But The Stars Read online

  In that moment, Cap’s eyes go dark, no longer retaining any white or even the pupils. His eyes refuse to reflect the subtle hints of light around them. The glossy sheen is gone, replaced with something akin to the membranes Dante saw in earlier reboots. Any humanity Cap had evaporates. He no longer blinks. It’s as though he’s blind and yet Dante’s aware he can see her all too clearly.

  “Why you?” he asks. At first, Dante’s confused, so he clarifies. “Don’t you ever wonder about yourself? You’re here—now. Why?”

  “Space and time, right?” she asks, understanding the gist of his point. “Out of 13.8 billion years and a diameter of at least 93 billion light years, why am I here in space? Here in time?” She shrugs. “Why do I occupy this tiny slither of space-time? I don’t know that there is a reason. Life is about finding meaning, not having it to start with.”

  Cap nods. A slight smile escapes his lips. Dante’s acutely aware she’s gaining insights into the workings of an alien mind as it strives to comprehend human consciousness.

  He says, “Think of how preposterous you are. You’re a collection of molecules that is insignificant on any scale—whether relative to this module, the ship, an asteroid, a comet, or a planet. You’re pitifully small compared to even a dwarf star—and yet here you are.”

  “Here I am,” she replies, only her words are measured, probing, wanting to draw this strange creature into more dialogue.

  “It’s your arrogance that fascinates us.”

  Us.

  That gets her attention. Dante wonders how adept these creatures are at reading body language. They seem to pick up on non-verbal clues, and for the most part, these are reactions she can’t screen. A slight twist of her head reveals her surprise with far more fidelity than anything she could say. As if in response, the avatar that is Cap purses his lips, pausing in thought before continuing.

  “You think of arrogance as an insult, but I mean it as a compliment. There’s something surprising and utterly unique about your perspective. You assume importance. Your literature speaks of individual rights but you’re a contradiction.”

  Without meaning to, Dante’s eyebrows twitch, rising slightly in alarm at the confirmation these creatures have trawled through their documents and videos. As if in response to her thoughts, Cap elaborates.

  “Your movies are—honestly—embarrassing. You entertain yourselves with depictions of us as monsters. We are the mythical beasts of your ancient past, destined to be vanquished by a mighty hero. We are Medusa. Hydra. Cyclops. The Minotaur.

  “All the aliens you imagine today are but the monsters of yesteryear. Think about that. Why would that be so? What does that tell you about the inner working of your own mind? Your fears? Your frail culture? What does that expectation say about your own dark desires? Your failings?”

  “But are you?” Dante asks, stuttering. “Are you a monster?”

  “Are you?” he replies, raising an eyebrow. “What you see before you is a mirror.”

  Dante preferred Cap with human eyes. Her natural desire is to make eye contact, but the darkness teases her, tormenting her. She has no doubt it’s deliberate, intended to leave her feeling unsettled, and damn, it works.

  “You’re the alpha,” he says, which is such an unusual term it elicits micro-movements as her eyes narrow and her brow shifts with the intensity of her concentration. “Your battles. Those of Perseus, Oedipus, Heracles and Odysseus. What are they but your own anxieties personified? Your heroes are who you want to but can never be.”

  Cap says, “Every other species on your planet is inferior to you—only they’re not. You like to think they are. You pride yourself on being different, only you’re blind to reality. You’re animals. You are the monsters.”

  “So are you,” Dante replies, and yet her words sound hollow. No sooner have those hastily rushed words left her lips than doubts creep in. Why would this extraterrestrial intelligence single them out as biological entities to its own exclusion? Is she dealing with an alien or some alien machine? Was Jeeves right? Is this an artificial intelligence? But what about what she saw in the murky depths of medical when she was rescuing Zoe? Cap has always maintained she saw what she wanted to see. Was that contrived by her own fears? Did she see what she imagined them to be? Did they fabricate that illusion to match her expectations of what an alien should be? Raw and visceral?

