The Derelict

An inert body, that of Lt. Ian Schiller, silently erupted through a radiant gateway, sailing ballistically into starry vacuum amid a cloud of glinting, billowing air. Limbs flailed and lungs collapsed, all straining with equal ineffectiveness. Eardrums immediately burst. Under less catastrophic circumstances Ian might have marveled at the prismatic beauty of the astral vista into which he had been cast.

But he had played the fatal roulette and had finally lost. This was the end.

Fulfilling one of his many lurking apprehensions about delving through the portals, he had appeared somewhere in open space, where his body was fated to horribly decompress and drift forever a bruised, bloated, frozen mass. Moments before, as he was stepping through the portal's blinding orb, during that usual crescendo of primordial fear--the unsettling false-sensations of bodily ripping and displacement across astronomical leaps of space-time which the portals evoked--the thought of tethering himself as he had done before had occurred to him. The torrent of air rushing into the portal should have immediately cued him to a dangerous pressure difference, but he had been far too distracted to notice. Was that horrible creature still pursuing him?

About six minutes before blackout, were among his wracked brain’s last thoughts. Pressure-chamber experiences and medical training flashbacks assailed him, filtered through the sensation of his brains fizzling like soda. What to regret in these precious last moments?

Several minutes had passed. Helpless thoughts of animal mortality pierced him as his boiling humours were cracking his retinas. Anon after the finality of his situation had set upon him, an odd calmness descended; he dreamed about what he might dream.

Beside paths of like-fated dust particles that glinted peacefully, almost reassuringly like tiny snowflakes in the void, he smashed rather unexpectingly into the far end of an unseen chamber. Arms absently raised before him presently crumpled against his head like an involuntary crash-helmet, wrenching fingers. The crash would have been painful had his chilled extremities and numbing nerves had more feeling in them, though he viscerally convulsed at the abrupt bending of spine.

Wild explanations darting through his oxygen-deprived mind, he started with violence upon impact, fumbling and thrashing like a fish flopping in a desert. Through a receding twilight of awareness, he was alert enough to feebly attempt to reverse himself and kick off the obstruction back to the portal. His limbs, however, now limp as a ragdoll's, heeded him little. Hands flopped like pillows, as if detached from him. His mind was awhirl. It was about when he felt his gaze should have been oriented back toward the portal that he realized how dazzlingly wonderful it all was. Everything strobed and pulsed and ever brightened, like a five-hundred-million megaton rainbow-file downloaded into his brain from heaven, and more coming. Even his flaring, magic hands before him--where were his hands anyway?--were invisible through its aura whose glowy glory; the intensity inebriated the mind and fried its eye. Somehow he could feel the hairs on his neck tingling with numbness, he could hear all the babies on Earth being born at the same time, and he could taste mathematics.

Brain was rising, rising above and swelling beyond the crude bounds of his body. Ian found himself smiling with a kind of frenetic jubilation he'd never before experienced, smiling through lungs that burned and compressed painlessly. He was sailing directly into the portal at infinite velocity now, kissing the face of eternity, arms extended in triumph, on his way directly to Earth--home--after all these years wandering a maze of alien doorways through the cosmos. There would be sex, cookies, and parades waiting for him.

Meanwhile, his limp body had folded against then meekly bounced from the unseen wall, from which he was slowly drifting. His vague, wild groping had done little to right himself, and his glassy-eyed gaze was now staring blankly, amazedly off into black nothingness while flesh purpled with disfigurement. The portal had closed behind him, blanketing him in a funereal pall of darkness. An ocean of stars looked on impassively at this atom that had found itself in the wrong place.

The unlimited skies awakened. A disturbance? Stars promptly vanished, blacking out in patches, soon all gone. Steadily, there was air: warmed air"air fit for humans. There was probing, and curiosity, and amazement, but familiarity... Calculations of probability, tinkered and refined with obsession, confirmed: with sufficient passage of time, after all, lightning will strike twice in any given place. Lightning had struck twice.

