The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

SAILING THE ANTARSA ^{VANDANA SINGH}

^{Vandana Singh is an Indian science fiction writer and professor of physics currently inhabiting the Boston area. Her stories have been published in numerous venues, including reprints in several Year’s Best volumes. She is the author of two short story collections, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (Zubaan/Penguin India 2008) and Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press 2018). For more about her, see vandana-writes.com.}

There are breezes, like the ocean breeze, which can set your pulse racing, dear kin, and your spirit seems to fly ahead of you as your little boat rides each swell. But this breeze! This breeze wafts through you and me, through planets and suns, like we are nothing. How to catch it, know it, befriend it? This sea, the Antarsa, is like no other sea. It washes the whole universe, as far as we can tell, and the ordinary matter such as we are made of is transparent to it. So how is it that I can ride the Antarsa current, as I am doing now, steering my little spacecraft so far from Dhara and its moon?

Ah, there lies a story.

I have gone further than anyone since my ancestors first came to Dhara four generations ago. As I stare out into the night, I can see the little point that is my sun. It helps to look at it and know that the love of my kin reaches across space and time to me, a bridge of light. I am still weak from my long incarceration in the cryochamber—and filled with wonder that I have survived nearly all the journey to the Ashtan system—but oh! It takes effort even to speak aloud, to record my thoughts and send them homeward.

I am still puzzled as to why the ship woke me up before it was time. During my long, dreamless sleep, we have sustained some mild damage from space debris, but the self-repairing system has done a good enough job, and nothing else seems to be wrong. There were checks against a half-dozen systems that were not of critical importance—I have just finished going through each of them and performing some minor corrections. In the navigation chamber the altmatter sails spread out like the wings of some marvelous insect—still intact. I put my hands into the manipulation gloves, immediately switching the craft to manual control, and checked. The rigging is still at a comfortable tension, and it takes just a small twitch of a finger to lift, rotate, lower or twist each sail. It is still thrilling to feel the Antarsa current that passes through me undetected, to feel it indirectly by way of the response of the altmatter wings! A relief indeed to know that the sense I had been developing of the reality, the tangibility of the Antarsa sea is not lost. We are on course, whatever that means when one is riding a great current into the unknown, only roughly certain of our destination.

There is a shadowy radar image that I need to understand. The image is not one of space debris, but of a shape wide in the middle and tapered at both ends, shutting out the stars. It is small, and distant, traveling parallel to us at nearly the same speed, but subsequent scans reveal no such thing. My first excited thought was: spaceship! But then, where is it? If it came close enough for my sensors, why did it choose to retreat? If this is why the ship woke me, which seems logical, then why didn’t it wake me earlier, when a nearly spherical piece of space rock hit us? When we grazed past a lone planet that had been shot out of some distant, unstable solar system?

The ship’s intelligence is based on the old generation ship AI that brought my ancestors to Dhara. It has a quietness and a quick efficiency that one would expect of an artificial thinking system, but there are aspects of it that remind me of people I know. A steadiness masking a tendency to over-plan for contingencies. That might be why it woke me up—it is a secret worrier, like my superficially calm mother Simara, so far and so long away. I will never see her—or any of them—again. That thought brings tears to my eyes.

Why does one venture out so far from home? Generations ago, our planet Dhara took my ancestors in from the cold night and gave them warmth. Its living beings adjusted and made room, and in turn we changed ourselves to accommodate them. So it was shown to us that a planet far from humanity’s original home is kin to us, a brother, a sister, a mother. To seek kinship with all is an ancient maxim of my people, and ever since my ancestors came to this planet we have sought to do that with the smallest, tenderest thing that leaps, swoops or grows on this verdant world. Some of us have looked up at the night sky and wondered about other worlds that might be kin to us, other hearths and homes that might welcome us, through which we would experience a different becoming. Some of us yearn for those connections waiting for us on other shores. We seek to feed within us the god of wonder, to open within ourselves dusty rooms we didn’t know existed and let in the air and light of other worlds. And the discovery of the Antarsa, that most subtle of seas, has made it possible to venture far into that night, following the wide, deep current that flows by our planet during its northern winter. The current only flows one way. Away.

So I am here.

I look at the miniature biosphere tethered to my bunk. One of my first acts upon waking was to make sure that it was intact—and it was. Parin’s gift to me is a transparent dome of glass within which a tiny landscape grows. There are mosses in shades of green, and clumps of sugarworts, with delicate, brittle leaves colored coral and blue, and a waterbagman, with its translucent stalk and bulbous, water-filled chambers within which tiny worms lead entire lives. Worlds within worlds. She had designed the system to be self-contained so that one species’ waste was another species’ sustenance. It is a piece of Dhara, and it has helped sustain me during each of the times I have been awake, these years.

It helps to remember who I am. This time when I woke up, I had a long and terrifying moment of panic, because I couldn’t remember who I was, or where I was. All I knew was that it was very cold, and a soft, level voice was talking to me (the ship). I cannot begin to describe how horrific a sense of loss this was—that my self had somehow slipped its moorings and was adrift on a dark sea, and I couldn’t find it. Slowly, as memory and warmth returned, I found myself, anchored myself to the rock of remembrance, of shared love under a kind sun. So as I ponder the situation I’m in, the mystery of why the ship woke me—I will speak my own story, which is also many stories. Like my mothers who first told me of the world, I will tell it aloud, tethering myself through the umbilical cords of kinship, feeding the gods within.

I have been traveling for nearly eight years. Yet I seem to have left only yesterday, my memories of the parting are so clear. I remember when my craft launched from the Lunar Kinship’s base, how I slowly shut down conventional fusion power and edged us into the Antarsa current. How it seemed hours before I could maneuver the little craft into the superfast central channel, manipulating the altmatter wings so that my spaceship wouldn’t fall apart. But at last we were at a comfortable acceleration, going swifter than any human on my world—and I looked back.

The moon, Roshna, was slipping away beneath me with vertiginous speed. The lights of the Lunar Kinship were blinking in farewell, the radio crackling with familiar voices that already seemed distant, shouting their relief and congratulations. At that moment I was assailed with an unfamiliar feeling, which I recognized after a while as my first experience of loneliness. It was unbearable—a nightmare of childhood from which there is no escape.

Looking at the screen, with my kin’s images flickering, hearing their voices, I was severely tempted to turn around. I was close enough to still do this—to arc my trajectory, turn from the Antarsa current into a high moon orbit and then use conventional fusion power to land. But I had pledged I would embark on this journey, had planned for it, dreamed of it—and there had been so much hard work on the part of several Kinships, so much debating in the Council—that I clenched my fists against temptation and let the moment go. I feasted my eyes on the thick forests, the purple scrublands of the moon, and the shining blue-green curve of Dhara below, the planet we had called home for five generations, memorizing the trails of white clouds, the jagged silver edge of the Mahapara continent, the Tura-Tura archipelago like a trail of tears, as a lover memorizes the body of her beloved.

This was the moment for which my friends from Ship University and I had planned and prepared for nearly ten years, soon after the discovery of the Antarsa. We had placed a proposal before the World Council, which debated for eight years. There were representatives from all the Kinships (except the People of the Ice, of course—they have not attended Council in two generations): the People of the Himdhara mountains, the People of the Western Sea, the Roshnans from the Lunar Kinship, and of course my own People of the Devtaru, among a number of smaller Kinships. There was endless discussion, much concern, but they let us design and send the first few probes into the Antarsa current. Interpreting the signals from the probes, the University experts determined that the current appeared to run in a more-or-less straight line toward the Ashtan star system five light-years away. The last signal from the last probe had arrived seven years after its launch, when the probe was as yet some distance short of the Ashtan system. There was something ominous about the probe’s subsequent silence—what had befallen it?—although the explanation could have been as simple as malfunctioning equipment or a chance hit by a space rock.

