Evening: Ngintaka

A few dozen of us live in the Twilight — those who want to survive. For me, living under the light of a real (if gray) sun is better than where I spent most of my life. Though sometimes I do miss what’s left of the stars.

I never lived on Earth but I try spelunking genetic memory. I fail but I’m not alone. Even those old enough (what a useless phrase!) to have known a birthworld have suffered fractures in their deepest memories as jagged as the rest of the universe.

Take me there, the kids whisper from the peak. Not to Earth but to the Spinners we watch in the less-than-day. Some think the Spinners sliced us apart &mdash they’re always quick to blame others for our losses. But our minds split long before. I want to see them. Do they hurt to touch?

No, my companion Matthew says suddenly, the first he’s spoken all day. They don’t hurt. They feel like something else. Then he carefully removes his sandals and goes for another walk.

Just a few years ago, when I was a boy and at least the children were still hopeful, we’d never have considered Ngintaka a new home. It’s an ugly, lumpy planet with one side forever facing its sun. Sunward it bakes and nothing lives, starward it’s frozen. Then there’s Twilight, the narrow gray band between the oven and the ice where an anemic sort of life becomes possible.

From space the green strips along the rivers look thinner than thread; they don’t show much broader on the surface either. By the time Casimir found Ngintaka &mdash Twilight all but hidden &mdash no one had spotted a planet since my earliest memories, and what few faculties we’d left Earth with were long crumbling. Some of us, like me, thought we’d finally better stop awhile on our two-billion year long flight and settle on real dirt before we tipped over into jolly insane.

Such as it is. I remember thinking that about Twilight. But I was nearly the first person to try putting down roots there and tending my stunted crops. What finally settled those of us here was the wild thought that the Dendri would never look for us on a planet so hardscrabble.

Humans are proud, humans are spoiled, they’d say on the latest leg of their eternal hunt. Humans would never stoop to living on this world.

So they would think. According to some. I’d never met a Dendri. No one of my generation on Casimir had. That’s just the legend. But refugee farmers who get barely enough to feed their families in good harvests don’t have time for legends.

Hannah was my only love. Hannah was afraid. She wanted kids but figured she’d have to sacrifice them someday to the Dendri, or that they’d grow stunted like all the plants in the Twilight. She bore my children. But we never married and she moved back to Casimir even before they renamed it, and she’s still up there on that unmoving dot in the sky, terrified like the rest to disembark but terrified to break orbit and keep running.

Sundown: The Spinners

Casimir was cobbled together from new and bastardized junk in the wide protected spaces of Arnhem Land, Northern Territory in old Australia. They were always careful, secret, our ancestors. The invisible watchers were apt to appear from anywhere at any time. They hated our ZIP technology. Using it meant 50/50 odds you’d get attacked. If you didn’t get hit right away you were fine, so most people never switched their ZIPs off.

ZIP: Zero Point Energy. The last and only energy produced by atoms at Absolute Zero when even chaos should be frozen.

Casimir’s ZIP engine was the hardest tool to slap together but mandatory. Otherwise the moon was still a frigid three-day trip. With it your only barrier was light speed. It powered the engines, force fields, life support, it generated food and water, it was life. ZIP engineers and mechanics were royalty. And thousands using ZIP engines had short life spans.

I didn’t say we engineers knew how it worked, just that we made it work. We had a propulsion system built on theory rather than fact, probability rather than certainty. No one knew how to test the theories &mdash or if they did the Dendri kept them hushed.

Time and again I read the surviving notes of Dr. Thomas Alton, my namesake and one of the discovers of ZIP tech, and the man who learned about the Dendri &mdash including their name &mdash and took most of their secrets to his grave. The Dendri attack that killed him burned most of his notes too; not much left but the name DENDRI and a margin scrawl stating “not from space”. Rumors bounced that his notes were backed up somewhere, but the soldiers combing his house later said they found nothing. Sometimes I read over what’s left, or even recopy them on paper I make with reeds from the riverbanks, but it’s only brain play. They’re too fragmented to hope for recovery.

