Our Old Crossed Stars

By Travis Knight

MANIRA PULLED HERSELF TOGETHER and rubbed her eyes. They were raw, a condition to which she had grown accustomed in recent weeks. She stared about her, recollecting where she was: on her starship, far past the Periphery, out in the isolated blackness of deep space.

The ship’s bridge had become her personal quarters, but it was as spotless now as it always had been. She was surrounded by the many banks of polished monitors, once laced with the fine lines of stellar cartography or the vibrant vital readings of the ship’s complex anatomy. They were all blank now, their dead screens reflecting her sullen stare like dull mirrors.

Though she had refused to speak with the ship for more than a week now, no signs remained of the meal she’d thrown across the bridge when her last fit had gripped her in its fearsome teeth. The ship’s diligent sanitation drones must have collected the debris while she slept. They were always watching and waiting to be of unwanted use.

A shame, she thought to herself as she drew her sleeping bag tight about herself. She couldn’t even make a ripple the in machine’s perfection. The unyielding calm made her outbursts look so petty, so irrational. The ship often seemed like a mother following after her, a naughty child, tidying while she threw her tantrums.

“Ship,” she said, breaching at last their contract of aggrieved solitude. “Display the time.” It had turned the chronometer off days ago and she hadn’t cared to ask for it since. Now, though, the voyage was coming to a head. Now she wanted to know.

Obediently, a plain clock coalesced in the air before the main display, where, if she would but request it, the ship would show her the tiny dancing lights of stars too far for her to bear. The numerals reflected dully on the blind monitors, lighting the bridge like little candles.

“Display time until next action,” she told it.

A second clock unfolded as if from some phantom pocket behind the first. Manira sat still, mulling it over. In three hours’ time, the ship would begin its braking maneuver. She shook her head and rubbed her face again, ran fingers through her lank silver hair. She longed for a brush, but wouldn’t go back to their old quarters to get it. Not yet, anyway. Not yet.

“Manira,” the ship said in a placid but professional voice. “Would you like a spa?”

***

Two years ago they’d rendezvoused with the University, when it had arrive in a nearby cluster. The University was mobile; a wandering fleet of laboratories and cityships that toured with a fluctuating population of several hundred thousand on academic diaspora. Some generous hand had paid for a battery of upgrades, so the University had come to orbit the donor’s wetworld while the work was being done.

Once they’d arrived, her husband Rossir had spent months submerged in its newest archives while Manira relaxed, mostly enjoying their otherwise empty ship. True solitude was a luxury she rarely enjoyed.

When Rossir at last returned, he was more excited than he had been in decades. He had come drifting through the hatch into her spa module like some eager young dolphin, bucking and wriggling with delight, like a man half his age.

The masseuse had oriented her to face her husband straight away, using gentle nudges here and there, and then withdrawn its dozen aluminum arms like an insect folding up into death. Suddenly, the module, humid and thickly scented in preparation for her sauna, felt wide and empty. The walls were bare, paneled in plasticized wood that absorbed heat, but repelled water. The only interruption along the wall was the arachnid masseuse, which took up the majority of the module’s space when it worked her old flesh; and she had grown so frail in her winter years, collapsing in on herself like an ancient star. What remained was a core of gnarled age, the glowing splendor of youth long since rubbed and worn and torn away.

“Manira, my beauty,” Rossir said from his perch at the hatch, as if he knew what she’d been thinking.

“You’re letting in the chill,” she said. He came further inside and the module sealed itself, closing them in together.

“I’ve found it,” he said. “But we must leave, well ... soon, anyway.”

Her hair had quickly grown unkempt in the absence of the masseuse. It drifted about her head now in a cobweb cloud of steely tangles. She reached back, increasingly conscious of her nakedness, and folded her hair into a simple knot. They didn’t often see each other like this. “What did you find?” she asked, ignoring the distress.

Her husband’s cumulus old eyebrows knit into a single tuft below a scrunched and speckled forehead. Even at his age, he was still irascible and mischievous. “Won’t say,” he said.

“You’ve come all the way back to the ship to tell me that you won’t tell me what you found?” She circled one thin arm about to orient herself in the microgravity. They’d abolished the ship’s grav for their sixty-ninth anniversary and never looked down. Weightlessness was easier on their old bones and kinder to the crow’s feet.

