Dark Planet: The Sorrows of Your Changing Face

The Sorrows of Your Changing Face by Brian A.
Hopkins

Mark is an artist and astronomer who lives and works in Sussex, England.
Brian is an electronics engineer who lives near Oklahoma City. His stories have appeared in Dragon Magazine, Adventures of Sword and Sorcery, and many small-press publications. This story originally appeared in Aboriginal SF.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

-- William Butler Yeats

There are gates on Earth, thousands of them, but it's to the original gate that Chandra Ben Warthen returns. The gate at Copernicus. On Luna.

A quarter million miles away, the blue-green marble of his homeworld spins against a dark crawling with stars and otherness. Shrouded in purged white waves of cumulus, it's not the same Earth he left fourteen months (thirty-eight years?) ago. But then, it never is.

Always changing. The face of a mother from whom he's been gone too long. Older. Wiser. The both of them.

Warthen has no intention of going downworld. He'll stay in Sol System no longer than he has to. Not because the dark beckons so loudly, rather that the past whispers so softly. For that reason he chooses the forsaken lunar gate. Here there'll be no one waiting. And no one not waiting.

Copernicus Gate stands apart from the surrounding complex -- as it did four hundred and eighty years ago (realtime) when he first stepped through. Those first years there was a great deal of nervous uncertainty about the gates: speculation that one might blow at any moment, taking half a world in the blink of an eye to deposit it in some far galaxy; fear that something might one day step through. So they installed the first gate a safe distance away on Earth's moon. It stands there yet, a tall silent monolith, somewhat remote from the melee of abandoned rocket pads and scattered laboratories, the pitted saurian hulks of mining and transportation vehicles, and the long rails of the mass driver. The gate's mate was placed in geosynchronous Earth orbit, an unnerving threshold across which Warthen had been the first to step. Afterwards they moved the orbital gate -- time and the hundred gates he's opened since fog his memory of where -- and the vast network began.

Twinning the technologists called it back then, hinting at the gate's creation of a traveler's exact duplicate, skirting questions about the destruction of the original. For decades the debates, scientific, social, and theological, raged. Eventually those who knew a time before the gates grew old and tired, died, and were replaced by generations who knew no other mode of travel. A few splinter groups remained, the Contra-technos, the Originists, but world opinion was driven by youngsters with their eyes on the stars. Reckless children accepted the gates as just another daily technological tool. Forgotten were the versions of themselves destroyed every time they stepped through.

Struggling to recall a suitable stride for lunar gravity, Warthen hop walks past the launching stage where forty pound packages of plagioclase, anorthosite, ilmenite and other ore were once wrapped in lunar silica and hurled over the horizon. At an escape velocity of a mile and a half per second, the packages would slip in a graceful, gravity-induced arc to a point forty thousand miles above the lunar far side where they were intercepted. Luna's resources were used to build Earth Station, that graceful lady spinning brighter than any star in a halo orbit about the L4 point. Long before the station was complete, however, the gates rendered the mass driver obsolete. Copernicus soon became the stellar equivalent of a ghost town. But it was the lunar colony that first started the station, the station that built the ships which hauled the gates, and the gates which opened the stars to mankind.

The rails of the mass driver appear to meet in the distance, there in the shadow of the Copernican rim. He knows it's a lie, an illusion. No matter how far or how fast you run, you never catch your twin. It paces, always just out of reach, mocking with reminders of wrong choices, broken promises, and petty betrayals, whispering of all the things you're missing.

Around the domed power plant, through the long bays of rust-hued hydrox electrolyzers, and up a pock-marked path -- an intrepid explorer wrapped in a shimmering cloak of composite particles -- Warthen makes his way to Port Authority.
* * *

Color shifts near the speed of light: photic aberrations as doppler effect works its magic, the stark blue-white of stars clustered in the center of the viewport and the distorted radiance of those shifting towards the periphery . . . all seen through his own diaphanous reflection. Terror, awe, sorrow and regret -- he's watched his emotions play like theater across a face superimposed over stars.