Some argued that an expedition was justified, because we hadn’t heard from the Ashtan system since my ancestors had arrived on Dhara. Two generation ships had left the old world, one bound for Dhara, the other for Ashta, and they had been one people before that. So our people had always wondered what befell our kin around the brightest star in our sky. Others in the Council argued that this was the very reason we should not venture out, because the silence of the Ashtans—and the probe—pointed to some unknown danger. And what if the current took us somewhere else entirely? What guarantee that we would wash up on a world as kind as our own? To go out into the void was to seek kinship with death before our time. And so on.

But at last the Council gave its reluctant blessing, and here I was, on a ship bound for the stars. I am a woman past my youth, although not yet of middle age, and I have strived always to take responsibility for my actions. So I watched the moon and the great curve of the planet that was my home fall away into the night, and I wept. But I did not turn around.

I float within my ship like a fishling in a swamp. I have swum through the inertial webbing (softer and more coarse at the moment, since we are at low acceleration) from chamber to chamber, checking that all is well. No more strange images on the radar. All systems working in concert. The bioskin that lines each chamber, produces the air I breathe, recycles waste, and spins the inertial web looks a healthy gold-green. We are now moving at half the speed of light, absurdly fast. From the porthole, the distant stars are like the eyes of the night. I sip a tangy, familiar tea from a tube (I have a little cold) and breathe slowly, remembering what my friend Raim told me.

Raim taught me to sail on the Western sea. His people designed the altmatter wings that spread within the navigation chamber (surely the only ship ever built whose sails are on the inside). When I woke from cold sleep there was a message from him. He said: Mayha, farsister, when you are lonely, make a friend of loneliness.

So I make kinship with the dark. I whisper to it, I tell it stories. Perhaps the dark will have something to say to me in turn.

At first our plan was to make the inside of the ship a biosphere, rich with life, choosing the most appropriate and hardy species, so that I would feel more we than I. But after debating on it the Council decided that unless I wished it very strongly, this would not be right. To subject other lifeforms to human whim, to put them in danger without compelling reason was not our way. Besides, we ran the risk of upsetting the balance of life on other worlds in case our containment protocols failed. When I heard the reasoning, I too fell in with this. We compromised thus: the inner surface of the ship would be a bioskin, but that was all. To save energy and to enable the long years to pass without pathological loneliness, we would install a cryochamber. My apprehensions at the length and solitude of the journey were nothing to that old desire within me since childhood: to soar skyward in search of our kin, new and old.

But as I was leaving, saying my forever goodbyes amidst tears and jokes and good wishes, Parin came up to me, indignant. She was worked up about the Council decision to not install a biosphere within the ship. She thrust something at me: a transparent dome of glass within which a tiny landscape grew.

“Mayha, take this!” she said fiercely. “I can’t believe they’re going to condemn you to such a long journey alone!”

I tried to argue that the Council’s position was an attempt to be just to all lifeforms, and that I didn’t know how her sealed-in, miniature biosphere would adapt to zero gravity—but I’ve lost most arguments with Parin. And the little biosphere was beautiful. Besides, I did not want our parting to be acrimonious. Parin and I had grown up with the rest of the horde of children under the same kinhouse roof. Through much of my childhood I had been part of her schemes and adventures. I remembered the time we had rescued a nest of firebirds from some imagined danger, and how we’d wept copiously when they died. Most of Parin’s schemes had involved guilt and good intentions in about equal measure.

I took the little biosphere, as she’d known I would. She scowled at me, then started to cry. We hugged and wept. Then the others had their turn at goodbye. Goodbyes at the kinhouse always take a long time; there are so many of us. And this time, for this historic one-way journey, there were people from nearly all the hundred and twenty-three kinhouses of the Kinship of the Devtaru, waiting to see me off on the shuttle that would take me to the moon, where I was to board my craft. There were also representatives from the People of the Western Sea, my friend Raim, tall and grey-skinned, stared at by the children, waving at me with one webbed hand. The Ship University folk had adapted the spacecraft from one of the shuttles aboard the old generation ship and tested it. A knot of them was present, waiting at the edge of the crowd for their turn. Closest to me stood my mothers, each displaying grief and pride consistent with her nature: Kusum yelling about the dangers of the journey and how I should be careful about this or that, as though I was three again, Brihat simply holding my arm and staring into my face, with tears streaming down her broad cheeks, and Simara being sensible and controlled although her smile wavered. My birth-mother Vishwana was behind them, regal as always, our representative to the Council. She nodded and smiled at me. Although I had never known her well, I had always been in awe of her. My kin-sisters and brothers were there, alternately cheering and weeping, and Sarang, grown so tall since I’d last seen her, tossed me a braided ribbon over the heads of the crowd.

My father was not there. I saw him rarely, since he was a traveler and a trader, and when I did we always took pleasure in sharing stories with each other. He had sent me a message by radio wishing me luck, but he was halfway across the world, too far to come in time.

Then near the back with the guests I saw Vik. He had partnered with me for fourteen years, and we had gone our separate ways, in friendship, until my decision to go on this journey became public. He had become a bitter opponent in the Council discussions, and would no longer speak to me. He looked at me from the back of the crowd and looked away again.

I have partnered for long and short periods with both men and women, but Vik was the one with whom I spent the longest time. There were times I thought we would always be together, as some partnerships are, but we sought joy in different things that took us on diverging paths. He was a historian at Ship University, content to stay in one place and let his mind go into the deep past. Like my father, I needed to wander. It was as simple as that.

I wanted very badly to end things well with Vik. I took a pendant off the string around my neck and flung it over the heads of the crowd toward him. It hit him on the cheek—he caught it, looked irritable, put it in his pocket. I smiled at him. He rubbed his cheek, looked at me and away again.

The shuttle finally took off. I scarcely remember my time at Roshna, at the Lunar Kinship, where my spacecraft was waiting. They took care of me, asked me again the ritual question before one goes on a long journey: Is your heart in it, kinswoman? Do you really want to go on this quest? And I said yes, yes, and there were more goodbyes. At last I was in the craft, up and away. As I manipulated the sails in the navigation chamber, as I’d done so many times on my way to the moon—except that this time I would be going beyond it—as I felt the familiar tug of the Antarsa current, the old excitement rose in me again. It was too soon to feel lonely, or so I thought, because the love of my people was an almost tangible presence.

As I float by the porthole, I can see them all so clearly. Their faces tender and animated, as I turn from the raised platform into the doorway of the shuttle, turn once more to look for the last time at my people and my world, to breathe the forest-scented air. There is the wide, woven roof of the kinhouse, and the vines running up the brown walls, the gourds ripening green to gold. Here I had played and climbed, looked at the stars, dreamed and wept. There is the gleam of the river, the pier, the boats waiting on the water. Dwarfing them all, the great, shaggy forest, trees like spires, trees like umbrellas, reaching leafy arms into the sky, taller than the tallest kinhouse. I think: when I rise up, I will see again the Devtaru, the one closest to us anyhow, greater than any tree that exists or can be dreamed. The Devtaru has shared its secret with us, and because of that I will fly beyond the moon. As I rise I will speak my gratitude to it, to all the world for having formed me, made me into myself. And so I did.

The devtaru is not a tree. It is perhaps what a tree would dream of, if a tree could dream.

The first one I ever saw lies two days away from my kinhouse. In my thirteenth year, some of us trekked through the forest with Visith, one of my aunts, who has been a sister of the forest most of her life. On the way we learned plant lore, and we practiced the art of offering kinship to the beings of the forest.

“Kinship isn’t friendship,” my aunt said. “Don’t go doing stupid things like putting your hand into a tree-bear’s nest, or poking around inside an occupied bee-apple. Learn to sit still in a clear space, and let the creatures observe you, as you observe them.”

We did a lot of sitting still. It was difficult at first but I got the idea of it quicker than the others. The forest whispered around me—sunlight dappled the ground. A wind-around approached me, its tendrils aquiver, looking for something to climb. I nudged it away with my toe—it was kin, but I didn’t want it taking advantage of my stillness. I sensed that I was being watched: a moon-eye monkey, which meant we were close to the devtaru. It was up in a tree, the white rings around its eyes giving it an expression of permanent astonishment. My heart thundered with excitement as the little creature peered out from its leafy shelter. But it was only after two days of seeing and being seen that the moon-eye came out into plain sight. A day later it took an apple-rind from me. After that the moon-eyes were everywhere, moving above me over the trees, chattering to each other and glancing at me from time to time. Then I could walk about without them hiding. I had made kinship!