Rossir watched her and waited until she was quite finished and settled. Steam clouds, cooling to flocks of scented water droplets, followed mindless orbits between them. The low, soothing lights were beginning to warm up, anticipating that the interruption meant she was done with her spa treatment. Rossir held up his hand and told the program to pause.

“I came to ask you if it was alright to get underway,” he explained.

She had spun herself about so they were both situated along the same axis. The air was beginning to bite at her limbs, so she curled her legs up. All she lacked was an umbilical, she thought. Instead, she asked, “You’ve already got permission? From the University and the transit authority?”

Rossir grinned broadly. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quickly. “I’ve got it covered.”

“Then yes,” Manira said, “I don’t see why not.” There was a heavy thrum deep in the distant bones of the ship; the telltale throatsong of the ship’s engines coming online. It was low and loud enough that if she tilted her head at just the right angle, she could feel it trembling through her sinuses like the tickle before a sneeze.

Her husband let go of the bulkhead and was hanging above her, just within arm’s reach of the wall. That boyish grin, the same one that had found its way onto all her sons, was stretched as wide as it was guilty.

“You primed the ship?”

“To leave on your ... affirmation,” he explained, clearly quite proud of himself. “I told you, we had to leave soon!”

“You’re a brat, Rossir,” Manira said.

He smiled, his eyes flashing as he turned himself about above her like a circling carrion eater. “I found something, Manira,” he said. “But I need you to tell me what it is.”

“Of course,” she said, holding out her hand. “Since we’re already under thrust, come have a spa with me.”

He palmed away from the bulkhead and drifted at her. “Anything for a pretty lady.”

***

The masseuse had done its work well, as always. It had cleaned her, for the first time in more than a week, and worked the knots of despair from her shoulders and sides and joints. It had oiled her skin and brushed her hair and, in the end, done its best to transform her from an animal into an old woman.

She looked at herself in the module’s wall-length mirror. Once, she’d watched her husband’s reflection, as if a bird hanging over them, as they made love on the floor—long back before they’d turned the gravity off. She’d watched the ropes and cords of his shoulders and lumbars raise and pull and release, watched the back of his head betray the hot kisses he left on her neck ...

She was not beautiful anymore. Her veins ran blue under her pale thin skin, like rivers under spring’s last ice. Her hair was a hag’s gray braid, wiry and prone to tangle. Her eyes had dimmed and clouded, losing their chestnut depths for a dirty sedimentary gray. She touched her face, where the years, stretched artificially long by relativistic travel, had weathered her into something not even her children would recognize.

Her children; they were buried on distant worlds now, each with their own stories she’d never know. She held their names on her tongue but did not speak them, afraid to loose and lose them like birds from a cage. All dead, now, surely. She’d lived four hundred years in the last seventy aboard the starship with Rossir, going from world to world, leaving memories and lifetimes behind like pebbles on the roadside.

That put her in a state, and she started throwing things again. The ship, sensing the fit she was sliding into, tastefully displayed the time in an attempt to distract her. Manira ignored it, continuing into the blackness as she smashed the masseuse’s bottles of ointments and cream. She felt a full tantrum coming on.

“Manira,” the ship said firmly. “Braking begins in ten minutes. Please proceed to the crash room.” A sliver of her forebrain acknowledge the rebuking tone, but she was tearing at one of the delicate arms on the masseuse, wailing, desperately ignoring the ship in the last act of defiance she had to her name. It sprung free of its socket, and she pulled until the sinewy wires tethering it to its old skeleton finally gave.

She brandished the new rod, searching for her next victim and knowing that whatever damage she could do, the ship’s drones would repair as soon as she left the room.

The lights slammed to a frozen blue. The howl in her throat curdled and withered to a moan. “Please proceed to the crash room,” the ship said.

Manira snarled as her resolve crumbled, and she flung the masseuse’s dismembered arm across the spa and pushed herself towards the hatch. It clattered against the wall, rebounded, and smashed into something else. There was a tinkling of broken glass. She smiled as she pulled herself through the hatch.

