Neptune Crossing

  *Yes.*

  He grunted. He had saved the Earth, then; he must have. /What . . . did it look like?/ he asked. There was no answer. He stirred, peering out the window, looking for some familiar patterns in the arrangement of the stars. He found none. /Can you tell me where I am?/ he whispered, suddenly more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

  There was no answer.

  Before he could ask again, he felt a sudden angular rotation. He glanced at the instruments. The fusion tube was still firing, at low power. But the ship was being turned, as though the attitude control system had been activated. The black stone in his left wrist was flickering red; it appeared to be in command.

  He studied the star patterns as they revolved past, straining for something, anything, familiar in the sky. How many light years would one have to travel before the constellations became unrecognizable? He hadn’t the faintest idea. He grabbed the telescope and swung it into place for a wide-field scan. He grunted in surprise. Some of those stars didn’t look like stars at all; they looked blurry, like galaxies. In fact, most of them did. But that was crazy, unless . . .

  Unless . . . he was . . . outside . . .

  No. He refused to consider that possibility. Just the thought of it caused a burning sensation deep in his chest.

  The ship had turned about ninety degrees when the curved edge of a great platter of light came into view in the window. Only it wasn’t . . . a platter of light, exactly. It was more like a vast, swirling ocean of stars. He blinked, not quite focusing on it; he couldn’t, didn’t want to focus on it. Didn’t want to let the pieces come together in his mind. There was something else, too, like a shadow across his gaze. He blinked, trying to refocus his eyes.

  There was something out there, dark, floating in space. At first he mistook it for a part of the great swath of stars, but it seemed to be intruding somehow from the darkness of space itself, and at last he realized it was in front of the starry sea. It was hard to make out, a shadowy silhouette against starlight; but it was a structure, perhaps a very large structure. He squinted, his heart pounding; as the ship continued to turn, he brought the telescope to bear with trembling hands. It was too dark to focus on clearly, but he glimpsed enough to guess that whatever it was, it was artificial.

  He looked up from the telescope, and gasped at the vast swath of stars behind the structure. The ship’s rotation had brought a much brighter feature into view: a blazing galactic center, partially wreathed in dark dust lanes. The sea of stars was, unquestionably . . . a galaxy.

  Bandicut couldn’t breathe. His diaphragm spasmed, trying to draw breath into his lungs. He heard himself making little involuntary crying sounds.

  This is frightening me, whispered a thought somewhere in the back of his mind.

  He blinked, searching inward for the source of that thought. But it was only his imagination, his subconscious.

  Something inside him released—and he gasped in one frantic breath, then another. He began to hyperventilate as he wrenched his gaze closer to the enormous structure shadowed against the light . . . and then back out to the majestic ocean of stars, tilted toward him. As he gazed at it, and its great glowing center, he knew with a sudden, terrifying certainty that this was the Milky Way galaxy. His galaxy.

  And he was viewing it from the outside.

  He blinked, and swallowed, and clamped his eyes shut against an uncontrollable rush of tears.