Parin was in trouble for being too impatient, trying to climb up to a moon-eye’s nest before it was appropriate to do so. The other two hadn’t yet obtained the knack of it and needed to practice stillness without fidgeting or falling asleep. We lingered in that place until their impatience gave way to resignation, and they broke through. We got a congratulatory lecture from Visith.

“A kinship is a relationship that is based on the assumption that each person, human or otherwise, has a right to exist, and a right to agency,” she intoned. “This means that to live truly in the world we must constantly adjust to other beings, as they adjust to us. We must minimize and repair any harm that we do. Kinship goes all the way from friendship to enmity—and if a particular being does not desire it, why, we must leave it alone, leave the area. Thus through constant practice throughout our lives we begin to be ready with the final kinship—the one we make with death.”

We looked at each other and shivered.

“You are a long way from that,” Visith said sardonically, then smiled a rare smile. “But you’ve taken the first step. Come, let us keep going.”

So the journey to the devtaru took several days, and when we were standing at its edge we didn’t even know it.

The ground changing should have been our first clue. The forest floor was dotted with undergrowth, but here we found that great roots as thick as a person reared out of the ground and back again, forming a fascinating tangle of steps and crevices that invited climbing. The trees had changed too—the canopy above seemed to be knit together, and trunks dropped down and joined the roots, making a three-dimensional maze.

Visith didn’t let us go into the tangle. Instead we made camp and practiced stillness between meals and washing, and took walks along the perimeter of the maze. After two days of this, during which our impatience gave way to resignation, and then, finally, the open, accepting, alertness of mind that births the possibility of kinship—Parin pointed at the tangle.

“It’s a devtaru! And we didn’t even know it!”

It was indeed. The enormous central trunk was deep inside the forest of secondary trunks, likely several hours journey. The roots went deeper down than any other organism on the planet. To see a devtaru in its entirety, one has to be airborne, or on a far away hill.

Under the canopy, the moon-eyes led us over the maze of roots and trunks. We found shelter in the crook of a giant root, underneath which flowed a clear stream of water. The bark against which I laid my head was a thin skin that glowed faintly in the darkness, pulsing in response to my presence. To make kinship with a devtaru is extraordinarily difficult—Visith is one of the few who has succeeded, and it took her nearly twenty years.

“Tomorrow we will go to a place I know, where the devtaru was fruiting moon-pods last I came,” she told us. “If the devtaru wishes, perhaps we will see a launch!”

I had seen the usual fruiting pods of a devtaru during our journey inside it, but never the legendary moon-pods. This devtaru was too young to make anything but small, empty moon-pods, but it would be a sight worth seeing. My heart was full. I wanted so much to be kin to such a being! Like Moon-woman, whose story Parin began to tell in the soft darkness.

There was a girl once, who sat in stillness seeking kinship with a devtaru for a hundred years. Potter-ants built a dwelling around her, and wind-arounds made a green tangle around that, so no rain or wind could trouble her. Flitters brought her crystals of sap and placed them between her lips so she knew neither hunger or thirst. She saw the devtaru and its beings, and it observed her with its thousand eyes, and at last they made kinship.

She lived within its forest, among its roots and trunks, and learned its moods and sensed its large, slow thoughts. She became familiar with the creatures who lived in its shelter, the moon-eyes and the dream-flitters, and the floating glow-worms, and the angler-birds with their lures of light. Then one day a moon-eye led her to a place within the devtaru forest where she found a large pod attached to the top of a trunk. The pod was just about as tall as she was and just about as wide in the middle, and it was covered over with a shimmering patina, so that she had to blink to make sure it was actually there. It pointed away from her toward the moon in the sky as though it yearned to break free, and it quivered gently as though caught in a breeze, although no breeze blew. The trunk glowed and patterns formed and dissolved on its surface, and the girl knew she had to climb right up to the pod.

And she did. She found that the pod’s lips weren’t closed as yet, and inside it was empty of seed. Within it there were little creatures, buzzwings and a grumpworm or two, and some leafy, mossy debris. She felt a great shudder from the trunk so climbed down hastily, just in time, because the trunk contracted, and the pod shot with a great noise into the sky. As it did, the trunk split and the girl fell down.

She walked for days through the forest and at last found the pod. It lay in a clump of bushes, already half-covered by leaves and branches from a storm. It made her wonder why the devtaru had bothered to send an empty pod into the air at all.

Now I’ve said she lived with the devtaru for a hundred years. When she was old, and the devtaru even older, something changed. The devtaru’s leaves had been falling for a decade or more, and now she could see that its long arc of life was ending. The moon-eyes and the other creatures left the shelter of the devtaru but the girl couldn’t bear to do so. The devtaru produced one last enormous moon-pod. The girl, now an old woman, crawled into the pod before its lips closed, and felt around her the creatures who were also stowaways, and felt also the smooth, shiny hard seed, half her size, larger than the seeds in the normal seed-pods. She had decided she could not bear to watch the tree die, and she would let it take her away to her final destination.

The pod grew and grew, and the old woman fell asleep inside it. Then one day the time came. She could sense a tensing in the limbs and sinews of the devtaru, preparing for the launch, but this time there came to her faintly a strange slight smell of burning. The lips of the pod closed completely, and if it hadn’t been for the stowaways making air to breathe, she would have suffocated. Off she went into the sky.

Now there was a sister of this old woman who came to see her from time to time, and she was watching from a hilltop not far from the devtaru. She liked to look at the stars through a telescope, so she was known as Sister Three-Eyes. She saw the great pod quiver and align with the now risen moon. Tendrils of smoke emerged from the crevices of the tree. Then the pod launched.

There was a noise like a clap of thunder, and the devtaru shattered. As it did, it began to burn from its deep internal fires, slowly and magnificently. What a death! But Sister Three-Eyes soon turned her attention from the dying devtaru and trained her telescope on the pod, because she wanted to know where it landed.

To her surprise, it didn’t land. It went higher and higher, and soon it was a speck she could barely see. Just before she lost sight of it, she saw it move into a low orbit, and then, suddenly, the pod changed its mind and made straight for the moon.

So she found that the devtaru’s last and final moon-pod is truly destined for the moon. Which is why the devtaru’s children grow on the moon, although they do not make such enormous pods as they do on Dhara. The lunar forest and the purple scrublands and the creatures that live there and make the air to breathe are all gifts of the devtaru, the only being known to spread its seed to another world.

As to what happened to Moon-woman—who knows? When the next generation found a way to get to the moon in shuttles, they looked for her in the forests and the grassy plains. They did not find her. Some say she could not have survived the journey. Others say that she did survive it, and she wandered through the lunar forests content that she had found a place among the children of the devtaru, and died a peaceful death there. These people named the moon Roshna, after her, as it is still called today. Her sister thought she saw a light burning or flashing on the moon some months after Moon-woman left, but who can be sure? There are those that believe that Moon-woman went further, that she found a way to launch her moon-pod into the space beyond the moon, and that she sails there still along the unknown currents of the seas of space and time.

Parin had always told this story well, but listening to it under the devtaru, in that companionable darkness, made it come alive. I wondered whether Moon-woman was, indeed, sailing the void between the stars at this moment, offering kinship to beings stranger than we could imagine. Looking at a small patch of starry sky visible between the leaves above me, I shivered with longing.

We never got to see a pod launch on that trip. But even now I can remember Parin’s young voice, the words held in the air as if by magic, the breathing of the others beside me, the feel of the tree’s skin glowing gently like a cooling ember.

The story anticipates the discovery of the Antarsa, of course. That I had a small role to play in it is a source of both pain and pleasure, because it happened when I first realized that Vik and I were growing apart from one another.

