Exodus Nebula

Chapter Twenty-One

Akenhymer had gone dark.

It was still there. A thing of figurative resemblance to a star occupied the space where the Akenhymer star ought to have been. A thing shrouded by a boundless integument. A once-sun subdued, restrained, iced.

Gireiah entered the bridge and spawned an articulated chair from the floor, fixing himself into its honeycomb enclosure and joining the others about the three-dimensional image fixed at the room's center. He studied the others a moment. Eulliam's interpretation hadn't changed much--older, is all; he nodded their familiar acknowledgement. Shisula seemed different--likely in many respects--though, Gireiah could not determine exactly how. It had been, after all, six years since he last encountered her.

"I suppose I should congratulate your duumvir," Shisula addressed, her voice familiar, yet, temporally-distant to Gireiah, as though time had weathered either it or his memory of it. "The dyad of you have worn the transit time well, emerging firmly, I see."

"The presence has elected to teach us," Eulliam said. He glanced back to Gireiah. "We have spent the majority accepting what it had afforded us."

"Yet, I suspect that you've felt its inhibitions," Shisula said. "Not necessarily that it hides knowledge from us. It simply chooses not to guide us."

Gireiah chimed in, "It lends us our devices. It leaves us to our devices."

"Precisely. I suspect it needed us to understand the things which we now do." Gireiah now noticed a difference--again, likely one of many: her eyes, having once been some other lighter color--whichever color he honestly could not say--are now solid and colorless, irises black as empty night. "And with our newfound knowledge"--she gestured to the image representation of the Akenhymer planetary system--"we emerge into the remnants of Akenhymer."

Remnants. There was certainly a lot remaining of it. All prevailed but the light which had once shone on these six, cold worlds. Akenhymer had gone out twenty-four years ago. The star was eleven light-years distant from their Sun; it had taken eleven years for the light--or rather, the lack thereof--to reach them, one year for Gireiah's own journey across continents, and twelve more to accelerate across the intervening space. For twenty-four years, these worlds orbited in total darkness, their atmospheres and oceans radiating heat away, freezing and solidifying. However, total planetary solidification would take hundreds of thousands of years. What currently remained was, more or less, an accurate depiction of what the worlds had been like before their sun simply switched off--by whatever means it had done that.

"The spirit of the vessel has given me command of its whereabouts," Shisula said. From within her honeycomb structure, Norish script and characters appeared where her hands gestured. Her controls, Gireiah surmised. "I can take us to any world." Shisula gazed to Gireiah, a gesturing beckoning of him, as if knowing his illumination on the subject of Akenhymer worlds by her prescience. Indeed, he had studied them thoroughly upon approach.

"We should visit them all," Gireiah suggested as his reply. He noticed another thing: her complexion. It wasn't the dimmer light, her face betrayed a stalky thinness he hadn't remembered of her and her skin had become much paler--perhaps all suggestive of her activities of the past six years.

"Will it prove enlightening?" She responded.

"Does it truly matter? Is our time here limited?"

"No. Well... no, but my control is. I may only guide us for so long. The spirit of the vessel will reclaim once he returns."

"And you reckon?" Eulliam queried.

She was a moment of thought. "We have perhaps a month."

"Can the vessel accelerate faster than comfortable gravitational acceleration?" Gireiah said.