning: dangerous astrophysical event detected. Warning—"

Shaam touched the pad again, having already learned what he needed to know about the ship's status, and flipped back to the window he had been reading. He scrolled a few lines back and began to read the ancient text:

”As one throws away worn-out clothes and puts on new dress

The embodied Self throws away worn-out bodies and enters a new

Weapons do not harm this Self, fire does not burn it

Water does not wet it, wind does not dry it

It cannot be cut, kindled, wetted, dried

Immobile, immovable, immutable, all-pervasive

It is Eternal.

It is unmanifest, unknowable, unchangeable

Realize this, and do not grieve."

Xa bowed her head and Master Shaam nodded. "If you imagine it matters, you may rise," he said. Xa gave it a moment's thought and remained seated. Shaam smiled. "Good girl."

She took a deep breath to calm her rising grief and panic. Ziik... "What has happened, sir?" she whispered.

"A spontaneous manifestation of a gravitational source, it seems. A black hole put itself in our path as we fell from slipstream and we clipped it. Our real-space velocity was such that, thanks to the disabling of our drives from the gravitational flux, we're are now trapped in orbit around it." He seemed unconcerned but she knew better.

"The other ships?"

"They did not evade and were lost at once."

Mercury's Dream. Destined. A dozen lives! Her breath came in as a sharp gasp; she forced herself to return to three-part breathing. The embodied Self throws away... "How did we not detect it before we were so close?"

Shaam glanced back down at the datapad. He did not directly answer her. "Since we appear likely to die after one or two more orbits, perhaps we may repent before the end."

"Repent?"

He sighed. His calm voice held the barest tinge of bitterness. "The Deep holds many secrets," he said. "Come. Let us contemplate our impending death."

13th May, 4004

TYC 1613-778-1 G9V 422.73 light-years From Tau Ceti

At the helm of the Infinity Unseen, Xa sat with one hand raised in a mudra of concentration; her other hand rested on her console with fingers moving idly over scanner controls. A planet loomed on the main screen: amber and blue, tinges of green and purple under vast white clouds. A golden sun peeked over the limb of the crescent planet, shooting rays of red around the planet's shadow. The planet had no significant moons though Xa's sensors had detected a cluster of trailing asteroids in parallel orbits. Indeed, it was probably the lack of moons and the density of asteroids in the system that had caused the planet its unstable rotational axis (eighty degrees tilted to the system's ecliptic plane) as well as the thick clouds that encapsulated the northern hemisphere of the world.

Xa directed beams of active sensors to probe the less cloud-covered regions where the atmospheric toxins were thinnest. Spectra flashed over the screen, flashing and rendering into lists of chemicals with proportion, temperature and density readings. Sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane. Hosts of other compounds less pleasant though, thankfully, in small enough proportions that she could visit the surface unsuited. It would have to be a brief visit, however.

She asked herself the question Black Star Liners had asked millions of times over the centuries the explorer corps had traveled the unknown and unknowable Deep on behalf of humanity: "How to take the measure of a world with but a few footsteps?" As always there was no answer except in awe. Even a small planet could be one's entire universe for a lifetime, with barely a sand grain's width explored to her satisfaction. In this system alone, there were a dozen planets... and beyond that the myriads of stars gleamed like untouchable jewels against the black sky. Xa whispered, "Glorious is the work of the One who created this greatness, which is beyond my humble reach."

She gazed at the console for a long time. “Here," she said softly, and placed a finger randomly in one of the safer zones of the planet. The cameras focused on a clear space in the southern hemisphere with golden foliage nestled in a series of valleys between a range of black mountains capped with snow.

She began to plot a course and that was when the pain began.

It started as a twinge that raced up her body from the base of her spine to her head. She stiffened, her hands frozen on the consoles as she sat back against the seat. Meditation would intensify the pain but would help her tolerate it, so she finished the course plotting, hit Execute, and closed her eyes to focus on the pain.

Fire spread out from her spine, grabbing the muscles of her back in cruel vise grips. She followed the pain as it ran through her body, expanding down the bones and nerves. Her arms and legs trembled from the effort of sitting still. Her eyes watered and soon tears were pouring down her face and her lower lip was bleeding from her biting it so she wouldn't scream. She would not give the pain the satisfaction of making her scream, not this time.

She reached inside herself, asking her breath and energies to quiet and to heal the pain. Her mind ran down the spine, exploring the flow, a rushing red river of magma searing her flesh from the inside. It boiled up her back, an eruption of black and red and agony awakening every nerve with coruscating waves, like the gas flowing over the surface of a star. It flooded her neck and then reached her head and the center of her thoughts.

This time she failed to contain the scream.

22nd September, 3989

The Deep, near Beta Sagittae

Creaking and groaning as her stressed structure was tormented by tidal forces, the starship Quiet Light orbited uncomfortably close to the event horizon of the black hole. Xa watched the computer plot the ship's complex orbit through a few hundred passes around the ravening sphere, calculating frictional forces as the ship repeatedly encountered the dust disk swirling around the black hole.

The results were not encouraging. It would be only two hundred orbits—at best—before the Quiet Light was consumed by the black hole's event horizon. A realm of timelessness. Xa had no desire to meditate on that fate.

"Master," she said quietly. "The calculations suggest we will encounter the event horizon in ten to fifteen hours, depending on the exact densities of the dust within the bands. Sensors are not able to penetrate the radiation and magnetic fields more clearly."

"I see. At least the gravitic shielding will prevent the radiation and magnetic fields from penetrating us," Shaam said. He seemed amused.

"The control elements for our engine singularities are totally destroyed; we will be completely unable to effect any worthwhile change to our course. I've done calculations for ejecting objects and gas from the ship, using the shields as a gravity sail, even detonating our PALF, but we cannot manage enough delta-v to do us any good. The distress drones launched automatically... but their drives shorted out due to the gravitational disturbances in the region. They're floating a few AU away."

"Perhaps we will soon envy the others who went before us.”

Xa's spine stiffened. She turned her chair away from Shaam and back toward her console. "Ziik and I..."

"I would be a poor Master were I blind enough to have not seen that," Shaam said, not unkindly. His voice was nearly drowned out as the hull shrieked again. The difference in gravitational forces between one side of the Quiet Light and the other, this close to the black hole, was enough to put great strain on the ship's structure. While Xa believed the gravity-based shields would be sufficient to divert the worst of the tidal stresses she was not sure if this was a blessing. Was it any better to be pulled into a hole in the universe where time would pass more and more slowly for them until, at the event horizon, it ceased entirely? "Perhaps it will not be so bad. We may be able to watch the stars dance through the eons in a matter of minutes, and see at last our place in this universe."

Xa didn't answer. Perhaps that would indeed be the one bright spot in their situation.

Something else was bothering her. "Master, I still do not understand. This black hole is smaller than a collapsar and according to the sensor logs was not affecting the local gravitational flux until we were on top of it. Interferometric calculations from the last sensor results of the Destined and the Mercury's Dream seem to indicate that it simply was not there until shortly before we struck it."

"That may be," Shaam agreed.

"But how? Did our passage in slipstream cause a gravitational eddy or something? An artifact of our drive singularities perhaps? We should find a way to warn someone, so that the Lines can take measures to prevent this sort of disaster." Even as she spoke she knew there was no way of warning anyone of anything. The drones were lost and it was highly unlikely any ship would approach within range of the Quiet Light's light-speed communication arrays.

"I do not believe it is the result of our drives," Shaam said, interlacing his fingers in front of him and leaning back in the command chair as another wave of rippling, shrieking hull stress shook the bridge and filled the space with a banshee wail. "You are but a Disciple, so you as yet have encountered little of the strangeness of the Deep."

"I bow to your wisdom and experience, Master," Xa said softly. "I seek to understand what strangeness you speak of."

13th May, 4004

TYC 1613-778-1 G9V 422.73 light-years From Tau Ceti

Xa lay immobilized in the main chair on the Infinity Unseen's silent, curved bridge. The agony in her arms and head had subsided but her legs and spine still screamed. Her face was wet from tears and the pain was so severe her nose had started to run as well. She wiped her face with a black silken cloth, each movement like open wounds through her lower back. The screens before her showed the scarlet fire of atmospheric reentry, and she felt, through the pain, the banking maneuvers the ship took as it moved through its preprogrammed course.

Reentry had always been the most dangerous part of space travel, since the ancient days of ill-fated Columbia to Xa's first posting, the Black Star Line seeker Danger Dancer commanded by Grandmaster Xyas. The gravity shields on Danger Dancer had formed an incorrect airfoil configuration, a malfunction blamed on an attempt to optimize the shields in flight to allow a closer approach to a Wolf-Rayet star. The survey mission to the star was successful. The reentry, less so.

Xa felt the cold rush of fear as the Infinity Unseen's main computer announced the reconfiguration of the gravitic airfoils for aerobraking. Fire played across the hull, blazing first orange, then yellow, then searing white as excited atoms and molecules hissed through the boundary layers between the shields and the tough hull. While it was impossible to perfectly reflect all the atmospheric gases and plasma, the shields were able to divert the majority of it so that it flowed around the hull instead of directly impacting it and causing turbulence and, as in the case of the Danger Dancer, tumbling...

Xa held onto the arms of her seat with white-knuckled hands as the plasma arcing around the ship flared to white, and relaxed as it slowly faded, leaving the explorer vessel coasting safely on airfoils over a wine-dark sea spotted with clouds and pale islands in the distance. This time, it seemed, she would not have to be cut out of a ruined hull and treated for burns, as that one reentry years ago.

Her body still would not move.

On the screen the sea gave way to the southern continent. Golden-green foliage shined in the sunlight except here and there where clouds and rain blocked the light. Infinity Unseen slipped into a weather front and the screen went cloud-white for a moment before the sensors compensated by shifting the frequencies to water vapor's transparencies. Lightning flashed blue and speakers connected to vibrational sensors on the hull registered crackles and booms.

The ship passed beneath the clouds at last and the screen shifted back to normal wavelengths. A range of black mountains, snow-capped, appeared on the horizon with broad forests of gold below. The forests became a blur as the ship decreased altitude to one kilometer above the surface. The mountains loomed and suddenly expanded to fill the entire screen and Infinity Unseen passed directly between two peaks and applied force with her gravitic drives. The ship decelerated rapidly and hovered for a moment along one wall of a deep valley before sliding down a slope of manipulated gravity to a smooth landing along the sandy banks of a river.

Rain fell on the hull, whispering. Xa lay and listened to it for awhile. She tried to meditate on its soothing rhythm, but whenever her mind focused on it, the sound became unbearable and the pain within her spine flowed upward and threatened to consume her.

"Glorious is Your work," she prayed softly, her eyes brimming with tears again, not from the physical pain this time. "I hope You one day judge me worthy to experience it again, mindfully and present to it, without this distraction."

The pain in her spine was her only answer, but that was no answer at all, so she just listened to the song of the rain.

22nd September, 3989

The Deep, near Beta Sagittae

Xa stood in her quarters, leaning against the flickering viewscreen that showed an actinic violet-white light, disc-shaped, spinning slowly around a sphere of pure nothingness. The nothingness was black except at the edges where distorted light gleamed in hyperbolic orbits around the unspeakably dense black hole. The innermost part of the disc was spinning fast enough the eye could not make out the details but at the edges the movement was slower and Xa could see brighter and darker regions of light as they orbited. Farther out the light became blue-white, then white, then pale yellow. The Quiet Light orbited just outside the yellow region, within a dim, diffuse cloud of orange-red that had not quite merged into the flat disc of the inner regions.

Magnetic distortions rippled across the disc and through the cloud of ionized debris that had formed around the black hole. The ship lurched occasionally as it passed through streams of magnetized matter that followed the field lines. The cry of the tortured hull was almost constant now; fortunately the stresses were still well below the hull's tolerances. Without the gravitational shielding, however, the differential between the black hole's gravity at the rear of the ship and at the nose would probably cause structural failure within a few hours. All it would take would be a few good hairline fractures down the ship's base and she would crack like an egg.

Xa reflected that her quarters, had they not been Spartan to begin with, would have been filled with debris by now from the random turbulence the ship experienced in her passage through the debris disc. As it was a beautiful, perfect diamond crystal she had picked up in a mountain range on a planet near Omega-1 Aquilae was laying on the floor in a corner and a cup of water was spilled on her desk. Strangely a delicate airflower made of fine threads of magnetite floating on a matrix of soft, feathery petals was untouched on the desk despite being completely unsecured and fragile enough that Xa could barely pick it up without losing pieces of it.

Such is life, she thought, as the singularity cut a hole in the view through the screen. And death, soon enough.

Xa folded her legs underneath her on the bunk and placed her hands together in front of her chest, then lifted them slowly upward, drawing a slow, deep breath as she did so. Her eyes drifted closed and her eyelids fluttered as she drank in the breath, separating her hands above her head and letting them fall down to her sides as she breathed out. With each inhalation she brought her hands together and raised them; with each exhalation she let them fall. Within a minute her mind was focused on her breath, and she searched for her watching Self, piercing layers of thoughts and concepts and finding, with a sudden realization of bliss, that there was no Self after all, only the Deep.

Xa let her awareness include her physical body, and as she did so the ship screamed again with the tortured sound of stressed metal. She felt the sensations within her body as her own flesh vibrated from the same gravitational stress. More flexible than metals and strongly shielded by the gravitational shields of the ship, her organic flesh was not harmed by the stresses—yet.

She breathed, this time not moving her arms. She accepted the air as she inhaled and let it release into the ship's atmosphere as she exhaled. It would be only hours, she realized, that this process would end, that, indeed, her body would be mangled beyond recognition soon, much less function.

She did not grieve. Nor did Shaam, she realized. The master was meditating in his own quarters, experiencing the final hours of his life with calm joy.

As the vision of Shaam entered her mind she was troubled and the Deep was covered once again by a thickening surface of thought and emotion. She longed to join the Deep again but her mind resisted. His words echoed in her head. The biggest mistake of the other Lines is that they think the Deep is Out There. The inner spaces, close to the hearth fires humanity has lit, are warm and visible and they have enough understanding to survive them. But it's out here, where the fires have not been lit, that we see the true Deep, which is One within us and without. Our secret, you see...

