Proverbs of the Void

Travelers to the Void have a few sayings. Some have been around a long time, like “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Others are new: “Those who venture here alone court the death of the soul,” for instance. At least, the wording is new. There have always been dangerous places, and fools with enough gusto to wander into them unprepared. Mountains and forests in winter, deserts, planetary frontiers, even the vast unknown that was travel through time. Now, there is the vast, anomalous, unknown region of space called the Void.
The first crewed vessels to approach the Void were deep space expeditionary forces mapping the farthest edges of known space. Over the past six-hundred years, all but one vessel has gone in and never emerged again. It is among the surest suicide missions.
The outlier was the long-haul colonial ship Childress VII, which entered essentially by accident while on its automated journey to an exoplanet in a far-off solar system. The Childress crew spent much of their time in cryosleep, waking only for short portions of the journey. They opened their eyes for the first time in decades, and looked out onto a starless sea. They stayed there, traveling ever onward, for seventy years. There are those on its crew who were born and died inside the Void.
Seventy years later, a probe returned, circling around the boundaries of the void and eventually communicating with the broader universe. The information was extensive, but vague: They had done only basic scientific analyses during their seventy years in darkness. The images and sparse descriptions fueled imaginations: in place of stars, there were glinting jewels of otherworldly light, titanic machines the size of moons, and bizarre aliens that resembled none of the known peoples or wildlife of Earth, Mars, or Shanzii. The crew called them “gods and dragons.”
The reports were a sensation, and after depositing their findings, the Childress crew only made one other dispatch, informing the universe that their mission had not changed, and they didn’t intend to discuss their experiences again. The crew has been in cryosleep and out of contact ever since.
They had done enough already. The fantastic reports caught the attention of thrill-seekers, risk-takers, and would-be exploiters, who gathered around the boundaries of the void and created a thriving new economy around it. Vivid imaginations dreamt of a world where the secrets of the Void unlocked new technologies and new fortunes. All this harvest has so far wrought is death.
On Earth, a crew of immortals gathered for their own fateful trip. Ageless, long-lived, and invulnerable, they would last for the long journey through the Void, and back again if they were able. Immortals are lonely by nature, isolated by circumstance or grief. Traveling across the universe into an unknown purgatory was just another adventure. The Euro-African Space Union found four suitable volunteers for the mission.
There was Skarta, the warrior woman demigoddess, and Akasha McNeal, vampire queen and a legendary figure in interstellar politics. Along with them was James Harrison, an otherwise-marginal art history professor who, in the late twenty-first century, publicly revealed himself to be many millennia old. The most mysterious of the crew was Hark. Hark was a remnant of the Aurralith, a civilization of machine beings who had dwelt on Earth since prehistory. Many had left the Earth with the advent of interstellar travel and contact with alien civilizations, hoping to find a home of their own. Others had merged with humans and other entities, a process the Aurralith called “connecting.” Around fifteen percent of humans on Earth were “connected.” Hark was the result of several connections, combining several species.
The four them had trained as astronauts for over a year and been in space for almost twice that. The next milestone on their path was the appearance of Saturn. They wouldn’t reach the Void for another decade. They had nothing but time.
“‘Time enough at last’,” said Harrison to himself, drinking coffee through a straw in the main rec cabin of the Long Time Running. The rec cabin was large relative to the rest of the ship, a tinker-toy of pipe-like corridor sections. Only the rec cabin and the engine and command were large enough to hold all four human(ish) crew members at the same time. Right now, it was just Harrison and Skarta.
“That’s familiar, but…” Skarta said, and gestured a fist at her head, long and lustrous purple-black hair tied neatly back.
“It’s from a 20th century television program. This loner wants to be away from people, and do nothing but read. He hides out in a bank vault to read, and the bomb goes off,” Harrison said, making a “mushroom cloud” gesture with his hands. “He comes out and he’s thrilled. ‘Time enough, at least’.”
“Happy ending?” Skarta said.
“He breaks his glasses,” Harrison said. “Not many people remember a time before easily gen-modded eyes. Now most glasses are just a fashion statement. Hell, I remember a time before glasses at all.”
“Me too,” Skarta said. “What was the first pair you ever saw?”
“Hard to say… I don’t have perfect recall, you know. A good memory, but only from practice. I think it would have to be… 1320s? I was living in Austria at the time. Just before the Battle of Mühldorf. I had a well-travelled acquaintance and he came back with treasures from Florence. I had the copy of Dante he gave me for… oh, a good sixty years.” Harrison said. He looked satisfied to drift into his distant past for a moment.
