Ad astra per aspera, et ultra ad Logos (Chapter 11)

Previous

Chapter 11.

Yupgo stirred in his bed, unable to fall asleep.

The last couple of days had truly tested him —landing on Solara, meeting the new Deathworlder, getting swarmed by Angela’s rowdy relatives, and now this. It was all too much. He hadn’t signed up to be a political puppet, left at the mercy of the Axios High Chamber.

The trip to the GC capital hadn’t been the glorious event he’d hoped for. As he stood before the High Chamber, delivering his first contact report to the assembled government representatives, the scheming had started almost immediately. He wasn’t even halfway through describing the alien’s morphology when his own representative began leveraging the discovery —apparently under the delusion that, because he and Yupgo were of the same species, that gave him some kind of advantage over the others.

The Chamber’s overall sentiment was one of misplaced optimism —each faction somehow under the impression that this new contact might give them a leg up over the rest.

Yupgo sighed deeply, unable to believe the absurdity of it all. His own government —the enlightened and peaceful Gardenworlders— were behaving like a pack of self-serving schemers. For all their seemingly uncivilized habits, the Deathworlders would never treat him that way. They might give him a scare, say something offensive, or do something bizarre and/or incredibly stupid, but at the end of the day, they treated him like one of their own.

Maybe the humans had it right, choosing to distance themselves from governance.

“Having trouble sleeping?” asked Aguija, nestling up to him.

She was lying on his outstretched arm, cuddled close. She had begun sharing his bed shortly after joining the crew, completely smitten by his “rugged” demeanor —apparently, his friendship with Angela made him look like some kind of daredevil in her eyes. He had to admit: her attentions felt good.

“A bit,” he said, gently caressing her face with his thumb. “It was today’s business with the High Chamber. The way they all behaved… as if Nirales would somehow help further their careers. If we’re lucky, we’ll get assigned to deep-space scouting and won’t have to return to GC space for a good long while.”

Aguija pushed herself up on one elbow and looked at him, slowly turning red. Even if the idea excited her, the reality of it clearly didn’t.

“You’re joking, right?” she asked, panic creeping into her voice.

Yupgo chuckled softly. Watching her blush deepen, he could finally understand why Angela got such a kick out of scaring him.

“Relax. It’ll be a while before anything happens. First, we have to wait for Bazall to give birth. Then we’ll need ship-wide upgrades installed by the Venerable Ones. And who knows how long that will take…” He trailed off, giving her a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“Wait… Bazall’s pregnant?” she asked, surprised.

“You didn’t notice?”

“Well, no, I haven’t,” she admitted, a bit embarrassed. “I’m not familiar enough with the olachy to tell.”

“I see. In any case, she is —and she’s due any day now,” explained Yupgo.

“Will she be staying aboard? I mean… with all the excitement we’re headed for?”

“The couple say they’re going to stay, but I’d bet that’s because they’re not entirely aware of what’s coming.”

They remained quiet for a moment, simply enjoying each other’s company.

“So, tell me about the new guy,” Aguija asked, curiosity gleaming in her huge green eyes. “Have you learned anything interesting about him? I’d love to work him into one of my stories, and I was wondering if there’s anything interesting about him.”

“Beyond the fact that he has practically no skeleton to speak of —holding himself up through sheer high-grav musculature (don’t ask me how that even works)— and that he was flung into space by the starship equivalent of a catapult just to see what would happen… there’s not much else to say,” he replied with a shrug. “Honestly, I haven’t learned much more about him. But if you’re that curious, you can always go downstairs and ask him yourself.”

He paused briefly, then added with a note of warning,

“Just make sure someone else is around. Bear in mind, he hasn’t exactly been house-trained, so to speak.”

She nodded thoughtfully, drawing lazy circles on his chest with one finger.

Shortly after, they both finally drifted off to sleep.

***

“Alright, easy now,” said Ivko. “Don’t get greedy —we don’t need much, just a couple of cubic meters.”