  Cap continues, only he sounds anything but alien.

  “What does it mean to be alive? To be conscious?”

  Mags has stopped pacing. Like the others, she’s deflated. Fight or flight—that’s all they’ve ever known. That’s the human—no, the animalistic response to a threat, only it doesn’t apply here. There’s nowhere to run to. No one to fight. In the absence of that evolutionary survival mechanism, all that can be found is inertia. Resignation. Defeat. Depression. There’s not a goddamn thing any of them can do when faced with this alien threat, and that leaves them all feeling deflated. Dante tries to stay strong. She might be able to fool the others, perhaps even Cap, but she can’t fool herself. She knows. The alien imposter, though, doesn’t seem to care.

  “Have you ever watched a horse being born, or a dolphin?”

  Cap continues, speaking as though he has intimate, firsthand knowledge of the ecosystems on Earth.

  “Immediately, they assess the world around them. There’s simply too much to process for them not to be conscious. Without conscious awareness, they could never deal with the complexity that is life. Being conscious is the key. It’s the filter. It’s the ability to make sense of the overwhelming and often contradictory sensory inputs assaulting us, demanding we arrive at a decision, an action.”

  Us?

  We?

  Dante was more comfortable with a clear divide between the crew and their captors. Monsters can be faced. So long as they’re them and not us, they’re easy to defeat. Something has to be done about them. They’re chased. Hunted. Killed. But us? Is this why the aliens have kept them alive? Do they somehow feel an affinity with humanity? What the hell happened down there on P4?

  Good and evil should be clear-cut, black and white. They can’t be us. They must be different. Monsters are inhuman—only sometimes they’re not.

  Up until this point, Dante’s assumed they were attacked, that the aliens were the aggressors, but it was the crew of the Acheron that invaded the dark depths of the subterranean lake on P4. All this would be much easier if these creatures were the aliens of her nightmares, with shiny black exoskeletons and saliva dripping from needle-sharp teeth, but ‘us’ leaves her unsettled.

  The other possibility is she’s hearing what she wants to hear, that she’s still being played—yet again. Like the soldiers in countless wars on Earth, Dante wants someone to point at the enemy and say, “Them. They’re not one of us. Kill them.” Us undermines that notion. She wants to hate them. The crew are being held captive against their will, and yet she’s curious about another intelligence that evolved around some other star.

  For all the advances over the past five hundred years, from the science of physics to biology and philosophy, no one on Earth is any closer to defining consciousness. Oh, there are the dull, sterile, dictionary definitions and spiritualistic mumbo jumbo, but it’s all just a guess. In some ways, it’s like trying to imagine how a computer chip works having never seen anything beyond its black outer casing, having no idea about its intricate, microscopic, electronic structure. It seems the soul is as incomprehensible as magic. Technically, everything she needs to know is right there, but something’s missing, some explanation for which there’s no substitute.

  “Why you?” she asks, reversing the question as she addresses Cap, intently aware the others are watching her, looking to take their cue from her.

  “Like you, we’re—”

  “No,” she says roughly, being quite firm as she interrupts him. Dante doesn’t want a facile answer. She wants to understand. “Not your species. Not your generation or team or whatever. You personally.”


  “We’re not that different,” alien Cap says with eyes as dark as the night.

  “Oh, no,” Dante says, wagging her finger in front of him. “You don’t get to say that. You have to prove that!”

  Cap pauses. Before he can speak again, Dante says, “You don’t know, do you? That’s why you went with the whole waterfall thing.”

  Cap’s eyebrows narrow, which is a distinctly human response for an alien.

  “For all your bullshit and reasoning, you still don’t know,” she says. “Oh, you’ve got your fancy definitions and psychoanalysis. You can watch us, tease us, even dissect us, but you have no answers either. You have no more idea about what it means to be alive than we do.”

  She points at Angel.

  “It’s easy to say she’s conscious, she’s self-aware, but how about you? Why are you here? Why are you experiencing this? You personally?”

