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The Geography of Stars

By Thalia Drogna

White light. So brilliant...

This is my home, drifting among the stars, where the light powers my sails and I float on the photon waves. Completely adrift, searching the anatomy of each star for something different, some factor that will make it worth my while to send out the signal to my home.

Energy, That is What it is All About

Fade in and fade out. As I travel further from each star so the power becomes less on my sails and I don’t have the necessary equipment to use any other force. It would be too heavy for my one man craft to carry and still support my life.

Life is Nothing Without Light

I always travel towards the light. What can I do but survey each new sun I reach, never finding the correct one. Maybe once in every few thousand million stars I’ll find the one I’m looking for but I haven’t passed the hundred million mark yet. Don’t despair, though, there are thousands of others just like me, all searching their assigned sectors for the one star that will be worth a signal home. Maybe it will be worth all the years that we have sacrificed and perhaps it will be the beginning of a new age. Maybe and perhaps. If we find enough of those particular elusive stars.

The Geography of Stars is Unlike Anything Else

You can’t map a star’s surface like those of the planets. The surface of a star is fluid. It is in constant motion and turbulence. Sun spots and super tornadoes cause solar storms which erupt and if I’m not careful and get too close, then my wings will be burnt. Like a moth to a flame, and there won’t be anyone to hear me when I scream as I evaporate into my component molecules.

Light is Energy and can be Transmuted

My ship was built for speed and longevity, it is packed as tightly as possible with my life support system and survey equipment. The solar panel provides stored power for the tiny engines, they’re not meant to get me anywhere, they’re just to store enough power for stasis-sleep to the next star, and give me the ability to manoeuvre and point me in the right direction. I don’t carry any fuel and the solar sail powers the rest of the assembly, I travel “slowly” at translight velocity. There is a certain amount of living forever built in to this set-up. I sleep while my star-chaser travels by the light of the night sky, from point to brilliant point, slowing to a halt while I dream. Then, rudely awakened, I carry out my survey, I find against the offending star and fall back into sleep having set myself towards a new target.

Each Star is a Failure

Every star I leave behind is a bitter disappointment to me. None of them quite the right type. I hear over the radio that other star-chasers have been lucky and returned home. I can receive only, I have no ability to send except in emergencies, and on the occasion of finding a correct star or as a transmission of last will and testament. Signals pass me and I catch them, I have no way of finding out how old they are but another voice is some comfort to me. Other star-chasers have died and I hear the end of their life, failure of this piece of equipment or some other piece, most wake to find they are too close to their chosen star and have a few minutes to compose their dying wishes before they plunge into the object of their fascination. It isn’t always safe being a star-chaser. My craft is good, no malfunctions yet and we’ve been out of dock for over five thousand years. I call it “Hope” because that is what I do every time I reach another star.

Hope for Success

I was surprised to arrive at my next destination and find another ship there. Not a star-chaser, but something else. I didn’t recognise it, but then I had been asleep for the
last ten years (approximately) and perhaps I was not up to date with the latest in space faring vehicles. This one glowed, it was as hot as the sun beside it. I had at first wondered if it was part of the sun itself but as I drew closer I could distinguish the two. I called out to it but it didn’t answer. I ignored it and it ignored me. I surveyed the star. It was a correct star, my very first. All the correct constituents were there, I found it almost unbelievable that I had finally found exactly what I was looking for. I decided to do what I would have done even if there hadn’t been another ship sitting next to my star. I sent the signal. It used all my power, every resource that I had.

Ten days later the energy miners arrived.

Stars must be of a particular type to produce energy that can be used by a power station. Anything else can poison the power station, when I left no one knew exactly what poisoned the power station but they knew what didn’t by a process of trial and error. So a fleet of star-chasers like mine were dispatched to find stars that could be used by the power stations. The pilots were all chosen carefully, mild agoraphobics, those with social disorders and anyone who displayed tendencies towards enjoying long amounts of time by themselves. I fell into the last category, I can’t stand the rest of my race; maybe that is a bit strong but I certainly could live without them. The problem with my category was that we still wanted to go home eventually, others were more willing to risk themselves in the pursuit of stars.

An End to Being Alone

The mining ship picked up my ship and brought my small vessel inside its huge hold. I climbed out of “Hope” for the first time since I left the docks. It didn’t feel as good as it should have done, more like I was leaving a friend than a ship. “Hope” would go to be scrapped, once the final signal had been sent it burnt out all the relays and connections, the amount of power needed was too great for more than one go. I met other people and remembered that it had been lonely out there at times, but for days I walked around as if I was still in stasis on “Hope”. Everyone else seemed to be painted in full and glorious colour whilst I was shaded in grey.

The deconstruction of a star was about to start.