“Feh. Is your entire life books and painting, Harrison?” Skarta said.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I also remember a time before books, though.”
“Not paintings, though. Those have always been here,” she said.
“Oh, yes. I wish I could have better appreciated it back then,” he said.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? Regrets are pointless. All we have is where we are now,” Skarta said.
“And look where we are,” he said, sentimental. Skarta didn’t reply, just unloading a balloon-like pod from the coffee machine. The gurgling sound of her zero-g-compliant drinking made for a silly symphony in the lonely quiet of outer space.
Floating in from one of the corridor tubes connected immediately to the habitat module was Akasha. A beautiful Black woman with blonde hair, Akasha was a woman of many names and many talents. “Queen of the Vampires” was her most oft-used title, although she insisted her crewmates address her by her first name.
“Are we chatting? You know, technically, it’s the night shift. I suppose for me, that’s fitting,” she said, fangs bared playfully. “Let’s see, are we drinking?”
“Just coffee, Akasha,” Harrison said. This far into the journey, he felt like his role was cleanly defined: the straight man, the square, the regular guy. It was a role he’d played often, not always by choice.
“Sleep is for the weak,” she said. “Only you two actually need it, no offense.”
“Barely need it,” Skarta said. “I was up for nine days once in a berserker state, fighting Janisarries. Or were they Mongols?”
“Fighting or killing?” came a voice from one of the other tubes leading to the hab. Hark floated through. Her outside appearance was of a woman in her early 40s with close-cropped, bright red hair. She had skin like a stark-white marble statue, flawless and shiny-smooth. Along the back of her neck was a patch of thorny black spines. Most of her body was hidden at all times by a cloak of impenetrable silver feathers. She called them wings, but no one had ever seen her spread them. Her spacesuit was specially designed to accommodate her.
Skarta took Hark’s somewhat alien presence in stride. “Well, you do one, you do the other… back then, anyway. I got less violent over the years. Less,” she said. She looked at Akasha and grinned. Harrison wondered if they were alluding to some past adventure together. He knew they were both active in the First Superheroic Age of the 20th and 21st centuries, but wasn’t sure of the extent of their history.
“Killing is… profound,” Hark said, and a silence came over the room like high tide.
“It is,” Harrison said. He was surely the least-experienced in violence of the group, despite being the oldest, but he had seen, and done, things he would never forget.
The group occupied themselves for a short while with repetitive motions and mostly-meaningless tasks. “We’re all awake. Should we play cards?” Skarta said.
“It’s been done,” Akasha said. “I appreciate the whole magnetic system you rigged up, but…”
“Yeah, you’re right. Not many games designed for zero-g,” Skarta said, and returned to the tablet in front of her, idly scrolling. They occasionally got news and entertainment downloads from Earth, but they were years out of date. You were better off waiting for a satellite cluster or a moon colony where you could briefly pick up a reliable net signal and download a terabyte or two of new timekillers.
“I know a game,” Harrison said. “Taught to me in Japan, a long time ago.” He’d lived in Japan for almost two hundred years, even at times when it was illegal for Westerners. His ambiguous ethnic features sometimes saved him from trouble.
“It’s a sort of storytelling drinking game. Very simple. We pick a word, a theme, something. And we share stories on that theme. Then we vote on who has the best story. And the winner gets a free round of drinks. I suppose here it would just be for glory,” he said.
“Hah. Sounds like my kind of game. How do you pick the theme?” Skarta said.
“Well, in Japan, we used these uta-garuta cards, with poetry fragments,” he said. “But for this group… Akasha, do you know Oblique Strategies?”
“Oh, yeah, that thing… I haven’t thought about that in a while,” she said. She turned to Hark. “It’s these cards with little phrases. They were supposed to help the creative process. I was still young back when those were popular.”
“I wasn’t,” Harrison said. Akasha grinned at him.
“Stop being so cute, old man,” she said. “Anyway, yeah, I have that on here somewhere…” She pulled up her reader and found the app. With one motion she generated a random card, and turned it around to show everyone else the screen.
Emphasize the flaws.
“A bunch of undying freaks passing the time with sad stories? Sounds about right,” Skarta said. “I’m in.”
“I think I can come up with one. I don’t want anyone to get hurt… Hark, is it—“
“Yes. I can think of many flaws I might wish to emphasize,” she said, flatly but authoritatively.
