Space

Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I’m really here.

She fought panic.

After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth’s orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship one hundred and ninety-eight days to travel out to the burster’s Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the sun.

Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

For eighteen years a signal crossed space, towards a receiver gateway which had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially dead (though not legally).

Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

There was no sense of waking – is it over? – she was just there, with the Spacelab’s systems whirring and clicking around her as usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before – eighteen years before.

Everything was the same. And yet –

‘Meacher.’ It was virtual Paulis’s voice. ‘Are you all right?’

No. She felt extraordinary: renewed, revived. She remembered every instant of it, that burst of exquisite pain, the feeling of reassembling, of sparkling. Was it possible she had somehow retained some consciousness during the transition?

My God, she thought. This could become addictive.

A new, complex light was sliding over the back of her hand. She suddenly remembered where she was. She made for her periscope.

From the dimly-lit, barren fringe of the solar system, she had been projected immediately into a crowded space. She was, in fact, sailing over the surface of a star.

The photosphere, barely ten thousand kilometres below, was a flat-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere – the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere – a thin haze above it all. Polarizing filters in the viewport periscope dimmed its light to an orange glow. As she watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting across the star’s surface; neighbouring granules were pushed aside, so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar which was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.