He had paused then, and Xa normally would have accepted his judgment that she was not yet ready for the rest of what he had to say. But she had pressed him. And though he could very well have said that their impending death did not justify her lack of patience, he had continued.

The Deep was obscured and her mind was alive with whirling, whispering questions, visions, and terrors that, fortunately, she did not let overwhelm her. She was too trained for that; she watched dispassionately as these thoughts passed through her, vanishing into the Deep from which they arose. A Deep that called to her again, a Deep she understood just a bit better now thanks to Shaam's words. From that understanding came no comfort though... only a deeper fear and more unanswered questions.

We map the stars and we map the Deep. When we do these at once we are Spirit discovering itself and we create that which we map. The Deep is, in our time, mostly closed to those who do not understand this truth, and I fear what would happen to humanity if our reality was defined by the rigid thought patterns of Red Star, or the selfishness of Gold Star.

What gives us the right to create this reality, then? she had asked.

I cannot answer that. And I daresay the Deep will extract a heavy price for our arrogance, even beyond our deaths...

13th May, 4004

TYC 1613-778-1 G9V 422.73 light-years From Tau Ceti

As the pain subsided from paralyzing to merely annoying Xa attempted to rise from her chair. Her numb legs gave no feedback and she toppled forward, catching herself on the back of the chair. The sudden stop sent a jarring pain through her arms and shoulders. She ignored it—it was nothing compared to the pain receding in her spine—and shook her legs to restore feeling. She kicked at the base of the chair and felt the reassuring sensation of impact, and so gingerly let go of the chair and stepped away from it. She reached into a compartment in the underside of her console, where she stored her foreign environment suit and other out-of-ship clothing. She unwrapped her sari and peeled off her sweat-soaked choli, withdrew a short-sleeved black outdoor robe from the compartment and wrapped herself in it, securely fastening it with a green belt. She put the sari and choli over the back of the chair to deal with later and pulled her lighter and eyepad out of a drawer above the clothing drawer, snapping the lighter to her left wrist and wrapping the flexible eyepad around the back of her right hand.

She left the cockpit and passed through her quarters to the airlock shaft in the center of the ship, entered the shaft, and let the platform carry up and out of the ship. As she cleared the opening the hatch began to close and she stepped onto it. She knelt on the sleek black metal of the top of the ship and prayed quietly. "So I have come through the Deep to this unknown Place where Your glory waits discovery. May my small self walk mindfully in beauty as I explore this place, and catch but a glimpse of what You have placed here."

She took a deep breath of the rich, alien air. It was slightly tainted with sulfur and an unidentifiable spicy scent. She thought of a cooking pot Ziik had tended to on some planet in Tarazed Maru, a few weeks before the incident...

She sighed, took another breath and moved her hands in a focusing mudra, then rose to her feet gracefully and surveyed the terrain.

The ship lay on the sandy bank of a gently-flowing river about fifty meters wide, some fifty meters to the east; the water in the middle was flowing vigorously and the river was a rich golden-green, more transparent than Xa had expected. The water reflected the light of the sun to the north in a wave of dazzling white against the horizon; Xa averted her eyes and looked west toward the slope of the river valley. The slope was covered in gray-green leafy plants through which larger, golden-green trees protruded. The trees formed a thick forest creeping up the slope; beyond the forest were dark cliffs of granite. Some kilometers away the cliffs revealed themselves as foothills of a mountain range.

Eastward, over the river, a forest grew unchallenged by the gray-green plants; a kilometer away this forest was split by a line of hills from which talus had fallen recently, obliterating trees. In fact...

Her eyes followed the arc of hills, for an arc it was. She flipped the eyepad into a usable configuration in her hand and keyed into the navigational logs of the Infinity Unseen, retrieving the scans of the region taken on approach.

Indeed, the hills to the east were the debris ring from a small meteoric impact. The talus falls from the rim of the crater seemed to be the result of a recent earthquake but the crater itself was at least several centuries old.

"Surely I am here for a reason," Xa said softly as she directed the ship's gravitic sensors to pulse the area and provide a seismic map of the underlying geological structure.

Her eyes traveled over the rim of the crater and she smiled, moved forward a few meters, and stretched out on the hull of the ship to rest awhile in the warmth of the alien sun.

23rd September, 3989

The Deep, near Beta Sagittae

Xa remembered every detail of the decision to get up and investigate the singularities of the ship's drives, but the memory was as a forgotten dream in the bardo: irrelevant; it was where she was that was important. She stood in the cramped engine compartment in the rear of the ship gazing at the impenetrable black casing of the gravitic drive. She watched the screen mounted in the front of the drive; it displayed an ever-changing array of graphics representing the magnetic fields that manipulated the six singularities so that their interactions produced finely-tuned gravity waves.

The graphics were going wild. Constant magnetic stimulation was necessary to create more complex waves than usual to counterbalance the black hole's chaos. The shields were strained; the wave harmonics were starting to exceed the ability of the computers to compensate for; indeed, a low and constant whine was heard reverberating through the Quiet Light as the computers decided to allow the ship's hull to resonate with several aspects of the waves rather than attempting to damp it out with an impossibly complex gravity wave. Xa watched the colored isoclines pulse and wobble around the dancing lights of the singularities.

"Xa." Shaam was standing in the narrow doorway with his hands laced behind his back. Xa did not move. "The computer mentioned that you were here."

"So I am."

"I had assumed that you intended to die with a view," Shaam said, coming to stand beside her. He turned to the computer and ran a finger along a row of slowly changing equations in the top right corner of the screen and shook his head.

"I had a thought," Xa said, and touched a square on the bottom of the console to bring up a set of controls overlaid over the singularities on the screen. "Since we are to die anyway, should we attempt the unwise?" Shaam raised an eyebrow and inclined his head. This meant continue. Xa continued. "I propose we force the gravitic drive to resonate in time with the singularity's gravity waves and pulse the shields to a configuration resonating with the event horizon."

"I had suspected you would go mad," Shaam said.

"The shields will fail," Xa said flatly. "Within twenty minutes, I suspect."

"Ten," Shaam said, tapping one of the terms of the equation scrolling across the top of the screen. Xa placed her hands together in a mudra of submission-to-an-elder.

"Yes, Master. Should we not then make use of them before then?"

The elderly Master placed his hands behind his back again and regarded the floor. His eyes drifted closed for a moment. "I shall be interested to see the results of your madness," he said.

The ship lurched but Shaam already had a steadying hand on her arm, preventing Xa's fall.

As the shaking increased, Xa dropped to the deck and sat in lotus, pulling the virtual console down the face of the drive's display. She made a quick sequence of the commands to the computer, some verbal and some by typing, and a second string of equations appeared below the first. Letters, symbols, and numerical values from the array of data plots below expanded under Xa's fingers and followed them up to the second main equation, substituting terms. Segments of the equation flashed at different speeds and changed colors depending on how bad of an idea the computer thought each one was. By the time she was done with the new shield harmonic, most of the equation was flashing rapidly in warning red.

"Implement, Master?"

He did not turn to look at the equation; he read the details of it through the haunted look in her eyes. "I have never encouraged insanity in my students," he said. "But I have never stood in its way either."

Xa breathed in and out, once, slowly, and flicked the flashing red implement marker on the black screen.

The ship screamed. So did Xa before she blacked out.

13th May, 4004

TYC 1613-778-1 G9V 422.73 light-years From Tau Ceti

Xa awakened to a cold breeze blowing down the neck of her robe. The sky was black and moonless, the stars were brilliant and a blazing green and violet aurora danced in the southern sky, providing enough illumination that she could easily see the trees across the river. She said a prayer of thanks and let herself slide down the domed upper hull of the Infinity Unseen to the rim of the cylindrical hull, several meters above the ground. She touched an invisible panel on the lip of the hull and a compartment popped open. A telescoping ladder extended to the ground.

She pulled her robe closer around her and tied the emerald-colored belt tighter and descended the ladder. When she reached the ground her feet sank a few centimeters into the sand. Grit squeezed between her toes and she wriggled them, feeling the wet, soft silt stick to her feet. She aimed her eyepad at the ground and ran a quick radar and spectrographic scan, measuring the size of the particles of sand and silt and the composition: arkose, high in feldspar from the granite in the nearby hills. Unsurprising. What was surprising was that her feet disturbed colonies of algal life that glued the top particles of the sand together to form a protective membrane for other, specialized algal colonies a centimeter deeper. She walked more lightly and found the sand to be capable of supporting her weight without her sinking.

She walked toward the river, running scans of the water. There were quantities of algae in the water, but nothing observably caustic or otherwise dangerous. She saw small, streamlined shapes darting through the water here and there, each with a large scoop-like mouth. Now and then one of the creatures would jump onto a slime-coated rock at the edge of the river and fasten its mouth onto it, then wriggle violently until it fell back into the water, leaving a short, erratic worm-trail of devoured algae. Xa smiled and sat motionless at the very edge of the water, bending forward into child's asana, placing her arms over her back and nearly touching the gently-flowing water with her nose. The eyepad fastened to her hand shined a small light into the river as she gazed into the water, observing the ripples on the surface caused by her breathing. Her eyes tracked a small algae-eater as it dashed under her face.

An arrow-shaped creature about the size of her hand entered her vision, looked up at her for a few seconds, waved sensitive antennae near the surface of the water, then continued slowly on its way. She laughed softly and her breath sent a small shock wave through the water. The creature fled at high speed: the vibrations of her laughter fit its idea of a prey trail even less than her breathing had.

Xa sat back on her heels and waved the eyepad over the water, imaging the various small creatures. After a few minutes she set the device to rigid mode and poked it into the sand, directing its sensors to observe the interactions between the algal forms, algae eaters, predators, and anything else that might come along. She authorized the pad to discuss probe distribution with the Unseen; behind her the ship's upper hatch slid open to allow the passage of a sensor drone which then placed itself at the eyepad's disposal.

Xa looked across the river at the shadow of the crater rim illuminated in aurora-light and considered it for a short time. Stars rose over its rim; Albireo, Tarazed, and Delta Sagittae blazed vermilion and scarlet to the northeast. Xa shed her robe and left it by her eyepad, then eased into the cold water of the river.

She swam with strong strokes, pulled northward by the current. The current, while strong, was smooth and the river was relatively narrow. She managed the crossing with no difficulty. The algae-filled water tasted both salty and sweet. By the time she reached the rocky ledge on the east bank of the river and hauled herself up, she was shivering. A few minutes in a vigorous meditative dance restored her temperature balance; she focused on the glowing coal of heat within her belly and let the warmth spread.

The crater beckoned; its rim was a hundred meters tall, looming through the night though it was still a kilometer away. The feathery trees, gray-green in the daylight, was now a forest of black shapes visible only where swathes were cut out of the shimmering aurora-light. Xa listened but heard no movement except that of the leaves gently rustling in the breeze.

The forest closed around her.

She made her way carefully between the trees. Stars and aurorae shined as broken specks and slashes of light through gaps in the canopy. Now and then a wide, hanging leaf slapped her gently in the face, causing her to reflexively shove at the leaf and stop to avoid falling on the bumpy ground. The trees got denser, then sparser as she approached the crater.

There was a sudden break in the trees; a ridge of shattered rock blocked her path—probably a ring surrounding the crater but she could not see more than a small arc of it in the darkness. Xa stopped and examined the slope as well as she could in the darkness: broken slabs of stone, many of them jagged and sharp but some rounded from melting, towered over her. She noticed one large slab of partially melted granite twenty meters long and resting at a forty-five degree angle to the ground. She climbed up to the highest part of the rock and sat down to examine her possibilities.

A stroke of luck: the rock was rested firmly against a larger boulder on the other side of the ridge; the other rock was secure and made a good path down to the forest. Below, heaps of cobbles threatened to break her legs if she landed on them too hard, so she crawled over to the larger boulder and let herself slide slowly down, ignoring the scrapes she was receiving.

Xa reached the bottom of the slope and stepped gingerly over the cobbles until she was treading on dirt again; the forest, thicker here, embraced her with feathery leaves and blotted out the stars. She pressed her way through, now paying closer attention to the smaller plants found growing between—and out of—the dominant trees. Most were feather dusters of long strands but there were, here and there, several variety of more-obviously vascular plants with strong radial symmetry. Leaves grew from discrete stems and the stems from obvious xylemic trunks. Some of the leaves had a metallic glint visible in the sporadic aurora-light.

The aurora brightened: she stepped into a clearing to find the rim of the crater towering over her with stars like jewels shining overhead through the curtains of the aurora. The uninterrupted light reflected off more of the small, vascular plants with shiny leaves. The plants, mostly knee-high but some as tall as Xa, climbed up the skirt of dirt around the crater rim. Tektites—misshapen balls of glassy rock—lay in piles around the crater and caught the light of the stars. The reflections of the aurora—which was turning more purple and less green as Xa watched—filled her vision with tiny sparkles, ethereally beautiful.

Her eyes traced the contours of the debris fans and searched the sparkling field of plants, then, a few dozen meters away, she saw the flower.

Her eyes widened and her lips parted in a silent O. The flower was beautiful: bigger than Xa's two hands together it gleamed with reflected starlight and aurora-shimmer. The spiral shape of the petals mimicked the golden numbers of a nautilus. The breeze picked up and she heard a sound: a subtle tinkling, like the ringing of a million tiny, invisible bells. The leaves of the metal-rich plants surrounding her danced in the wind.

Her eyes were drawn back to the flower, and as she watched, awestruck, the petals began to ripple in the wind. Several of the petals let go and blew away.

Xa began to run through the field of alien plants and came to the flower. The plant was as high as her neck and its branches were arranged in spiral staircases, each with bunches of leaves on the end and down the ventral surfaces of the branch. Xa noted the beautiful structure of the plant absently; she would take images of it later. Her eyes were drawn to the flower.