I have been torn between excitement of a most profound sort, and a misery of an extremely mundane sort. The excitement first: there have been several flickering images on the radar. It is clear now that there are others around me, keeping their distance—spaceships from the Ashtan system? Our long lost cousins? I sent a transmission in Old Irthic to them, but there is no reply. Only silence. Silence can mean so many things, from “I don’t see you,” to “I don’t want to see you.” There is a possibility that these are ships from other human-inhabited worlds, but it would be strange that they would not have made contact with us on Dhara.

My other thought is that the occupants of these ships may be aliens who simply cannot understand my message, or know it to be a message. This is even more exciting. It also makes me apprehensive, because I don’t know their intent. They appear in and out of range, moving at about the same average speed as my craft. Are they curious? Are they escorting me, studying me, wondering if I am an enemy? All I can do is to practice what I did in the great forest: stillness. Stillness while moving at more than 50% of the speed of light—I wonder what my aunt Visith would say to that! Do nothing, says her no-nonsense voice in my memory. Wait and observe, and let yourself be observed.

That I have been doing.

The misery is that I have a message from Vik. Sent years ago of course, but there it is: he is grateful for the pendant I tossed him when I left, and he has found a new partner, a fellow historian at Ship University, a woman called Mallow. When I first got his message I just stared at it. A sense of deep abandonment welled up inside me; my loneliness, which I had tried to befriend, loomed larger than mountains. Of course I had expected this—even if I had stayed on Dhara, there would have been no going back to Vik—but I felt resentful of his meticulous observation of correct behavior. Yes, it is a graceful thing to do, to tell a former long-term partner when you have found a new love—but I would never come back, never find a new love, someone to hold—there was no need to let me know. Except it would make Vik feel better, that he had done the right thing. He had not thought about me, and it hurt. For once Parin’s little biosphere did not assuage my pain. I couldn’t even go outside and run up a mountain or two. Instead I swam from chamber to chamber through the inertial webbing, if only to feel the web break and re-form as I went through it, my tears floating in the air around me like a misty halo, attaching to the gossamer threads like raindrops. There was nowhere to go. After I had calmed down I tethered myself to the porthole and stared into the night, and thought of what it had been like.

After Vik I had taken no lovers for a while, until I met Laharis. She was a woman of the Western Sea. I’d been working with Raim on the ocean, learning to sail an ordinary boat before I learned the ways of the Antarsa. We had been out for several days, and had returned with a hold full of fish, and salt in our hair, our skin chapped. Raim and I developed a deep love and camaraderie, but we were not drawn to each other in any other way. It was when I was staying at their kinhouse, watching the rain fall in grey sheets on the ocean, that his sister came up to me. The others were away bringing in the last catch. Laharis and I had talked for long hours and we had both sensed a connection, but the construction of the altmatter wings from the discarded moon-pods of the devtaru had taken up my time. Now she slid a hand up my arm, leaned close to me. Her hair was very fine, a silver cascade, and her smooth grey cheek was warm. Her long, slanted eyes, with the nictitating membranes that still startled me, shone with humor. She breathed in my ear. “Contrary to stereotype,” she whispered, “we Sea folk don’t taste like salt. Would you care to find out?”

So we learned each other for two beautiful months. During our time together I forgot stars and space and the Antarsa—there was only her slow, unfurling self, body and mind, every part an enchantment. I would have wanted to partner with her, had I stayed on planet. Now that I was far away, I could only remember and weep. She never sent me messages, though her brother did. I think it was hard for her and perhaps she thought it would be hard for me.

Dear darkness, help me keep my equilibrium. Here I am, in a universe so full of marvels and mysteries, and I mourn the loss of my already lost loves as though I was still young and callow. What a fool I am!

I shall keep stillness, and feed no more that envious, treacherous god within, the god of a heart bereft.

Vik has rarely ventured from Ship University. He’s one of those people who likes to put down roots and ponder how we got here. The past is his country. Ship University is a good place for him.

It is housed inside the generation ship that brought my people to Dhara so long ago. The ship lies in a hollow made for it in the sandy plains near a lake. It contains the records of my people’s history and of the home planet, and the cryo-chambers are now laboratories. The shuttle bays are experimental stations, and cabins are classrooms. In the forests or the sea, the mountains or the desert, it is hard to believe that we have the technology we do. “Have high tech, live low tech,” has been a guiding principle of the Kinships. That is how we have lived so well on our world.

Ship University’s sky scholars were the first to study the flight of devtaru pods. Vik’s friend Manda, a sky scholar of repute, told me how the mystery deepened as the early scholars tracked the moon-pods with increasingly powerful telescopes. I can see Manda now, slender fingers brushing back her untidy brown hair, her eyes alight. I was visiting Vik after wandering for a month through the Bahagan desert, and it had become clear to me that there was a wall between us. I felt then the first hint of the ending to come. I think Vik sensed it too. He sat next to me, looking restive, while Manda talked. She showed us a holo of a devtaru moon-pod launching from a century ago.

Despite my misery, I found myself fascinated. There was the tiny pod, dwarfed by the curve of Dhara, apparently going into low orbit. The moon wasn’t in the picture, which was to scale, but we were informed that the planet, the pod and the moon formed a more or less straight line through their centers. In its orbit around the planet, the pod began to tremble abruptly, like a leaf floating on a stream disturbed by a random eddy. Then it swung loose from its orbit and made straight for the moon. It traveled with such astonishing rapidity that all we could see was a silver streak. Then the scene cut to the moon and the pod approaching it, swinging past it a few times, slowing gradually until at last it made a rough landing in the southern forest. There was a bloom of light, a brief fire where it hit, then the film stopped.

“This was taken by Kaushai, back about a century ago. All this time there have only been speculations as to how the devtaru pods get to the moon, why they suddenly change course from low orbit to the trajectory you saw. The pods themselves have no means of propulsion. There is nothing in the void of space between the planet Dhara and the moon. The first probes that were sent to duplicate the orbit of the pods suffered no strange perturbations, nor were they drawn toward the moon. The devtaru pods apparently violate fundamental laws of nature: that momentum and energy must be conserved.”

I knew something of all this, of course. But I had never seen the holo before. It was quite amazing. I felt Vik stir beside me—he looked just as entranced, and when my gaze met his, as miserable as I.

Yet it was a chance remark I made on that visit that set the sky scholars on the right track.

I go back to that time in my imagination. Vik and I are both starting to realize that our paths are too different to allow for us to be together, although it will be quite some time before we have the courage to say so to each other. So the golden afternoon, and our togetherness, have acquired a deep, sad sweetness. We join Manda and her friends for a walk around the lake. They have been talking all day about the mystery of the devtaru pods, telling us how they spent years camping by a certain devtaru, watching it, getting to know it, asking it to share its secret. Now some of them feel as though the devtaru has communicated with them already, that they already know what the secret is, but it is buried deep inside them and needs some kind of stimulus, or reminder, a magic word or phrase to bring it into consciousness.

After evening sets in we find ourselves tired and hungry—we have walked a long way and the stars are beginning to come out in a pale pink sky. We are at a place where a small river empties into the lake, making an intricate delta of rivulets. We are wishing we had a boat to get to the shore from which we ventured, where the bulk of Ship looms, its many windows lit. The air is full of the trembling cries of glitterwings. I am speechless with emotion, with the thought that the end of our partnership is as close as the other shore. Vik is silent beside me. Just as we are talking about boats, I find the remains of one at the bottom of a rivulet. It is full of holes—in fact, most of it has rotted away, but for the frame. It lies indifferently in place as the water rushes through the holes.

“If this boat were solid,” I say, “and the current strong enough, it would move. It would carry us home.”

A pointless, inconsequential remark. But Manda stares at me, understanding awakening in her face.

She told me later that my remark was the thing she needed to unwrap the gift the devtaru had already given them. What had been one of the saddest evenings of my life was the moment when she and her colleagues solved the mystery of the devtaru pods. Two days later Manda spoke to a gathering of hundreds.

“Imagine an ocean that washes all of space and time. Like the water ocean, it has currents and turbulences. But its substance is invisible to us, as we are invisible—or transparent—to it.

“This is not so strange an idea. As the neutrinos wash through ordinary matter, through you and me, as though we weren’t there, as water washes through the broken boat with the holes in it, so the subtle ocean—the Antarsa, named by our poet Thora—washes through planets and stars, plants and people, as though we did not exist.

