by

Dario Ciriello

by

Dario Ciriello

Yvène felt the pressure against her soul the moment she woke. She barely made it to the tiny cabin sink before she threw up. Gasping, she released the cabin’s foldout seat and settled before the little shrine she'd arranged in the study nook. She closed her eyes and breathed.

It normally took her less than a minute to uplink via her Dea implant, but she felt instead as if she were trying to work free of a wet blanket tied around her.

She ran a diagnostic on her uplink soulware. Nothing. She tried a second time. Still nothing.

If the Goddess spanned all that was and underlay the totality of existence, where was She now? Over the past decade the Far Sisters had sent priestesses out beyond the Boötes void and to Trinità Grigia in the distant Horologium Cluster: even a billion light years away, they'd still been able to uplink. Why then would She shun this ultimate boundary?

The doubts, never far away, resurfaced. Why, of all the Sisters on hundreds of worlds, had they chosen her?

She tried again to uplink, without success. But though her implant was quiet, other senses rang with the strangeness of whatever filled –- or failed to fill -- the nothingness beyond the ship.

Yvène realized that she had begun to push back, and that her breath, and thus her mind, had become scattered. She settled herself, visualizing the boundary of her physical body aligned with the boundary that lay beyond the fragile husk of the ship.

Far enough. No further.

#

Yvène slipped into the control room. Misha was cradled in his pilot's couch, synched into the ship, his back to Yvène. After a hundred hours at the boundary, he and the AI would once more charm the dark energy required to dilate the transform tunnel and propel the ship back to Jupiter space.

Kenna, Oort & Kuyper Mining and Heavy Industry's senior physicist, sat in the crew chair to Misha's right. A slight, unsmiling woman, openly angered by Yvène's presence on board, she worried the rows of controls before her with tight, precise movements, utterly absorbed.

O&K, the project's financiers, had fought the Sisters' request to take a priestess to the boundary; Destiny was by necessity a tiny craft, some thought the extra berth would be better occupied by a scientist.

In the center of the room, Stephen, the mission's Cosmologist, stood staring at the overhead display. The display was blank, but not entirely still. Ephemeral flecks of colored snow twinkled here and there in the not-quite black field, aggregating into the occasional ghost of a line or angle or circle, vanishing as instantly as they appeared.

Stephen surfaced from his reverie as Yvène joined him. He looked at the drink bulb in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. His eyes shifted to Yvène and he broke into a boyish grin.

"Coffee?" he said. The mundane question jarred against the strangeness of what lay outside.

"No, but thanks." She pointed to the display. "Is that it?"

He frowned. "Yes. We don't think the sparkles and flickers are, um, real, just the system trying to come to grips with whatever's out there. Kenna's configuring the instrument array to make some kind of sense of it." He studied her face. "Are you all right?"

"Just. . . this sense of -- it --pushing at me."

"It?"

"The boundary. The No-Thing."

Kenna sniffed, and muttered something inaudible.

"Could be the field," Stephen suggested, "though I'm damned to see how you could feel it."

"The field?"

"Borrowed energy from the interface. That's what's holding us here."

"I don't understand."

Kenna didn't deign to turn. "I could show you the equations, but you'd probably prefer to go meditate or something."

Yvène glanced at the physicist. Childish. She raised a translucent shell in her mind, a ward between herself and the woman.

Stephen hurried on. "When I say the field's holding us here, it's arguable whether 'here' is even a real place. We haven't fully emerged from the transform tunnel; just hanging, as it were, between its terminus and ordinary spacetime."

Kenna turned a glare on him, which he appeared to not even notice. He sucked on the bulb of coffee.

"It's like the opposite of a black hole's event horizon," he went on. "The closer you approach the boundary, the more energetically spacetime curves away from it. Impossible to detect under normal conditions, even nose to nose.

Yvène felt the pressure closing on her again. "How near to it are we?" she asked, surprised that her voice came out as steady as it did. She would have liked to scream.

