Starlady & Fast-Friend

Yes, it was a common dream.

But they were most uncommon dreamers.

And they were lucky. They were born at the right time. They were still children when the Hades Expedition, bound for Pluto, came upon the blinkies. Then the darks came upon the Hades Expedition.

Twelve men had died, but Brand felt only a child’s thrill, a delicious shiver.

Three years later, he and Melissa had followed the news avidly when the Second Hades Expedition, the lucky one, the one with the first primitive energy screens, made its astonishing discoveries. And a crewman named Chet Adams became immortal.

He remembered a night. They’d walked hand in hand, up a winding outside staircase atop one of the city’s tallest towers. The lights, the glaring ceaseless lights, were mostly below. They could see the stars, sort of. Brand, a younger, smooth-faced Brand with long curling hair, wrapped his arm around Melissa and gestured.

Up. At the sky.

“You know what this means?” he said. The news had just come back from Hades II; dreamers were everywhere. “We can have the stars now. All of them. We won’t have to die on a starship, or settle down on Mars. We’re not trapped.”

Melissa, whose hair was reddish gold, laughed and kissed him.

“You think they’ll find out how it’s done? How the darks go ftl?”

Brand just hugged her and kissed her back. “Who cares? I suppose ftl ships would be nice. But hell, we can have more now. We can be like him, like Adams, and the stars can all be ours.”

Melissa nodded. “Why fly an airplane, right? If you could be a bird?”

For five long years they loved, and dreamed of stars. While the Changling Jungle swelled, and the fast-friends sailed the void.

* * *

Robi returned to the bridge just as Brand activated the main viewscreen. Surprise flashed across her face. She looked at him and smiled. Above, the picture was alive with a million tiny lights, pinpoints of sparkling green and crimson and blue and yellow and a dozen other colors. Not stars, no; they shifted and danced mindlessly, constantly, blinking on and off like fireflies and making the scanners ping whenever they touched the ship.

She floated herself to her chair, strapped down. “You kept my course,” she said, pleased. “I’m sorry I got so angry.” She put a hand on his arm.

Brand shook it off. “Don’t give me any credit. We’re dead on. The blinkies came to us.”

“Oh,” she said. “I might have known.”

“They’re all around us,” he said. “A huge swarm. I’d guess a couple cubic miles, at least.”

Robi looked again. The viewscreen was thick with blinkies in constant motion. The stars, those white lights that stood still, could hardly be seen. “We’re going right into the swarm,” she said.

Brand shrugged. “It’s in our way.”

Robi leaned forward, spread her hands over the instruments, punched in a few quick orders. Seconds later, a line of flashing red print began to run across the face of her scanner. She looked up at Brand accusingly. “You didn’t even check,” she said. “Darks, three of them.”

“This is not a trap run,” Brand said, unemotionally.

“If they come right up to us and ask to be trapped, I suppose you’ll tell them to go away? Besides, they could eat right through us.”

“Hardly. The safe-screen is up.”

Robi shook her head without comment. The darks would avoid a ship with its safe-screen up. So, naturally, you couldn’t trap them that way. But Brand wasn’t trapping this time.

“Look,” Brand said.

The viewscreen, suddenly, was empty again; just a scattering of stars and two or three lost blinkies winking a lonely message in blue and red. The swarm was gone. Then, with equal speed, it came into sight again. Far off, growing smaller; a fast-receding fog of light.

Brand locked the viewer on it; Robi upped the scopes to max magnification. The fog expanded until it filled the screen.

The blinkies were fleeing, running from their enemies, running faster than the Chariot or any man-built ship had ever gone or could ever hope to go, unaided. They were moving at something close to light-speed; after all, they were mostly light themselves, just a single cell and a microscopic aura of energy that gave off short, intense bursts of visible radiation.

Despite the lock, despite the scopes, the viewscreen was deserted less than a second after the blinkies began to run. They’d gone too far, too fast.

Robi started to say something, then stopped. Instead she reached out and touched Brand by the elbow, squeezing sharply. Up in the viewscreen, the stars had begun to dim.

You can’t see a dark, not really, but Brand knew how they looked, and he’d seen them often enough in his imagination and his dreams. They were bigger than the blinkies, vastly bigger, almost as big as a man; pulsing globes of dark energy, seldom radiating into the visible spectrum, seen only by the drifting flakes of living matter trapped within their spheres.

But they did things to the light passing through them: they made the stars waver and dim.

As they were dimming now, up on the screen. Brand watched closely. Briefly, oh so briefly, he thought he saw a flash of silver as a flake of darkstuff caught the tired sunlight and lost it again. The old fear woke and clutched at his stomach. But the dark was keeping its distance; their safe-screens were up.

Robi looked over at Brand. “It’s begging,” she said, “it’s practically begging. Let’s drop screens and trap it. What’s the harm?”

Brand’s face was cold. Irrational terror swirled within him. “It knows,” he said, hardly thinking. “It didn’t go after the blinkies. It senses something different about us. I tell you, it knows.”

She gave him a curious stare. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “It’s only a dark. Come on. Let me trap it.”

Brand mastered himself, though the fear was alive and walking, the Hades fear, the trapper’s companion. Creatures of energy, the darks ate matter. Like the blinkies they swept clean the scattered dust and gas on the fringes of solar space. And they moved through blinkie swarms like scythes, carving tunnels of blackness in those living seas of light. And, when they found a lonely chunk of nickel-iron spinning through the void, that too was food. Matter to energy, converted in a blinding silent flash. An incandescent feast.

A hundred times Brand had faced the fear, when he sat before his computer and prepared to drop his screens. When the ship was naked, when the screens were down, then only the mindless whim of the dark said if a trapper lived or died. If the dark came slow, moving in leisurely towards its sluggish steel meal, then the trapper won. Once the dark was in range, the safe-screens would blink on again, covering the ship like a second skin. And, further out, the trapping screens would form a globe. The dark would be a prisoner.

But if the dark moved quickly….

Well, the blinkies ran at light-speed. The darks fed on the blinkies. The darks ran faster.

If the dark moved quickly, there was no way, no defense, no hope that man or woman or computer could raise the screens in time. A lot of trappers died that way. The First Hades Expedition, screenless, had been holed in a dozen places.

“Let me trap it,” Robi said again. Brand just looked at her. Like him, she was a trapper. She’d beaten the fear as often as he had, and she had luck. Still, maybe this time that luck would change.

He unstrapped, pulled himself up, and stood looking down on her. “No,” he said. “It’s not worth the risk. We’re too close. Leave the dark alone. And don’t change course, you hear, not five feet. I’m going down to angel.”

“Brand!” Robi said. “Damn you. And don’t bring that thing up here, you understand? And….” But he was gone, silently, ignoring her.

She turned back to the viewscreen and, frustrated, watched the dark.

* * *

Asleep, awake, it never mattered. The vision would come to him all the same. Call it dream, color it memory.