“We don’t know whether the Antarsa is made up of neutrinos or something else. We suspect it is something as yet unknown, because too much is known about neutrinos, which can be caught by ordinary matter if the net is both deep and dense.

“Now imagine a form of matter that is not ordinary matter. This, too, is not strange, because we know that what we call ordinary matter is rather rare in the universe. There are other forms of matter that make up the bulk of the cosmos. One of these forms, what we are calling the altmatter, is opaque to the Antarsa. So if you place a piece of altmatter in an Antarsa current, it will move.

“The pods, of course, have to be made in part of altmatter. How the devtaru acquires it we don’t know; maybe it draws it up from deep underground, mingles or combines it with ordinary matter, and forms the pods that are meant to go into space.”

That was so long ago, that moment of revelation. Some years later, experimenters took the discarded moon-pods that are empty of seed, the ones that the devtaru shoot out for practice when they are young, to make the first altmatter probes. And now I am here.

Here I am, working the sails in the navigation chamber. I’ve done enough waiting. I am steering my craft as close to the edge of the current as I dare, as slowly as it needs to go so that changes in speed won’t tear it apart. I want to get closer to my mysterious companions.

The shapes on the radar flicker in and out with increasing frequency now. Some are shaped like fat pods, but some appear vaguely oblong smudges. I want to see a pod ride by with Moon-woman in it, waving. If that happens, I will extend a grappling hook, gently as I can, and bring the moon-pod close to me so she can crawl into my little craft and share a tube of tea. But no, there is no likelihood of moon-pods being this far away from Dhara. After all, the Ashtan system is a few months away. The star is discernibly a round yellow eye, no longer a point, and the planets around it, including Ashta, appear disk-like as well, although I need my telescope to clearly see them. I can just see Ashta’s polar ice caps. It is far from my spaceship at the moment, but when I enter the system it should be at a point in its orbit that brings it close to my trajectory. I have to be careful that the Antarsa current does not pass directly through the planet, because I will simply crash into it, then. I am anticipating some delicate maneuvering, and there is no time like this moment to practice.

After a long while, I discover something.

My companions move unobtrusively away as I approach them, which means, of course, that they can sense my presence. Are they simply making room for me, or is it something else? However, what I’ve found through this experiment is that the Antarsa current, the central, fastest channel at least, has widened considerably. It took me much longer to find its edges, where there are dangerous eddies and rivulets. The speed of the current has not changed, however. Mystified, I continue on my way.

I send my offer of kinship out, but as yet there is no answer but silence.

Listening to the silence, I am reminded of a story my father, the trader, told me when I was small. Among our people the Kinships are fairly self-sufficient, but we do have need of small shipments at regular intervals: metals from the Himdhara mountains, cloth from Tura-Tura and so on. We send out our herbs and jewelry. There is constant flow of information between the Kinships (except for the People of the Ice, about whom my father told this story) and also with Ship University. Most things are transported where possible by boat, in a rare while by flyer or shuttle, but there are also wandering caravans that go overland, and my father has traveled with many of these. He is from a kinhouse of my own people further east of here, deeper in the forest and he met my mother during one of his journeys. Neither was interested in a permanent partnership but they remain cordial when they meet. And always he has tried to come see me, to bring me a shell from the Western Sea, or a particularly pretty pebble from Himdhara.

The People of the Ice stopped speaking to us from the time that the second generation of humans was grown. By that time the Kinships had each chosen their place, depending on where they felt most accepted and would do the least harm to the beings already present. My people of the Devtaru had genetically modified ourselves to digest certain local proteins; the Western sea folk had modified their bodies to be more agile in the water and to hold their breath longer than any other human. The People of the Himdhara could thrive in the thin mountain air. The People who settled in the Northern edge of the great continent, where there is ice even in the summer, adjusted themselves to live in that terrible cold. It was said that they grew hairy pelts like the beasts that dwelt there, but this could have been a joke. All the Kinships tell jokes about each other, and most are reasonably good-natured, but the People of the Ice got the worst of it because they were so remote, in both geography and temperament.

When I was little, my father said, his caravan was asked by the World Council to go into the North to find out what had happened to the People of the Ice. Was it that they did not answer radio calls because something terrible had befallen them, or were they being obstreperous as usual?

Take only a few people, said the Council, so that they don’t feel invaded. So my father and three others—a man and two women—went. They wandered for days and weeks through forest and scrubland, desert and plateau, until they came to the land of perpetual snow. Here the trees grew up into tall spires, and the wild creatures all had thick, luminous coats and some knew the use of fire. My father knows this because one night the party followed a flickering light through a snowfall, and found large, hairy creatures huddling before a fire, tossing twigs into it and grunting. As is our custom, the four travelers sat some distance away and waited, speaking softly the offering of kinship, until the creatures waved their paws at them and invited them, through expressive grunts, to join them. My father says these were shaggorns, and fortunately this group was full of meat and therefore amiable. They are very curious and they poked at the travelers with twigs to see what they would do (some of his companions laughed but my father only smiled and gently poked back) and one of them wanted to try on my father’s coat—my father allowed this, but had to give him his watch to get his coat back.

It was bitterly cold, but the four survived with the help of the shaggorns, and one late afternoon they found themselves at the edge of an icy plain, over which rose a city.

The city was made of ice. The buildings were constructed with ice blocks and had slit windows, and the streets were ice. People moved about them on skates, and the travelers could not tell whether they wore hairy pelts or if they had grown their own. The travelers set themselves down outside the city’s perimeter but in plain sight, in keeping with the tradition of waiting for an invitation.

But there was none. People skated across the ice, from building to building, and didn’t even look at the travelers. One little girl stared at them but was roughly pulled away by an adult. The four travelers sang the offering of kinship, but there was no response. This was a terrible thing to witness, my father said, because they had come so far and endured so much to make sure that their kin were safe. They were cold, hungry and tired, and the song was acquiring rather angry overtones. So they stopped their song, and set up camp there because the evening was setting in.

In the morning they found some supplies—meat, some cooked roots, all frozen by now, a pelt blanket. The meaning was clear: the People of the Ice did not desire kinship, but they meant no harm. There was no weapon left symbolically at the edge of the camp. They did not want a kinship of enmity—they simply wanted to be left alone.

So the travelers began their return journey, somewhat mollified. The next evening, before they were able to go very far (they were tired, as my father said), they saw a small dwelling in the forest. To their surprise they recognized the home of a farsister. Farsisters and farbrothers are people who wander away from their Kinships for a life of solitude, usually seeking some kind of spiritual solace. Some of them have done terrible things and seek to redress them or have suffered a loss and need to find a reason to live. Others simply wander in search of something they can’t identify, and when they find it, usually in a place that calls to them, they settle down there.

The farsister’s courtyard was snowy and bare, and furnished with only two low flat-topped rocks that my father assumed were intended to be chairs. This meant that the farsister did not like company, but one person would be tolerated. There was an intricately carved block of ice near the door, which indicated the occupation of the person within. That she was female was indicated by a red plume of feathers that hung from her door.

My father sat outside the courtyard and waited. She made him wait for several hours, by which time it was night and getting very cold. Then she came out and ushered him in. She turned out to be a grim, dour woman who seemed to be made of ice as well. The inside of her little hut was just as cold as the outside and this didn’t seem to bother her.

She told him that she was not of the People of the Ice, and that there was not anything to be done about them, they kept to themselves. She gave him a cold tea to drink that made my father feel dizzy. He felt himself falling into deep sleep, and the icy fingers of the farsister easing him down into a cold bed.

When he woke up he found that the hut was empty. Moreover, there was no sign that it had ever been inhabited. The hearth was cold, and filled with ashes, and a wind blew through the open window. My father felt frozen to the marrow. He got himself up slowly and painfully and emerged into a snowy dawn. The courtyard of the hut was bare—no sitting rocks, no ice carvings, no evidence that anyone had ever lived here. His companions were waiting anxiously for him at camp.

