Odis made her ranging measurements, gathering in her data like number-clouds, inhaling their cottony wealth. Beneath her, Adventurer prepared to go into orbit about Shiva.
She breathed in the banks of data-vapor, translated by kinesthetic programming into intricate scent-inventories. Tangy, complex.
At first she did not believe the radar reflections. Contours leaped into view, artfully sketched by the mapping radars. Calibrations checked, though, so she tried other methods: slow, analytical, tedious, hard to do in her excitement. They gave the same result.
The Circular Ocean stood a full 10 kilometers higher than the continent upon which it rested.
No mountains surrounded it. It sat like some cosmic magic trick, insolently demanding an explanation.
Odis presented her discovery at the daily Oversight Group meeting. There was outright skepticism, even curled lips of derision, snorts of disbelief. “The range of methods is considerable,” she said adamantly. “These results cannot be wrong.”
“Only thing to resolve this,” a lanky geologist said, “is get an edge-on view.”
“I hoped someone would say that.” Odis smiled. “Do I have the authorised observing time?”
They gave it reluctantly. Adventurer was orbiting in a severe ellipse about Shiva’s cloud-wrack. Her long swing brought her into a side view of the target area two days later. Odis used the full panoply of optical, IR, UV, and microwave instruments to peer at the Circular Ocean’s perimeter, probing for the basin that supported the round slab of azure water.
There was none. No land supported the hanging sea.
This result was utterly clear. The Circular Ocean was 1.36 kilometers thick and a brilliant blue. Spectral evidence suggested water rich in salt, veined by thick currents. It looked exactly like an enormous, troubled mountain lake, with the mountain subtracted.
Beneath that layer there was nothing but the thick atmosphere. No rocky mountain range to support the ocean-in-air. Just a many-kilometer gap.
All other observations halted. The incontrovertible pictures showed an immense layer of unimaginable weight, blissfully poised above mere thin gases, contradicting all known mechanics. Until this moment Odis had been a lesser figure in the expedition. Now her work captivated everyone and she was the center of every conversation. The concrete impossibility yawned like an inviting abyss.
Lissa found the answer to Shiva’s mystery, but no one was happy with it.
An atmospheric chemist, Lissa’s job was mostly done well before they achieved orbit around Shiva. She had already probed and labeled the gases, shown clearly that they implied a thriving biology below. After that, she had thought, the excitement would shift elsewhere, to the surface observers.
Not so. Lissa took a deep breath and began speaking to the Oversight Group. She had to show that she was not wasting their time. With all eyes on the Circular Ocean, few cared for mere air.
Yet it was the key, Lissa told them. The Circular Ocean had intrigued her, too: so she looked at the mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide that apparently supported the floating sea. These proved perfectly ordinary, almost Earth-standard, except for one oddity. Their spectral lines were slightly split, so that she found two small spikes to the right and left of where each line should be.
Lissa turned from the images she projected before the Oversight Group. “The only possible interpretation,” she said crisply, “is that an immensely strong electric field is inducing the tiny electric dipoles of these molecules to move. That splits the lines.”
“An electric shift?” a grizzled skeptic called. “In a charge-neutral atmosphere? Sure, maybe when lightning flashes you could get a momentary effect, but—”
“It is steady.”
“You looked for lightning?” a shrewd woman demanded.
“It’s there, sure. We see it forking between the clouds below the Circular Ocean. But that’s not what causes the electric fields.”
“What does?” This from the grave captain, who never spoke in scientific disputes. All heads turned to him, then to Lissa.
She shrugged. “Nothing reasonable.” It pained her to admit it, but ignorance was getting to be a common currency.
A voice called, “So there must be an impossibly strong electric field everywhere in that 10 kilometers of air below the ocean?” Murmurs of agreement. Worried frowns.
“Everywhere, yes.” The bald truth of it stirred the audience. “Everywhere.”
Tagore was in a hurry. Too much so.
He caromed off a stanchion but did not let that stop him from rebounding from the opposite wall, absorbing his momentum with his knees, and springing off with a full push. Rasters streaked his augmented vision, then flickered and faded.
He coasted by a full-view showing Shiva and the world below, a blazing crescent transcendent in its cloud-wrapped beauty. Tagore ignored the spectacle; marvels of the mind preoccupied him.
He was carrying the answer to it all, he was sure of that. In his haste he did not even glance at how blue-tinged sunlight glinted from the Circular Ocean. The thick disk of open air below it made a clear line under the blue wedge. At this angle the floating water refracted sunlight around the still-darkened limb of the planet. The glittering azure jewel heralded dawn, serene in its impudent impossibility.
The youngest of the entire expedition, Tagore was a mere theorist. He had specialized in planetary formation at university, but managed to snag a berth on this expedition by developing a ready, quick facility at explaining vexing problems the observers turned up. That, and a willingness to do scutwork.
“Cap’n, I’ve got it,” he blurted as he came through the hatch. The captain greeted him, sitting at a small oak desk, the only wood on the whole ship—then got to business. Tagore had asked for this audience because he knew the effect his theory could have on the others; so the captain should see first.
