Julie lay under a light cotton sheet watching the shadows dance across the ceiling of her room. The candle in its holder sat on the nightstand, and a slight breeze coming in through the open window caused the flame to flicker casting sinuous forms of light and dark above. The sun had set amid gathering storm clouds, and the golden tinge around the edges of the clouds on the horizon gave the western sky a warm glow. Then, all was darkness as the storm moved in off the ocean. It was now past 10:00 o’clock, and a warm rain was falling outside. Julie felt restless, and not a bit sleepy.

Dr. George Neville, Julie’s dad, was the lead astronomer, though the youngest by far, of the team of veteran sky watchers at the Golden Hinde Observatory just outside Melbourne. The transmissions from the Gemini probe were expected to begin shortly after midnight tonight, the culmination of the second stage in a twenty-year project to gather information from the far reaches of the solar system. Set in synchronous orbit in the plane of the planet Jupiter were two enormous x-ray enhanced radio telescopes, their orbits and angles of scan controlled by the Gemini team here at control central. Each of the two orbiting dishes spanned 100 meters, edge to edge, and both were linked through some of the most advanced and sophisticated computers in existence, much of it commissioned through special arrangements with the military. That was 13 years before Julie was born.

The twenty-year mission of the Gemini Project was to seek out and identify the mysterious source beyond the orbit of the tenth planet, Styx, the effects of which were influencing the orbits of all the outer planets. These transmissions from Gemini were eagerly awaited by the worldwide astronomical community.

Julie watched with fascination as shadows played across the ceiling of her attic bedroom. They were matched by similar patterns of light and dark that moved across the fields of her mind. She lay in the semi-darkness, the warm breeze washing over her, the sounds of the rain-filled night playing outside her window. Then, as it had happened on several occasions before, a woman in a flowing garment appeared out of the shadows in the corner near the window, and stood beside her bed. She smiled down at Julie, and held her gaze with steel-grey eyes. She held out her hand. Julie grasped it, rose from her bed, and walked with the woman over to the window overlooking the back yard.

Outside, rain pelted the familiar oak tree, its broad spread limbs unbending under the added weight. The two sat down on the window seat, pulled their knees up under their chins, and wrapped the heavy comforter around their shoulders. The night sounds died away, the light from the candle on the nightstand dimmed, and the room’s walls swirled in a silent vortex around the two. Julie closed her eyelids over deep blue eyes. Then there was darkness, and the absence of all sound.

Dr. Neville stood with the team’s technical advisory group behind a technician at the main monitor. On the large green screen, and over the system’s speakers, there was the usual interference, the crackling intergalactic white noise that was always present. Added to this were the occasional blips and beeps as the technician keyed instructions at the console. Suddenly, the quiet murmurings in the control room, and the background noise of the universe, were broken by the distinct sound that all knew was the initial message from Gemini.

Computers around the control room whirred to life, their lights blinking in sympathetic union with the two distant travelers, and the first stages of transmission began. Team members stopped and turned to the monitors to watch the incoming message.

Julie felt a slight chill as her world went dark. Time seemed to stop. She snuggled against the woman, and buried herself in the satin blanket. After what seemed an age, the ringing in her ears stopped, and she felt a tingling sensation all over. She could feel the temperature around her dropping, and could see a cold steel-grey light through her half-closed eyelids. Her traveling companion was still there, warm, supple, and secure. Julie tried to move, but felt no response from her body. In fact, she couldn’t feel her body at all.

The woman was there, but then, not. In the far reaches of her mind, she heard the woman speak, and was baffled because it seemed she was hearing inside where her head should be. “Yes, you are hearing me with your mind,” said the woman. “Here we have no bodies.” Julie looked around her, but there was only darkness. The woman instructed her to listen with her mind, and to visualize with her mind; it would take practice. After a while, Julie could see lights around her, lights of different colors and intensities. The woman said the lights were life forms from another place in the galaxy, and their colors told who they were.

Monitors came to life, and vast fields of numbers streamed across the screens. The Gemini team watched in rapt wonder as the twin satellites transmitted their coded signals. The main computer’s program worked the immense body of numbers, and began the process of deciphering their encoded meaning. At Dr. Neville’s direction, the technician keyed in the codes accessing the preliminary readings, and slowly, a picture began to form on the master screen.