It was a long journey home, my father said, and they were glad to come back to the warm lands and make their report to the Council.

When he used to tell us children this story in the sunny garden in front of the kinhouse, with the warm sun at our back, we would shiver in the imagined snowfall. We were trapped in the hut of the ghostly farsister, or lost in the enchanted forest with the People of the Ice in their hairy pelts, wandering around to scare us, to take us away. Later we would come up with games and stories of our own, in which the Ice folk were the principal villains.

When I was older, my birth-mother would take some of us to Council meetings. Council meetings rotated from Kinship to Kinship, and when we were the hosts, my mother would let us come. We would see our sea-kin, with their scale-like skin and their webbed hands, and the tall mountain folk with their elaborate head-dresses, or the cave kin with their sunshades over huge, dark eyes, and our own eyes would go round with wonder. In the evenings various kinfolk would gather round a fire or two and tell jokes. We would joke about the people of the Ice, and why they didn’t ever come to Council (“they were afraid they’d melt” or “it would be too hot in their fur coats”). During one of these occasions my father was also present—he pulled some of us older ones aside.

“You all talk a lot of nonsense,” he said. “Listen, I never told you one part of my story about the People of the Ice. What I dreamed about while I slept in the hut of the farsister.”

We were all eyes and ears.

“Listen. I dreamed that the farsister took me to the city of ice. Some of the Ice people met me and took me in, saying I could stay the night. I was put in an ice-cold room on a bed of ice, and it was so cold that I couldn’t sleep. In the night I heard my hosts talking about me, arguing. Some said I should never have been brought here, and another voice said that maybe I could be made to substitute for some relative, an old man whose time had come. The executioners would not know the difference if I was wrapped in furs and made unconscious, and that way the old man could live a little longer in secret. This went on for a long time, until the people moved away. I was so scared that I fled from there. My captors chased me some of the way but without much enthusiasm. Then I woke up in my cold bed.”

My father paused.

“I may have simply dreamed the whole thing. But the dream was so vivid that I sometimes wonder if it didn’t actually happen. Since that time I have wondered whether the reason for the silence of our Ice kin is something more sinister than mere bad manners. What if their genetic manipulations to adapt to the cold resulted in something they did not expect—something that prevents them from dying when they are old? Since they cannot die, they must put to death the old ones. And they are terrified that by mingling with us they will let loose an epidemic of deathlessness. So in their shame and misfortune they keep themselves separate from all other humans.”

We were appalled. To cheat death, even to wish to live longer than one’s natural span, is to show so much disrespect to all living beings, including one’s own offspring and generations yet to come, that it is unthinkable. It is natural to fear death, and so it takes courage to make kinship with death when one’s time has come. How terrible to have death itself refuse kinship! To have to kill one’s own kin! It was an honorable thing to isolate this curse in a city of ice, rather than let it loose among the rest of the Kinships. After my father’s revelation we found ourselves unable to joke about the People of the Ice with the same carelessness.

I am thinking about them today because I wonder about the silence of the spacecraft around me, and the deeper, longer silence of the Ashtans. Did they settle on their planet, or did they find it unsuitable and move on? Did some misfortune befall them? Or did they simply turn away from us, for some reason?

I don’t know if I’ll ever find out.

So much has happened that I have not had time to speak my story until now. Dear, kind darkness, dear kin on Dhara, I have made such a discovery! My companions, whose flickering images on the radar screen have so mystified me, have revealed their true nature. It is hard to say whether there are simply more of them—they are so clear on the radar now—or whether I have gained their trust and they have moved closer.

They are not spaceships. They are beings. Creatures of deep space, made of altmatter, riding the Antarsa current like me.

I found this out a few days ago, when the radar screen presented an unusually clear image. A long, sinuous, undulating shape, broadest in the middle and tapered at each end moved parallel to us. Something waved like a banner from the far end—a tail. It was huge. I held my breath. The visual image showed a barely visible shape, lit only by starlight and the external lights of my ship, but it reminded me just a little of the seagu, that massive, benevolent ocean mammal of the Western Sea.

It was clearly made of altmatter. Its flattened limbs—fins?—moved in resistance to the Antarsa current, which propelled it forward. There was a purposefulness, an ease with which it swam that was delightful to see. Here was a creature in its element, apparently evolved to travel between the stars on the great Antarsa ocean. I closed my eyes, opened them, and the image was still there. My fingers were shaking.

How to describe what it meant to me, the company of another living creature, be it one so removed from myself! I had lived with other living beings all my life before this journey. I had played with chatterlings in the great forest near my home, swum with ocean mammals—walroos and seagus, and schools of silverbellies. Even in the high, bare mountains of Himdhara, where life is hardy, scarce and without extravagance, I had made kinship with a mog-bear, with whom I shared a cave for several days during a storm. Nearly always I had traveled with other humans. This was my first journey into the dark, alone. Parin’s biosphere had much to do with maintaining my sanity, but how I had missed the company of other life! I blinked back tears. I took a deep breath and thanked the universe that I had lived to see such a marvel.

It was an exhilarating moment. It reminded me of my time with Raim, learning to use the sails on his boat on the Western Sea. Wind and current carried us far from the shore, and that wind was in my hair, whipping it about my face, and chapping my lips. Raim was beside me, laughing, rejoicing that I was finally moving the boat like an extension of my own body. Just then a school of seagu surfaced, and leaped up into the air as though to observe us. Crashing down into the water, raising a spray that drenched us, they traveled with us, sometimes surging ahead, sometimes matching our speed, their eyes glinting with humor.

This creature did not seem to have eyes. It must sense the world around it in a different way. I wondered whether it detected my little craft, and what it thought of it. But close on that thought came a new surprise. A fleet, a school of smaller shapes tumbled past between my ship and the behemoth. They were like small, flattened wheels, perhaps a meter in diameter as far as I could tell, trailing long cords through the current. They moved not in straight, parallel lines, but much more chaotically, like a crowd of excited children moving about every which way as they went toward a common destination.

As though this spectacle was not wonderful enough, I saw that around me, on either side and above and below, there was life. There were fish shapes, and round shapes, and long, tubular shapes, all moving with some kind of propulsion or undulation. They shimmered the way that altmatter does to the human eye, and some had their own lights, like the fish of the deep sea. These latter ones also had enormous dark spots on their bow end, like eyes. What worlds had birthed these creatures? Had they evolved in a gas cloud, or in the outer atmosphere of some star? They were so fantastic, and yet familiar. Our universe is, we know, mostly made from other kinds of matter than ourselves, but I hadn’t imagined that altmatter could be the basis for life. It occurred to me now that altmatter life might be much more common in the universe than our kind. Space is so big, so empty. We have always assumed it hostile to life, but perhaps that is true only of our kind of life, made of ordinary matter.

For the next two days I prepared radar clips and visual clips to send home, and watched the play of life around me. I have seen what seem to be feeding frenzies—the behemoth feasted on those wheeled creatures—and I might have witnessed a birth.

Today I saw a new creature, twice as long as the behemoth I had first set my eyes upon. It had armor plating with fissures between the plates, and apparent signs of erosion (how?), as though it was very old. It trailed a cloud of smaller creatures behind it, evidently attendant upon it. Its round hole of a mouth was fringed with a starburst of tentacles. I was musing on the problem of the radar imaging system’s resolving capacity, wondering what I was missing in terms of smaller-scale life in the life-rich current—when I saw the leviathan’s mouth widen. It was at this point ahead of me and to one side of the ship, so I couldn’t see the mouth, but I inferred it from the way the tentacles fringing the orifice spread out. To my astonishment a great, umbrella-shaped net was flung out from the fringes of the mouth, barely visible to my radar. This net then spread out in front of the creature like a parachute; the creature back-finned vigorously, slowing down so abruptly that a number of other swimmers were caught in the web. Had I not swerved violently, my craft and I would have been among them. The acceleration might have flung me across the chamber and broken some bones, had it not been for the inertial net, which thickened astonishingly fast. (That the ship suffered no great damage is a testament to the engineering skills of the great generation-ship builders of old, my craft being a modified version of one of their shuttles).

