Evanishing Amid the Storm

“The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see”, said C. S. Lewis in a sermon preached at St. Jude on the Hill Church in London on 26th November 1942 in the midst of a wider point about how the small personal things allow us to glimpse the wondrous numinous collective…

The following piece was first published on 1st January 2022 in Issue #2 of Elegant Literature, a new fiction magazine based in Canada sharing worldwide English-language short stories inspired by monthly prompts.

You can read the 2000-word original here, which was framed around the prompt Dark Descent – “write a story involving darkness, descent, and a torch” – and won that month’s first prize. It’s followed in the magazine itself by a short commentary written by author and guest judge Max Gladstone, who I then had the privilege of speaking to about it here.

The 6500-word version featured below continues the narrative past the original cliffhanger and concludes the arc I had initially envisioned one feverish night of candlelit writing deep in winter 2021 on the eve of submission.

I’m indebted to Burns for the title and this piece in the New Scientist for the premise. More can be found on the tangled lattice of inspirations here, but ultimately it was the wildly self-indulgent result of me asking myself what the darkest place in the universe would be and whether darkness is ever just darkness without the qualifying and quantifying presence of brightest blazing light.

Do you have someone you would follow into a darkness so deep that, even though we can’t know for certain, every single piece of evidence indicates it ends in absolute oblivion? Do you have more than one? And is that really the true nightmare scenario? When the choice to follow someone is also the choice to leave someone else behind… Would you still make the leap? What would the deciding factor be? Would it be the fear of such a fate? The uncertainty shrouding it in question marks? Or would it be the person?

In short: it serves as a relatively succinct distillation of my entire personality, so if I never get to publish anything else I can rest in the knowledge I scribbled my soul somewhere for someone to witness and hopefully smile at – even for just a second or two – in those quietest creases of their day.

‘Kioka.’

‘I see it, Tam.’ Her eyes dart from screen to porthole to navigation panel, hair falling across her face as she reaches down for the lever to disengage the laser lock and wilt the graphene sail. I try to resist the urge to brush the loose strands behind her ear, my hand itching like I’m holding it over a candle.

I clench both fists and steer my gaze back to the porthole.

‘Is it like you remember?’ Her voice is still limned with preoccupation, but there’s something else woven through the words, something that makes my heart stumble.

I stare out at the blazing blue halo marking the grave of a long-dead star. The ancients had dubbed it the Unicorn for its elusive home at the heart of the constellation of Monoceros, striding across the celestial sphere unseen for eons, uncloaked at last by the tidal distortion it idly inflicts on the red giant waltzing around it, siphoning the old grieving neighbour’s tears away in one bloody swirl.

Nicnevin Ulysses Boyd.

In the two millennia since the Kepler exodus, when the interstellar superhighways were first constructed, stitching our galaxy’s star systems together with ultraviolet laser channels threading the needle from one hulking hydrogen array to another on and on and on across thousands of lightyears, generations of explorers mapping the creatures their forebears had painted in the sky, this impossible puncture in the fabric of what we know remains unknowable.

Not that such a technicality was ever considered an obstacle for the species that had crawled out of the ocean and fostered the flame and severed the silence with song.

For years it was going to be unmanned. But in the labyrinth of resource negotiations and ethical ruminations this led exactly nowhere. No signal would ever be able to escape the event horizon so it would just be snowfall in a cosmic river. When NASRDA developed the shield capable of withstanding the gravity well, at least for a few milliseconds, suddenly all of that conjecture atrophied into crumbs crushed under a legion of boots thundering to shipyards in every corner of the habitat. Because, inside, a millisecond might as well be an eternity, waving its white flag.

The signal encoded with the schematics wouldn’t reach Tyche let alone Kepler or even Earth for more than a millennium, when every single person aboard Tiangong 88 and their children and their children’s children many times over and again would be stardust anyway, so really the greatest quandary that had always been burning beyond the utmost bound of human thought became nothing but a question of who.

We knew where. Tiangong 88 had been roaming this neighbourhood of Monoceros for centuries and the Unicorn array was its epicentre from the very date of its deployment.

