Fred said, “The low-frequency spectrum has changed.”
“Which means?” Redwing asked.
“It’s got a lot more signal strength. Let me run the Fourier—” His fingers and hands gave the board complex signals through its optical viewers. “Yep, got some FM modulation, pretty coherent.”
“Someone sending? Now?” Beth said. “Maybe they want to talk?”
“This is really low-frequency stuff,” Fred said. “The antennas we use to monitor interstellar Alfvén waves, to keep watch on perturbations in the magscoop. Never thought we’d get a coherent message on those!” Fred brightened, always happy to see a new unknown.
Karl had gotten up and now stood behind Fred’s chair. He said, “That fifteen kilohertz upper frequency—look at the spike. Amazing. Antennas radiate best if they’re at least as large as a wavelength, so … that means that the radiator is at least thirty kilometers across!”
Redwing tried to imagine what big structure could send such signals. “Is there anything on radar of that size in the jet?”
The answer came quickly: no.
“How can we decode it?” Clare asked. She stood and walked over to see Fred’s Fourier display.
Fred said, “I can look for correlates, but—hell!—we’re starting from knowing nothing about who the hell is—”
This time Redwing barely had time to register the prickly feeling on his hands and head before a crackling burnt-yellow discharge surged all along the bridge, snarling. The air snapped as they again dived for the deck. Redwing hit and flattened and saw Clare choose to stand against the nearest wall. A tendril shot forth and caught her. She twitched and crackled as the ampere violence surged through her. Her mouth opened impossibly wide, and a guttural gasp escaped—and then the mouth locked open, frozen. Smoke fumed from her hair. Her legs jumped and her arms jerked and she fell.
Her red coverall sparked at the belt. Tiny fires forked from her fingers as she struck the deck. Her hair seethed with smoke. She shuddered, twitched—was still.
Redwing did not move, but he noticed the tension had left the air. A seared silence came as acrid air stung the nostrils.
In the silence he could hear a last long sigh ease out of Clare, whistling between broken teeth.
Beth sobbed as they gingerly gathered around the singed body. Redwing wondered what he could do in the short time before the cylindrical alien ships arrived, climbing up the jet toward them.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Memor was roaring out of control. The two other Folk restrained her as she twisted and clawed at them. Their howls and wails blended together, even to Tananareve Bailey’s ears as she ran toward the enormous, thrashing things.
Her Folk attendants had scattered, not knowing what to do. They were backed against the walls, stunned into silence by Memor’s deep growls. Tananareve could tell they were too afraid to leave and too afraid to do anything. She saw that a figure among them lurked under a cowl, a humanoid with a gray metallic head, carrying three ruby red eyes that peered out from the cowl’s shadows. A cyborg, she guessed—mind downloaded into a metal body. Such things had begun to manifest Earthside in the era when they had departed, so perhaps it was natural that an alien form of embodied Artilects should have manifested here in a Bowl that was millions of years old. The cyborg had a crystal silicon carbide assembly, four arms, and sturdy legs. She had seen no artificial bodies in the Bowl but now here was one, an attendant to the Folk, cowering like the rest, against the pink living wall.
Tananareve glanced at all those pressed against the walls and now could tell they were all far too afraid, too devoted to the entire Bowl system, ever to see any other future. A stasis state where nothing changed.
Then there came a move, from the Folk.
Bemor acted. He held his genetic sister in a firm embrace while Asenath did something at the back of Memor’s head. Her great shape stopped writhing and shuddering and then slowly eased, her arms going slack. Memor’s eyes were distant, her face blank, breath long and heavy, a whuff whuff Tananareve had not heard before. Her big, nimble four-fingered hands twitched but did nothing.
Bemor turned from Memor, chuffing and labored, his face troubled. Blinking, he saw the humans and Sil. “We now know what you Sil have been spreading.” His voice came from the barrel chest, low and threatening.
