Celestial Creatures

Short story

Image credit: NASA

The Captain roused me late in the third watch, when the ship’s breathing was an unconscious roll underneath the decks and all but the mechanics were down in their bunks asleep. Her voice came in apologetic over the nerve, the electro-muscular signals buzzing underneath: “Sorry to wake you, Doctor, but there’s something… you’d oblige me greatly if you’d take a listen.”

I told her I would attend her presently. Captain Armstrong was not the kind to summon me in a fit of late-shift anxiety. There are those for whom solitude is naturally self-amplifying; when the warmth of the ship underfoot lends its slightly hypnotic effect and the vacuum outside makes the interior of the bwyst feel like a womb, people with this tendency will follow their personal terrors all the way back to that first darkness, given an hour. Armstrong was made of steadier stuff.

Moreover, she possessed the typical military awe of people in my profession, and thus far on our voyage had taken pains not to disturb me with unnecessary questions about the ship’s functioning. I considered these good qualities in an officer, and her present attentiveness to the bwyst’s inner workings only magnified the warmth of my first impression toward her.

I dressed, collected my instruments, and went out into the dim, humming cavity. The biofluorescent organisms in the bulkhead pulsed gently in ripples of green and violet, in slow time with the movement of the underlying muscle. They provided steady light even without amplifying devices, which I noted with approval as a sign of good gut health.

The Auriga Chalice was a massive starcrawler, in fact the largest I had served on since I had taken my credentials. I had spent the bulk of my career on mid-size transports, with hearts weighing between 200 and 500 kilograms—though like most iatronauts I had also taken opportunities where they arose to dabble in the care of those small, delicately-bred ships used primarily for inter-station travel. There is a marvelous variety in their shapes and a delightful intimacy to their care; their pilots learn to breathe with them, to listen for the minutest vascular or gastrointestinal signals and optimize their function through near-unconscious response to them. Such a pilot is halfway to credentialed himself.

The military navigators were, in my experience, a cruder kind. There were bright lights among the officers, to be sure, but the starcrawlers they manned had left the feral shape of their distant ancestors as far behind as their pilots had. Consistency of conformation was paramount in a military pedigree. Only grudging allowance was made for the introduction of those foreign influences necessary to prevent the diseases of inbreeding. Thus any small inconsistency in their handling, their cavity size, even the quality of their internal luminescence, their officers treated as defects, rising in some to the level of personal insults. Any military-bred ship requiring real sensibility to pilot would have been euthanized and scrapped for parts.

Still—having spent half a post upon her I could not help but like the Chalice, clumsy striped colossus though she was. Despite all efforts to break her ancestors of their wildness she still strained at the stars on liftoff. When I had made my first approach to her, seen her basking against the orbital dock in the light of a double sun at 150 million kilometers, her many compound eyes half-closed and glittering in the vacuum, I had found myself curiously charmed. And charmed I remained, even as I fended off all the usual small complaints of a ship at work, strained muscles and hull polyps and the like, by a steadfastness that made her something better than merely stolid.

I came onto the bridge with a polite amount of noise, so as not to startle the occupant. Captain Armstrong was alone at the helm. Such a ship barely needed steering; she had been trained to the magnetic fields at her destination. Still, life is made of unpredictable moments.

“Captain,” I said, and she turned to me with an expression of unguarded pleasure.

“Doctor Vaughan,” she said, and shook my hand. She was a broad-shouldered woman, made square and solid by the wide legs of her uniform. “Thank you for your time. I wondered if I should call you or if it could wait until working hours, but I wasn’t sure…”

She allowed me to assure her that I was quite at her disposal and continued. “I believe… look, you’ll have to forgive me. I’m sure I’ll make a mess of the terminology. But I don’t suppose you could… put an ear to her heart?”

“Her heart!” I said.

“Yes. I’ve been at the watch for three ticks now—” this with a glance at the chronometer, which said nothing to me—“but even before that, when I was down in the mechanical cavity, and again in the mess, I thought… well, I didn’t think anything, really. But I feel it like my heartbeat, do you understand? A sense of, something’s not quite…” She trailed off. There was a determined unease around her mouth. “It’s like waking up in the night at a noise you didn’t properly hear. Something in you knows, even if—do you see?”

“I’ll have a look,” I said.

I was skeptical of her report, despite my esteem for her professional opinion. The 2000-kg heart of a military starcrawler beats, on average, once every five minutes. The rising and falling tide of the vascular system roars well below the range of our hearing, palpable only in the shifting vibrations of the decks. It is easy to read too much significance into minor changes in such a vast system, when one is smaller than some of the bwyst’s intestinal parasites. I considered that perhaps Captain Armstrong was more given to flights of anxiety than I had first supposed.

