Exceptions to Reality (5 page)

Well, Anna Surat was thinking about it, and she intended to give full voice to her thoughts.

There were guards posted outside Bastrop’s quarters. They had been there since Tyrone had mobilized them four months ago, when the first serious rumblings of discontent had begun to make themselves known among the crew. Everyone was aware that if Gibeon Bastrop died, his crazed quest across the cosmos would die with him, and they could all go home. No one had tried to hurry the process along—yet. Surat knew that they were hoping time and accumulating infirmities would do for them what none of them could do for themselves.

She was admitted without having to wait. Depending on his mood and health, Gibeon Bastrop liked company. Long journeys in Void were lonely matters at best.

She found him seated before his dog. At the moment, the obedient sphere was taking dictation. Bastrop pivoted his motile to greet her. As he did so he essayed the shadow of a smile. Once, that expression had charmed millions. Now it was all the Old Man could do to induce the muscles in his face to comply with the simple physical demand.

“You’re looking well today, sir.” The polite mantra fooled neither of them.

Bastrop waved the dog away. It drifted off to sulk in a corner, powering down as it did so. “I’m always up for a visit from an attractive woman, Anna Surat. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

When was the last time he had a woman? she found herself wondering perversely. Does he even remember what it was like? So old—he was so old! If not for the dozens of doctors and billions of credits at his beck and call, he would have been dead thirty or forty years ago. Instead, he had bought himself an extra lifetime. And for what? So he could spend it like this, visibly decomposing in an expensive hospice motile that every month had to take over more and more of his own failing bodily functions? She resolved never to allow herself to be placed in such a situation. Not that she really needed to worry about it. She was about a hundred billion short of qualifying for that level of care.

“Mr. Bastrop, I know that Shipmaster Tyrone has been to see you…”

At her opening words his expression fell. His voice dropped to a raspy whisper. “Oh. That again. I was hoping…” His words trailed away.

Hoping what? she wondered. That I was coming for the pleasure of your selfish, semi-senile company? She forced herself to smile engagingly, wondering even as she did so if he was capable of responding to such gestures.

“You can’t subject us to this any longer, Mr. Bastrop. It isn’t reasonable. It isn’t fair.”

From the depths of memory the parchment-like substance that formed his face twisted into a semblance of a grin. “The search for beauty is never reasonable or fair, my dear. Being beautiful yourself, you should know that.”

Damn him, she cursed silently. She had been determined that nothing the aged industrialist did was going to affect her. But even the shadow of that smile was capable of lighting something within her. It was no comfort to know that it had done likewise to thousands who had been subjected to it before her.

“You can’t distract me with words, sir.”

“Pity.” He turned slightly away from her. “There was a time when I could have done so with a simple phrase. Long ago, that was.”

Feeling sympathy in spite of herself, she advanced to rest a hand on his shoulder. Beneath the synsilk lay very little flesh and much narrow bone. The feel of it made her want to pull her hand away, but she did not.

“You are unloved here, sir. I realize you know that, and don’t care. I can’t change that. Not even you can change that.” Her words came a little faster. “But by turning for home now you can regain their respect! You can finish this in a way that will be remembered with pride instead of animosity.”

He turned back toward her. Not by pivoting the chair this time, but by making an actual uncommon physical effort to rotate the upper portion of his remaining body. “And what about you, Anna Surat? Do
you
hate me for what I’ve done?”

“No, Mr. Bastrop. I don’t hate you. I just want to go home. I have a husband, you know. At least, I hope I still have a husband.”

“You are a starship navigator. He knew what he was getting into when he married you. Everyone knows. I’ve been married myself, so even if you think otherwise, I do understand. Outlived most of them.” He shook his head slowly. “They were all comely, in their own way. But they were not the Chauna.”

Surat knew she was out of line in speaking this way to her admittedly generous if stubborn employer, but the time for overindulgence was past. “
Nothing
is the Chauna, Mr. Bastrop! They say that you were once the smartest man in the galaxy. What happened to that person? Did he—?”

