Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [0]
CHAPTER 1
There are some parts of space where even the human heart, eternally optimistic, finds it hard to feel itself welcome. At those outer fringes of the Galaxy that the humanities have just begun to reach, the starfield, which elsewhere lies in such rich streams and billows of brightness between the inhabited worlds, thins away and goes chill and pale. Here the starlight is only indefinite, faintly glowing —the million points of light near the heartworlds now dimmed by terrible distance and the clouds of dark matter between the stars to a vague cool fog, hardly to be seen except when one looks away from it. Usually the onlooker finds it hard to look away, forced by the sight to think how small even a galaxy is in the va/s, how tiny even the Local Group is compared to the darkness holding it, and all the other galactic clumps and supergalaxies; and which, beyond the bounds of mere spatial integrity, probably holds other whole universes as well, numberless, all of them subsumed into the greatest dark—that of entropy— which broods and bides its time.
In these, the deserts of space, the oases are few and far between. Once in a half a million cubic parsecs you might find a star that had struggled to bring forth planets in the barrenness and managed it—but for daunting distances around it, there will still be nothing but emptiness, and as background, only the shimmer of light that indicates the hearths of the crowded worlds. In the face of such contrasts that light becomes almost somber, speaking of its impermanence and newness in a universe where for unknown time unnameable darkness gestated, holding the light in it unborn, until the first great laugh, the outburst of newborn power and matter into the old thoughtful void.
Far up here, above the great Galactic Rift, that light seems most tenuous—the darkness not of dust or distance but of simple nothingness. Few sentient beings pass this way; observers are rarer than stars. But every now and then, something breaks the aridity of the dark desert. A distant gleam, a silver flicker, swelling, growing closer; like a memory sought for in a dark mind and suddenly recalled. If the observer had senses not dependent on something besides sluggish light to reflect and carry messages— tachyons, perhaps—they would see it grow and flash past them, touched with a spark of red on the port side, green on the starboard, and the letters NCC 1701-D dark on its hull. Then the memory is off again in the dark, with a trail of rainbow behind it, quickly fading, the legacy of its warpfield. Lone ambassador of the multifariousness of known worlds, here and gone again, out of the darkness, into the darkness: Enterprise goes about her business.
In his quarters, Jean-Luc Picard stood away from the canvas and glanced sideways for a moment at the darkness pouring past. He could almost feel it, the thickness of the dark: that strange, empty, but somehow heavy and oppressive quality that it had, this far out from the light and life of the more populated parts of the Federation. They were far out on the fringes, and the relative emptiness of things was chilling. It was at times like this that his thoughts turned elsewhere, to other imageries: warmer, slightly more reassuring—however subjective it was to feel that one needed reassurance in this dark. Picard knew himself well enough not to ignore such feelings, however illfounded he might suspect them to be. At such times he gladly turned his mind toward home: the hearth of the mind.
He turned back to the canvas. Landscape was not usually something he attempted, and certainly not usually from memory. Which, when he realized it, had driven him immediately to try it.
It was a wood in the Luberon, not far from the vineyards of home. A sunny morning, in the earliest part of autumn: you could tell it from the trees—the green of the birches and oaks in that wood was not the fresh color of spring, but the tireder, resigned, mellowing green of trees whose leaves are thinking of turning. Here and there, in the dapple of the birches against the