Still, it was no great inconvenience to assemble the Kelso cardiometer and the stethoscope, and we were well-positioned for the work on the bridge, which in this particular breed of starcrawler was in fact the cardiac ligament which our ancestors had first given that architectural signifier. Captain Armstrong assisted me with a will and with many cheerful questions about what this lens or that vibrometer contributed to the instrument’s function. She was that kind of woman whose natural curiosity invited an equally inquisitive discourse, so that in our first private hour together I learned a great deal about her history as an officer and about her affection for the Chalice in particular. “She is a bright creature, Doctor,” she said earnestly to me as I lowered my head into the chamber of the stethoscope and the panels illuminated themselves around me, “a canny bwyst, and I try to read her moods.”

I remained among the instruments for an hour. The Captain busied herself elsewhere on the bridge, or pretended to. But the moment I shifted to withdraw my head she looked at me attentively.

I frowned as I emerged. “You have a good ear for her, Captain,” I said. “There is a… a murmur.”

It was not like me to hesitate so. The aberration the instruments had detected had been faint and strange. On the cardiometer it appeared just behind and just before the fat, slow curve of the heartbeat: Something smaller, sharper, of variable frequency. “I confess I cannot immediately identify the cause.”

The Captain stood before a broad, curved screen-membrane showing the overlapping magnetic rings in the starfield around us, her hands clasped tightly behind her back. “That’s worrying news, Doctor, this far out—we cannot make berth now, not here, and we cannot go back—not without throwing the mission. We’re dangerously close to foreign fields to be uncertain in the health of the vessel.” She paused. “Is it—it could be benign, I suppose?”

I felt the weight of my inexperience. I had never heard such an echo in any smaller heartbeat. “Of course it could,” I said. Before my eyes, the cardiometer produced another swelling curve, another sharp echo. My heartbeat quickened as well. “But I cannot say so without further study. If I may say, it is remarkable that you were able to detect it, Captain.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “It’s as I said—like waking up knowing you heard something. As simple as that. …But Doctor, how soon will you know—? That is, what further study is required?”

I rather wished she had not asked. I had hoped for an hour to consider the question myself before taking inquiries. I busied myself in deconstructing the cardiometer and stethoscope and bought myself a moment to think. “We’ll start with the usual panel,” I said. “Everything—blood, intestinal biome, mucosal survey. If it does not produce a diagnosis it will, at least, allow us to rule out the obvious. And, I hope, present us a clearer picture of any impacts on locomotion, metabolism, offensive capabilities, and so on.”

I kept my voice even. I knew it was terribly likely the mission—which I was determined to comprehend only in its broadest strokes, my responsibility to the ship being the same whatever the officers’ orders—would continue, unless I could mount an argument that the murmur interfered in some way with the offensive systems. If all of Chalice’s appendages were in working order, if it seemed a sufficiently slow-acting malady, she would be obligated to carry out the remainder of the post regardless of the consequences for her health.

“Very good, Doctor,” Armstrong said. A iatronaut must school her expression as a matter of professional courtesy; the Captain did not bother to hide her worry. “Poor old bwyst.” She put her hand against the inner hull. The biofluorescence brightened around her fingers at the stimulus.

And then a curious expression came over her face. Her mouth fell open, and she tipped her head to one side as though seeking after some distant sound. Then she turned quickly from me and pressed both hands hard to the hull.

“Doctor,” she said, but I was already rushing to her, pressing my hands against the hull beside hers. For long seconds I sensed nothing but the faint, velvety movement of the organisms under my fingers—but then why was her face so intent, her eyes so distant, though they seemed fixed on mine?

Then the vibration came through my hand. It rang in my bones, bright and high, it sang in the ulnar nerve and made my fingertips tingle. I opened my mouth and nonsense came out: “Captain,” I said, “A cymbal. A mirror. A bell—”

“Yes! Yes!” she cried. For we had both understood in the same instant: Something was striking the outside of the ship. Something was causing the great polysaccharide shield on the ship’s prow to resonate at exhilarating frequency. Now that I had come to meet it I felt it in the bones of my skull, in all my ribs, in my heart and my gut.

The Captain’s face was bright, her eyes wide, and I had the fleeting thought she comprehended something still brighter, something I did not. “Chalice!” she barked, and the ship’s electrical intelligence flickered into wakefulness in the transparent wires along the ceiling. “External view, if you please!”