We knew what. Three prototypes of the tensor shield ship were built in a joint venture between 147 nationally syndicated agencies led by NASRDA, ESA, CNSA, NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ASAL, and ISRO. The name of the golden ribbon of flame with its sleek spin and conical hull was immortalised instantly and unanimously, dredged up as though by divine decree to echo an ancient symbol of international cooperation and comradeship, that vessel of the sacred fire.

We knew how. Someone would have to rip away the veil and steer the first of the three into the belly of the beast, ready to be spit out somewhere or everywhere or nowhere, reborn.

We knew why. We’d always known the why – so that even one of us would bear witness to the answer to the oldest question ever asked.

It became nothing but a question of who.

Who would pilot Torch 1 between the Unicorn’s teeth.

When we heard the announcement that another ancient Earth custom would be honoured, it was all over.

We sat that night by the lore lamp, me and her, sipping ginger tea and watching the violet web of the Monoceros lasers wheeling above, blasting vintage millennium folk rock, blethering about books and blazars and old bards. The firelight danced across her freckled cheeks as though her laughter was the metronome, her scorching spiced rum voice eviscerating the shadows, grey eyes bright as dawn, hair bold as the chestnut bur, all high waving heather and stormy blasts bending – like autumn incarnate. She’d speak then of swan dives, of hurtling along the highway, drenched in interstellar darkness, photons streaming off her sails, knowing that a fraction of force in the wrong direction – one faulty panel, one failed relay – was the difference between the tether and the tide.

She’d always been the virtuoso, playing language like Ling Lun does the flute or Achilles the lyre, be it numbers or notes or words, composing concertos for every one of my charted stars like Holst did for the planets, Vivaldi for the seasons, Chopin for the nights.

So when we heard the announcement that another ancient Earth custom would be honoured, the question of who had only one answer.

Nicnevin Ulysses Boyd.

Vinnie.

My sister.

The pilot.

A poet.

And now here I am again, peering out at this missing jigsaw piece, barely 20 kilometres across, its shorn edge shining with the quantum soup spilling forth from all it swallows as we cling to some semblance of an orbit, time itself slowing into a festering quagmire infested with all those particles that had been left behind, entangled pairs split on the titan’s incisors.

For the first time since the day my sister flew over the horizon I let my gaze do so too.

It’s sinking to the bottom of the sea and seeing your visor crack. It’s a sickness no sedative can quell. A gaping maw gnawing at your eyes even as you claw them from your skull. Torrential. Total.

And now here I am again. Without her.

‘Yes, it’s exactly like I remember.’

I can feel the contours of Kiok’s expression in her stillness, seeing the way her jaw would be set, brow knitted, sleeves pulled over her knuckles, without having to look at her.

‘How long do we have?’ I ask the porthole.

And the flurry of motion resumes. ‘We’re now firmly moored in the ergosurface so assuming they triggered a station cascade within hours of our heist and secured clearance from NASRDA to launch the Anyanwu—which, I mean, they will have… She has the newest fluorine-infused sail in the port and is fitted with the Torch’s tensor coils. And the fact we commandeered an Arirang geobukseon hot off the line and then stole the second Torch right from the dock by the third? They’d want something with the capability to board a reinforced turtle shell, possibly even on the highway… Assuming all of that happened as we forecast, the temporal flux gives us a couple of days. At best.’

My right hand moves unbidden to the silver ring on my left thumb, the same one my sister wears, like an entangled quantum particle tethering me to her always – anywhere.

‘How long will it have been for Vinnie?’ It’s hardly more than a whisper, my fingers twisting together until they burn.

‘No time at all… All the time that’s ever been?’

It takes me several seconds to realise Kiok’s hands are on mine. I stare at them for a moment, uncomprehending, as her thumbs move imperceptibly. She’s so warm. All I want in that moment is to lean into that warmth, like a petal tracking the sun on its golden walk. There’s still soil caked on her boots from the biosphere at the heart of the ship housing the botanical garden, arboretum, and hydroponics chamber, where she spends most of the hours she isn’t tending the ship itself. She’s always wreathed in a heady fragrance of fresh violet and apple blossom because of it. My eyes, as though suddenly magnetised to her body, trail across the black silk of her taikonaut flight suit past tool-lined pockets up to the silver characters emblazoned on her right bicep: 신기옥. It’s the same place as the initials on my own suit – TTB – just above where I sewed on the armband from one of the eight surviving segments of the gold ribbon that had been cut from the hatch of Torch 1 before lift-off.