“The Circular Ocean is held up by electric field pressure,” he announced. The captain’s reaction was less than he had hoped: unblinking calm, waiting for more information.
“See, electromagnetic fields exert forces on the electrons in atoms,” Tagore persisted, going through the numbers, talking fast. “The fields down there are so strong—I got that measurement out of Lissa’s data—they can act like a steady support.”
He went on to make comparisons: the energy density of a hand grenade, contained in every suitcase-sized volume of air. Even though the fields could simply stand there, as trapped waves, they had to suffer some losses. The power demands were huge. Plus, how the hell did such a gargantuan construction work?
By now Tagore was thoroughly pumped, oblivious to his audience. Finally the captain blinked and said, “Anything like this ever seen on Earth?”
“Nossir, not that I’ve ever heard.”
“No natural process can do the stunt?”
“Nossir, not that I can imagine.”
“Well, we came looking for something different.”
Tagore did not know whether to laugh or not; the captain was unreadable. Was this what exploration was like—the slow anxiety of not knowing? On Earth such work had an abstract distance, but here…
He would rather have some other role. Bringing uncomfortable truths to those in power put him more in the spotlight than he wished.
Captain Badquor let the Tagore kid go on a bit longer before he said anything more. It was best to let these technical types sing their songs first. So few of them ever thought about anything beyond their own warblings.
He gave Tavore a captainly smile. Why did they all look so young? “So this whole thing on Shiva is artificial.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose so…”
Plainly Tagore hadn’t actually thought about that part very much; the wonder of such strong fields had stunned him. Well, it was stunning. “And all that energy, just used to hold up a lake?”
“I’m sure of it, sir. The numbers work out, see? I equated the pressure exerted by those electric fields, assuming they’re trapped
in the volume under the Circular Ocean, the way waves can get caught if they’re inside a conducting box—”
“You think that ocean’s a conductor?” Might as well show the kid that even the captain knew a little physics. In fact, though he never mentioned it, he had a doctorate from MIT. Not that he had learned much about command there.
“Uh, well, no. I mean, it is a fairly good conductor, but for my model, it’s only a way of speaking—”
“It has salt currents, true? They could carry electrical currents.” The captain rubbed his chin, the machinery of his mind trying to grasp how such a thing could be. “Still, that doesn’t explain why the thing doesn’t evaporate away, at those altitudes.”
“Uh, I really hadn’t thought…”
The captain waved a hand. “Go on.” Sing for me.
“Then the waves exert an upward force on the water every time they reflect from the underside of the ocean—”
“And transfer that weight down, on invisible waves, to the rock that’s 10 kilometers below.”
“Uh…yessir.”
Tagore looked a bit constipated, bursting with enthusiasm, with the experience of the puzzle, but not knowing how to express it. The captain decided to have mercy on the kid. “Sounds good. Not anything impossible about it.”
“Except the size of it, sir.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Sir?”
A curious, powerful feeling washed over the captain. Long decades of anticipation had steeled him, made him steady in the presence of the crew. But now he felt his sense of the room tilt, as though he were losing control of his status-space. The mind could go whirling off, out here in the inky immensities between twin alien suns. He frowned. “This thing is bigger than anything humanity ever built. And there’s not a clue what it’s for. The majesty of it, son, that’s what strikes me. Grandeur.”
John slipped into his helmet and Shiva enclosed him. To be wrapped in a world—His point of view shifted, strummed, arced with busy fretworks—then snapped into solidity, stabilized.
Astronomy had become intensely interactive in the past century, the spectral sensoria blanketing the viewer. Through Adventurer’s long voyage he had tuned the system to his every whim. Now it gave him a nuanced experience like a true, full-bodied immersion.
He was eager to immerse in himself in the feel of Shiva, in full 3-D wraparound. Its crescent swelled below like a ripe, mottled fruit. He plunged toward it. A planet, fat in bandwidth.
For effect—decades before he had been a sky-diver—John had arranged the data-fields so that he accelerated into it. From their arcing orbit he shot directly toward Shiva’s disk. Each mapping rushed toward him, exploding upward in finer detail. There—
The effect showed up first in the grasslands of the southern habitable belt. He slewed toward the plains, where patterns emerged in quilted confusions. After Tagore’s astonishing theory about the Circular Ocean—odd, so audacious, and coming from a nonscientist—John had to be ready for anything. Somewhere in the data-fields must lurk the clue to who or what had made the ocean.
Below the great grassy shelves swelled. But in places the grass was thin. Soon he saw why. The natural grass was only peeking out across plains covered with curious orderly patterns—hexagonals folding into triangles where necessary to cover hills and valleys, right up to the muddy banks of the slow-moving brown rivers.
Reflection in the UV showed that the tiles making this pattern were often small, but with some the size of houses, meters thick…and moving. They all jostled and worked with restless energy, to no obvious purpose.
Alive? The UV spectrum broke down into a description of a complex polymer. Cross-linked chains bonded at many oblique angles to each other, flexing like sleek micro-muscles.
John brought in chemists, biologists in an ensemble suite: Odis and Lissa claimed in the scientific choir. In the wraparound display he felt them by the shadings they gave the data.
