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Description

Deep within the drive cavity, an inky black underspace loomed around us. Nothing was on the sensors and nothing met our eyes, naught but blackness without limit and a cold indescribable, the border of a world cleaner and purer and less infinite than our own, devoid of stars, and mass, and the energy of substance.
Even something as small as a pebble of a drifting gust of gas would have revealed itself to our spectrometers and telescoping imagers in here, or at least would have reflected the glare of our floodlights when we turned those on, but nothing did, not for millions of miles in any direction. Even the ubiquitous background radiation of the universe’s own natural rarified life was nowhere to be felt, and our rangefinders were pinging back a distance of infinity. The navigation lights on our hull, and the gentle light shining from the bridge window, was all that was keeping our own ship from submersion in the same blackness, and our light marked us as aliens.
This blackness continued for a great time, days perhaps, until we rounded a corner of sorts, some manner of toroid fold we would have had no way to know we were crossing, except that when we arrived, we saw eyes.
Dozens of eyes grouped into dozens of faces, arrayed in our path as if in anticipation of our arrival, pale, aglow, unaligned, unblinking, not so very small, and not so very distant. What creatures they belonged to, if they belonged to creatures, must have been every inch as perfectly and unassailably black as their habitat, for our spotlights and rangefinders could find nothing beneath the eyes, or above the eyes, or in any crevice between.
Except for one.
One face belonged to a creature of light. She was as vast as the eyes of her fellows would imply, as long and strange and stoic as her nature would warrant, and as bright as the surface of the moon on a clear Earthly night, and her eyes were black. Hers was a mutation, an aberration, and it had made her out as an ambassador, for she was the only one among them who could make dealings with visitors from beyond, and they say that as an outcast, she was the only one humble enough to do so.
And she spoke to us with a riddle. “God created a stone so heavy he could not lift it.”
“He sent a man to break it.” Our captain replied.

And we were allowed passage.

Description

Deep within the drive cavity, an inky black underspace loomed around us. Nothing was on the sensors and nothing met our eyes, naught but blackness without limit and a cold indescribable, the border of a world cleaner and purer and less infinite than our own, devoid of stars, and mass, and the energy of substance.
Even something as small as a pebble of a drifting gust of gas would have revealed itself to our spectrometers and telescoping imagers in here, or at least would have reflected the glare of our floodlights when we turned those on, but nothing did, not for millions of miles in any direction. Even the ubiquitous background radiation of the universe’s own natural rarified life was nowhere to be felt, and our rangefinders were pinging back a distance of infinity. The navigation lights on our hull, and the gentle light shining from the bridge window, was all that was keeping our own ship from submersion in the same blackness, and our light marked us as aliens.
This blackness continued for a great time, days perhaps, until we rounded a corner of sorts, some manner of toroid fold we would have had no way to know we were crossing, except that when we arrived, we saw eyes.
Dozens of eyes grouped into dozens of faces, arrayed in our path as if in anticipation of our arrival, pale, aglow, unaligned, unblinking, not so very small, and not so very distant. What creatures they belonged to, if they belonged to creatures, must have been every inch as perfectly and unassailably black as their habitat, for our spotlights and rangefinders could find nothing beneath the eyes, or above the eyes, or in any crevice between.
Except for one.
One face belonged to a creature of light. She was as vast as the eyes of her fellows would imply, as long and strange and stoic as her nature would warrant, and as bright as the surface of the moon on a clear Earthly night, and her eyes were black. Hers was a mutation, an aberration, and it had made her out as an ambassador, for she was the only one among them who could make dealings with visitors from beyond, and they say that as an outcast, she was the only one humble enough to do so.
And she spoke to us with a riddle. “God created a stone so heavy he could not lift it.”
“He sent a man to break it.” Our captain replied.

And we were allowed passage.