I clear my throat. ‘We better get moving.’

I’m the first to stand, tugging my hands out from under hers and striding from the bridge without a backwards glance.

Torch 2 is nestled in the shuttle bay in the dragonhead prow of the geobukseon. Kiok followed me immediately but doesn’t speak again until we’re several hours into the launch preparations and the final sequence pitches the hangar into pulsing purple light. I’d piped one of my playlists over the intercom, now midway through an original Earth recording of an old Dutch master’s rendition of Bruch’s 1st concerto, a favourite of Vinnie’s she’d often resurrect on her own violin. It wasn’t even her favoured instrument, of which there were at least three or four, and yet she’d mastered it beyond anything I could ever hope to match on my oboe. I turn the music down as Kiok repeats herself.

‘Tamlyn and Nicnevin?’

It’s the last thing I ever expected her to say. Seven months alone together on the highway and we’d so sparingly spoken of family and faith and history. It was always quantum mechanics and sail or spin maintenance and the simple truths of the every day. Not this. Of course, when I’d sought her out exactly one year ago, the legendary Arirang engineer, I only had to say my name and she instantly knew my story.

Tamlyn Boyd. The cartographer. The fugitive.

The sister who’d stayed behind.

I spring the Torch’s aft hatch and retrieve the gleaming golden tensor spacesuit, assembling it in slow methodical movements so it stands before me like a second shadow, arms stiffly raised as though awaiting an embrace. ‘My mum’s old book of folktales her father had given her from his mother from her mother from her mother … and so on right back to the first Boyd who flew out from Glasgow in the Kepler exodus… She shoved it at the midwife aboard Tiangong 87 and asked him to read out the first two names he found. And that was that.’

I’m still fiddling with the zipper at the back of my taikonaut suit when she steps up behind me and brushes my fingers aside, dragging the silver clasp down my spine in one smooth sweep. Her hand falls away when it reaches my waist but she doesn’t move. I hesitate for a moment then shrug the silk from my shoulders and it drops to my ankles. She trips slightly on the material as she whirls back to the control board to spool the fusion reactor, the needle of my gaze following her like the slice of shadow around a sun dial.

‘What was her favourite story?’ she says lightly, not looking at me.

‘What?’

‘Your mother. What was her favourite story? From the book.’

‘Oh… Same as my grandpa’s. Tam o’ Shanter? Older than the turbine that tale is. This raucous epic of wild nights and wanderers waylaid and powers beyond comprehension. Of losing sight of heart and home – and of finding it again… We’d be the witches dancing round him as he recited the passage with the shedding poppies and the snow falling in the river and the rainbow’s lovely form evanishing amid the storm…’

I glance over at her when she makes no reply to see her left hand clenched around her right wrist where the bracelet is, staring at the maritime keystone, a mighty plaque set into the floor of the hangar engraved with the ship’s name: Arirang-37-이태영. Her whole body is rigid as an oak, violet alarm rays strobing around us like we’re lightning rods rooted to the hull, the purple waves setting her eyes ablaze.

She turns to me then.

‘Why are you doing this?’

I watch her, impassive. ‘I’m her sister.’

‘But why—’

‘She’s my sister.’

‘Tam—’

‘Kioka, if you need any more than that to understand you never will.’

‘I get it, Tam, I do. What I don’t get is why it’s almost two years later and you’re so ready to throw yourself into a well not knowing if it leads to an escape hatch or a dead—a dead end.’

I see her gaze skate over my body, a dragonfly across a pond, cheeks flaring. ‘The black hole information paradox, even with superstring-theoretical and holographic matrix models, dictates that—’

‘Tam.’ Her voice is scorching now. ‘Why?’

I close the distance between us in three strides, seizing her hand and pressing it to my chest, breath catching at the cold kiss of her palm on my bare skin. ‘It’s a swan dive, Kioka.’ She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink, breast rising faster and faster as her dark eyes flicker between mine like foxfire. ‘You get it now? You feel it? It’s a swan dive. A fling yourself into the abyss because you have adamantine faith that you’ll fly dive.’ I let my arms fall to my side but her hand stays where it is. ‘I don’t need to know. My story will end on the same page as hers.’

I barely hear her reply. ‘What if it’s not the end?’