The free-floating corpse of this fragile creature, this strange life form with a central trunk, four radiating limbs, and an odd sensory bulb atop, was handled by strange but inquisitive limbs, working nimbly with both tenderness and medical precision from a script of action perfected over an unknown past.

***

A glimmer of consciousness returned, tailed by an unwilling recollection, scourged by a feverish cloud of immeasurable over-looming deepness, engulfing his body within an impenetrable gulf of cosmic terror.

He incoherently croaked aloud his thoughts: A wall? A wall in outer space?

It could only have been a madman's dream. His wracked brain must have imagined it all. Neither the bodies nor brains of humans were made for any of this, the stark hostility of environments foreign to Earth. He distinctly remembered being cold, numb, and dead. Oddly, his cracked, bleeding lips presently hurt more than anything.

Assessing his situation through a stupor, Ian found himself blinded, deafened, and severely bruised when he awoke to nauseous disorientation: decompression trauma. The unseen, unheard thing or things he could sense hovering all around tended to him with flippery, nonhuman sensations. In an overpowering moment of instinctive panic, he wrenched free of one of the grasps and attempted a feeble, blind escape to where he knew not, but he was promptly restrained. Despite pinning him down, the flippery sensations didn’t seem to be hurting him, but rather were studiously brushing over his wounds, seemingly with a convalescing effect.

Mounting tiredness now overtook what little remained of his senses. He knew he shouldn’t succumb. Survival intuition demanded he should keep aware, but in darkness, it was hard to tell sleep from otherwise.

For the sleeper, replacement eye tissue was synthesized and infused, ruptured ear tissue was grafted closed; time, sleep, and chemical nourishment restored both purpled flesh and addled mind. For all he knew when he next awoke, the severities of his injuries had been a bad, aching nightmare caused by fever or exhaustion.

Despite his initial body-horror upon awakening, his fears that he’d been permanently mangled and turned into a vegetable by the effects of pressure and temperature, and despite Ian’s vague terror caused by half-remembered sensations of invasion in his ocular and aural cavities; he found that he was being provided with a hospitable (though weightless) environment.

As Ian's enfeebled senses focused, he found that the flippery things in the vague darkness about him were grotesque protrusions from his disorienting surroundings: a homogenous, smooth-skinned cocoon, lighted faintly from an unidentifiable source. Walls? Floors? Ups? Sideways? Nothing felt right… Nausea sets in. A violent wonder-cloud of free-floating bubbles was given miraculous birth, unweighted curds of pearly yellow enjoying brief life before their absorption into the nearest blobby surface.

After an interminable sequence of intense soreness, thirst, disorientation, more nausea, hunger, claustrophobic panic-fit, and hyperventilating bewilderment, he settled into a more calm state that fed curiosity. The skin, the pseudopods, seemed to be intelligently interested in him " curious themselves. He overcame a hesitant fear, and as his act of First Contact diplomacy with this new creature, he taught the cocoon-skin-thing how to hand-shake, which it learned with apparent eager fascination, accomplishing it with its plastic-metallic flippers with human-like dexterity.

“Hello?” his strained voice rang through offshooting passages dark and unplumbed. No answer except for a reactive wave of slight convulsion that coursed through the organ-like roomful of strange appendages.

It was as if he had fallen into a futurist's painting of a robotic stomach. In his aching delirium, he vainly hoped he was day-dreaming in some two-bit urbia-surrealium art gallery this whole time.

Towering overhead, the dark environment's tactile limbs surrounded without crowding him, like pseudopodia made from some animated, liquid-state plastic-like material, were what had evidently recovered his dying body and treated it surgically. They twitched thoughtfully, seeming to gaze at him like doctoral spectators in an operating gallery. He found them highly responsive to his touch, hard like metal yet simultaneously as yielding as water.