Time dilates. Einstein's ancient E=mc². Measured reality attenuates and mass increases -- but only to the stationary observer. For Chandra Ben Warthen, slipping silent through the long dark night, one set of measurements is as real as any other. He's a ghost outside time's domain, running in a hyper-reality where everything (and everyone) he's left behind accelerates in a mad dance. Days, months, years, even decades, they are no more than words. Time is anything he chooses it to be.

Yet, heartache and sorrow remain immeasurable constants, bittersweet companions across the vast emptiness between suns. He cannot forget the gentle curve of her smile, the shifting colors in the depths of her eyes, the supple lines of her face. Sometimes it's Letha's face he sees reflected in the viewport. The stars behind that painful visage seem to shift and lose their place. At those times he can do no more than rage and weep, locked within his throbbing confine of steel, hurtling toward a star that mankind will one day visit -- once he's opened a gateway.

In her frenzied dance, even at the speed relativity relates it to him, Letha has a lifetime to forget. He, on the other hand, remembers like it was yesterday.
* * *

When the archaic airlock completes its cycle and the inner door opens on a dim corridor, Warthen does not immediately drop his personal field. Stepping across the threshold, he looks left and right for some atmospheric clue. Only the cautious survive life in space. Warthen's principal axiom is "Take Nothing for Granted."

There's a water dispenser several meters down the left corridor. Its inverted tank is more than half full of placid fluid. Safe then. He deactivates his body field. The shimmering cloak winks out as charged particles spin away at the speed of light. A rush of cool air greets him. The air is alive with the smells of humanity. He breathes deep, near shuddering at the intimate touch of life in his lungs.

A placard advises him that the office he seeks is to the right. He arrives to find a wizened old man sleeping behind a counter. The sleeper's outdated hull boots, locked comfortably to the aluminum wall, identify him as a spacer: hull mechanic, plating specialist, any of a hundred null gee professions flooded with the unemployed.

Warthen plugs his ident into the counter's data panel. It takes a moment for the machine to assimilate his card -- personal identification has undoubtedly undergone several revisions since his card was issued. Eventually, the old man's terminal beeps as data scrolls up. He awakens with a growl.

"What d'ya want?"

"Name's Warthen. Gaterunner. I want another run." He tosses the old man a data card. "You can put that out on the nets. The Narcissan gate's open."

The boots release with an almost imperceptible click and the spacer's feet drop loudly to the floor. "Warthen, you said?" He squints at the screen.

"Just in from Narcissa." In case the old man didn't catch it the first time.

The spacer wipes at dust that's gathered on the terminal screen. Warthen realizes his caution in the ancient airlock was justified: dust in any closed environment leads eventually to systems failure, maybe even death.

He studies the data for a moment, then turns his attention to Warthen. His eyes narrow. "Chandra Ben Warthen," he whispers. In his voice Warthen hears the awe that the narrowed eyes seek to hide. "I thought you'd be much older."

Warthen jerks free his ident. "Tell them Narcissa's open. Get me another run."
* * *

There are but a handful of gaterunners who run alone. Solitary, lonely men and women, burned in one way or another by society, most are seeking to escape something or someone. Easy to get lost in time when it has so little meaning at the speed of light. Easy to forget someone when you know they'll have forgotten you, perhaps even grown old and died, in your absence.

Most gateships are family enterprises. Familiar faces to share the tedious months of boredom and the brief but spectacular wonders of a new world. Someone's hand to hold as you make that leap of faith through the new gate.

Chandra Ben Warthen has no family.

No siblings. Parents killed when he was five.

Freak accident, the transportation engineers said. Poor design was more the truth. In his mind's eye Warthen holds the image of his parents rushing forever outward, gaterunners with no destination and no scheduled return. Though gates didn't even exist when his parents were alive, it helps to think of them that way. He can almost believe that it was a discarded set of parental twins that missed turnover and slammed into a Lake Pontchartrain staging terminal at three hundred miles an hour.