The smile is impossible to swallow as I spin away to step into the spacesuit. ‘Well, then the page turns. We forge a different end from the fresh ink of that faith.’

‘And what of mine? What of my end?’

I secure the last clasp and finally meet her gaze, mirth melting as though it was never there. ‘You’ll have more pages. So many more pages.’

‘Without you in them?’

The words garrote me.

All I can do, movement now restricted by the suit, is gesture at the taikonaut uniform with the gold armband still pooled on the floor by the plaque.

‘Keep that warm for me, will you?’

‘Tamlyn?’

When my eyes touch hers it’s like stepping inside a solar storm.

‘Who’s going to remember us? That we stood here. That we said these things and felt these things. That we’re not just snow falling in the river.’

‘Someone will. Somewhere… Even in another time.’

‘How do you know that?’

I take three long seconds – just three – to drink in every detail of her, the way the hair tumbles over her left shoulder like a clear mountain burn, how she pulls her weight onto one leg as though poised to sprint, the silhouette of those elegant engineer’s fingers, the beckoning shadow of her throat, the words quivering on her lips, the rage waging war on her brow, the tension locking her jaw, the light playing on her face, the tears lingering on her eyelashes, the ones I’ll never see fall.

‘How do you know, Tam?’

‘It’s a swan dive.’

And I climb through the hatch of Torch 2 and into the cockpit, securing the lattice of belts in seconds as the reactor primes, the air lock slices the hangar in half, and the countdown begins.

She doesn’t stop speaking throughout the whole arc of my approach, whispers wild and sweet, beating the silence back with the stories I’d ached to inhale for so long, at once solving the ciphers to every secret I’d glimpsed in her omissions and contradictions, her elaborate occlusions and persistent inhibitions. She speaks of her childhood and her inventions, of one father’s illness and the other’s crusade to cure him, of her workshop and her first garden, of the unquenchable thirst of her moonshot dreams and the puzzle that promised to slake them all. The one that had unfurled on her doorstep exactly one year ago and sewn itself into her skin.

And with every word the current carries me further towards that cosmic cradle – further away from her.

But there’s just no force in the universe that could have stopped me after half of my heart had gone striding right out of it. Over a year of meticulous plotting to pull off the heist. Almost another to actually physically get here. The ache of the absence was and is visceral, vicious, and – frankly – intolerable, and so I will be the second emissary to consort with Goliath.

The ancients had long ago launched such an endeavour, but there are still 1300 years to go before the Hawking signal sails into system A0620-00. There have long been plans, now akin to legends, to follow it, with the first habitats scheduled to arrive early in the 58th century. The ones who’ll witness the glittering wake of that ancient missive of hope and peace just several centuries after it finally soared over an event horizon will never know what we did here, what we lost, what we found. But I’ll know. And that’s enough.

I’ll know.

And really, that means that we’ll know. Because why wouldn’t it?

This happened. This was witnessed. This was seen and heard and felt.

No matter how long it takes anyone else to feel it too. Or even if they ever do at all.

Safe passage is never promised for those intrepid signals eternally criss-crossing each other across the cosmos, their recipients only the vaguest possible inklings in the eyes of their dispatchers, sent thousands of years before they’d arrive at those most distant habitats sifting the stars from Monoceros to Manaiakalani, or the three planets still blinking in the abyss – the first, that brightest blue marble, forever spinning at the wellspring of our wanderings.

In any given moment we only have a full picture of the history of humanity from a point at least two thousand years ago, and that blind spot increases with every passing second as the furthest wanderers drift ever further from each other, our songs and stories only able to soar slightly faster than our laser-propelled sails. I think that’s why the art of the 21st century is so treasured beyond all that came before or after. It was the last time we all shared the same soil, breathed the same air, bathed beneath the same sun, able to speak to anyone alive within seconds, if afforded the freedom and technological means to do so.

The enormity of the thought lances through me like I’ve swallowed a comet.

And by the gods, did they have stories to tell.

‘Kioka?’

‘Tamlyn?’

‘Why are you doing this? Why did you agree to do this? To help me do this?’

‘I—’

‘They’ll charge you with—they’ll—’

‘Tam, you know why.’