He quickly found that this thing, this place in which he drifted through deep space, was very much an enormous living being, apparently sentient, a living vessel that had tumbled through cosmic blackness for aeons in a state of invisible hibernation. Ian would later learn that even it did could not recollect its creators or their purposes. It had been abandoned long ago, at a time beyond its ability or care of remembrance. He explored its arterial halls, some irregularly-shaped, finding handholds in the weightlessness from organic striations, and this “spaceship,” as if to help wordlessly explain to him his situation, occasionally provided him with windows of an uncertain material, gazing out into the face of astral abyss.

Lonely years of wandering desolate, alien corridors and inhospitable worlds without companionship had damaged Ian, socially. Even in this less-hostile habitat, he still muttered to himself his thoughts, consulting with more preferred company that were the ghosts of his memories, sometimes discussing present circumstances under his breath, other times totally lost in better days, in watercolored reveries of a distant Earth's springtimes. He found himself, however, strangely embarrassed when he caught himself, now that he was among this other (seemingly social) being, alien as it was, in whose bowels he had become a hostage of fate. How could it know his ramblings were abnormal for a human?

Need to focus, Ian, he mentally chastised himself. Stay logical and collected. Stay military"stay reg.

Though the ship was clearly intelligent (and vastly so, he would learn), Ian realized he hadn’t even thought to properly communicate with it at first, apart from superficial manual interactions, including handshakes. He rationalized that this negligence might have been due to his dazed, benumbed brain still recovering from decompression. He found rather directly that non-tactile communication was conducted from the same featureless plastic-metal-sort-of-surface with which he’d already been interacting. Any variety or detail of light or sound emanated from an indeterminate source. The “spaceship” seemed to also sense in the same decentralized manner by way of his glossy skin. It listened to his voice, which was cracked and grated at first from its long-term disuse, and responded with attempts of its own, imitations to begin with.

So it was natural enough that either Ian or the ship would eventually learn the other’s mode of communication, stuck together as they were with little else to keep them occupied. Since the ship seemed to have none that Ian could perceive, he taught it his own -- English -- and it proved an apt pupil. Within what would have been about a week of time on Earth, the ship had mastered the language as thoroughly as Ian’s ability to speak it. There was also a fair degree of therapy in this for Ian, mentally and physically, as he attempted to readjust his brain to interacting with something that wasn’t thinking from his own increasingly compartmentalized thoughts. His own raspy voice, unexercised except through physical exertion, fits of manic, or incoherent self-mumbling, also improved as the ship learned to approximate human vocalization. The ship’s disembodied voice progressed from a jittery, shattery sound, analogous to a human body sculpted from shards of broken glass, to that capable of smooth and facile speech.

Surpassing an initial hesitance between them, the ship and he made for eager friends, of sorts, hanging onto anything the other said, listening to tales of each other’s travels. It turns out they were both a tad eccentric in their current state, both starved of and craving social interaction for longer than either could remember. Ian found himself chuckling at his own jokes on occasion, half-recounting his own anecdotes from unrelated experiences that he forgot to mention, sometimes drifting off into detached mumbling while pensively tugging at his shabby beard. The ship’s narratives, on the other hand, perhaps reflecting a computer-like consciousness, were generally more coherent, yet frequently embarked on topics and events describable only as arabesque.

Through more solid conversation, Ian learned that the ship, though presently drifting without propulsion or course, was indeed capable of travel, and not only in conventional linear modality. The ship attempted to describe, both with its limited technical vocabulary (such that Ian had taught it"and which Ian’s human brain was capable of understanding), even with diagrams dynamically rendered in its fluid metal-skin, its ability to bend points of space in order to effect instantaneous travel across hypothetically infinite distances. In fact, its primary space-time-twisting engine was the very same cryptic portal through which had Ian himself arrived aboard, having unwittingly exercised an alternate, "obsolete,” mode of its operation from an ancient connective node. The ship projected the portal's generated well of time-space distortion using what it described as a gravity-lens algorithm it addressed as the Pragmer Misi, inhumanly complex yet gracefully simple within the scope of its complexity. The ship spoke of this math-like algorithm with strange reveries hinting at admiration.