“Get senile?” Gibeon Bastrop chuckled. “I don’t think so—but then if I was, I wouldn’t know it, would I? I don’t think the pursuit of ultimate beauty stamps me as mad, Anna. I think it marks me as sane. Saner than most, I should say. Ultimately, what else is there but beauty? Beauty of discovery, beauty of thought, beauty of soul. It’s one thing I’ve never been able to buy, navigator. Now it is all I want. The last thing I want. No other human being has seen it. We will be the first.”

“Many myths are highly attractive, Mr. Bastrop. Seductive, even. But in the end they’re only myths. Isn’t the loveliness of legend enough? Can’t you leave it at that?”

“Maybe the Chauna is a world, Anna Surat. Have you thought of that?” Excitement danced in eyes that had been thrice replaced. “A world so wonderful even the Cosocagglia have no words for it. Can you imagine the reaction such a discovery would trigger? A world even more captivating than Earth, empty and waiting for us. Or maybe it’s a gas giant with multiple rings that glow like gold in the light of triple suns. But most likely it’s something we cannot imagine.”

“Neither can the Cosocagglia,” she responded, “because it doesn’t exist. Anything of absolute beauty has to be imaginary, or it ceases to be exceptional and becomes just one more item in the always expanding stellar pantheon.”

He started to reply, stopped, and began to wheeze softly. She ought to call somebody, she knew. She ought to summon help. Instead, loathing her deliberate inaction, she stood and watched, silent and hopeful. No such luck. The hospice motile did things with tubes and probes, and in less than a couple of minutes the Old Man was breathing normally again. Shallow, but normal.

“That was unpleasant.” His eyes met hers. “You really think I’m being unreasonable, Anna Surat? To want, after more than a century and a half, this one last thing? To view beauty that no one else has seen?”

Her attitude softened. He was working his wiles on her, she knew. A hundred years of practice gives a man certain skills. But she could only be manipulated to a limited degree.

“No, Mr. Bastrop. It’s not unreasonable to want such a thing. But it is unreasonable to want to see that which does not exist. If you would only—”

A voice entered the room via an unseen synthetic orifice. “Mr. Gibeon Bastrop. Mr. Gibeon Bastrop, sir!” She recognized Tyrone’s commanding tones. What was he doing awake? Sleeptime was precious to every crewmember, from the lowliest to the Shipmaster. What had wrenched him back to alertness? “Are you awake?”

She responded for him. “Yes, he’s awake.”

“Navigator Surat? What are you…? Never mind. Mr. Bastrop, I’m rotating the
Seraphim
on her axis. Look to your port and viewers.”

“Why?” The transformation that abruptly overcame the Old Man was astonishing to behold. Suddenly he looked barely a hundred. “What’s happening?”

“Something—we’re not sure, sir. An energetic trans-mutation of a level—Berkowski and her people are working on an analysis, but the field changes and fluctuations are—”

The Shipmaster broke off. Perhaps he was too busy to continue. Or perhaps he was simply, like everyone else on board the
Seraphim
who was at that moment in a position to view the event, too overwhelmed to continue.

The enormous expanse of the two-story-high port polarized automatically as the twin suns of Delta Avinis revolved into view. Nearby, one of the dead planets that orbited the twin stars took a shadowed, heavily cratered bite out of Void. Anna wondered at the Shipmaster’s words until the second, lesser sun slowly hove into view. Then she pointed and her lips moved slowly.

“Oh! Look at it. Just
look
at it!”

Gibeon Bastrop had displaced the hoverchair forward until it could no longer advance. It was right up against the port, pressing against the thick transparency. Had Bastrop been able to continue, the navigator had no doubt he would have done so, right out into the vacuum of space itself.

“Look at what, Anna Surat? At that? At the Chauna?”

Something had materialized
between
the two suns. Hitherto invisible, the extraordinary ephemeral shape was rapidly becoming visible as it drew energy from the nearest star. One gigantic jet of roiling plasma after another burst from the surface of the smaller sun to be drawn across many AUs into the larger. Each jet was several hundred times the diameter of the Earth, infinitely longer, with an internal temperature rated in the thousands of degrees Celsius.