The Silvdrake had docked at Station 284-44, deep in golachy space, near a ringed gas giant. Bazall and Bahoom had decided not to risk anything and chose to spend the final days of Bazall’s pregnancy on familiar ground, surrounded by close relatives. The safety of the station was a welcome relief for the couple, allowing them to recharge before their next long voyage.

Meanwhile, the two human engineers, not wanting to remain idle, took it upon themselves to refill the ship’s water reserves. Normally, this would’ve been done at the station, but this particular one was reserved exclusively for Golachy-owned vessels —an ancient exclusivity charter with the Galactic Council, established God knows when.

So they took the Homunculus and flew out to harvest ice from the nearby planetary rings.

“That’s a rough three cubic meters —give or take some impurities,” said Willy, after carving into a massive block of ice with his shoulder-mounted lasers.

Floating in a frozen ocean of spinning ice boulders, they were both struck by the same thought, the same feeling —and as if on cue, they began to sing:

“O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:

The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark

Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs

Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.”

They sang the old poem, stirred by that ever-present sense of awe before the implacable forces of winter —in this case, of a cosmic variety.

The rings: a graveyard of unborn worlds, ripped apart by entropy and condemned to spin around their executioner until the heat death of their star. And yet, now their shattered remains were being given new purpose —replenishing the Silvdrake’s water supply. The inevitability of entropic death, momentarily defied to prolong the existence of sentient life —a middle finger to natural forces the cosmos.

“How long do you think it’d take us to make a full orbit around the planet?” asked Ivko, as he placed a couple of propulsion drones on the freshly carved ice block and slaved them to their gunship.

“At full speed? Pushing the suits to their very limit?” Willy did a quick mental calculation. “Maybe ten hours.”

“We should do it,” Ivko said plainly. “You know —send the block back, let the drones purify it, siphon the water into the ship… and just fly off.”

The tantalizing, crazy idea began to take shape in their minds —the caveman impulse to do something stupid slowly overwriting their higher rational thoughts.

“Fuck it,” they said in unison.

They programmed the Homunculus’ return trip and watched it fly off, ice block in tow.

“Angela, you copy?” said Ivko over the intercom.

“Loud and clear. What’s up?” came her chipper voice.

“The ice is secured and en route to the ship. The drones will handle the rest. We’ll be staying here for a while... chasing an edge,” Ivko replied.

“What edge?” asked Angela confused.

The two humans exchanged a look —a psychotic grin plastered on their faces— and sang in unison:

“We chase the edge where reason dies,

And carve our names upon the skies.

Through every law we choose to fall,

To make a myth of mortals all.

The void may howl, the stars may crack,

But never shall we turn or slack.

For in the fire, we are made bright—

The fools who dared, and called it right.”

And just like that, the two humans fired up their fusion cores and began soaring through, over, and beneath the icy rings —slicing through rock with their entropic blades and bashing aside the rest with their energy shields. They carved a path through that cosmic graveyard, displacing debris in their wake at breakneck speeds.

***

Angela remained silent, listening to their grunts and roars as they did their thing, and, with a smile and a sigh, simply ended the call.

"Ok, then," was all she said before returning to her stories.

She had connected herself to the station’s intranet and was reading some of the local literature, not particularly impressed by its lack of imagination. Comfortably seated on the rec room’s couch, she had spent the better part of the day reading, content with the simplicity of it all.

Suddenly, the room’s doors slid open, and Nirales walked in. He seemed a bit bored and was clearly looking for someone to talk to.

"Hello, Angela," he said. "Are you busy?"

She looked at him and smiled, inviting him to sit down by tapping the space next to her.

“Not at all.”

He accepted and did as offered. A brief silence followed —the newcomer unsure of what to say.

"I can tell you’re bored," she said, putting her PIT down.

"I’m afraid so," he replied, glowing a dull, embarrassed yellow. "I haven’t quite gotten used to your way of doing things. In my world’s military, we were told exactly what to do at all times —how much downtime we were allowed and for how long... but here," he trailed off for a second, "no one tells you what to do. You've got no real leadership —or at least none I can identify."

