Story Excerpt

Consumer
by Stephen Case 

Thoughts in space came slowly. Trennis knew this was true, but she could not feel the difference. Her mind was spread across the radius of her drone swarm so that thoughts that would have lanced through physical neurons in milliseconds took orders of magnitude longer, skipping through drones separated by entire light seconds. Instead of feeling her thoughts slowed though, it felt rather that the universe had sped up around her. She could almost see the whorls of nebula drifting in gentle spirals through her sensors.

Aboard the Grove, her siblings slept through the standard-weeks and semi-years that Trennis and Mother searched the edges of the nebula. Time had little meaning here, where nothing ever happened. Her family had been searching this nebula, staring from its relative safety out toward the neighboring stellar systems, for Trennis’s entire adult life. The older siblings all took shifts, loading their consciousnesses into drone swarms while the rest of them slept, passing decades hidden in the night.

Trennis loved the silence. She loved the taste of the nebula’s heavy metals on the skin of her drones, the soft play of magnetic fields against their hulls. She pushed her swarm to the sculpted boundary of the nebula. Straining her sensors outward and using the diameter of her swarm as a baseline, she could just detect the parallax of the nearest stars, giving the starscape before her a hint of three-dimensionality.

She didn’t feel hungry when she was in a swarm. She didn’t get tired, or bored. She drifted like a cloud, sending her drones poking along the edges of the nebula, peering outward.

There.

Something in the field of view of a single drone. Trennis turned the rest toward the same spot, stilled her mind, and looked.

Something there.

For a moment she felt a wash of terror, but this wasn’t the bubbling gravitational wake of a Fermi-hunter. The object was motionless, either moving with zero relative velocity or drifting with the slow speed of a star. It was not stellar magnitude, though, and appeared only the faintest infrared.

It was exactly as Mother had described.

“I see something, Mother,” she whispered, sending a signal from the drones at the periphery of her swarm toward where Mother’s drifted a few light-seconds away.

“Describe.”

In her swarm, Trennis was a mind in which every neural node had eyes and ears. They all strained toward the object.

“Too far to get a clear fix on parallactic distance,” she said. “Glowing in infrared. Nothing from gravimetrics.”

There was silence in response for several seconds. Trennis tried not to let herself consider what it would mean if this was indeed what they had been seeking for so long. But it was impossible not to feel a stir of emotion. If this was in truth a Closure, if it was one of St. Dychild’s Spheres . . .

“Wait for me,” came the reply. “I’m coming.”

Trennis focused her attention on the drones at the farthest perimeter of her swarm, probing for any hint of parallax in the object. She could see it now through several drones. It was far too distant for features to be visible, and the lack of parallax meant it was at least several light-years distant, far beyond the reach of her swarm even if the yawning darkness beyond the nebula carried no risk of hunters. The infrared photons she was gathering slowly painted a picture. The object was large. It was spherical. 

It was clearly artificial. 

Trennis felt a surge of hope. It would take finding only a single Closure to justify all the long years of searching.

 

In the bowers of the Oaken Grove, Mother told them stories in the night.

“We are but whispers,” she would say, “hunted in the dark. But we were once much more.”

Mother said there was a time when humanity was more than refugees on hidden ships like the Grove scattered among whatever vagabond fleets remained. There had been entire settled worlds, she said, scattered across the galactic reaches. Humanity had an empire among the stars, its vastly distant worlds sharing ideas and information across the galaxy’s breadth in conversations lasting thousands of years.

On some of those worlds, civilization had flourished on a scale Trennis could only imagine, no matter how brightly Mother painted the visions: human consciousnesses in drone swarms spanning light-years, swarms that dwarfed the tiny cluster Trennis rode within and that could stride between planets like gods. Humanity had carried the capacity to re-shape worlds themselves, to weave nets about the very stars. 

Yet in all the immensity of space, humanity was alone and wondered why.

The answer came when, after centuries of striving, the light-speed barrier was finally breached. The first skip-space generator was hailed as humanity’s final conquest, the defeat of distance itself. Ships suddenly jumped across the night, taking in moments voyages that would have taken millennia. For the first time, the galaxy was truly united, all humanity connected in a vast community.

It was only then, Mother said, that the Fermi-hunters came. As if skip-space technology had been a signal, the hunters appeared, everywhere and all at once. Whenever Mother reached this point in her stories, her voice fell. All the embellished descriptions she used for detailing the wonders of the worlds of humanity faded. 

There was no need to describe the hunters. 

Trennis had seen them for herself.

After humanity’s ships were ripped from the night, the planets fell. Hunters ravaged the surfaces as though to ensure the civilization that had given rise to the skip-space generator would never again have capacity to trouble the fabric of space. And, once awakened, the hunters did not stop. No worlds survived but those of rumors and legend.

That was where Mother’s tales always ended, with the legendary Closures. The worlds of humanity that had been the most evolved had the capacity, she said, to hide themselves completely, to reshape their very systems, to spin out vast networks of braided filaments of carbon and silicon, to cocoon their stars. They were able, Mother said, to encase themselves, turn themselves away from the night, and hide.

No one had ever found a Closure. None among the straggling survivors of humanity in the dwindling refugee fleets had claimed to have seen one. But there were stars, Mother insisted, that had gone missing from the oldest charts.

“Maybe the hunters ate them.” This suggestion usually came from Egregia, one of the youngest of the siblings.

“Even the hunters could not consume a star.”

