Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “I only trained for this so, y’know, I could make crew. I was an engineer, best there was, but not the right category for shipwork. Only I noticed this jobclass and I figured it was nothing I couldn’t stack in on.”

  Nigel contorted his lips in a way he hoped conveyed agreement. He peered at the medico’s thin, bored face and tried to read the woman’s mood accurately. If nothing else, this exercise took his mind off the unpleasant ringing in his ears which always came as the medmon began sucking harder, filtering the plasma out and keeping his red blood cells. The blocky machine mixed in artificial plasma at the same time, but still the ringing came. With the plasma presumably went the damaged blood cells, while new stuff flooded in. Antioxidants to wipe out free radicals. Microenzymes to unlink confused old DNA strands that had gotten tangled. Immunological boosters. Leaching agents to destroy aging cells which had lost the ability to reproduce themselves correctly. The antisenescent cocktail.

  “Does seem rather a bore,” Nigel said carefully.

  “Damn right,” she said, surly. “You know, hard to believe, but once doctors used to do this. It was a big deal.”

  “Really?” Nigel tried to keep some interest in his voice, despite the fact that he could remember when doctors injected one with needles and thought eating meat was bad for you.

  “Now a flush job’s just, uh …”

  “Maintenance?”

  “Yeah, right. I mean, I like to work with my hands, real on-line stuff, but this jacko—no offense, y’know, I mean I ken you need it, but it’s like being a hairdresser or somethin’.”

  “You were an engineer.”

  “Fact. Now they got me tracing plasmapheresis and slappin’ fixes on hormones and—”

  “How’d you like a spate in the drive tubes?”

  She came out of her fixed anthology of gripes and looked at him. Until now he had been another anonymous customer, another plug-in for the medmon. “Well, shit, sure I’d tumble to that, only—”

  “I believe I might be able to get you on the crew.”

  “Who says?”

  “I do; I’ll take it up with Ted Landon.”

  “You could do that? I mean, it’s tough to get—”

  “Of course. I can see this is bloody tedious. Must be dreadful, particularly for folk like me, who’re just the same old thing, piping it through the medmon.”

  “You know it.” She brightened and her thin face filled with interest. “You could maybe get me workin’ with that team? I mean, just cleanin’ the tubes would be, you know, interface solid state, lots of fieldwork and some lab stuff, too, I’d—”

  “Fine. You seem the sort who should be set free of this.” He would have waved an arm in mute demonstration, but he made the attempt and found motor control gone. “Feel like a zombie.”

  “Here, we’re nearly through.” She flipped a switch and he could move his right arm.

  “Seems a pity I have to use up someone’s time to do this—the monitoring, the patching, so on.”

  “Yeah. You should be able to handle it yourself. How come you’re not on self-serve medmon?”

  “Ted’s being careful. Wants to monitor all the old scruffs like me.”

  “Jeez. Just makes more work.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Frap, if you could get me into engine work—”

  “Think you could put me over onto self-serve? I mean, it’s a dreadful waste.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good. I’m not going to make a mistake where my own health is concerned, after all.”

  She looked at him. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Thanks, very.”

  He relaxed. Relays thumped and sensation returned to his chest and arms. He hated dealing with people the way he had just done, but at times there seemed no way out.

  Nigel was in a good mood. He and Carlotta and Nikka had spent the evening playing sambau on a traditional board. He had lost heavily, giving up a month’s worth of household chore time to Nikka and some ship credit to Carlotta. Unfazed, he kept up a stream of bad puns and unlikely stories.

  “What’s got into you?” Carlotta asked. “Been skoffing those disallowed drugs again?”

  “Nothing so mundane.” He winked and thumped his chest “You see here a revitalized son of Britain.” He paused, weighing whether to go on. Then: “I got on self-serve.”

  “Oh, good,” Nikka said mildly.

  Carlotta said, “Translation: now nobody’ll know how fast he’s falling apart.”

  “Correct! A man’s enzymes are not suitable points for snooping by program directors and similar riffraff.”

  Carlotta asked, “How’d you do it?”

  “Moment of opportunity. Talked the medmon attendant into it.”

  “Um. The attendant’s got the right—decentralized authority and all …” Carlotta said, frowning. “But a simple systems review will catch it.”

  “That’s where you come in.” Nigel watched her expectantly as she arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got plenty of comm-systems lackeys. Surely you can exempt me from their small-minded scrutiny.”

  The two women glanced at each other and laughed. “So that’s—”

  “The old razzmatazz,” he said lightly.

  “Nigel, you want me to put information into the system that’s not true.”

  “Truth is merely an opinion that has survived.”

  “You mean faking data.”

  “Right, sacred holy data.”

  “You’re presuming on our, our—”

  “Oh, come on. We’re not English schoolchildren, sitting about eating crumpets and reading When the Otters Came to Tea. This is for keeps.”

  Nikka said softly, “You’re asking a lot, Nigel.”

  “Love survives forever and all that, but vanity is less rugged. I can’t sit in this apartment scanning reports and doing nothing.”.

