Chapter 17
This was the end of the road. If space had roads. Their collision course with the null cloud was full steam ahead. If spaceships had steam.
Mariah stood in the Starlit Salon with the others, facing the viewport. The snack bar had been decimated as if Lub had rampaged through, and she was so glad comfort calories didn’t count when confronting a cosmic mystery.
She longed for Suvan with a power that might bridge space and time. But she knew he was where he needed to be.
At least for now. As for what came next…
There would be a next after this end, she swore to herself. Because nothing really ended. Suvan might not remember their night together, but this voyage hadn’t ended yet.
However, the null cloud looming off their bow looked like a black hole, and they were all rocket scientists enough to know that was very much an end.
“That is not a black hole,” Captain Nehivar was saying from his holographic projection to one side of the viewport, flickers of the bridge behind him.
“A null cloud is a patch of concentrated dark matter. The quantum-level disorder at its core creates a flaw in the gravitational scaffolding of spacetime around it. That results in a surrounding accretion disk of energy waves. As we approach, the going could get rough, but we will almost certainly not be torn into a collapsing stream of subatomic particles.”
He tilted his leonine head, tufted ears flicking. “Aaaand I’ve just been informed by our chief engineer, that joke was not funny. Chief, if you want to explain instead?”
Suvan appeared in the captain’s place. But instead of the dark profile that had been her first glimpse of him, he was facing the monitor, the many lights of his engineering console shining on his quill-scales.
“The signal of the resonark’s entanglement—its echo or its mate—is coming from the cloud.
As we cross the energy waves, there will be distortions—bumps to the ship and also warping of perception.
” His pale eyes glinted, and his gravelly voice lowered.
“Don’t be afraid. We’ve come this far chasing our dreams.”
Mariah felt the shared sigh flow around the gathering. They were in this together. Evens might have secretly masterminded their collection, but they’d chosen to continue, to see where this strange thread of longing would take them.
And their chief engineer had powered their ship through the voyage even though he hadn’t signed on with romance in mind.
She looked around the salon, as if she could magically envision the links between friends and lovers, the care of the crew and the appreciation of the passengers.
And in a way, the links were obvious: in the glances and touches, in smiles or the alien equivalent, in the hope and anticipation casting into the future.
They had taken the free tickets to the Cosmic Connections Cruise looking for love, and not in their wildest dreams would they have guessed they’d find it like this, out here in the middle of nowhere.
The cloud might be dark matter, as the captain said, but in the viewport tuned to the widest span of wavelengths, an eerie lightshow flickered within the layers of obscuring atomic churn. Like a stop-motion electrical storm of fractal patterns spiraling into nothingness.
“It looks like the resonark,” someone murmured.
But big enough to swallow a hundred speed-date cruisers.
Delphine’s crisp tones crackled through the comms: “Contact with outer cloud wall in three…two…”
The ship shivered, a delicate tremble that didn’t even jostle the bottles firmly secured behind the bar.
But behind them, the resonark flared, bright enough to cast their shadows on the viewport, as if their gathering were suddenly outside the ship.
As one, they swiveled toward the anomaly.
And the same vision hit them all—
A collective cry from every throat did what the edge of the null cloud could not, dropping them to their knees as every imagination was flooded with the resonark’s energy.
In that breathless instant, they were one…
An infinitely hot, dense singularity, tearing itself apart in a violent explosion, becoming space and time.
And as the universe became, those eternal bonds were broken, atoms dispersing across the expanding void, accompanied only by a background wail of cosmic loneliness, separated by entropy’s cold reality that all things would drift forever separate and alone.
But then… A reaching through the isolation, a quantum rebellion against the abyss, as tiny forces once split apart remembered each other across the widening dark.
A thread of yearning, tenuous and timeless.
But not unbreakable.
At one end of the thread, the resonark—once trapped in the power systems of an abandoned ship until its tessellation was given plasmic form by the harmonic resonance of other lonely hearts in unison.
And in the forsaken depths of a distant galaxy, lost in a vortex of tattering dark matter—the other end of the thread disappeared.
Linked, they were a fundamental force defying entropy: love as simple physics—a power where connection was stronger than separation, preventing the universe from scattering into meaningless dark, a promise that every seeking heart might find its answer if it dared to cross the void.
All of them standing transfixed beneath the pulsing shadowlight understood the resonark wasn’t a monster hijacking their engines or a chaotic waveform leaving them adrift; it was going home.
But the link was fading, almost gone, and if they didn’t help complete this cosmic circuit, a beautiful thread in the fabric of reality would be broken forever.
And every such thread—light, dark, and every hue between—was crucial to the interconnected pattern of the universe, just like each of them, by merely existing, was part of the tapestry.
Later, Mariah would discover that everyone aboard experienced the same flash of insight but in a slightly different way: as music or the organic systems of a living body, as a garden’s symbiotic web or a cosmological dance.
Always, though, the awareness remained that each precious point and the connections between them were fragile, to be nurtured and treasured.