“Maybe the maps were broken or corrupted.” This from Severa, the oldest and always questioning.

“Perhaps. But we seek them still.”

Perhaps we just need to hope they are there, Trennis realized one day when Mother was telling the stories. 

 

Trennis could feel Mother approaching, hear the soft radio hiss of Mother’s drones decelerating as they mingled with her own.

“Show me,” Mother said, and Trennis focused weak lasers from several drones, offering tiny trails of irradiated particles trailing toward the object.

“No signs of heat leakage,” she told Mother. “As best I can tell, its size is smaller than projections, but . . .” Trennis did not say the rest, but in their intermingled swarm her thoughts may have been loud enough to hear. We may have found it: a place of safety.

Together, Mother and Trennis drifted farther toward the nebula’s edge, propelling their drones with the soft discharge of supercooled gas. Their tiny relative motion forward helped them see more clearly through the comparative thickness of the nebula. With their combined swarm, they could gather more light and create an even larger observational baseline.

“Size about 30 percent lower than expected,” Mother agreed after they had waited in silence for several hours, “though that rules out nothing.”

The last of Mother’s swarm was finally arriving. With all their drones available, they shifted into a new configuration: a lenticular cloud that would let them focus on the object, listen to it, spend significant time gathering as much data as possible. They would be absolutely sure before they broke cover. Families did not survive long without learning to be cautious.

Even as they kept the eyes and ears of their drones focused on the object, Trennis devoted a portion of her swarm’s periphery to scanning for any signs of hunters. They had seen none since Mother led them into the nebula, not long after Trennis came aboard, but that meant nothing. Since the hunters had appeared, there was no threshold at which travel was safe. There was no way to know what might draw them from the fabric of space. 

It was as though the night itself had grown teeth.

“All right,” Mother said after what felt like several hours, but, in the slow speed of distributed thought, was probably several weeks. “We have enough to go home and wake the others.”

They turned their swarms back toward the Oaken Grove, and Mother sent the signal that would begin to wake the family from their long sleep. When they were close enough, Trennis switched her swarm over to auto control to be gathered up in the bays along the Grove’s exterior and shunted consciousness back to where her body waited. Stars faded as her mind left space.

She opened her eyes in the sway-berth.

“Welcome back,” Festidia whispered. Her older sibling was leaning over her, smiling. “Good fishing?” 

Trennis’s eyes slowly adjusted to the interior. The Grove was running dark, still waking up, with only the faint bioluminescence of its interior planking outlining the ship’s curving walls in soft crimson and blue flows.

She gripped Festidia’s hand as she stepped out of the berth. 

“Any sign of hunters?” Festidia asked.

Trennis shook her head and muttered the traditional prayer, “Gods shield us from the hunger of space.” 

Trennis had seen the hunters once, before she joined the family of the Oaken Grove, when she was still a child growing up amidst the ragged refugee fleets. The fleets had kept to the thickest dust-shrouded regions of the galactic arms, looking for other survivors from planets or ringworlds. In those days, ships scattered their crew like spores, and Trennis—whose parents had long ago died when the life support systems had finally failed on the overcrowded vessel where she was born—had been passing from one ship to the next when hunters found them. 

Trennis had been in transit, leaping with only the protection of an environmental suit from a huge luxury liner with crystalline sails to a weathered nuclear-powered vessel carved out of an asteroid, when they came. She watched the skin of space boil away around each vessel, watched them pulled apart in a frothing darkness that might have been grasping tendrils or simply the optical effects of reality shearing away. Within moments the huge flotilla was gone, and Trennis was alone, an abandoned piece of flotsam from another lost fragment of humanity.

She drifted for days before the Oaken Grove, late to rendezvous with the flotilla, had coasted into range and found her.

Mother’s voice stirred her from reverie. Brighter flame-lines in the grain of the ship’s planking began to kindle, bathing the interior in orange and yellow. The light was beginning to feel like morning, like what sunrise might have felt like on a world that orbited a star.

“Festidia,” Mother was saying as she rose from a sway-berth farther down the hall. “Gather the other siblings. Tell everyone to meet in the Great Hall.”

“Everyone, Mother?” It had been a long time since all the siblings had been awake at once.

“Everyone.”

 

The Great Hall was near the center of the Grove, and for all the varied gardens that formed the ship’s interior, Trennis felt the Hall was what gave the ship its name and true identity. It was a wide chamber circumscribed with huge trees that were kept alive even when the Grove was in its lowest power modes. At the center of the chamber the intersecting branches formed a spherical bower. 

“Trennis detected a vast artificial object beyond the nebula’s edge,” Mother said when all the siblings were gathered. They filled the interior surface of the large bower, grasping the netted branches loosely with arms or legs. Mother floated at the center. “I have confirmed, and we’ve gathered all data possible at this distance.” She paused. “We need to go there.”

“Why not send our swarms?” The question, as the first question always did, came from Severa.

“Because if what we have found is a . . . Closure—” Mother spoke the word with a slight hesitation. “We will never gain entry with our drones.”

“If it is a Dychild’s Sphere, will we gain entry at all?” It was Maxime, whose thick blue hair drifted over her face in waves. “If they were created as protection from hunters, they might have shells a hundred miles thick. Whatever is inside might not want visitors.”