The darkness is an assault now, pressing on my face like a pillow. The blazing blue halo has receded to a distant twilight over the edge of the horizon that now glimmers unblemished in every direction as I soar into the grave of the long-dead star.

It’s a darkness I’ve only known twice before. Once nearly two years ago, and once nearly two decades, when my grandpa had first described the storm. But he said there was always an anchor in words. You could tie yourself to the rigging when the tempest descended and trust absolutely in the strength of that hawser. The truth of the thing.

I didn’t understand him until now, sliding like a snowflake into the sea.

‘Tam… Tam, I—I’m afraid.’

She’s so far away. I close my eyes and let his voice rise up around me, his oldest recitation, surging into the silence with a sledgehammer.

‘Tam—’

‘Nae man can tether time or tide… The hour approaches, Tam maun ride—’

‘Tam, you’re seconds from the cliff edge—’

‘That hour o’ night’s black arch the key-stane, that dreary hour he mounts his beast in—’

‘You’ll find her, Tam, you’ll find her—’

‘And sic a night he taks the road in, as ne’er poor sinner was abroad in…’

‘Tammie… Sarang—’

‘The wind blew … the wind—Kioka?’

Nothing. My eyes snap open.

‘Kiok?’

I’ve never heard such silence.

Never seen such absence.

Nor felt such fear.

Here at the quiet limit of it all.

As the jaws of the Unicorn close around me.

I am seized.

I am shed.

Earth into earth.

And in a moment that’s so much more than a moment, I see it.

A tree.

Or at least something that looks like a tree, a sprawling green web glowing softly in the great ocean of ink swirling around the porthole. I tear my eyes away from it to skim the readings on the screens surrounding the fusion yoke long enough to establish that whatever physical laws govern the space I now sail through, they don’t belong to my universe.

I look back at the tree. It’s no longer suspended in absolute darkness – soft lilac light, growing brighter by the second, spilling across the space behind it, and then fuschia pink, periwinkle blue, marigold orange, like an aching sunrise seeping forth in every direction. But I see no planets or stars, only trees, great mossy roots reaching and tangling every few hundred thousand kilometres, maybe? Though there’s no way to know for sure from the broiling green swamp of the radar screen. I blink through the tears, relying on nothing but my eyes to understand.

As I draw nearer to that first solitary sapling, something flashes, a reflection perhaps of my own spinning fusion engines, bouncing off whatever’s bound in its branches – a shining glint, almost metallic.

But it’s not green.

It’s gold.

I tear at my harness, surging from the cockpit seat to get physically nearer to the porthole, hands splayed against the three-inch thick quartz glass, heart roaring in my ears, afraid to even blink lest that impossible golden glint vanish.

The source is unmistakeable now.

It’s right there, gleaming silently in the foliage.

Torch 1.

‘Vinnie.’ The whisper sounds like a thunderclap. It doesn’t stop me calling for her again, this time as loud as I can, thumping one fist against the glass and half expecting it to shatter.

There’s a flicker of movement to the left of the tree.

What emerges a second later doesn’t, initially, compute – a rippling billow of grey, like a wave, but with wings.

I have to remind myself to breathe as the branches unfurl before it and seem as though to consume it. I glance frantically at the screens once more but they’re as utterly useless as ever. And then Torch 1 starts to turn. I can’t tell if it’s under the influence of its own thrusters or if the branches are literally guiding it, but metre by metre it’s yawing and rolling, until it’s fully perpendicular to me, still nestled in that green net.

Its starboard hatch is now dead ahead. My eyes flicker again to my own yoke control but a second later the spaceship lurches around me and I’m sent tumbling back into the cockpit seat with a strangled string of curse words. The dashboard lights up like someone in the ancient films throwing a match onto gasoline. Every single warning contradicts the one before it. I seize the yoke but it’s unresponsive. Yanking out the throttle has no effect either. All I can do is cling to the seat itself as I’m sucked towards the tree.

I lose sight of it completely when the yawing motion begins, a mirror image of the other ship’s movement, and as the spin leaves the engines, so too does the gravity that had otherwise been present since I’d entered or emerged from whatever I’d entered or emerged from. It’s like I’ve been plunged into water, motionless myself but, suddenly, afloat. I’m thinking absently of whether my carefully styled mulberry pompadour is still holding its shape when the whole ship jolts again with a bestial hiss.

