The Last Starry Night
The Setting Sun

“Don’t shoot,” said the Shaman, as Grandma instinctively raised her gun. “That is the ship’s power source. If you fire, the matter inside it will escape at relativistic velocity and vaporize the ship.”

“That sounds bad,” said Grandma.

“Let it go,” said the Shaman. “It is falling up toward the sky sheet. In a moment it will punch through the ceiling and the hull and be gone.”

“I thought the sky sheet was under us,” said Azzie.

“This ship has lost power,” said the Shaman. “It has begun to spin and tumble. Soon, it will begin to fall toward the sky sheet as well.”

“That sounds bad, too,” said Grandma.

“It is,” said Srini. “We’ve got to get power back somehow.”

“There are probably emergency power sources,” said the Shaman.

“We should get to the control room and see what we can do,” said Azzie.

The five humans and five Shamans made their way back to the room where Gwen still lay. Ngoc and one of the Shamans examined her, and the rest of them gathered around the consoles. The huge mirrored Shaman ship was gone, leaving only the huge sky sheet and the two suns blazing in the darkness.

A Shaman said, “This console makes no sense at all.”

“Sure it does,” said Srini. “It’s laid out a lot more clearly than the Warriors’ ships. Look, there’s even a joystick to drive with.” She gingerly moved it. “It’s almost as though the ship were designed for humans. -- Of course, it isn’t working...”

As they stood, the sky sheet was tilting slowly, rising up on their right drunkenly.

Srini tapped more controls. The console just beeped at her. The ship was not responding at all.

“What are we going to do?” said Azzie.

“We’re going to,” said Srini, and then stopped, because she didn’t know.

“Well, y’all can do as y’all like,” said Grandma. “I’m going to hold on tight.”

***

Azzie went over to where Ngoc and the Shaman were examining Gwen. “Will she be all right?” asked Azzie.

“I don’t know,” said the Shaman. “Someone has given her some kind of shock. Her mind is stunned. I do not know enough about humans to say what will awaken her.”

“She is breathing fine,” said Ngoc.

Azzie knelt and held Gwen’s hand.

The ship began to shake unpleasantly, disconcertingly as they plummeted down. The blotches of green and blue were resolving into continents and seas much too quickly. Srini began smacking buttons at random.

“Calm down,” said Grandma. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Give me a hand here!” demanded Srini.

So Grandma started punching buttons at random too. After a few heartbeats, the ship lurched like it had been kicked sideways, and the console’s lights changed. “All right!” said Srini. “It says some rockets are firing. I’m going to try to point the rockets toward the sky sheet, to slow our fall.” Azzie watched with fearful fascination as the sky sheet slowly rotated around under them again. With a terrible shuddering squealing, the ship began to slow down.

Srini whooped. “We’re going to make it!”

“What’s that flashing red light?” asked Grandma.

“Um,” said Srini. “I hadn’t seen that. Well, it’s hard to say, since I can’t read the writing under it... But it’s right next to the rocket engine controls. So, um, it’s probably pretty bad.”

The ship continued to shudder and rock as it fell. It began to speed up again. Srini grappled with the joystick, twisting as hard as she could, but the ship’s fall continued.

“I’m going to try to turn us towards the largest blue patch I can replace,” she said.

“That’s amazing,” said Grandma. “Room enough for hundreds of thousands of Earths. Too bad Floyd isn’t here to see it.”

“He’s probably glad not to be plummeting to his death,” said Azzie.

“Well, that’s true too,” said Grandma softly. “But don’t give up yet, dear heart.”

“I think it’s turning!” said Srini.

“Away from the sky sheet?” asked Grandma.

“Um, no. Toward that blue patch.”

“Oh. Well, good work.”

“Shamans,” said Srini, “you can see the future? Are we going to – Shamans?”

The Shamans did not answer. They had rolled themselves up into yellow blobs the size of beach balls.

“That ain’t a good sign,” said Grandma.

The blue patch got larger and larger, and the green and brown blotches around it drew back and away until all that was before them was a great azure expanse, coming up terribly fast. Ngoc closed her eyes.

Srini screamed.

For a flash, the blank blue sea was speckled everywhere with glittering waves, and

then Azzie was thrust forward out at the window, and she landed hard like a kick in the stomach, and everything went black.

Azzie wondered whether she’d passed out. She couldn’t see anything, and she couldn’t move, but she could blink her eyes – at least, it felt like she was blinking. She opened her mouth to call out to Srini and Grandma, but her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton. Everything was absolutely quiet, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton too. She had no idea which way was up. At first she thought she might be hanging upside down, and then she was sure she was on her back,

and then on her side.