“Can we take ten to come up with our stories?” Akasha said. “I’ve got a lot to go through. My mental library has a lot of dusty shelves.”
“Make it twenty. We should do rounds and personal maintenance first, anyway,” Harrison said.
# # #
Skarta floated back into the rec module to see her three companions already there. “Eager for the heartbreak to begin, are we?” she said. “I guess I can’t complain, but sometimes I wish there was a little more work to do around here.”
“There’s work, just not for a while. We’re on a straight trajectory now,” Harrison said. “Automated systems are all copacetic. Navigation, propulsion, deflection, all working as intended.”
“Plenty of time for some heart-to-heart brutality,” Akasha said. “How do we decide who goes first?”
“Well… when I played this game, you started with the oldest, and then went around the circle, clockwise,” he said. Each member of the crew looked to their left and right, getting a sense of the order.
“Under those roles, you would go first,” Hark said, looking at Harrison.
“It looks that way,” he said, sheepish. “First me, then Skarta, Akasha, and then you, Hark. Is that alright with everyone?” Nods and noises of assent came from around the table.
“Okay. Emphasize the flaws,” Harrison said, repeating the prompt. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes, casting his mind back over two thousand years. He kept his eyes closed as he spoke.
“France. 1759, I think, is when it started. At the time, I was working in a bakery. One of my low periods, you might say. Long hours, hot, sweaty labor,” he said. “This nobleman came in one day with his retinue. A rare thing — they wouldn’t normally be seen among the rabble. He looked at me with hate in his eyes, and his men dragged me from behind the counter and into their carriage.”
Harrison opened his eyes and relaxed his posture, as if he needed to be comfortable to keep going. “I woke up in a dungeon. There really were such things in those days. I was chained to the wall. Bound, at my wrists.” He held up his arms to demonstrate. “He told me he’d seen me as a child. My face. It might be true, I don’t remember. He thought I had the secret to immortality. And he tortured me.”
“God damn,” Skarta said.
“It went on and on. I don’t think the details matter. He thought he could find something that would break me, to make me tell my secret — I didn’t have one, by the way. I have no idea why I’m like this. Or, he thought he could take my power. He drank my blood, among other things. Obviously, nothing worked. Eventually, I think he was just happy to torture me. To take out his rage. He saw mortality as the ultimate weakness,” Harrison said.
“How did you escape?” Hark said. She sounded kind and gentle, like a good teacher.
He sighed before answering. “I’m not a warrior, like you three. I tried to think of escape plans, but nothing worked. So in the end? I waited him out. The nobleman died, his son took over. His son didn’t believe his old man about the immortal in the basement, but he didn’t let me go, thinking I was good leverage for something else. The guards kept feeding me. Some of them even brought me books and things.
“All things come to an end, and the tide was turning in France. A mob came to the house. One of the same guards friendly to me let them in. He undid my chains and left the door open as the mob killed the nobles. They spared the guard’s life, for a while. I’d survived — I’d won — and all it took was time. I remember when I first saw the sun again,” he said. “I thought — I decided — rather than my long life being a gift, or a power, it was more like a glitch. A bug in the system of mortality. An unbreakable blister. A never-fading scar.”
The crew let the moment wash over the room, the background hum and noises of the ship occupying the space.
“Thank you for sharing,” said Hark.
“Yeah,” said Akasha. Skarta just nodded.
“Your turn, Skarta,” Harrison said, passing the metaphorical baton.
“Setting me up for failure, huh?” she said, and grinned. “I thought about this. I have a list of flaws a mile — miles — long. I’m nothing but flaws, stitched together to make a person. To make a badass warrior chick goddess, sure, but…” She sighed.
“Babylon. I don’t know the year, don’t even ask. A long, long time ago.” she said. “When beer was safer than drinking water, and bronze was worth more than gold. I wasn’t having it. I’d been losing fights, getting wasted, having bad sex. I got arrested a hundred times. A thousand. Back then, for women… you already know. I won’t get into everything that happened.”
She let herself float, gently spinning as she stretched, like a zero-g pirouette. “I started to wonder if it would have been better off dying a long time before. Like maybe I was a mistake,” she said. She looked at Harrison, holding eyes for a second. “A couple thousand years later they started calling it ‘spiraling,’ or ‘circling the drain,’ or ‘rock bottom.’”