The airlock.

I shove myself off the chair and make a wild lunge at the cockpit door. It’s out of reach so I awkwardly hook one leg around the back of the chair itself and propel myself aftwards. I’m through the cupboard-sized crew cabin and into the auxiliary control bay in seconds. The central hatch is on the starboard side, an exact mimicry of Torch 1 down to the molecules. I’m flattened against the portside panel, gazing at it, a single smooth slab of polished amber silumin mounted with a silver wheel, the same one I’d spun just a few hours earlier, sealing me on one side, and Kiok forever on the other.

I watch, transfixed, as it begins to turn again, someone – or something – manipulating it from what can only be surmised as the deck of its twin.

Torch 1 and Torch 2, torn from all our recorded yesterdays of space and time, docked together once more – somewhere.

The only thing missing, to complete the tensor trinity, is Torch 3.

Well, Torch 3, and that first blazing beacon’s pilot.

My pilot.

The poet.

As the hatch swings open, I stop breathing.

Golden silumin. Blinking control panels. Billows of steam.

A figure.

I see a flash of freckles, hair like flame, shining grey eyes, the silver thumb ring, a waft of cedarwood, and then there’s that hot cocoa and candlelight voice, siphoned straight from my dreams.

‘Tamlyn Tithonus Boyd!’

I’m bringing both legs up, I’m planting my feet against the wall, and I’m hurling myself at her like a caterwauling spray of shrapnel from a shotgun before she can land the last syllable.

She launches herself forwards as she does and we collide, caught in one careening centripetal orbit, spinning, yelling, two dark and howling years splintering into dawn with a single spear of lightning.

It’s more than an hour before I’ve even begun to forage the furthest edges of the jigsaw.

We’re both cross-legged in the galley of Torch 2 in a cloud of zip locked kimchi udon, gingered green bean fries, olive and goat’s cheese drop scones, cucumber sesame salad, canned peach thyme iced tea, and veritable bushels of fresh fruit, the Unicorn just visible beyond the aft porthole, rage-red from this side, like a vast droplet of blood on a blackboard. She’s fervidly attempting to explain for the third or fourth time how exactly it’s been nigh on two and a half Earth years for her, give or take a month, despite having stayed in what could most crudely be described as the general vicinity of the Unicorn, despite the quantum soup, despite everything.

Because of them. The winged grey waves.

‘The space herons.’

‘The space—right, consider me pleading for your pardon.’

There’s that old mysterious glimmer in her eye as she shrugs off what I had until this precise moment disregarded as a backpack. It’s the same curious umber brown leather-like material as the suit she wears – categorically not the tensor spacesuit. From within she unsheaths a pearlescent keyboard.

‘Look.’ She plays a few notes and we slowly sink to the floor as gravity is conjured from – quite simply – nowhere.

‘Vinnie … what the shit?’

‘It’s okay. You just have to take everything you know about everything’—she scoops a handful of air in front of my face—‘and dispatch it to hell.’ She motions hurling it back at the Unicorn like a javelin, that dark world where I had shed one universe and donned another.

The keyboard is a work of art. I listen, enraptured, as she describes how the shimmering ribbons she immediately began thinking of as herons were waiting for her, emerging as she did in the cocoon of Torch 1 from the eye of their god, the seed around which they had knitted their sprawling civilisation, though there were countless more like them spread across this realm, each sprouting from one of these bleeding seeds, black holes bridging our universes where they’d brushed up against each other like bruises. If every black hole was a bruise and every bruise was a bridge and every bridge led to another universe, each eternally inflating at different speeds at different times, the graveyards giving rise to ever more, then the ancients were right. They always had been and always would be.

Nothing is every truly destroyed. Anything lost can be found.

I move towards the porthole again with a vague gesture at the Mandelbrot canvas of branches interspersed with starbursts of orange like pomegranate trees blanketing this strangest cosmos in an infinite forest filled with birds. ‘So … this?’

‘Right. It’s more like matter. Like liquid luciferin or amniotic fluid. Except it’s also not at all like either – so best to erase the slate entirely. And while you’re at it just use the slate as a bat and the chalk as a ball for all the good it will do you to write anything down. You have to feel more than calculate or compute. It’s in the bone marrow. That’s what the trees are, basically. Bone. Though not really.’