Quert stepped forward, mild and calm, seeming utterly unafraid. Tananareve had met the alien Sil only moments before and was still trying to understand them. They were humanoid and walked with a fluid grace, their tan clothing adjusting itself to their movements. Quert said, “Glorian message came to human ship, the SunSeeker.”
Bemor huffed, stamped around, clearly calling on outside Artilects, and thinking on what they said, and finally himself said, “I am, yes, aware that our forward stations, orbiting from ahead of us, did not register the Glorian signals well and bring them to the proper level of attention. A bureaucratic error, alas. These stations have had no true news for many kilo-orbitals. They suffer from a sclerotic inability to adapt, to remain fresh.”
Quert said softly, “We know so. Sire.”
Bemor ignored this status salute. “These humans managed to get the Glorian mischief to you, the vagrant and difficult Sil.”
“It was important, surely you can see so, Sire. We spread such message through city-speak.” Quert spoke mildly but with eyes steady. “Then came more. Diagram of Bowl’s path. Much long history, strange tales the Glorians know.”
Bemor said, “Annoying! You had no need to be familiar with such.”
Quert did not blink. “Sil think opposite.”
Then they got into a hot discussion Tananareve could not follow, so she stepped back a few paces, into the comforting circle of humans. She had not realized, living so long among aliens whose social signals were strange and hard to register, what a simple warmth came from her own kind. After so long, it felt like a profound blessing. As the Folk chatter waxed on around them—Bemor booming, Quert’s small voice in sliding syllables—she considered her fellow humans. This was so strange in itself that the mere phrase fellow humans said it all as she thought of it. She had competed for, and then signed on to SunSeeker, all for one solid purpose—to go to a distant star and begin a new civilization. Straight out, true enough—a species imperative, some had said, and so she had supposed. She did feel that, then. She had stored her eggs and planned to find a man who deserved them, and to do what she could, in some distant land among the stars, to bring humanity to a greater destiny.
Yet … now these fellow humans in their nervous chatting selves looked … strange to her. Their rambling, whispered words, their ill-concealed yet clearly frightened eyeball-jittering glances … all these seemed both familiar and yet edged in strangeness.
Cliff, for example, looked worn down. Skinny. Standard uniform but patched here and there, knees and elbows replaced, and tattered beyond easy recognition. Rough-cut beard, hair chopped into blunt wedges, a true wild man from many wearing days. Yet his eyes were watchful and quick, listening to his team and also sizing up the alien discussion going on a few paces away. He seemed somehow telescoped down a long range, so she could see him in a perspective she had never known. As a member of his species, he talked less than others and never stopped studying his surroundings. Watching him was to her now refreshment, consolation, peace.
Best to leave that for later, though. You met the alien on your own terms and what you took away might be unexpected. She had to use whatever perspective worked.
So Tananareve turned to Irma, smiled, and did the ritual girl thing, and got the whole story in a few minutes.
The Glorians had sent their own history of the Bowl’s long trajectory, plus some cartoon threats to stay away from Glory. Apparently they had been surveying all their galactic neighborhood for a great long time, while keeping electromagnetic silence. But now that the Bowl was steadily approaching, they resorted to a simple microwave signal train. And it told a truly ancient tale.
An event
the Folk called the Great Shame was marked in the Bowl’s path. The Sil wrote it in their architectural messages. Their new city rapidly rebuilt after the Bird Folk smashed it. The new Sil array of parks, plazas, streets, and structures held an agreed code. This conveyed a message other societies ringed around the great expanses of the Bowl could see and use. Now everyone knew of the Great Shame.
Tananareve asked, “And why’s that important?”
“Because the Folk destroyed their own home world,” Cliff said. “As we saw. Earth. It looks like they blundered into the Oort cloud, and their gravitational impulse nudged the Dinosaur Killer comet, sixty-five million years ago.”
“So life changed directions,” Tananareve said, eyes distant. “Doomed the dinosaurs, but made us possible.”
“Must be more,” Irma said. “Must be.”