The cosmologist nodded. Kenna appeared to have not even heard. "That's a good question. It's hard to determine, partly because we're using the transform field to tweak the local physics so that we can study the boundary. But based on display lag and allowing for the odd physics, we're looking at ten to fifteen light-minutes distant, no more. Say a hundred and fifty million miles."

Misha pushed the sync-cap up off his head and climbed out of the pilot's couch, massaging his scalp through thick black curls. "Out here, that counts as nose to nose," he added, with a smile at Yvène.

The display continued to produce a few lonely sparkles and fleeting ghosts of geometry. Yvène tickled her implant for any possibility of uplink, found none. She pictured the Destiny as a moth trapped in a web of forces, batting at the darkened windows of an infinite cathedral. She glanced at the others; how could they not feel it?

As if in answer, Stephen stretched his arms, clasped his fingers behind his neck; she heard the click of a tense joint popping. "Kenna's deploying the main equipment arrays; it'll take the best part of an hour. Anybody hungry?"

#

The Far Sisters had begun as the Order of our Mother of the Stars, a mystical offshoot of Earth's old Southern Catholicism, at around the time Jokastra Eng had formulated the proofs that led to the development of the Dark Transform and the opening of interstellar space. In the global clamor for meaning that followed the inevitable expansion and collapse, the Far Sisters grew from a small, cloistered community to a widespread and respected faith.

The Far Sisters' teachings were simple, and drew not a little on older Goddess and fertility cults. All living things were the dream of the Goddess; spacetime was Her cloak, the galaxies the milk of Her breasts; Her flesh was dark matter, Her laughter the explosion of stars.

The Sisters imposed no rules, made no judgments, excluded no-one from the ranks of believers. Their sacred teachings recounted how, at the birth of our universe, the male and female principles had separated. The primordial God had left to father other universes, leaving the Goddess to nurture all that is.

The Sisters promised no afterlife, but encouraged their followers to practice acceptance of the real and take joy in today: 'the pleasure you feel is the pleasure you bring to the Goddess', went the teaching. This naturally led to a degree of worshipful partying among believers, which the Sisters did nothing to discourage.

Those few whom the Goddess chose were elevated to the sisterhood.

Yvène, strictly a weekend believer, found herself visited by the Goddess in the middle of a restaurant one evening, suffering a spontaneous uplink so intense that she passed out. On waking, she recounted a dream in which she had merged with the Goddess in the vast reaches of infinite space.

In the weeks that followed, Yvène had tried everything to deny the vision; but the more she resisted, the more the Goddess impinged on her mind with dreams and coincidences too extreme to ignore. Bewildered, she eventually visited the local temple of the Far Sisters, where she was interviewed, accepted into the Order, and fitted with her implant that very day.

#

With the Destiny's instruments fully deployed and calibrated, Stephen and Kenna began to measure and sample, analyze and record. Stephen was clearly excited, boiling with energy and enthusiasm, in counterpoint to Kenna's unemotional, measured efficiency.

Alone in her cabin, Yvène dimmed the lights, performed a traditional cleansing, and cast a protective sphere about the place. Satisfied that all external influences had been banished, she tried again to uplink.

Almost at once, her consciousness began to align with the Goddess's. She diffused outward through the ship's flimsy hull, ballooning into the velvet void until her center was everywhere.

She glowed with the Goddess's welcome. Galaxies glimmered like dust motes through her being, and she heard the crackle of hard radiation and the ceaseless whisper of neutrinos; she ran her fingers through nebulae and gas clouds as a child might play with a wisp of smoke.

But there was something else, something not the Goddess, yet ancient, immense. It pressed at her back, beyond the dense folds of night. Imagination? Even during uplink, a corner of her mind always doubted

A billion sparkling galaxies wheeled around her as she turned. She glimpsed an edge of iridescent light before it slipped around behind her again; and once more, faster than she could turn. If that was the boundary, it was reluctant to let itself be known.