Casimir reached into the quantum foam and grabbed a fistful of power that flung us away from Earth at the lion’s share of light speed for three cramped and claustrophobic and fearful human generations, so far and so long we lost the Milky Way and more than half the stars are dead.

After the kids are tucked in, Davyd and Matthew and I are fishing on the Bando &mdash a broad and shallow river too thick to drink, too thin to plow &mdash lounging under what we named the Coolabah trees. Ngintaka’s fish happily impale themselves on our hooks. Before us they were the top of Twilight’s food chain, aside from the Sand Sharks who manage to ignore the most obvious hooks.

Settling on Ngintaka only added to generations of redundant conversations: Storm front coming, keep the barn locked tight is a new one. How’s the wheat? is always popular. Damn flood brought more salt into my field. Matters of keeping alive. When survival isn’t a question we arc back to the talks shipside. Tonight’s a Casimir talk.

“How long do you figure we traveled, Thomas?” Davyd asks.

I shrug as I always shrug and say, “Two billion years.” Sixty-eight years shipside; Earthside, thanks to relativity, two eons. Earth may not even be there anymore. Most think it isn’t. Then again, most of us assume the worst about everything.

“I just don’t know,” Davyd says as he always says. He looks up at the Spinners; from my four-thousand acre station under the atmospheric dust they look, I'm told, like Sirius did from Earth, flashing neurotic psychedelia, all nine of them. But up close...

Davyd looks away fast and adds, “We can’t find the Milky Way and there’s more black in the sky than stars, but the universe wouldn’t age so much after two billion years. I think we went a lot farther.”

Davyd still lives on Casimir, renamed Arnhem Outstation like it was some kind of terrestrial colony just waltzing around the stellar corner from Sol. So he’s an ear-basher. Twilight’s air is thin; residents economize even speech. “Maybe,” I say. Stunted growth.

We’ve got a nice festive corroboree going. Matthew even drew himself a spiral to sit on while hooking the fish. He doesn’t talk much, but never did for all that. He thinks important things rather than says them, something he says his family always did even before the British forced them into schools and work camps when they refused to flee into the bush. If we’re supposed to know what he’s thinking we’ll hear him. He’s barefoot and smiling to himself while bobbing his fishing rod.

“Word is Hoffer’s back to studying the Spinners,” Davyd bashes our ears some more. I don’t respond so he continues, “I know, everyone says if you look at the Spinners too long you’ll go crazy. Hoffer says he doesn’t have to worry; he’s already ticked.” His chuckle’s a nervous, guilty little noise. “He thinks they’re really smaller than atoms. A lot smaller. Size of a quark, maybe.”

I look at him for the first time in an hour. “How? We saw them from light years away.”

“Spinners punch out as much light as a star, Hoffer doesn’t reckon how just yet. Another thing &mdash they act like pulsars, but pulsars emit EM based on the harmonics of their pulses. The Spinners don’t seem to care about harmonics at all. And they keep changing what they emit. Now it’s radio, now it’s X-ray, sometimes it’s everything all at once.”

My thoughts are already swinging to where if I can’t eat it and it doesn’t protect me from storms, I’m not interested.

“Hoffer’s airy-fairy,” I tell him. “We didn’t even know how far the stars really were till we got spaceside. Now you yank me about Hoffer reckoning what Spinners are?”

Davyd reddens. “I didn’t say he knew, just he was studying them again. Why do you have to always be so damn hard-headed? Must be this bloody thin air. And no grog.”

“The Spinners are the last stop,” Matthew says. “Casimir’s got to the end of its walkabout.”

“Pretty of you to say,” Davyd says.

“There’s life sunside.”

I gape. “No way. Our scanners never found anything.”

“They wouldn’t find this, Thomas, not this. This followed me from Arnhem.” He means old Australia, not the ship.

“A Dendri?” Davyd said. I go cold; was I wrong to doubt them all my life? Were the fearful afraid for good reason?

“Whowie,” Matthew says. “Twenty feet long, six legs. Head and tail of a frog and eats anything gets in his way.”

“You’re yanking me.”

He showed us a long, fresh scar on his left arm. “Tried to chomp my arm first. I thought I’d have to let him have it for the rest of me to get away, you know? But he didn’t chase me.”