Trennis chewed breadnuts still warm from the Grove’s catalysts. They carried the flavor of clove and cinnamon. She tried to imagine cities large enough to cover the surface of worlds and then tried to expand that to worlds stretching across the interior of a sphere with the diameter of an entire stellar system. There would be surface space within a Closure for trillions, perhaps quadrillions, of inhabitants. This was the hope that Mother had so long threaded through her stories: that all the vast diversity of humanity could be retained in such a structure and still have room to spare–cities, continents, entire planets’ worth of forests or seas, mountains and fields.

Assuming they were right in what they had found.

Assuming they could get inside.

“When they were constructed,” Mother said, “worlds were just beginning to fall to the hunters. The builders would have known what was happening. They would have left a way for survivors to reach them.”

Mother spoke as she always did: calm, slow, with the authority of knowledge and experience. She had lived longer than any of them, and as far as Trennis knew she had been aboard the Grove when the first of Trennis’s adopted siblings found their way there. Mother’s authority, despite Severa’s constant questioning, remained absolute. They were not a crew aboard the Oaken Grove; they were a family. Trennis had been on enough refugee ships during her long adolescence to know that with the breakdown of any other hierarchy, family was the only kind of structure that endured. They were a family, and they obeyed their Mother.

“But if it is as huge as a Closure,” Severa said, leaning inward from her perch on the branches, “our swarms will let us explore the surface most efficiently. Even if there are entry ports, on a structure that large it could take years to find them.”

“We will have our swarms when we arrive,” Mother said.

Fusion lamps hung within the branches, casting soft and mottled light. Vines heavy with orange and purple trumpet-blossoms draped the outer reaches of the bower, where the branches thickened into trunks radiating toward the walls, and an occasional dragonfly darted among them, wings slowed to visibility in the ease of low gravity flight.

“The distances, though . . .” This was Festidia, who after the joy of waking now wore worry like a cloud on her brow. 

The fear she felt was shared around the table. For all they knew, they were the only surviving family in the galaxy outside a Closure. They were afraid to leave the safety of the nebula. To push across that distance to the Closure felt like exposure.

“We can’t keep hiding forever,” Trennis found herself saying. She felt the vastness of the Closure as she spoke, hanging dark and sealed against the night. “If this is what we think it is, it’s worth any risk. If it is what we think it is, it must open to us. But not by signal or proxy. We have to go there ourselves.”

“What do you know about it?” Severa’s voice was sharp, almost harsh.

Trennis folded her arms, suddenly embarrassed. “Just a feeling.”

“The feeling is right, though,” Mother said. “What are we hiding for if we cannot risk ourselves on this last hope?” She gestured, and an image materialized in the space beside her, a visualization built of the data their drones had collected. 

The projection showed a solid sphere of darkness, as though a bit of night had congealed at the bower’s center. An indicator blinking near Mother’s shoulder helped them interpret the size: the object was something that could span the interior of a small planetary system. It gave off nothing but the faintest reflection of starlight, but in the image the Grove’s processors had been able to generate from the raw data gathered by their drones, there were indications of some kind of exterior structures barely visible. There was no doubt the object was artificial.

Mother gestured again to unlock the data, a signal for the siblings to pull up their own mirrored projections and run the image through multiple filters. The bower erupted into a flurry of discussions as they zoomed into the image or tested their own resolution algorithms. Mother and Trennis had brought the data; now the family needed time to digest it, test it, play with it.

After a time, though, even the idea of a Closure across scant light-years of space was not enough to hold everyone. They had been sleeping for a long time, and it had been even longer since everyone was awake together. There were things to do, garden paths to explore, couplings to be had. Eventually only the dozen or so senior siblings remained, staring at what looked to be a seething cloudscape hanging between them. In truth, it was a representation of the nebula in which they had sheltered for the past several years.

“Trillions of miles of empty space,” Severa grumbled.

The projected image had become a map, with a tiny viridian dot showing their location deep within a curl of nebula and a crimson ring marking the location of the potential Closure, nearly the length of Trennis’s thin arm away. Mother resized the image, and the space between the indicators grew, the clouds falling away to the margins of the projection, until the display focused on the gap alone.

“There is a protostar here.” Mother pointed, and a tiny spot of white was crowned with a yellow indicator. “Of sufficient mass for us to drop toward and use for acceleration. We could make the crossing at significant relativistic speed.”

“Skip-space would get us there immediately.” This from Maxime, whose tattooed arms were now crossed over her chest.

Refugee ships still skipped, either in emergencies or when the despair of long relativistic travel became too much to bear. But nothing was as likely to draw the Fermi-hunters.

Severa stabbed at a projected pad angled toward her, hammering away at the numbers implied in Mother’s suggestion. As she worked, a tiny thread spun out from the dot marking the Oaken Grove, dipped toward the crowned star, and veered across the projected space to stab at the crimson ring.

“Possible,” she muttered, long fingers poised over her pad like a spider. “Assuming we ramp the Grove to full acceleration.”

Festidia leaned forward. “That might draw the hunters as easily as skipping.”

“Anything might draw the hunters,” Severa shot back. “If we knew what drew them, we could have figured a way to disguise ourselves a long time ago.”

“How long would the journey take?” Mother asked.

There was silence as Severa worked. Trennis could hear younger siblings laughing somewhere nearby. She had never determined whether the Oaken Grove was a pleasure yacht from some lost luxury planet, an experimental agricultural ship, or simply a vessel from a world in which traveling in such verdant abundance was normal. It was certainly like none of the ships Trennis had grown up hopping between. 

“Twenty-four semi-years.”

That gave them pause. Twelve years was a long time to break cover and travel at full burn. 