The tiles, Lissa found, fed on their own sky. Simple sugars rained from the clotted air, the fruit of an atmosphere that resembled an airy chicken soup. Atmospheric electro-chemistry seems responsible, somehow, Lissa sent. Floating microbial nuggets moderated the process.
The tiles were prime eaters. Oxidizing radicals the size of golf balls patroled their sharp linear perimeters. These pack-like rollers attacked invader chemicals, ejecting most, harvesting those they could use.
Lissa brought in two more biologists, who of course had many questions. Are these tiles like great turtles? one ventured, then chuckled uneasily. They yearned to flip one over.
Diurnal or nocturnal? Some are, most aren’t. Are there any small ones? A few.
Do they divide by fission? No, but… Nobody understood the complicated process the biologists witnessed. Reproduction seems a tricky matter.
There is some periodicity to their movements, some slow rhythms, and particularly a fast Fourier-spectrum spike at 1.27 second—but again, no clear reason for it.
Could they be all one life form?—could that be?
A whole planet taken over by a tiling-thing that co-opts all resources?
The senior biologists scoffed. How could a species evolve to have only one member? And an ecosystem—a whole world!—with so few parts?
Evolution ruled that out. Bio-evolution, that is. But not social evolution.
John plunged further into the intricate matrices of analysis. The endless tile-seas cloaking mountains and valleys shifted and milled, fidgety, only occasionally leaving bare ground visible as a square fissioned into triangles. Oblongs met and butted with fevered energy.
Each hemisphere of the world was similar, though the tiles in the north had different shapes—pentagonals, mostly. Nowhere did the tiles cross rivers but they could ford streams. A Centauri variant of chlorophyll was everywhere, in the oceans and rivers, but not in the Circular Ocean.
The ground was covered with a thin grass, the sprigs living off the momentary sunlight that slipped between the edges in the jostling, jiggling, bumping, and shaking. Tiles that moved over the grass sometimes cropped it, sometimes not, leaving stubs that seemed to have been burned off.
The tiles’ fevered dance ran incessantly, without sleep. Could these things be performing some agitated discourse, a lust-fest without end?
John slowed his descent. The tiles were a shock. Could these be the builders of the Circular Ocean? Time for the biologists to get to work.
The computer folk thought one way, the biologists—after an initial rout, when they rejected the very possibility of a single entity filling an entire biosphere—quite another.
After some friction, their views converged somewhat. A biologist remarked that the larger tiles came together like dwarf houses making love…gingerly, always presenting the same angles and edges.
Adventurer had scattered micro-landers all over the world. These showed only weak electromagnetic fringing fields among the tiles. Their deft collisions seemed almost like neurons in a two-dimensional plan.
The analogy stirred the theorists. Over the usual after-shift menu of beer, soy nuts, and friendly insults, one maven of the digital realm ventured an absurd idea: could the planet have become a computer?
Everybody laughed. They kidded the advocate of this notion…and then lapsed into frowning silence. Specialists find quite unsettling those ideas that cross disciplines.
Could a species turn itself into a biological computer? The tiles did rub and caress each other in systematic ways. Rather than carrying information in digital fashion, maybe they used a more complex language of position and angle, exploiting their planar geometry. If so, the information density flowing among them was immense. Every collision carried a sort of Euclidean talk, possibly rich in nuance.
The computer analogy brought up a next question—not that some big ones weren’t left behind, perhaps lying in wait to bite them on their conceptual tail. Could the tiles know anything more than themselves? Or were they strange, geometroid solipsists? Should
they call the tiles a single It?
Sealed inside a cosmos of its own making, was It even in principle interested in the outside world? Alpha Centauri fed It gratuitous energy, the very soupy air fueled It: the last standing power on the globe. What reason did it have to converse with the great Outside?
Curiosity, perhaps? The biologists frowned at the prospect. Curiosity in early prehumans was rewarded in the environment. The evolving ape learned new tricks, found fresh water, killed a new kind of game, invented a better way to locate those delicious roots and the world duly paid it back.
Apparently—but don’t ask us why just yet! the biologists cried—the game was different here. What reward came from the tiles’ endless smacking together?
So even if the visiting humans rang the conceptual doorbell on the tile-things, maybe nobody would answer. Maybe nobody was home.
Should they try?
John and Odis and Lissa, Tagore and the captain, over a hundred other crew—they all pondered.
2.
While they wrestled with the issue, exploration continued.
A flitter craft flew near the elevated ocean and inspected its supporting volume with distant sensors and probing telescopes. Even Shiva’s weather patterns seemed wary of the Circular Ocean. Thunderclouds veered away from the gap between the ocean and the rugged land below. In the yawning height clouds formed but quickly dispersed as if dissolved by unseen forces.
Birds flew through the space, birds like feathery kites.
Somehow they had missed noticing this class of life. Even the microlanders had not had the speed to capture their darting lives. And while the kite-birds did seem to live mostly on tiny floating balloon-creatures that hovered in the murky air of the valleys, they were unusually common beneath the Circular Ocean.
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 45