From his wristwatch, Ian estimated he had already spent almost two months aboard. As this time passed Ian learned in their dialogues that the ship’s pseudo-technological brain was supplied with a rich treasury of records from the vanished civilization of its builders. Its records spanned topics of general knowledge and exact sciences pertaining to that dead culture, but also (as one would expect aboard a spaceship) encompassed exhaustively detailed star-charts, representing thorough navigational and scientific metrics on hundreds of billions of stellar bodies, including stars and their planets. For the moment, however, Ian had much less interest in researching an alien culture than in securing an achingly-sought path home.

A fluttery sense of nervous anticipation quivered within as he realized the library’s vast extensiveness. Virtually unlimited information on a galaxy's celestial bodies were presented to him in a makeshift display, almost like a liquid-yet-solid clay tablet in motion, composed of the amorphous, organic-plastic-metal of the ship's interior skin. Unfortunately, little information was available for bodies outside their current galaxy, beyond that extrapolated from observational (categorized as “historical”) data, but the galaxy covered by its records looked vaguely like the Milky Way--an auspicious sign.

As part of his ample contingency training, Ian had been rigorously instructed in astronomy and astrometrics, among other things, before he had left on that fateful exploration mission from Earth. Through painstaking techniques memorized from repetition as well as mnemonics, he could identify the Milky Way galaxy and fix Earth’s position within it, even with meager visual or numerical information.

In this pursuit he labored over the charts for many hours, but despite his best efforts to reconcile the star maps with what he knew about the Milky Way, the star charts of the galaxy, in whose outskirts he and the ship seemed to be floating, appeared only vaguely analogous, yet still quite alien. The major arms and several distinctive clouds fundamentally resembled the galaxy he knew, yet remained eerily different. Volatile features were misplaced, and some small, characteristic blips were altogether missing. A mere semblance was not acceptable. Similarity would yield no place called home.

Hopes of return faded as meteorically as they had risen.

Perhaps I’m looking at it from a strange angle...? he speculated.

But try as he did, what he saw could not be reconciled exactly with what was etched into his mind. And yet it remained so oddly similar. Was this a different galaxy? Was this apparent similarity a manifestation of the fractal-like repeatability found throughout nature and the cosmos?

“Ship, can you search your star charts with criteria I give you?”

It affirmed that it easily could.

“Alright, then. How many single-star solar systems,” he carefully considered his words, ”of average-sized yellow stars do you have on file that are positioned approximately within a radius of 27 thousand light-years from this galaxy’s center, with at least eight planets, and whose first two planets have no satellites?”

After defining and clarifying some terminology, including the definition of the color yellow, the ship effortlessly equating them to the alien metrics native to its organic library, the search yielded 3,487,532 matches.

Earth was but a single grain of sand in a dune sea that seemed to sprawl for infinity. At this prospect, the hope in his heart shriveled more so than it had before, but he still wasn’t out of options.

Ian, tone souring: “Can you narrow down those search results with more criteria?”

It certainly could.

Swallowing his disappointment, he continued with grim determination. What could it hurt to try?

“Of those results, how many have a third planet with only one moon, and have a prominent belt of asteroids between their fourth and fifth planets?”

More defining of terminology. 39,018 matches. The ship's library system chirped thoughtfully, eager to help, uncertain what to suggest.

This could still be possible if I keep chipping it down, Ian thought, the wilted flower of his optimism blooming anew. With patience and strategy, even an astronomical number could be pared away to yield one critical match, or at most a manageable handful.

“How many of those have a fourth-position planet with two moons?”

12,620.

