The Ship That Sailed Forever
by Andrew Darlington

Time is all we have in the end. Time and music. Both are slipping away through Neema Waetau’s fingers…until her domain is invaded by predators, and by love.

Neema Wartau was ten years old, and a million years old. She lived on an asteroid circling a dead sun in a place beyond time and space. An island at the very edge of the galaxy, just forty-k from end to end, yet vast enough to fulfill her every need. Big enough to rediscover the hidden grottos and lavish groves anew in each lifetime. She knew that she was right here, where she’d always been, and that she was nowhere else but here. She guarded and cherished the music that was both the pleasures of the blood and the mind. Yet her expression told of the deep disquiet in her soul, the terrible melancholy left by passion turned as much to ice as the stilled ripples of some frozen pool. Desire transfused into dry despair.

Do you want the truth, or a pleasing comforting fantasy? The truth? Very well, so be it. This is her story.

From her balcony it seemed the tints of her planetoidal world and the hues of its gravity-locked sky were dyed with the wonders of paradise. The stars are prickles of sweat on the skin of the void. Her eyes ache from trying to take it all in at once. Music forms the molecular spores that link the stars into continuity. The healing force that animates the universe, interpreting its apparent chaos. The mathematics that gives it voice. From a time when instruments were first made from bone and blood, the sound they produce is always the breath of souls. It’s the music of shimmering heat-haze and rainstorms, rocks on goat-tracks and ancient olive trees cracking in the wind, of long exile and yearning. This is what she believes. Because she was created to be its custodian. Her habitat is both a museum and a memorial. 

The futility of any vocation is not, in itself, a reason to abandon it. And it was from her balcony that she first detected the moving mote of light that turned out to be the approaching ship, a pulsing beacon of light calling out to her. A grasshopper, its solar wings extended in gossamer configuration, drinking neutrino-burst energies from the few remaining stars. Feeding on the invisible wind of solar particles and exotic materials that surge in tidal power-ripples. Yet it’s also a gunship. So much is apparent. Soon she can see shapeless figures that appear momentarily, framed in its galleries. They move like ghosts. Something supernatural. Their shapes unfamiliar, glimpsed through radiation firewalls. Creatures she’d almost forgotten, drenched in sudden bursts of light that resemble black and white negative images. 

The day has blinked into one of those unstable points in time, nasty and hazardous, never agreeable. Time had once been thick with them, but not for some tens of thousands of years. Yet abruptly, the next few hours had become uncertain in a quite disturbing fashion. She finds herself faking an interest in this most tedious of distractions. Watching, after all, is the less time-wasting option. But only marginally so. She was more peeved than intrigued.

The ship closes on her asteroid, with the obvious intention of docking. So she must be there to greet its imminent arrival. There’s a chill in the arcade of salmon and sand-coloured stone. Every arch has its puddle of shadow. Every branch shadows her path in black. She likes shadows. Her music was written as the 118th Commonwealth declined, to be replaced by the resurgent 202nd Galactic Soviet, within the globular star-cluster where the suns are so close there was no such thing as night. A thousand golden stars to incandesce the sky into lustrous eternal fire. She’d worked from the hub city-worlds for Ministers, commissars and administrators, caught up in their subtle and elliptical stratagems, willful intrigues and machinations. Time drifts backwards to a time of wonder and fascination, to summon its distant past. Until the dreadful cycle of wars destroyed it all.

Even now, at various times she imagines she hears the echo of their voices. Sometimes as though sleeping, with an urge to wake, but at other times in waking hours too. Staring at, but not seeing those lost palaces limned against the sunburst prominences of glowing stellar coronas. A million years away, she’d inhabited so many discarded bodies since. Now there is just the imperative to preserve that legacy. For it to live on, in a purity of devotion.

She can see the ship to better advantage now, as it prepares its final approach, microreactors maneuver through the membrane-interstices of quantum mechanics. As the grasshopper alights, the binding nanomech docking-clamps mesh. The bioreading quarantine protocols scan safely within positive tolerances, no biohazard. She deliberates how best to fake a hospitality she does not feel. She arranges her expression. It had been a long time. Loneliness had never been something that had concerned her. Her world had been predictably safe. That was enough. If it was now or never, never holds a certain lure.