“Where’d you see it?” I asked.

“Two-hundred klicks west.”

“Now I know you’re yanking us.” It was too hot that far out.

He laughed. “There are ways. There’s food and water and lots of shade.”

“Shade. For two-hundred degrees. And water...”

The back of my skull tickles. I feel Matthew’s thoughts crawl over my head but I must not be worthy yet to know what he’s saying, since I don’t hear anything. He smiles faintly and dips his feet in the river and hums.

They fled Australia together, the whites and Aboriginals and some Asians and Pacific Islanders, all crammed in a ship the size of a skyscraper the Dendri missed somehow, and flew out of the solar system in days as it accelerated to c faster than it should have.

The Aboriginals and Islanders stowed along to protect the folk who had more of a “technological heritage” than they. Not that the Aboriginals and Islanders were primitive by Western standards anymore. They had their jeans and TVs and whatnot, but usually the Dendri left them alone. No one knew why.

By the time Casimir was launch-ready there was a superstition that Dendri would never attack the descendents of “modern Stone Age” peoples, so a few, like Matthew’s great-grandparents, volunteered as safeguards. Funny thing was the whites and some Asians still treated them like and assumed that they were there to serve.

The “primitive folks” would consider that and laugh.

No one thinks down on them outwardly now, though they still treat the Aboriginals like it sometimes. Those staying shipside teased Matthew when he announced he and his family were moving planetside. “It’s a big desert just like home, ain’t it? Maybe there’s a big rock you can name &mdash whaddaya call it? &mdash Uluru?”

“No,” Matthew said, himself a Yonglu from Arnhem Land. “Uluru is not here. Not on Earth anymore either.” It’d be a long bit before I reckoned what he meant.

Matthew knew I never thought down on him. We’d known each other practically from the nursery. He decided to settle on Ngintaka even before I did and put down his station next to my spread. Planetside with us he still wears sandals with his cotton shirts and denim pants — always sandals, since he wants his feet to breathe and he could take sandals off quickly if he’s got to walk somewhere. And when he’s not planting or harvesting or slaughtering, he’s walking.

“My family were Shark Dreamers,” he told me when we were squirts. “They shared dreams with sharks and made the sharks come to them. Now no sharks so they’re not sure who to dream with.”

Don’t let the name fool you. Sand Sharks aren’t sharks but they do eat relentlessly, on land or water. Give me a great white or oceanic whitetip over those monsters any day.

“When my family dreams,” Matthew says, “they ask for new companions.”

I was always grateful Matthew Yunupingu settled early on for me as a waking companion. Matthew is just his Balanda name. One of my first memories is him confiding one of his Yonglu personal names to me: Mandawuy. Sometimes I still call him that.

Casimir had wandered through space for less than a year when Earth winked out.

One day the world was there, the next day nope. The ship mood was never happy to begin with &mdash they weren’t just fleeing the Dendri but also the martial law and crushing governments that shot up after the first attack — but forever after they were smothered in mourning. Most thought the Dendri destroyed Earth; though not everyone figured it the same way.

My great-grandparents were skeptics. The Dendri hadn’t been, really, more powerful than us &mdash supposedly they used the same weapons we did &mdash but they were terrifying because they always came out of nowhere. Yet my ancestors pointed out several stars were also vanished, something well beyond what they thought the Dendri could pull off. And these were stars with nary an inhabitable world, so no threat.

But without alternatives the stellar deaths were blamed on the Dendri, like most everything found to be out of order. If my great-grandparents hadn’t been ZIP engineers they would’ve been murdered along with all the others who tried to relieve the passengers’ fears and paranoia.

The longer Casimir traveled the sparser the universe became. After ten shipside years every known star winked out. Blamed on the Dendri &mdash though speculation about the new stars was squashed by the Council. It was like the universe was rewriting itself around us.

The ship was never meant to travel so far and long, but &mdash if a torque generator broke, it was the Dendri’s fault. Hairline cracks in the converters &mdash Dendri trying to stop us. Nothing was ever human foul-ups. No matter that we never saw Dendri. We kept running and the Council kept telling us what we should be afraid of and so whenever we detected a habitable planet we were too afraid to stop and poke about, always too afraid to settle.