“We don’t need orders. Each of us is trained to think, to assess, to act. We’re not waiting for permission —we look around, see what’s needed, and do it. That’s the foundation of the Order: absolute responsibility, born from within. No one commands you, but you’re not alone —everyone pulls their weight, and then some. We prepare ourselves relentlessly, not to outperform each other, but to better serve. Over generations, that mindset shapes everything. We don’t chase medals or praise. Serving is reward enough.”

“I guess that’s easy with such levels of automation,” he said.

“Very true —but it wasn’t always like that. There was a time when we had little access to GC tech, and had to make do with our own ingenuity. It’s thanks to the efforts of the early members of the Order that we get to lounge about as we do now.”

“It must be nice, having that kind of personal commitment to an ideal. My people could certainly learn a thing or two,” he said, a bit dryly.

“What are your people like?” she asked.

“Apparently not too different from yours, once upon a time,” he said, lowering his voice. “Even down to the superstitions.”

She gave him an understanding look. To say that the revelations of the previous day had left the Oakarat in a daze would’ve been an understatement. He’d spent most of the night pacing in his room, trying to wrap his head around the ludicrous idea that —not only was there a god-like entity, a cosmic sentience— but that it actually seemed to care for the beings of the universe. So much so, in fact, that it had walked among them, adopting the shape of each species, in an attempt to get them to behave better. 

He’d always fancied himself a rational man, —someone unbound by superstitions, or fairy tales. And yet he was currently face to face with an anthropological reality that just couldn’t be explained away by a fact of mere happenstance.

“What’s his name?” asked Angela.

“Whose name?”

“Your messiah’s. The one your people killed.”

Even though he saw it coming, the question still caught him off guard.

She looked at him expectantly, smiling, quietly waiting for his answer. Nirales met her gaze.

“Dabom Tish,” he said. “And yes, he was left to dry under the blistering sun, strapped to a Y-shaped post.”

The contextualization process gave Angela a reasonably accurate mental image of what he meant.

Her smile remained as radiant as ever.

“And would the term Tish, by any chance, mean something like the anointed one?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a linguist. I’m an astronaut,” he said, clinging to the prestige of his title —though, aboard this ship, it meant precious little.

“That’s okay. But tell me —according to your people’s lore— how long did it take him to come back to life?”

“A bit over a day and a half.”

“As in… he was executed in the evening and came back the morning of the day after the next?”

“Yes,” he sighed.

“Fascinating,” she said with mock interest, fully aware that everyone else’s lore said the exact same thing.

“You know it’s just a story, right? It’s not real. It’s just a myth,” protested Nirales.

“I take it you’re not a man of faith?”

“Not quite,” he replied plainly. “I’ve seen enough horrors in my life to have serious doubts about the proverbial guy upstairs.”

“That’s fair,” Angela said with a soft nod. “But tell me —how many of those horrors were the result of someone’s actions? Of their choices? And how many might’ve been avoided if people lived more selflessly?”

She looked at him, her gaze curious rather than accusatory.

“And how many were committed in the name of that same God?” he shot back. “If people started killing one another in my name, I’d definitely step in.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Alright,” he sighed. “But what about natural disasters? Accidents? Disease…” he trailed off, the weight of the examples hanging in the silence.

“What about them?”

“If He cares so much about us, why would He allow such things to happen?”

Angela sighed deeply and held his gaze for a long moment.

“One of the things we learn from history is that faith —true faith— is not inherited, but discovered. It is not solely a doctrine handed down, but a path each must walk alone. If one is truly rational, one must seek, question, and wrestle with the unknown. One must exhaust the words of those wiser than oneself, study the footsteps of others who began from the same doubts, and observe how their journey changed them —what they found, and what they lost. Only the irrational presume to have all the answers, and sneer at those who walk a different path. Certainty, when unearned, is not strength. It is fear dressed as truth.”