“We may be the last ship left,” Severa said slowly. “As far as we know.”

Mother nodded. 

Watching her, Trennis wondered for the thousandth time where Mother had come from. The siblings talked about their past, whether they had been raised as infants on the Grove or were foundlings, like Trennis, from elsewhere. Trennis glanced at them around the perimeter of the bower: Festidia, Severa, Theodora, Maxime, Slowstart, Nightlife, O’ooma, Choralis, Clement. They had lived their lives in the shadow of the hunters. They had grown up wanderers, hiding from night itself. But when Mother spoke of the times before, the age when humans had re-created their worlds like gods, she spoke as though she had seen it herself.

Lifespans were strange in a relativistic Universe. With the loss of much technology, the human lifespan had decreased to barely a standard-century. But add to that the effects of relativistic travel and the decades spent sleeping, and it was possible (when fleets of ships still crossed paths) to find someone whose lifespan covered centuries that your own did not, or vice versa.

“As far as we know we may be the last ship,” Mother agreed. “And as far as we know, this object might be the last bastion of safety in the galaxy. Certainly it is the only one we have found. The only one we may ever find again.”

“I want to hear it again,” Choralis spoke softly. Her thin face carried most clearly the fear they all felt. “If we are going to go out there in the dark, all of us, I want to hear the story of the Closures one more time.”

Mother drew back her head and steepled her fingers. Her eyes, which always had a faraway cast, seemed to sharpen.

“When the hunters came,” she said, striking a familiar cadence, “the Golden Age of the Collectivity of Humanity ended. We stopped voyaging across the night. We stopped speaking to one another. Those ships that had fled, like this one,” she gestured to the vines around them, “scattered across the galaxy. All we could do was wait in emptiness—vagabonds, wanderers, fugitives from shores of light. And in the long darkness, we watched and listened.”

As Mother spoke, Trennis’s eyes traced the thread connecting the position of their ship to that of the artifact.

“What we heard were the dying cries of worlds, of entire fleets. What we heard were the choruses of humanity being silenced one by one. What we saw was nothing—no sign of war, no irradiations lighting up the skies, nothing but the darkness of space swallowing everything we had created, bit by bit.

“Until we noticed, those of us looking closely, that a handful of stars were fading. Not disappearing, not going nova, but slowly, over a period of decades and then centuries, fading away. Being shielded. Being closed off. And we knew then that those systems had reached the goal for which many of us had been striving before the hunters came—of completely wrapping a parent star, enclosing it to harness every bit of its energy.

“There was hope, we realized. Those systems were closing the gates, walling themselves in, and within those Closures humanity would endure.”

“And then the message?” Choralis prompted.

Mother smiled sadly. “From everywhere and nowhere. A burst before the last of those stars faded: find us. A call to all who remained outside, who remained in the night.”

Severa was frowning. “If we knew what stars were closed off, why search at all? Why not travel directly toward those coordinates and reach the Closures? How could they become lost?”

“The we in the story, daughter, is poetical. This was all generations ago. Maps have been lost and recovered and lost again. Data is sporadic and unreliable. The Closures became a legend and a hope.” She paused. “Until now.”

The thread—representing twelve years across the night—hung in the image between them.

“I will not command us to risk it,” Mother said. “I know in my heart we should. No matter how beautiful this garden, it remains a prison. But I only ask; I will not compel.”

She was silent then and looked around the bower.

Humanity had long lost the privilege of democracy or representation. But now, very clearly, she was deferring to them, to all the siblings perched among the tangled branches.

Trennis realized her heart was pounding.

Festidia set her elbow to her knee and placed chin firmly in hand, forcing herself to speak over her fear. “I say we should go.”

“Me too,” Maxime rumbled.

“Yes,” Choralis muttered.

O’ooma smiled and raised both hands in her world’s silent yes.

Theodora nodded.

Nightlife and Slowstart locked eyes in faces that had been scarred by some tragedy before coming to the Grove and said “Aye” together.

Clement hugged her shoulders as though either cold or afraid, but spoke without hesitation. “I trust Mother.”

They looked at Trennis.

Trennis remembered the frenzied, broiling darkness that broke around her when the refugee flotilla was consumed. She had felt then, though she had never spoken of it to anyone, that she had been seen by something unimaginable, that there beyond the coiling black that had pulled everything she had ever known into the space below space, something vast and utterly without regard had looked toward her with a million eyes. In that moment she had felt that the Universe was not only empty and meaningless, but so far beyond meaning as to be itself a despair that was physical and studded with stars. The only thing real was that the night itself hungered, and they were asking her now if she would acquiesce to walking back out into it.

She tried to speak, found she could not, and licked her lips.

“Yes,” she breathed. Then, more loudly, “Yes.”

“Fine.” Severa pushed herself toward the center of the bower. “I’ll have Grove ramp up fusion cones slowly, so the chambers have time to adjust to new relative down.”

Given time, the corridors of the ship could readjust, realigning their configuration within the vessel’s interior. With full acceleration, the family would have a clear down for a long time, and the gardens would adapt accordingly.

It was no sooner said than it began. Trennis felt the motion in her stomach, felt the new slight stresses stirring the branches around them.

They were on their way.

1. Approach

Twelve years. Twelve old years, standard Terran years.