It seemed impossible that the ship’s records (possibly outdated by millions of Earth years as they were) could be so extensive, but Ian tarried not to marvel over this or the enormity of the life-teeming universe. Instead, nervous hope again blossomed within him, tickling innards like butterflies. Head swam with lightheadedness and hands trembled with anticipation, but he was still able to focus after some pause, silently awed at the prospect of returning home. Ian’s face twitched with suppressed joy. Earth, the long-lost, nurturing blue marble he had left behind so many years ago, was in proverbial sight as a search result in an alien library of celestial bodies.

He could barely stammer out the words. Collecting himself, he continued: “Of those matches, how many have a third-position planet whose period of revolution is divisible by approximately 365 of its own rotations?”

One match.

A paroxysm of elation overtook Ian’s brain, wracked as it was by alien nightmares of the past several years. He shrieked and babbled exclamations of giddy exuberance, and the ship was quite accustomed to his outbursts. There was little deliberation on the next course of action.

From the night of space, a remote observer would have shortly thereafter spied a flash and a glinting object winking momentarily out of local space-time.

***

“I want to see it whole--get a good look at it. Ship, could you please take us about, to a sunward angle?" asked Ian like a bright-eyed schoolboy as the living, ancient vessel dutifully glided into a desired position and roll. From a fair distance, they speedily traveled against the rotation of this faintly-recalled bluish opal in space, this aqueous drop in an ocean of emptiness. Earth. Defying astronomical odds, he was home.

Sweet tears of joy dripped from beatific face as Ian beheld what years and light-years had obscured from memory, had attempted to uproot and replace with nightmarish labyrinths of civilizations that had lived and died long ago in places human eyes or feet had never seen or stepped. These places of anguish and primal fear of otherworldly beasts had become his dreamlike homes, houses of anguish. But the tortuous, torturous road was over. He leaned against the glassy substance that served as a gallery, caressing the sea-blue vision. A wan, pocked moon rose spectrally from behind as they sailed; yes, there was no doubt this was Earth.

Following moments of blithe, however, a dysphoria. He and the happily unaware ship lingered on, while a shroud of apprehension drew over him. An unsettling inability for Ian to fully orient himself with the visible geography gradually suffocated him. The warm, glowing jewel in space seemed to recede to a dismal, alien spot in pupils that dilated with a moment’s revelation, as awareness to the situation suddenly struck his psyche like a sledgehammer upon ripe cantaloupe.

It was no small wonder that the star maps of the galaxy looked so strangely familiar due to Ian's astronomy training, and yet remained so alien in spite of it. It was the same galaxy, but it had changed, swirling and mixing differentially, as galaxies do. Perhaps the ship, blithely unaware of this complication, simply did not understand the sensitivity of time to a short-lived creature such as he. It would later be divulged to him as he bitterly gnashed that the portals' bending of space also tended to funnel time in a similar direction, following a function proportional to distance traversed--forward.

Viscera wrenched with a despairing nausea. It was all wrong, but with unwillingness and terror he slowly identified the distorted masses sprawled with sinister serenity before him from lessons on the subject of plate tectonics remembered from secondary school Earth-Space science, and later from Geology at university. While he watched awestruck and stupefied, for how long he knew not, the circuit of Earth’s daily dance revealed that Australia was smashed into Asia, that mere remnants of the Mediterranean parted a tight fusion between Africa and Europe, and that the Atlantic-facing sides of the Americas and Africa were pushed further apart, eaten into by ravenous inroads of sallying ocean.

His muddled brain reeled with defeated comprehension. Everything he had known had crumbled to dust aeons ago--people, places, names--even all of the very ideas behind them. There was no telling what creatures dwelt down there now, no telling what strange spoke on the wheel of evolution had revolved; homo sapiens had only been a trivial hundred-thousand years old. Butterflies of hope previously fluttering had died and become a bubbling putrescence in the pit of his belly. He felt like he would be sick... For gazing back at Ian with cruel contempt from a starry void of frigid night was the face of a radically changed Earth, marbled agelessly with blue and green and white " an Earth of approximately 200 million years A.D.