  Cap says, “Like you, I’m here now.”

  “But you know that’s not an answer,” Dante replies. “Why you and not someone else, another of your kind.” She laughs. “There’s no reason for any of us, is there? Not us personally. Not really. We could be zombies. We could be machines. Programs. We could be anyone else but us and the result would largely be the same, and yet here we are—so why us?”

  Given the way the alien previously used the term us to unsettle her, Dante feels justified in driving that point home. Two can play hard ball.

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” she says. “Why am I here for this brief moment in time?”

  She articulates her next words carefully, making sure they roll off her tongue with passion, wanting him to empathize with her position.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “We’re a contradiction,” he says, and for a moment, she believes him. Previously, it was humanity that was the contradiction, but in his last few responses Cap has used the inclusive pronoun, including both sentient celestial species in his reply. On some level, she’s getting through to him. For once, she’s manipulating him.

  “So tell me,” she says, “You’re smart. You’re alive. You’re aware, but what does that mean?” She squints slightly, looking carefully at him as she asks, “What are you?”

  Cap is quiet. He looks uncomfortable.

  Dante leans forward on the bed, pushing almost to the point of falling forward and landing on her feet, but she feels as though she needs to get a better look at him, a man she’s known for over a decade, someone who’s become a puppet for some other alien intelligence. Cold, dark, empty black eyes stare back at her, but she’s looking for something metaphorical, not physical. The act of focusing helps her zero her mind.

  With softly spoken words, she asks, “What happens when you die?”

  Dante’s curious as to whether these creatures have any kind of religious belief numbing the harsh finality of death. Or perhaps they rationalize their demise in some other way, with equally empty notions such as dying for their country or planet or their children or species or some other cultural idiosyncrasy.

  “All of space and time comes to an end,” he says.

  “Only it doesn’t,” she replies.

  “For me, it will,” Cap says.

  “You’re afraid,” Dante says as the thought dawns on her like a nearby star emerging from behind a darkened planet. “Here, for all this time, we’ve been in fear of our lives, unsure what the hell we’re dealing with, only it’s you that’s afraid.”

  Cap shifts slightly in his seat. This is the first time she’s seen any physical response since Mac and Naz dumped him in front of her. As much as she wants to break eye contact and look to them for confirmation, naturally wanting to ensure they’re following all this, she knows that would be a mistake. For now, it’s just the two of them—her and the alien. It’s as though they’re the only sentient beings in the entire universe. Both of them are looking for answers. For once, her alien captor is at a loss for words. That’s a first.

  “We shouldn’t be fighting,” she says, looking for any semblance of emotion in his facial features but nothing is forthcoming. On one level, she’s playing him exactly as he played her. On another, she’s entirely serious. Part of her is seeking to disrupt his reasoning, wanting to tilt a sense of Stockholm’s syndrome in her favor, but on the other hand, she’s looking for hope.

  He laughs. “You think there can be peace between us?”

  “Why not?”

  The alien that is Cap gestures around him, taking them all in.

  “Peace is an illusion. It’s as fickle as all of this.” He points at her. “You can’t fool me. I’ve read your history. You’ve never known peace on your world. Not real peace. What makes you think you could ever know it out here among the stars?

  “No, the only peace you’ve ever known has come from the barrel of a gun. You find peace by exploiting others. You see conflict on your own world and find peace by turning away and closing your eyes, pretending all the petty, selfish, self-centered ideologies that lead to war don’t exist.”

  He laughs.

  “And your so-called peace never lasts. Why is that, Dee? What does that tell you about your species?”

  Damn, he’s good, using her nickname to disarm her, slamming her with irrefutable logic.

  “You think you can sway me?” he asks, opening his arms wide and inviting a response. “You think you can turn me? Come on then. Tell me. What is there about any of your lives that suggests peace is possible? Why should we let any of you live?”