She looked for the Destiny, a tiny, spinning hub-and-rim construct the size of a fingernail, held in its membrane of forces at the mouth of a cave darker than the night.

She shrank, shrank, shrank, until the ship grew from a tiny toy to a human-made thing. A gleaming articulated stem attached a circular pod bearing a great blossom of instruments to the ship The bright orange letters that formed the little ship's name screamed humanity's pride.

But strange winds blew here, disturbing her focus. Flowing from the No-thing behind her, cold tendrils of something like fear –- a thing she had never felt during uplink.She tried to turn again, but she was caught up and swept away from that place, back toward the star-dusted dark of the known.

And from everywhere she heard the whisper, Trust me, daughter.

Flash of light, stab of pain at her neck, fast as the slash of a cat's claw. . .

Yvène was back in her body.

A fierce buzzing at the base of her skull, where the implant was grafted into the skin had brought her back. She probed the area with a fingertip and felt an unmistakable, high-frequency vibration, as though a wasp were waking under there.

An implant couldn't vibrate. It was just a biochip.

She forced herself to remain still, focusing on her breathing and on slowing her heart rate. Let the adrenaline roar through her system, watch its progress at a remove, allow it to dissipate.

But the sensation in her neck grew, became more intense, sharper, hotter. The chair toppled as she made for the door. The needle of fire became a dagger; a whimper of pain escaped her as she fumbled at the plate. By the time the door slashed open she was on her knees, clawing at the fire in her neck. She screamed.

The empty tubeway spun around her, and the world went away.

#

Misha held up a small, melted lump of plastic. Stephen hovered behind him.

"Your implant," said Misha, "what's left of it. I had to cut it out, fast. It was smoking, starting to melt. There wasn't time to prep you properly. I'm afraid there may be some scarring, but the derm should cover most of the damage."

She stared up at the little black thing in his hand. There was no pain, but a vague awareness of the medsleeve over her forearm and a heavy, delicious sensation of warmth and comfort. Painkiller. Good.

"Do you know what happened?" asked Misha.

No. Yes, maybe. She had a voice somewhere, went looking for it. Her cabin seemed to dilate and grow transparent. Patches of dark stole across the walls. She was uplinking spontaneously.

"Yvène?"

She tried to focus on Misha's face. "Tired," she managed.

Worry lines relaxed into a smile. "Okay, rest now. I'll come to check on you. The comm's right here if you need anything, okay?"

She had a vague impression of him placing something in her hand before he turned to leave. Maybe she mumbled a thank you.

#

Misha watched the scientists sort through readings and data. His sense of anticlimax grew as the hours crawled by. He wasn't sure what he'd expected out here, beyond all known space, but it certainly wasn't boredom.

Kenna gestured at the overhead which still ran its random dance of ghost-forms and speckles. "It's as though half the equipment wasn't even working."

"So what's next?" said Misha. Four days of this would have him crawling up the walls.

Stephen stifled a yawn. "We're about ready to begin the active test series. UHE laser, terawatt plasma beam, good old-fashioned lead balls. . . We'll see what poking and prodding turns up."

Misha blinked. Before this, it hadn't bothered him that he was largely in the dark on the specifics of the project. He'd only been hired to get the ship and its crew here and back in one piece. The pay was more than generous, the mission historic enough to set him up for life.

But only if they got home in one piece.

"You're going to fire lead balls at -– at that?" Suddenly, the boredom seemed safe, the stillness out there something best left alone.

"Fifty millimeter projectiles, accelerated at several gees. From this distance they'll impact at somewhere around three percent of c." Stephen chuckled; Misha realized his mouth was hanging open like an idiot's. "Don't worry about reaction forces. The round leaves the cannon at low v before igniting its little reactor. Tiny thing. Packs a punch, though."

Plasma beam. Nuke-powered slugs. "What the heck are you trying to do?"

The cosmologist blinked. "Well, see if the boundary reflects energy or absorbs it. Try to get some sort of read on what the thing is."