To everyone’s amazement, with the exception of Dr. Neville, there were shadings of grey and light and shadow, and vast areas in between devoid of all matter. The technician keyed in another set of instructions, and another. The forms on the screen changed, taking on more definition, the contrast increasing. The technician keyed in a fourth instruction, and the screen transformed into a beautiful visual of shapes and forms of light and dark.

Dr. Neville watched as spiral arms turned and moved sinuously though ever so slowly across the screen. Growing pinpoints of light shone out of the vast void of space between gaseous clouds of matter, and their colors gradually shifted from blue to steel-grey, and back to blue again.

Julie felt the presence of a dark light form nearby. She sensed its presence more than anything else. In spite of radiating a form of light, it lacked any warmth at all, and Julie shivered. There was also a dull lavender light form that trailed the darker being, almost as though it was a tail trailing a comet. The lavender light gave Julie a terrible feeling, one of emptiness, like nothing she was familiar with back home. Then, Julie sensed yet a third light form – this one was a greyish brown light, that made her blood run cold and clouded her mind.

It was incongruous to call it light, because its form was almost invisible. Like the other forms, it more gave Julie a bad feeling inside. The dark light form moved around Julie and her companion. It spoke in words that felt at once velvety and smooth, yet which stirred pain in the back reaches of Julie’s mind. Julie was confused. The words felt good, as of wholeness and sunshine. “But why does it hurt so to hear them?” asked Julie. The woman spoke softly, but with a power that startled Julie. She challenged the dark light form, and countered its pain, its distress, its darkness. Julie felt warmth returning and she relaxed.

Dr. Neville sensed that something was wrong with the vast parade of numbers appearing in the computer’s visual memory matrix, but couldn’t put his finger on the problem. His assistant, Dr. Brigitte Najinski, pointed out a series of numbers she thought affected some of the shadow areas in the image on screen, and suggested that they were actually reciprocals and the computer had incorrectly calculated them. Dr. Najinski keyed in a complex series of instructions, and waited. The picture changed, but only in subtle ways.

Dr. Neville watched with fascination. The light areas grew dimmer, as several dark areas seemed to draw light from them. Dr. Neville said he believed what they were observing was energy transformation accompanying the genesis of a star. Dr. Neville said he believed this phenomenon was not occurring anywhere near our solar system, but elsewhere in some distant galaxy, and through some unique effect this amazing event was being witnessed in our galactic neighborhood.

The lavender light form hissed at the woman, and Julie cringed. The woman looked directly into the brightest area of light, and stared it down. The lavender light seemed to squirm, its intensity alternately rising and falling. It withdrew in haste behind the dark light form. The greyish brown light then moved rhythmically around the two companions. Its form was deceptively attractive, but the woman shielded Julie from it and told her not to look directly at it. Julie could feel the penetrating cold, and she was beginning to feel drowsy.

The woman generated her own powerful light that countered the negative greyish brown light. Julie could feel one side of her glowing warm, the other, facing the dimmer light, losing temperature and growing colder. The woman urged Julie to fight the dimming lights, to counter their drawing of warmth and energy from her with the light within herself.

Dr. Najinski tweaked the keyboard once again with her magical fingers, and the computer hummed and the forms on screen moved in their subtle dance of light and dark. Gradually, the gaseous areas of light swirled and coalesced into brighter forms, and eventually into star masses surrounded by vast areas the blackness of midnight.

As the screen stopped its dancing, there appeared a twin energy source, surrounded by three lesser forms. Energy passed back and forth between the twin energy points and the three satellites, and the brightness of the twins waxed and waned, but gradually grew. With each cycle of energy transfer and transformation, the double source increased in power, and the three lesser gave up their energies, their lights dimming.

Julie felt her mind clearing, and felt herself warming amidst the various light forms that moved around her. The woman drew her circle of light around Julie, and this added to the growing warmth she felt. The lights of the lesser and darker light forms dimmed even more, and Julie could feel memory traces of pain drop away and diminish. The darkness split, and midnight spilled out onto the landscape of the universe, and ran down jagged mountainsides into valleys, along riverbeds, and into the western galaxies.

The Gemini team watched as the screen grew alternately brighter and darker, eventually ending with a portrait of light forms heretofore unobserved – a double star, with three dark planets circling in synchronous orbits, each trailing a dark shadow of a tail. The double star glowed blue, shading into steel-grey, and back into blue.

Julie opened her eyes. The warm night breeze gently moved the candle flame, casting night shadows across the meadows of her mind and onto the ceiling…