  “If you’re not physically capable—”

  “Don’t you see, that’s merely a hand stick to beat me with. Ted—”

  “I can’t do something dishonest!” Carlotta cried.

  “Dishonest? Seems to me its in what the Americans delightfully call a gray area.”

  Nikka said slowly to Carlotta, “It would mean a lot to him. Otherwise he’ll lose his job.”

  “Which means what?” she replied. “No more servo work on the surface.”

  Nikka leaned forward earnestly. “That’s very important to him.”

  “Him! Always him!”

  “We have to support each other,” Nikka said stiffly.

  “Mierda seca.”

  “I believe that means—”

  “What I mean is, we’re both revolving around him. Don’t you see that?”

  Nikka blinked, her face immobile. “There is inevitably some inequality …”

  “Sí, nobody can balance it all perfecto—but we’re, we’re competing for Nigel, and that’s wrong.”

  “Yes,” Nigel said, “it is. I don’t see this as part of a contest, though. You—”

  “I see it that way,” Carlotta said.

  “And I don’t,” Nikka responded. “I’m simply saying that Nigel needs help.”

  He said mildly, “I’d like to go down there in person. No chance they’ll allow that. So servo’d is the only way I’ll see anything of Isis.”

  Carlotta looked at Nikka and doubt crowded into her face. Nigel watched. It was best to keep well out of things now.

  Carlotta had come out of the sun-streaked decaying barrios of Los Angeles, carapaced in executive competence. She skated with womanly grace over the myriad details of a systems-analyst universe.

  Her career had involved collisions with managers and bosses, job switches and long hours. The natural drift in a technical career was to loft into contract manager, then program director, then division head, buoyant in the modern managerial morass. She resisted. She wanted to keep close to the work.

  In time she got a reputation as a terrific trou bleshooter who suffered fools not at a
ll, particularly if they were bosses. She had her own standards and they had made her unapproachable. Until Lancer departed Earth orbit and started trials, she had been bottled up inside herself. Nikka had liked her from the start, though, and along with Nigel had slowly developed connections, getting the three of them through the early, uneasy years, and onto a plateau of comfortable intimacy.

  But any three-way dynamic was stressed, inevitably, if only by constant comparison with the conventional two-person model, which looked so bloody easy. How much loyalty did their snug harbor command? Nigel wondered as he watched Carlotta.

  “I … I suppose I might … for a while. Only while we’re in Isis space, though.”

  “Great! Knew you’d see the advantage of an old sod not having to explain every gimpy leg.”

  He was being falsely jovial, and they all knew it, but it gave the women a chance to sit back and listen to him as he rattled on about the surface work. Nigel studied Carlotta’s pensive eyes as he talked. She smiled reflexively at his jokes, but she glanced at Nikka now and then tentatively, as if seeking approval. He saw that she had made this compromise more for Nikka than for him. Very well. He had gone begging and had gotten what he asked. Best not to fret over the reasons.

  —we’re competing for him, she had said. Perhaps so. He had to admit that he rather enjoyed that, had always been open to this sort of arrangement, as far back as California, with Shirley and Alexandria—

  He abruptly jerked his head, stopping the thought. The women flicked puzzled looks at him. He made his face become casual, distant.

  He didn’t like to think of his previous three-way tie, and how it had ended. Letting the past filter into the present that way was a bad idea. He had to try to see Nikka and Carlotta as they were, above a calculus dictated by experience.

  Still, he could not ignore the other side of the equation. In counterpoint to competing for him, they in the bargain competed with him … for each other.

  It worked. He kept his own medical records and was able to disguise temporary injuries or stillness. That kept him on the roster but didn’t help him get jobs he wanted. It was weeks before a good servod surface mission came along, and Nigel didn’t make the squad.

  The team went after an EM creature, intact. Alex had tracked thousands of them with the big radio antenna. In a valley system near the Eye, the EM signals had begun to ebb away. Then one winked out.

  “Dead?” Nigel asked him.

  “Prob’ly. Didn’t move for ten days. Then we lost its signal. Weak, for sure.”

  “Does its body heat show up in the infrared?”

  “Did. Doesn’t now.”

  FIVE

  It took a week to reach a shipwide consensus, then another to plan the raid. The all-volunteer party dropped down, grabbed the alien, and boosted up—all in less than two hours.

  They brought the big polyflex sack into the sterilized bay. The EM creature lay in it like a Tinkertoy monster that had fallen on its side, legs at impossible angles. In the blazing uniform bay light the thing had no shadow. It did not move. The team of sixteen wheeled the specially made cart slowly, carefully, into position among the crowded banks of sensors and diagnostics and gleaming racks of surgical instruments.

  Nigel watched intently through the big viewport. He could make out Nikka in a stark white sealsuit. She pulled at the roller platform on the cart and the thing inside slumped into a better position. They were all drilled and sure. They moved quickly to position the instruments around the EM creature. Then they sliced the bag.

  As the scalpel went in, the sack exhaled a thin mist. The team drew back for an instant and then, sheepish, watched the dust settle to the deck. The bay air was Isis normal, but without the fine sulfur-rich haze. Nikka sawed away part of the sack and stepped back, handing the polyflex to an assistant behind her. I hope it doesn’t need that wind and dust to live, she said over General Comm.