The crash room lay behind the their old quarters in the core of the ship. Manira hesitated on the bridge, looking past into through the door of the dormitory module, which the ship had unsealed for her. It was still dark inside. She’d broken all of the lights in her first fit, and the ship, probably observing some bizarre protocol Rossir had taught it about human behavior, had kept the space unchanged. The only lasting monument to her humanity aboard the otherwise immaculate vessel. Now it called to her like the grave, beckoning her into its void. She might have been sailing out into empty space itself, for all the looks of it.

She knew what she’d find inside. Clothes drifting derelict; little meteors of personal effects and comets of shattered glass and mirrors. She’d find the captured light of their wedding photos, and the exotic jewelry Rossir had given her to celebrate the longevity of their marriage. The ruined solar system of her former life, tossed in the armageddon of an all-consuming rage.

“Light the quarters,” she ordered. The ship complied, and several small drones, set close to the walls like uneven new fixtures, snapped their external lights on. Two swiveled to face her, casting light on her immediate surroundings. The others found strategic places to cast their beams to guide her forward.

In harsh white relief, Manira saw the detritus of her marriage, of her love; she pushed away anything that came too near with stiff fingers, sending them spinning back into the shadows, back to where she’d forget. Slowly, like some preying angel, she floated down and through the module where she’d slept every night for more than seventy years beside her husband, curled against his warmth. Their smells still haunted the air; the old soap he insisted the ship synthesize, the smell of his sweat. The animal scent of skin and love, bottled and abandoned.

Manira held her husband’s name on her tongue as she had her children’s, afraid that if she whispered it in that dark sacred space, she would lose it, too. It was too much to bear, this keeping of souls. She clamped her eyes tight and waited for the ship to evacuate her.

***

Manira had met Rossir when they were both young, when she was still looking for a reason to justify her love of travel, and he was still rigid and aggressively particular about the details of life. Over the course of two strictly platonic voyages, chaperoned by the incidental dozens of other students and researchers, Manira had surveyed half a dozen planets in Rossir’s company.

On the second voyage, she’d learned from another female that Rossir was completing his terminal degree in paleoxenoanthropology; he was already a renowned speculator of alien cartography in circles that spoke the requisite jargon. Mostly, he kept to himself during the long months of voyage, or else stood at the door of the viewing deck, curious to see the naked stars but too afraid to approach the glass, as if it were prone to burst at any moment.

Once, she’d heard him arguing with a younger man, a hot-headed neo-nudist who would wander the halls as stark as space itself. They were near to screaming about the coordinate assumptions for reading an old Dreidic map, which was, she discovered later, one of the charts used to plot their course.

Those speculation voyages were all part of one University licensed experiment or another, it seemed. Perhaps a confinement-effect sociology major had engineered her fateful fight with Rossir, too. She’d never learned for sure.

It came late into the second journey. Manira had, at that point, settled on a career in planetary surveying—geology, but with the added perk of travel. She was particularly interested in analyzing the makeup and breakdown of whole planetary systems, and how the planetary roster for each affected colonial investors. Rossir had bought her a drink and asked her what she “did.”

“Couldn’t a robot do that just as well, and send the data home for you to study?” he’d asked with one eyebrow curved above the other, as if he’d uttered some svelte proposal. He had been handsome then, in the low light of the bar. But his words had cut her close.

Of course a robot could take readings and beam the information home she knew. Instead of showing that he’d hurt her, she said, “Can’t a robot translate, too, Rossi?”

Rossir stood up straight, assuming his full height. He looked down his slightly crooked nose, right into her eyes, and said, “An algorithm can translate just as well as a probe can survey, miss, but they’ll never appreciate the beauty of language. And it’s Rossir, with an r at the end, if you please.” Then he’d downed his whole drink in one stiff gesture and stomped off.

“It was only my eyes, there and then / what knew her cowl’d cloud,” she said under her breath. The final lines of Manira’s favorite poem, the one that had led to her career choice. She stirred the drink he’d bought her and saw he’d written his room number quite discreetly on the napkin beneath the glass. When Manira looked after him, Rossir had already vanished.

***

The ship pulled Manira into the crash room. It was bathed in the same blue light as the spa, but here the monitors along the walls were alive with active readouts. Rossir had been fluent in the machine’s hieroglyphs, but to her it was just so much visual noise flickering sinuously along the walls. She might have attacked the monitors, too, if she’d had the presence of mind.