Then she heard a raspy hissing noise, and the blackness in her eyes melted away. She was lying on her back on the huge hemispherical window, looking up at the control center. Gwen was draped over a console, hanging limply, seemingly tied to a chair by some sort of webbing. Where were the others? A noise behind her: Srini was lying on the window next to her. She was groaning and trying to get to her knees. Azzie’s head felt thick. She rolled over and looked out the window under her. There was nothing but dark, dark, almost black blue there.

“We must be underwater,” she said. Her mouth still felt sort of sticky. Srini coughed in answer. Azzie saw Grandma a few feet away on the window, staggering to her feet, helping Ngoc and Johnny up as well. The Shaman-balls were scattered here and there around the ceiling.

Azzie noticed a thin film of sudsy, bubbly stuff on her fingers and the window she was sitting on. As she rubbed it between her fingers, it dissolved into the air. “What is this stuff?”

“I think it’s like an airbag,” said Srini, shaking her head as if to clear it. “A foam that fills up the control room to protect us in a crash. Now that the crash is over, it’s dissolving.”

“You think so?” said Azzie.

“Look at Gwen,” said Ngoc suddenly.

Azzie now saw that the webbing holding Gwen into her chair was really a big pile of the same foamy stuff, and that it was slowly disappearing. Azzie stood up as quick as she could and tried to get under Gwen, to catch her when she fell. As the last of the foam disappeared, and she dropped from fifteen feet towards the window, more foam sprayed from the walls, coating Azzie again and filling the space as Gwen fell through it, so that the two of them ended up tumbling over and over, completely unhurt, wrapped in a ball of tiny bubbles.

Azzie struggled to her feet again as the foam dissolved around them. Gwen was face down on the window. Srini was standing, rubbing her temple. Gwen groaned.

“Gwen! Are you okay?” said Azzie.

“Am I okay? Let me put it this way,” said Gwen. “I know I can’t be dead because being dead couldn’t possibly hurt this much.”

“We might be dead,” said Grandma. “I don’t see how we could have survived that crash.”

“Crash?” said Gwen. “What crash? What’s going on?”

“Believe it or not, we did,” said Srini. “This is must be a well-built ship.”

“I wonder how far we are under the water,” said Azzie. “And are we still sinking, or floating back up, or what?”

“Under water?” cried Gwen. “I thought we were out in space. It’s like I fell asleep during one movie and woke up in the next one.”

“See if the pilot’s console will tell us,” said Srini.

Azzie clambered up the wall, which had been the floor, and hoisted herself up so that she could see the pilot’s console. Meanwhile, Srini explained the situation to Gwen.

“The console is working,” Azzie said. “But I can’t read anything on it.”

“I wonder if the ship would float?” mused Srini.

Then several things happened at once. The dark blue from the windows became a light, bright eggshell blue, and then flashed into blazing fire-yellow sunlight. They were tossed towards the ceiling, and foam spurted from the walls again, catching them before they hit anything. The ship popped out of the water, then splashed back down into it, and bobbed up and down. It turned as it bobbed, so that the floor moved under them. The foam let them go, and they slid or dropped down the walls onto the floor again.

For a long moment they simply sat, breathing heavily, as the ship gently rocked on the water. All around them, in every direction, was open sea. A few torn wisps of cloud drifted afar off near the horizon.

“All right,” said Grandma. “We’re alive and safe. We’ve still got to do something about the Earth’s sun. What kind of shape is the ship in? Can we fly it? Can we wake up these Shamans?”

Gwen tapped a Shaman gingerly. It didn’t respond.

“That probably means the danger isn’t over,” said Srini.

“See what you can do about flying this ship, Srini,” said Azzie. “I get the feeling that we’ve got to get out of here.”

Srini began examining the console.

“What’s that?” asked Ngoc, pointing out the window.

Azzie turned with a feeling of foreboding. What now?

All around the 360 degrees of vision afforded by the windows, the ocean horizon was absolutely flat. Except in one place. There, the ocean rose up, like a mountain of water in the far, far distance. The mountain was incredibly wide at the base, and swept up to a perfect point at the top. The bright yellow sun hung directly over the mountain, as if the water were reaching up for it. Somewhat smaller and dimmer, off to the right, was the other sun, Earth’s sun.

“I have no idea what that is,” said Azzie.

“It looks bad,” said Gwen. “Very bad.”

“Srini,” said Azzie, “can this thing still fly?”

Srini looked worried. “A bunch of lights are on,” she said. “I think – I think maybe.”

