Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  Where are the EMs? Off that way, his pulsing faceplate display says. Beyond the beeping reference tabs the earlier teams have left, lighthouses in the murk. He revectors. The suit swerves with the usual oversteer, huge paws biting into the caked silicates, the sliding ceramic plates at arms and legs rasping in the pressing silence.

  Nigel receives split signals from his two worlds. Encased in the hushed module aboard Lancer, he feels the subtle clutching flex of servos responding to him, amplifying each movement. Simultaneously, across kiloklicks of space, the feedback exosenses and senceivers give him the rub and clank of the hydrasteel robot, striding over hummocks and stones, two locomotors thrusting forward as two stabilizers seize the crumbly turf. All this spills into the run-on tapes as he gathers data and checks for landmarks—spots now familiar to Command but coming fresh and crisp to him, his first time on this storm-worn place.

  Rustworld. Grains of iron blow by, licking at his lenses, and sulfur dioxides make white tracers in the ruddy sleet, so much oxygen locked up forever in the land, stirred by the winds. A sudden burst of IR flickers over the ridgeline he is mounting and Nigel thumbs for amplification, the lightpipes gathering in photons and processing them, filtering turbulence in the air and the surges of dust, narrowing the reception cone and the scale, for he knows this opening in the clouds will pass, so he has only moments to grid an overview; he sees the valley he has memorized, checks it against the overlay that flashes on his faceplate and shifts to follow his head turning, the distant scarp looming like a rough-edged knife, the black basalt flow fanning out beneath him, scraggly bushes dotting the gullies where the brown, matlike grass clusters, clinging to heavy topsoil that the winds cannot snatch away. He angles downslope, boots clank clank on metal-rich stones, Ra’s steady glow making the sky momentarily brim in echo to the strawberry tinge of the soil. The curling smoke to leftward rises from the shank of the mountain. He sees the slumbering heat in the massive shoulder of rock to the east, the oven which can rumble forth with fitful streams of lava and boiling ammonia, steam rising from the caldera, new moisture free at last to wet the winds and stem the tide of dust from the Eye. He crunches forward and suddenly there comes a shift in the insistent singsong that he half listens to, the radio stutter altering. It is a chromatic weave, that much they have learned, not the diatonic tones of Western music, so Nigel cannot seem to feel the scattershot clicks and shifts as music at all, even if he could assemble it in his mind after eliminating the long pauses between each quick darting blip, and yet now something changing in it draws his attention. The buzzing in the radio spectrum—he flashes a time-summed display, watches it evolve—is quickening, new amplitude-modulated pulses adding to the steady pattern.

  Where are they? Regional sensos, buried in crevices to elude the EMs’s notice, report to him in a flurry of data points. There: a few EMs are active, beaming their labored signal skyward, toward the distant, invisible Earth, which for a few hours now peers around Ra. But most are dormant, their tracers static, though a few show sluggish movement on the 3-D-projected map. Nigel thumbs a flash-forward of his recon path, sees that he will not reach the vicinity of the EM creatures for some hours, and without hesitation stamps down, the suit reinforcing the motion, sending him arcing over a gray boulder and down the opposite face of the blunted ridgeline, gyros keeping him from tumbling at this new surge, and he lands crump and is off again, keeping the leaps low to avoid attracting Command’s attention, but moving fast, attention riveted to the murk ahead as the dust closes in again, the stubby wire-trees scooting by below. His acoustics pick up the persistent immemorial breath of the Eye winds and higher, a chippering, a rustic of frantic scurryings as small things scatter before him. They run only a few meters and then stop, exhausted and listening, conserving their muscles’ reserves as they scavenge the dust-laden air for oxygen. This new sulfur-swollen storm from the Eve has robbed the air of more oxygen than usual and beneath the gale, life becomes torpid, sluggish. Skimming, he runs. Below passes one of the curious cairns, its stones sliced with hacksaw lines, not a representation of anything men can make out, but made by the EMs, they are sure of that. Several of the creatures have lingered near the cairns, rearranging the stones, murmuring in the microwave.