Petals continued to blow from the flower. It was disintegrating before her eyes. Somehow it was too fragile to withstand the wind. Her soul measured the balance of weeping to see this beauty falling apart before her eyes and laughing with joy and gratitude that she had been present to see it in this moment.

She did both, and reached out tenderly to touch the flower.

Revealed in the aurora-light, it was the color of blood; the petals, highly reflective, caught purple and turned it into traceries of light along the veins and bumps on the plant. The spiral of the flower was repeated on several other axes, Xa noticed, as the last of the outermost layer of petals blew away and was gone. Inside, the petals grew in a vertical spiral, with the largest petal underneath the ball of smaller and smaller petals that formed the core of the flower.

Xa's right hand formed into a mudra of peace as she gently touched the globe of petals at the center of the flower with her left.

She felt a prickling sensation and turned her hand to see a spot of blood at the end of her finger. The petals, it appeared, were razor-sharp.

She spread her hand out, thumb upward, and was beginning to pull away when the remaining core of the flower exploded.

Stabbing needles overwhelmed the nerves of her hand, tracing up her arm. She felt the pain radiating into her spine—no not again, not now, she thought—and lurched backward from the plant.

The pain in her arm continued to spread, and the pain in her back rose to meet it. Somewhere near her heart they met and the shining violet light of the aurora dancing overhead was washed out by red agony, and then shining, dazzling, blazing, blinding blackness.

23rd September, 3989

The Deep, near Beta Sagittae

The Deep's dream burst with Light, awakening to a ship wailing with harmonics of gravitational stress and her hands went to her ears to find plugs in them. The vibration was so severe that she felt it on her skin.

Then she realized that she was only feeling the skin on her face; the rest of her body was floating somewhere where she could not feel it.

Shaam stood before her. There were earplugs in his ears as well, and he was frowning and typing on a console near her while one of the ship's drones, configured for medical operations, was doing something to Xa; she could not tell what, could not even move her head to watch.

Suddenly she could feel and move again: the medical drone had removed the nerve block. For a moment Xa reflected that this was no favor, but the pain in her arms, legs, and lower back subsided quickly.

Shaam brought up a medical scan; Xa winced as she examined the array of broken bones and other injuries she had just had repaired. He changed the display to show her current state (mostly repaired) and gestured for her to rise. She did so—painfully—and immediately went to the door to the engine access on the after side of the main chamber. Shaam followed, pulling one earplug out as they entered and sealed the smaller room.

The screaming hull was still painfully loud, but somewhat quieter and less chaotic; the noise was limited below the kilohertz band. Xa pulled out one of her earplugs and Shaam put his mouth to her ear. "The shield change caused the ship to suffer a sudden acceleration of about thirty gravities for half a second; you were injured when you were thrown against the drive. We are closer to the singularity and our shields are now trapped in resonance with it. I was able to engage the drives, however they are not producing motive power, only reinforcing the shields. We are being drawn faster toward the singularity and should succumb to tidal stresses in less than one hour. We lost one drive singularity."

"Are you injured, Master?" Xa yelled in his ear.

"No." Xa narrowed her eyes at him, searching him for injuries anyway. "Your idea was interesting, Xa. I did not imagine shields could do such things." He indicated the screen; the shields were resonating like a blob of gelatin being manipulated from many directions. It was eerily beautiful.

Shaam retracted the view on the screen; the ship shrank to one corner. The singularity came up on the other side of the screen; its gravity waves resonated in the same pattern as the ship's shields.

"Alas we do not have the mass to create our own event horizon," Shaam said, loudly but calmly. "It would be a remarkable opportunity to check certain math. But I suspect the Deep would not give up her secrets so easily."

Xa turned away from the console, replaced her earplug, and sat down. She reached up and touched the main screen mounted on the door to the engine compartment, quickly keying a view of the singularity. The gravitational source was visible directly now, at least in a way. The screen showed a bubble of galaxy warped into an impossible shape and then turned upside-down; streamers of white-hot gas plunged into this region, down into the very center, and disappeared. Xa imagined she could hear the scream as the ultimate Deep caused the interstellar matter to simply not-be.

As it was about to do to the [i\Quiet Light[/i], Shaam, and herself.

"Master, I shall meditate now," she said. He could not hear her, but her intentions were obvious as she entered lotus and placed her hands. Shaam left the chamber.

She watched the screen as the ship slowly drifted closer to the singularity. The drives were fighting with all their power; Xa could see the jiggles and nearly imperceptible lensing effects from the gravity waves. She took a deep breath and touched the screen for a moment, running her fingers over the screen before returning her hand to her knees.

She took a few deep breaths to center herself and let herself return to the Deep.

It is amazing how efficiently one accomplishes this state when about to die, she allowed to pass through her mind. Amusement at this passed also, was noted, and vanished into the singularity, not-being. Fear was a disc of boiling white-hot gas blasting her body with radiation from radio wavelengths to X-rays; the gas and the radiation together passed through her in gravity's curves, entered the Deep, and ceased. Shortly, such would be her: not-being, timeless.

A smile passed over her face, through her subtle body, and into the Deep. But the smile was timelessness, and it became a laugh, also timeless.

Xa sat on the deck with tears rolling down her face. She was aware of the warm, wet sensations as they trickled but the laughter took over; it was all too silly. The Deep took her laughter and returned it to not-being, so she made more, which was taken in its turn. The Deep was patient, but the laughter was as eternal.

Then she became aware of the nothingness that was swallowing it. Inside was everything else. The laughter died in her throat and she ceased to be aware of the tears, or her breathing, or anything else.

Nothingness was timelessness and was.

Light was.

The Deep was the Light, was Nothing, was...

Was Xa.

Xa was the thought that arose, moved through her subtle body, activated her physical body to speak a bemused "oh."

The Deep beckoned. But she already was, so where was the sense in that? She was this understanding, and again the thought came from Nothing to filter down into the form that she, temporarily and eternally was, sitting on the deck. Then that which she was returned to the Deep and her body was not, for the ship was—

No, that was the future.

"No," the Deep said, timelessly. "No-time," it clarified. "No-thing," it was.

"Xa?" the Light spoke, from within the Deep, which spoke from within the Light, and was Xa.

"Yes," Xa answered herself. "Shaam!" she knew before it happened, and cried out.

Agony was, suddenly.

Timelessly.

The Deep sat in front of a screen and healed itself as the Light it was tore it apart.

And the Light was elsewhere; the Deep was the Deep, and Xa was Light, but the Light was agony.

Timelessly.

And then... nothingness.

The Deep's dream burst with Light, awakening to a quiet ship. Xa was wailing with harmonics of gravitational stress and her hands went to her ears to find plugs in them, white-hot spikes driven into her head. She yanked them out, screaming, as Shaam stood over her, helplessly watching the medical screen—one of the only things still functioning on the ship.

"Xa," he said softly, but she did not hear. The agony was, and the darkness of the ship was only the Deep, and the only Light was the pain. But she held onto it, helplessly, as though drowning in a sea of it. Her body was wet: sweat and water; a blood-soaked, wet towel nearby showed where Shaam had bathed her. The water dripping was like acid on her skin.

"The Light," she cried, unseeing, unhearing. Shaam put his fingertips together and regarded Xa over his hands. His eyes were sad. The old Master spoke:

"The earth was without form and empty, with darkness on the face of the Deep

But the Spirit of God moved on the water's surface

God said, 'Let there be Light', and Light came into existence

God saw the Light was good, and God divided between the Light and the Darkness."

Xa heard. She wept herself to sleep, returning to the Darkness.

17th May, 4004

TYC 1613-778-1 G9V 422.73 light-years From Tau Ceti

She wanted to awaken to the morning sun but the lights of her quarters shined in her eyes as soon as she opened them. The light was dim but painful nevertheless. Her body was gone. "Nerve block?" she asked, and the ship's medical subsystem affirmed her guess. "Remove it."

Even as words left her mouth she realized that she had made a mistake.

A moment later the ship's drone whined into motion and she sensed a contact at her neck. A moment later white-hot lava crawled up her body from the base of her spine. She cried out involuntarily but did not countermand the order. The lava covered her, drowning her senses in agony. Her vision shimmered out through tears. Her hands dug into the bed; her right hand reached over as if of its own accord and clawed at her left, which seemed to be the source of the torture. She dug the fingers of her right hand back into the bed and forced a deep breath—it was more a strangled scream—and brought her left hand up to look at it.

Jagged furrows oozed scarlet where her nails had ripped the flesh; blood poured down her hand to her wrist and around the underside of her arm. Between the scratches, her skin was sliced in about a dozen places. The cuts were T-shaped, with the long axis of the T aligned parallel to her fingers. The skin was neatly cut as though with a razor and peeled back along the stem of the T.

Inside the cuts the soft lighting reflected off shiny surfaces with metallic red glints.

Xa stared at them. They pulsed in time with her blood and with the lava surrounding her. She fought back the scream that was trying to rip its way out of her body and forced herself—somehow—to a sitting position. The drone assisted her and set her back against the head of the bed. "Apply—" she gasped. "Apply another nerve block." And the scream escaped and she writhed against the head of the bed, her hands digging into her legs. The drone slipped an arm past her contorting body and grabbed her by the neck to hold her still long enough to apply the nerve block.

Xa floated on the surface of magma currents, feeling her suddenly nonexistent body burn to a crisp and flow away from her as streams of ash.

"Ship, report," she said through a mouthful of red-hot pebbles.

The ship displayed an itemized list of its actions over the last four days—! she thought—on the main screen over her head. The ship had tracked her biometrics during her swim and her encounter with the flower; registering her distress it picked up the drone and downloaded the eyepad (leaving it on the riverbank), flew across the river, retrieved her, and sedated her. As soon as she was aboard the ship launched to orbit, entered slipstream and bandjumped up to delta—the ship had suffered some singularity evaporation in recent weeks and the AI refused to take the ship to epsilon until the next drive refit—and set course for the binary system Swadhisthana, just inside Tarazed Maru. The ship accelerated to 0.78c, an extremely dangerous velocity—a ship with anything less than Black Star Line navigational deflectors would have been destroyed by the radiation of passage. Even so it would take twenty-four days ship time—thirty-eight days external time—to reach the Black Star facility there.

Twenty-four days... assuming she survived the journey. The dangerous passage left that in doubt anyway, and then there was...

"Ship, medical report," she whispered, and the ship began reciting a description of her condition.

The words infestation, unexplained, quarantine, and fatal were the most recognizable in the string of medical jargon.

An alien parasite had entered her bloodstream through cuts in her hand and microscopic pathogens, with genetic code analogous to silicon DNA, had dispersed into her tissues. The infection had paid special attention to her central nervous system and lymphatic system. There, the alien s-DNA had generated a number of "interesting" retroviral forms, several of which were capable of direct interaction with—and alteration of—her carbon-based DNA. Her bloodstream generated encapsulated copies of a hybrid form of the two types of DNA with receptor corresponding to her own monoamine neurotransmitters; bonding with her cells, these false neurotransmitters then generated further replication as new copies of themselves and as free-floating tryptamine analogues.

The drone's limited medical capabilities had succeeded in arresting most of the tryptamine bonding but repeated efforts at flushing the neurotransmitters out of her body had failed. The viral capsules had resisted all attempts at treatment and expanded, taking over her spinal and brachial nerves, spreading networks of a vascular plant-like root system that seemed to draw sustenance from the neurotransmitters in the nerves.

"You are telling me I've become a walking flower pot," Xa said through clenched teeth. The computer mulled this over for a long moment and then agreed.

She searched through the history of known alien parasites capable of infecting humans—the list was only a dozen entries long; alien biochemistry rarely was compatible enough—and found nothing even remotely as complex. Most alien infestations were simple. The most well-known one was Sheolian angelstrand, an aerial bacteria that produced a solvent that dissolved human cartilage and used the chemical soup resulting to replicate itself. It had similar effect on the cartilaginous plants on the planet but the effects were chemical, not genetic. So far no alien life-forms on record had demonstrated any ability to interact with human DNA or even RNA.

Xa decided she could have done without the honor of discovering the first.

The malevolent, metallic-looking glimmer under the skin in her hand drew her eyes. The medical monitor shrilled a warning just as, impossibly, a stabbing pain in her armpit reached her awareness despite the nerve block.

"What—?" she gasped and the pain spread quickly like lines of fire down her arm to her fingertips.

The drone came to her and ran a set of sensors over her body. Xa's lips pulled back in a snarl of pain and anger as the drone directly touched her arm with the sensors, increasing the pain. "Infestation transmitting neural impulses directly, bypassing the somatic nervous system." Xa pulled her arm away and realized suddenly that she should not have been able to do that.

The lava returned. This time she was the volcano, not merely bathed in it. Her torso was on fire from the inside out, with intense pressure trying to squeeze liquid flame out through her skin. She collapsed onto the bed and felt herself blacking out, but even as she felt welcome unconsciousness approaching spots of color blazed behind her flickering eyelids, forcing away the blackness and bringing her awareness down from her head, down the throat of the volcano.

She heard a sound and it was incorporated into the pain. She was screaming, she realized with that small part of her awareness that still cared about anything but making the torture stop. The pain in her throat was a small red drop in the greater ocean. There were other screams with her: alarms on the medical drone, alarms on the ship. Had the ship struck something? Had it crashed and caught fire? Was it being pulled into the red-hot accretion disc of a black hole?

No, it was only her. Gravity ripped at her flesh, trying to tear off her skin so it could more effectively fill her with pain. She wasn't on fire and she hadn't crashed, but the ground was coming up toward her to smash her to pieces. The agony promised her it would stay with each little piece of her as it caught fire and exploded across the landscape.

Desperately she sought to enter meditation; she forced herself to focus on the pain and where it was coming from (everywhere!), to watch the process of it arising (it didn't, it was timeless!), to seek the boundary around her pain and the places where there was not-pain (nowhere!), to do something that would allow her to experience the illusion of the pain arising from a detached, meditative center. Nothing helped. She reached outward, opening her eyes and trying to feel beyond herself.

