Page 1 of Into The Rift

Part I

Prologue

From the journal of Prince Jago Ballenescu,

son of Prince Anarr, and grandson of King Davos of Tygeria.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

---William Butler Yeats

“If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.”

---John Wheeler, theoretical physicist

Don’t worry too much about those quotes.

This isn’t going to be about ancient poetry, though I had a book of that stuff once that my grandfather Blake gave my father. He was bored by it and passed it on to me. I read it on a long, tedious trip to Earth once, and I was surprised to find I actually liked a lot of it. I copied down the parts I particularly enjoyed and stored them on my communicator. The verses by the old human poet, Yeats, seemed to be oddly appropriate to the situation I find myself in at the moment, which is what made me think of it.

Considering we’ve so narrowly averted what it talks about in that poem—the “blood-dimmed tide,” and “anarchy” and maybe even the “ceremony of innocence,” if I knew exactly what that was.

At least I hope we’ve averted it.

Likewise, that other quote about physics seems appropriate considering I find myself in the middle of a quantum physics situation at the moment. I don’t understand much about quantum physics either, nor, I suspect, does anybody else, really, though some people like my tutors always used to claim to.

Poetry can be obscure and hard to understand, but quantum physics is a whole other ballgame, as my human grandfather Blake would say. It says a lot about the subject to consider that even with all the time since that old physicist John Wheeler—the one I was quoting—was alive, the whole field is still deeply within the realm of theoretical science. In other words, it’s based on ideas or abstract principles rather than any practical uses for it.

But theoretical or not, here I am, careening through the intergalactic medium of the rift, dodging stars, metaphorically speaking, and praying that Niko was right when he said the shell of our ship can withstand the temperatures of the hot hydrogen gas that fills up the space around us.

When I was a little boy, Blake used to tell me to “keep my fingers crossed” to make things work out the best possible way, so that’s what I was doing now. I had them crossed on both hands. So far, we’d had phenomenally good luck. We’d even traveled through a wormhole and back again.

Hopefully back, that is—we haven’t quite made it out yet and traveled back home yet, though Niko says we’re more than halfway there. I’m currently gazing out at the pitch blackness all around me and trying to figure out whether or not this message I’m writing down now might have any chance at all of being found one day and sent back to my family. Just in case something happens.

Almost certainly not. But I’d still like to try.

I didn’t leave a message when I left—when I decided to steal a ship, break Niko out of his jail cell and try to get him back to the Pton planet. That was due to some unforeseen circumstances. I hadn’t really known I’d be leaving with Niko at the time.

It would be nice to write down everything that happened since then, though. I think this has likely been the greatest adventure of my life, whether or not I manage to survive it, and it feels like there should be some kind of record of it.

A contemporaneous record—that’s a word that Niko taught me. It means that whatever’s happening is still going on at the time of writing, while I’m still alive and here and going through it, like I hope Niko and I will be at the end of this thing. If we don’t make it out of the rift, though, maybe the ship will at least survive, defying all the odds and somehow make it through the vastness of space to be found by its rightful owners. My message on this communicator could then find its way to my parents and the rest of my family to give them some kind of resolution.

Niko calls that “magical thinking,” and he’s right. I confess I’m guilty of that from time to time.

My uncle Larz was found after going missing for five, long cycles, though. After almost everyone had given up hope, except for Blake, my omak-ahn, who never did. It was before I was born, so I’d only heard about it, and his case was different than mine, as he had been kidnapped and sold by slavers. Niko didn’t sell me. Still there were some similarities. The family looked for him a long time, and it almost drove them crazy until he was finally located. My family knows what happened to me—I didn’t just go missing. They saw me getting into my grandparents’ ship with Niko and taking off. That doesn’t mean they understand what happened, or that they’ll ever stop searching for me, if we don’t make it out of here.

If we did this thing right, our actions helped save so many planets in the galaxy from destruction, potentially saving millions of lives. I can rest easy in that knowledge, wherever I might be or whatever comes next in the afterlife, knowing that the place where I was born and lived the first twenty years of my life is safer than it was. It would go back to being just the way it was before it came within a hair’s breadth of destruction, and there would be nothing more to fear from the Pton emperor, not ever again.

I don’t even have to feel guilty, because the emperor we killed brought his doom upon himself by his own actions, his cruel savagery, and his complete lack of pity or remorse. He was the instrument of his own bloody destruction, and I think that’s just the way it should be.

Everything will fall into place. Things won’t fall apart. The center will hold.

Fingers crossed, anyway.

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