Closer to thirty-two Alterran years, which had still been used on some of the ships Trennis visited as a child. Only seven-and-a-half Davidian years, which were used on the planet Festidia’s original fleet came from. Thousands of days by any calendar, though there had been half a dozen different days and semi-days in use among the refugees as well. Oaken Grove days, as best Trennis could tell, were slightly shorter than the dark-light cycles of the ships she had grown up on, but she no longer noticed the difference.

However the time was divided, the trip was long. They slept for portions of it, all of them. Younger siblings stayed in deep sleep for most of the time, rising only occasionally to take lessons and nutrition and to complete the exercises that would keep their bodies from atrophying while they slept. The senior siblings slept in shifts, pairs awake and caring for the ship while the rest slept.

The gardens of the Grove grew lean. The ship diverted energy from growing the diversity of fruits that usually flourished, shunting it instead to fusion cones. Most trees shed their leaves as the flame-lines in the chambers were extinguished and the gardens plunged into a night lit only by soft bioluminescence. The nutrition that grew now came in dense nuts and simple root crops packed with vitamins, confined to a handful of small gardens along the ship’s spine. When Trennis passed down the corridors, heavy with ship acceleration, it was as though winter had come to the interior.

Oaken Grove had traveled hard and fast before, though, long before any of them were passengers. This passage, for it, was relatively easy.

The ship now had a top, where before there had only been the lazy curving corridors of wood. Acceleration meant moving forward along the ship’s axis was now climbing, and a chamber had been adapted at the very fore of the vessel from which to monitor the ship’s systems and trajectory. Festidia said it was a control deck, and pronounced the term with the same hushed reverence Mother used when she told stories of the Golden Age.

To Trennis the new chamber felt like a cave, its wooden walls giving way to a dome built of the signals from fiberoptic vines piping light from the Grove’s exterior. The effect was of standing at the bottom of a well, with control tables lining the perimeter and the upper half of the chamber giving a view of the sky above but really before them. When they had plotted a course to the Closure, the thread of their pathway looked as though it curved across space. The way Severa had spoken, it sounded to Trennis as though they would be falling toward their target. But in reality, Trennis knew that all orientations were convenient fictions. More than anything else, it felt as though they were rising toward their destination, that the object was out there in the darkness over their heads, and that they were racing upward to meet it.

Apart from the cones, Grove was running dark, with only passive sensors. It meant their view of the object was formed only from the photons captured by the Grove’s exterior. And those photons, though they picked out with a sharp clarity the stars that shone harsh and clear now that they had left the nebula, still showed the potential Closure as little more than a black dot, invisible without the crimson indicator hung over its image like a bright shroud.

When Trennis slept and then woke for her next shift, it was the size of her fist held at arm’s length.

The next time she awoke, it was the size of her outspread hand.

Finally, Mother woke them all, and the Grove began questing for the object’s gravitational field, working to determine the best trajectory to drop into orbit with as little deceleration flare as possible. The black sphere that was the Closure—that must be a Closure, Trennis insisted for the millionth time—now took up the view of most of the dome above them.

There had been no signs of Fermi-hunters during the crossing, though Trennis knew that meant nothing. They lurked below the skin of space, and when they came there would be no warning.

Trennis had seen planets before. Not in the flesh, of course, but there were thousands of sims of the lost worlds of humanity, and Mother had made the family visit many in their lessons. Trennis had seen the riven surface of Chad, where hive cities tunneled nearly halfway through the planet’s thin crust, lining mist-shrouded canyons. She had seen the glass forests of Is and the crimson-and-gold double world of Callistix with its seventeen moons. She knew, as well as one could know from a sim, what it felt like to approach a world from orbit. And though she had never done so in truth, she knew the feeling enough to know that this felt wrong.

The object they approached was too large. It was hard to explain exactly how one could know that in space, with no sense of reference or scale, but nonetheless the feeling was there. The object kept growing in view, and soon it was as though they were approaching not a world but a wall, a barrier that cut off more and more of their sky. Yet they were still millions of miles away. Trennis could not conceive of something so large that was not natural, something that had been created by creatures like her.

But were they really like she was? Surely humanity must have evolved to god-like stature to create something like this. She thought of her consciousness distributed through her drone swarm, and she tried to imagine what it would be like to have a swarm of millions or perhaps trillions of drones and direct them in shaping something so immensely vast.

She couldn’t.

There were no nearby stars, so the object’s surface was still nearly indiscernible, like a dark sea with only flecks of something on the surface that barely caught the starlight, making the surface seem jagged and irregular.

The ship around them was quiet, still hushed in the winter of the long passage. The younger siblings were hushed as well whenever they came on the command deck, staring upward at the strange vista. They seemed frightened of the dark plain, which by now took up nearly the entire sky, with only a fringe of stars glimpsed around its edges.

The older siblings gathered in its shadow.

“We’re getting pretty close to it, Mother,” Severa said. She was standing, arms crossed as usual, studying the sweep of black on the dome above. “We should take an active sweep to map its surface.”

Mother nodded, and Severa motioned to Choralis, who worked the sensors. Oaken Grove whispered out a soft song of light across the spectrum and then interpreted the echoes it heard. Contours of the black surface leapt out in detail as new data was superimposed.

“Spurs,” Severa said. “Rising thousands of miles above the surface.”

They were immense pillars, half a dozen of them perhaps, spaced so far apart they might have been asteroids orbiting a central sun. Again, Trennis’s mind grasped for the scales involved. The spurs were longer than continents, wider than moons.

“Are they for docking?” Festidia asked.