The crash room was almost entirely empty, its heavily padded walls only perturbed by the monitors and two deep recesses that were the crash couches. When heavy braking or emergency maneuvers were needed—the kind that ran your sinuses dry with crushing acceleration—they had taken shelter here. The ship could deform the walls to add additional seats if needed, and across the many years, it had accommodated their children. But mostly, it was just those two ruts like the footprint of some enormous animal depressed into the wall.

Rossir’s name was stenciled above his seat in gold thread. Hers in silver. She let the ship usher her towards her seat and saw the couch adjusting its material, undulating as it prepared to receive her. It deflated like a broken heart, the thick black covering as firm as well-oiled leather, and as soft as crushed velvet. Her fingers touched the outer lips and she pulled herself in with a practiced twist.

It closed up around her, hugging her into a gentle tomb. She choked back the panic at being pressed in and held tightly, and forced herself to relax.

Manira had fallen into her crash couch, what, a hundred and more times? She’d lost count. With Rossir present to go over the verbal checklist, it seemed perfectly natural to stuff herself into it like a morsel feeding a hungry mouth. But without him, the couch was terrifying, and she felt as if she might truly be eaten, as if she might be buried alive in this vast steel mausoleum he’d stolen for their final trip to the stars together.

When Rossir had finally confessed to taking the ship without the University’s permission, she had asked whether they were under pursuit. He thought it unlikely; he had disabled security checks years ago and they had not bothered to fix them on the occasions when they rendezvoused. To him, their negligence was an implicit permission to use the vessel as he saw fit. And over their many years together, he had.

Seventy-five years. She held the number like a mantra, inhaling on the vowels, exhaling the consonants. To an outside observer, those seventy-five years were stretched into centuries, dotted by the lives of their children, now just a scattered number line of memories and forgotten somethings or other. A queue of faces and people she missed missing, but could it have been another way?

Rossir—he had given her a lifelong honeymoon aboard their surveying vessel, exploring the stars and the strange remains of long-dead civilizations. He’d found things, and she’d told him what they were. That had been their life together, seeking and learning, always chasing down another lead, always excited in one another’s work.

No, it couldn’t have been another way, she knew. And that was how it was, up until the end.

“Manira,” the ship said, interrupting her reverie. “Are you comfortable?”

“As comfortable as I can be,” she said it without acid, and looked down at her body in the chill blue light. She saw how thin she was, how little left there was to protect.

“Confirmed. Closing crash web now.” Threads like spider’s silk, but magnitudes stronger, wove themselves into a fine mesh faster than her eyes could follow. In seconds she was cocooned in darkness. The pillowed walls of the crash couch plumped themselves up a bit, squeezing her more firmly, and then the pressure receded as it sought some coldly optimal level.

“Commencing braking burn,” it said. There was a hanging pause, and then the thunderous pressure hit her. It felt like a moon rolling onto her chest, crushing her against the back of the couch, pressing her into the second dimension. Her old bones felt like twigs bowing to the wind; her eyes welled with tears that clung to her eyeballs and threatened to bruise.

The last time they’d done this, and all the times before that, Rossir had been in the couch beside her. He’d been singing, damn him, forcing the tune out even as she struggled to keep from fainting. Manira had held onto his raspy old voice, the only sign left of the outside world, all else collapsed in the singularity of the braking crush. By the time it was over, she often realized he wasn’t singing any song in particular, but flowing through many, choosing lines and verses and stitching them together into something just for her; he couldn’t hold her hand through the couch, but he’d do his best.

The silence was crippling, and it threatened to break her even more deeply than the pressing weight did. She found herself gasping, clutching at her throat, eyes wide but blind in feral panic. Rossir wasn’t singing to her, and what if something was wrong? She hadn’t actually listened to the ship’s rambling diagnostics since—

***

Rossir died nineteen days before the braking maneuver. She knew what had happened when he didn’t whisper good morning.

He died in his sleep, next to Manira, their feet tangled at the bottom of the sleeping bag that kept them from drifting apart in the dark free-falling womb of their habitat. She had screamed until the ship cut the bag in half with a field and pulled them apart.