The railcar had viewports, each small enough that no adult could fit through (though many tried). His father broke out the glass. While Mother screamed to hurry, weeping against Father's broad back, and the terminal, aswarm with terrified, scurrying travelers, approached at a horrifying speed, Warthen Senior held his son at arm's length and looked at him one last time. He tried to say something, "I love you" perhaps, but the words caught in his throat and big tears broke from his soft brown eyes. Then he shoved his son through the jagged remains of the port.

The wind caught the small boy and carried him up and away, slinging him far out over the lake. As long as he lives, Warthen will never forget his terror, a fear so encompassing that he didn't even feel the mortal lacerations up and down the length of his body. His blood blew on the wind like gay streamers, like the smoke trails of bygone skywriters. From that day on he would fear absolutely nothing, not even that first step from Luna to Earth orbit through the unknown dimension of the gate.

Well, that isn't entirely true. He was shaking the day he waited for Letha to join him at his gateship, terrified that she wouldn't show up. And she didn't.

Warthen died that day in New Orleans -- almost five hundred years ago. Wounds from the viewport. Impact with the lake. Drowning. A lake skimmer swept up his battered corpse, just one more piece of drifting refuse to the mechanized devourer of pollution. If an attentive dockworker hadn't spotted him when the skimmer came in for processing, Warthen would have been recycled and flushed back into the lake as base elements.

Dead at age five. Yet so long as there's a recoverable body, death ceased to be a deterrent to medical science years ago. The medtechs with their molecular restructuring computers, tiny surgeons whose operating theater is the human cell, repaired the damage and brought him back. But for his parents, splattered throughout the terminal building with the other passengers, there was no such resurrection.

Warthen recalls very little of being dead, but sometimes he dreams of an ultimate gate where a million time-phased versions of himself wait on the far side. They beckon, smiling with their identical mouths and eyes. They open their arms and call to him, but his dream lacks sound, as if it exists only in vacuum.

Still, he can read their lips. Brother, they call. Come with us, brother.

He goes to them. They embrace him. And then they rip him limb from limb and scatter him among the stars.

When he awakens from the dream, it's all he can do to keep from shutting down the ship's vast magnetic scoops, dumping the interstellar hydrogen he's caught. With no fuel and the right vector, he'll glide forever through the infinite night, as incapable of making turnover as his parents were.

He sees it as a form of suicidal immortality.
* * *

Liquor and information. Timeless commodities for sale in any port. Establishments that deal in them are never far from Port Authority ... even here.

The bar isn't much, a squat quonset hut made from a refurbished payload canister. The walls have tarnished to the color of ancient blood. There are no viewports and very little light. The bar is automated, with a drastically limited selection. Warthen is the only customer.

After he's ordered and received his drink, he turns to the table's integrated data terminal. It's a holographic setup, icon-driven. An old model. This pleases him because he knows how to use it. His ident and a time-sequenced password bring up his net account.

"Hello, old friend," he says as a grey timber wolf materializes on the tabletop. His computer totem smiles: sharp white teeth and penetrating black eyes. There's something in its mouth. "What's this?"

The wolf drops its small burden and steps back, working its mouth as if in distaste. The parcel unfurls: a tiny dove with an envelope in its beak. The dove drops the envelope and with a burst of wings is suddenly gone.

"Catch it!"

The wolf bounds off-field, but returns a few seconds later without the dove. It wags its tongue at him in a wolf laugh and its bright eyes seem to ask, "Did you think I could fly?"

"Not your fault," Warthen tells the icon. "You're just getting old." Whatever software routine the dove represents could be as much as thirty-eight years more advanced than his wolf.

He sips his drink and studies the sealed envelope . . . eventually decides to let it lay for the moment. "Image," he commands. "Letha Aries Bishop. Twenty-one sixteen A.D." And suddenly she's there beside the wolf. Warthen's heart drops to the pit of his stomach.

The terminal outdoes itself, animates her. She's all smiles and curls, bright eyes and laughter. She reaches out and strokes the wolf. Pink tongue hanging in a totally un-wolf-like expression, the icon doesn't seem to mind.