  He surges among the rumpled hills, expending power reserves without care, running, rasping, clanking, probing the ruddy murk ahead. The spatterings of radio singsong shift and click. Above, a bright lance of yellow breaks out on the scarp: lava. Its fuming brilliance cuts through a shroud of dust, and Nigel puffs, the exertion building in him now a thin sludge of fatigue, as he trots down a long gully and onto the floor of the ravaged sulfurous valley. A shadow melts and then reforms and Nigel stops dead still, half-hidden by a shank of rock. A strange prickly sensation seeps into him as he watches the shadow behind a veil of dust, a shadow of pale blue that works forward, four legs, yes, the quadrupedal imperative, one of the biomechs aboard had said, and the alien looms, suddenly near, as a gust clears the air. Huge. Silent. Still. Yet a crisp microwave pulse bursts from it as the long rectangular head turns, jerking like a wheel on ratchets, away from Nigel and toward the base of the scarp. Its skin is waxy and rough, cloaking an apparatus of bones so obvious that to Nigel it seems he looks deeply into the radio being, sees the lattice-work, the boxy ribs, the brittle cage of sticks that encases the abdomen, the stiff long legs that jerk as the thing picks its way among the heat-shattered rocks, stepping tentatively, walking by touch. Nigel lets it recede until it is a mere slight darkening in the rosy haze, and then follows. Above, yellow fingers lace the rock face. His acoustics pick up the frothing bubble of the volcano, a sluggish torrent of lava splashing down a few hundred meters away. Exosense registers rising heat. He follows the EM creature. To Nigel’s left a splotch grows suddenly, becomes definite, huge, towers over him in the shifting russet streaming. He squats, shuts down his mechanical murmur, holds his breath—

  Nigel, what’s the idea bein’ off recon path? I jess come on an’ run a check on all stations. Ramakristen says everybody’s on hold till ’is storm’s over, an’ I check you—

  “Quiet, Bob, I’ll rep you later.”

  What you mean, later? Man, you’re three sigmas out from your point.

  “In contact mode, Bob. Flag my output for T’ang.”

  He steps quickly back in the swirling dust haze and the two shadows move off together, stick legs jerking, faster than he has ever seen them on 3-D. The rectangular heads turn and he hears a stuttering, a broadband splash of microwave beats and harmonics.

  Christ, you got EMs all round you, Nigel, how’d you get in there and for goddamn sure why?

  Nigel calls up the color-coded overview and sees the blips converging, integrated vectors all pointing toward him now—no, no, near him, east a few hundred meters. “Something’s happening.”

  That’s jess what’s supposed to not; you’re there to hold the position, not make—

  “What’s the radio map say?” Nigel murmurs to deflect the man, and moves cautiously behind the swaying shadows that lumber away, melting in the flowing, clotted air.

  I’m gettin’ it, Alex is on line, but I got to beep Ted on this Nigel, you’ve blown the tactical guidelines all to hell.

  Nigel stays silent, listening to the howling hollow winds as they sweep over the upthrust crags of split boulders, listening on acoustic channels for anything from the EMs. Nothing comes, and nothing ever has. They appeared to be nonvocal. Yet they are blind as well, and sense each other only with the massive boxy radio emitters in their heads. Their song now lifts, scatters along a diatonic scale. He edges closer. These are among the biggest, over four meters high, and they lurch as they grope for purchase on the rugged gray rocks.

  A booming crash rolls through the fine, dust-shrouded eternal days.

  Hey get away from there, I jess picked up—

  “It’s the volcano, that’s all.”

  But you’re smack on top a—

  “I can run faster than a lava flow.�
��

  What if there’s a slide? They’re happenin’ all time there—

  “Quiet.”

  Fuck, Nigel you’re—

  “What’s Alex say?” Ahead, more shapes.

  Oh, the EMs are all shut down. Went out ’bout a minute ago, all of a—

  “Quiet.”

