Black Whole

At 16,400 feet on the Chajnantor plateau high in the Atacama Desert in central Chile, Sabyll fell off her saddle when the light finally went, the muted sun expiring.

Darkness should’ve prevailed. She was prepared for that — the immensity of emptiness. But it was not so. Even in the protection of the array, she was surrounded, as if in a snow globe, by the ever-crowding stars that threatened to sweep her off the plateau.

She grasped her mule’s leg to brace herself against the sudden vertigo of interstellar light. Moments ago, she’d thought the ALMA antennas, long abandoned, would provide some kind of stability, an anchor that might secure her when night arrived and the heavens came to suck her soul away. But there was nowhere to hide.

So foolish to have come. So foolish to ignore the tales. Sabyll had been warned. Yet, who could fathom such bottomless light still existed in a world gone dark. In the choked world below where smoke and grit ate the sky, few would believe there was a way through it, but Sabyll had been given the key. A simple talisman, keepsake from another time, another world.

A star chip.

An ancient, etched crystalline city that hung around her neck, its markings too complex for the naked eye, redolent of delicacy, purity, divinity. A product of finer elements, manufactured of dreams, not of the fouling furnaces of industry.

Earth was a fuming mess, a toxic bloom humanity had unleashed in the atmosphere over a thousand busy, busy years. A world blighted by the descendants of Edi-son. Sabyll knew the tales. Knew of a brighter epoch when suns like her own were harnessed as great steeds to conquer galaxies.

Her mother had said Sabyll could set it right. That the Atacama was beyond the blight. That great machines and their masters could call back the Age of Light. Free them from the darkness. Make them whole.

The star chip.

Still, she hesitated. Questioned. Was the darkness so bad? Maybe better to drown in smoke, sink into the particulates, become bottom dwellers, blind and insensate. Rather than naked to the riotous cosmos above that both enticed and accused.

She clasped the star chip. Felt the hum of her history. The cellular urge to expand, grow. Neither the darkness nor light would suffocate her. She had a duty to earthkind. She must remind those that had fled this world of their obligation. A time for calling out.

The quiet domes of ALMA, silos of an old harvest, should awaken to her touch. Sabyll stepped onto the wide platform and faced the formidable gleam of polished metal barring her entrance to the array, she perceived another creature. A large, dark form looming by the entrance.

A Nether? Could it really be that monstrous creature from tales meant to keep curious young ones from venturing into the high passes and succumbing to toxic shock?

She stepped quickly back and saw the looming form shrink. Did it cower as well? Was it frightened of her?

Why not? She was a terror herself. Twice dead. She’d killed herself once by leaving her people and again by braving the Atacama. She should never have survived the climb through the upper toxicity. She threw up her arms and laughed, and the dark shape mimicked her movements.

“Well met,” Sabyll whispered to her self-spirit, her shadow, rarely seen in the miasma of the lowlands. “Well met.”

Removing the star chip from her neck and waving it before her like a talisman, approached the entrance with greater confidence. She had no idea what would happen, but she trusted in the legends her mother had told. She believed in the fantastic powers of those from before. And that trust was rewarded by an aperture that began to glow and then hum, as if hungry for the star chip. Like any good pilgrim, Sabyll offered it.

Without fuss. The bleached door retreated and a blackness, the wholeness of possibility, presented itself. Sabyll stared into the darkness. She knew this kind of darkness, as had so many generations. They’d grown up with so little light, with so much unknown. She’d come to call back the Edi-son, builders of ALMA and starry empires, to reclaim and repair the world they’d abandoned.

Star chip in hand she entered the array, turning a last time to countenance the vast firmament’s radiance. Sure that her shadow, the reminder of a lost past, could not follow her steady steps into the black wholeness beyond.