When she had gathered herself, she gave her husband a sailor’s burial in the centuries-old fashion. The ship was the only other witness as she dressed him in his wedding suit, kept in cold storage for so long, and clamped his chill fingers around the flower he’d given her before their first dance as a wedded couple.

Manira had watched him through the small window of the airlock as it drained down to vacuum slowly, ruffling the edge of the blanket she’d wrapped around his corpse. When the air pressure was just low enough to set him gently adrift, the ship opened the external door.

She watched with one hand on the window, straining, until he had become no more than a tangential piece of debris for the ship’s automatic navigators to track. Then the desperate rigidity she’d forced upon herself boiled away and mad grief had descended like the terminus line on some far seen moon: stark and black and consuming.

Her husband was dead and she was alone in the belly of their stolen ship.

***

“Wake up, Manira.”

The voice did not belong to the ship. The ship was polite, concise. It didn’t speak with that clipped, teasing tone that had startled her out of the dark. She opened her eyes and saw a ghost before her, smiling, bent slightly at the waist to better align his creased old face with hers.

“Rossir,” she whispered. He nodded, then shook his head. She composed herself, felt bruises and aches. Nothing was broken. The crash couch deflated a bit as she moved, easing its padding for her. She was numb here and there, and the blood began to flow back into her fingers, making them prickle. She winced as she pressed against the crash web. It retracted quickly, freeing her.

“Are you well?” Rossir—or, rather, his holographic projection—asked. It wasn’t a perfect illusion; like all of the ship’s holos, it glowed a bit at the edges, a faint aura that grew more pronounced as the projection moved about. It followed her as she pushed off the couch, hands in its pockets and standing on the deck, as if there were gravity on the ship. It watched her go overhead towards the hatch.

“No,” she said. “No, I feel awful. When were you simulated?” Cut straight to the chase; this copy of her husband that the ship had kept from her made her skin crawl. It was an abomination.

“One hundred and thirty two days ago, ship-time,” it said with a friendly smile.

“His last gift to me? A companion?”

It shook its head and flickered up into the air to match her drift. “I felt it necessary to provide you with a ... tour guide, just in case.”

Manira fought the urge to twist and look at it. The pause in his—its voice—those last few words had been a direct recording made by her husband; she noted that. It wasn’t just a simulation. Apparently, it also contained recorded responses from him. The ship was certainly simulating his intelligence based on years of their interaction, but it wouldn’t have made much of something as subtle as the pause. Too many reasons that might happen in human speech, but she knew the affectation well.

“Don’t pretend you’re my husband,” she said. “You’re not Rossir. You’re a holographic duplicate; a talking photograph.” A bitter oversimplification, she knew, but not far from the truth.

“Granted. Rossir made me, for you. I will adjust my speech accordingly, but I cannot alter the pre-recorded responses.”

“Fine. What did my husband want you to tell me?”

“That I love you very much,” was the instant response, the real response, “and still do.”

She paused as her fingers brushed the lip of the hatch to their old quarters. “I know,” she said. The projection said nothing, just hovered perfectly still. “It hurts,” she said. “All through me.”

“Follow me to the bridge,” it said to her. “We’ve arrived, Manira. The whole reason Rossir brought you here is out there, waiting for you! Let me show you.” The projection snapped in front of her. It grinned at her and then turned around, pinwheeling its hand as if it had real mass to cater about. The lighting drones flickered to life, and the ship nudged her gently forward with a field, moving her more quickly through the quarters and raw shadows than she could have safely managed on her own.

At the other end of the module, she saw the holographic simulation of her husband waiting by her survey station on the bridge. He lay a hand on top of it, standing as he had so many times before, wearing a distant grin dug out of silicon memories. “I remember this place.”

“You don’t remember anything, simulation,” she said more harshly than she wanted to. “Direct my attention.”

“Here, sit here and listen. I have a story to tell you, first.”

“I am not in the mood for a story,” Manira muttered as she drifted to the survey station and oriented herself to the chair. She buckled herself down, and then tied her hair back in one fluid movement.

