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night.
    You, in your long, grey ships
    of cold rationality and hard mathematics,
    shimmering along the path of light,
    bending time in your starswept path:
    Do not imagine yourselves free of madness.
    Not the rich, pulsing joy of winedrunk dance,
    nor the madness that lets poets speak to stars
    and hear songs from the dripping waters
    of rain caught upon roofs of steel,
    or the cold, silent songs
    pulsing from the deep.
    Not the madness of high towers,
    of concrete poured over pulsing grass,
    or the frenzy of human dance,
    of instruments and drums,
    singers chanting in the dark,
    collapsing with the sun.
    Those are the insanities of earth,
    the madness that only earth and water
    can beat into bone and brain.
    But the madness of the dark,
    the madness of the silent stars,
    the madness of the dark matter
    that will move upon your ships—
    Do not imagine yourselves so free.
    Do not imagine that in this darkness,
    nothing awaits.
    Do not imagine that no one
    will hear you scream.
    In the spaces between stars,
    our tentacles pulse.
    We see your grey ships
    and thirst.
    We eat upon human screams,
    and in the shadows of the stars,
    we hunger,
    hunger.
    The bright stars in all their frenzy
    hide us well.
    We hunger. We hunger.
    You cannot imagine.

RUBEDO, AN ALCHEMY OF MADNESS
    By Michael Matheson
    Michael Matheson currently resides in Toronto, where he works as an author, freelance editor, and technical and public relations writer. He has been a presenter at the ACCSFF and has served since mid-2010 as the editor of the Friends of the Merril Collection publication, Sol Rising .
    THE STARS GLEAM like polished bone out on the galactic rim, edging up on the borderless black of deep space at the outer reaches of the Milky Way. There are graveyards there, celestial sepulchres of rotted hulks and ruined metal that drift in slow arcs through long orbits. It’s deathly cold on the rim. Light from distant stars diffuses before it reaches so far out, not enough of it left, by the time it hits those frigid boneyards of blasted metal, to warm what lies within.
    Once, these trackless wastes of accordioned metal were home to smugglers and the kind of pirates who preyed on half-mad colonists keen to dare the endless black of the deeps and claim what lay beyond. But they died out long ago, or were driven off by the kind of men who claim a bounty for killing work. Now, only Eliana keeps silent vigil here, an accidental caretaker in this unhallowed place, where Death has walked with arms outstretched, gathering all unto him.
    With the crash and sweep of Debussy’s “La Mer” flooding over the Lacrima ’s speaker system on a loop, Eliana drifts in the arms of morphia, its hot bloom in her stomach and her bowels a balm to wounds that refuse to heal. Slumped, opiate-riddled in the grimy bucket seat of her not-quite-several-hundred-feet-long, decaying shuttle, cobbled together from the skeletal hulks of still-older wrecks, she dreams the face of her dead son.
    She sprawls, tethered by fraying straps, in her pilot’s seat; enclosed in a full pressure suit of black metal and antiseptic cloth resembling nothing so much as a shroud. Only her helmet is off, the bulbous capstone floating several feet away and suspended in midair in the weightless cabin. Her head lolls one way and then another, hot tears orbing as they hit her cheeks and float off to make a starry sea of the darkness from the blank, black screens for the ship’s lateral and aft camera HUDs, arrayed around the closed shutters of the cabin’s forward viewport. She drifts between sleep and waking. Her face is grey and lined with age, framed by straggly locks of still-night-black hair. She has been out here on the edge of absolute darkness a long time.
    ***
    Twitching and whimpering in her sleep, struggling against the straps that hold her down in the weightless cabin of her ship, Eliana is awakened with a start by her ship colliding with an interposing object. Her ship tumbles from its