The spurs ran in a line along the outer surface of the object, disappearing into the distance where its slow curvature hid them from view. Oaken Grove had slid into orbit around the object now and was moving parallel to the surface, skimming over its immense face. The mass of the object was that of a large star, enough to capture them and let them bleed off their velocity through jets of exhausted gas. They were avoiding a flip and burn they were afraid would alert the hunters—as well as perhaps whatever was inside the object. 

Better to wait and watch.

There was no obvious sign of an entrance port, no lights or activity on the surface, no querying radio call, not even a beacon. That made sense, Trennis admitted, if this was indeed a Closure created to hide and shield whatever was inside.

“Maybe the spurs are an indicator,” Severa said, pointing at the view. “We should follow them around the surface. They could be a passive way of indicating something—perhaps where to go to find a way inside.”

Trennis gave this some thought. A featureless sphere had no point of reference or coordinating system unless given one by rotation, which would define an equator and two poles as well as generating centrifugal gravity for whatever was inside. Their scan showed the object was indeed rotating along a direction that placed the spurs at the object’s equator. That meant coordinates on the surface could be defined in terms of distance from those spurs and toward the poles. But there didn’t seem to be any distinction between the spurs themselves, so there was no obvious way to mark a reference point for longitude.

“I want to take the skiff to one of those spurs,” Festidia said suddenly. The others turned to look at her. “The Grove can continue searching from orbit, but someone needs to go to the surface.” There was an earnestness in her voice Trennis had not heard before. “Those spurs look like places where ships might dock. It seems reasonable to start the search there.”

“We should stay together,” Severa retorted. Slowstart nodded vigorously.

“At least until we’ve explored further,” Mother agreed. “We have not even circled the structure yet.”

“That will take time.” Festidia bit her lip. “We’re so close.” Her voice trembled. “So close to safety. What if it’s just waiting to feel the touch of human contact?”

At the speed they were moving, another spur was already rising up on the horizon.

“I would go with her,” Choralis said.

Mother studied the two of them. “Why not go as swarms?”

Festidia, who had always seemed among the most docile of the siblings, had her narrow face set. “It needs to be human contact. This thing was designed by humans; it might just be waiting for our touch.”

“What, you’ll knock on the hull?” Severa scowled.

“Please.” She looked at Mother.

The Grove had a skiff—a delicate craft of bone-steel and canvas that had clearly been collected at some point long after the Grove itself was crafted—stowed with folded sails along a lower branch near the fusion cones. It had never been launched in Trennis’s memory, but some of the younger siblings played in its narrow cabins that still smelled of oil and marrow.

“Fine,” Mother said slowly. “But it might take months for us to make a full orbit and return to collect you. You may be alone in the dark for a long time.”

It was not until Festidia and Choralis embraced Mother and left the command deck that the weight of what was happening hit Trennis. Everything seemed dwarfed by the significance of their nearness to the object, but here were two siblings physically leaving the Grove, something that had never happened as long as Trennis had been on board. First they had left the safety of the nebula, and now two of her siblings were leaving the safety of the ship itself.

The view above them was still of their direction of travel, but Trennis pulled up a display on her tablet of the skiff anchored to the hull-branch and watched as it detached itself and descended toward the Closure’s surface like a seedpod, spiraling slowly as it moved. It was delicate, a tiny ribbon of hull and sail that carried little more than a bubble of air and a skip generator. It seemed wrong to let the two of them go off on their own, as though a human hand against that unfathomably vast surface would indeed be the key to entering. The Closure might have a keyhole the size of a gas giant, and it would still take years to find it.

“The poles,” Trennis mused aloud as she watched the skiff descend.

Severa turned to her. “What?”

Whoever built the object had the capacity for engineering feats Trennis could not fathom, but they would have had to know their structure might drift for centuries before anyone found it, especially as civilization collapsed in the galaxy around it, and since it was clearly made to remain hidden. Yet those who crafted it must have suspected—must have hoped—that there would be humans outside who might one day locate it and need a way in. And whether the story Mother told of a signal was literally true, the myth was no doubt based on a kernel of fact: they wanted to be found. Surely, then, they would have created it with clues obvious to a human mind.

“That’s where we should go,” Trennis explained. “There are only two unique points on this surface, two places where you would design an entry. Any spur along the equator is the same as any other spur, for all we know. The only unique points are the north or south pole.”

“How could you know that?” Slowstart asked.

“It seems reasonable.” Trennis shrugged. “Whoever is in there has no idea how long it might be before someone finds them, or from what kind of culture they might come. Even if they had written a message on the outside, there’s no telling if anyone could read it. Geometrically, there are only two choices.”

Mother was watching her carefully. “And which do you think we should choose?”

They had shed more acceleration by passive venting, which meant the gravity provided by acceleration was gone and they were on the float again. Seats and control tables had been slowly shifting accordingly, growing perches for zero-g.

Trennis gestured, and a ghost of the object materialized at the center of the room. “We’re traveling opposite its direction of rotation now,” she explained. Projected, it looked like a black ball, studded with spurs along its equator. “Using classical conventions, that means we could indicate our direction as west, with this pole the north and this the south.” Pale purple letters in standard script appeared at her command.

“Either pole would take us a week to reach, and we’d be leaving Choralis and Festidia behind,” Severa pointed out.

Trennis nodded. “We’re leaving them behind whatever direction we go. Right now I want to think through which pole is the best possibility—if we decide to go there.” She glanced at Mother at this last, who was still watching her. “Here’s the orientation of the galactic plane, relative to the equator.” She summoned the data and projected it, then gasped. 

