Sky Dancer

by Clarissa Grunwald

Like most things, exorcisms had come a long way since the advent of spaceflight, but that didn’t mean Davi Spencer was having an easy day. There was something big coming—something so big it was fucking up the PhaDAR. Instead of an orderly series of pings and echoes, Davi was getting something that sounded like bubbles blown into water, pitched up two octaves.

“Machine’s not broken,” said Mikkel, Davi’s least favourite systems tech, when she called for someone to come up and check it.

“Then how do you explain that?” Davi had retorted, gesturing at the noise, and also at the screen, which was flashing green-red-yellow.

Mikkel shrugged. “Seems like your department, not mine.”

“Can’t you get Lara to take a look at it?”

“Lara’s off 'til Tuesday.”

“A second opinion from someone.”

“Machine’s not broken,” Mikkel repeated blandly. “I promise. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to do your job. Whatever it is, get rid of it.”

The physics of ghosts are not well understood. Davi had been advised by physicists not to worry about this too much. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to visualize the intricate configurations of energy that make up a ghost. Pretend the ghost is a sphere. Blast it with particles, and it will scatter.

But this ghost was so big that, according to her calculations, all of the ionized sodium on board couldn’t disperse it. She didn’t have the materials, and she didn’t have the energy, and she didn’t have any backup to speak of.

She called Command but knew there wasn’t much they could do about it. There wasn’t enough time to change the ship’s course without risking the structural integrity of the whole craft.

“It sounds like a technical error to me,” said the clerk, after a solid fifteen minutes of haggling with the AI to put her through to a human. In almost two hundred years, robots hadn’t gotten any better at answering phone calls. “Have you asked Systems?”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe they could take a second look,” the clerk said. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”

“Well, I’m not,” Davi said. “Put me through to Command, please.”

“Sure thing,” the clerk said, and hung up on her.

She tried twice more, over the course of the afternoon, to get through. She sent four written updates, coded URGENT and with data embedded, to the central repository where urgent written updates went to die. The ship moved forward on its inertial trajectory. Space parted around the bow. Meanwhile, she kept on getting calls from her sister. She ignored the first two, picked up the third.

“Ria, it’s really not the time.”

“Hello,” said a voice on the end. “Hello. Hello?”

“Who is this?” she asked, typing coordinates into the simulator even as she was speaking.

“Are you all right over there?” the speaker said. “Sky Dancer, can you hear me?” His voice faded in and out, his mouth moving closer to and further away from the speaker. “We heard a—Hello. Hello?”

“Davi,” Ria’s voice cut in, the man’s words going distant. In the background, Davi could hear children shrieking with what may or may not have been glee, a sure sign that Ria was still at work, in the nursery four decks down. “Can you—sorry.” A door closed. The shrieking quieted, but only slightly. “Can you hear me? You cut out.”

“No, what did you say?”

“Mom wants to know if we can go there for dinner.”  

“What, tonight? Why?”

“Probably because she’s lonely, Davi, and you never go see her. You could be there in twenty minutes if you wanted to!”

The PhaDAR screen flashed: Closer, closer, closer. “No, I can’t, I’m sorry. I’ll see you later.”

As a student, Davi had once taken a spacewalk where she intentionally put herself in the path of a ghost, to see what it was like. The ghost was invisible, a weak signature on Davi’s hand-held. Still, she felt it when it hit, a shock of ice and a rush of claustrophobia, and for a moment, it was so hard to breathe she thought the thing had somehow turned her oxygen off.

“Panic response,” her professor, Dr. Ortega, had said, reeling her in by her tether. “Extremely common, nearly always temporary, and that, Spencer, is why we don’t just get in front of ghosts.”

At 20:00, Ria came to the lab with food. “Mom told me to give you this,” she said, pressing a foil-wrapped sandwich into Davi’s hand. “She’s worried you don’t eat.”

“I eat,” Davi said. “Thanks.” She didn’t unwrap the sandwich. There was no good way operate a terminal while eating a sandwich, and she had a lot to do. “Have you heard of the Sky Dancer?”

“No, what’s the Sky Dancer?”

“I don’t know, I was asking you.”