He looked at her blankly, caught off guard by her reasoning. There was no anger in her voice, no trace of reproach —only calm, and something deeper still: understanding. A quiet trust, not just in him and in his intelligence, but in the framework of her faith.  He was suddenly surprised at the effectiveness by which the mycobacteria in his brain, was bridging the gap between their species.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Let’s say—for the sake of argument—you’re right. Through and through. Why would God even bother with us? What’s the point of it all?”

“Well, that’s easy,” she said with a small genuine chuckle. “You want the long answer or the short one?”

He shrugged.

“The simple answer is that God needs us alive and living —not merely existing— to fulfill the purpose of life. That is: to shine the light of consciousness into the darkness of existence. Our souls —or consciousness, if that offends your delicate sensibilities— are directly linked to him. They are part of him. And it’s through us that he can begin to understand: himself, and the fact of being. Think of us as his dendrites, his feelers, his fingers —the sensory organs he uses to probe the nature of reality. He cares for us the way you care for your arms, your legs, your fingertips.”

“And that’s the simple answer?” he said in shock. “How can that even be considered simple?”

She chuckled, shifting her weight and tucking her legs beneath her.

“Well, it is —compared to the long one. Because if we really wanted to get into how we are his dendrites, we’d have to dive into higher-dimensional forms of being, emergent identity fields, recursive spacetime topology... and I don’t know about you, but I barely passed non-linear algebra.”

She gave him a playful glance, then softened again.

“Besides, this isn’t my theory. This idea has been developing over the last thousand years —countless minds, scattered across the stars, have contributed to it. I’m just echoing their work. I didn't come up with it over coffee.”

Nirales just sat quietly, his mind once again thoroughly blown.

“You just don’t mess around when it comes to dropping life altering lore on others, do you?” he said, cycling through an array of colorful emotions. “Tuyaara said as much when she examined me for the first time. Something along the lines of, ‘only you know how much information is too much information’.”

Angela laughed at that.

“Yeah, we’re not big on hiding knowledge from others. Just another thing we left in the past.”

“My government would disagree profusely with you,” he stated.

“You never did tell me about them,” she pointed out. “What are they like? Where are you at, technologically speaking?”

“That’s a tricky question. If we’re talking about technology widely available to the public, then nuclear power and cybernetics are the latest thing. But the actual tech—the kind reserved for those in the highest positions of power—is strictly classified. Willy was right when he guessed I was testing a direct gravity beam prototype ship. I guess there are even crazier things, way above my pay grade.”

“Hmm,” said Angela, narrowing her eyes. “We never did get too deep into cybernetics, ourselves. We did with the atom, though —dropped a couple of nukes to end a war and said, ‘no thanks.’ We did keep them, you know, to ensure peace through mutual assured destruction —as you would.”

She chuckled, before growing uncharacteristically somber.

“You know,” she began, “when we managed to avoid nuclear Armageddon, we thought it was a pretty obvious outcome. After all, nuclear annihilation is bad for business, and the global economy just wouldn’t have allowed for it.” She took in a deep breath. “Boy, were we wrong. If we only knew how bad it could’ve gotten…”

“What do you mean?” he inquired, clearly lacking some context.

“Right,” she said, “I forgot you haven’t had time to go through all our histories. When you’ve got a while to spare, look up the nokaltorun’s history on the Eirenarch terminal. Navrek’s people. However bad you think you’ve got it, trust me when I tell you —shit could always be so, so much worse. The fact that they’re here with us, thriving among the stars, is a miracle.”

“Was it so bad?”

“Again, when you have the time, look it up. Maybe Navrek wouldn’t mind telling you about it —although it’d be better if you asked him after you’ve done some research. You can access the terminal from your PIT; that way, you can do it at your own leisure.”

The room went silent for a brief moment as Nirales eyed the tantalizing presence of the terminal on the other side of the room.