Stopping became a moot point over the last fifteen years of our sixty-eight year waltz; we found no habitable planets. Till Ngintaka. We stopped cause the rest of the engineers and I shut down all our work. If we hadn’t been engineers our strike would have been our last toss.

A few of us shipside were game to risk settling in the Twilight. We promised (with our fingers crossed behind our backs as our grandparents might put it) to come back if Casimir &mdash Arnhem Outstation &mdash signaled us. Now I’m watching the ship flashing in the sky when a barefoot Matthew puts his hand on my shoulder.

The ship flashes again. I can almost hear it roaring.

“You going?” Matthew asks. “Still got your upper hundred of wheat to bring in.”

“Nah. Like you say, too much work.”

He rubs his hands as if chilly and stares at me for awhile. “Bad dreams.”

“Like what?”

“Not me &mdash you. That’s not a signal from them, the flashing, is it?”

“Nope. Not a signal.”

On my own, even missing Hannah, I wouldn’t have gone back. I could’ve stuck with Twilightside forever. It was Davyd, flying down in a scorched shuttle with a face full of scars and panic, who convinced me to go back to the ship for the first time in a year.

We’d almost missed Ngintaka; Spinner light hid it.

We actually found the Spinners first and worried they were massive alien outposts or signal stations the way pulsars were once thought to be. They look big as stars but their mass is unreadable. Like pulsars they’re madly whirling tops of the cosmos and seem to exist for no other reason than the fact that they do.

Some broadcast radio signals &mdash in shortwave, for all that. Others X-rays, or ultraviolet or infrared, some microwave &mdash every EM wave you can imagine. But like Davyd reminded me, they’re never consistent.

Their oddest bit is redshifting. It was only after humans started filling space — escaping &mdash when we learned to our crank that the free-floating hydrogen molecules — H₂ &mdash filling up the universe alter the properties of redshifted light. The stars were still no closer to us than they we thought, but some we calculated to be all kinds of light years apart were next door to each other. Stars with inhabitable planets we thought were our neighbors proved unforgivingly far away. The Casimir refugees imagined the Dendri laughing at us as we flung ourselves blindly into space.

Spinners give off redshifted light, skewing the readings of everything around us too. Even though they aren’t moving.

Arnhem Outstation seems okay from a distance, but close up it looks like wreckage.

The population’s likely still alive, mostly. There’s self-sealing cabins and bulkheads, and every room’s filled with emergency supplies and miniature sustenance generators. Still, I’m glad my kids are planetside. I imagine people huddling in corners, blasting at shadows and creaky walls. I’m not much ashamed to say I feel nothing for them.

Davyd’s not doing well. Drained face, hands shaking on the throttle but he sails us smoothly through the bridge dock, where the Council waits.

“Professor Kinder,” the President greets me, ignoring Matthew. “The Dendri have found us. Follow us to the bridge.”

I stay flat-faced. The Dendri “found” us whenever anything went foul. But this time something catastrophic tried its best to tear the ship apart. Why not the Dendri, even two billion years (or more) after they attacked Earth?

The legends said the Dendri attacks started with a translucent undulating wall of energy moving forward swiftly and relentlessly, smashing anything in its path, unstoppable though sparing organics. Less than a third of the way to the bridge the alarms sound and the first Dendri wall I’ve ever seen slams into me.

A few seconds after I hit the steel-plated deck, Matthew and I are fishing on the Bando under the light of the Spinners.

“You’re a hard mate to find,” Matthew scolds me. “Tonight I’m a Tommy Dreamer.”

I glance up because I notice stars &mdash something you never see Twilightside. They’re blinking off and new ones blink on as if a black aurora is rippling through the sky.

When I see Earth all clear and blue and bright enough to break through the Twilight I drop my fishing rod and reach for it. I blink and it’s gone.

I blink again and it’s back. Changed, slightly, though I’m not sure how.

“I’ve talked to the Spinners,” Matthew tells me.

I’m still reaching for Earth: blink, gone; blink, back, changed.