When she was quite finished and settled, the projection began. “Fifteen years ago, Rossir found reference to a ... rumor. But it took him years to translate. Just one of his side projects. You know how he was. It was written in a time-sensitive language, with a cipher that re-oriented symbols in a three-dimensional space. It was like cracking a safe that had been locked centuries ago. Manira, when when the authors of that reference were searching the stars, we were still building pyramids on the backs of bloody slaves!

“But Rossir’s search led him further. That rumor only led to an even more ancient story,” the projection said. It held one hand palm-up, and a string of alien symbols that meant nothing to Manira slid out of his palm towards the ceiling. Each character was haloed in a trim of fuzzy light leaking away from its focus; they formed a rainbow stream. “The refernce led Rossir to a transcript dating back two million and sixty-five thousand years. They, who knew the face of the galaxy before we were yet a dream upon the Earth, had told the story as a cultural ... epic. But it was no mere parable. It was founded in fact.”

“Rossir—projection,” she corrected herself, “I don’t want to hear some alien yarn.” Hearing that thing speak in Rossir’s hushed, enthusiastic voice made her throat ache. Recording or not, she couldn’t handle it.

“I will condense,” the projection said. “A great explorer, who had discovered many worlds and strange things, was given a challenge by a powerful king; in exchange for the most expensive jewel in the galaxy, the king would give the explorer anything he desired. So the explorer searched high and low, discovering great treasures, but never satisfied until, while far afield, he found what he was looking for.

“The explorer never returned to the king’s court. Even with all his spinning worlds, the king could not provide the thing the explorer desired most. Instead, he summoned his mate, who had been faithful during all the long years of his journeys.”

“Why?” Manira asked. “What was his wish?”

In response, the bridge’s main screen came to life, showing the view off their prow. The bridge’s dull monitors snapped on, showing a variety of read-outs and charts. She ignored them and peered out through the main screen. Rossir waited, silent.

At first, the stars seemed as lonely as ever, so thinly, uniformly spread through the intangible sea in which they burned. But the ship was turning, and in a few breaths they came into view of the system’s only parent star: a small, dim cinder, a red dwarf that might have been as old as the galaxy itself, for all she knew.

They were less than a hundred million kilometers away from the star, yet it was the size of her fingernail held at arm’s length. They were in a remarkably close orbit. Close enough to see that around it—around it was a ring of twinkling, swirling, irregular ... She turned to study the survey station’s screen.

“I found something, Manira,” the projection said, voicing one of Rossir’s true recordings. “I need you to tell me what it is.”

She looked up at it, looked up at Rossir, at this memory he’d made for her. “Diamonds,” she said. “That ring is made of diamonds.”

“Yes,” he said. “A billion years ago, some poor planet was crushed to diamond by its own mass. And then a cataclysm destroyed it, scattering it around its parent star, winding itself into a ring of nearly perfect stability. Waiting to be remembered. Our explorer found it.

“For all his wealth, the king could never grant the explorer’s wish.”

“What was the wish?” Her voice caught in her throat; the ship enhanced the view, showed her the ageless rocks dancing in their slow orbit. It was beautiful, curving away and around the ruddy star.

“That his wife would know his love for her. So he summoned her to him, and gave her the largest diamond necklace in the universe, Manira. And now, a quarter billion years later, I give it to you in turn. Because I love you. Because nothing and no one could give me what I wanted more than you already have.”

***

She’d known from the outset that it would be their last voyage together. Rossir had been falling ill more frequently, and had become downright obsessive in some secretive project the year before they’d departed. His discovery in the archives at the University had been the final straw; en route, he spent much of his time resting, either asleep beside her or reading feverishly.

He had moved on too soon, left her terrified and alone, sustained by the ship while she held in her private stasis. But he’d planned ahead, had found a way to support and love her even in his absence. The diamonds had awakened her, replaced the icy grip of fear with pride and knowledge. He had given her her soul back—and now she wasn’t drifting. Her eyes were raw, and she saw, perhaps for the first time in weeks, where she really was: in and around a monument to their love, to their marriage, to his love for her.

The diamond necklace sprawled vast and beautiful and ancient around its ruby host, and Rossir called to her from their gloried stars. 

Travis Knight is a teacher from central New York State, where he has written for a few local magazines. His stories have also recently appeared in “Abandon Towers Online,” and in the “Ancient New” anthology from Deepwood Publishing.