  The hissing heat of the lava flow is farther away; he picks it up clearly on acoustics. Ahead, the shadows tilt and settle. Seeking heat? It would be useful; they have a low metabolic rate and, while they are not reptiles, they could save valuable reserves by warming up at a convenient though dangerous source. He shrinks back into a cleft of rock. Six of them converge on a rough outcropping, where blue-green mottling dots the broken rock. They move awkwardly, shifting and canting their hulking bodies, and slowly they settle downward, the knobby black protrusions that frame their abdomens thrust forward—a sexual image flits through Nigel’s mind—and down upon the bare rock. He comes closer. No radio crackle. They might as well be asleep. In the wan rosy light they could see him if they had eyes, but they do not stir. Nigel waits. No motion. Then, slowly, their skins begin to swirl, the pale blue blushing and rippling, quick rainbows of color washing over them. They are inert, but their shiny, waxen flesh dances with a gaudy chromatic flourish. The distant volcano rumbles, flashing yellow. Something is happening, something quiet and important, and if he can catch the weave of it—

  Nigel, this is Ted. You’re ordered back, right now I don’t want you—

  “Certainly.”

  In Ted’s precise voice there is an edge of anger. Nigel sees he has pushed the limits of his watch assignment as far as they will go for this time. Best to retreat. And he is tired, too, more than he expected to be. There is something intense here that has drained him in the effort of sense it.

  “Falling back, Ted.”

  He edges away. In his servo’d harness he is sweating and he hopes the tap-ins will not reveal how tired he is. He will take it slowly on the long walk back. The mere act of shambling back to the suit storage and maintenance module will itself be a crisp pleasure. He has learned to savor such immersion. He scuffs lemony sand and treads backward, watching the EMs fade from view, and turns into the rushing howl of wind and the endless streaming of the ancient, transfixed rustworld.

  THREE

  Ted stuck his head out of his office doorway as Nigel went by. “Hey, got a sec?”

  “Of course.” He paused at the open doorway which faced the crescent pit of Command. Consoles and running displays dotted the yawning floor, and tiers of separate subsections rose up from the plain like large trees. People moved everywhere, yet there was only a mild hum of unassignable noise, a blending of typeout machines, human voices, and a steady tremor that seemed everywhere and nowhere, that came from the rock itself. Nigel leaned against the doorframe, a bit tired. Here the slashed rock of Lancer was given a cosmetic plastsheen.

  “C’mon in.”

  Ted’s office was lined with pseudwood, deep walnut. Nigel wondered once again why the man hadn’t simply gotten the real thing; it massed only fractionally more.

  “I see you out there in the pit a lot,” Ted said conversationally.

  Nigel smiled. The preliminary ritual: a touch of how’s- the-weather, and then to business. “I like to get round every day. Sometimes takes them awhile to log in new data.”

  Sage nod. “Yeah. They got this habit of refining the radio maps till they’re like Picassos, when all the time guys like you are panting for the raw goods. Difference in styles, I guess.”

  Nigel nodded. He had long since accepted the mismatch of interests. “You had something new …?” he prompted.

  “Give a look.” Ted flipped on a meter-sized wall screen, tapped in a command. Isis swam into being. The image swelled, shifted to a narrower focus, and centered on a tiny glint of light. Numbers clicked by in a blur at the lower left hand. The glint moved across the pink face of the Isis highlands.

  “A satellite.”

  “Yeah. In a polar orbit, crossing a little to the east of the Eye’s center. Here’s a closeup.”

  An irregular rock, pale gray, with a grid of black clots scattered across the face. “Curious,” Nigel said. “Those spots, they’re not an artifact of the opticals?”

  “No, that’s what everybody thought at first—some bug in the program. But they’re there, all right.”

  “Artificial.”

  “Yeah. A converted asteroid, I guess. And there’s another one.”

  “Oh?” The images shifted again. A second dot traced out an equatorial orbit as the screen time-stepped. Close-up: Another chunky gray rock, gridded. “Um. In sum, they can survey every square centimeter of Isis. The minimum needed to give full coverage.”

  “Right. We’ve run those orbits backward for nearly a million years. They’ve been stable that long, but if they were put up before that, they’ve had to make course corrections to stay in place.” Ted leaned forward over his desk, fingers laced together. “Got any comments?”

  “How is it this wasn’t in the dailies?”

  “Look, the techs work faster without the whole crew looking over their shoulder.”

  “Um.” Nigel stared at the rough surface of the thing. “Some signs of old cratering, very nearly worn away. Are those scratches there? Perhaps some shock fracturing from old impacts. But the black dots were clearly put in long after that. What’s the mag on those?”