“It’s inclined by less than two degrees.” Even Severa was impressed. “Chances are extremely unlikely random orientation would bring that about.”

Trennis nodded again, taking a deep breath. It had been a hunch. She hadn’t been sure when she called up the image. She hadn’t even been sure, she realized, that what they were looking at was indeed what they hoped it was. But there could be no doubt now: the engineered artifact—the Closure—was oriented almost straight up and down with respect to standard galactic coordinates. It was obviously designed that way.

“Okay,” Severa said slowly. “Now superimpose standard galactic north.”

Trennis did. The tiny silver arrow appeared beside the pole she had marked north.

Slowstart whistled softly. “Galactic up. Someone hung this thing not only with the right alignment; they spun it with the right orientation.”

“Call the skiff back,” Mother said. “We’re going to that pole.”

Severa looked blank for a moment, querying data from the Grove not currently displayed on any screen. “I can’t,” she said after a long instant. “They’re gone.”

“Hunters?” Mother’s voice was sharp.

Trennis spun back to her own display. Where before she had been watching the skiff descend toward the surface, now she saw only blackness.

“No sign of hunters.” Severa’s voice was strained. “They’re just gone.”

“Could they have skipped?”

“We would have seen it.”

“The Closure has defenses,” Mother said, her voice thick with constrained emotion. “I should have suspected. Get us some distance. Increase velocity.”

“We should go down there to look for them.”

“Increase distance,” Mother said, making her voice crack with authority without raising it a decibel. 

They felt the Grove nudge forward with acceleration.

“Maybe they’re inside,” Trennis found herself saying softly, like it was a wish. “Maybe we’ll find them when we find a way in.”

“Send a message,” Mother said to Severa, “toward the Closure. A low pulse, but widespread. Just in case . . .” She trailed off for a moment, the authority in her voice fading. “In case they’re listening. Tell them where we’re headed.”

Trennis wasn’t sure whether she was talking about someone within the Closure or Festidia and Choralis. 

“If there are hunters—” Severa began, but Mother shook her head.

“Just do it.”

Had Mother lost children before? She must have. They had all lost. They were an entire ship of lost children. They had lost their worlds before they ever knew them, and after that they had lost the ships that had carried the remnants of their civilizations. They had been whittled away in the night until for all they knew they were truly the only ones left, here, at the very edge of what might be safety.

Mother surely must have lost children before.

But her face was ashen as she turned from the display. “I’ll be in my quarters.” She stopped in the doorway as she left and looked at Trennis. “Come with me.”

 

Trennis had never been to Mother’s chambers, which were near the center of the ship. She paced the curving corridors beside Mother, using the long, gentle steps of the soft gravity from the Grove’s slow rotation, a gravity that only held here in the outer passages. Her heart hurt. She kept seeing Festidia, who she felt she knew better than any of her other siblings, and Choralis, with their lean face and grey eyes. They had been part of the family, and now they were gone. Disappeared. They had moved a hair’s breadth, it seemed, beyond the walls of safety, only to be swallowed without a trace.

Trennis watched Mother from the corner of her eye, fearing somehow that she too would disappear. 

Is this what it had felt like, Trennis wondered, in the cradle-days of humanity? When there was only a single world, as the myths insisted, hanging all alone in the night? Had those first peoples felt an overpowering loneliness under the merciless stars? A line from one of the old songs that Mother used to chant rose up in her thoughts: Alone in the dust do we come, and alone in the dust shall we pass.

Unless there was safety within the Closure. There could be entire civilizations waiting beneath its skin. Trennis tried to imagine them, tried to visualize the sheer vastness of inhabitation that could be enclosed within the diameter of the artifact. More surface area than a thousand worlds. The Closure could be a great in-gathering, an efflorescence, a hidden repository of life and history and culture. There would be remnants, survivors of the golden ages of myth, creatures that strode across that interior vastness, that still held the power of humanity in all its glory.

If they could get inside.

The doors to Mother’s chambers were ringed with vines that were bare of leaves now. A single peacock, one of the few biologicals that remained once the Grove bent its energies toward propulsion, perched there with burnished copper feathers swaying gently in the low gravity. Mother spoke a word of passage, either to the doors or the bird or both, and the woodgrain panels flowed away.

Trennis wasn’t sure exactly what to expect inside, but it was nothing like what she saw through the doorway. The Oaken Grove was a garden, but Mother’s chambers were like a tomb. They were empty at first glance, containing nothing more than a large spherical room opening out beyond the doorway with a few farther openings that could obviously orient themselves around the hub of the central room depending on relative gravity. But the walls were clean stone, glowing faintly, and the entire place was cold.

As Trennis looked more closely, she saw that the stone surfaces of the room held items, dozens of them, slightly inset into the surface so they would not drift as ship gravity altered. Some seemed broken pieces of porcelain or bone; others were strips of fabric, shards of various metallic surfaces, pages of writing. A few looked like small pieces of machinery.

“Fragments of worlds,” Mother explained, following her stare, “collected over a lifetime. Each a piece of a world now lost.”

Trennis let herself drift closer to the wall. There were more artifacts set deeper into the stone, which she saw now was transparent to a significant depth. A carved piece of green stone rested in the surface beside a slate with bright pink and blue hieroglyphs. A doll with faded eyes was held in suspension beside a cracked plate. She pointed to a copper artifact that looked like a flute she had seen Festidia play. 