Servomech vacuum seals hiss, to admit a rascally crew of ragamuffins, four of them. The first three all seem to have eyes set a little further back under the front of their skulls than she remembered. Unless memory plays tricks? Mere evolutions? Or de-evolutions that, by biological chance, has corrupted their DNA? Trip Hadesbreaker, a stocky roly-poly man, his mind a nest of snakes. His pale skin bears a sunless waxen sheen. Korregar who’d made a deal with monsters, only for the monsters to turn and bite off chunks of his soul. And Gwatara, hook-nosed, cybernetically enhanced, his skin lizard-scaled as though acid-burned. A dangerous countenance, racked with narcotics and insomnia.

Hadesbreaker detects a stale aroma. No lack of cleanliness, nothing soiled. More simple age in the smell and taste of endlessly recycled air. He swaggers over to confront the lone woman’s young-old face. There’s a certain rawness of youth in the bones of her face, but not in her eyes. She can feel his unease, and the contrasting pull of his curiosity. He puts his hand on her shoulder in an unpleasantly proprietorial way, then closes his eyes, as though smelling or sensing her presence… then he opens them again. ‘If I can have your full undivided attention.’ A command. Not a request. She wants to wash his touch away.

‘Welcome. Everything is fine.’ She says. Well, it’s not, but you know. There are drinks to be served. It keeps her hands occupied, and – she recalled, creates a sense of social bonding. All she needs now is words to say. It’s necessary to take the long view. Sometimes that involves difficult decisions. And it comes at a cost. She slows. As if the unaccustomed mental activity is draining her power-reserves.

There are piled cushions draped with cashmere throws, large sliding windows of blue-veined bottle-glass panels that look out onto her terrace where conifers in terracotta pots form a serrated row of pinnacles. The intruders sprawl around the octagonal cupola eating and drinking. Hadesbreaker, Korregar and Gwatara, in a kind of seething, a whispering of speculation, a twitching, a gathering of resolve. How to avoid the discomfort of messy conversation? How to circle around it like wary beasts? How to dance? They are neither gentle nor respectful, there are sounds of destruction. Not that it matters. There’s nothing here that cannot be replicated again, furniture or crockery. Even Neema Wartau herself can be replicated.

Only the fourth member of the party, Heretika, is different. She glides through the cool stone galleries like the vision she embodies. Both aloof and ornamental, buoyed on the magnetism of her pride, she wears a black gown strewn with the blossom of exploding suns. With glinting scintillations that emanate from two hooped earrings and a delicate amethyst pendant framed on an expanse of coffee-cream feminine neck. In a restless watchfulness, Neema Wartau feels a long-forgotten stirring that may once have been desire, making her palms itch and her heart beat faster.

‘What do you feel?’ she asks herself. ‘I feel alive’, she tells herself.

The girl is obviously stolen. ‘May I ask you a question?’ she whispers at Heretika when she manages to unobtrusively corner her.

‘Of course. You might not get the answer you want. But you may ask.’
‘How is it you are here?’

‘It’s a long story. Perhaps I should tell you some other time.’ Heretika has impish raccoon eyes, warmed by the fierce fire of golden irises centering their brilliant whiteness. Neema quizzes with her eyes. Piecing together her tale. There’s a newly-spun web of worlds, a trading alliance that is prey to these predators. She has a sullen mouth, perpetually downturned, that switches in an instant from uttering single-words of speech, to the unexpected sadness of a smile. Her tongue gives a salamander flicker. Neema is looking at her in close-up, watching more than listening. The thoughts she sends are complex, troubling. A rapid series of image-impressions that shimmer like smoke, a handful of glittering trinkets, a journey between suns, a bloodied fist. Taken, enslaved, but unbroken, stubbornly impenetrable. These predators need to find a hidden base-worldlet from which to operate. From which to kill and loot across the space-lanes. This asteroid will suit their purpose perfectly. Neema will survive, for only as long as they find it convenient.

Noticing the object of her attention, Hadesbreaker guffaws unpleasantly. ‘Some people just enjoy the drama of suffering.’ His mouth crammed with a set of teeth that must surely have been intended for a much larger head. Speaking with a strangeness of clipped vowels, yet slurring the ‘s’ into a venomous hiss.

 
How long will it take? Must every new civilization relearn the same basic truth, that people are not property? That they must be free to determine their own destiny.

