by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
Regardless of the captain’s orders or their stations, all of the crew onboard the Wanderlust had gravitated to the bridge by now to watch the main viewscreen with openmouthed awe. Many a muzzle gaped at the fizzing, crackling static on the viewscreen. It didn’t look like the emptiness of space. It looked like they’d broken open the universe and found pop rocks fizzling in soda pop under the veneer.
“What are we looking at here, Captain?” Korvax asked, his squeaky voice unusually low and sedate. The gravity of their situation, the sheer bizarreness of it all seemed to have subdued him. Though, his pointy snout kept twitching, and his prickles stood out more than usual.
“That’s a good question,” Captain Carroway meowed, gesturing with a paw at the two dogs who had concocted this whole shrinking plan. The two cleverest officers on her ship. “What are we seeing here?”
Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee looked at each other before trying to answer her. The Xolo-Lupinian hoped the Papillon would take lead, but he merely shrugged. So, she took a stab it.
“I think it’s Hawking radiation,” Lt. Diaz woofed, finding herself suddenly feeling much steadier. It was easier to think about abstract physics concepts than the very real weight of lives she’d spent for her own gain. Except, right now, the abstract physics was feeling a lot more concrete, and those lives existed on an entirely different scale, growing farther and farther away all the time. Would Lt. Diaz be able to live with herself by simply never looking back? She wasn’t sure.
“What do you mean, Hawking radiation?” Cmdr. Chestnut chittered. The golden-mantled squirrel sounded genuinely curious and delighted. Either he hadn’t realized yet that the Zakonraptors aboard the asteroid base hadn’t been saved, or those lives simply weren’t weighing on him. “I thought that only happened at the edge of black holes.”
“The edges of black holes are why we know about Hawking radiation,” Lt. Diaz explained. “Matched pairs of subatomic particles — tiny ones like photons or neutrinos — spring into existence at the edge of a black hole’s event horizon, and one of the pair falls back into the black hole, while the other one escapes. So, when we see photons escaping from a black hole, that’s how. But here…”
The Xolo-Lupinian trailed off, staring at the viewscreen in awe, overcome by what she was seeing. She wasn’t the only one. Korvax looked more confused than overawed, but all of the others were spellbound.
Pulling herself back together, Lt. Diaz continued, “Out here, in the empty vacuum of space, there should be almost nothing… but… at our scale, I think we’re seeing Hawking radiation happening in real time. Matched pairs of particles popping in and out of existence, canceling each other out, and then… un-cancelling each other. Like bubbles bursting. The line between existence and non-existence is thinner here, I think, this close to the narrow edge of reality.”
“It does look like bubbles bursting!” Korvax exclaimed with delight. The grin on his pointy muzzle made it look like the hedgehog thought that metaphor explained it all. Everything was settled now. They were looking at bubbles. “The universe is made up of soap suds! Who knew, who knew.” He chuckled softly to himself, looking inordinately pleased.
The whole crew — all ten of them — watched the fizzing froth of colors on the viewscreen in silence after the hedgehog’s chuckling quieted down. Long moments passed in shared awe, until finally, Cmdr. Chestnut chittered softly, “It’s like it’s washing us clean.”
The golden-mantled squirrel pointedly glanced at Lt. Diaz and then the captain and back again, making sure each of them caught his gaze before looking away. He wasn’t the kind of squirrel who could ever straightforwardly tell either of them that they’d been forgiven for their transgressions, for making choices that led to other people’s deaths. He believed too deeply in the weight and importance of all life.
But Cmdr. Chestnut also knew that neither the Norwegian Forest cat nor Xolo-Lupinian were ever going to completely forgive themselves for the lives they’d cost, and he knew the value of being able to put your guilt down. Or at least put it away, in a deep, dusty, rarely opened drawer inside your heart, so that you could move on and keep functioning.
“How long can we maintain this situation?” Captain Carroway asked, discomfited by her first officer’s quiet, understated kindness.
“For as long as its beneficial,” Lt. Lee woofed. “The Waykeeper’s child’s natural hyperspatial slipstream is protecting both of us from the degradation that our mismatched scale compared to the matter around us would otherwise cause. So, we can simply stay this size until our momentum is worn down by the friction of this Hawking radiation.”
The Norwegian Forest cat looked surprised and delighted by the Papillon’s answer. Her rumbly voice dropped to an almost whisper, and she asked, “The Hawking radiation causes friction at this scale? Friction in the empty vacuum of outer space?” The Norwegian Forest cat sounded amazed.
Knowing the captain’s love of a good metaphor, Lt. Diaz woofed, “It’s like a shaggy carpet. If your legs and feet are big enough, the carpet’s weave makes no difference to you as you walk. But if you’re small enough that your feet have to drag across the thick fabric with every step…”
“It slows you down,” the Norwegian Forest cat concluded, sounding every bit as happy with the metaphor-offering as the Xolo-Lupinian had hoped she would be. “What a discovery. We could write scientific papers about this experience, and they’d be studied for decades to come.”
“We’ll certainly have enough data for it,” Lt. Lee woofed.