“Where is that from?”

“Challis. I was never there, but we traded once with a ship that carried survivors.” Mother paused. “Many of these places I never visited myself.”

“Do you think there will be other survivors, Mother?” Trennis asked. “Inside the Closure?”

Instead of answering, Mother gestured to a doorway opposite the one they had entered. “Go through there, Trennis, and bring me one of what you find within.”

Trennis obeyed, pushing off from the stone floor and drifting through the open doorway. The chamber beyond was smaller, but otherwise similar to the one she had left. Instead of embedded artifacts, though, on the far wall stone gave way to the flowing wood that formed most of the Grove’s interior. Branches grew from its surface, reaching into the room and bearing wide silver leaves. Small yellow fruit dotted the branches. Trennis picked one and took it back to Mother.

The stone walls of the main chamber had sprouted a pair of perch-seats. Mother gripped one loosely with her bare feet, and Trennis took the other. She tried to hand her the fruit.

The older woman shook her head. “It’s for you.”

Trennis waited, confused. It was normal to pluck food from the ship’s walls, and she was not surprised Mother had her own particular varieties of fruit, but this seemed something else, as though this fruit served a medicinal or ceremonial purpose she didn’t understand.

“You assume this ship is a garden,” Mother said when she saw Trennis’s confusion. “So did I. I lived here a long time before I realized what it really was.”

The artifacts were still visible in the walls, floating below the stone like shapes under water.

“What is it?”

“The Oaken Grove is a library,” Mother said. She glanced at the walls. “No, not this collection. I built this myself, in the first years of my journey. But the ship itself is far older than that. I believe it dates back to when the Closures were created, maybe even before then. It carries information that traces back millennia. But accessing that information is not straightforward.”

She pointed to the yellow orb Trennis held.

“The information is not written, or at least not in a language easy to read. And there’s no catalogue, no way to seek specific information or retrieve it. Perhaps library is the wrong word; maybe it’s more like having a conversation. Bits of information encoded into the chemicals of the fruit itself, which bind to cells in the brain to transfer memories and images. But either I’m an imperfect receptor or something has gone wrong in the long years since it was created, or there’s an additional step that I never learned. Because I only get fragments.”

Trennis thought of all the stories Mother had told them during their time together. She had assumed those stories were bits and pieces of history gathered in Mother’s travels, perhaps even things Mother remembered herself. But they were the ship’s memories instead.

“Have others eaten them?” Trennis asked, staring at the fruit she held.

Mother shook her head.

Trennis released the fruit and let it rotate before her like a tiny golden planet. “Then why me?”

“Do you remember what you told us when we found you? You had been drifting for days.”

Trennis shuddered.

“You said you had seen the hunters. That they had been all around you.”

“I remember,” she muttered. 

“You are the only person I know who has seen them directly—seen them outside of a ship. The only person who has been that close when they came. I think that may mean something.”

The fruit was still rotating slowly. 

“Sometimes the fruit seems to draw out memories linked to experiences,” Mother continued. “I wonder if it would be the same for you.”

“You think if I eat this, we might learn something new about the hunters. Or about the Closure.”

“Yes.”

“Why wait until now?”

Mother was silent for a time. “Because knowledge is sometimes painful,” she finally said. “And I wanted to spare you that if I could.”

Trennis nodded and plucked the spinning fruit from the air.

 

Bastion-XII-Dahmet cycled up slowly. When full awareness was obtained, it queried the external sensor array for the constellation of reference pulsars. Based on their timings and orientations, insufficient time had elapsed for up-cycle and internal review. Nonetheless, something had stirred it to awareness, and the first step in reawakening was to query all systems in range of its consciousness.

The fusion cores in its administrative regions were still functioning, though some had been redistributed by the internal cargo.

All local energy systems were operating in hibernation mode.

Ballasts were at sufficient distances from the core and retaining their orbital velocities. The gravitational manifold in which those paths were bent retained its cohesion.

No other neighboring intelligences had been awakened.

No unidentified vessels within the interior.

All systems normal.

The interior was quiet, peaceful, waiting.

If nothing was amiss in the interior, then something must have caught the attention of the incredibly delicate gravity wave detectors in the spires ringing the exterior. It could not be a planet or a star, as that would have brought all internal intelligences to immediate alert. This was something smaller, something that at the most needed only one or two awakened to deal with.

Contact?

The minds that had been combined to form Dahmet’s collective intelligence had long ago lost bodies with physical hearts that could race, but nonetheless there was a stirring of excitement. Its consciousness raced outward to the spires, listening. There it was, passing, the delicate weight of its mass pulling at the interferometers threading the thousands of miles up and down the interior of the spires.

There was something out there.

Dahmet cast backward over the records of that something’s motion. It had clearly changed course, moving parallel to the line of spires.

It was artificial.

It was a ship.

Was it what they were waiting for?

Dahmet listened. Besides vibrations of mass from the ship’s passage—light and small, nothing like a heavy cruiser or generational ship—there was nothing. It was not broadcasting any greeting codes. It was not giving the signal for entrance. There was no virtual flag or standard projected above its hull.

But so much time had passed, Dahmet admitted. If there was a ship, then there were almost certainly survivors. Perhaps the war was over. 

Perhaps the war had been lost?

There was no guarantee, Dahmet reflected, that the ship was even of human construction. There was no guarantee that it was a human craft, or that there were any humans on board.

For now, Dahmet would wait.