Sakshi
Chapter One
An inflection point
Yes
We remember
The Initiator is here
The dense sphere is here
We remember
Trajectory will require adjustment
One of us must disassociate
Change to mass particles.
Yes
We remember
Chapter Two
Amos Fielder sat with his head forward and his shoulders clenched, concentrating on the target. A thin sheen of nervous sweat covered his forehead as he nudged the railgun’s controls. The neutron star floated in the hologram—its pale blue surface occasionally spouting small flares that quickly receded. HAL, the ship’s AI, had painted a small, black X on the star. Amos adjusted the railgun and rolled his neck back and forth to relieve some of the tension. “These damned controls are touchy.” A near miss would be a disaster.
Springer, an adult Phagean, hummed a reply that HAL did not translate.
The crosshairs changed from red to green. Amos did not hesitate. “Package away.” The ship trembled and lurched slightly.
Amos’s ten-year-old daughter shouted from across the bridge. “Goddammit, Dad.”
He did not look up from his console. “Gracely, language.”
“But I almost had the last Squadgy block in place. Why’d you have to move the ship?”
Amos was tracking the trajectory of the package. “Just trying to get these two neutron stars to crash together. No big deal.”
Springer made a noise like two garbage cans banging together. HAL translated. “Your daughter is not terribly impressed with the importance of our experiment.” The Phagean used one of his claws to flick a screen on his console.
Amos was busy with his own screen. “Maybe she’ll be more impressed when these two stars collide in twenty years or so.”
Springer rumbled like gravel being unloaded. “The young are interested in the things of the young. Trajectory of the package appears optimal.”
Jered, Gracely’s six-year-old little brother, came over and looked at the screen. “How can you mash stars together?” he asked.
Amos kept his eyes on the numbers streaming down his screen. “There are two neutron stars orbiting each other and getting closer and closer with each pass. They’ll collide eventually, but if we nudge this one in exactly the right way while they are the farthest apart, we can make them collide in twenty years instead of five thousand.”
“But why?”
Amos smiled down at his son and ruffled his hair. “Because it’s cool, and we hope to learn some things about gravity and dark matter and subatomic particles. Sometimes you have to make the biggest explosions to see the smallest things.”
Jered wandered over to join a juvenile Phagean named Sprat in watching Gracely assemble the Squadgy blocks.
Amos leaned back in his seat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He stretched his hands above his head and rolled his wrists. “The numbers look good. There’s nothing we can do now but wait and see.” He spared a glance at Gracely.
She was carefully examining one of the blocks. It moved in her hand. First one end would swell as the other end thinned out, then it might flatten across its width before becoming taller and narrower. It wasn’t random. There was a pattern and a rhythm to it. If she could find the pattern, she could add it to the rectangular block of eleven others on the floor of the ship. Done correctly, they would lock together and form a solid unit. If not, the blocks would fight against each other, and the rectangle would tumble back into twelve slowly twisting blocks.
Jered skipped around in the low gravity and watched as she studied the problem. He was a true savant at Squadgy Blocks, and there could be no doubt about it, Gracely was feeling the pressure.
Amos addressed the AI, “HAL, time to impact of the package.”
HAL responded without hesitation. “Time to impact is eighteen minutes and forty-two seconds.”
Amos swiveled his chair around to enjoy the drama of Gracely and the blocks.
Sprat stood, as always, near Gracely. He was Springer’s apprentice? Disciple? Intern? There was no good word for the relationship.
Amos couldn’t help himself. “What are you going to do, Gracely?”
She looked up with a bit of terror in her eyes and then turned to Sprat. Sprat raised his stubby little arms in a gesture of helplessness. She looked back down at the block, and Amos could see the determination in her gaze. That was his Gracely. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips.
Gracely lowered herself to the floor and started to insert the block. Jered shook his head. She stopped.
Amos lifted his eyes to look out at the neutron star in front of them. The metal shields in the bow of the ship had been opened like the petals of a flower, and the polymer shell was all but invisible, giving them a spectacular view of the Milky Way. The star was a pale blue sphere the size of the planet Harmony’s largest moon when full. They were close.