Nothing. A black hole beckoned, and if there was an outside universe beyond the accretion disc she could not see it. The pain subsided ever so slightly as part of it turned into a mad whirling sensation; the Deep pulling her inexorably, spinning, into Nothingness, into Darkness within the Light.

"Yes!" she screamed as she felt the Deep pulling at her, demanding that she not-be within the Darkness. The harmonics of her voice resonating through her body were agony, but the Deep rippled in time with her scream, and for a moment she—

Was pulled away, held at bay, orbiting the Deep through a circle of pain, reaching desperately for the oblivion that awaited her there in the heart of the Deep, in the heart of Darkness. A network of scarlet tendrils weaved in the accretion disc and she was trapped in them. They bit into her flesh and into her mind, expanded tortuously through her flesh in complex forms, pressed against the inside of her skin and demanded release. She screamed again as venomous red leaves exploded from her body in a shower of blood, half of it watering the stars and the other half disappearing into the singularity. Her blood boiled away, became white-hot vapor as it touched the stars. Particles exploded away from the stars, fresh explosions catching her awareness on the fronts of agonizing shockwaves, over and over from random directions throughout the universe. Her screams were now only the echoes of the shockwaves, and the gravity of the stars sang in sympathy, causing dancing singularities at the interstices of complex forms and forces. The singularities, ravenous, formed networks matching the expanding plants, and the Deep was everywhere, within all space and within the plants themselves, pulling.

Her mind disintegrated with her body; the pain was the blood on the edge of a million jagged, shattered shards of awareness. Scarlet dripped from a hurricane of flying, broken shards, whirling around the singularity, now red-hot, now golden flame, now searing white, spinning ever faster with each circuit. The light shined on the solid flesh rendering it in overexposed skin-tones, but then the shards became red metal reflecting the light, and then broken glass transmitting the light and letting it pass outward. And at last, diamond, shredding the light into an array of rainbow colors mirroring the spectrum of the disc surrounding the singularity.

The fragments of pain and light and metal that were Xa swirled into Deep, endlessly, along a path that followed gravity's infinite complexity outward, toward a distant star—

06th August, 3990

Yesod Station, orbiting Swadhisthana B

Xa awakened to silence and pain. A moment later, before she opened her eyes, she heard a sound nearby and her hand lashed out at the source of it. Her hand struck metal, hard. The metal flew away from the impact and Xa was in a crouch on the bed, her eyes opening—

She looked around, puzzled. She was in a blank room with pale orange walls, crouched on a bed. There was a robotic arm—a medical drone—overhead, wobbling from when she struck it.

She jumped off the bed—painfully, all of her muscles were complaining—and asked the robot what it was doing. It informed her that she was scheduled for another sedation. "I think not," she said, standing. "Why was I sedated?"

"You have only today come out of your coma and you are—"

Dizzy. She wobbled and fell to the floor but had the presence of mind to tuck and roll and got to her feet quickly, leaning on the bed. "How long was I comatose, and why?"

"You were comatose for ten and a half months after—"

"Months!"

"Grandmaster Shaam sedated you aboard the Quiet Light. You did not regain consciousness after the sedation despite a regimen of neurological treatments administered by the shipboard drone's medical program. The Quiet Light traveled here and you were subjected to additional treatments which were likewise unsuccessful. Over the last sixteen days, progress was made in repairing the damage to the synapses in your central nervous system using an old technique involving stem cells and you began to show signs of recovery. Over the last day you have come out of coma several times but due to certain anomalies in neurotransmitter levels you were sedated to prevent muscular and lymphatic system injuries. We have been unable to ascertain the exact cause of your coma."

"Where am I?"

"Guest quarters on Yesod Station, Swadhisthana B system. You arrived two months ago."

Xa had not been to the station yet, but she was familiar with it. It was a Black Star Line outpost and the nominal headquarters of exploration missions of the Sagittae spaces between Anser Maru and Tarazed Maru. Swadhisthana was a double star system; the smaller component, which Yesod orbited, was an orange dwarf of high metallicity with a surrounding array of metallic asteroids. Yesod Station had a small shipyard and was engaged in the production of Calling-class Watchers.

A door that had not even been visible in the pale orange wall opened and Shaam came out. He seemed tired and had lost weight, but his gaze was clear and Xa immediately gave him a respectful—and grateful—bow.

"Master, this humble student thanks you most deeply for your care over the months of travel—" she began, but Shaam raised a hand. Xa immediately closed her mouth.

"My care of you was my last act as your teacher," Shaam said quietly.

"Master?" Xa sat down on the bed and folded her legs into lotus. They were shaky and hard to move, but that she was able to move at all was a testament to a regular regimen of muscle and nerve stimulation. "I do not understand."

"Xa, you have seen the Deep. I stand with you now as a brother, seeking the mysteries of the universe. You, I suspect, have much more to teach me now than I might have to teach you." Xa opened her mouth to protest. He smiled, but did not raise his hand to forestall her.

"Master Shaam," Xa said softly. "You are an excellent teacher, and if there is anything I could do to repay the debt I owe you, I pray you but speak it."

"Nothing, dear sister," Shaam said. "There is no debt. But stand before me, here in this place that circles a living star. I last saw your waking eyes filled with the Deep, in a place that no eyes should look." He approached her and raised his hand, palm facing her. Xa slowly stood up and lifted her hand. Her face flushed scarlet, but she met his gray eyes with her impenetrable black ones and placed her hand against his. Shaam held her gaze and they stood there together, the rest of the universe only Light somewhere, as much a part of them as in the deepest meditation but not currently relevant except to illuminate them. Shaam's smile disappeared, and his face grew first grave, and then puzzled, and then profoundly disturbed.

"Master?" Xa questioned. Shaam looked away. Xa's lips parted in astonishment, but the expression passed quickly and her eyes narrowed. "Master, what is wrong?"

"You looked into the singularity, and now your eyes are the surface of the Deep," Shaam said quietly. He looked back into her eyes; whatever he saw there brought a look of fear across his face, subtle and controlled but unmistakable. Xa's eyes widened in horror... and a twinge started in her lower back. She rubbed the base of her spine with her free hand, but a sharp pain blazed, shooting up her body and drawing a gasp from her. Shaam's expression became one of concern—and helplessness.

"Master, what is—" Xa got out before the pain became a supernova of blinding red fire, searing her nerves all along her torso. "—happening to—"

Desperately she focused her attention on the pain and attempted a breath control exercise that would help her activate her training in biofeedback. Instantly, the pain flowed up her neck and into her head and her mind became frothing red waves on an ocean of agony. Her hand clenched around Shaam's in a bone crushing grip.

Shaam caught her as she fell and laid her on the bed. She gasped, her body convulsing for a moment as the pain intensified again for a moment—a million lasers searing her back and head—then eased to a constant throbbing, burning, bone-deep ache that was almost pleasurable in comparison to the torment she had just suffered.

"Master, what is happening to me?" she whispered. Her face was wet with tears and sweat ran in rivulets down her naked, flushed body. "I cannot move my—"

"Yes, I know. The scans revealed this possibility, but I had hoped..." His voice trailed off, and he went to the screen and typed in a few commands, bringing up a scan of Xa's body. It was not a scan type with which she was familiar. "When you were resonating with the singularity as well as our shields and drive singularities, some of your tissues, in particular your central nervous system, suffered... damage of some sort on the quantum level. Many of your spinal and brain cells exhibit quantum-scale fractures, or, more accurately, statistical errors in a variety of states, such as spin states. We observed these fractures for some time and found that at random times there arises a state where the statistical errors resonate, which cause a net increase in energy discharge within your synapses, neurotransmitter receptors, and microtubules of your somatic cells. These random discharges disrupt neural firing, causing pain and paralysis until they pass."

"Master, am I to be discharged from the Line?"

"You will be subjected to irregular and unpreventable paralysis and crippling pain; you may also suffer permanent neurological damage. There may even be other effects we have not foreseen. The staff here is recommending your discharge from the Line and your retirement to a location where advanced medical treatment—and research facilities—are available."

Using her arms to drag the dead weight of her body, Xa forced herself to a sitting position and wrenched her legs into lotus. The pain increased, centering in her solar plexus and sending waves radiating through her torso. By force of will she spoke and grabbed for his hand. "Master Shaam, I do not accept that fate," she said in between deep, shuddering gasps.

Shaam looked into her eyes but looked away as though her gaze burned him. "As you defied even a black hole," he said softly. "Xa, you are not fit to command a ship. However, I believe it would be a great loss to the Line for you to be discharged... and, knowing you, it would be the sharpest cruelty to hold you back from following the call of the Deep. The desire has always been strong in you, but it sings in your very nerves now."

"Truth," Xa whispered.

The old man pulled his hand free of her grasp and touched the screen again, turning it off. "The Guiding Circle will decide," he said. "I am taking you to Flameseed."

"It will take us—"

"Less time than you think. A White Star Envoy carrier was dropping off a compliment of dispatches to link this station and several others in Tarazed Maru; we are transferring all of Yesod Station's data to Flameseed. I convinced the captain—an old friend of mine, as it happens—that the quantity and importance of this update merit the use of the carrier for a direct transit to Flameseed. We will be there in ten days. I shall prepare our quarters aboard whenever you feel ready to travel. The captain has agreed to wait several days if necessary."

"I am prepared."

Grandmaster Shaam bowed to her and left the room. Xa had time only to register confusion as to why the elderly master—formerly her teacher—would bow to a mere Disciple before the pain blazed outward in spreading, constant waves, as though the center of her body was an opening into a universe of agony. Resisting with every drop of her concentration and control, she managed to avoid being overwhelmed for nearly a minute.

When Shaam returned he had to carry her out. Semiconscious, Xa dimly felt herself moving, floating down a corridor into a Light she could not see.

25th July, 4004

Yesod Station, orbiting Swadhisthana B

She was aware of voices talking on the other side of a bulkhead but she couldn't quite make out what they were saying; their voices carried as waves of blood red pain. Her muscles tightened—body? Where did that come from?--and she took a long, deep breath.

The distant conversation vibrated along her nerves.

—I tell you, it is not contagious. There is no way that organism can spread out of her body; there are no evident sporoforms, seeds, or even viral—" the first voice, male, was interrupted by an older female voice.

"There is no way that organism can exist; it makes little sense to make blanket declarations of its potentiality. There is the distinct possibility that the organism will progress to a reproductive stage that could cause it to spread beyond the subject and endanger others—"

"And while we debate the unforeseeable, the 'subject' has awakened and is suffering."

"Awakened? Impossible."

"It makes little sense to make blanket declarations of its potentiality," the first speaker returned.

A sigh. "Shall we sedate her again?"

"According to this, she is sedated, for all the good it is doing."

A long pause, and motion, and the door to Xa's chamber opened. Two Black Star Line officers, hidden by black foreign environment suits, stepped in. Xa could see a decontamination-style airlock behind them briefly before the inner door closed. The man spoke. "Good morning, Xa. I am Healer Ath, and my superior here is Master Lia. It is the 25th of July, and you are aboard Yesod Station, where you arrived thirty-one days ago."

Xa moaned softly. "Not again."

"You seem to have a history with this place," the man agreed. "We made a study of your previous case fourteen years ago and found it quite fascinating. Master Lia was part of the medical team here at that time, though you may not remember. She is convinced you died back then and are even now dreaming us in your bardo."

Xa ignored that attempt of humor and tried to sit up. She found herself restrained to the bed with magnetic binding fibers on her arms and legs. "Remove this," she said.

Lia shook her head. "You are in quarantine until we receive word from the Guiding Circle as to what to do with you. We have recommended you be placed into permanent quarantine on Xleixa Medical Station."

"Lia has recommended," Ath muttered; Lia gave him a calm, calculating look.

"I will remain in this room. Remove the restraints," Xa said.

Lia shook her head. Her green eyes were visibly sad through the helmet. "I am afraid that will be impossible. You have been sleepwalking and exhibiting violent behaviors and, despite apparent unconsciousness, you have also demonstrated perfectly functional cognitive abilities. You almost managed to hack the room's life support to force the computer to override the door and let you out; fortunately you were being monitored and we prevented your escape. You are not in control of your actions and you are a danger."

"Lia believes the... infestation will mutate into a reproductive form and spread to others," Ath said.

"I heard," Xa said.

Lia gave her a curious look. "How did you hear through a sealed airlock?"

Xa did not answer. Instead, she asked, "What is my condition?"

Lia gazed at her a long time before answering. "As you know, the quantum damage in your nervous system causes energy discharges and synaptic disruption based on the quantum environment you are passing through at certain times, or causing during meditation. We have seen six examples of this sort of damage in Black Star Liners and the other five subjects died within hours. We are uncertain why you are still alive. It may be a result of the Guiding Circle's decision fourteen years ago... nevertheless, these effects cause great difficulty in getting submolecular scans of some of your tissues and this has prevented us from getting more information on the atomic structure of the infestation you are currently suffering. However, our observations agree with that of your medical drone: several forms of neurotransmitters have been co-opted by molecular components of the parasite, and macroscopic components are growing in branching structures along your nerves. Closer examination reveals microscopic tendrils infiltrating your neural sheathing and, in some cases, bridging the synaptic barriers in your central nervous system. So far the infestation has largely restricted itself to your spine and brachial nerves, however, tendrils have grown to other areas as well but have not yet developed, including the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes of your brain and the brachial and lumbosacral nerve plexi. We suspect that these tendrils will expand along the primary nerves of these plexi; we have no idea what it might do in your brain."

A sudden chime came from the screen on one side of the chamber. "Now hear this: WQD-1618 Golden Sandals arriving at Starward Bay. Masters Klara and Lia please report dockside for Priority Dispatches."

Lia looked up, then turned to Xa. "This will be the Guiding Circle's response," she said. "I will return shortly." She slipped her interface glove into the airlock's sensor and a moment later the door slipped open, admitted her to the decontamination chamber, and slid closed.

Xa was quiet. Ath shuffled his feet. "May I sit, Adept?" he asked, gesturing to a cushion on the floor nearby.