“They’re sentient?” I ask.

“No. But doesn’t mean they don’t want to talk to us.”

I blink a dozen more times and the stars rewrite themselves and I figure out every time Earth reappears the continents have shuffled a little.

“Actually,” Matthew continues, “not being sentient makes them want to talk to us more.”

The Earth eventually fixes in place and I realize I’ve peeked at the tectonic movements of two billion years. The continents my grand-grandparents knew are long crushed into another supercontinent teeming with incredible menageries I couldn’t dream about.

I curse my great-grandparents for quitting Earth. “What the devil are Spinners then?” I ask, wanting to grab a handful of riverbank and throw it at the now-frozen stars.

“Philosophers.”

Generations of futility and iron fists inside a too finite steel ship crush me. Sixty-eight years of running exhaust me. “Nick off,” I tell him. “Don’t yank me. Not now.”

“No yank,” he says. His eyes follow his fishing line down to the water. “You and me believe in different gods, you know? So lets not talk about gods. Let’s talk about spirits. All the universe is spirits, spirits fill it, and everywhere the spirits have got religion. They worship the universe and their worship creates it over and over again. See? But philosophers, they want religion without God, without worship. Humanist religion. Deities of reason. The Spinners &mdash they’re philosophers.”

I see the dirt wave rolling up behind and reckon too late that I got no rifle. Sand Sharks are nasty behemoths, their skin the grays and browns of dead soil. They pick up the slightest vibrations in earth and water since their eyes are black and blind.

“Knew I couldn’t talk long,” Matthew says. “They want to talk to you. No worries.”

It ruptures the earth and fangs me into its belly and I wake up on a shuttle hurtling through space toward a hundred shining doors, all wide open.

“We fly blind like Casimir,” Matthew says. “All your Moiety showing up at once. Turn on the ZIP engines and you pull open a million places you can go and boom!, you go through one without knowing where you go, because you don’t even know you go through. Earth isn’t just two billion years behind us &mdash we’re in a place where the Milky Way didn’t exist to begin with.”

“Which door?” I scream as we plummet toward them. He doesn’t answer. “Matthew?” Only then I realize he’s shirtless and a red shark filled with jagged stripes is painted across his chest: the picture of his family.

I call him by the only Yolngu name I ever knew for him. “Mandawuy, which door?”

“Don’t know. Maybe all of them. Maybe you turn around and go back. Hooroo,” he says, and I’m on the bridge of Arnhem Outstation with a bloody rag around my head and the steel-plate floor rumbling beneath me.

Nightfall: Dendri

“Primary engines,” I hear Captain Prescott say.

Silence; I assume they’re damaged or offline. Then, “Kinder’s awake,” and the captain’s gazing down at me with genuine concern, not just cause I’m an engineer.

I stand unsteadily and run into a containment field. Prescott snaps to one of his officers, “Take this field down.”

“But sir, the President said—”

“I ordered you to drop containment, lieutenant.”

I stumble into yielding air and Prescott catches me. “You’re trying to start the engines?” I ask. Break orbit? “Without signaling me first?”

Prescott’s stare is grayer than the Twilight. “Did you want us to signal you, Tommy?”

It’s tough to breathe. My lungs knockabout with too much: too much air, too much oxygen.

Prescott, son and grandson of Casimir captains, looks to be deciding something but we hear “Council on the bridge!” and then the President, son of a Casimir President, is glaring at me. I remember that glare. Same one he wore when I told him I’d move planetside and take no ZIP generators with me, I’d build and sow and reap with my own hands.

“Why is this man out of containment?” the President demands.

“We need his help with the engines,” Prescott tells him evenly. “He can’t work from a cell.”

“There may be biological agents&mdash”

“He was already scanned,” the captain says, giving me a sidelong look letting me know they did no such thing. “Mister President, it is my belief that in order for Professor Kinder to be of greatest use to us, he must be informed of the—”

“The decision is made. Especially considering the circumstances.”