  “Here.” The screen filled with black and then backed off to show some surrounding bright, scuffed rock. “Can’t resolve anything. Maybe they’re holes.”

  “Tried active probing?”

  “No, not yet, but Alex—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Huh? Why not? Alex says he can probably get a good look-see by tonight. His interferometry can give us twenty, maybe thirty pixels in that patch. Then—”

  “You’re daft to tap on someone’s door without knowing who’s inside.”

  “Inside? Good grief, Nigel—”

  “I urge caution. This is the first piece of technology we’ve seen in Isis space.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Let’s study the surface first.”

  “Dammit, there’s nothing left down there. The erosion’s so fast. And the crater-count expert, Fraser, says there was an era of heavy meteorite bombardment roughly a million years ago, too. That’s wiped the slate clean of anything that could’ve put up those satellites.”

  “No signs of cities?”

  “Not yet. There’s damn-all down there, far as the IR and deepscan people can see. That’s why seems to me we should look at what’s been left in orbit. These two satellites are probably the only old stuff around Then, when we understand that, maybe those EM creatures will make more sense, and we can start—”

  Nigel looked intently at Ted. “The cratering data, I haven’t looked at that yet. What’s the whole history?”

  Ted waved a hand, his mind on something else. “Fraser’s still doping out the crater size versus frequency curves. He has to recalc for the fast erosion, and allow for different epochs.”

  “How many epochs of crater making were there?”

  “Oh, Fraser says there was the initial period, just like our solar system, but that was ’way back. He’s got that probe data from the moons around the gas giant, and that gives over five billion years ago, when the initial cratering stopped. But then there was this recent epoch, you can see it in the highland terrain on Isis. A lot of junk falling, all over.”

  “About a million years ago?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Seems damned strange. After the planets swept their orbits clean of debris, vacuuming up the initial junk from the formation of the whole Ra solar system, there should have been an end to cratering.”

  “Well, look, Nigel …” Ted leaned back in his net chair and began toying idly with a pen. “Isis has been moving outward from Ra, forced out by tidal forces, so who knows how that’s going to change bombardment? I mean, this is a
whole new ball game here and the old rules of thumb don’t apply.”

  “Precisely,” Nigel said in a clipped, introspective way.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Why assume the satellites are the last bit of whatever civilization the EMs had? Their orbital age is about the same as the last cratering epoch—but coincidence doesn’t mean causality.”

  “Look, we’ll know more when we find some cities.”

  “One supposes.” Nigel shrugged, and got up to leave. “Maybe the EMs never had any.”

  But there were cities.

  Or at least, buildings. Site Team #6 found the circular motif, using IR studies of a particular highland plateau. There was evidence of earlier ages with heavy dust dunes, but now a shift in the Eye winds had uncovered a plain that was, from radioisotope dating, 893,000 years old. Gently curving depressions ringed a central high spot, an ancient weathered hill. Lanes radiated from this point, spokes in a wheel. Excavation found buildings a mere fifteen meters below the dry, wind-scraped terrain. The ancient stones were rectangular and carried faint markings. The anthropologists on Lancer deduced little from these scratchings. They could trace the general outline of streets, an irrigation system, and a river valley ecology. There was no trace of fabricated or smelted metals, but then no one had expected any. What the rust did not claim, the winds rubbed away.

  FOUR

  Nigel watched the blood streaming out of him and yawned. Somehow it always made him sleepy. The first few dozen times it had made him pass out.

  “Hey, I didn’t ask you wanted ta lay down. Wanna?”

  “I’m inclined to it, yes,” Nigel said, but the medico didn’t smile. She simply lowered his operating chair with a quick, carelessly efficient wrist motion. Nigel watched the tubing carry away pink strands of his plasma into the medmon.

  The hulking machine clicked as it moved on to another sampling diagnostic.

  “Some skilled job,” the medico muttered. Nigel would have nodded sympathetically, except his upper arms, chest and neck were turned off. The medmon had to keep cardiovascular rhythm going despite the drop in pressure, and it was easier if the patient didn’t interfere. He could operate his mouth, though. “Let something go wrong and you’d be needed, you know that. Same as a pilot—”