When miners reach a star which has been surveyed by a star-chaser, they conduct their own more detailed survey. They have more equipment and it is better at the job, star-chasers are too small to do anything but identify the correct stars. The miners need to know exactly what each star is made of and how much there is of it before they begin to mine it. They take detailed studies of what the climate and geography of the star is like before they even begin to take what they need. What this ship found had never been seen before.

Life is Fed by Stars

Life exists because there are stars to supply warmth and light. This star had provided life in a different way. Everyone was very excited, they had been trying to contact the fiery ship which I had encountered, instead they had contacted someone else. They had contacted beings which lived on the surface of the sun. There were problems with this. It had never happened before, there were no procedures to follow and miners like their procedures. The miners were greedy as well, this star was worth a lot of money to them and to Home.

It could provide enough power for a few thousand years at Home, and by the sounds of it, the previous suns were running low. Nobody wanted to say it out loud but people had dropped odd remarks which made me think that an energy crisis was looming, which would explain why the mining ship had arrived so quickly. We don’t usually talk to aliens, not even the big and supposedly powerful ones. It works in the same way that children don’t talk to strangers, no matter how many sweets they are offered.

All Stars are Valuable

This star was particularly valuable though, apparently to both of us. We offered firstly to move the aliens to another sun, not really caring how or what it would cost us, but the aliens didn’t want to leave their home. I have no idea what life for a sun-dwelling alien is like but they obviously liked it where they were. As it transpired the aliens ate exactly the parts of star that we wanted to use, it would have been quicker to find another correct star than find the aliens another suitable sun. In the end the deconstruction crew couldn’t wait any longer and began to take the star to pieces.

Deconstruction and War

The sun-dwelling aliens had failed to mention that they had problems of their own, even before we arrived. They had been engaged in talks with another sun-dwelling race, the ones that had been sitting in the fiery ship all this time. There seemed to be a debate over who actually should be living on the afore mentioned star and the party from the fiery ship had laid claim to it, being from a similar star themselves and enjoying the imperial expansion period of their history. It seemed that the denizens of the fiery ship regarded the inhabitants of the star to be little more than savages, which, never-the-less, they were in discussion with (probably before they started a war, obliterated them and stole their sun).

Up until a month ago there was no evidence for the existence of any life on the surface of stars, let alone sentient life, and now there were two races about to fight it out over my first correct star. I suppose that it is only logical that if you look at stars for long enough, they will start staring back at you.

Negotiations

The three parties involved got as near as they could to sitting around the negotiation table, considering that this was actually impossible for two of the parties. As usually happens in these situations, the negotiations failed; no one apart from the negotiators were quite sure why, because they were the only ones who understood the sun-dweller race and customs. I’m just a star-chaser and I certainly couldn’t understand their explanations. The whole thing ended in war, not just an ordinary war but a three way scrabble over a sun. Obviously we were at a disadvantage, there was no way we could mount foot attacks on enemy bases on a sun, and the ships were so hot that if we came near them we just melted. For a while it looked like the sun-dwellers would be left to fight it out between themselves. They had obviously been developing methods of killing each other for years.

War Over Sunshine

We have been dealing with sun energy for a very long time. Ever since we discovered solar panels, perhaps even before that when the first person lit a campfire with a magnifying glass. This gave us one very important advantage, we knew how to demolish stars, and it was reasoned that beings which lived on a sun were likely to be made of the same stuff as their home. Maybe and perhaps.

The ethics of deconstructing a sun whilst it has inhabitants are definitely sketchy. Whilst I had simply been watching the story unfold, there had been a debate going on amongst the crew about whether they should even being considering deconstruction as an option. They at least had a conscience. The army did not though and ordered the deconstruction of any enemy ship which we came across and the eventual complete deconstruction of the sun. Mainly the deconstruction crews obeyed but they balked at deconstructing the sun. There was a general moral problem with killing off an entire species of sun-dweller. At that point we felt rather sorry for the sun-dwellers.

An Unfortunate Change of Fortune

While we were playing games in the sun, the attacking sun-dwellers had been watching us carefully. A few days after we began to deconstruct their ships we received a transmission which was sent to all ships and translated into our language. It read “Under statute 56, subsection B dash 9 of the Intergalactic Sun Accord, your sun has been declared a danger to shipping and unsuitable for habitation. Under the Accord your sun will be demolished forthwith. Please do not try to stop us, there are more of us than you.”

And there were. It became quite obvious that the attacking sun-dwellers had been hiding their forces, in fact it became quite obvious that all the stars we had demolished so far had been inhabited by some form of sun-dweller and they would really like to exact retribution. It had never occurred to us that people could live on a sun, and we had never bothered to ask. As the sky filled with bright pseudo stars, the human race crept away to another part of the galaxy to sulk.

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