Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “Ummm. Fits with the estimate of the lifetime of their orbits.”

  “Yes. But about two hundred thousand years older than the maximum limit on their orbit lifetime.”

  Her eyelids flickered; she was becoming drowsy, the knottings of strain in her face relaxing. Nigel felt a surge of elation himself, a conviction that the crisis was past for her. “I … see. Interesting … but …”

  “Exactly. Where were the Watchers for those extra two hundred thousand years?”

  Nigel was helping cool down a greenhouse compartment when Carlotta found him. He watched the winter landscape form as the cool air forced a rapid cycle. The condensation of mere moisture, he reflected, was an infinite source of beauty. First frost made her sketches on the panes of the observing station. Curled leaves applauded the winter wind. Fall came, setting forth ice like the best bone china.

  “I dropped the ball,” Carlotta said. He glanced up at her and she shrugged. “Your self-serve is revoked. I thought I had all the admin programs blocked, but—”

  “Ah, well. Cheeky of me, anyway, wanting to slip out from under the microscope.”

  She put her arm around him. “Think they’ll pull you out of servo work?”

  “Depends on my next physical.” He rubbed his hands together, studying the knuckles. “The joints have been protesting lately.”

  “Naw, they’ll keep on the Grand Old Man.”

  “Grand Old Crank is more the tune. At staff meetings I keep nattering on about the Snark and Marginis and machine civilizations in the galaxy. All quite unverifiable, unsubstantial stuff. I …” He gathered himself, stopped rubbing his hands, and stood up straight.

  “Nigel, you look tired.”

  “Optical illusion. See here, let me throw some of that Grand Old Sod tonnage around and get you some extra people. I think I know the right lever to use.”

  “Listen, I am sorry I messed up.”

  “Carlotta, that wasn’t some sort of sly jab. I never thought I’d get away with it for long, anyway.”

  “If I’d just thought of that one retrieval option, I …” She leaned against a bulkhead. “Madre de Dios.”

  “You’re the one who needs the help. Extra work for the mission, Nikka’s scrape—I’ll get you a shift off.”

  “No, really, I …” It was his turn to put an arm around her. “Nonsense. It’ll serve other uses, to boot. Just the sort of thing to get Ted’s attention. A touch of special influence peddling, quite the way a Grand Ole Schemer would.”

  “Ummm,” she murmured wearily. “So?”

  “It’ll make me seem a bit more active, stirring up ship politics and all.”

  “Oh. Listen, I think the medmon won’t flag you until after this surface mission, anyway.”

  He kissed her on the forehead. “Good. Any chance there’s a way round that, ah, ‘retrieval option’ in future?”

  She frowned. “Well, if I … um, maybe.”

  “Good. Might need it later. Can you make it look as though we never tried this dodge?”

  “Well, if I move fast—Hey, you figuring you might need it again?”

  He said lightly, “Could be.”

  TEN

  Nigel moves restlessly on the brow of the hill. He has been told to stay in place, hold his position. The first attempt at contact must be orchestrated with care and each person will cover a piece of this long, sloping valley, but still he has been the quiet, persistent pressure forcing Bob Millard and Ray Landon toward this attempt, and he feels he should make the try himself, he has a sense of these creatures. Now the moment approaches and he is in a fixed spot, ready to flank the converging swarm of EMs and reinforce Daffler’s moves, listening to the voices as they report in the EM movements, waiting with the rest. First chance I get, I’m off, he had told Nikka this morning, half in jest, but the years of working in teams have blunted somewhat his oblique skepticism, and so he clanks across the hillface, listening, servo’d into this carapace which casts a shadow like an insect on a nearby slate-gray valley wall. A passing mist has cleared the air of sulfur dust. Nigel can hear small animals reviving as the oxy-absorbing dust becomes mud. High clouds let pass a restless flickering of direct Ra light, giving the humped land a glow of sullen rot.

  I’m leaving cover, comes from Daffler. There’s a group of them turning their eyes upward. I think they’re going to start sending.

  Bob Millard’s drawl replies, Earth just rose above ’at big hill. You figure they’re charged up?