Now that the Ashtan system is nearly upon us, I have a new worry. I don’t know whether the Antarsa current flows through any celestial objects, such as the sun, or a planet, or a moon. If it does, I must manipulate the altmatter sails in time to escape a violent crash. I am afraid something like this might have happened to the altmatter probes that were first launched from Dhara, that stopped sending back radio signals. Or perhaps they were swallowed by some creature.

Strangely, the current appears to be slowing; this would be a relief if it wasn’t laced with chaotic microflows. I can sense them through the way they make the sails shiver, something I could not have told a few years ago. Sometimes I feel as though I can see the current with some inner eye, almost as though it has acquired a luminosity, a tangibility. I imagine, sometimes, that I can feel it, very faintly, a feather’s touch, a tingling.

I have a sense of something about to happen.

What can I say, now to the dark? How do I explain what I have experienced to my kin on Dhara? What will you make of it, my sister Parin, my brother Raim? What stories will you now tell your children about Mayha, Moon-woman?

Nothing I once assumed to be true appears to be true.

As we entered the Ashtan system, the Antarsa current became chaotic on a larger scale. At that point I was not far from the second planet, Ashta, with its two lumpy little moons. Navigation became very difficult, as there were eddies and vortices and strong, dangerous little currents. There is a backwash from Ashta itself, I am convinced. This can only be the case if Ashta has a core of altmatter. Otherwise wouldn’t the Antarsa wind simply blow through it, without becoming so turbulent?

This is not surprising. On Dhara there must be altmatter within the planet, else how would the devtaru have drawn it up? On Dhara, however, the Antarsa current does not go headlong through the planet, nor is it so wide. There is only a soft breeze through the planet, with the current itself running perhaps two hundred thousand kilometers distant. Here a broad channel of the current rushes through a region occupied by part of Ashta’s orbit, and includes the tiny, uninhabitable inner planet and the sun. Depending on how much altmatter there is in these celestial objects, there is likely to be quite a backflow, and therefore much turbulence. A mountain stream studded with rocks would behave the same way.

For a long while, I was caught in the rapids. Caught with me were other creatures, altmatter beings of a fantastic variety, swimming valiantly, changing course with an enviable dexterity as the currents demanded. My hands were sore from manipulating the sails, my mind and soul occupied with the challenge of the moment, but the ship’s AI managed to send a message in Old Irthic to Ashta. There was no reply but the now familiar silence.

I now know why. Or at least, I have a hypothesis. Because I have seen things I can hardly yet comprehend. I will not be landing on Ashta. It is impossible, and not just because of the turbulence.

This is what I saw: The day side of Ashta, through my telescope, showed continents floating on a grey ocean. There were dark patches like forests, and deserts, and the wrinkles of mountain ranges. I saw also scars, mostly in the equatorial belt, as though the planet had been pelted with enormous boulders. Most dramatically, the edges of the continents seemed to be on fire. There were plumes of smoke, mouths of fire where volcanoes spoke. In the interior, too, the scarred regions were streaked or lined or edged with a deep, red glow, and there were dark, smooth plains, presumably of lava. I imagined the invisible Antarsa current slamming into altmatter deposits deep within the planet, the impact creating internal heat that liquefied rock, which erupted volcanically onto the surface. There must be earthquakes too, on a regular basis, and were there not forests on fire?

That the forests were there at all spoke of a kinder past. Perhaps the Antarsa current had changed course in recent geological time? Now Ashta was a planet in the process of being destroyed, if the current didn’t push it out of orbit first. I had never seen a more terrible sight.

But as we got closer, I saw much more to wonder at. The radar picked up something thousands of kilometers in front of the planet.

It first appeared as a roughly rectangular shadow or smear, very faint, that later resolved into a great array—a fine mesh of some kind, reminiscent of the net of the altmatter creature who nearly ate us. But this was on a massive scale, stretching across much of my view of the planet. Studded within it at regular intervals were lumps that I couldn’t quite resolve—knots or nodes of some kind? No, too irregular. The net seemed to be held in place by beings, crafts or devices (I couldn’t tell the difference at this distance) at corners and along the perimeter so that the whole thing sailed along with the planet. Its relative indifference to the chaotic Antarsa current indicated it was made of ordinary matter. Getting closer, I found that the lumps were creatures caught in the net, struggling. There was an air of great purpose and deliberation in the movements of smaller objects about the net—these craft, if that is what they were, appeared to buzz about, inspecting a catch here, a catch there, perhaps repairing tears in the net. It might have been my imagination but the creatures became still once the busy little craft went to them.

I went as close to the net as I dared. I had already folded the altmatter wings to decrease the effect of the current, although the eddies were so turbulent that this did not help as much as it should have, and my ship shuddered as a consequence. I switched to fusion power and edged toward the net. I wanted to see if the busy little objects—the fishermen—were spacecraft or creatures, but at the same time I didn’t want to be swept into the net. One can’t make an offer of kinship unless the two parties begin on a more-or-less equal footing. From what I hoped was a safe distance, I saw a drama unfold.

A behemoth was caught in the net. As it struggled, it tore holes in the material. One of the busy little fishercraft immediately went for it. Arms (or grappling hooks?) emerged from the craft and tried to engage the behemoth, but the creature was too large and too strong. A few lashes of the powerful tail, and it had pulled free, swimming off in the current—but the little craft-like object or creature broke up. From within it came all kinds of debris, some of it clearly made out of ordinary matter because it was impervious to the chaotic churning of the Antarsa and only influenced by gravity. These bits had clean, smooth trajectories. Flailing and struggling in the current, however, were three long, slender creatures with fins and a bifurcated tail. Were these the pilots of the craft, or parasites within the belly of a beast? The inexorable currents drew them to the net. I wanted to linger, to see whether they would be rescued or immobilized—two of the busy craft went immediately toward them—but I was already too close and I did not want to subject my ship to more shuddering. So I powered away in a wide arc.

I made for the night side of the planet. I was hoping for lights, indicating a settlement, perhaps, but the night side was dark, except for the fires of volcanoes and lava beds. Whatever beings had engineered the enormous net had left no trace of their presence on the planet—perhaps, if they had once lived there, they had abandoned it.

My kin were clearly not on this planet. The generation ship must have come here and found that the constant bombardment of the planet by altmatter creatures made it a poor candidate for a home. I hoped that they would have escaped the net, if the net had been there at the time. It was possible, too, that they had come here and settled, and when, as I thought, the Antarsa current shifted and slammed through Ashta, they perished. I felt great sadness, because I had hoped, dreamed, that I would find them here, settled comfortably in the niches and spaces of this world. I had imagined talking to them in the Old Irthic that I had been practicing, until I learned their languages. Instead I had to send a message home that they were not here after all.

Where had they gone? Manda had told me that the old generation ships were programmed for at least three destinations. Wherever they had gone, they had not thought it worthwhile to send us a message. Perhaps something had gone wrong en route. I shivered. None of the options implied anything good for our lost kin.

I decided I would attempt a moon landing. The moons did not seem to be made of altmatter as far as I could tell. The moon over the dark side was in the planet’s wake, where there should be fewer eddies and undertows. So I brought my craft (still on fusion power) into orbit around the moon.

That was when it happened—a totally unexpected undertow caught the folded altmatter wings in the navigation chamber at just the right angle. I had at that moment cut speed from the fusion engines, preparatory to making an approach, so the undertow caught me by surprise. Before I knew it we were flung head-on toward the moon.

As I saw the moon’s battered surface loom larger and larger, I thought of you, dear kin. I thought my moment had come. You would wonder at Mayha’s silence, and hypothesize various endings to her story. I couldn’t let that happen to you. Quicker than thought, I powered the fusion engines to brake my craft. I made a crash-landing, bumping along the uneven ground, over and over, until at last we were still. I felt the slight tug of the moon’s gravity. The inertial web retracted slowly—I winced as it pulled strands of my hair with it. I was shaking, weak from shock. How slowly the silence impressed upon me as I lay in my craft!