  This thing’s dead already, came from elsewhere in the bay. And the assembled specialists began. For years they had waited to see something like this, and now the waxy skin of the EM lay glistening under the piercing lights. A murmur came from them.

  Nigel breathed deeply, not noticing the crowd around him. The air in this corridor was as flat and pure and dead as it was in the bay, BioSci had ordered a clean, positive-pressure balance all around the bay, just in case. He reached up and flicked the comm monitor perched on his ears, and tuned for all channels coming from the work zone.

  Careful, careful there, Andreov, peel that back as though it were your daughter’s hymen.

  thick-skinned isn’t the word look at that like shoe leather

  X rays look good. Complicated bone structure I’d say.

  Some kind of tripod spine running down into the underbelly see but what’s that big long thing up there, must be in the head

  yeah that’s parabolic, Jeffreys said that on the boost-up, a longitudinal parabolic antenna fitted into the rectangular frame in the head, so it can pick up microwaves all along the long axis

  must be what ’at bone’s for, housin’ the nerve endings for its radio sight, picks it all up an’ ’er’s a processor some’ere in ’ere to shape up the input for ’at funny-shaped brain

  okay the spectral stuff is coming in on these tissues; nothing big so far pretty stringy stuff really

  chem says the flash on that first sample is just plain ole oxy-binding iron hemoglobin wrapped up in a corpuscle blanket, same biochem patent the vertebrate line holds on Earth

  this stuff’s chromatophores just like I said and McWilliams said was bullshit, remember but lookit it respond see

  man look it jumps up like that from smooth to prickly must be papillae in the skin

  maybe helps flick off the dust

  it’s a reflex probably not conscious, just like shivering is for us

  you keep ridin’ my ass ’bout that I’ll oh you think so huh look at that sked we don’t get to those incisions for half hour at least, so you can wait for your microspecs until Kovaldy makes his cut

  I know we got to move fast can’t tell if this thing is clinically dead after all what’s it mean we’ve been through all that before only now looking at the goddamn thing jeezus it’s impressive so big the 3D doesn’t really make you feel it but still I think we ought to hold back until the superficial team is through we don’t know what sort of neural patterns we’re going to hit

  hey that’s some kinda sac you’ve

  sir there’s fluid over there on team A’s incision lots of it they say

  caught it fine only can’t figure what

  look at that pH

  like nothing I ever saw it’s a metallic salt a whole big bag of it carried up under that

  watchat

  got the needle okay

  standard tissues here high water-storage ability just as we expected

  no, nobody touches the head or anything spinal yet didn’t you agree on that when we laid out the

  hand me the other one I can’t cut see this stuffs like leather

  flaps are all over the slit there, you can see on the low-E X ray, see sir I think that’s a mouth only the flaps are down over it, there are teeth back in there

  awful damn sharp but what’s it eat

  Avery, get those legs braced better no we don’t go in yet I don’t want it to move is all, tell Kajima we’re ’bout ready

  clean at up ’fore you

  get your lens on this I’m making a cut like so up and across

  hold the bowl just in case

  Nikka you got a hand I

  something tough here I think I

  Hey

  Jesus

  ’at’s not living tissue at all Sam

  little threads of it I thought we’d hit some nerves by this time but this stuff jeez get chemsamp over here

  tough innit

  grab that

  you know what this is it’s silicon, right, strings of silicon with boron in it of all things

  I don’t get it there a
re look it’s all laced through this living tissue here maybe some intrusion

  like cancer maybe?

  hey Singh we’re getting some weak electroneural noise from the head I think we oughta step down till we

  it’s gangliated, that silicon, part of the bones maybe?

  somethin’ like a belly here, let me see that scope shot yeah it’s empty see, just maintaining pressure and notice how it’s linked to that tangle of stuff, for sure that’s an intestine, all stacked funny how regular they are innit perfect design for getting max digestive surface for the space you want, concentric

  yeah, spherical shells instead of the swarm of ropes we’ve got in our gut

  a lot better engineering you ask me

  no we must have separate samples of each, I know they’re coming fast now freeze-dry or vac-dry them every other one of them if you have to but don’t fall behind I told Ladunda we should have had more backup on that but would he of course not well do what you

  low metabolic rate they got though listen with that low a blood O2 you’d be a corpse

  this one is already

  well sure but not because of that there must’ve been something else

  it stopped moving jess like the rest in the valley

  shit now look just four centimeters away from that boron-silicon string there’s that look at the lines that’s phosphorus for sure, lots of it, all mixed in with the silicon

  I think we oughtta stop right here until we get this straightened out

  it must be rotting now already, you want to crack your suit and give it a whiff just go right ahead

  come on

  we’ll have to vac you afterward of course but for science y’know you should be proud

  stop gawking Kafafahin and fix that

  put a potential drop across it you get funny characteristics see

  what are you doing, Jeffreys?

  the electrical characteristics of these silicon threads they’re damn funny in fact you asked me I’d say it’s a transistor, a lot of ’em