Amos turned to his screen and began scrolling through the readings to pass the time. Everything was in order, and he spoke to Springer, “It won’t be long now. Ten years of work, and it comes down to this.”
Sprat’s patron hummed and clicked without opening his mouth. “Yes, Amos, our work will soon…” Springer stopped and turned to look outward. “There is an unusual number of Sakshi present.”
Amos glanced up and frowned. “What the hell…?”
There were easily a dozen Sakshi within a hundred kilometers of their ship, and more popped into place as he watched.
Jered turned away from his big sister’s dilemma and looked up through the polymer shield. A light twinkled into being nearby as a new Sakshi appeared. It looked like a brown and grey cloud of shifting shapes and frothing forms. Light flashed in the interior. He had seen them before. “Why do we have Sakshi?” he asked. “What are they for?”
Amos shook his head. “Nobody knows. They are one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. They seem to be alive, and they’ve even discovered DNA patterns within them, but that just started a bunch of speculation about them seeding life in the galaxy.”
“What do they do?”
Amos was frowning at the gathering. “They don’t seem to do much of anything. They just hang around. But it’s really strange to see this many at the same time.” There were already two dozen, with more appearing for every passing second.
“Indeed,” said Springer. “They are very loud.”
“I can’t hear them,” said Jered.
“That’s because you’re not a Phagean. Springer and Sprat can hear electromagnetic waves because they live most of their lives underground and use it to navigate.”
“I wish I was a Phagean.” He looked down at his hands. “Then I could listen to Sakshi and use my claws for digging.”
Amos smiled. He remembered fondly a time when Gracely had asked when she might grow scales like her friend Sprat. He looked over to where she continued her fight with the Squadgy blocks. Sprat appeared to be studying the struggle, but it was difficult to tell what a Phagean might be looking at. Sprat’s eyes were solid black, shiny as polished plastic and shaped like two mouseholes. His head, with two small nasal holes and a lipless mouth, hung forward, and his little chest and abdomen were covered in something that looked like grey fur. Sprat’s back and sides were covered in silver scales, hard and slick as worn wood. The ends were flat and fit together tightly, resembling a now extinct Earth species known as a pangolin. His torso curved first back and then to the front. Near the floor, Sprat’s body took a sharp turn backward and was supported by four short legs. From the side, Phageans closely resembled the numeral 2 with legs.
Amos called out to them. “Are you kids seeing this?”
Sprat turned his head upward, but Gracely was totally immersed in the Squadgy problem. She carefully turned the block in her hand and timed its entry to the rectangle just so. The block held and the rectangle jiggled slightly but stayed together.
She let out a breath. “There,” she said.
Jered skipped over to appraise her work. He took a few steps around the assemblage to view it from several angles.
He turned his head to the side and thought for a moment. “It’s not stable,” he said.
“What do you mean it’s not stable? Look at it. It’s perfect.”
Jered leaned forward and gently tapped one of the corner blocks. The rectangle quivered and then convulsed. Blocks spun up in the air and tumbled away. They moved slowly in the low gravity and seemed to take forever before they came to rest.
Gracely was furious. She shoved Jered, and he fell backward, unable to catch himself. “You ruined it!” she screamed. “You stupid earthape!”
Jered bounced up. Gracely’s father called out, “Gracely Anne Fielder!” and came out of his chair.
Jered’s eyes danced. “Oooohhhh. You’re in trooouuubllle.”
She looked down at the scattered blocks. “Aw, shit,” she mumbled.
Amos grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. “Gracely! You know better than that. We do not use that word.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. He broke my game.” She hesitated for a moment as Jered circled around behind her father. He was grinning. She pointed at him. “And he does look like an Earth… ling.”
Amos had to admit there was some truth to it. They were Martians, and almost all Martians had extremely dark skin, but Jered was several shades lighter than average. With his wavy brown hair and dark eyes, he could have easily come from the Indian subcontinent on Earth.
Amos took a deep breath and slowly let it out in a long sigh. “Ay yai yai. Gracely, we are Martians. You are Martian. Jered is Martian. There are no Earthlings here. Do not use that word again. Now apologize to your brother.”
Gracely pushed at one of the blocks with her toe. “Yes, sir.” She looked up. “I’m sorry for calling you a bad word, Jered.”