Suddenly, the doors slid open and Kana and Tuyaara walked in, playfully chatting away.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” said Tuyaara playfully. She was wearing a simple dark tank top and shorts, leaving little to the imagination. Kana, for her part, wore her usual blue, low-cut, form-fitting robe and black leggings, tail swaying side to side with every step.

They strode into the rec-room with purpose, dropping themselves onto the massive couch.

“What have you two been talking about?” inquired Kana with curiosity.

“Same ol’, same ol’,” said Angela with a slight shrug.

“Amazing,” retorted Tuyaara sarcastically.

“Oh yeah? And what have you two been doing that’s so much more interesting?” shot back Angela.

“We had a good workout session,” said Tuyaara. “Honestly, at first, I was a bit skeptical about the boys’ choice of claytronic configuration for the gym —thinking there weren’t enough machines, or that they looked impractical— but after trying them… I take back everything I said and regret ever doubting their know-how. By the way, where are they?”

Angela pulled out her PIT, dialed them, and placed it flat on the table, waiting for them to answer.

“SUUUUUUUP BOOOOOOOSS!” cried Ivko.

“Boys, do you mind telling Tuyaara where you are right now?” asked Angela coyly.

“Barely over a tenth of the way! Willy thinks he can pull his funny shenanigans with me, but Libera’s might can’t be matched!” he said, clear strain in his voice.

“THE FUCK IT IS!” retorted Willy over the same call. “Impera is going to teach you the error of your ways!”

Angela disconnected the call and looked at the three stunned and confused crew members.

“They’re racing around the gas giant with their power-armors,” said Angela plainly.

“Of course they are,” stated Tuyaara, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You really think they could just stay put here and quietly sit on their hands until it was time to go? Not a chance. Those two need to move and do their crazy things, otherwise they’ll go mad. We’ve still got at least a full day before we have to move on from here, so it’s good they’re blowing off some steam.”

“Why are we staying here, though?” asked Nirales, his confused blue shining plainly.

“Bazall, the lady golachy, is giving birth on the nearby station. So, we have to stay here until she’s done,” explained Tuyaara.

“She’s one of the Gardenworlders from upstairs, right?”

“Yes. She and her husband are cartographers. Their job is to map out the various uncharted worlds the ship encounters along the way and forward the information to the appropriate GC authorities,” explained Angela. “Not sure which ones, though.”

“The Department of Terraforming Waitlist,” answered Kana helpfully. “They in turn get selected by interested parties, and the Terraforming Rings get to making them livable whenever they get to them. It takes years for the selected planet to be finished. I mean, it’s a planet —what was that phrase you humans like using...? ‘What’s worth showing takes time growing?’”

The humans nodded.

“Wait a second, cartography? Don’t you have machines for that?” asked Nirales.

“We have machines for a lot of things, but just as we aren’t all replaced by Eirenarch mobile platforms, they aren’t replaced with basic topographical scanners,” explained Kana, emphasizing the respective groups.

He looked at her in confusion but was interrupted before he could ask a follow-up question.

“An Eirenarch mobile platform is an ambulant automaton directly linked to Eirenarch,” said Angela. “There’s a limit to how many of them she’s allowed to produce in a year, so that’s why we haven’t received ours yet.”

“Right, the massive planet-sized unleashed AI that you humans just keep around,” said Nirales, shining a timid, fearful red. “One day I’d love to hear the story of how that came into being —but not now. I’ve had enough revelations for one day.”

The three women laughed at that, patting his back understandingly.

“So, to circle back to the golachy lady —why aren’t you there with her as well? I mean, if she’s going to become a mother, I’d assume that’s a pretty big deal. Shouldn’t you be there for emotional support, or something?”

“To cut a long story short, Deathworlders aren’t allowed aboard certain stations. We would scare the locals too much,” explained Angela.

“Wait, what? So, you’re good enough to act as their bodyguards, but you’re too dangerous to mingle with? How does that make any sense?”