Xa didn't respond for a moment. The pain was ebbing slowly and she was watching it leave. When she finally responded to the comment she was resigned and sad. "Certainly. Please lower this bed though." Ath nodded and tapped on the pad affixed to his interface glove. The bed slid down until it was level with the floor, and then Ath sat in lotus on the cushion.

"Adept Xa, I regret your situation," Ath began.

Xa couldn't help it. She burst out laughing. Ath looked away, uncomfortably. Xa slammed her arm down on the bed beside her. "I am sorry," she said as she stopped laughing. "I appreciate your concern. I just am very tired of hospital beds and it seems the farther away I get from one the more likely it is I will end up in one."

"So it seems. Might I suggest avoiding the Sagitta spaces entirely?"

"That would seem to be wise, wouldn't it?" Xa shook her head, painfully. Her neck was stiff. She lay quietly for a time, and then said, "Something about Lia disturbs me."

"I work with her," Ath muttered, making a noise of agreement. "She has seen some interesting medical cases at this station."

"Such as mine?"

"None so interesting..." He looked at the ceiling nervously. "Except..."

The screen chimed. "Healer Ath, medical emergency, Starward Bay. Gamma radiation absorption and lower abdominal trauma caused by rupture of damaged drive magnetics."

"White Star maniacs," Ath said as he jumped to his feet. He pushed his interface gloves at the lock and it opened. "Can't fly a ship in a straight line without playing with shortcuts and frying themselves crispy." He stepped into the decontamination chamber, and turned. "Xa," he said, looking into her narrowed, black eyes. "Be strong. I have reason to believe you will live." He keyed the door shut before she could respond.

"Well," Xa said to the Deep, gazing at the ceiling. "That's reassuring."

A few minutes later the door snapped open again. Master Lia and a small, trim woman with red hair were standing in the lock. Lia held a White Star dispad. Without a word she handed Xa the dispad and Xa's interface glove. Xa raised an eyebrow and placed the biometrically-encoded authorization glove on her hand, linked into the dispad, and read the message. Her eyes widened.

Adept Xa: Quarantine revoked. Report to Flameseed, Crimson, Crimson Maru, aboard BVD-0009 Levanah's Dream for evaluation before Guiding Circle soonest. Come alone. Lost One/Keter White-level security to databases all subordinate Yesod, Swadhisthana, Tarazed Maru granted, Guiding Circle authorization. Download all references 'Star's Blood' to secure storage medium and convey with you to Flameseed; remand materials to Guiding Circle upon arrival. Detach BS-0201 Infinity Unseen from dock at Yesod and send on automatic/lockdown to Tau Ceti for later retrieval, variable course at your discretion. May the Deep keep you well. -Grandmaster Shaam of the Guiding Circle, Flameseed, 10th July, 4004.

"Thank you," Xa said. "I have orders," she said to the two women standing in the room. The shorter one, presumably Master Klara, the commander of Yesod Station, nodded shortly. "What ship is the Levanah's Dream?"

"That is my ship," Klara said.

"I am to take her to Flameseed," Xa said, showing her the pad. Klara's took the pad and read the message, her muscles tightening and her eyes widening with each line.

"Keter-White? I only have Tiferet-Yellow access and I run operations Black Star operations in the entire Maru. And you're taking my ship..." Klara's eyes suddenly filled with tears. "So be it, sister. I will prepare her for the journey. Fly her well." Klara left the room in haste.

"You have friends of distinction," Lia said quietly.

"What is Star's Blood?"

Lia went to the door and locked it. She then unfastened Xa's magnetic binding. Xa rose to her feet, shakily; she bent her legs and pressed her hands against her thighs for balance until she was steady enough to straighten. Lia watched her with poorly-suppressed astonishment. "We were convinced you would die in that bed," she said softly. "I am grateful to be mistaken."

"Thank you," Xa said.

"Star's Blood is the name we have given to the infestation you have. We have seen it before."

Xa's eyes narrowed. "Explain," she said.

"The life form has been found on several planets in the region you were exploring. Recently, another specimen was recovered underground on Tarazed IV. All of the specimens have been found in systems in a roughly straight line."

"I see. You suspect an intelligence?"

"I suspect nothing. I only store data and pass it on when requested. Some of the Guiding Circle might have some idea what it means, but they are not sharing."

Xa nodded, and began stripping out of her hospital clothes. She opened a drawer in the wall and found her clothing. She pulled out a black sari decorated with Black Star Line's logo, and a dark violet choli and pants that matched the logo colors. She put on the clothing, folded her hospital robe and placed it in the drawer. "This should be an interesting month," she muttered, and nodded at Lia. "May I leave quarantine now?"

Lia grunted and stood aside. "Namaste, Adept Xa," she said, waving her through the door.

"Namaste," Xa answered the ancient salutation: "I salute the Light of Life you."

But was it Light? she wondered. Or am I just the Deep now? Why am I suddenly feeling a difference?

Xa felt a chill as she left the room.

17th August, 3990

Flameseed Station, orbiting Crimson

Farseeker Noos cackled as Xa entered the black, blue, and violet-decorated observation center at the top of Flameseed. Xa started at the sudden sound and bowed deeply, respectfully to the members of the Guiding Circle seated around the room. Noos was the only one standing, except Shaam, who entered with her.

"I thought Shaam was out of his gourd," Noos said in his raspy, aged voice. Xa only bowed to the 130-year-old Farseeker. "Quit the bowing and scraping, girl. You're not out of your gourd, but if you keep doing that, your brains will surely fall out as Shaam's have."

"Yes, Farseeker," Xa said meekly.

"I believe you know all of us here," Noos said, waving one arm around the room as he plunked himself down on the carpeted deck in lotus. Shaam sat as well and gestured for Xa to sit; she did so immediately.

A middle-aged woman with a smiling face nodded to Xa. Grandmaster Myr was a communications specialist who worked closely with White Star Line to maintain strong lines of dialog between distant sections of Black Star Line's operations. Nyet, an argumentative, heavy-set blond man a few years older than Xa, nodded shortly. Shaam took his seat and another older man nodded to him and then stood. The room was silent. "Namaste, Xa," the old man said.

"Namaste, Farseeker Yu," Xa said softly. "I am honored to be in your presence."

"Likewise. You had an interesting experience recently." Yu's Oriental face was calm and his small, brown eyes were focused on Xa's. He clasped his hands behind his back and walked closer to her, but turned his profile to her and looked out the dome overhead into the stars.

"Yes, Farseeker."

Noos grinned. "I think we all have, Yu, but none of us our out of our gourds as much as these two." He waved a hand to include Shaam and Yu.

"Debatable," Master Nyet said. Myr chuckled.

"You doubtless wonder why you are here," Yu said.

"To determine if I am still fit to serve the Line?" Xa asked.

"You are fit," Yu said. The others made murmurs of agreement, except Nyet, who was silent. Shaam looked at him, raising an eyebrow, and Nyet shrugged. Shaam's eyes caught Xa's and there was a glint in them.

"Despite my injuries? I could be incapacitated at any random moment."

"Black Star ships have drones," Yu said flatly. "You will be monitored by whatever ship you are assigned to and if you fall on your face, you shall be returned to your ship until you recover."

"But what if she encounters a situation where her disability kills her before the ship can respond?" Nyet demanded. "You claim this Disciple—"

"Adept," Shaam murmured.

Xa's eyebrows arched.

"This Adept, is so valuable to this Line, do you plan to have her wander the Deep until she falls in a lava pit when her drone isn't looking?"

"If that is how it shall be," Yu said mildly. "An asteroid might smack this dome right now and kill us all."

Myr grinned up at the dome sprinkled with stars. "More likely it will be one of our couriers flying through it. But I much agree with Yu. Considering the nature of our work, I see little point in seeking guarantees."

"What is my value, besides as an explorer like any other?" Xa asked.

"Are you aware of how the Quiet Light escaped the singularity?" Yu said.

"No..." She looked at Shaam, whose face was impassive.

"When you were meditating and manipulating the gravitic systems of the ship, your body and mind resonated with them. This is to be expected; all physical materials are affected by gravitational and quantum forces. What was unique is that you saw the gravitational manifestation of the ship and of the singularity and manipulated them."

"I did?"

"You are alive," Yu said simply.

"I see. Do you believe I have metaphysical abilities regarding singularities?"

"If you did, you don't anymore," Nyet said. "The injuries you suffered prevent you from many forms of meditation, including that which would reveal what you saw in the Deep that allowed you to do what you did."

"She will overcome this," Shaam said.

"I suspect so also," Yu said. "I have made plans assuming this."

"You make plans?" Noos cackled. "Since when?" Yu turned his impassive face toward him. The older man stuck out his tongue. Xa raised an eyebrow.

"Where do we go from here?" Shaam asked softly.

"Xa will get a ship in several years," Noos said. "Then we will see what this madman has in mind for us all." He gestured at Yu.

"In the meantime, we will take a few journeys," Yu said, turning to Xa. "Shaam's place is here; he has work here. You, Xa, shall be prepared for the Endless Journey under my tutelage, if you wish it." Xa stared at him, her breath caught in her throat. "You will have plenty of time to decide."

"Yes, Farseeker. I would be honored to study what you have to teach."

"Be careful what you wish for," Nyet said. Yu gave him his inscrutable look, bowed to Xa, and left the observation lounge.

"Well, that's that," Myr said. "Let us just lay and watch the stars awhile."

"Certainly. We must not forget why we are really here," Shaam said, and laid back on the carpet, gazing out the window.

The meeting seemed to be over so Xa gave a mental shrug and leaned back on the deck. The Deep wheeled overhead, and Xa felt like she was falling into infinity.

It was a beautiful feeling, even if it lasted only a moment.

[StarSeekerVDS]

01 August, 4004

The Deep, near HIP 19409

As Xa traveled the Deep, she dreamed...

The wizened old man cackled and waved his walking staff, carved from alien xylem, at the woman standing with hands clasped behind her back in the center of the circle as though she were an ant frying in the focused heat of the Guiding Circle's regard. Xa did not cringe as the waving staff nearly hit her in the head.

"You just cannot keep your neurons in order, can you girl?" the old man demanded. "This is the third time you've been here and every time you've been nothing but trouble. Even when you don't end up here, you're nothing but trouble."

Xa did not respond. She raised an eyebrow at another old man in the Circle, who gave her the slightest nod. "As you say, Farseeker. Trouble seems to find me." She paused, considering just how true that statement was. Her first posting, the Danger Dancer had crashed and burned fifteen years ago; she had nearly burned to death with it. Later the same year her second posting, the Quiet Light, was crippled by a black hole that destroyed the other ships it was flying with and killed all the crew except her master Shaam—now in the Guiding Circle and seemingly her only advocate there—and herself... and she had survived only with severe injuries. A few years later her next master, Yu—head of Black Star Line—disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

And now she was host to an alien parasite infecting her body and mind—a parasite that, according to science, should not even be possible.

A parasite that somehow the Guiding Circle was already familiar with.

"No, no, I am convinced that something in your spirit has a bloodhound's nose for trouble and you follow the trail as diligently as your sensors will allow." Noos cackled again and waved his stick at Shaam, who looked away.

Xa looked at the other members of the Circle who were present. Slia Jbee, the youngest Farseeker in the Line's history, an intense young woman with black hair and piercing green eyes gazing straight at her. Myr, the communications specialist Grandmaster. Horizontal Blue, the autistic painter, seeming to ignore her altogether as she doodled on a canvas, grinning. And Bloody Jak, the former Red Star Line marshal, scowling openly. Xa looked away from his hostile gaze.

"We have reviewed the medical investigations," Shaam said gently. "We have, as you have read, encountered this before. In fact, I do believe the first of the Guiding Circle to encounter it directly was..."

/ /

Yu stood at the edge of the ship's hull as it swayed in the wind of the golden gas giant. Below, an infinity of cloud and lightning and blackness threatened to swallow the incautious. Thus, Xa was cautious.

"Paranoia is not caution," Yu snapped as Xa stepped farther away from flat lip of the ship. "You who have touched the Deep and lived should fear nothing."

"I fear the Deep, Farseeker," Xa said, placing her hands before her chest in a mudra of balance. "I never claimed otherwise."

"What will you do, then, when the Deep takes you for the last time? Scream in terror and attempt to flee?"

"I will defy it as long as I can."

The ship continued to sway and Yu stalked over to her. "As you did with the black hole? Death is not so forgiving."

"Forgiving!" Xa demanded. Yu knew full well what she had suffered when the gravitic distortions of the singularity and the Quiet Light 's drives had damaged her body on the quantum level. Paralysis and agony had struck her randomly ever since, like lightning from the gas giant's sky. Suddenly and irresistibly crippling.

"You survived your arrogance and your defiance. Do you think you would have, if you were not meant to?"

"No, Farseeker. I suppose not."

"Yet here you stand on the edge of a ship that, should it twitch wrong, will throw you into death itself, and you persist in your arrogance as though you were not entirely at the mercy of the flawed technology upon which you depend and the universe's amused tolerance of your folly. Should the wind strike you wrong or the lightning flash too close, where will your defiance lead you?"

"Straight into the pit, I suppose," she said.

"Good, you have listened somewhat this day. So what shall you do for the rest of this day while we're out here on the edge of death?"

Xa gazed up. Bright blue sky blazed with the light of a blue-white sun that would burn her severely if not for the heavy sunblock she was wearing. Clouds swirled in vortexes of shadows and silver linings and a moon orbited far overhead, almost lost in the glare.

She peered over the edge.

Below... more vortexes. Lightning. Clouds upon clouds in layers of white, gold, brown and green. Twisting, beckoning. She gasped as she saw the blackness of the singularity that had threatened to swallow her two...

\ \

"...years ago, BVD-0009 Levanah's Dream encountered a cluster of anomalous metallic asteroids moving at 0.0127c in the scattered disc of K0V system (provisional name Icequiet – see log Master Klara); vector analysis confirmed extrasystem origin but ultimate source indeterminate. (see log Master Klara). Spectral analysis confirmed presence carbon/multiple metal-based organic structures matching earlier spectral descriptions of Star's Blood organism..."