So real. He passes his hand through the miniature work of wonder. The particles controlled by the hologenerator -- not so different from his personal field generator -- are so small he doesn't even feel them as they swirl about his hand. Letha's image wavers for a second, then reforms. He notices for the first time that there's a rose in her hand. Just one. But then, that was all he'd ever given her.

"Twenty-one seventeen." The year he left.

The smiles are gone. Her shoulders hang. Her eyes are underscored with dark crescents, haunted with guilt or loss (he can't quite decide which). She's demolished the rose. Red petals lay scattered about her feet.

Wiping at his eyes, Warthen considers shutting down the terminal. This hurts more than he expected. He looks at the wolf which is lying down now, head on its paws, gazing up at Letha with eyes echoing more anguish than any subroutine should be able to generate.

"Where were you, Letha? I waited as long as I could."
* * *

Alpha Centauri. Omicron Eirdani. Eta Cassiopeiae. Barnard's Star. Sigma Draconis. Delta Pavonis. Tau Ceti. Warthen placed those stargates.

He's been closer than any man to the billowing clouds of gas and dust that veil the Orion Nebula, that stellar nursery which, at fifteen hundred light years distance, is perhaps forever out of mankind's reach. He's seen the stars of the Trapezium group at Orion's center, gleaming within a celestial cavern carved by their own intense ultraviolet radiation. He's skirted the gravitational whirlpool of a black hole, been close enough to see the accretion disk where the dark monster fed from a neighboring blue supergiant. He's been farther and lived longer than any mortal in history.

It isn't enough.

If loneliness were a color, it would be the black of deep space strained through the luminescent vectors of approaching stars. A fire streaked umbra safe behind glass. Look, but don't touch. Don't ever, ever get close enough to touch the pain. Just run. As far and as fast as you can.

A philosopher once said that suffering builds new places in the heart. But did he say, asks Warthen, what I was supposed to do with these new places, these vast empty vistas echoing her voice?

It was an eclipsing binary, Beta Lyrae, that made him think of twins and what one could accomplish by occupying two places at once. The technology of the gates was always within his grasp. Not only did he have complete technical data, he actually had a gate on which to experiment.

If Letha were twinned, one Letha could stay behind with the family and friends she couldn't bear to leave, and one could accompany him to the stars.

He was four light years out when he succeeded in modifying the gate. His redesigned and reprogrammed gate would ensure that the originating gate maintained, not destroyed, its traveler. Because he had no idea where and when Letha would step through a gate, he wrote extensive software to monitor gate users, a capture routine to seize her when she used a gate, and redirection codes to twin her at his gate. On Earth, Letha would step back from her originating gate, believing there'd been some sort of malfunction. She'd report the incident, a maintenance team would service the gate, and that would be that. No one would know about the Letha-twin on board his gateship.

Manufacturing a shipboard failure that the authorities would believe, one that would require him dropping to a speed at which the gate would function, was a simple task. This deception was necessary because gates can't transmit at relativistic speeds. At sublight speeds it's merely a matter of programming the correct equations. Basic astrogation explains how even a stationary gate such as the one at Copernicus is moving: orbiting about a star, expanding with the universe. Gates are capable of compensating for such movements. Hypervelocities are another matter.

Executing turnover and dumping velocity took another light year. Five years total -- for Letha. For him it was only a few months.

In that time Letha became an influential, key member of the Originists, sworn to forsake the technology of the gates ... lost to him forever.
* * *

"Twenty-one eighteen."

"Twenty-one nineteen."

. . . At 2122 her face changes, pain and contrition replaced with something of the Letha he'd fallen in love with. It takes but a moment to find the cause. The capture routines he initiated ages ago stored her wedding announcement. He reads it through twice, knuckles white where he grips the table.

In 2124 her daughter was born. He and the wolf examine the Letha miniature from every angle. Though hard to find, Warthen locates every genetic quality the father contributed.

2126: Her second daughter; grey beginning to cloud the dark hair at her temples; lines working out from the corners of her eyes; a fuller figure that he finds bitterly attractive.

