A Visit to Hallows Gate

There is a place in the Void where ships tend to gather.  Some homing instinct bred into them through the first four generations of space travel, perhaps.  Some say that there are obscure gravimetric or cosmological undercurrents that impinge on their delicate senses.   Others say that ships have souls, that the christening of a starship awakens it, and that they seek out such stellar locus points the way their human inhabitants find themselves on pilgrimages to holy lands.

 

The place in question is called Hallows Gate.  The corpse of a star cluster limns it for light years around with a glowing contrail of gasses, giving the entire region of space a picturesque grandeur - and conveniently obscuring it from some forms of detection.

 

Two human souls have followed their inner daemon here.  Instinct made them request passage from the ''Southern Cross''.  The ship rumbled and grumbled and its captain gave her assent.  Now they stand on the observation deck, watching the halo of gas and trapped light, studying the glowing embers embedded in the cloud that represent the fast-burning last stages of stellar fusion.  A flickering candle by astral standards, but even God's weakest furnaces will rage for thousands of years more.

 

The ''Southern Cross'' is conferring with its fellow ships.  Its brothers and sisters are exchanging bits.  Star charts, experience logs, digital memories, encoded opinions, virulent memes, even the DNA of their own construction.  "Sex" is too crude a term for the process of transmitting schematic details in Science Description Language via laser-beam, but any children the ''Southern Cross'' bears will assuredly carry the imprint of these fellow vehicles.

 

The human passengers of these clustered star-ships, of course, will explore the gamut of information exchange in their own way, from sex on up (and down).  They pray to the Dragons and discuss the Gods.  They write in their journals or take pictures or extract their own brain-states, capturing the transcendent experience of Hallows Gate in digital form, thereby sustaining the long-running underground cult of rapturous sensory playback.

 

And among the passengers and crew and star-ships, a new rumor begins to spread. There is talk that one of the ships in the area is different.  There's talk of a transtechnology discovery, perhaps an evolution or perhaps a divine artifact. Few can say for sure, but the rumor is that one of the fusion-powered ships needs no fuel, that it gathers its power from the very essence of the Sun itself...