Gracely’s eyes tightened and Amos knew without turning his head that Jered was taunting her behind his back. He decided he didn’t have time to deal with it.
Gracely reached out and took her father’s hand. “Daddy, I’m tired and this is boring. Can we go home now?”
“Not yet, darling. It won’t be too long.”
Springer broke in. “Four minutes to impact.”
Amos moved back to the instrument panel. “Antimatter package is looking good. I hope we can push the star far enough.”
Springer was looking over the same numbers. “I am not concerned with the power. The package contains the proper amount of antimatter. We are much more likely to have misaligned the shot.”
Amos nodded. “We’ve done all we can. The spin of the star makes it dicey, but I feel pretty good about our calculations. If worse comes to worse, we have another package to throw at it.” He looked up from the instrument panel. “Geeze, look at all the Sakshi. There must be hundreds of them.”
They all looked out at the congregation of Sakshi. Strangely, none of them were between their ship and the neutron star, but more and more appeared as they watched. Amos thought it looked like dirty popcorn being heated.
“Telemetry looks good,” cried Amos. “We are right on target. Impact in one minute and forty-five seconds.”
Both Springer and Sprat stiffened in unison and turned to look off to the right of the star. Amos was too busy monitoring his instruments, but Sprat raised his arm and pointed.
“Daddy, look,” said Gracely.
Amos frowned and looked up, following Sprat’s arm. One of the Sakshi was condensing into what looked like a spiral of light. It flashed brightly and then shot straight at the package in a move that was almost too fast to see. It impacted the package and was gone, but the package continued on.
“What in the hell!” Amos could hardly credit what he had just seen. He looked down at the panel.
Springer rumbled. “The package appears unharmed, but the trajectory has been altered.”
Amos leaned into his screen. “It’s going to miss the target by… at least 300 meters to spinward and… 200 meters to the north.” He ran his hand through his hair. “By the tiniest of the gods. All this work. And the Sakshi… I’ve never heard of them doing anything. What the hell just happened?”
Springer appeared to be watching the package as it closed in on the star. “I do not know. I have heard stories of Sakshi manipulating matter, but I never knew what to think of them. We have another package. Perhaps we can correct.”
“And what,” said Amos, “watch them shoot the next one down?”
“We must try.”
Amos put his hands over his mouth as if trying not to hyperventilate. “Right. Right. It will take a few minutes to gather enough data to chart the star’s new course. Let’s see where it’s headed, and we can take our last shot. I can’t believe it.”
The package was now too far away to be seen, but Amos kept one eye on his screen and the other on the star above them. “We should have contact in three, two, one…” there was a blue eruption like a small flare on the surface, and concentric rings of darker, blue-crested waves spread out from the impact like a pebble thrown in a still pond.
“What are those rings?” asked Jered.
Amos didn’t answer for a moment. “Those are sonic waves. It’s sound going across the surface of the star. Now please shut up and let me work on this.”
Sprat hummed and clicked. HAL translated. “It is blue thunder.”
Gracely and Jered nodded in agreement. “Blue thunder,” said Jered. “Cool.”
The two Martian children were chastened by their father’s obvious distress and sat quietly as the long minutes slowly went by. Amos and Springer were hunched over their panels watching numbers spool out in a seemingly endless stream. Finally, a holographic chart arose from the panel. Amos and Springer stared at it for a moment and then turned toward each other.
“That’s impossible,” said Amos.
“Yet that is what the numbers tell us,” replied Springer.
Amos turned back to the chart. “HAL, run these numbers and tell me what happened.”
HAL spoke, as always, without preamble. “Your original target was in error. The Sakshi corrected the error, and the two neutron stars should collide in a little over twenty years. I cannot say with certainty whether the impact will be direct or give you a more precise timing without more…”
Amos broke in. “That’s enough, HAL.” He put both hands on top of his head and watched as the blue thunder faded away and the star returned to its featureless pale blue appearance. “I don’t know what to think about this.”
“But this is excellent,” said Springer. “We shall see these stars collide.”
Amos was still trying to make sense of the holographic chart. “I suppose,” he mumbled. “If Earth doesn’t start a war and kill us all before then.”
Gracely spoke up. “Can we go home now?”