‘You write music?’ he asks, while sucking his prominent teeth.

‘My original incarnation wrote the greatest music of all time. Is my name not still spoken?’

‘Is it good? Can you dance to it?’ Cold dead eyes that never hold your gaze. ‘Amuse me. Play us some.’

‘Are you sure about this?’ A show of hesitation. As though making decisions. Through the surrounding glassite curvature of the pavilion she catches glimpses of the slumbering grasshopper ship, its hungry wings furled. As though rocking on solar tides. ‘I wrote and performed a special piece for Commissar Elana Moon. Do you wish to hear what I wrote for her?’

‘Your call.’ 

She distributes earbuds in order to enhance and filter sensitivities.

She materializes a piano keyboard. The music begins with a single low resonant drone, falling into a cluster of bright carillon and drizzling sparks. A storm of chromatics. Strings resonate, setting up vibrations in the air. Attuned to the pulse of a heartbeat. The throb of blood ticking in the tympanic membrane. G to B-flat. Humans are animals who took raw sound, and categorized its every molecule. Scored and filed it into an ordered system. Sound. The natural ambient noise that is all around us. Into notes. Tonics. Subtonics. Diatonics. Sonic patterns. From a whisper to a scream. We understand the language and science of harmony as we understand the microverse of subatomic physics. What it can do. All that it is capable of.

‘I will set the tone, a little cultural anthropology for your instruction and amusement. I was a girl moving through systems, escaping the war-devastation of my homeworld, towards the thronging hub-city planets during the resurgent 202nd Galactic Soviet, within the lustrous eternal fire of a thousand golden stars. An impossibly small voice, unbearably naïve and vastly frightened by it all. I focus fairly effectively on being competent, by collaborating, playing other people’s music, stealing technique from those I admire, making notations. I never articulate my ambitions to anyone, even to lovers, but it is to where I gravitate. Pain is a shared currency that unites us. When scars need words, there are songs and poems to articulate them. How can a person bear to live and die without accomplishing one remarkable thing? I knew I was destined to create something unique. We have symphonies within us. So we must create something – just one thing, so majestic, that we can die content. Soon, fighting for my place, I was writing through sponsors, eventually for Commissar Elana Moon, who was caught up in her own subtle and elliptical stratagems, willful intrigues and machinations. Within that echelon, there is the obligation and profession of granting boons. It can be lethal, or it can be advantageous. It is not in their nature to offer more than they are willing to give, or grant favours graciously. I knew that I needed to get through to the essence of it all, in order to express it. For this, I need good judgment, based on all the data available.’

Ghosts move within the enclosed space of the gallery. The voices of the long-dead. While the predators lounge, losing interest. Just maintain focus. ‘Moon was pursued by creditors. The result of some poor venture investments. She needed promotion within the hierarchy in order to free herself. Khassim was the obstruction. Coincidentally, he was also the warlord whose command had devastated my homeworld. Occasionally, there is a universal synchronicity. A moral equivalence. An obligation to my advantage. So I wrote… this. The music you are now hearing.’ The merest hint of remorse, of guilt. But events determine there is exactly no time to consider the metaphysical implications.

Sounds oscillate into a high frequency white noise. Two of them protected by earbud insulation. Three with its intensity enhanced by the same device. They tense. Spasms of fear distort their three faces, in a creeping terror. Their fingers grip… just as Khassim’s had, swathed and enveloped by this same extreme tonality, frequencies freezing up limbic systems, stilling cortical connections, pausing respiration, arresting cardiac function. Breath stalls in single vaporous gasps. Just as Khassim’s had, before Commissar Elana Moon ascended to replace the deceased warlord. His strange unexplained death opening her way.

Time is all we have in the end. Time, and music. Both are slipping away through our fingers.
Do you want the truth, or a pleasing comforting fantasy? The truth? Very well, so be it. This is how her story ends.

Neema Wartau was a million years old. Heretika, was a slave from a newly-spun web of worlds. Once they’ve disposed of the stilled corpses they pass down through the shadowed chill of the arcade, to where the grasshopper ship moves imperceptibly, straining at the docking clamps in its hunger for escape. As they uncouple the vessel, Neema glances back at her asteroid, covetously, but only momentarily. It has been a good home. It might be again, eventually. But for the moment, there are other options. There is still a galaxy. And this ship can sail forever.