Then the ship’s AI began to speak. The fusion engine was intact, but one of the altmatter wings was broken. There was some damage to the outside of the ship, and the AI was already launching a repair swarm that clambered insect-like over the cracked and fissured shell. Anchoring cables had dug in and secured us to the surface of the moon. There was a spare wing stored within the navigation chamber, but it would take a long time to shape and match it to the old one. Then I would have to remove the broken wing and put in the new one, and adjust the rigging to the right tension. Working with altmatter meant that as I turned a wing this way or that, it would pick up a current or two and tumble out of my hand, and blow about the chamber. After a while I decided I needed to restore my mental equilibrium to the extent possible under such circumstances. So I did what I would do at home: after suiting up, I went for a walk.

Walking on the moon was both exhilarating and terrifying. To be outside my little home after years! I could spread my arms, move my legs, go somewhere I hadn’t been before. There was the great bulk of the planet ahead of me, dominating my field of vision, dark and mysterious, streaked with fires, limned with light. The moon seemed to be a fragile thing in comparison, and I had to fight the feeling that I would fall away from it and on to the smoking, burning planet. I had to step lightly, gingerly, so that the ground would not push me away too hard. I walked halfway around it and found myself at the edge of a deep crater.

Lowering myself down to it was easy in the low gravity. At the bottom it was very dark. My suit lights picked out an opening—a hollow—a cave! I stepped into it, curious, and found a marvel.

The cave was filled with luminous fish-like creatures, each about as long as my finger. They circled around on tiny, invisible currents, so I guessed they were made of altmatter. As I stared at them in wonder, a few darted up to me, hovering over my visor. I stood very still. To make kinship with a fellow living being, however remote, was a great thing after my long incarceration. I was inspected and found harmless, and thereafter left alone. I stood in the dark of the cave, my ears filled with the sound of my own breathing, and fervently thanked the universe for this small encounter.

As I turned to leave, I had a terrible shock. My suit lights had fallen on somebody—a human, sitting silently on a piece of rock against the wall of the cave, watching me.

No, it was not a person—it was a sculpture. Fashioned in stone of a different kind, a paler shade than the material of the moon, it had clearly been brought here. I went up to it, my heart still thumping. It was the statue of a woman, sitting on a rock cut to resemble the prow of a boat or ship. There was a long pole in her hands, and she looked at me with obsidian eyes, her face showing a kind of ethereal joy. I thought she might be one of the old gods of our ancestors, perhaps a goddess for travelers. I touched the rock with my gloved hand, moved beyond tears. Why had my kin left this symbol here? Perhaps they had tried to make a home on Ashta, and failing, had left the statue as a mark of their presence.

I spent three days on the moon. I repaired the wing, a task more difficult than I can relate here (Raim will find a better description in my technical journal) and went back to the cave many times to renew kinship with the fish-like creatures and to see again the statue of the woman. The last time, I conducted an experiment.

I took with me some pieces of the broken altmatter wing. They confirmed that the inside of the cave was a relatively still place, where the Antarsa currents were small. By waving one piece of wing in front of the statue, and using another piece on the other side as a detector, I determined after a lot of effort that the statue was made of ordinary matter except from the neck upward, where it was altmatter or some kind of composite. This meant that my kin had made this statue after they had been here a while, after they had discovered altmatter. I stared again at the statue, the woman with the ecstatic face, the upraised eyes. She saw something I could not yet see. I wondered again how she had come to be placed here, in a nameless cave on a battered moon of Ashta.

I am now moving away from Ashta, on a relatively smooth current of the great Antarsa ocean. I am convinced now that I can sense the Antarsa, although it blows through me as though I am nothing. I can tell, for instance, that I am out of the worst of the chaotic turbulence. I can only hope that I’ve caught the same current I was on before I entered the Ashtan system—it is likely that the current splits into many branches here. I will be completely at its mercy soon, since I do not have much fuel left for the fusion engines. I also must conserve my food supplies, which means that after this message I will enter the cryochamber once more—a thought that does not delight me.

At last I have relinquished control of the altmatter sails to the ship’s computer. I woke from several hours of sleep to see, on the radar screen, images of the altmatter creatures sailing with me. Unlike me, they all seem to know where they are going. Here their numbers have dropped, but I notice now a host of smaller replicas of the behemoths, and the wheel-like creatures, and I wonder if the Ashtan system is some kind of cosmic spawning ground. I wish very much to offer kinship to these creatures. I already miss the little fish in their cave on the moon. That has given me hope that although we are made of very different kinds of matter, we can make a bridge of understanding between us. Life, after all, should transcend mere chemistry, or so I hope.

I have sent many messages home. In a few years my dear ones will read them and wonder. The young people I will never see, children of my kin-sisters and kin-brothers, will ask the adults with wide eyes about their aunt Mayha, Moon-woman, who forever travels the skies. But I have one faint hope. Out on the Western sea, Raim once told me that the great ocean currents, the conveyor belts, are all loops. It seems to me that it is likely, if our universe is finite, that the Antarsa currents are also closed loops. If I have chosen the right branch, this current might well loop back toward Dhara. Who knows how long that will take—perhaps my descendants will find only that this little craft is a coffin—but the hope persists, however slight, that I might once again see the blue skies, the great forest of my home, and tell the devtaru of my travels.

One casualty of my crash-landing on the moon is that Parin’s biosphere is broken. I am trying to see if some of the mosses and sugarworts can still survive, but the waterbagman broke up, and for a while I found tiny red worms suspended in the air, some dead, others dying. There was one still captured in a sphere of water, which I placed in a container, but it is lonely, I think. I am trying to find out what kind of nutrients it needs to stay alive. This has been a very disturbing thing, to be left without Parin’s last gift to me, a living piece of my world.

I stare at my hands, so chapped and callused. I think of the hands of the stone woman. An idea has been forming in my mind, an idea so preposterous that it can’t possibly be true. And yet, the universe is preposterous. Think, my kin, about this fact: that ordinary matter is rare in the universe, and that in at least two planets, Dhara and Ashta, there is altmatter deep within. Think about the possibility that altmatter is the dominant form of matter in the universe, and that its properties are such that altmatter life can exist in the apparent emptiness between the stars. Our universe then is not inimical to life, but rich with it. Think about the stone woman in a cave on the irregular little moon that circumnavigates Ashta. Is it possible that there is some symbolism in the fact that she is made of both matter and altmatter? Is it possible that the generation ship of my ancestors did not really leave the system, that instead my kin stayed and adapted more radically than any other group of humans? Imagine the possibility that the fate of all matter is to become altmatter, that as the most primitive and ancient form of substance, ordinary matter evolves naturally and over time to a newer form, adapted to life in the great, subtle ocean that is the Antarsa. Suppose there is a way to accelerate this natural change, and that my kin discovered this process. Confronted with an unstable home world, they adapted themselves to the extent that we cannot even recognize each other. Those slim figures I saw, thrown out of the ruins of the little spacecraft after its epic battle with the behemoth—could they once have been human?

How can anyone know? These are only wild conjectures, and what my kin on Dhara will make of it, I don’t know. It depresses me to think that I never found a way to make kinship with the creatures monitoring the vast net. If there had been a circumstance in which I could have met them on a more equal footing than predator and prey, I would have liked to try. If my ideas are correct and they were once human, do they remember that? Do they return to the little moon with its cave-shrine, and stare at the statue? At least I have this much hope: that given my encounter with the tiny fish-like creatures of the cave, there is some chance that lifeforms composed of ordinary matter can make kinship with their more numerous kin.

My hands are still my hands. But I fancy I can feel, very subtly, the Antarsa wind blowing through my body. This has happened more frequently of late, so I wonder if it can be attributed solely to my imagination. Is it possible that my years-long immersion in the Antarsa current is beginning to effect a slow change? Perhaps my increased perception of the tangibility of the Antarsa is a measure of my own slow conversion, from ancient, ordinary matter to the new kind. What will remain of me, if that happens? I am only certain of one thing, or as certain as I can be in a universe so infinitely surprising: that the love of my kin, and the forests and seas and mountains of Dhara, will have some heft, some weight, in making me whoever I will be.