After the flash, their shadows lingered beyond the transparent plasteel viewport for a heartbeat.
As they recovered their senses and staggered to their feet, Mariah realized the feelings button in the monitor Suvan had installed on the bar was shining rhythmically in time with the resonark’s prismatic pulsing, both emitting a faintly chiming call and response.
But even as she watched, the echoes were falling out of sync again, fading.
“We need to get the resonark out into the cloud,” she said, the vision still reverberating in her mind. “Now.”
A swell of voices affirmed her certainty.
In the projection from the engine module, Suvan was hunched over his console.
“Entanglement can be initiated through proximity, by providing identical conditions until their quantum states overlap. But the resonark and its match aren’t simple particles.
” His rough voice cracked. “I don’t know how to ensure their reunion. ”
“Another cloud interference wave ahead,” Delphine snapped crisply. “This one’s got more crossing signals. Brace yourselves.”
Everyone scrambled for seats on the couches, but this time, the turbulence was only physical, with no accompanying vision.
When the jouncing ceased, the resonark seemed even more faded. Mariah peered closer.
“The knotwork is coming undone,” she gasped.
Leaping for the bar, she clambered up, balancing on top of the monitor as she reached for the fraying filaments where the prismatic light was bleeding out along the unraveling edges.
“Mariah!” Ikaryo and Remy were immediately at her side, steadying her.
“If it comes apart…” She choked on the rest as she frantically twisted the strangely brittle thread back upon itself. Why hadn’t she thought to check it? She always checked her work for wear and tear.
Except she knew it wouldn’t have mattered. After all this time—since the beginning of time?—the resonark needed to reconnect with its match.
“I’ll get your knitting needles from your cabin,” Felicity said. “What else do you need?”
“Get the biggest ones,” Mariah said. “And the chunkiest yarn I have.”
Suvan’s voice thrummed under her feet. “Mariah, why are you on the bar?”
“The yarn is separating.” She cursed under her breath as the fibers broke again, too frail to hold even the gentlest spin. “And the resonark is just vanishing.”
“You can’t hold onto the shadowlight by hand,” Suvan said. “If we could contain it in the capacitorus again…”
“I don’t think it’s going to last that long.” With a grimace, she tied off the distressed strands, mentally urging Felicity to hurry. “And I don’t think it can go back anyway.”
Time was a one-way arrow, and their course was already set.
As if conjured, Felicity reached up beside her, needles brandished. “Here. And I brought…all the yarn.”
Mariah grabbed the needles and one of the heaviest fibers. “If some of you could twist the lighter weights together…”
“Got it.” The cruise director gestured, and a half dozen people jumped forward.
“Mariah, step up.” Anoushka pushed a hovercart closer. “Chief sent this.”
Grateful for the California childhood that had given her a passing familiarity with surfing, she transferred to the cart, compensating for the momentary wiggle. All the while, her hands spliced new stitches to the disappearing edges.
“Crossing another wave,” Delphine warned.
Grimly, Mariah kept knitting. And while everyone else was jolted, the cart hovered steadily. But the knotwork, which she and Felicity had strung up on temporary supports before the recital, loosened at one corner, sagging.
Caught within, the resonark’s shimmering sphere distorted too, like it was melting. The prismatic light trickled down the needles to her fingers. Stiffening, she held her breath…
But the light was like cool water, evaporating the moment it touched her skin. They definitely couldn’t carry it if any touch warped and fractured it.
“Incoming wave,” Delphine shouted.
And everything disappeared—
A vibration. Rippling through spacetime. With none to see, not a light. With none to hear, not a sound. With none to touch, nothing. Only a possibility.
A chance, dying now.
Mariah gasped as the vision released her. To her shock, her hands were still knitting, stitching through that glimpse into their cosmic mystery even as the ball of yarn shrank.
Now other hands were passing her another yarn, twisted together from multiple strands of mismatched weights, fiber type, and colors.
They’d hopscotched whimsical all the way to weird.
Somebody had even spun in strips of the IDA-branded bar napkins. Pieces of the words spiraled through her fingers: Big. Sky. Inter. Galac. Tic. Dating. Agency. Cosmic. Conn. Ections. Cruise. Love. Love. Love.
The pattern was like a prayer.
Around her, she was vaguely aware of the others debating how to help while she focused on the stitches, her fingers flying. But she couldn’t do this forever.
“Mariah.” Suvan’s voice wasn’t coming from some comm.
She dropped her gaze, struggling for a moment to refocus. He was right there at her feet.
“I can’t keep…” She swallowed, but the lump in her throat was stuck.
“Just a little longer. We’re taking the ship as close as we can to the signal source, but the disordered waves are going to keep impacting the ship. We’ll have to launch the resonark into the cloud.”
“But if I stop weaving—”
“Don’t stop. Not yet.” He wrapped his hand around her ankle as his pale eyes glinted up at her. “You’re going with me.”
Going…where?