Heartlight (18 page)

Standing inside the great globe as if it were an ark, the two travelers began to sail into the billowing mists. Crystals, some gargantuan and some as small as stardust, floated past on all sides. Some of them, symmetrical and shimmering, reminded Kate of Ariella. Clouds of heated dust swirled about them, aglow with all the colors of the universe.

A gaseous shape in the distance caught her eye. It was a strange, slender cloud with dozens of long tendrils extending from its sides. As they drew nearer, she discerned that the tendrils themselves branched into smaller tendrils, and from them spouted still smaller tendrils, like thousands of misty fingers reaching out from the main stem. The entire form seemed to be dancing—bending and swaying to a rhythm older than time.

“It looks like a tree!”

Grandfather, who was studying the cloudlike being carefully, nodded in agreement.

Then the form began to metamorphose. Ever so subtly, beginning on the outermost branches, the twigs of the cloud tree began to brighten. As if a swarm of fireflies had alighted upon the misty fingers, the tip of every twig started to glow with a warm, white light. Gradually, the light seeped into the larger branches, then into the trunk, then down to the roots, until finally the whole tree radiated like a miniature star, sparkling silently in space.

Kate reached for Grandfather’s hand, which had simultaneously reached out for hers. Together, they watched the glowing cloud tree dance before them.

“That is one of my oldest and finest creations,” boomed the Voice, jarring them out of their reverie.

“How old is it?” asked Grandfather.

“It is nearly as old as I am, and that is more than eight billion of your Earth years.”

Kate had never found it easy to comprehend such numbers. Eight billion years! And she used to think Grandfather was old.

“I resent that thought,” he replied, his eyes aglow with humor. “Compared to this star, I feel like a young bobbin.”

“That’s the whole point! If Trethoniel is over eight billion years old, that means it’s more than a hundred times . . . a hundred times . . . a hundred times a hundred times as old as you.”

“You are beginning to understand, young one,” boomed the Voice. “Even your rudimentary brain power has led you to the correct conclusion.”

Kate stiffened. “I may not be a genius, but at least I don’t pretend to know everything.”

“Nothing in the universe is hidden from me,” replied the Voice in an imperial tone. “Nothing in the universe is beyond my knowledge.”

“Nothing at all?” asked Grandfather, an edge of sadness in his voice.

The Voice did not respond for several seconds. At last, its deep tones resonated from above and below the great globe. “You are correct, Doctor Miles Prancer of the planet Earth. Young as you are, you are wiser than I had thought. Only one thing in the entire universe is still beyond my understanding. Only one thing is still beyond my power.”

“What? What is it?” asked Kate.

“In time, even you shall understand,” replied the Voice.

Kate turned to Grandfather for an explanation when, suddenly, the globe began to rotate. Slowly it spun around until they were no longer facing the illuminated tree. Then, gradually, the misty curtain before them parted, revealing Trethoniel’s nebula stretching far out into the galaxy. Intertwined like the threads of a timeless tapestry, the colored clouds undulated gracefully in the stellar winds. Every so often, the light from Trethoniel would catch a floating crystal and it would explode with a dazzling burst of light, shining like a jewel in the tapestry.

Kate was reminded of Morpheus and Orpheus. What had actually happened to them? Were they gone forever? But no answer came to her questions.

“Beautiful,” sighed Grandfather, still captivated by the glorious vista.

“Yes, it is beautiful,” declared the Voice. “On the day I was first flung to this far corner of the universe, I was nothing more than a ball of gathering gases. When all around me was empty and dark, when not a single neighboring star could be seen, I began to weave my cape of colored clouds. For many star-lives, I have spun endless crystals and painted the moving mist, even as I manufactured more light than can ever be measured. I have labored, long beyond my destined time, to create the most beautiful star in the universe.”

“And you have succeeded,” Grandfather added.

“No!” boomed the Voice, with such force that it shook the globe and almost knocked them off their feet. “I have not succeeded. All my labors may still amount to nothing. Nothing at all!”

A long pause was filled only with the wailing of the winds.

“Come. I will show you more.”

