My Admiral,
When I agreed to undertake this journey, I saw it as a temporary prison lasting a year. A year without respite, on the same ship, waiting for our arrival. That was not the case. If Garen Antor followed an untroubled route through sidereal space, the stars have since moved – and one could say: the universe has become populated, Xeno civilizations have bloomed, and we must now make regular stopovers to smoothly avoid overly dense galactic arms or simple nebulae.
Andreï is developing one of his theories: the diversification of Xeno civilizations, their rise, is exponential, in aligned cycles. Living beings, according to this theory, all become sentient at roughly the same time and rapidly spread throughout the galaxy; we encounter each other, and the encounters, initially sparse, become exponentially more numerous, because the more time passes, the more sentients are eager to explore, to know, to conquer, and they possess the technological means to satisfy these urges. Then they transcend… they disappear almost simultaneously, leaving behind their messy rooms, artifacts and wonders that the animals who will next, together, reach sentience will use once again to conquer the universe, and so on, layer after layer. Synchronicity is not a magical fact, it's simply a law of large numbers: a civilization traveling through space will encounter another, and even if it doesn't grant them the secrets of Drift, even if that is always the case, it will have shown them that it was simply possible. Civilizations are like flowers, he told me, as he handed me one. Like a field of flowers. They bloom in the same season, then wither to make way for another bloom. We are not even the reason the process exists: we are the process. Sooner or later, something will be born from our gesticulations… something incomprehensible, but all that we have done, all our hopes, all our sorrows, all our grandeur and our petty vices, it will be neither good nor bad, merely a process, a cog in the great machine. May the Blind Gods one day tell us what this machine produces. I would like to have that answer.
We made contact with a pre-stellar Xeno civilization that attacked us without warning – fortunately, with poor missiles whose trajectories were badly calculated. They won't conquer the stars anytime soon. Before departing, we took a few high-resolution photographs of the dominant civilization to try to deduce their history. But as the Captain said ironically: this love of war makes me nostalgic for our HS. But yes, this belligerent or fearful civilization will have seen our ship arrive and vanish, and will know that Drift travel exists. Let's hope they gain wisdom before the day of true first contact.
We then lost nearly six days of travel due to a Xeno incident remarkable enough for me to relate it. As you know, our perception of the universe is limited to three dimensions, but the "unified-limit" theory of physics, finalized in the 22nd century, teaches us that there are a decimal number of dimensions, that is, fractional – something close to 5.5. Baryonic anomalies began to appear in space, and we exited Drift, again. These were fragments of matter seemingly sliced in space that roughly formed circles. The severed parts, upon study, were cut with a precision below the Planck scale – the smallest possible – so we first thought they were fractal anomalies like those found on Tybalt. The explanation lay elsewhere: it was a great entity moving between dimensions without really being aware of it – a bit like us, in fact: when you wave an arm, you pay little attention to whether you wave it parallel to a plane or along a line, perhaps astonishing beings of one or two dimensions who see something arrive from nowhere.
Following the circles – which were merely the visible parts in our perception of a long sinuous tunnel – we found a planet orbiting a black dwarf, half eaten away: imagine a literal crescent moon. Once again, it was the entity that had overlaid part of our dimension.
We landed on the planet – a rocky planet, regolith, dead from the beginning. When we arrive on lost worlds that no one has seen or will ever see, the Captain is often seized by a mystical and contemplative mania. Oxygen was limited, but he took the time to run his hands over the ground, to pick up a stone – very sharp, in fact. He said to me: Billions of years in stillness and death, before and after us. What will differentiate us at the end of time from these rocks? Today we cast our gaze upon them… a little of them becomes immortal in us.
He asked me if I knew the cult of the Humble Epic of All Life. I did not, though I have inquired since. Aside from aspects that strike me as useless mysticism, it is a Xeno cult, the only one permitted in HS to teach the stellar language. Sometimes I wonder if Andreï isn't half Xeno himself…
We found an immense well, dug as if by a giant screw. We sent down a rover with adaptive gravity to drive vertically along the walls. At the bottom, a spherical cave, nearly flawless. In the center appeared – sliced in half, thus half in another dimension – an organic and, to say the least, cerebral mass. It was, without being structurally similar to our neurons, an arrangement for information transmission. The Captain interfaced our AIs with the Entity. We didn't establish clear contact, nor even grasp its form, but we glimpsed its size – roughly four light-years across. After several unsuccessful attempts, the Captain reluctantly decided to send it an electric pulse, and it withdrew reflexively. The planet returned whole with full gravity restored, and one must salute the presence of mind of our helmsmen who managed to keep the Alecto in orbit.
While we were already far from that rocky planet, and after the Captain had submitted his report on the matter, he summoned me to his office. It's been several days, I know, since he last had communication with the Wau, and it weighs on him. I also sense that he wants to ask me something but lacks the courage. He is difficult to read, Admiral. His mind is twisted like a labyrinth… and his thoughts scatter in every direction. I feel that only a small part of him is truly with us.
He nevertheless diverted the conversation by suggesting we imagine what fantastic creature we had encountered and what its purpose was. Were we, to it, nothing more than an invisible mosquito it has already forgotten?
He told me, pensive, eyes on a bay window opening onto the dancing stars: mystics have noticed something obvious that no one talks about. Atoms are proportionally spaced from each other in the same ratio as the stars. As if everything in the universe naturally distributes itself according to the same invisible rules. Everything – everything except what we call our reality and our scale… that is different. It is the exception. The world of humans, of Xenos, our universe at our scale, what we can conceive and explore, is an anomaly, Pallas. I sometimes think that life is an accident, the grain of sand in the gears. Perhaps the Blind Gods are called so because they haven't yet seen us. Perhaps in the end they will cover everything in their light except us, because they will never see us.
You understand in this report that Andreï blends the rational and the mystical. I have never seen him religious and I think he would deny it. He would deny it by telling you: it is not religious to believe in the Blind Gods, because they exist.
I would like to express a concern. When I told you I thought Andreï wanted to confess something to me, I almost believed I was about to receive a love declaration. For me or someone else, for that matter. But as I write these words, I have another hypothesis. Andreï, walled up ten years in orbit around nowhere, was quick to set out to the edge of the universe, and now that we are traveling, the stopovers are frequent. Did he ever intend to fulfill a mission? Or is he hiding something from us? Does he wish, like a religious zealot, to meet the Blind Gods whom Garen Antor claims to have spoken to? Was what he wanted to tell me meant to unburden his conscience? For I sense guilt. I will keep you informed.
P.