Prescott’s eyes narrow and his voice broadens. “Circumstances, sir? The latest Dendri attack proves we must share—”

Then the President’s in my face. “Thomas Kinder, the Council has determined you to be an enemy combatant. Your actions when we took orbit around Ngintaka—”

“Actions!” Prescott explodes. “If he and the other engineers hadn’t forced us to stop Casimir—”

“Arnhem Outstation.”

“—and study the Spinners, we might never have learned to communicate—”

“That’s too much, captain. Be careful you don’t reveal classified information or the Council may be forced to deliberate on your patriotism as well. You would be much harder to replace.”

Prescott stiffens. “I demand to see proof of Professor Kinder’s guilt.”

I've watched the exchange like I’m still stuck in a hazy containment field forbidding speech and movement. “Take battle cover,” the President orders as he pushes a button. The buzz of the field returns and fire sears into me like to shred my bones and tear out my nerves, burning through every dendron to blow up every cell from the inside out...

I never hear words over my screams but I see them just like the legends said: invisible but for their outlines, the barest glimpses of faces if you only look at them from the sides of your eyes, and then they look human, but all the exact same size and shape... They open fire on the bridge with pulse pistols and bullets, the same weapons we use, but most of their fire is absorbed by shields. Two of the bridge crew are hit but the Dendri are down in just a few seconds.

Behind the bulkhead where the President and the captain took cover I see the President fire point blank at Prescott. And the President sees me see.

The shields drop and the fire in my body ends without leaving so much as a scar. The legends also warned us Dendri bodies disappear and they do. Someone is shouting for a medic for the captain, whose uniform has a gaping hole in the chest.

The President was florid and stomped over to me. “Enemy combatant!” he shouted, then twice more. “When we threatened you, the Dendri came to save you! You and everyone else who deserted us for Ngintaka is legally an enemy now. Take him to the bridge dock!”

I’m in no state to resist but they headlock and drag me anyway. Prescott’s body is the last thing I see before they force me into a blind-shielded space suit and blow me out the airlock.

Vaguely I hear my funeral over my suit com. Most of Casimir is still religious and the last rites are one law even the President is afraid to break, especially for a man spaced without trial.

The com crackles and another voice: “... Hear ... Tommy? Too much burden...”

“Who?” I ask, but already know it’s a voice from the dead.

“Alton’s notes...” Prescott is whispering. “All ... hidden...” A pause. “Dendri.” The next pause on the still-open line doesn’t end.

The warning chime means I’m left five minutes of oxygen. Behind me I can almost hear the Spinners sing new notes with every pulse sailing effortlessly through my bones and nerves and brain cells, probing, tapping, questioning and picking apart to carefully put back together. Their hands are bright while gently removing my helmet’s blinder and I see a universe full of stars for the first time in years.

Arnhem Outstation is a broken black caterpillar hanging crooked in the sky. Occasionally it sparks with fires or repair, hard to tell which. Lights are on the bridge and movement, then I’m swallowed by Spinner light.

The Spinner’s pulsing doesn’t whack my eyes. I reach to touch it like I tried with Earth and my hand glows but my suit scanners register the Spinners as the median of nothing. Not energy, not matter, but some state in between. Age beyond what my scanners can read, and they can read in the billions of years, back to the Beginning. The Spinners must’ve been born from the circumstances of those first few microseconds &mdash or they may even have been part of the birth itself. All spirits of the universe are religious, Mandawuy reminds me. The Spinners are the philosophers. Deities of reason.

“Tell me a story,” my Aboriginal companion says while we’re fishing. “Tell me about you.”

I toss out my line again. “You already know everything about me.”

“Tell me about you, Thomas Kinder.”

I reel in: the hook’s empty. “Here’s a better idea. Tell me about you.”

Big smile. “Okay. Everywhere in the universe is the clay to create life. Everywhere is the light to see life born. These have always been and always will be.”

I get it via the ex nihilo knowledge always tagging along with dreams: “Hydrogen molecules and electromagnetic energy.”

Mandawuy points to the Spinners. “The universe had to make life to be born. The universe dreams itself, Tommy, in and out of multiple creations, which is itself, and in and out of time, which it’s got no use for. You look at the Spinners and see redshift, you always running away from time. I look and I listen to their songs and I see blueshift, bringing time to me.”