The great globe glided forward into the curling mists. Behind them, the glowing cloud tree reached out its longest branch, as if it were trying to deliver a message to them before they departed. Gracefully it stretched, unfurling like a fiddlehead fern in the spring sunshine, until it was about to touch the surface of the globe.

With a sudden jolt, the globe accelerated its flight. The misty finger reached out to its maximum length, but fell a few inches short of its mark. As the unknowing voyagers vanished into the billowing clouds, the illuminated tree seemed to shrug sadly and recoiled its branch. Slowly, twig by twig, the luminous form went dark, until at last its light was completely gone.

“We’re descending,” Grandfather declared. “We must be approaching the surface of the star.”

Just then a gigantic tower of flame, white at the center and red along the edges, arched above them in a burst of brilliance reaching thousands of miles into space. The atmosphere sizzled and sparked. It felt as if they had just flown into a celestial furnace. For an instant, the swirling clouds turned into scarlet flames, licking at the great globe and its passengers. Then, like a collapsing building, the titanic tower of flame fell back to the star. It washed over them in an avalanche of fire.

“Whew!” said Kate as the flames disintegrated and were replaced by deep red clouds. “I thought the desert on Nel Sauria was hot. This is definitely no place to have a real body. Even inside a globe. If we were made of skin and bones there’d be nothing left now but two lumps of charcoal!”

“Not even that,” corrected Grandfather. “It’s hard to believe, but we are only at the edge of the corona, Trethoniel’s outer atmosphere. Compared to what it’s like down inside the core, an eruptive prominence like that is barely lukewarm. The pressure in there is something like five hundred
billion
times the pressure on the Earth’s surface, and the temperature is close to seventy
million
degrees Fahrenheit.”

“That’s what I call hot,” agreed Kate. “It makes even a healthy Sun seem pretty feeble.”

Grandfather nodded, as the globe drew closer to the turbulent, bubbling surface of the star. Bridges of superheated plasma, arching along the lines of magnetic fields, spanned gigantic cones of ejecting gas. Rumbling like countless engines, huge convection cells—seething pots of ionized gases—percolated with energy from deep within the star’s core. The face of Trethoniel looked like one gigantic firestorm, continuously flaming, churning, and erupting.

“Look!” cried Kate. “What’s that?”

They trained their vision on a great pillar of yellow-red flames that rose like the stalk of a fiery flower from the stormy surface. Upward it climbed, until finally it opened into a wide bowl, large enough to contain a planet the size of Jupiter.

As the globe approached the midsection of the gigantic flaming stalk, it veered to the side and began to spiral higher and higher. At last, they had climbed to an altitude where they could see the thick folds of red and yellow petals that lined the underside of the great bowl, shielding its contents from the stormy surface of the star.

“I wonder what it holds,” said Kate.

“Something very special, I suspect,” Grandfather replied, his voice filled with anticipation. “I didn’t see anything like this when I flew near the surface with Orpheus.”

“Could it be something that could help the Sun?”

“Possibly.”

“Look!” cried Kate as they crossed above the rim. “Look at all those rows of bright green! But what—hey! What’s that?”

As they flew above the fiery bowl, dozens of flat yellow creatures that glowed strangely became visible against the scarlet red background of the interior floor. The creatures glided busily to and fro across the radiant green rows lining the bowl, like farmers tending a fertile field.

Grandfather shook his head in amazement. “Those beings are huge! I would guess each one is at least the size of France! What are they?”

“They are Celethoes,” answered the Voice. “They live in only two dimensions, so they can be seen only from above or below. Most stars have a few of them, but only the greatest stars have more than that. And no star in the universe has as many Celethoes as Trethoniel.”

“And what are they growing?” asked Grandfather, eyeing the luminous rows of green.

“Pure condensed light,” thundered the Voice, allowing each syllable to reverberate among the clouds.

Anxiously, Kate squeezed Grandfather’s hand.

“It is the rarest element in existence,” boomed the Voice, “a substance every star needs to survive. With it, a star will radiate life-giving light across the heavens. Without it, a star will surely die and go dark forever.”

“That’s—” Kate began.