Misha frowned. The boundary –- whatever it was –- existed for a reason. It marked the edge of the known, and maybe the edge of what they were meant to know. He couldn't shrug off the impossibility of what they'd nestled up against. That sense of pressure Yvène had talked about.

"In any case," the cosmologist mused, "I'd be happy just to get some usable data. The chances of us affecting the boundary in any meaningful way are, I suspect, next to zero." He chuckled. "I very much doubt we're going to poke a hole in it and precipitate a catastrophic phase change for the universe."

"Thanks for the reassurance," said Misha. Stephen smiled, the irony passing right over his head.

#

Yvène wandered in and out of uplink, never quite joining fully, always aware of her physical body back in the cabin. Uplink blended with dreams and waking. She woke at one point to see Misha in the doorway, watching her with concern.

Awake again, she wondered if there'd been any uplink at all, with her implant gone. Perhaps she'd dreamed it. But there'd been that first time, when as an ordinary person she'd been chosen by the Goddess. She still remembered the power of it. How in the course of that brief encounter the Goddess had spoken her thousand names, and the one most secret name that only the Sisters knew: the name of Her summoning, the name of true Joining.

Yvène spoke that name into the empty cabin.

No floaty joining and perfect calm, but a soul-rattling surge of uncontrollable force shattered all sense of self. The Goddess responded to Her one true name and took Yvène to the brink of madness. Like a dam bursting, everything that was Yvène –- mind, ego, will –- broke and was swept away in that flood of raw energy. Eons of time buried her; she shook with power and knowing, drowned in her own immensity. The true joining, blasting all doubts.

#

Misha checked on Yvène. She appeared peaceful, just lying there, one hand tucked under her cheek. Attractive too, not just physically, but in a way that dug into him a little. What would she be like in the sack? The Far Sisters weren't known for chastity, after all. Yvène, though. . . she'd be complicated.

The med panel read all green; approaching the bunk, Misha could see Yvène's eyelids ripple in REM sleep. The medsleeve would keep her drugged as long as necessary, he thought, with a touch of envy.

With every passing hour, the sense of the No-Thing –- that was what she'd called it -- out there had grown, until he felt it as a physical presence. Misha'd never been any sort of believer, but what they were doing here went too far. If there was anything humans weren't meant to know, the No-Thing was it, and here they were knocking at its door.

He shook his head. Nuts to it -- it wasn't his problem. At five million for a four-day trip, you did what you were told and counted your blessings.

Back on the control deck, Misha watched the display from the doorway as they fired the plasma beam

The two scientists were quiet at their console as they waited for a read on the beam's effect. The minutes dragged. Was he the only one feeling the tension? What if they ran all their tests and nothing happened?

A frantic pounding broke the silence.

Stephens's legs hammered a tattoo on the deckplates. He screamed, a weird glissando thing beyond sanity; half-rose in a squirming, reptilian movement, swayed a moment, and toppled sideways, arms flailing, legs sliding out from under him. By the time Misha overcame his shock, the cosmologist lay unmoving on the floor between his chair and the main console.

1. #

It felt something at the empty place where there could be nothing, a tickle at the back of its dream, intrusion into its perfect sphere of self. The touch was precise, just there. It reached, caught the touch, sent a part of itself to seek a joining. It compressed, flowed, expanded into a place not of its dream; confined, yet. . . interesting.

And there, a bright new dream, complex, delicate, ephemeral.

It entered, seeking to join.

The host-dream felt the joining, reacted with change and bright flashes in its image-place. Disruption, disharmony! It adjusted its touch, sought understanding, found the nexus of control. A surge of images, then nothing.

Strange: not real.

And it returned whence it had come, to the more fruitful dream.

#

Yvène awoke drenched in sweat. The medsleeve must have stopped feeding her drugs – she was clear-headed – but the uplink had been overwhelming, terrifying.

Uttering the Goddess’s one true name had never before resulted in such appalling power. Any more might have killed her.

But how, with her implant gone?