He folds his hand across a Spinner’s cheek. “You think you run away, but everything you think and everything you do flows back from all streams and breaths of wind back into you. The faster you run, the faster they flow.” His gaze soars back to the sky. “The universe can only be born and survive by giving back as much as it takes. It’s a gift but most don’t see it this way. They don’t see all the branches coming back to their own roots. But the universe needs dreams, and the Spinners help it dream every dream it needs.”

“Are they alive?”

“Everything’s alive. They read your dreams and dream with you.”

“Electromagnetic energy,” I realize. “They read ours and then give it back mixed with a bit of their own. Then if they’re the cause of the Dendri...” Not right. The Dendri are born of quantum reality. The reality that still exists even at Absolute Zero, the Zero Point. The Dendri are&mdash

“Every dream given back.” Matthew’s checking on me over his shoulder. We’re raked by the ship’s blaster fire and buckles are the only thing keeping me from getting hurled against the roof as we spiral into atmosphere.

“Hold on mates, it only gets rougher from here,” Davyd warns and throttles the stick down so hard I can almost see the column cracking.

“The ship’s done with us,” Matthew assures him. “Now they’ve seen Dendri for themselves so they don’t care what happens to us. They’ll run again.”

“Not Dendri,” I whisper. “Dendrites.”

The ship only waited until we made landfall, if they were waiting at all. Arnhem Outstation transformed back into Casimir but never moved. In a single blink it was simply gone. This time, though, the stars didn’t rearrange themselves, and Earth never reappeared, though I caught myself hoping.

Day and Night Along the River

“It ain’t just survival, mates,” Davyd has just now figured out. “It’s good times, too.”

Matthew and I started fishing to supplement our sparse harvests, but the Bando became the forum of our best corroborees. Though he still insists I’d hear more of our conversations if I’d go on walkabout with him. He also promises he’ll never go farther sunside again — not with the Whowie hungry and guarding the border between sun and Twilight, eager for him to come back.

“Then again, maybe I just dreamed it,” Matthew says.

“Awfully big scar the dream left you,” Davyd says, but he still doesn’t understand. He will once he watches the Spinners long enough. They’re still listening to us for all that.

“Bloody hell,” he mutters. “I finished reading Alton’s notes. Why didn’t we think of that before?”

“Cause we never stopped and restarted the engines before.”

“The saps’d rather people get killed than give up ZIP tech. I’d never even heard of dendrites.”

“Just an analogy,” I tell him again. “Mess around with the quantum foam and you never know what’ll pop out. ZIP fuels every reality and channels it back to those taking from it — us &mdash like impulses shooting along dendrites from nerves to cells.”

“We were fighting ourselves, weren’t we? Just other versions defending themselves when we saw them and attacked. To them we were Dendri. But why didn’t they almost ever attack Aboriginals or Islanders?”

“Our thoughts are straight,” Matthew says. “We know what we’re thinking. Yours needs roots. They’re all chaos.”

“Not when I’m fishing,” Davyd protests.

It isn’t till now I realize who the Dendri were that attacked when the President tortured me: through the fringes of my dreams I see each one’s got my face. “Council reckoned I’d found the way out,” Davyd kept talking. He’d learn economy soon enough. “Just my lark, really &mdash if this Spinner is sending out a radio signal on this-and-such frequency, why not signal back the same way? Pretty soon we got them in line with our signals and the President figured that was the ticket out.”

I remember Casimir blinking out of existence and I don’t speculate whether or not he was right. I miss Hannah, but I’m thankful again our children were planetside.

In the Twilight the sky is always gray but seems to have gotten more luminous, not bright but not dreary. And I know I sound loony but I’d swear with blood I can occasionally see stars, and more of them than I ever saw from Arnhem Outstation. Matthew says we’ve hit the end of the universe and’ve decided to start traveling backward. “Redshift Dreamer” he calls me. Dreaming time while it’s trying to flee, pulling it back and making it obey me as his family once called the sharks.

Matthew says he’s a Dreamer again, too. He hasn’t told me what kind, but promises if I go on walkabout with him he’ll tell me that too.

©2007, Danny Adams