Memor thrashed and called in long strident shrieks. She raised her huge, thick-lipped mouth and made a warbling, keening sound. Bemor sheltered his sister twin through this and gathered himself, a big hulking presence, and said to them all, “The Sil did not truly know what they were doing. This is the Great Shame, yes. Now that it is known, the task of us all is to make clear that it came from an earlier species, and so does not imply that the Folk are responsible.”
Tananareve’s eyes flared, eyebrows arched. “Huh? C’mon—this ‘does not imply that the Folk are responsible’—but you caused it! And why’s Memor so distressed?”
Bemor shuddered a bit and in low bass tones said, “She is in conversation with her … Undermind. The Great Shame was merely a phrase to her. Now she has discovered that her Undermind concealed its meaning, to preserve her balance.”
“I thought you Folk could view all your unconscious,” Tananareve said.
“Not always.” Bemor hesitated, then with a rustle of feathers that she now knew meant he had made a decision, went on. “The proto-Folk of that ancient era, who committed the Great Shame, were unwise. They returned to their home system, flush with triumphant contacts with scores of nearby worlds. The dynamics of their parent system were well known to them, but wrong. Their data was gathered when the second sun—our star, now—was still in place. And perhaps they ventured too deeply into the large cloud of iceteroids.”
Tananareve was digesting this when Cliff frowned and said, “The Bowl has one great commandment—stability is all. Right? Having this Great Shame is a contradiction you don’t want to face—is that what’s making that one”—a nod to Memor—“so crazy?”
An awkward silence. Then Asenath said, “We Folk differ from those who built the Bowl. Those could not view their Underminds. The vagrant forces that arise in Underminds can be managed, if the sunshine of the Overmind shines upon them.”
Tananareve said, “You think of your unconscious as like, say, bacteria? Sanitize it, problem solved?”
Bemor and Asenath looked at each other and exchanged fast, complex fan-signals with clacking and rustling. Bemor had Memor in a restraining hold and the big creature was slowly becoming less restive.
“Not knowing your desires renders them more potent,” Bemor said. “They then emerge in strange ways, at unexpected moments. Your greatest drives lie concealed from your fore-minds. So the running agents and subsystems of your immediate, thinking persona can be invaded, without knowing it, by your Underminds. Quite primitive.”
“Which defeats control, right?” Cliff said.
“And so stability,” Tananareve added.
Asenath said, “You mean, Late Invaders, that notions simply appear in your Overminds?”
“You mean do we have ideas?” Tananareve considered. “Sure.”
“But you have no clue where the ideas came from,” Asenath said.
Bemor added, “Worse, they cannot go find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds is barred to them.”
“Astounding!” Asenath said. “Yet … it works in a way. They did get here on their own starship.”
“There are many subtle aspects,” Bemor began, and then paused. “We must keep to task.” He turned and gestured. Attendants rolled forward a large machine.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Tananareve said. “Is this the same machine you put me in before? That Memor used to study my mind?”
“No,” Bemor said. “This enables you to communicate with other minds, specifically those who need you to serve as an intermediary.”
“Who?” Tananareve turned to Irma and Cliff. “I hated that suffocating box with its foul smell. And the feeling—like snakes swarming over my skull. Then fingers in my head. I’d think something, then it slipped away, as if something was … running greasy hands over it.”
“We require you to enter this device,” Asenath said. She turned to Bemor and said in Folk—but not so fast that Tananareve could not translate it—“Do we need the others? They are trouble.”
Bemor rattled suppressing signals with his hind feathers. Not now.
Cliff and Irma had caught none of this. She said, “Look, I can’t square that Great Shame history of yours. You came back from star-voyaging to see the old place, Earth. So why haven’t we found Folk artifacts on other planets in the solar system?”
“There were stages. There was the era, after the Great Shame, that earlier Folk forms called the Dusting. It was a rain of small fragments into the solar system. An aftereffect of the Shame, in ways known to orbital specialists, arising from multiple iceteroid collisions far out from Sol. A sad era. Mere high-velocity dust destroyed much space-based technology. It etched whole cities out of existence on worlds not protected by atmospheres.