‘Vinnie.’

‘I know, isn’t it glorious?’

I gaze out at the impossible vista as she narrates its contours, this inconceivably massive organism connecting every single one of its gods in a swirling sentient lattice within which the herons soar, singing to each other across the eons like whales, bending their sunrise soup as though shaping wind currents with their wings. They’d accelerated her perception of the passage of linear time to match her specifications. Me. To match me. She knew I’d leave to go after Torch 2. She knew I’d return with it – at any cost. And with that knowledge she could bear the solitude. She could bear anything.

There was no truth more fundamental.

If I left, I would always return.

Anything lost can be found.

Except for her.

The woman I’d left behind.

When Vinnie asks why I’m holding my stomach as though I’ve just been stabbed, I unspool. The first thing I describe is her garden on the Arirang and the way she would sink into the soil like she’d been uprooted from it a lifetime ago and was at last restored, then the little clockwork automata she would leave scattered throughout the ship for me to discover on my morning maintenance rounds as though making up for the lack of crew, then her melodious multilingual orations on loop quantum gravity and pharmacognosy and millennium myth retellings.

They would have adored each other, her and Vinnie, navigating the mountainous tributaries of language and tracing them to the lochs and oceans faster than I could ever have even dreamed.

Because that’s how she’s surfed the storm.

Language.

The herons had crafted an atmosphere for her in the trunk of one of their colonies, stocking the hollow with a steady stream of similarly synthesised essentials from food, water, and clothing to paper, electricity, and, as already demonstrated, gravity. Part 3D printer, part god. Torch 1 had also been left as a relic in the eyeline of their deity, cradled in the bone-branches to keep it powered. I think of the old Earth legends of our progenitor, Voyager 1, the original wanderer, and how it became a UNESCO world heritage site, no one allowed to even remotely interfere with it as it fulfils its destiny, hurtling through the Oort Cloud carrying the golden record of our songs and stories to the other side for at least the next twenty-eight millennia or so, though records from the time showed that 22nd-century Oort tourist ships would run regular flybys.

Torch 1 had no such audience. Only her. Her and the herons, feeding its veins. So she’d still had access to its living quarters, limited amenities, and – most importantly – data, which of course included the Tiangong network library containing every byte of human thought and expression ever digitised. Excepting those that haven’t reached us yet.

On her own for all this time. Yet not alone.

They first began to communicate with something akin to avian call notes, with different frequencies signifying different things. She’d built herself the keyboard from their bones, utilising the Torch’s computer to render their shared song into words. She plays to them and they listen. She plays to them and they answer, singing their tunes without our words so the computer can assemble the lyrics through the mirage of her translation matrix. Our words with their song.

Singing to each other. They feel what she feels. She feels what they feel.

Not alone.

I’m wrestling something feathered and frenzied in my chest. ‘No one will ever know.’

‘Someone will. What is it your old poet used to say? Even in another time.’

She lifts the keyboard, her palms a plinth, and I clutch at my heart, the thing with feathers ramming my ribcage. Her smile could power a planet.

‘I’m going to sing it to them. I’m going to make the universes sing to each other. Like the herons do… They weave realities as good as spells to us with their wings. I’m going to use those same currents to send a feedback loop through the Unicorn’s entangled quantum conduit. That black hole is going to sing, Tam. And Tiangong is going to hear it… Earth will too. Even in another time. Earth will too.’

The tears are burning my throat. ‘What will you play?’

She looks at the keys, eyes flashing, and we’re back by the lore lamp, spinning gold from sorrow. ‘Something that will never be forgotten.’

The herons erupt.

Vinnie straightens. I can’t parse the implications of the cocktail of confusion and wonder that washes over her face. She’s at the galley’s modest console in a heartbeat, overriding and syncronising.

And then the computer is voicing the alert.

‘A third flame sears the seed.’

‘A third what does what?’ I’m on my feet now too, skidding over to the porthole. ‘The seed as in the Unicorn?’

‘Tam.’

I turn. She’s watching me, that expression back, somehow even more scorching.

‘Tam,’ she says again. ‘It’s Torch 3.’

‘It’s—’

‘But it’s older… We’ve been at the Unicorn’s temporal configuration these past few hours. It hasn’t. Obviously. It was at home port.’