The warbling from the PhaDAR crescendoed, then faded back down. Ria started, turning. “What’s that?”

“Work.” She put the unwrapped sandwich down and pushed over to the nearest monitor.

“It’s always work with you.” Davi could feel Ria behind her, arms folded, watching her type.

“What are you doing, shooting them?”

“Yes.”

“Does it kill them?”

“It can’t kill them. They’re not alive. It keeps them away from us.” She tapped the screen.

“That’s the one that I’m worried about.”

“Why are you worried about it?”

“It’s huge.” 

Ria looked out the viewport. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s on the other side of the ship. And it’s probably not visible, anyway. Most of them aren’t. I really need to get back to it. I’ll see you later.” 

But she was wrong. The ghost was visible. Elsewhere on the ship, people were gathering around windows, or clustered around monitors, swivelling telescopes. The ghost was hundreds of miles off, but there is no horizon in space, and no atmosphere—nothing but distance and darkness to hide behind. They could see it, a long, ungainly shape, black against the stars save for a faint green aurora of light around the edges. The colour of the dark side of a strange planet.

A call came through. “Dr. Spencer, what the hell is that out starboard?”

Command. “Probably the phenomena I called you about,” Davi said.

“Why haven’t you gotten rid of it?”

“I’ve tried everything I have, sir, but it’s too big. Listen—from the trajectory of this thing, it looks like it’s going to hit the upper seven decks. The lower three should be unaffected. Put out a call, get as many people as you can to shelter on the lower levels, prioritize the young, the elderly, people with health conditions—”

“Is it dangerous?” 

“I suspect for some people it will be. For the rest . . . it’s unpleasant.”

“Why’s this my first goddamn time hearing about this?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been putting in regular updates.”

“We’ll get people moving,” Command said. “You make it go away.”

Davi looked again at the flashing monitor. There was no way the thing was going away. She hung up just in time for her handheld to start vibrating with the emergency alert, and a moment later, with a message from Ria: “You gotta get to the viewing deck.”

The viewing deck was charging admission, and it was crowded. There was a line going all the way down the stairs and into the mess hall. “Flash your badge,” said Ria’s voice in the handheld as Davi approached. “I’m holding up traffic at the left viewport.”

“I don’t have a badge.”

“Figuratively. You’re the ghost expert, here to look at a ghost. Cut in line!”

“Just tell me what you’re looking at. Why aren’t you downstairs? Where’s Mom?”

“She’s downstairs. Come on. Shove a little, it won’t kill you.”

Inside, Ria was waiting for her as promised. “Look,” she said, as Davi squeezed her way through the throng.

Davi looked. “That’s a ship,” she said. “That’s a city ship, that’s—it’s got to be bigger than ours.”

“That’s the Sky Dancer,” said Ria.

*

Fifty years ago, spiralling away from its parent sun, the ship dubbed the Sky Dancer suffered a sudden, catastrophic failure to its environmental systems. It was so close to its launch point, it was technically still being built. Robotics operatives on a smaller craft just meters away were affixing a solar sail to its anterior hull when they heard panic over the comms and, minutes later, dead air. The craft was visible in Earth’s sky for three days after that, but there was no recovery operation. There was no one to be rescued, and nothing to be done with the bodies—four million in all, a city’s worth of dead.

In another time, no one would have spoken of anything else. But so many people were leaving: hundreds of millions, on hundreds of shifts, and news, like light, can only travel so far. The Sky Dancer drifted onwards.

On the viewing deck, the crowd was thinning out fast. Someone made an announcement over the speakers, urging everyone to remain calm. Davi tried to count the viewports that dotted the ship’s spinning passageways. She shivered. For the first time, she thought about why there were so many ghosts in space.

“Should we move away from the windows?” asked Ria.

“Won’t matter.”

“What happens when it goes through us?”

“It goes through us.” The viewing deck was almost empty. The Sky Dancer’s dock lights were lit, rows and rows of round, white eyes. They stared unseeingly through the ship, their gazes fixed on the dark beyond. 

Clarissa Grunwald lives in central Pennsylvania where she works as a librarian. She has previously been published in Every Day Fiction and Electric Spec.