A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, made and mirrored upon itself
It's the entrance to eternity that not enough navigational crews dream about, beautiful though it is whenever they forget.
“So, yes, this is why we scan on all spectra, because, you know, not all black holes and dark matter phenomenon have a sign on them saying, “Hey, see me” – if they did, you know, they wouldn't be dark.”
The day before my uncle and I were to resume our work on the fleet starship Amanirenas, this was the conversation my aunt was in about the incident that was going to give Uncle Benjamin and I another week of vacation.
“Don't tell me we've run another fleet ship over the Rainbow Gate!” Uncle Benjamin said when Aunt Almira was off the call.
“Yeah, Benjamin and Khadijah, again. Go head on and unpack your bags. Nobody's going to be doing anything anywhere outbound in that direction until the Alcantara is repaired, what with the leaks in their warp core.”
“Another set of careers also pass through the Rainbow Gate as well!”
“Yes, hubby, already stripped of all rank, given a nice severance package, and told to go take up another line of work, because this here clearly ain't for everyone.”
“How are we letting these people out of the Academy?”
“You probably do need to speak to some people over there, Admiral-hubby, because what they are all assuming is that they don't need to go over and test things like understanding that visible light ain't the only thing you have to see.”
“That's common sense, Almira!”
“Well, I'm 80, you're 82, and we're both back at work because, you know, common sense ain't common.”
Both of them – Admiral and Captain Banneker-Jackson – cracked up laughing, and then my uncle, being the admiral in the pair, called the powers that be up the line from him because someone had driven their starship, yet again, too close to the Rainbow Gate.
The Rainbow Gate was just a little drifting neutron star within 55 parsecs of Earth, still not on its star's old course through the Milky Way because of the blast of its supernova, still wobbling into a new, erratic arc. It had been drifting for as long as humanity had been observing with telescopes, and became visible upon getting about 45 parsecs out from Earth in that direction, in ultraviolet and above.
The problem was that the Rainbow Gate lay on one of the less-used approaches to the Solar System, and every so often, a commercial or fleet ship forgot that it was not where they left it. A commercial vessel, and its offering of a warp drive, had last lit up the gate in visible light as you see it above – the gate to that crew's eternity, with the appearance of peacock-built angels built right in to welcome them.
The Alcantara's night crew had simply run their warp field around it, forgetting it was a half-light year nearer to their route than it had been at the beginning of their five-year mission. Someone had forgotten to update the star chart, and someone else had forgotten to do a full sensor sweep.
“That ship is all kinds of messed up, but, life support and impulse power are the last to go,” Aunt Almira said about it.
“Oh well,” I said. “They got off easy. Only a few careers have gone through the Rainbow Gate on that one. Are we going to put out a fleet buoy eventually?”
“Way ahead of y'all,” Uncle Benjamin said. “I put in that request 20 years ago, but it's like getting a stop light instead of a stop sign up on Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries. Gotta have a few more serious wrecks before people get around to it. Maybe the Alcantara will be enough, but it's cheaper to retire that whole night crew than to put up the buoys necessary because of the wobble in the energy fields of a wandering neutron star.”
“Why are we like this?” I said.
“Humans are forever humaning,” Aunt Almira said.