The magnetic fields vanished from the screen. We both turned, our hands still pressed to the inner hull, and what we saw was impossible.

There was the starfield, fading to haze in the far distance; there were the many suns in all their jewel-bright colors; there was the nearest world, a gas giant striped in red and gold, and rising at the bottom of the scope of our vision its single rocky moon. And silhouetted against its stark white face there was something massive and alive—something with a shape almost familiar, a mode of movement almost comprehensible. The mind rioted against it because of its familiarity, refused to believe it was possible because it seemed so nearly possible. Would delusion not produce an effect more alien? Would the mind not go further than this, seeking fantasy?

“Vaughan,” Armstrong said, and pressed one of her hands over mine. I understood her: Is this real? she asked me, the expert, her only witness. “Is that—”

“Bwystfil serenii,” I said, and hoped she would not draw her hand away, would not strand me alone in my wonder. “It is—”

“Extinct,” she breathed. “Isn’t it?”

Yes, yes, extinct, for thousands upon thousands of years. Nonetheless—! Nonetheless she was beautiful in the moonlight on the screen before us, an undulating, chitinous, feral creature. She was smaller than Chalice but vast still, lithe with great gaps in her to let the vacuum through. Nothing about her had been made with transport in mind. Nothing about her was for us. Chalice beside her was lumbering and overbred, slow and ill-defended.

“Vaughan,” Armstrong said again, and her hand pressed harder into mine. “D’you—”

The rest was lost. The shield reverberated again under our hands, that bright bell-like strike. Then our legs turned to jelly as the entire bridge groaned under our feet and all the air in the cardiac cavity resounded as inside of a massive drum.

Armstrong cried something unintelligible beside me. My vision collapsed. I thought I would be shaken to death, that they would find us both at the end of the watch melted into some kind of awful chimera as our cells rattled apart and forgot which of us they had originally belonged to. I pulled one hand from the hull as though dragging it through water and clung to Armstrong while my eyes liquefied in their sockets, my heart stuttered and jumped, all my bone marrow separated itself into neat stripes of hemoglobin and plasma, and every thought I had ever had vibrated out of phase and exploded from my head in a cloud of mist.

The ability to distinguish units of time returned to me first, as the waves of sound grew farther apart. I observed distantly that the vibration was receding. The bridge came back slowly, followed by my awareness of all my constituent parts. My ears rang and rang.

“—ging,” Armstrong said next to me. I looked down and saw that her hand, its edges still blurred in my vision, was tight around my upper arm, holding me upright.

I must have looked at her like an utter fool, for she beamed at me and spoke again, and I found my mind was capable of organizing at least some input into sounds. “Never heard that before in my life!” she said. “Can you believe it? She cried out to us and the old bwyst dredged that up for a reply.” She laughed, and it sent up a sympathetic ringing in my ears. “Chalice was singing.”

“The heartbeat,” I said. My voice was muffled in my ears. “The second heartbeat. It was hers.” I looked back to the screen and found it lifeless—just the white moon, the glittering starfield. “Where—?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Vanished as we were being shaken to pieces. What do you suppose they said to one another?” As I tried to fathom a reply to this, she shook her head, making it meaningless. “And to think,” she said, “If I’d done the smart thing and waited til morning to call you I’d have had to see her alone.” Her smile was radiant. She still had one hand against the hull, the biofluorescence beginning now to crawl up the edges of her fingers. “Would you have believed me?”

My feet did not yet feel connected with the deck. I stared at the screen, where the moon drifted out of the external view and the vacant starfield spilled eons-old light into my eyes. “I would have accused you of drunkenness,” I said.

I was familiar with those parties who would be scientifically interested in such a sighting, if they could be convinced of it. And it would be absurd not to try to convince them—to explain what had happened before our eyes. History had not begun until the first bwysts had been lassoed out of the heavens. Civilization had not truly existed before they were tamed, given their useful predictable shapes, made ships. “Was it recorded?” I asked.

Armstrong paused. “You know,” she said, “I didn’t think to record it. Not for a moment.” She grinned as I stared at her, stupefied. She put her back heavily to the hull and the biofluorescence flared, placed her briefly in silhouette, then accepted her shape and was still. “Not for a moment,” she repeated. My stricken expression did not touch her. She laughed again, quieter now, looking out past me at the cardiac cavity with its flickers of electric signals through the muscle wall, the instruments and panels showing nothing of interest. “Can you imagine?”

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Thanks to those who gave this a read ahead of time.