Starsight

The delver was staring at the wall. I leaned forward and saw that there were tiny pinpricks in it. Holes? I could hear a buzzing noise from them. The more I focused on it, the more awful it sounded. It was an annoyance that marred the otherwise perfectly serene room.

I looked back at the delver. It wore my face, which should have been strange. But . . . for some reason it wasn’t? I prodded at it with my mind, curious.

Curiosity came back. I cocked my head, then closed my eyes. I felt . . . pain, agony, fear from the spots on the wall. The delver sensed those emotions, and reflected them back out the way they’d come.

“You don’t understand emotions, do you?” I asked it. “We’re misinterpreting you, like I misinterpreted Cuna. You don’t hate us. You just reflect back what we feel. That’s why you look like me. You’re only sending back at me what I’m showing you.”

It looked at me, its face impassive. And . . . I could tell that what I’d said wasn’t exactly true. It did hate the buzzing sounds, the annoyances. But much of what we showed it—much of our experience of the universe—was completely foreign to it. It reflected those back at us, part of a fundamental inability to understand.

“You have to go somewhere else,” I said to it, and tried to project the location of the delver maze.

It looked away from me, staring back at the wall.

“Please,” I said. “Please.”

No response. And so, I reached out my hand and touched it. The white room shattered, and suddenly I was expanding, as if . . . as if I were as large as a planet. A galaxy. I was expansive, eternal. I’d lived forever in peace, in a place where time had no meaning. Except when people intruded.

I saw them now, the buzzing annoyances of Starsight. The shield fell before my barrage, and I started forward, sweeping across a few of the nearby ships. Those sounds went out, and each quieted insect was a relief. It wasn’t just occasional trips through the nowhere that bothered me, but each and every one of these obnoxious buzzes.

I could finally reach them. Quiet them. It was glorious!

I pulled back, and was in the room, my hand pressed to my chest. I felt a lingering hatred of everything living. The delver would destroy all of Starsight in pursuit of its peace. I understood that, because part of me was from that place where it lived. The part that could touch the nowhere.

“Don’t,” I pleaded. “Please don’t!”

Some of the specks on the wall vanished.

What could I do? I couldn’t fight it. I was nothing more than one of those specks myself. No amount of training in a maze, fighting with destructors and light-lances, could have helped with this moment. I could not have trained to defeat this thing.

The people of Starsight deserved a diplomat, or a scientist, who could understand this problem. Not me.

More specks vanished, and—tears pouring down my face—I grabbed the front of the delver’s flight suit with both hands. I felt that overpowering expansion happening again, the alignment with its perspective, which was so vast as to make individuals meaningless.

But they weren’t.

“See them,” I whispered. “Please, just see them.”

I had seen what the delver experienced. In that frantic moment with a catastrophe starting before me, I tried to show it what I’d experienced. With all my strength I towed on its consciousness.

It worked. Instead of growing to the size of a galaxy, I pulled us down so we shrank to the size of a child. Infinity went both directions. You could expand forever outward, but at the same time, the closer you looked at something, the more detail you saw.

For a moment, we were a child who played with floating globes of water. We were Mrs. Chamwit, delivering dinner to a neighbor. We were Cuna. We were the Krell on the street who had apologized for bumping me. I touched the mind of the delver and showed it those annoyances from the perspective of each individual person. I showed it that the buzzing was sometimes laughter.

This is what I see, I said to the delver. Though I had to learn how to look.

The delver stopped advancing. Its mind touched mine, and I felt emotions, images, and alien things that were neither. Things I didn’t have the senses to otherwise experience or explain. In the midst of it was an idea . . . a question.

They are like us?

Not words. Ideas. The term us was projected into my mind as a set of meaningful concepts I could roughly interpret.

They . . . , it repeated. They are alive?

Yes, I whispered. Every one of them.

The thing trembled with an emotion I understood without needing interpretation. Horror.

The delver pulled in, somehow reversing upon itself. I was ejected from that place where I’d been, as the entire thing—the enormous planetlike mass and the strange being at the center—vanished.

Dumping me into space.