The truth crashed into her head. The implant was never intended to facilitate uplink! It was a governor, a way to dampen joining so that a priestess could withstand it. That explained why the Sisters fitted it to new priestesses at once.

Yvène wondered why they hadn't told her, how it remained a secret. Was there a probation period? How long did you have to be a priestess before --

A blade of fear slashed at her raw nerves, followed a heartbeat later by a scream outside her room. Before Yvène could summon the visualizations for a banishing, the sense of terror dissipated as suddenly as it had started.

She detached the medsleeve. Stood. The cabin slewed alarmingly before her balance reasserted itself. She found a coverall, slipped it on, and made her way unsteadily into the tubeway and up to the commons.

Stephen lay still on his back, the contents of a medkit scattered beside him. Misha knelt at his side, a small device loosely held in one hand. Kenna turned a poisonous look on Yvène.

"He's dead." Misha glanced up. "Massive stroke."

Yvène didn't need an uplink to understand. That wasn't a No-Thing out there, it was a something, a very ancient something, a something that, once disturbed, had reached out and touched the cosmologist.

"We have to leave," she said. "What's out there –-"

"No," said Kenna.

Misha hesitated a moment. "Yvène's right. We don't belong here."

"We're not going anywhere! I've waited years for this opportunity. We still have almost eighty hours, and I intend to use every minute of it."

Yvène could see the woman's fear writhing in yellow-green coils beneath the tough words. Not fear of the boundary itself, or even what lay beyond it, but fear of not knowing, of leaving empty-handed. Of failing.

And more than that: Kenna was afraid of her, or rather of what Yvène represented. Afraid that whatever was out there wasn't within any knowable realm, wasn't quantifiable by any instrumentation, couldn't be described in any set of equations. She had everything at stake.

Misha was shaking his head. "We have a dead man here. Whatever killed him –- "

"He had a stroke," said the physicist. "You just said so."

"Yes, and something caused it, something from out there. Something that should have been left alone. You want it to kill you too? As pilot it's my --"

Kenna cut him off, her face bloodless, her voice coldly calibrated. "And as Chief Science Officer I'd remind you your payment is contingent on the mission fulfilling its objectives. You do your job and let me do mine. Got it? Right now, removing the body would seem a priority."

Misha's shoulders slumped, his internal struggle short-lived. He started picking up the scattered contents of the medkit and shoving them back in the case.

"Wait," said Yvène, kneeling. She laid her palm across the dead man's eyes, extending her awareness, afraid of what she might find, ready to raise her wards at the slightest touch of anything other.

But there was just a dead man. Whatever else might have been there was gone.

"Leave him alone, damn you!" snapped Kenna, slapping Yvène's hand away. The woman was boiling over, irrational, on the edge of violence.

Yvène rose to face her. With the shadow of the Goddess's power still on her, she could stop the woman with a single word. But she had no wish to experience another uplink like the last. Ever.

And Kenna turned abruptly back to her chair and began to palm controls and tap at keys and switches.

#

Yvène was sitting on her bunk with her knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her legs when Misha appeared in the doorway. "May I?"

"Please."

He pulled out the only chair from the little nook she'd turned into a shrine and sat heavily. "What was it, Yvène? What killed him? Was it the same thing that melted your implant?"

She shook her head.

"How do you know?"

Yvène looked at him. "Are you a believer, Misha?"

He shrugged, noncommittal. "I'll listen."

She told him about the uplink she'd had, about the intensity of the joining without the moderating effect of the implant. "She did it. She took my implant away."

"Why would your –- your Goddess –- hurt you?"

Because she wants me to join with her, unmoderated. The thought terrified Yvène.

"And why take it away now, when we've got that to deal with?" He jerked a thumb toward the cabin's wall, toward the that. "And you know what Kenna's doing? She's powering up the plasma generator for another try."