“Quiet!” commanded Grandfather. “Let me think. Your Celethoes . . . could they be making PCL by breeding some derivative of the hydrogen isotope? Something like deuterium or tritium?”

“A good guess for a beginner, Doctor Miles Prancer. But the pure condensed light they are making is not related to the hydrogen isotopes capable of nuclear fusion. Such primitive materials I have long ago abandoned. My pure condensed light, unique in all the universe, contains free photons, twin neutrinos, and properties far beyond your comprehension.”

Kate watched the graceful movements of the Celethoes. They seemed to be spinning threads of glowing filament from their own bodies, then weaving them tenderly through the rows in a methodical manner. Tiny pinnacles of illuminated green dotted the endless furrows: fresh PCL emerging from long incubation.

“And your Celethoes,” probed Grandfather, “are they your only source of PCL?”

“No!” declared the Voice. “Over the ages I have developed many other sources.”

“Such as?”

“I have no desire to tell you,” bellowed the reply. “Even if I chose to tell you, it would take ten thousand of your lifetimes to explain, and then you would still not understand me.”

Kate bristled at the Voice’s tone.

Grandfather, however, seemed unperturbed. “With so much PCL available to you,” he continued, “how can you be in any danger?”

“Because,” the Voice rumbled, “I need something else to survive—something more precious even than pure condensed light.”

“What could that be?” asked Grandfather, quite puzzled.

“In time!” roared the Voice. “I shall tell you when I am ready, when you will learn how to help me. But do not expect me to explain all my secrets to lesser beings like yourselves. I do not have time, and your tiny mortal minds could never comprehend more than a fraction of my creation.”

Kate tried to contain her rising pique, but her thoughts betrayed her. “Who says we’re lesser beings? Just because we might live for a shorter time. Aren’t we all part of the same big Pattern?”

“Fool!” bellowed the Voice, with such force that the globe jolted and both Kate and Grandfather fell to their knees. “Contemptible fool! I do not need to listen to your childish babble. Trethoniel is the only place of perfection in all the universe!”

Grandfather squeezed her hand urgently.

“Forgive her, Great Star,” he called into the mists. “She does not understand.”

Kate’s mind was whirling with images of The Darkness, the terrible tail, the scorched desert of Nel Sauria . . . These were not her idea of perfection. Why didn’t Grandfather understand?

“But—” she objected meekly.

“Not now, Kaitlyn!”

“Silence!” commanded the Voice, barely suppressing its rage. “I tolerate her ignorance only because she travels with you, Doctor Miles Prancer.”

Kate cast a frightened look at Grandfather. Then her eyes fell to the fiery bowl below them.

Something had changed. By some silent command, the Celethoes had ceased in their labors. They were gathering together in the center of the red valley, their bodies glowing brightly as they slid across the fields to their destination. There, they formed a circle, a circle of connected light.

“The perfection of Trethoniel is under attack,” the Voice rumbled. “Ignorant Celethoes may continue to perform their labors, hiding the impending tragedy from even themselves, but that does not alter the essential truth. Unless something is done swiftly, unless I can obtain the one thing I need, the greatest star in the universe will soon produce no more light and no more music.” There was a somber silence before the Voice uttered its final sentence. “Trethoniel is about to die.”

As the words echoed across the starscape, all fell still. Even the wailing wind seemed to hold its breath as the phrase
about to die
hung heavily upon it.

Then came another sound, subtle and struggling to be heard. Faint though it was, Kate recognized it immediately.

“The music!”

The unmistakable chords rose delicately to them, like the scent of a distant lilac bush on a gentle breeze. Harmonious was the song, and full of healing. Joyful, and full of peace. As Kate drank in the lovely music, she heard something which had eluded her before. Pain too ran through the melody, and tragedy as well. Yet, on some deeper level, the joy seemed to embrace the pain, as the peace accepted the tragedy. The power of the music was all the more profound because of it.

“The music—it’s coming from the Celethoes!” cried Kate. She pointed to the shining circle below them, which seemed to swell in luminosity as the music swelled in strength. “They’re trying to tell us something. I know they are. I can feel it.”

Then a sudden turmoil filled the air. Kate caught a glimpse of a dark form gathering in the faraway mists.