My Blue Heaven

Alyssa Muniz fingered the palm frond in her hand, nose pressed to the glass of the viewport.  Outside existed nothing but blue... a swirling blue funnel, flecked with streaks of white and gray and occasionally a little of what looked like purple... but mainly blue.  A hundred shades of it.  If one looked closely, one could name them.  Azure.  Indigo.  Sapphire.  Cobalt.  Copen.  Lapis lazuli.  Cyan.  Ultramarine.  Aquamarine.  Delft.  Turquoise.  Prussian blue.  Royal blue.  Sky blue, sea blue, electric blue, midnight blue.  Other unnamed shades of blue.  Just blue, blue, endless blue.

She felt the frond in her hand.  It was green.

Both scientist and frond originated in Puerto Rico.  There, her father took her as a child to the top of the hills overlooking the Arecibo Array Historical Monument, where they still maintained, to this day, the radio dish which gained fame centuries ago in humanity's search for extraterrestrial intelligence.  It had been a special experience for her, once it was explained to her what it was, what it had been used for.

"You mean we didn't know there were other people on planets?" she asked at a tender age, trying to wrap her mind around the idea.  The 'other people' as she called them, the ones she could see were not like her... 'not human', as some put it, though others thought it rude to call them that (aliens too)... they had always been around, ever since she could remember.  Ktarians, Bolians, Vulcans... there were even Klingons living on Earth in the 24th century, but she stayed away from Klingons.  They were scary.  She found it hard to imagine a world without them.  She went to school with them, talked to them, shared and played with them.

"At one time we didn't," Daddy said.  "It was just us... that..."  He pointed at the huge white bowl with the pointy thing sticking out of it.  "And... the universe."  There was something in the way he said it... 'the universe'... said with a touch of awe, and looked up, twisting his head sideways – little Alyssa sat on his shoulders – that took hold of Alyssa's mind and never let go.  It stayed with her, day after day, year after year, after that.  As evening waned, and they descended the hill back to the air-car, Alyssa's face brushed a palm frond.  She didn't know why she just reached out and grabbed it.  She gave it a tug, tore it off, and kept it ever since.

She kept her nose pressed to the transparency of the viewport, half-expecting it to feel cold to the touch.  But it didn't, not at all.  Modern technology; she had that to thank... if she were of a mind to be grateful.  It simply was what it was... and she didn't come here to marvel at the mechanics of Starfleet or Federation science.  Protective forcefields outside the viewport, and in the viewport, both invisible to the eye, blocked harmful radiation and the cold she would no doubt feel were the port made of glass.  Glassmakers still practiced their art, their craft, on Earth, and elsewhere in the Federation.  Her father, an old-fashioned man, used glass for every window in his home.  There was no danger of storms or cyclones or hurricanes or that bad weather Puerto Rico used to know, back in the same days they used Arecibo, thanks to the modern miracle of the weather-net.  She remembered pressing her nose to the glass of her bedroom window, those starry evenings of her childhood, and just staring, face cold, rapt in silence, into the sprawling vista of another endless blue... breath taken by all the pretty twinkling lights.  That shade of blue, the blue of the star-studded night sky on Earth, earned itself a permanent home in her memory.  The stars called to her with each little flicker, each little twinkle.  If there was one thing she would recall someday on her deathbed, the last thing she would ever recall... it would be the sea of stars in the endless blue.

She could not see the stars in slipstream, of course; could not feel the cold.  It struck her that blue was also the color of melancholy.  But soon, soon she would see the stars of another galaxy... a galaxy barely visible to the naked eye from her home... Divine willing.

Many thought her odd for believing in the Divine.  They found it more than ironic, an astronomer of the 24th century, who saw that science worked, who used and lived on science on a day-to-day basis, would believe in some nondescript higher form of life – which, most argued, was just another name for God.  Humanity had 'grown up', they claimed; stopped believing in deities and relying on them to solve their problems and started learning to solve them for themselves.  They didn't need any 'gods' to live their lives in comfort, wanting for nothing; why did she?  She didn't have an answer for them.  She tried explaining it once to an old boyfriend, but he gave her 'that look', that look that said he thought she was crazy, just once, and that was the end of the attempt.  But she never stopped believing, even the times when she got sick of being 'different' and didn't want to believe, and she knew why.  She couldn't.  She couldn't comprehend a universe so beautiful, so orderly in its design, made up of matter that stuck together, defying laws of entropy that said it should have flown apart long ago, nor ever even agglomerated to begin with... couldn't comprehend all of that without some sort of purpose behind it.  Order could degenerate into Chaos, but Chaos didn't normally give rise to order.  There was just something there, in the universe, that spoke to her... from the time she heard the call of the stars, to when she learned of the Nonallix B singularity and what it could do.  She didn't think of it as 'God'.  Not the 'Yahweh' or 'Jehovah' of the old Judeo-Christian religion, nor even Allah or Zeus or any of the other 'creator deities' created in the minds of men.  This was not some distant father-type (or mother-type) figure which sat on high, ready to dispense punishment for disobeying rules in some ancient book.  This was the orderly will which somehow held the universe together.  It was simply divine... The Divine.

She jumped slightly as the shimmering blue maelstrom evaporated, and black space swept in on her.  She felt her pupils widen at the sudden decrease in light... then suddenly contract again as a new, brilliant source of light appeared.

"We are secured from slipstream," Havercroft called out, securing the conn-sole from the journey just made.

April looked up from a PADD in his hand, thumbed his imprint and returned it to the yeoman standing there.

"Full stop."

"Full stop, aye."  Havercroft's hands moved, working.

"Keep our distance," he warned.

"Tactical, recheck your shield calibrations," Maguire said in the XO's chair.

April rose from his chair – "Screen on." – watching eagerly as the avatar of their next step came into view.  The bare wall at the front of the bridge opaqued to reveal the expanse of space, lit by a baleful blue glow.  Screen filters adjusted for the sudden influx of brilliant light.  Blue giants were the hottest, brightest of stars.  But still an eerie cerulean pall bathed the front half of the bridge.  Coupled with the blue glow of the deck lights, it turned the bridge into a vivacious study in blue.

"Gorgeous," April whispered, thinking aloud, before having his attention drawn to the simmering cloud of light beyond.

Nonallix B1.  The singularity laid inside, at the heart of it, hidden by the foaming stellar matter being drawn from the star.  A thin tendril emanated from the far edge of Nonallix itself, glowing hot like a light-bulb filament, connecting the small spherical shape.