  “I guarantee it,” Nigel called. “They’ve been hard by the volcano up there on the ridge.”

  Working backward from the radio positions of the EMs, folding in the facts of their hunter patterns, the exobiology types have made sense of the EMs’ systematic forays out from their crude “villages”: excursions for game on the plains, for water in the muddy streams, for the shrubs and lichen they can pull from the ground, but most important, for the upwellings of current that came with the irregular volcanic spurts. They used every source for body mass and energy. When the dust came, scavenging oxygen from the air, they alone had the stored electrical energy to carry on, to continue the hunt for animals now grown sluggish. The rest of the Isis ecology was purely organic, without the semiconductor nervous system. An EM would radiate a focused beam at its prey, and then listen to the side-scattered emission, waiting for the slight shift in the absorption resonance which signaled a hit. Then it would fire its capacitors fully, burning down the prey before it could sense the warming of its tissues.

  I’ve picked out one.

  Bob says, Careful, now They’re singin’ up a storm.

  Nigel listens intently to the chromatic layers as they build in the tiers of his radio display. The pauses between the darting blips of noise get shorter, modulating a weave of counterpointing themes, a gathering tempo overriding the booming voices, bringing a swelling percussive urgency. The EMs are tilted back, he can see them now as he moves down the face of the hill. They peer upward and sing in grand unison, calling out as they have been for years with a patient need that somehow comes through the oddly spaced clicks and ringing long notes. Their heads yawn, their legs move, they settle into position. A signal has gone down the valley. In the amber light Nigel sees other EMs stop and tilt and turn, all readying themselves for the soaring song that binds them together. Nigel surges forward, counting them, wanting to be closer to Daffler when he sends the answering pattern they have agreed upon. There are hundreds of EMs in the valley now, coming out from their caves to seek, to hunt, to sing in the clear fine air.

  If Isis has a voice it is the wind. Nigel hears its reedy strumming, blowing across his carapace, and the hollow sound seems to blend with the tangled radio pulses until Nigel catches a resonance between them, a dim hint of the EM nature as counterpointing lines merge, oblique intersections of rhythm that come and ebb and volley down through the repeating weave, symphonic, measured, but plunging onward—

  Moving down to my right.

  —and the mood breaks. Nigel feels it slip through his hands, a trace of a summation he had begun to glimpse now falls away. The EMs apparently cannot hear the roiling winds of this place, anyway, the biomechs say, so the comparison is probably pointless. Nigel shrugs. It is difficult to get the sense of a world when it is necessarily divided up into detail, the facts piled up until, like an Impressionist painting done a dab at a time, the picture emerges—of life enmeshed and triumphant, for to live at all here was a victory in this globe-girdling, silent struggle against Ra’s heat engine. The biosphere is linked in subtle ways, they have found: the rate of carbon burial in the wetlands, in the muds of the continental shelves, is precisely what is needed to regulate the concentration of oxygen; nitrogen serves to build pressure to the useful breathing level, and to keep the fine dust aloft; methane regulates the oxygen levels and ventilates the oxygenless muds; the dust suppresses energy levels when it blew, giving the EMs their decisive electrodynamic edge, putting them atop a fragile pyramid.

  I’ve pi
cked out my spot. Range to the customer is—maybe two hundred meters. Daffler sounds sure of himself.

  Good, Bob Millard answers. We copy you beyond its killin’ range.

  Close observations have shown that an EM cannot focus and deliver fatal power levels at distances greater than 120 meters. This was of prime importance in designing Daffler’s tactics, and his suit. The fabric he wears will reflect above ninety percent of incident radiation at the EM hunter-killer wavelengths. Nigel surges over a field of broken gravel and through a sand lobe, trying to bring Daffler into view. There: he is coming out of a rutted gully, a thin figure in the wan light, kicking up puffs of ruby sand. Nigel can see other servo’d forms at distant spots, dispersed so that the EMs will not be disturbed if they notice something odd about the reflecting disguises the humans use.

  Daffler stops, kneels, sets up his apparatus. Power okay.