“People have the right to associate with whomever they choose. If they don’t want to mix with someone, they’re within their rights not to do so.”

“And you’re all okay with this?” Nirales was incredulous. The mere idea of barring someone from accessing a place just because of their inherent physical attributes was beyond his comprehension.

The three women just shrugged.

“It doesn’t bother us one bit. The galaxy is huge, with room for all,” said Angela. “People have the right to keep to themselves. Besides, would you want to go where you’re not welcome?” postured Tuyaara. “I know I wouldn’t.”

“But that’s discrimination!” he protested.

“And?” retorted the doctor.

“What do you mean and? It’s wrong!”

“So, you want to force people who don’t want to live together, to live together?” posed Kana. “And somehow, that isn’t wrong?”

Nirales just stared at them in confusion, unable to understand their position.

“What do you mean by discrimination being wrong?” asked Angela. “It may be a miscommunication issue.”

“Well, it’s when you deny someone access to something because of reasons beyond their control —like being born on a higher-gravity world.”

“In your world, can anyone become a medical practitioner? Even those not smart enough to pass the qualifying exams?” asked Tuyaara.

“Well, not them, but…”

“There you go. You’ve just discriminated against those not smart enough. They didn’t choose not to be smart, or to lack the drive it takes to reach the top of any given field. The exact same principle applies here,” Tuyaara continued. “That station is part of sovereign golachy territory, and as such, they’re entitled to decide who comes in and who doesn’t.

“On top of that, we’re a peacekeeping organization. We don’t go where we aren’t invited.

“And on top of that, what exactly are we missing by not going there? They’re still tepid Gardenworlders doing their equally tepid activities. We’d be just as bored there as we are here. So, relax, and don’t get offended on our behalf.”

“We don’t get offended,” added Kana. “That’s too childish a thing.”

Nirales remained silent for a long moment, trying to wrap his head around what they had just told him. He didn’t even notice his facial tentacles beginning to curl upwards in quiet frustration.

Debating them felt pointless —their ways were what they were, likely for reasons buried deep in their history. There was even a fair chance that, once, they had believed as he did.

Clearly, he needed more context.

With a polite excuse, Nirales stood and left, returning to his quarters to review their history —to try and make sense of it, and, through it, of them.

“I feel for the poor man,” said Angela with genuine sincerity, after he’d left the room. “It can’t be easy, finding yourself so far from everything you’ve ever known —no matter how flawed it might seem to us.”

“He’ll adapt. Or he’ll go mad,” said Tuyaara flatly.

The other two women gave her reproachful looks.

“That was a bit heartless,” Angela murmured.

“When faced with the stark choice of life or death, most will always choose life,” Tuyaara replied, unmoved. “That’s what we all had to do, one way or another. That’s how we got here. He’s tougher than he looks. He’ll make it.”

“Still…” Angela began, but let the thought die there. Instead, she stood and walked to the light regulator. After dimming the room, she returned to the couch.

Kana, grateful for the gesture, removed her goggles.

“Thanks. That’s much better,” she said, blinking her large, iridescent eyes.

“It’s a shame you have to keep those peepers hidden so often,” Tuyaara said, studying them with academic fascination. “They’re quite the marvel of evolution.”

Kana smiled, her train fluttering gently.

“Is your homeworld as dark as Askana, your cradle planet?” Angela asked.

“No,” Kana said, shaking her head. “Tacita orbits a young star —not a bloated red giant— so there’s much more light. We deal with it by living underground during the summers, and coming out mostly at night.”

“We do something similar,” said Tuyaara. “Only we’re hiding from the cold, not the sun.”

“I really pity you two,” Angela said with a hint of sorrow. “There’s nothing better than feeling the sun’s warm kiss on your cheeks.

“I can think of a few things better than that,” Kana said, smiling coyly.

The three women burst into laughter at the young Seyalthra’s naughty implication.

They continued chatting for a long while, enjoying the girl time, until Neryh finally called them over for lunch.

 ***