“Great!” said Grandma. “Take off! Take off!”

Srini punched at the console. The ship’s rockets lifted them from the water, creating a boiling froth under them. Gwen and Ngoc cheered. The ocean dropped away, and in a few seconds, it was far below.

Now they could see the water-mountain more clearly. They were maybe ten miles high over the ocean, and could see the landscape of the sky sheet stretching out in every direction below them; and the water-mountain loomed over it all. It was truly huge -- the size of many Earths -- a tremendous perfect cone. It only cast a shadow from Earth’s sun, because the sky sheet’s sun hung directly over it. Clouds of steam rose from the water where it reached out of the atmosphere of the sky sheet. It was as if the ocean were reaching out an arm to grasp at the sun. And the sun -- it became clear as the ship rose higher and higher -- the sun was dropping toward the sea mountain.

“Great Vishnu,” breathed Srini. “I know what that is. It’s our tin can.”

“I have to say it don’t look much like a tin can to me,” said Grandma.

“No, no, I mean, it’s the tin can from this ship – the power source that the Shamans warned us not to shoot. When Preimo released it from its housing, he must have allowed it to get heavier and heavier, just like the one we released from the Warriors’ ship that first day...”

“So what’s that mountain doing?” asked Gwen.

“The tin can must have an incredibly huge mass by now. Its gravitational field is enough to pull up a mountain of water from the sky sheet, and it’s pulling the sun down as well.”

“What will happen when the water meets the sun?” whispered Azzie.

“It’s going to be bad,” said Srini. “Bad for all the Warriors on that sheet.”

Azzie felt sick. They just destroyed the million-year-old City of Warriors. And now they were about to destroy the sky sheet, too?

“But surely there are safeguards against this kind of thing,” she said. “Surely there have to be ways to keep the suns from hitting the sky sheet.”

“Probably,” said Srini. Her eyes were locked on the windows. “But with the City destroyed, maybe their safety systems aren’t all working properly -- people not at their posts, automatic systems gone haywire...”

“Horatio’s Ghost,” said Grandma. Azzie tried to close her eyes against the sight. But she couldn’t look away.

Their ship was rising as fast now; they were already so high that the continents and oceans below were fading together into a uniform turquoise. They were as high as the top of the mountain of water, sheathed in steam. The sun hung just over it, and the mist and the water glittered and shone like snow in the sunshine.

Then abruptly the entire mountain burst into flame. All along its length it blazed white-hot, and tentacles of plasma reached out across the sky sheet. At its base, the turquoise surface boiled and fumed, fusing and burning like paper lit with a match. In less than a minute, the mountain was gone; and the sky sheet was punctured with a huge jagged hole, edged with fire. As they watched, the circle of fire grew and grew, consuming the sky sheet as it went. Here at the center, the yellow sun drifted further away, continuing on its new course. The Earth’s sun hung nearby.

“Will it all burn away?” whispered Gwen.

“I don’t know,” said Srini. “Probably not. But all the Warriors – they would have been on that part closest to the sun. They’re...”

“Just like that,” said Azzie. “First the City, and now the sky sheet.” She felt numb. She could not bring herself to imagine so many deaths.

“Are there any Warriors left?” said Gwen softly.

“Not many,” said a Shaman. Azzie turned to see that the five of them had unrolled, and were watching the sky sheet burn away.

“So, the danger’s over?” asked Grandma.

“Yes,” said a Shaman. “Our ship will be returning for us soon.”

“Good, good,” said Grandma. “And what will happen to us?”

“According to inter-species law,” said the Shaman, “we should return you to the Warriors. Under the circumstances, however... we will simply return you to your planet. If you wish.”

“What about the Earth?” demanded Srini. “It’s still freezing in its toy universe. Can you fix that?”

“Of course,” said the Shaman. “We cannot bring the Earth back into the larger universe, since it would still be in danger from the remnants of the sky sheet. But we can put the sun back into the smaller universe.” The Shaman gestured with a tentacle.

Now Azzie could see something that looked like a tremendous gossamer gauze flung over the sun, glinting as though made of spun silver. It was slowly forming a huge sphere around the sun.

“What is that?” asked Srini.

“It is a very strong compression field,” said the Shaman. “Useful for pinching spacetime.”

The gauze enclosed the sun, and then began to contract, like a balloon losing air. As it did so, the sun seemed to shrink with it, until at last the sun disappeared. The gauze vanished as well. With the sun’s light gone, and the other star passed behind the tattered sky sheet, the sky became almost utterly dark. Only the faint swirls of distant galaxies lit the control room.

“Take me home,” said Azzie.