  The EM Daffler has selected is a stiff array of folded legs and body, still and waxy in the distance. Nigel suppresses the gathering EM chorus in order to hear Daffler. The EMs are singing out a complex form of darting spikes, coming down hard on a note which forms part of the word maybe, still a fragment from that old program from Earth. May … Daffler taps in his carrier wave; Nigel can hear its hum … beee

  Here goes.

  Daffler’s reply comes booming in. It starts the antique radio program over from the beginning: It’s Arrr-thur Godfrey time … and the notes roll out from the rutted valley.

  Nigel is holding his breath, leaning forward so the pads butt against his shoulders, reminding him of where he is, encapsulated in Lancer, and the frozen forms down the amber valley show nothing.

  Their chorus pulses on for a beat, two beats, and then there comes from the EMs a curious spiky scattering of notes, a rippling in the higher frequencies which cascades down into their central fugue, spreading noise and confusion through the next word whhh … until it loses coherence … whhheeerreee and dissolves in the foam of a thousand random buzzing, clicking jots.

  As they have planned, Daffler switches to a new program, now that he has caught the attention of at least some of the aliens. He focuses forward, toward the nearest, and begins the signal. It is a simple code, a few pulses. Beneath it, keeping contact, Daffler sends the continuing program, the long-dead announcer brightly calling out the names of the guests and the background music coming up, piano, light like splashing water.

  The nearest EM begins to lower its head. Down the valley the other stickwork shapes are moving, too, the great square heads tipping down from the shrouded red glow above, with its distant beckoning point of radio, alive with the babble of life, and the legs begin to work, tilting them erect as the nearest one suddenly jerks into motion, taking a step, and a new voice pours into the radio spectrum, sharp and clear: a fast chatter of blips that ripple and soar upward in amplitude, obviously something carrying a complex code.

  Nigel instinctively starts forward, rocks clattering beneath him as he speeds down the hillside without thinking of the gradient, the hydraulics protesting with a wheezing churn. “It’s a framed”—he begins, and a rising tide of anxious clicks stutters across the radio spectrum—”reply,” he yells.

  Daffler is transmitting his patient tutorial cues beneath the stretched syllables of the program, thaaattss … It is a simple arithmetic pattern with geometric implications, a form the exologic specialists thought general enough and even obvious.

  Clank and suddenly Nigel slews to the left and spins, sensors abruptly canted uphill as he feels the treads and rocker arms lose their grip. Pebbles rattle against him, he slides into the wake of a small avalanche he has started, dust fogs the lenses and he falls, crunches against a boulder, his treads spit gravel, the center axis tilts, and he begins to tip over. He slams on the brake, lets the robot rock backward, and abruptly accelerates, throwing himself to the left as the treads spin, grapples fight for purchase, and the axis comes level. He thuds to a stop Christ Nigel what’re you suspended a third of the way over the lip of a gully.

  In the last two seconds Daffler’s geometric hailing signal has spat out another amplitude-modulated spike ahhll … and a fresh piano note springs into the air, each fragment of time hangs, crystallized. The radio spectrum is a forest of uttering spikes, a pattern Nigel has not seen before, bunching and rebunching, in furious movement like bees swarming around the sober, bell-shaped linewidth that is the envelope of Daffler’s steady signal … whheee … Above it the piano note subsides, falling into a bass uuummmmm and Nigel sees the EMs have stopped broadcasting their piece of the old program, their energy is now converging and crowding into the shifting, darting turbulence which closes in on Daffler’s line.

  Nigel peers out at the valley. The EM heads swivel toward Daffler. Their arms flail about, cutting the air in elaborate arcs. They lurch to their feet and the thin spindly legs stamp ritually at the ground, pounding, pounding. Some dart back and forth, heads jerking with anxious energy. Nigel pauses to watch but the soil beneath him crumbles, a shelf cracks and falls away under his forward struts. He clutches at a stone ledge, misses, grasps it, and sags farther over the edge. The gully is rocky and deep. If he falls—

  “Daffler!” he sends. “I think they’re trying to get a coherent signal together.”