It’s like I’ve been shoved off the edge of a building. ‘How long?’

She’s silent a moment as she hurtles through the calculations. ‘Eight—eight years. Maybe nine. Impossible to say for sure without a precise record of its flight path.’

I press my forehead to the glass, closing my eyes, utterly unable to ask my next question.

Instead I’m pitched into the silvery dusk of memory, a silken evening months ago back on the Arirang.

I’d found Kiok, as predicted, ensconced in the biosphere, a microcosm of the gargantuan one at the heart of the Tiangong habitat that had been gradually forging a ship-wide ecosystem complete with nutrient and hydrological cycles since launch.

I’d passed beneath the ribbons of peonies wreathing the entrance of her enchanted garden, winding my way through blazing clusters of globe amaranth and oxblood lilies, ambrosia splayed like spears of sunshine and arum like green flame, rivers of palest honeysuckle, myrtle, and jasmine, and then that final walkway of red, red rose. She was knelt at its end in a fiery pool of cardinals and crown imperials, flowering almond draping the branches above her like soft pink clouds as the wild-wood echoes rang. When she saw me approaching she’d overcompensated and I only realised later, compulsively replaying our interactions as I did at the close of every day, that she must’ve been crying.

I’d helped her prune for a while, filling her in on my latest ephemeris entries, and then she’d said something about time, words surely so flippant and fleeting for her but that would keep me up at night in the weeks that followed, tossing, turning, burning. She said that if we lived out our forever here, let the sands of life run their course, tending these flowers together, stitching these nows into a tapestry that would turn them eternal, then she thought she could hang it up in winter and know that her summer had been one that would blind the stars. As long as she never had to weave it alone.

I quietly left the bracelet on her workstation the next day. I’d hammered it into shape from the same silver as my first sextant, the one I still carry with me wherever I sail, and engraved six words into the slender band: or like the rainbow’s lovely form. I wear a matching one. I’m not sure whether she ever noticed, though I saw hers just visible at the edge of her right sleeve when we met for lunch. If I could bottle that feeling…

There are so many minute things I’ve trapped in amber to cling to when the darkness would be otherwise overpowering, the way she moved when she was thrumming with anticipation, the way she frowned when she was concentrating, the way I could make her stop and sigh like she was sinking into her precious soil, playing my oboe or reciting poetry as she tinkered or filling the galley with the warm embrace of toasting spices. The way I could make her laugh. The way I could make her blush.

And I’d left her alone in the cold tomb of that doomed orbit.

I’m utterly unable to ask the question.

We walk in a mirage of disbelief to the auxiliary control room. Vinnie’s playing her board with renewed fervour, fingers flying across the keys, composing the same request as before.

Yaw, roll, dock, pressurise, yaw, roll, dock, gravitate.

The airlock hiss is a viper rearing, the silver wheel a blur.

As the hatch swings open, I stop breathing.

Golden silumin. Blinking control panels. Billows of steam.

A figure.

I see a flash of tool-lined pockets, hair like a lake at night, dark tremulous eyes threshing the twilight into flakes of fire, three silver initials emblazoned on black silk above a strip of gold ribbon, a waft of fresh violet and apple blossom, and then there’s that inebriating look of warring want and hope and sorrow, siphoned straight from my dreams.

I close the distance between us in three strides, reaching out to brush back the hair that has fallen across her face and catching her tears on my fingertips as I do.

She looks up then and I vanish into that solar storm, submerged in an everywhere of silver as I feverishly catalogue every single change, the scar tracing her jaw, the thick braid flowing past her waist, the fearsome bandolier of hardware binding her in a gleaming saltire corset. I can feel the familiar metallic halo around her wrist when her hand glides up my chest to my neck, to my chin, to my cheek.

They made three prototypes of the tensor shield ship. They didn’t know all of them would fly. They didn’t know there would even be one soul willing to make the dive. They didn’t know there would be three.

I suspect, if they were to put it to the polls, they’d find there are as many as there are bridges stitching the universes together into a tapestry of nows turned eternal – and we’re going to make them sing to each other, like the herons do.

Her eyes sink to my lips as I whisper her name.

My sifting snowfall evening the plains, my sweet aurora flitting and seeking, my lovely rainbow formed – at last – from forever.

My secret.

My song.

‘Kioka.’