2127: Another child, a boy. The sight of him catches in Warthen's throat. He holds his head in his hands and weeps uncontrollably for several minutes, stopping only when a new icon joins the wolf on the table top.

The gryphon folds its wings and sits beside the wolf, waiting till Warthen has wiped his eyes before it speaks. "It's good to see you, Chandra Ben Warthen."

"You too, Allister Dell Griffin. Why the icon? Afraid I won't like how you've aged?"

"Present circumstances make it impossible for me to meet you in person or transmit a realtime image, Chandra. You see, I'm dead." The snap of the gryphon's beak lends the word a terminal note of finality. "Have been for eight years now."

"Then...?"

"Computer construct. Latest fad: neural consignment and all that medtech stuff. It's still me." The gryphon ruffles its feathers and contemplates its feet. "Or at least I think it is."

"I suppose it's better than nothing," Warthen acknowledges. "Have you brought me a gate run?"

"I should fire you, Chandra. That stunt you just pulled in Port Authority is going to cause me a lot of trouble. You know there are procedures for releasing information on a newly opened gate. You don't just throw it out on the nets for --"

"Have you got me a gate or not?"

"And all that trouble you had enroute to Narcissa! I don't know what was going on out there, probably don't want to -- "

"Allister!"

The gryphon snaps off whatever other comments it has about the Narcissan run and stares at him with eagle intensity. "Things are a little complicated right now. The Originists have grown stronger while you were away." The gryphon points accusingly with one razored talon, prompting a growl from the wolf. "Your old girlfriend and her husband are behind it. I've run simulations; we're in for big trouble with these people."

Warthen feels a fist clamp round his heart. "Allister, give me the punchline. Are you telling me there won't be any gate runs?"

"Oh, hell no." The gryphon looks insulted. "No radical group's powerful enough to halt interstellar commerce. Wait a little while and they'll all be dead. But we've got to be careful. No new gates for awhile."

"Awhile?"

"Say fifty years or so."

"With no runs for fifty years, you'll lose every gaterunner in existence."

"I didn't say there wouldn't be any runs. I said there won't be any new gates for fifty years or so. That means --"

"I know what it means, Allister. So give me a run that's longer than fifty years."

"You've been out longer than most, Chandra. Nearly everyone's picked up and run in the last ten years. I've only got one run left. It's a long one."

Warthen looks at the image frozen on the table. Letha's daughters are playing with the wolf, tugging at tail and ears. Her infant son is cradled in her arms. "Increment image," he tells the hologenerator. "Time interval: one year per second." It happens incredibly fast, time and fate changing her face, bending her back. The children spring up about her, spawn children of their own. As an Originist, Letha naturally rejects the anti-aging miracles of the microsurgeons. When it's over, Warthen is staring at a sixty-five year old woman.

"How long?" he finally asks.

The gryphon looks away. "Two hundred and seven years realtime." A long silence. "It's all I've got left, Chandra. The ship's already waiting at Earth Station if you're interested."

Two hundred and seven years? Very little survives that kind of time. Letha will be gone. Her children will be gone. Her grandchildren will have grandchildren. Surely no one will remember Chandra Ben Warthen when he returns.

The wolf tips back its head and howls as Warthen lets out a long sigh.
* * *

The dove's letter is of course from Letha. Dated shortly after he left, the letter has been waiting all this time, coded for delivery upon his return to the nets.

It's miserably brief.

Chandra,

By the time you read this, it'll be far too late for absolution, but please forgive me for not being there. You know I love you. But love wasn't enough for either of us, was it? You could no more surrender your stars than I could trade my world.

I wanted so much to see you before you left -- if only just to say goodbye -- but I knew that if I saw you I would be hopelessly lost. You always had that power over me. Even now, however far in the future you're reading this, I know that if I looked in your eyes, I'd fall all over again.

Believe me when I tell you that I'll always love you.

Letha

He imagines that he can smell the ink, the crisp paper, her fragrance on the discarded envelope. But it's only a projection. There's nothing real here, nothing for him to grasp and clutch to his trembling heart. He wonders briefly why she left it there all those years. At any point in time she could have canceled the message.
* * *

At a tenth the speed of light, the gateship is far from stopped, but it's moving slow enough for Warthen's purpose.