“I decided if I had all this time, was I just going to fight? Was this all there was to it? Eventually, they offered me a choice. I could go with some slavers across the sea — to some place I’d been before and would be again — or I could throw myself onto the mercies of the high priest. Who probably would also enslave me, or rape me, or try to kill me. I thought maybe I could kill him, and escape.
“But this priest was different. He cared about his rituals, and his magic, and his gods. He worshipped because he truly believed. And he had reason to. The membranes between worlds were thinner in those days. Things happened, that should not happen. Things were born, that should not, could not, really be,” she said. “He taught me ways to peer through the veil. Taught me magic. And then I knew. I would learn it all. I would learn all the world had to offer. Everything.” She stopped spinning and looked around the room at each member of the group.
“Emphasize the flaws,” she said. “I knew that I could not fill the emptiness with more despair and pain. I had to create something, out of myself.”
The group quietly took in the information. There was a tension in the air, not an uncomfortable one, but an awareness that their game to pass the time had stirred up feelings of deep darkness and long-forgotten pain. Plans were already underway in the backs of minds to improve morale on the next shift.
Akasha was next, she knew, and she had a sour look on her face. “God, I’m supposed to follow that? Look. I’ve had a pretty fucking cool life, to be honest,” she said. “I mean sure, I’ve dealt with plenty of bullshit, of course. And being ‘immortal’ isn’t even really… I don’t know. You guys have that long-lived wizard shit going on. And yes, Harrison, I know, you’re not. But still...”
She pushed away from the round central table they usually used as a meeting place. It was called a table, but mostly it was a hand gripping ring, since nothing would actually stay on it without being held down.
“I’ve been to other universes. Those membranes Skarta was talking about? I’ve been through. In one, out the other. Places, people, and things, that are utterly impossible have danced before my eyes,” she said. “I was a superhero, vampire queen, goddess, alien princess, cosmic entity, immortal rock star. I am. I will be. A prophetess told me I’ll go on forever. To the end of the universe. The last vampire. The last superhero. The last Canadian, even. You believe that shit?” she said.
“I believe it,” Harrison said.
“Maybe we’ll be there with you,” Skarta said.
“Maybe it’s coming sooner than any of us think,” Hark said. The room winced at that.
“Emphasize the flaws. I think a flaw I have is that it almost doesn’t matter to me anymore. Everything I’ve done… I meet something new, a new challenge, a new level,” she said. “I escalate. And I wonder if it’s turning me into something I don’t want to be. I’ve been… doing this.” She gestured with her hands to indicate the room. “Adventuring, superheroing, whatever, for so long, and I’ve had lots of friends go bad. I worry that I’m next. That I’ll slip over the line so easily one day… and never go back. Be the tyrant queen of the universe. Because I could do it. If I wanted to? I could do it.”
The group nodded, slightly, solemnly.
“You won’t do it,” Harrison said.
Akasha just looked at him. “Yeah. Probably not. But if I wanted to? Who would stop me?” she said.
“Me,” Hark said, seriously. Akasha laughed.
“Respect,” she said. “I believe that. Respect.” She held out a fist for Hark to bump.
“Emphasize the flaws,” Harrison said, in recognition. He repeated the words like an incantation.
“Emphasize the flaws,” repeated the others, without being prompted. It was like a toast.
“Hark. Do you have a story?” Harrison said.
“I do. There are many details that are… too painful, to share,” she said. “I am a merged entity. Aurralith, human, Shanzi, and others. A total of seven individuals comprise my current makeup. And my mind shares the stored memories of twenty-nine others as a form of historical archiving.”
“Wow,” Skarta said, genuine.
“Some merged at the moment of death. Others chose to merge to gain an advantage in a battle, or to stem the tide of a disaster. Others merged for no reason at all,” she said. “Five of them were women. One was male. One was. Unique. The circumstances are mostly irrelevant.
“But two of my connected were special. They were in love. Their moment of joining was perfect. Beautiful. Not a tragedy, but a celebration. And yet… in joining. In becoming me? They ceased to be with each other. I am them, but I could never be them,” she said. “That is the flaw, which I choose to emphasize.”
Akasha silently put a hand on Hark’s shoulder, and the entire crew sat with the moment.
“We have a long road ahead of us,” Akasha said. “We will have to be us. Flaws, and all.” The thrum of the adjacent engine module reverberated through the corridor tubing behind them. The sea of space in front of them was silent. The travelers of the Void held tight to proverbs new and old.

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