“But enough of this!” Bemor said. “Into this device you go now, Late Invader. We are ordered to send you thus, for reasons opaque to me. The Ice Minds would have it so. Welcome to this”—a broad sweeping gesture with a final feathered flourish—“a singular machine which we term a Reader.”
She had no choice. The assistants looked nasty and they moved swiftly, closing in on her. She turned and embraced the people near her. “Damn, we’ve just reunited and, and—”
“We’ll still be here when you come out.”
The others gave murmuring reassurances. She turned to follow the assistant, some nervous little form of robot, and suddenly a loud thunderclap hammered through the room. The fleshy walls of the skyfish rippled with it, and the floor lurched beneath her. She staggered, caught herself on Irma’s shoulder, stayed standing. “Damn!”
“A shock wave,” Cliff said. He turned to the Folk. “From what?”
Bemor looked out the transparent wall. “Disaster.”
PART XIII
THE DIAPHANOUS
It appears that the radical element responsible for the continuing thread of cosmic unrest is the magnetic field. What, then, is a magnetic field … that, like a biological form, is able to reproduce itself and carry on an active life in the general outflow of starlight, and from there alter the behavior of stars and galaxies?
—EUGENE PARKER,
COSMICAL MAGNETIC FIELDS
THIRTY-NINE
Karl said, “It’s a standing kink.”
Beth looked at the screen showing the jet, its plasma and magnetic densities highlighted in color. “This is a snap of it?”
“No, it’s real-time. The sideways movement of the jet in the Knothole region is hung up, lashing against the mag bumpers meant to keep it away.” A side excursion had forked over against one of the life zones, penetrating the atmospheric envelope of a pie-shaped wedge.
“How in hell did that happen?” Redwing asked from over Beth’s shoulder.
Karl grimaced. “We’ve been driving our fusion burn pretty hard, trying to get some distance from the fliers that are coming up at us in the jet—”
“And failing,” Redwing added.
“—so that added our plume to the plasma already forcing the kink instability. Nonlinear mechanics at work. The kink has gotten into some mode where it snags against the mag defenses and just stays there.” Karl shrugged, as if to say, Do
n’t blame me, it’s nonlinear.
“So it’s getting worse down there,” Beth said. Her eyes were always on the shifting screens as they powered away from their pursuers. In the howling maelstrom of the jet, there were always vagrant pressures, sudden snarling knots of turbulence, shifts in SunSeeker’s magscoop configuration. Now SunSeeker had Mayra Wickramsingh and Ayaan Ali as backup navigator/pilot, since Clare Conway had died in an instant’s sudden lightning flash through the excited air above the bridge deck.
That had been only an hour ago, but the sharp terror of it was already fading in memory. There was too much to do now, to think of what had happened. Beth had helped carry away the charred corpse, holding Clare by the arms, seeing the face that was swollen and already darkening. Only hours ago, she had seen that mouth smiling, laughing.
Beth heard her own voice rattling out, “Those flitters, as you call ’em, Cap’n, are coming up fast.” Her eyes studied the slim, quick shapes, just barely defined in size by their microwave radars. They had spread into a triangle, centered on SunSeeker’s wake.
Redwing stood in the middle of the bridge and said to everyone, “We’re plainly about to go into battle. Those flitters are fast. We can’t outrun them. So we’ve got to engage them with a ship not designed to do battle at all.”
Silence. Jampudvipa usually said little, but now she said quietly, “Is there any advantage in leaving the jet?”
Beth knew Redwing should answer that, but she seethed with anger now and could not stop herself. “I don’t want to maneuver against craft that fast, with our only fuel the star’s solar wind. Or what’s left of it—the jet gets over ninety percent of the plasma that leaves the star. I can’t fly hard with no mass coming through the scoop.”
Karl Lebanon asked, head bowed, “What do the flitters fly on?”
“Not plasma, right?” Redwing turned to Beth.
“Their plume shows fusion burners, but they’re running on boron-proton. They carry their fuel and reaction mass.”
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