  “Life is a privilege,” she says, struggling to hide the tremor in her voice. “A wonder beyond compare, more beautiful than the rings of a gas giant, more colorful than a nebula, more awe-inspiring that a spiral galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars. You said it yourself. Physically, we’re insignificant and yet we aren’t. Life is the greatest marvel in the universe. We deserve a chance.”

  For Dante, this is a cry for mercy, but Cap’s facial features harden. He looks at her through darkened eyes.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Cap’s not,” she replies, staring him down.

  “That was unfortunate,” the creature says, which for Dante is revealing. He could have claimed Cap’s death was an accident. She wouldn’t know. Perhaps one of the crew down on P4 at the time might, but she wouldn’t. Unfortunate, suggests it was deliberate and, to her horror, avoidable. It lies about her recollection of being on P4 with Cap, leaving her wondering how she can distinguish between manufactured memories and real ones. If it wasn’t Cap down there on the rescue mission, who was it? Who was standing beside the airlock? Who was in the control room?

  “Does it bother you?” Dante asks, being deliberately vague. She’s leading her statement, drawing it out, making him wait for the subject of her question, wanting it to be personal. “That you’ve been called on to interrogate us? To torture us?”

  He shrugs, asking, “Did it bother you when you launched out into space?”

  Like Dante, the alien hides the true subject of his question, teasing her, toying with her. He relishes the confusion it causes. His eyes narrow as he delivers his actual question with delight. “Did you even think about the billions you left behind?”

  She’s confused. He clarifies.

  “According to your own historical records, people were starving. Dying. Men, women and children in other parts of your world. From disease, war, famine. And you left them. What were they to you? Just numbers?”

  “No,” she says, feeling her face go flush as sweat forms in her palms.

  “You could have helped. You’re a doctor. But no, you boarded a spacecraft instead. Does that bother you?”

  “It’s not like that,” she says, feeling she has to defend herself. Deep down, Dante knows it’s futile. The very act of being defensive puts lie to her position. Regardless, she blurts out, “We have to look forward. To look up. To the future.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need hope. We. We need…”

  “Need what
?” Cap asks. He can see she’s uncomfortable. “What is it you need, Dante? Water? Food? Shelter? Safety? Peace? That’s what they needed. What did you need when you launched into the unknown?”

  Her lips go dry. As she fails to speak, Cap continues, saying, “You turned your back on them.”

  “We can do both,” she says. “You don’t understand. You couldn’t.”

  “What don’t I understand?” Cap asks. “How you can be so cruel to yourselves?”

  She hangs her head, shaking it slowly.

  “We need to explore. For us, it’s like breathing. Without exploration, we’d suffocate. All those problems, they’d only get worse if we turned inward.”

  Cap nods. To her surprise, he’s content with that answer. Seems the aliens are done learning about humanity in the abstract and want to zero in on individuals like her. Nothing that’s happening to her is haphazard. Everything she’s exposed to is deliberate.

  “So what are you?” she asks, shifting back onto the offensive. “A waterfall?”

  Cap smiles, shaking his finger back and forth. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “Who is it?” Benson asks, breaking into the discussion and shattering the flow of the conversation, but it’s clearly been bugging him and he can no longer remain silent. Dante clenches, wishing she could rewind the moment and get him to be quiet, but Benson continues, asking, “Who’s the other alien among us?”

  Cap’s dark eyes never leave Dante. His head remains resolute, facing her as he says, “You know. You’ve always known. You just don’t want to admit it.”

  Dante looks up. Her eyes dart around the crew, unsure what he means.

  Mags has her hand by her mouth, covering her lips, stunned by what she’s hearing.

  Zoe’s got her arms folded across her chest, but not in a manner that signals defiance. She’s not shutting anyone out. On the contrary, she’s seeking solace, wanting to be held, even if only by her own slender arms.

  Benson is perplexed. His head is cocked slightly as he tries to decipher Cap’s words, wondering precisely what Dante supposedly knows—only she doesn’t understand what Cap meant either. She’s as confused by Cap’s statement as Benson is.