#

It was more careful this time. It entered the new host in a measured trickle, stealing quietly into the dream nexus. It remained still, observing, and had begun to align itself with the host before the host –- the woman-dream, the Kenna, as it now understood it -- became aware of its presence. But the Kenna's reaction was unexpected, and shocked it into a reply that caused the Kenna's dream nexus to cease functioning in any coherent way.

But before the Kenna-dream stopped it had caught a glimpse of a more robust and ordered system, one which might prove better capable of hosting it.

It flowed. . .

#

A new dread had taken hold of Yvène, making it difficult to keep her fingers tight around the rungs as she hurried after Misha to the control deck. If it had come back –- she knew it had –- they were powerless to stop it.

But the Goddess was not. Yvène could speak the name, become again possessed, surrender control, once again endure that terrible shattering of self.

But if she did, then what? Fight it? Try to force it back? What if it remained in the ship and they returned home with it aboard? Better, perhaps, if they all died out here.

As they entered the control deck the display lit up in a burst of brilliance so intense Yvène and Misha had to cover their eyes. A moment later the screen was grey and dead.

Kenna was slumped in her chair, one arm dangling. She was breathing, but catatonic; her mouth was slack, her eyes open but unfocused. Misha waved a hand before her face, to no effect.

A bank of lumos lit green on the board, and there was a whine from below, down toward Destiny's hub. The deck shivered beneath them. The lights flickered.

Misha was in his chair and pulling the sync-cap onto his head before Yvène could react.

"No!" She lunged forward to rip the cap away from his head, but he seized her wrist with unhuman speed and slammed her to her knees. With a bang! the lights went out, plunging them into impenetrable dark.

Terrified, Yvène spoke the name. This time the uplink was so fast that she almost lost consciousness.

She stood in a plain of tall grass stretching away to snow-capped mountains fresh as tomorrow. The sky overhead was burnished steel, the air sharp with ozone. The breeze hissed like static. No world was ever so new.

The grass around her burst into flame; a curtain of fire pure and blue, rising dozens of feet into the air, encircled her. Not threatening, merely containing. She felt something brush against her mind, heard its voice. What are you?

Without knowing how, she took the storm-driven waves she'd watched break against the ruins of Sydney as a child and hurled them at the flames before her, quenching them instantly in a roar of steam. She walked forward through the steaming grasses. Mother to all am I. Show yourself.

A ripple crossed the plain, and the breeze grew to a mighty wind. The grasses folded; tufts of them ripped loose and pelted past her along with clods of earth and small stones. It did her no harm, but impeded her progress.

She invoked the deeps of space.

The storm stopped abruptly, air yielding to vacuum. The sky was black velvet, the plain and mountains invisible. And in that dark, she felt him. And remembered.

I know you, she said into the silence.

His fear came to her, vast, raw.

I know you, she repeated. An eon ago. You returned to the place of dreams, to father new dreams. New universes.

An absolute stillness, time itself stopped.

A glow parted the dark before her, a fuzzy sphere of brilliance. She wondered if she appeared the same to him.

You are not my dream, He said. You are Other.

She advanced. Let me touch you.

A new wave of fear came from him. The brilliant sphere retreated.

You cannot go back. That dream is done. We must dream together now.

She let light back into the grassy plain and he paused. She fashioned a bubble of images and memories and all that she knew, all of it, and let it float to him.

Oh! he said, after a time.

Yes, she said. Look. . .

#

In the dark and the growing cold, they held one another. Neither the AI nor the rest of the systems had been able to contain the power. The ship was dying.

Yvène savored the few sweet moments of humanity that remained to them, the simple, primal sensation of human comfort, of touch, of shared warmth. Very soon there would be only the great and ancient creators. The Sisters had been right all along. Closer than shadows, Goddess and God waited to reclaim them and begin the new dream.

Misha's teeth were chattering. "Is it the end?" he asked. "Wh-What about everyone else?"

"The beginning," she said. "It'll take time, eons. And we'll be there to see it."

"But not like this," he said, his voice suddenly tight and small.

"Not like this, no. Better."

And she kissed him.

THE END