"Dance in the Dark"

[Rhean t'Valae 0]

"Dance in the Dark"

 

How could the very stars be wrong? Oh, Elements... What was a scientist to do when all the facts she relied on went awry? Here was Dhawiir, blue and bright, and there Aefvisuu, just as it should be. But look, there lay Kalharv, unmistakable with its odd, heavy-element specta: a star oddly young for its neighborhood. Only that could not be Kalharv, because that trickster star lay four light-years towards the galactic south.

 

Oh, it was little enough of an error, surely; just enough to set someone scolding back on ch'Rihan where some poor centurion at Galae's Astronavigation and Cartography would surely catch hell for allowing galactic drift to go uncorrected for so many cycles. Only there was Tefira, equally unmistakable, for how many stars had full fourteen planets, not even counting the veritable fleet of moons? Faster moving, yet right in place where it ought to be. Still Rhean frowned at it across the light-years, for those fourteen, so dependable in their cosmic dance, were all out of place like hlai scattered before hnoiyikar.

 

It might be the sensors, of course. Small wonder that they should be functioning ill; with the poor ship crippled and bleeding from the gut, how could the eyes and ears be expected to know where they were? But it was hard, so hard on a science officer. Those sensors were not bits of machinery and programming, but extensions of the scientist -- eyes and ears indeed, better than those of flesh, capable of seeing into the hostile void where no light lived, of hearing where there was no air to carry sound.

 

To be so betrayed by her instruments was like a blow; almost it was easier to think the stars were wrong, that they had forgotten the steps of their dance. Perhaps a stray black hole had passed through this sector, or even a rogue star. For more and more, betrayals aside, Rhean was coming to think that the stars were wrong, not the sensors, not the charts. What hand could rearrange the jewels in the fabric of space? Wide-eyed, she stared out at the unfriendly, uncertain dark, suddenly wishing for good solid Earth beneath her, and Air not bottled into a starship far from its homesun. Elements help us all...