Xa removed her fingers from the screen and the words sat there regarding her silently. The materials she had been requested to study on her way to meet the Guiding Circle at Flameseed were very detailed and well-organized, the work of a dozen professionals in advanced biochemistry and physics. Spectral analyses matched those of the exploding red flower she had discovered on the planet she had decided to name Bloodflower. She turned her left hand to look at the slashes there that stubbornly refused to heal. Her hand was covered with a dozen small T-shaped cuts. The skin was pulled back; a few naked capillaries and nerves pulsed gruesomely over a metallic-silver substrate that underlaid much of the flesh of her hand. Tendrils of that same substrate had expanded through her arm, down her spine, and even into her brain.

As the fine blood vessels over the reflective red substance beat their slow, steady rhythm, she shuddered, remembering the searing agony that the initial infection had caused her. Her ship, the Infinity Unseen, had taken her to Yesod Station in Swadhisthana system at the edge of Tarazed Maru. The medical drone had kept her unconscious for the two-month journey. Once she had arrived—and during the trip to Flameseed in Crimson Maru, the station at the heart of the Black Star Line—she discovered that the organism had infiltrated her very genetic structure and co-opted her neurotransmitters for its own use. It was theoretically impossible since the parasite was not even based on DNA.

While she had not suffered any recurrence of symptoms she knew it was only a matter of time.

She pulled her environment suit's black glove over her hand to hide the wounds.

She ran a quick check on the Levanah's Dream, the ship loaned to her by Master Klara for the journey to Flameseed. With a Zeta-band slipstream drive, it was ten times faster than her own ship and apparently Farseeker Shaam saw some need for haste.

As she returned to her reading explored the medical logs detailing the four known cases of Star's Blood infection, she realized why.

"...Disciple Glyx died aboard Yesod Station on 4002.02.23 at 12:55:42. Cause of death given was parasitism-induced mutation of neurotransmitter secretion leading to cerebral neural failure and cardiac arrest..."

"...Master Nvana died aboard Levanah's Dream on 4003.06.30 at 23:32:16 while en route to Yesod Station. Cause of death given was parasitism-induced..."

"...Disciple Relek died at Xleixa Medical Station on 4003.07.30 at..."

"...Adept Ti Heleris died at Flameseed on..."

"I see," Xa said softly, staring at the black glove on her hand.

04 August, 4004

Flameseed, Crimson System

The station was quiet except for the subliminal hum of the well-tuned machinery that kept the air and water flowing for ten million people. Xa walked down the great two-hundred-meter cylinder of the Promenade; fortunately her ship was docked only a kilometer from the center vertical shaft that would take her into the main body of the disc-shaped station, so her walk was short.

The Promenade, nearly deserted now at nighttime, was lit only dimly by the great light strips extending to the vanishing point kilometers down the tunnel. Soft gold night-time lights were nearly matched in intensity by the ruddy light of Crimson, the star visible through the Promenade's seemingly endless bay windows. The few people strolling the silent Promenade cast ghostly shadows of dark yellow and red which flowed down the corridor in strange, ghostly shapes. Xa passed by the kiosks and buildings lining the transit sector in the center of the tunnel—her soft shoes made no sound as she glided down the strip of stationary sidewalk. Closer to the center, the moving sidewalk whispered. Beyond that, the deserted vehicle lane and lastly the main transit trains were all poised to move passengers at ever higher speeds down the tunnel. Transit trains hummed with standby power on their six lanes overarched by the regularly spaced bridges connecting the centerward and spaceward sidewalks on opposite sides of the trains.

Xa felt no need for speed. She mused darkly that it would take little effort to cross over one of those bridges, walk back the way she came, and escape the station entirely before her inevitable meeting with the Guiding Circle to whom she went with the same level of joy she would face a guillotine specially prepared for her.

The sidewalk passed through a series of emergency bulkheads separating the Promenade from the main vertical shaft; in an emergency the bulkheads could be dropped and the four Promenade tunnels—two on each side of the station—could even be completely severed from the station if necessary. The Promenade's counterparts below the station, four tunnels of engineering and emergency equipment, was arranged similarly. All eight of the tunnels had berths for docked ships, room for hundreds or even thousands of ships of the Lines (depending on whether they were small, narrow craft like Xa's own Infinity Unseen or massive Gold Star Line freighters), though rarely was more than fifty ships docked at a time—and Xa did not want to be in the Promenade if it was ever filled to capacity, at least not without earplugs.

Xa passed through the armored rings of bulkheads making up the central transit tube and found an appropriate lift car. The spherical chamber dropped the nine kilometers down to the central ring of the station's main body in less than a minute—as the lift fell, she considered why she was not currently quarantined or even being requested to show up in a spacesuit, which seemed the most basic precaution one could possibly take when infected with a deadly parasite and expecting to meet with the leading council of Black Star Line—or any other VIP or self-styled VIP for that matter.

She was puzzling over this as she reached the center of the station and the lift shaft, instead of passing directly through the station core, spiraled dizzyingly around the center and came to a stop at her destination. When she left the car it zipped away down one of the radial shafts leading out from the station's hub like a spitball shot through a straw. Her destination was only meters away: the door to the main chambers of the Guiding Circle, the very center of Flameseed and of Black Star Line.

She pressed her hand on the door plate and it paused for nearly a minute as it analyzed her skin chemistry, infrared patterns, ultraviolet aura, retina configuration, DNA sequences, and nerve responses. At last the entire door flashed with purple lights and she stepped inside.

"...position of White's communications nexi are posing an interesting challenge in keeping Flameseed connected to the Sagittae spaces to any great degree; your networks of friendship with Zeta-band-capable couriers is the only thing allowing us to remain connected with Coreward assets and with Trapezium Maru's recent expansion I am not sure how long that may persist. Carter's reassignment of Betelgeusean and Bellatrixi fast couriers to serve Trapezium interests is bothersome." Myr spoke calmly and softly to Shaam, ignoring Jak's scowls and Noos's rolled eyes. Shaam listened with quiet attentiveness, though he noted Xa's entrance and acknowledged her with the barest warning look before responding to Myr.

"I nevertheless believe that Vir made the right decision," Shaam said cryptically, and immediately changed the subject. "However, the Sagittae spaces currently have more interesting and possibly useful discoveries to be made than even the Pleiades."

"Or my homeworld," a young woman said sadly. Xa did not know Slia Jbee's story, but it was obvious to look in her eyes that she had one.

"In time, Slia," Shaam replied, turning his head to look in her direction with a compassionate gaze.

"Shaam, your obsession with Sagittae has gone beyond reason," Jak snapped. Noos leaned back in his chair and placed his staff on his knees, smirking as the younger man leaned forward. "You have thrown how many ships at that area? How many people? And you've still turned up nothing that supports your pet theories, nor certainly anything of concrete benefit either to the Line or the Sphere. Can you not admit defeat?"

"Defeat is a question for Red Star Line, not Black. There are things there we must understand."

"There's nothing there. Just more space and more planets. More of your precious Deep."

"You're wrong, Jak," Slia said quietly. "I have seen the same patterns in the spread of certain forms of astrophysical anomalies that Farseeker Shaam has. That Lost One Yu saw."

"I don't know which I find more laughable. A deluded young woman or a deluded old man."

The response was instantaneous. Xa wanted to crawl out of the chamber through an air vent to escape the charge in the atmosphere. Shaam's lips compressed and his calm, compassionate eyes hardened... just so. Slia leapt to her feet. Noos flipped his staff suddenly vertical and scowled. Horizontal Blue, the autistic painter doodling on a canvas and apparently ignoring the conversation with her back turned to the others, suddenly drew a few black and red lines across the elegant blue-green abstract she was painting.

Myr was the one who responded vocally. Her kind, motherly voice was quiet, but harsh. "You are out of line, Jak."

"Good," the former marshal snapped. "Your Line is a disorganized mess whose only direction is pipe dreams and visions; if I must step out of it so you all can look past these, so much the better."

"You have made no mention of what productive direction you would see us follow," Noos barked, slapping the staff into the palm of his hand. "Do so or shut up."

Jak subsided and stepped away. "I will do so once I have firmly conceptualized certain ideas I have been discussing with some of the captains on leave here."

"That'll be the day," Slia muttered. When she had stood, she noticed Xa and now waved to her. "Adept Xa, welcome," she said. Jak's scowl deepened. Myr lifted an eyebrow and made a gesture of greeting and respect. Blue stopped painting for a moment, and dropped the bowl of black paint on the floor, where it spread in a slow circle around her feet. She reached down and dipped a finger into it and pressed the finger to the painting, leaving a small, black dot in the center.

Noos waved his staff. "Well speaking of the Sagittae debacles," he said. "Come, girl, join us."

Xa took a few measured steps until she was in the center of the circle. "I come as requested," Xa said after taking a deep breath.

"Welcome, Xa," Shaam said quietly.

Noos cackled. "You just cannot keep your neurons in order, can you girl?" Noos demanded, nearly hitting her with the staff as he waved it around. "This is the third time you've been here and every time you've been nothing but trouble. Even when you don't end up here, you're nothing but trouble."

Xa looked helplessly at Shaam, who gave her a slight nod. "As you say, Farseeker. Trouble seems to find me."

"No, no, I am convinced that something in your spirit has a bloodhound's nose for trouble and you follow the trail as diligently as your sensors will allow." Noos cackled again and waved his stick at Shaam, who looked away.

Xa flinched under the steady regard of the Guiding Circle. Her eyes met Jak's—his glower was openly hostile. She looked away.

Horizontal Blue was grinning as she doodled.

A strange feeling arose in Xa's belly and her body suddenly felt cold. Her eyes widened as Shaam spoke. "We have reviewed the medical investigations," he said gently. "We have, as you have read, encountered this before. In fact, I do believe the first of the Guiding Circle to encounter it directly was..."

"Yu," Xa said softly. "It was..."

/ /

Yu was standing behind Xa with a stick. Xa balanced on a vertical rock sticking out of a pile of larger boulders. Her mind was silent. Awareness of all the details of the landscape were as much a part of her consciousness as her awareness of her legs—muscles each held with just the tension required to keep her balanced perfectly; of her hands—holding a stick of her own that she had whittled from driftwood. Even the breathers in her nostrils, filtering the carbon dioxide and concentrating the oxygen, felt like part of her own body.

Yu moved and the awareness of that movement caused her body to move in response. Her answering motion was efficient and economical: a pivoting of the pelvis, a short slash with her stick that interposed it between Yu and her body, and a gentle flick of her weapon to knock the old master's weapon just a few degrees off its course (which had been directed at her kidneys). She completed the motion with an upward jab that would have caught Yu on the chin had he not rotated his body and pulled his head back a few centimeters, allowing the stick to pass centimeters in front of his face.

"Better," Yu said. Xa experienced no satisfaction from the comment: it simply was. Xa's awareness expanded back to the horizon and again she was the horizon, and the sea, and the sky. Xa had not seen Yu's navigation to this world and, since she had not yet seen the night-time stars she did not know where she was. This was proper: she had to be the world, not map it.

In so doing she could begin to truly explore. She had experienced the Deep and her own true nature—briefly—and now she could only return to it and seek to make use of it.

Her musings—directed as they were to her sense of self—brought her out of samadhi; Yu noticed and gave her a gentle thump on her forehead with the end of his stick. "Return," he said, and pointed at the sea. "But speak first."

Xa raised an eyebrow: she had wanted to ask a question but did not think she had given any external indication of that. No matter. "You cultivate non-dualistic awareness while simultaneously casting this cultivation as a personal evolution. My limited understanding suggests a contradiction. Would you clarify?"

"Your intention is the Endless Journey," Yu said. Xa gave a short nod: the religion of exploration for the sake of exploration resonated with her and had ever since she read the Muse's evocative writings on the subject, in her youth on Maia VIb. The mysterious woman's treatises and novels on the joys of being a spirit seeking to understand the universe and teach the universal Spirit what she learns had become quite popular with the Sphere at large and recruitment to Black Star Line had picked up substantially when her first epic trilogy, Universe, Know Thyself had been published in 3965. Xa had walked that path for many years, learning from not only her explorations but her studies and meditations on other religious paths—the old Endless Journey path that began on her homeworld sometime in the 3400s, the expanded Hindu and Buddhist doctrines growing out of the 21st and 23rd century philosophies of integralism and non-dualistic science, even the older and more metaphoric Jewish and Muslim canon. She had found that all religions seems to speak of the same subject matter but from paths so different that it was hard to discover the common thread.

She felt that thread in samadhi—indeed, she was a part of the thread. The same thread had revealed itself years ago when she was ensnared by the singularity that had almost destroyed her. She sought to reconcile her intellectual understanding of the nature of the universe with the all-too-brief direct experiences of it.

Yu sat on a rock nearby. "You have faced dangers. You will face deadlier ones. The stars will strive to burn you with fire; metal and alien life will slice through your blood and nerves like a thousand knives. One day the Deep will take you at last. While that which is you will in the end return to the Deep, the echoes and traces of your life will remain in this maya and will also affect where you go in the bardo."

Xa nodded. "I must make sure that what I learn here will affect the Spirit in the right way when I die. Hence personal evolution: I am the same nature as Spirit, and what growth I experience, Spirit also experiences."

Yu laughed. "Child, bardo is not an after-death state. It is a between-awarenesses state. What comes afterward depends on your state beforehand. You will find yourself in this state of not-being-but-becoming more times than you will like. I only hope you will survive it. It is..."

\ \

"...in your blood," Shaam continued. "indeed the concentrations are nearly ten times greater than even in the case of Master Nvana, who literally had flowers coming out her ears by the time her ship reached Yesod. Yet, while the progression is obvious, it is taking a different turn than the other cases."

Xa fought off her strange sense of deja vu as she pulled her mind out of the vision and back to the present. "Might it have something to do with my Maian chemistry?" she asked shakily.

