The Last Starry Night

Gwen went down into the bowels of the ship to see if she could find a tin can – Srini thought the Warriors would probably have spares on board – while Srini carefully examined the controls.

“What we want to do,” she said, “is get into nullspace and stay there. I don’t think anyone can find us there.”

“How do you know?” asked Azzie. “What is nullspace, anyway?”

“Some kind of region outside space, I guess” said Srini. “Human astronomers haven’t discovered it. But I bet it’s a lot bigger than normal space, and it’s got to be the kind of place where ‘direction’ and ‘distance’ don’t mean a whole lot. So I bet it’ll be hard to find us there.”

“Whatever you say,” said Azzie. Srini found a button she liked and pushed it. Nothing happened. She scowled.

Azzie decided to let her think, and went over to Ngoc. She had strapped herself and Johnny to one of the Warriors’ couches, and was stroking his hair. Azzie perched next to her.

“Mama,” she said quietly. “Do you remember what happened with the Beast?”

Ngoc shook her head. “No. I just remember being so angry at – at the Beast. And at – and at your father.”

“Daddy? Why?”

Ngoc bit her lip. “I don’t remember. There was something he said that wasn’t right.” She closed her eyes. “Do you remember him very well, Azalea?”

“I guess,” said Azzie.

“It hurts to remember him,” said Ngoc. “But it hurts more to forget.”

“Got it,” said Gwen. She rose up out of the opening in the center of the control room, brandishing a metal cylinder. “I found it in a cabinet in the wall in the power source room. There’s another one floating in the air there with lightning all around it, but I decided to leave that one there.”

“Good idea,” said Srini. She punched a button, and the view outside faded to black.

“You did it!” said Azzie. “We’re in nullspace!”

“Your tin can,” said Gwen, handing it to Srini. “It’s much lighter than the other one.”

“Thanks!” said Srini. “Now let’s see what’s going on in this thing.” She turned it over and over, poking and prodding it.

“What are you trying to find?” asked Azzie.

“First of all, it’s some kind of power source,” said Srini. “It can power this whole ship. Second, remember how Gwen said it was getting heavier? That’s impossible, right? Third, when Gwen dropped it and it fell up through the ceiling, that’s when we all suddenly felt like up was down, and the Warriors got sucked out of the ship. I’m guessing that the tin can had something to do with that. So there must be some very interesting things inside here.”

“Actually,” said Gwen, “I’m kind of rooting for hash. It’s been hours since we’ve eaten.”

Azzie groaned. Then there was a soft click from the tin can, and Srini was able to unscrew one end.

She took off the end carefully. The end was about one inch thick.

“Woah,” she said. “It’s empty!”

She showed them. There was nothing in the can at all.

Azzie took the end that Srini had unscrewed. There was a mirror on the interior side. “There’s a mirror on this,” she said. There was something odd about it, though. She held it up to her face. But the face in the mirror wasn’t hers.

Azzie yelped and let go of the mirror.

“What?” said Srini. She had been looking into the hollow can.

“There’s someone else in there,” said Azzie.

Gwen plucked the mirror out of the air and looked at it. “I just see some flowers,” she said. “Wait, I’ve seen those flowers before. They’re...” She paused and looked at Srini’s flowery dress.

“What?” said Srini. Gwen showed her. “That’s them,” said Srini. “Weird.”

“I didn’t see flowers,” said Azzie. “I saw you – your face, Srini!”

“And that made you yelp?” said Gwen. “Srini isn’t all that bad-looking.”

Srini stuck out her tongue at her, and raised her hand as if to hit her with the hollow can. Gwen said, “Woah! It’s changing!”

“What is it?” asked Azzie.

“It’s – it’s the side of my nose.” Gwen looked over to the side, right into the hollow can in Srini’s hand.

“Oh,” said Srini, and looked into the can again.

“Now it’s your face,” said Gwen.

“Thanks for not yelping,” said Srini. “Okay, so there must be some kind of camera in here or something. The hollow side sends pictures to the top. What earthly use is that?”

“A movie camera?” said Gwen.

Srini reached her fingers into the can. “Where’s the bottom?” she said.

Gwen yelped and threw the mirror away from her. Azzie got a glimpse of it as it flew: she could have sworn it had grown little legs. It bounced against a control console and drifted lazily. The legs were gone.

“It reached for me!” cried Gwen.

“What are you talking about?” said Srini. She was looking in the can again.

“It reached out a hand at me,” said Gwen. “For real!”

“A hand?” said Srini. She pushed herself over to where the can top was floating and grabbed it, then maneuvered her way back over to Gwen. “Okay. Take it again, and this time hold on to it.”

Gwen took it meekly. Srini kept her eyes on it while she slowly put her hand back into the hollow can. A small brown hand reached out of the can top directly at Gwen’s face. Gwen swallowed and her eyes bulged, but she didn’t move.

The hand reached further, and touched Gwen lightly on the nose.

“Wow,” said Srini. “I can feel your nose.” Her arm was in the can up to her elbow.

“Please,” said Gwen. “Please just stop it now.”