  Yeah. Good. I’m getting through, at least. Just—

  “They must have planned some reply, the same as we. They can triangulate on you so they know you’re local, but—

  The ledge slumps and tumbles down the gully. Nigel pushes down on his forward arms, catching at the caked soil to gain an increment of momentum, and thrusts back, motors roaring as a plume of dust gushes from his threads. The steel links catch—slip—catch—and he surges back, scrabbling to safety as Bob’s voice repeats Christ Nigel what the hell is all ’at you’re to stay put—

  “They’re excited, look at them—”

  Yeah give Daffler a minute an’ we’ll see—

  “No, I don’t—”

  On the spectrum the spikes converge by the hundreds on Daffler’s thick line. The EMs are tuning their individual frequencies, flexing interior muscles to adjust the lengths of their metal-laced spines. Their signals sputter with detail, the amplitudes shifting on the carrier waves in complex patterns, spilling into Daffler’s line, caahhnnn … focusing on him, many of them performing the curious jittering back-and-forth dance, agitated in a way never seen before, seized with passion, expending their electric reserves in a spilling torrent, each straining toward Daffler, reaching out with their planned surging stutter.

  Nigel senses them trying to see Daffler, to resolve him, to unmuddy the image, but their low frequencies cannot see detail shorter than their wavelengths, cannot pick out the spindly arms and legs which would distinguish Daffler from the native Isis animals, and so a storm of emissions moves to higher frequencies, seeking definition. The EMs are sending their preordained answer and at the same time they try to see Daffler, the bringer of tidings, tilting their heads swiftly, canting themselves at angles, pouring energy into the spectrum—

  Daffler cries out.

  Jesus—it’s—I’m regis—

  A sputtering howl comes welling up from the man. He shrieks. Daffler topples, curling up. The parabolic dish beside him crashes over. Daffler writhes, puffs of dust obscure him. The shriek chokes off into a gurgle.

  Nigel leaps a narrow ravine and roars down the hillside, scattering stones as the EM spectrum fills with discordant notes and the comm band says I’m not picking up insuit from him—Look I’m moving to flank that nearest bunch of ’em I don’t like—His equipment’s out—Can’t see anything try to move closer—Nigel you make out any movement, and the EM emissions recede, the spiky jumble dies. Nigel finds a sure path and surges down the slope, toward the pall of fine iron dust that shrouds the area. He approaches.

  Daffler’s suit had metal framing at the stress points. It is gone now. The dish sags in its mounts. And Daffler … It is like an enormous fowl burned up in a neglected oven, greasy and bl
istered and seared a blackish brown all over, the whole face burned off, all the hair, even the ears. The stumps of arms and legs are bent at the knees and elbows, clenched rigid in the last moment of life, this ornament of some mother’s eye now reduced to a charred mass with wings and shanks sticking out of it.

  Jesus look

  Those bastards didn’t give him a chance, just

  How long to bring that freezer in we could

  Hadn’t counted on ’at, I’d give it ten minutes minimum

  Cancel, the brain’s fried for sure no way we could

  Jess burned him down never gave

  Fuckin’ spiders!

  Nigel watch out there these things could

  Yeah well they’re not gettin’ a chance to

  Lookit that one ’ere, still pointin’ at ’im

  I say we break ’em up

  Yeah ’at one near you Phillips

  I’m on ’im got my grapplers out

  “Wait, we don’t know what went on yet. I think they simply—”

  Those two Guthridge the legs are the best I’d Lookit ’im go down, fuckin’ spiders cut the props out from under ’em

  Goddammit they got excited, it’s a ghastly mistake—”

  Holtz, swing round on that one

  Chop it down chop it

  Lookit ’em can’t tell what’s hittin’ ’em

  Filthy goddamn bugs

  You got ’im you got ’im look out it doesn’t fall on you.

  Jess burned Daffler down like

  They’re cuttin’ they’re runnin’

  Bastards!—chop ever’ one that keeps focused

  Yeah never know what these things

  Fuckin’ spiders don’t look so great legs gone do they

  Get ’at one it’s still

  “—bloody idiots they—”

  Cut ’im cut ’im he’s

  Run ’em, run ’em ’at’s right

  Shit that gunk jams up the grapplers where you break the legs watch that

  Hey on the left