"The Maian geneng suite primarily affects the symbolization of sulfur and sulfur compounds, as you know. It is really quite elegant, considering the complexity of the internal sulfur cycle in humans and other animals. You could breathe hydrogen sulfide at concentrations that would cause instant death in most humans, thanks to the specialized alveolar cells that oxidize it and absorb the resulting sulfates. Your kidneys and liver have mechanisms to absorb the surplus immobilized sulfates and other compounds—and I must say that the decision to incorporate heavy-metal chelation chemistries directly into your bloodstream using your internal sulfur cycle as an industrial agent... quite fascinating. You are quite resistant to heavy metal poisoning and any sort of sulfur poisoning. However... we are not seeing any reaction to any of these mechanisms by the Star's Blood symbiont. We suspected that the chelates may be disrupting the ion cycle of the symbiont's iron and chromium production, but we found that is not the case."

Jak interjected. "Symbiont? Are you mad?"

"The organism is doing her more good than harm, neurologically," Shaam said with a dismissive gesture.

"It will kill her," Jak snapped. Slia looked down at the table and fidgeted.

"A strong possibility." Xa raised an eyebrow.

"Send her to Xleixa," Jak pressed.

Noos waved his staff in the air. The old man then thumped the end of it on the deck, making it ring like a bell. "If she survives the journey, that is. And you'd be happier if she didn't, wouldn't you, Bloody Jak?" Xa looked at Jak, interested to hear the answer.

"We should quarantine the entire Sagittae region and notify the Sphere of a dangerous, multisystem biological threat there," the former marshal said. Xa narrowed her eyes—no one in the room missed the fact that he had failed to answer the question.

"Some things cannot be swept under the rug, Jak," Shaam said. "We opened a Pandora's Box and it will not close."

"You, Slia, and Yu opened it," Jak said dismissively, turning his back on the Circle and heading over to one of the inactive screens on the chamber's wall.

Horizontal Blue giggled and painted red swirls in one corner of the picture. Shaam looked over her shoulder and chuckled. Myr stretched out on a long cushion on the floor and closed her eyes.

"Jak is worried," Xa noted.

Noos shook his head. "No, he's scared shitless. There are things you don't know, girl."

Xa inclined her head. "I await your instruction, Farseeker," she said respectfully.

"Who said we were going to instruct you on anything?" he snapped.

"She has earned an explanation," Shaam said, his voice growing hard. "She may very well die in agony, I think we should let her decide for herself if our decisions were right."

Noos pointed his staff at Shaam. "Fine. You explain it."

Jak finished checking the screen—it was displaying scrambled pixels that Xa knew would resolve itself into messages for Jak through the pad on his wrist—and returned to the Circle. "Do you have no understanding of security?" Jak demanded.

Myr, her voice calm and relaxed, murmured, "I daresay even young Slia is far less insecure than you, Jak."

Jak snorted. "Anyone can feel secure if their delusions make them think the star they're flying into is a pretty light rather than a ravenous fireball."

"Better than not flying at all, or flying only to shoot things," Slia said.

"Get on with it," Noos said.

Shaam took a moment to take Xa's measure. She nodded, slowly, and let her mind move into a state of absorption. Shaam began to tell her the story...

04 August, 4004

Flameseed, Crimson System

"There is a legend among the people of Tarazed that a falling star shattered above the Foothills of Exile in the first year of the planet's colonization, and the skies rained blood, heralding the arrival of the human race on that world and symbolizing the strife that led the Tarazedi people to seek a new home there." Shaam sat in lotus on the deck of the Circle chamber and most of the others had joined him—though Horizontal Blue was drawing little red raindrops on her painting and Jak was standing against a table with his arms folded over his chest, shaking his head. Xa sat on her feet with her hands on her knees, listening attentively, though she could not shake the feeling that something was disturbingly wrong with the situation.

"This legend was considered allegorical at best until a Master witnessed just such a rain on a planet of Tarazed's distant companion star in 3904. Since then, such events have been documented five times: two on Quest and three on different planets being surveyed by Black Star Line captains. So far no samples have been successfully retrieved; the source of the rain disintegrates in atmosphere leaving no detectable trace on the ground. We have linked it to Star's Blood through spectral analysis: Master Klara is expert at spectroscopy and was present on Quest during the last event, three years ago." Shaam raised a hand and formed it into a quick sequence of gestures; a scanner beeped acknowledgment from somewhere in the chamber and a hologram filled the space in front of Shaam. "Since we began our program of exploring the Sagittae spaces in 3946 with the establishment of Yesod Station, we have discovered a total of twenty manifestations of Star's Blood, including five examples of rain, ten swarms of extrasystem debris infested with particles of the life form, and five colonies such as you encountered on Bloodflower. Of the latter, all of the colonies were disturbed and exploded, causing infection of the discoverer."

Xa held up a gloved hand. Shaam nodded. "The infection was much the same nature in the other four cases. In three, it was on the right hand, and in the fourth it was on the face... specifically, in the eyes." Xa shuddered—she had seen the autopsy images. "Each case reported feeling a very strong drawing to the flower that went beyond what they had experienced when discovering other unique, beautiful, or out-of-place items elsewhere in their journeys."

"This was the case with me," Xa agreed. "The flower was hypnotic."

"Yes, far more so than one would expect, even considering its perfection in manifestation of the golden ratio in nearly every observable measurement."

Xa raised an eyebrow. Flameseed itself was based on the golden ratio, or phi, a number known since ancient times to exist in many aspects of nature, astronomical and biological alike. It was often considered the universal "beauty constant", reflected even in optimal human physiology, and was the source of many architectural measurements through the ages. Flameseed had been deliberately designed to make use of the ratio: each of the discs of the main body of the station was phi times the size of the next smaller one. The tubes and pylons were similarly proportioned and, to Xa's eyes at least, the station was indeed one of the most beautiful she had encountered. Yesod and many other newer Black Star Line stations followed the same general design. "Do you believe that this design is the cause of the attraction that we have experienced toward it?"

"Perhaps, but I don't believe it is that simple." He made a gesture, calling up a file on his hologram. A star map slowly spun in three dimensions. Purple circles appeared around certain stars, including the central star of the subtly-outlined sphere of Tarazed Maru. An arc grew, connecting these stars.

They were all on a distinct curve.

Xa asked the obvious question. "Have you tracked this curve back to the source?"

"We have captains following the arc. While these data points are all within two hundred light-years of each other, we have found only one possible data point along this curve." The stars zoomed inward toward each other. Far away from the data points already plotted, another circle appeared—beyond the other side of the Human Sphere, Outward from the Orion End, over two thousand light-years from Tarazed. "Since this is an A-class star, we are calling it Blood—"

/ /

Silver stars splashed across the sky as the ship hung motionless in space several light-years from Dubhe. The Ursa Major Group, the A-class stars that made up Earth's Big Dipper (known on Quest as the Great Ark), shined with white light. Dubhe itself, the brightest and closest, was a pale orange and painted the ship's bridge with ruddy light.

Yu gazed into the light of the nearby orange giant. "It is very peaceful here," he said. "More so than most spaces, I think."

"Why is that?"

"The Ursa Group is largely overlooked by everyone, even the Line. The stars are relatively young and their systems poor in metal. The Line gave them a cursory inspection and mapped all the classical Plough stars and their worlds. This was done in the earliest days of the Line, before our spiritual aspect had even taken root much less matured, and I fear we missed something. To us, I think the Ursa Group will forever be only quiet, dead stars."

"What stars would you call living?" Xa asked.

"An insightful question. It is not so much that any star is dead—in fact, the stars may very well be alive and conscious in a traditional sense; the complexity of their magnetic and electrical fields almost guarantee it—but we humans will never know that for sure because they are alien and vast beyond our comprehension. However, there are places we explore that strange things happen, unlike quiet Ursa. Your encounter with the singularity was only an example.”

Xa inclined her head. The ship she had served with Grandmaster Shaam had run afoul of a singularity that seemed to have not existed until they encountered it. Xa's lover Ziik had been killed and the two other ships in the formation destroyed outright with all hands. Xa closed her eyes against the...

\ \

...Pain registered in the base of her spine but Xa barely noticed as she listened, fascinated, to the building argument between Shaam and Jak.

"You knew Xa was going to encounter this parasite when she started exploring Sagittae. Yu probably set her up to it—the wily old bastard knew more than he let on from the first day he entered this Circle."

"As if you would know; you weren't even born yet," Slia snapped.

"I have my sources."

"Those captains, even older ones, who agree to feed you information as bribes for enhancements of their ships," Shaam said mildly. "Rest assured that practice will not persist."

"Hear hear," Noos cackled.

"Better the devil you see..." Slia muttered.

"Yu knew exactly what Star's Blood was—the first of the major discoveries happened just when Xa showed up here last time. You saw how quick he was to take her under his wing and fill her ears with tales of 'the dark mysteries of the Sagittae spaces.'" He did a credible imitation of Yu's intonations. "What he should have done is reassign her to the other side of the Sphere and left well enough alone."

"Xa is pivotal in these explorations." Xa looked back at Shaam, wincing as the motion sent a quick pulse of pain through her aching spine.

"And she's going to die anyway," Jak said. "And it is quite possible she will talk."

"What is there to talk about?" Shaam said softly. "According to your vehement arguments, the entire thing is a delusion and of no consequence. Why do you fear Xa's voice in this matter?"

Jak held Shaam's gaze for a long moment, then bowed gracefully. "Perhaps you're right."

"In which direction?" Slia snapped. "Or do you forget what they found on the first mapping run of Bloodsilver?"

Jak glanced at Xa. "I don't believe we should discuss that now." Xa glared at him, but was distracted by the sudden rise of a burning sensation in her lower back.

"I think... I think I'm going to have another of my attacks," she said as the pain began to intensify. Fear of the pain warred with fury at the timing and humiliation at the setting. She lowered herself to the deck; she sat in lotus with her hands clenched tightly enough around her knees that bruises would result.

Even Jak seemed concerned. He went to her side along with Shaam and Slia and sat beside her. "I told them it was a bad idea to send you out," he said. "Shall we send for a healer?"

Xa shook her head sharply. She knew that a healer would do little good. She bit her lip as the pain spread in waves with her pulse, expanding up her back and then down her arms. Her body was covered with sweat and she trembled with the effort to control the pain for as long as possible.

It wasn't long. Xa's body twisted with convulsions and her hands dug bloody welts in her legs even through the tough cloth of her robe. Shaam toweled her face with water and Slia pulled her hands off her knees and held them tightly. "We are with you, sister," Slia said firmly.

Jak stood beside Xa and put a hand on her shoulder as she rocked back and forth and tried to keep from crying out. "Be strong," he said. "We stand with you."

Xa cried out and her hands crushed Slia's in a death grip. The younger woman's hands would be bruised, but she did not even wince, only returned the grip as best she could.

"I can't move," Xa whispered. Tears flowed down her face. She felt as though razor blades were moving through her flesh. "Can't... meditate. Can't..."

"You will," Slia said quietly. "Your destiny is among the stars and you will return to them."

Pain overwhelmed her and she floated between semiconsciousness and superconsciousness. When she came to, she found that Slia was removing her glove.

"What—?"

"I wanted to see it," Slia said as she turned Xa's hand over and examined the cuts. The metal inside was gleaming with red highlights.

"Dangerous—" Xa gasped and tried to pull her hand away but her strength was spent.

"I am not afraid," Slia said.

"Look!" Shaam said. He pointed at the T-shaped cuts in Xa's flesh.

The parasite was glowing with a faint red light. As Xa looked at it she gasped, her eyes transfixed on the light. Starlight seemed to shine just inside her flesh, somewhere deeper inside her that she could not go but desperately wanted to. She could not look away.

07 August, 4004

Flameseed, Crimson System

Xa came to on a stretcher in Flameseed 's sickbay. The pain had ebbed to a dull ache that burned through her body only when she moved. As she forced herself back to full consciousness she groaned softly and rose to sit in lotus; her body screamed in protest, flames shooting up her spine.

Slia was standing there. She came forward and took Xa's hands as Xa bit her lip and defied the pain again to settle into lotus leaning against the bed's headboard. "Good morning, sister," Slia said softly. "It has been three days since you went into your coma. We suspected you would not wake from it."

Only then did Xa notice how weak and tired she felt. Combined with the throbbing pain throughout her torso and arms, it made her want to do nothing other than collapse back onto the bed and sleep. "To the Deep with that," Xa croaked, not sure whether she was responding to Slia's comment or her own thought. Slia handed her a glass of water and helped her drink.

"Thank you, Farseeker," Xa said quietly, squeezing the younger woman's hands in gratitude and then releasing them. "What is the progress of my... infection?"

Slia looked away. "It has spread," she said. "The organism is intertwined between the hemispheres of your brain and throughout the nerve plexi at every primary chakra. So far it does not seem to be interfering with the functions of any of these."

"Not every chakra has an associated plexus," Xa said, puzzled.

"For those chakras that do not, the organism has formed complex networks of its own."

"That is... fascinating," Xa said—and meant it, despite her bitterness.

"Yes, I suppose so. I was originally thinking that the nanomedical department at Xleixa would be able to extricate the organism—they are well-known for the quality of their nanotech procedures—but now I am not so sure. Healer Mxal believes the infestation has infiltrated not only your cells but your energy structures... which were rather strange to begin with thanks to your encounter with that wretched singularity back in '89. I think interference might do you more harm than good."

"And the rest of the Circle?"

"Recommends you report to Xleixa anyway and remain quarantined while they study this infection. At least that's Jak's idea and the others haven't objected too strenuously."

Xa sighed. "I do not understand Jak."

"Who does? He has an agenda. I do not understand why Yu asked him to join the Circle before he was Lost."

"I understood Yu even less," Xa said dryly.

Slia gave her a sharp look. "Is that so? How strange."

"He taught me, but he did not share anything of himself in doing so."

Slia's emerald eyes bored into her. "You really don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

Slia shook her head. "It is not my place to say... at least not yet. There are things you must know about Yu though, in time."

Xa accepted this with a bare nod of her head. "I think... I can get up now."

"Shall we take a meal in the Promenade?"

"I would like that," Xa said with a smile. She freed her legs and made herself rise, denying the pain the courtesy of acknowledgement. "I think I will move slowly, though."