Srini quickly pulled her arm out. “Okay,” she said softly. “So there’s some kind of actual connection between them... Whatever goes in the bottom of the can comes back out the top...”

“What is it?” said Azzie. “How does it do that?”

Srini shook her head. “It’s teleportation. I have no idea how it works. I wonder if it has something to do with nullspace? -- Anyway, the question is, why did they do this? A teleporter that just teleports stuff to the top of the can?”

“Not very useful for hash,” said Gwen, sounding a little disappointed. “If you put some hash in it, it would fall to the bottom, get teleported back to the top, and fall back to the bottom again – again and again!”

“Falling faster and faster,” said Srini. “Right! That’s it!”

“Huh?” said Gwen. “Fast food?”

“NO!” said Srini. “Look, it’ll just fall faster and faster – there will be nothing to slow it down. There’s no limit to how fast it’ll be going, except the speed of light.”

“Light?” said Gwen.

“Right. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Three hundred thousand kilometers per hour. The hash will get closer and closer to the speed of light, but never get there. That’s Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

“Okay,” said Gwen. “So you’ve got really fast hash. So what?”

“Two things,” said Srini. She was breathless. “First off, you’ve got this incredibly fast-moving thing, and you’ve hardly spent any energy to get it so fast. I mean, I imagine that the teleporter uses some energy, I don’t know how much, but basically once this thing gets going you’ve got a tremendous amount of energy in this can. They must have some way of siphoning off the energy. That’s why it’s a power source! I mean, just imagine if you got your hash falling really fast, I mean really fast, and then suddenly turned off the teleporter. The hash would slam out of the bottom of the can with the speed of a comet. A multi-megaton explosion!”

“A bomb,” whispered Gwen.

“Right! But it gets better!” said Srini. “According to Einstein, as things approach the speed of light, their mass increases. So the hash gets heavier and heavier as it falls faster and faster.”

“Oho!” said Gwen. “So that’s why the can got heavier!”

“Right! And that’s why the Warriors got sucked out of the ship when the can fell through the ceiling! The can had so much mass by then that it had a really strong gravitational field! The can sucked them out!”

“A gravity bomb,” said Azzie.

Srini set her mouth in a thin line. “Right,” she said. “A bomb we can use against the Warriors. With just one of these, dropped in the right place, we can completely destroy the City of Warriors.”

Srini looked at Azzie, Gwen, and Ngoc.

Gwen said, “No. No way. We can’t do that. We’ve done enough killing.”

“But if we don’t, billions of people will die!” cried Srini. “We’ll be killing those humans if we don’t do something.”

“Do something, yes,” said Gwen. “I like the idea of doing something. But not killing.”

“Remember how the Warrior children helped us,” said Ngoc. “We can’t kill their people.”

“Yes, they helped us – they gave us this ship,” said Srini. “They even killed their own people to do that – remember the dragon? They had to expect that we’d use the ship against the Warriors.”

“What is this, Srini?” asked Gwen. “You freaked out when I killed that first Warrior when we were first captured. You wouldn’t even touch a gun. Now you want to bomb them back to the stone age?”

“They’re going to freeze the Earth!” cried Srini. “I think a little self-defense is called for!”

“What do you think, Azzie?” asked Gwen.

“Well,” said Azzie slowly, “my father felt like killing in self-defense was okay. If it was necessary.”

“Right! Right!” said Srini.

“On the other hand,” said Azzie, “there are a lot of Warrior children in that city. Those children haven’t done anything to us.”

“But there’s no other way to stop the invasion,” said Srini. “We have to make a choice – a choice between killing Warrior children, and allowing billions of human children to be killed. I mean, it’s a terrible choice, but really – I mean – there’s only one way to go, right?”

Srini looked confused and afraid. So did Gwen and Ngoc. Azzie remembered the Beast’s words about sacrifice, and making a choice between evils. Only a member of a child species would think that there had to be some way to solve all problems without sacrifices. Adult species understood that sometimes there was no way out -- that you had to make a choice between evils, and accept responsibility for the consequences.

Azzie didn’t think that she could live with either choice.

Suddenly an alarm sounded, and the control console next to Srini began hissing in Warrior language. Srini tried to read the display. “I think there’s another ship here,” she said.

“Here in nullspace?” said Azzie. She looked at the blank window. “I don’t see it.”

“I don’t think light travels in nullspace,” said Srini. “So we can’t see it. But it’s big, twice the size of this ship. And...”

At that moment, a swirl appeared in the air near them, a confusion of color that resolved into a doorway. Beyond the doorway was brilliant light.

“I don’t like this,” whispered Gwen.

“So here you are,” said a voice from the doorway. “Nullspace is not a good place to hide. I would have found you earlier, but I overestimated your intelligence.”

“That voice is very familiar,” said Srini.

A figure appeared at the door. It was small and humanoid, but they could make out no other features because of the bright light behind it.

“You have probably been trying to figure out how you can possibly save the Earth now that the Beast has ruled against you,” it said. “Well, I am here to solve your problem, so call me your deus ex machina.”

The figure stepped out of the doorway. “Actually, more like a diabolus ex machina,” it said, sneering. Now they could make out its face. It was Trocmo.