And each time a violent, spasming plasma jet erupted between the two stars, a portion of it illuminated the Chauna. The legend of the Cosocagglia was not a wandering planet, or a lost ship of profound dimensions, or a streak of natural phenomena as yet unidentified by science. It was at once something less, and much, much more.

“My God,” Anna Surat whispered in awe, “it’s alive!”

There were two wings, each ablaze with lambent energies of wavelengths as yet unidentified. They rippled and flamed across the firmament, faint but unmistakable, like bands of energized nebulae ripped loose from their primary cloud. Nearby stars were clearly visible through them, but they were substantial enough to hold color. With each massive emission from the smaller star, the Chauna partook a little of the enormous energies that were passing between the two suns. The central portion of the event—creature? spirit?—was sleek and slightly less pellucid than the wings. No other features were visible: no limbs, no face, no projections of any kind. No other features were necessary.

“It looks,” an awestruck Anna observed almost inaudibly, “like a butterfly. But what’s going on? What is it doing?” She had to strain to make out the Old Man’s reply.

“It’s feeding, Anna. Though it’s millions of kilometers across, it’s too fragile a structure to pull energy from a star itself. So it waits for one star to move near enough to another, for all that great deep gravity to do the job for it. When it senses what’s going to happen, it places itself between the two and filters what it needs from the fleeting eruptions of plasma, like a great whale feeding on plankton. Neutrinos, cosmic rays, charged particles—who knows what it ingests and what it ignores? How would you, how could you possibly study such an entity? We can only watch and marvel. In the process, it apparently acquires throughout the length and breadth of its otherwise imperceptible substance a little ancillary coloration.”

“A little!” The tenuous but vast extent of the Chauna was already greater than both suns. She continued to stare—what else could one do?—even as the
Seraphim
’s instruments methodically registered the immense strength of the repeated solar outbursts while her screens fought to shield her frail, vulnerable, minuscule organic occupants from the effects of all that energy being blasted into space.

On other worlds, instruments would register the pulsar-like outburst and place it in the accepted category of celestial disturbances. They would not note the presence of a third object drawing upon a tiny portion of the expelled energies. Though of unimaginable size, that object was far too ephemeral to be perceived by distant instruments.

The feeding of the Chauna was an infrequent event, or it would have been noticed before. The Cosocagglia had noticed it, in their thousands of years of space-faring. Now it was, at last, the turn of humans to do so. The myth had been made real. And it was a discovery that could be shared and supported. The
Seraphim
’s battery of recorders would see to that.

When those incredibly attenuated sun-sized wings
moved,
there was a collective gasp among the crew of the witnessing vessel. Nothing like a Chauna had ever been seen before, and nothing like a Chauna in motion had ever been imagined. It was beyond imagining, past belief, a magnificent violation of established astrophysical doctrine. With that movement, no one questioned any longer if the phenomenon was alive. It was visible for another minute or two, a colossal undulation of energized color rippling against the starfield, a million billion times vaster than any aurora. Then it was gone, the life-sustaining solar energy it had assimilated dispersed throughout its incomprehensibly vast incorporeality.

For a long time the navigator stood staring out the lofty port, aware she had been witness to one of the greatest sights—if not
the
greatest sight—the galaxy had yet placed before a captivated humankind. Then she was reminded that her hand was still resting on the sharp shoulder of the man who had made it possible for her to experience the inconceivable wonder. The man who had insisted it was real, that it existed, and that if they persisted long enough and looked hard enough, the tiny wandering creatures called humans might actually be able to descry such a marvel. Who had insisted despite the protests and disapproval of his fellows.

Suddenly she understood a little of what had made Gibeon Bastrop the singular individual he was. Suddenly she understood something of the source of his remarkable ability and drive and power. It made her wish she could have known the
man,
and not simply the pitifully weakened and aged husk that presently occupied the motile.

“You were right, Mr. Bastrop. You were right all along. You and the Cosocagglia. And everyone else was wrong. Mr. Bastrop?” Her hand slid gently along the bony shoulder until it made contact with the leathery neck. The head reacted by falling forward, stopping only when the strong chin made contact with the all-but-exposed sternum. The neck did not pulse against her hand. When she shifted it, no air moved from the open mouth against her palm. She drew her hand back slowly.