“I guess that’s one way to keep busy during the rest of the journey,” Ensign Melbourne meowed wryly. “If you hate fun, that is.” The white tomcat could think of better ways for the Papillon to spend his time. But also, Ensign Melbourne couldn’t truly object to anything that would wholesomely capture Lt. Lee’s attention and lift the pretty little dog out of the depression that had been weighing him down.
“I’ll write it with you,” Lt. Diaz offered, feeling strangely vulnerable as she uttered the words. “If you’d like.” The Papillon didn’t really need her help, and the Xolo-Lupinian knew it. She felt like a fool for even making the offer, but then Lt. Lee smiled.
When the Papillon’s small muzzle, framed by his butterfly-like ears, was graced with a smile — the kind of genuine smile that caused his bright eyes to sparkle too — he really was the prettiest little dog there could be. “I’d like that,” Lt. Lee woofed to Lt. Diaz. “Co-authors.”
“Co-authors,” the Xolo-Lupinian agreed. She was a much larger dog physically, but somehow, in the dynamic between them, she’d come to feel like Lt. Lee took the lead. Maybe it was because he actually was a Tri-Galactic Union officer, and this was a Tri-Galactic Union ship. Or maybe it was just because he had such a centered, grounded energy, much more than Lt. Diaz would generally expect from such a small dog. He knew who he was. She wasn’t always sure that she could say the same about herself.
There were two wolves inside Lt. Diaz — one that was actually an uplifted Xolo dog and kind of wanted to let all this Tri-Galactic Union idealism nonsense wash over her — wash her clean — and bring her back to her younger, more naive view of the universe, and another one that had evolved from wildness naturally under the five moons of Lupinia who wanted to howl and fight, never accepting an easy oversimplification when the universe is far too complex to ever fit into nice, simple, little boxes.
Those two wolves had to get along, every minute of every day, and Lt. Diaz felt like she never knew which one would be ascendent at any given moment. But right now, for this moment, they were in harmony — they were both happy with the fact that the Wanderlust was racing at full speed toward home, and the crew around her appreciated the work she’d done to help make that happen. Lt. Diaz felt at peace. She felt like — for a moment, just this moment — she fit into the place she was at. And she didn’t usually feel that way. Ever.
By some tacit agreement, the whole crew kept watching the main viewscreen in silence. Communing with the deep fabric of space — appreciating the warp and weft of the universe up close — in an almost meditative trance. All of them were tired; none of their sleep schedules had been properly honored by the Zakonraptors’ interruption in their lives; and their carefully overlapping, rotating work shifts would have to be entirely reconstructed from scratch. But for now, they were all together, experiencing something profound. It was a bonding moment, and no one wanted to break it.
Eventually, though, tiredness won out. Korvax excused himself to take a nap, gibbering away about how he’d taken on an undue number of shifts keeping watch while down on the planet, because he’d wanted to keep an eye on the sky where he knew his Ollallan daughter was. Lys didn’t excuse herself to take a nap, but she did fall asleep with her squiggle of a body leaned against one of the computer consoles. Ensign Werik brought her a blanket and draped it over it, only to disappear afterwards himself.
One by one, the officers of the Wanderlust excused themselves or disappeared to take naps or grab bites to eat in the multi-purpose room. And one by one, they quietly reappeared as well, looking more refreshed. None of them asked permission, but also, none of them took their turn — leaving the vigil being kept upon the bridge — when there weren’t at least two other officers there, awake and alert.
Captain Carroway would certainly reinstate the Wanderlust’s strict, rotating work and sleep shifts once they were back in normal space anyway, but it was remarkable to Lt. Diaz to discover that — at least for a little while — the imposed structure had become unnecessary. The Norwegian Forest cat with her love of rules and regulations had done such a good job of molding this small, ragtag group of ten wildly different officers into a cohesive crew that they looked out for each other automatically. They took turns and shared the burden of their journey without anyone having to ask. No small feat.
The whole experience felt kind of like a snow day following an ice storm. The storm had been scary, and real damage had been done. But now, everything was quiet — hushed and reverent, almost joyful in a subdued way — and they were simply waiting for the snow to melt. Drinking cocoa and watching the blanket of whiteness over the world, or in this case, drinking a bizarre, gloopy concoction that Korvax had whipped up and kept bubbling hot in the multi-purpose room and watching the frothing, rainbowy Hawking radiation.
Sometimes, if Lt. Diaz crossed her eyes a little bit, she imagined she could make out patterns in the fizzing chaos of color. Constellations, shadows, or even whole pictures — intricate scenes that played out her guilt in front of her eyes with Zakonraptor scientists and their laboratories exploding in flame… or sometimes, better times, her hopes, like how her brother and parents would greet her when she returned to Lupinia. Staring at the Hawking radiation felt a little like staring into raw material of a waking dream. Hypnotizing.
But every snow day must come to an end, and eventually, Lt. Lee announced, shortly after returning to his station from a nap that had left the long fur on his butterfly-like ears all disarrayed and funny, “It looks like we’re slowing down. We should consider increasing our size before we lose all of our momentum, so we can use what’s left to help us choose a good location to come out of our shrunken state.”
It felt like he’d announced that the streets had cleared and there would be school again tomorrow.
Continue on to Chapter 21…