When he shuts down the engines an eerie silence consumes him. In that silence he remembers his dream and his brothers soundlessly urging him through their gate. He remembers Lake Pontchartrain and death.

It takes him two hours to locate a tachyon data stream, accessible at sublight velocity. Ten minutes later, he's aligned his receiver and the ship's systems are digesting five years worth of universal news and information. The Originist movement has grown. Among its members is listed one Letha Aries Bishop.

Warthen's hopes and dreams, all his plans, are destroyed by that one piece of information.

With the ship oriented as it is, nose in its wake, he considers returning to Earth. But they'd never let him pilot again. If they suspect his present delays are all a scam, he's already in for trouble, a possible suspension or worse. To turn back would destroy his career.

Gate running is all he knows, all he's ever wanted to do.

It'd take him another five years to get back. Five more years in which Letha could not help but grow farther and farther from memories that to him are as new as yesterday.

But, he thinks, looking in the starless abyss of the gate, something of me can return.

He finds a jealousy in himself that he's not proud of. It takes him several days to convince himself that its not the same as Letha loving another man. And even if it is, her happiness is that important to him.

When he steps briefly into the gate, arriving nowhere but where he started, he feels a tugging that pulls something from him, something heavy he's been carrying in his heart. It's no lighter, this heavy burden of grief and unrequited love that he bears, this new place in his heart, but perhaps it's a little brighter.

As he reorients the ship and begins the tedious process of restoring the gate to its original configuration, he wishes them all the happiness in the universe.
* * *

Intrepid. She's sleek and silver and not at all what one might expect for a vessel that'll be discarded at the end of her only journey.

Warthen likes the name. He thinks that Allister Dell Griffin must have chosen it. An intrepid man, the gryphon. He's found his immortality in synthetic constructs of silicon and software. The beating of his heart has been replaced with bursts of light pulsing through infinite labyrinths of optic filaments. Not a bad exchange. It might be worth trading your emotions for that sort of immortality. To see the universe unfold, to watch the sorrows of her changing face, it's not so small a thing.

I have my immortality too, thinks Warthen. In history. In song and legend on a hundred worlds: "Chandra Ben Warthen opened this gate." In the eyes of three beautiful children. In the eyes of all their generations to come.

Several hundred people have turned out to see him off. Earth Station is a spacer's community, a place where Warthen is recognized. Or maybe not. He suspects that Griffin might have had something to do with this as well. An announcement on the station net perhaps. Big news, a gaterun of 207 years. The longest ever. Another first for Chandra Ben Warthen.

He stands by the Intrepid for a long time, shaking hands, smiling, trying to remember every face that bids him farewell. It's a long road where he's going and when he gets lonely he would like to see faces other than hers in the viewport.

When there are no more hands and the crowd has drawn back as if anxious for his departure, Warthen steps to the airlock. Hand on the controls, he takes one last look, one deep breath of life.

In the far shadows of the sloping corridor, there stands an old couple. Warthen remembers the dove and how it took flight after delivering its message. Good enough reason to have left the message in place all those years. He doesn't wonder how the old couple got here. There's only one route available, one means of traveling that fast. With any luck, their Originist friends will never know.

She's still beautiful. The tears on her face say she still loves him. The pain in her eyes says she hasn't forgotten the younger Chandra Ben Warthen, that loner who slipped through her fingers and found an eternity of sorts in the time paradox of faster than light travel. A smile trembles at the corners of her mouth and, for no apparent reason, he suspects that there's much of the young girl he loves in her yet.

The man beside her nods and smiles as Warthen meets his gaze. How much he reminds Warthen of his father! Odd, but Warthen wants to embrace him as much as her. There are so many questions. Does he dream of a thousand brothers waiting? Is that why he, who has opened so many gates, sides now with those who oppose them?

Warthen returns their smiles before the airlock closes. He wishes they'd brought the children.

Back to the Planet's surface.