"We are young yet," Slia said. Xa grunted mild disagreement. The Farseeker smiled, took the older woman's arm, and helped her steady herself; Xa took a few slow, careful steps toward the table near the door where her clothes were folded. Xa stripped from the hospital gown and shakily dressed in the black-and-violet uniform striped with blue lines, and then wrapped the silver cape-sari tightly. Xa attached her pad to the back of her hand and checked for messages; she skimmed the Flameseed news alerts and spoke a few short answers to some issues up for vote that she, as a local transient, was entitled to vote in. The process took her less than two minutes; Slia helped her out the door and they began walking down the corridor toward the station's core.

"Shall I call a pod?" Slia asked. Xa shook her head. Slia grinned. "I figured. The main lifts are five hundred meters down."

"I will make it," Xa said, pulling somewhat away from Slia's support and walking mostly under her own power.

"You are the stubborn one, sister," Slia said.

It did not take long for them to reach the central core and board a lift; Xa leaned heavily on the railing around the lift once the door closed and the car began to accelerate upward toward the Promenade tunnels. They rode in silence; shortly after they boarded the lift stopped to pick of a party of chattering teenagers discussing a new shop on the Promenade. Xa raised an eyebrow and attempted to follow the conversation but the local slang dialect was too esoteric to comprehend without spending far too much mental effort to translate.

"Say, Blackie, you look kinda off-course; you gonna dock or crash?" one of the kids asked her in a concerned voice.

Xa parsed the comment for a moment and then responded. "I'll dock, on manual though."

"Right-right," the kid said; his companions chuckled. "If you Blackie O-stars want to fly with us for a bit, we're going to eat."

Slia smiled. "I would like to take you up on that offer, but my friend Xa isn't flying so straight though."

"Right-right," the kid said, disappointed.

The lift's screen indicated they were reaching the Promenade deck; the Black Star women bid goodbye to the teenagers and they set off at separate angles.

"O-stars?"

"The hottest," Slia said, grinning.

"Ah."

"There is a good cafe two kilometers down," Slia said, guiding them to the movewalk in the center of the Promenade. "Not far from your ship."

"She is not my ship," Xa responded instantly—she would not do Master Klara the disservice of laying any claim to the borrowed vessel, no matter how tempting the new ship was. "Mine is on the way to Tau Ceti, Shaam's idea for some reason."

"How strange," Slia said, steadying Xa as she nearly fell over in stepping onto the movewalk. "Look, we have company."

A few meters ahead, Jak was waiting. He stepped onto the movewalk next to them. "Good morning," he said.

"You fly an awfully close formation," Slia said coldly.

"Someone has to keep an eye on you crazy people," Jak snapped. Why are you not in quarantine?" he demanded of Xa.

"If I was safe to present to the Guiding Circle I doubt I am contagious," Xa said, standing up straight and letting go of Slia's arm. Her body stopped shaking—it tensed instead.

"That was a foolish idea from Shaam, who is as full of foolish ideas as your companion here."

"Leave my space, Jak," Slia said, her green eyes flashing as she moved her hands into a mudra of rejection so potent that it bordered on obscene.

"This station is not your space," Jak said. "Xa, you must come with me. We're going to send you to Xleixa. They will be better able to help you there and you will not endanger others." He moved to take her arm.

Slia interposed herself, but Xa waved her away. "I will be fine," Xa told her. She took a deep breath to calm herself. "I do not think Xleixa has anything to offer," Xa said.

"Adept Xa, the Guiding Council has stated that you will report to Xleixa Medical Station."

"The Guiding Circle has said no such thing, and besides it is a Guiding Circle not a military tribunal!" Slia snapped. Jak scowled and clenched his fists in anger.

Xa stepped between the two. "Let's step off," she said, and jumped off the movewalk. The others followed.

"The cafe is here," Slia noted, gesturing to a small building surrounded by arcs of pool, trees, and tables.

"Xa," Jak said warningly, and placed a hand on her arm. "You need to..."

/ /

"Go," said Yu, and raised his staff into a diagonal blocking position.

Xa became the flicker of a solar storm, her limbs licking flame around a core of starfire. Her own short staves whirled in a complicated arc that was half mathematical precision, half dance. As she lashed out, the old man blocked her effortlessly with swift sideways movements of his weapon, then pressed his own attack, swinging the staff in short arcs that battered through openings in Xa's pattern. Xa flicked away an attempt to poke her in the solar plexus with the butt of the long staff and responded with a motion that got her right-hand staff behind Yu's weapon and her left-hand staff over his head. Somehow, he evaded both, ducking under his own staff and using it to strike the lower, right-hand weapon in such a way as to cause it to deflect the strike from above.

Yu struck at Xa's abdomen with the side of his staff. She did not step back; instead she twisted and flipped her two weapons into the air, extricated her blocked hands, reached up and caught her staves, and used them both to forcefully club Yu's staff into missing her. The deafening crack echoed from the distant stones.

Yu showed no surprise at the risky, aggressive move; continuing his relentless assault he battered Xa's blocks back closer to her body, restricting her freedom of movement while he used his longer staff to extend his own reach and force her back.

Xa scowled and slammed her weapons back against the long staff in hard, vicious arcs. She did not retreat so much as a centimeter, even when Yu struck at her face. She ducked and bashed the attack aside with an upward, outward swing while simultaneously striking Yu a brutal blow in the chest with her lower hand.

Yu gripped his staff at opposite ends, with both hands, and used a combination of thrusts and twists to block Xa's next attacks; the rocks echoed again and again with staccato reports like a badly-tuned emgun as Xa continued her assault, striking with one weapon any brief opening she could make with her other weapon. Yu's staff blurred and they fought to a standstill for nearly a minute before Yu swung his weapon vertical and slammed the butt on the ground.

Xa broke off her attack instantly, saluting the old man with both weapons. She took them in her left hand and held them vertical.

"That was interesting," Yu said. "I have no complaints about your technical skill or reflexes."

"But?" Xa asked. Her breathing was slow and even despite the exertion. She lowered the weapons—both were cracked, she saw now—and set them on the ground.

Yu tossed his own staff aside. "I once sought to teach you when to resist and when to fall back by beating you bloody when you insisted on stubbornness."

"I failed to learn that lesson," Xa agreed.

"While you certainly have learned to hold your ground against me, you will someday find yourself resisting some greater force than a decrepit old man and your stubbornness will kill you."

"Perhaps I only hold ground because I know I do not need to fall back before a decrepit old man," Xa said. Yu snorted.

"Doubtful." Yu picked up a folded fabric that was sitting on the ground and spun it; it unfolded into a round cloth decorated with a blue and violet mandala. Yu reached into the drone sitting nearby, extracted a few bottles and dishes, and set two places on the cloth. Xa knelt and took two probes from her belt, dialed up their diameter and dialed down their sharpness. She saluted Yu with the chopsticks, said a quiet prayer of thanks in Maian Quiet, and began to eat the fish and rice ration.

Yu gave her a piercing look. "I do speak both Maian Quiet and Maian Tempest," he said in the latter, general-use Maian dialect.

Xa arched an eyebrow in surprise. "Did you study locally or via database?"

"Do not insult me." Xa frowned, but nodded. Maians as a whole did not care to share their two synthetic languages with the Sphere community at large—especially the formal Quiet dialect—and to seek outside sources for the Maian languages was considered highly disrespectful even in the nearby Alcyone and Electra systems.

"Did you live on Muse?"

"More rudeness," Yu said, but smiled slightly. "Yes, I resided on Yume for a time, before you were born."

Xa inclined her head. Because of the proliferation of local names for Xa's home planet, it had no official designation in the Sphere atlas besides Maia VIb. Yume was a name meaning Dream in ancient Japanese and also in Maian Quiet, and was used primarily in the southern hemisphere of the water world.

"Next you will tell me you know the Muse," Xa said, stabbing a piece of fish with her chopsticks. Yu gave her an inscrutable look that somehow left a gnawing discomfort in the pit of her stomach.

"That would be a fascinating subject of discussion," Yu said mildly. "But we shall not have that conversation today."

Xa nodded and drew a clump of rice seasoned with the egg-flavored muskiness of sulfur compounds to her lips. She looked at Yu through her lashes and inclined her head to one side. "You are not an engineered Maian, anyway," she said. "You do not seem to use sulfur supplements."

"True. I was born on Pathway, Vector IX."

Xa considered a mental map of the Sphere for a moment. "Helix Maru?" she said, disbelievingly.

"Yes, even Pathway is... a desecration of the sacred, though Mendel George has made impressive reforms in recent years during his tenure as Planetary Reverend. When I lived there it was nearly as bad as Luther is now. I left that Maru in my teens, and resided on Electra Station One until I joined Black Star Line at twenty," Yu said.

The Electra system, one of the bright blue Pleiades stars along with Maia, was quite close to Xa's home system. "Well, you were in the area," Xa noted. "We have also visited the system during your teaching of me."

"Even Black Star Liners have roots to acknowledge from time to time, so long as they do not become dangerous attachments." Yu's eyes burned into her.

"My parents were lost at sea when I was a baby," Xa said softly. "I was raised by a cousin when I left the geneng crèche."

Yu did not answer; he finished his food and returned his dishes to the drone, which dutifully stored them in a compartment for later disposition. Yu stood, retrieved his staff from where he had left it, and began doing katas against the suitably-outfitted drone. Xa followed his movements for awhile, but after a few minutes some of his rapid movements became too much to keep track of and she began feeling a bit of a headache.

Xa went out into the rock field to meditate. As she passed beyond the circle of the camp she paused, reacquired her own weapons, and took them with her. When she found her seat she planted the staves into the ground, pointing up into the stars.

One particular nearby star, an aging scarlet giant, blazed a brilliant...

\ \

Red light blazed a brilliant scarlet in Xa's vision as she fought off Jak's second attempt to restrain her. His lighter was already lying ten meters away where she had wrenched it from his belt and hurled it; in fact, the supposedly unbreakable belt itself was nearly ripped from his trousers. Jak found himself on the defensive and used a combination of sambo strikes to force some distance between himself and Xa. She backed away—in the direction of the fallen lighter—and dodged Jak's attempts to grapple. She reached the lighter just ahead of him; he feinted an attack and dropped to retrieve the weapon, but Xa spun and kicked the weapon into the path of an oncoming transit train. The lighter shot sparks on the track briefly as it was run over but Xa was sprinting away, the pain in her legs overridden for the moment by the desperate urge to flee.

"Xa! Get back here!" Jak snarled, and began to chase after her. Slia interposed and struck at the startled Farseeker's face with the heel of her hand, the combination of the momentum of her strike and his run spattered blood from his nose and he rocked back, stunned for a moment. Xa did not see Slia's delaying action and continued to run; she sprinted up the overpass over the tracks and took the movewalk on the opposite side of the transit bundle.

"Security!" Jak bellowed.

The station computer responded immediately: "Please state the nature of the security emergency," came a directed sound beam aimed in Jak's direction.

Xa did not hear the answer; she was sprinting down the movewalk, adding her own headlong velocity to the movewalk's own speed. It took her little time to reach the vertical lift that took her to the Levanah's Dream's berth on the docking tunnel above the Promenade. She slapped her hand on the airlock controls, not waiting for the doors to slide all the way open before squirming through and reversing the control.

She provided her handprint and voice pattern to the computer and entered the airlock on the bottom of the borrowed vessel. She automated the prelaunch checks—something she never did—and acknowledged the computer's go-ahead with the order to cold-restart the PALF reactor. The AI complained but Xa overrode the complaints while simultaneously activating the engines manually and deactivating communications subroutines. "Warning—" the AI began. Xa applied a short burst from the ventral docking thrusters, ripping the vessel from the station. Brilliant red lights flashed on the station as Flameseed went to alert; the circular dock that Xa had just separated from flashed a pattern of white, red, and violet lights in rapid succession, indicating that the airlock was no longer safe to dock at—Xa had probably caused some minor damage to it by not allowing the power and computer couplings time to retract.

Xa didn't care. Red light flared in her head, along with building pain in her torso. Her hands shook as she programmed a few subroutines into the computer that would keep the ship's AI from interfering with her.

The PALF went to full power and Xa, kilometers from the station now, engaged the drives at the full four hundred gravities the Void's Dance class was rated for, and then a few extra that Klara had tweaked out of the engines.

A Black Star Line ship, a small but high-acceleration Silent Calling class, pulled away from the station a moment later; Xa gazed at the telltales through a haze of tears. At least it meant the station was not going to use its prodigious weaponry to blow her to atoms. The other vessel overtook the Levanah's Dream in minutes and came alongside, ignoring all traffic codes to come dangerously close and flash a coded message through with its purple running lights. Xa turned away from the screen and continued slipstream preparation.

As an afterthought she turned the ship around and accelerated in the direction of Xleixa. Perhaps it would throw them off her course for long enough for her to leave the Crimson system's gravitic sensor detection range.

Eight minutes after the reactor hit full power the Levanah's Dream flashed into slipstream. Xa stared into the mirrored barrier around the ship, knowing that somewhere nearby the other ship had transitioned to beta band and was tracking her. No matter. In thirty-two minutes she would be in zeta band, one band higher than her tail—or any other ship in the Maru—was able to match except for the White Star Line's fast couriers.

She wondered bitterly if she would qualify as a Lost One yet. She leaned over her console and cried with grief and the rising tide of pain in her body, longing for the sight of the stars—but the stars of slipstream were invisible past the ship's opaque field.

Xa sank back in the chair of the stolen vessel as the pain overwhelmed her again—red fire blazed from the cuts in her hands, like blood, the the light of Crimson. She stared into the fire, pain taking her body in slow, unrelenting waves. Blackness began to swell between the waves, a hot blackness that was no relief from the fire... but at least there were stars in it...

Xa lost consciousness before the ship even reached gamma band. The ship flew on, following the dangerous course that was the last order given.

[Pakkrat [N7LA]]

Amazing.  This should see more views if moved to the Roleplaying sub-Form.

 

From the Editor's desk at NET-7 SOL, this is the Pakkrat.