“They weren’t thrown out of the System as they’d planned, on an open-ended hyperbolic trajectory; instead they were put into this wide, and deadly, elliptical orbit — an orbit which was closed, taking them nowhere, very slowly.
“I guess they tried to stick it out. Well, they’d broken up their ships; they had no choice. Maybe if we had time for a proper archaeological study here we could work out how long they lasted. Who knows? Hundreds of thousands of years? Maybe they were hoping for rescue, for all that time, from some brave new future when humans had thrown out the Xeelee once more.
“But it was a future that never came.
“By the time they set up their beacon, their final plea for help, they must have known they were through — and that there was nobody to come to their aid.”
“Nobody except us.”
“Yes,” Louise growled. “And what can we offer them now?”
“What about the beacon?”
“I shut it down,” Louise said softly. “It’s served no purpose… not for five million years.”
Spinner sat in her Xeelee-crafted cabin, watching the grim little tomb of ice turn beneath her prow. “Louise? Where to now?”
“The inner System. I think I’ve had it with all this bleakness and dark. Spinner-of-Rope, let’s go to Saturn.”
19
Surrounded by swooping photino birds, Lieserl sailed around the core of the Sun. She let hydrogen light play across her face, warming her.
The helium core, surrounded by the blazing hydrogen shell scorching its way out through the thinning layers, continued to grow in the steady hail of ash from the shell. Inhomogeneities in the giant’s envelope — clouds and clumps of gas, bounded by ropes of magnetic flux — moved across the face of the core, and the core-star actually cast shadows outwards, high up into the expanding envelope.
The photino birds swept, oblivious, through the shining fusion shell and on into the inert core itself. Lieserl watched as a group of the birds broke away and sailed off and out, to their unknowable destination beyond the Sun. She studied the birds. Had their rate of activity increased? She had the vague impression of a greater urgency about the birds’ swooping orbits, their eternal dips into the core.
Maybe the birds knew the ancient human spacecraft, the Northern, was here. Maybe they were reacting to the humans’ presence… It seemed fanciful — but was it possible?
The processes unfolding around the Sun were quite remarkably beautiful. In fact, she reflected now, every stage of the Sun’s evolution had been beautiful whether accelerated by the photino birds or not. It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process.
Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?
She smiled at herself. Ironic. Here she was, an AI five million years old, accusing herself of too much anthropomorphism…
But, she thought uneasily, perhaps her true fault lay in not enough anthropomorphism.
The sudden communication from the humans outside — the whispers of maser light which had trickled down the flanks of the huge, dumb convection cells — had shaken her to her soul.
She’d undertaken her cycle of messages, she suspected strongly, because she was driven to it by some sinister bit of programming, buried deep within her: not out of choice, or because she believed she might actually get a reply. So she’d packed her data with pictures of herself, and small, ironic jokes — all intended, she supposed, to signal to herself that this wasn’t real: that it was all a game, unworthy of being taken seriously because there was no one left out there to hear.
Well, it seemed now, she’d been wrong. These people — of her own era, roughly, preserved by relativistic time dilation in their strange ship, the Great Northern — had returned to the Solar System.
And they were — she’d come to believe — people who didn’t approve of her.
They hadn’t said as much, explicitly. But she suspected an inner coldness was there, buried in the long communications they exchanged with her.
They thought she’d lost her objectivity — forgotten the reason she was placed in here in the first place. They thought she’d become an ineffectual observer, seduced by the rhythmic beauty of the photino birds.
Lieserl was some form of traitor, perhaps.
For the truth was — in the eyes of the men and women of the Northern — the photino birds were deadly. The birds were anti-human. They were killing the Sun.
They couldn’t understand how Lieserl could not be aware of this stark enmity.
She closed her eyes and hugged her knees; the hydrogen shell, fusing at ten million degrees, felt like warm summer Sunlight on her Virtual face. She’d watched the photino birds do their slow, patient work, year after year, leaching away the Sun’s fusion energy in slow, deadly, dribbles. She’d come to understand that the birds were killing the Sun — and yet she’d never thought really to wonder what was happening outside the Sun, in other stars. Had she vaguely assumed that the photino birds were somehow native to the Sun, like a localized infection? — But that couldn’t be, of course, for she’d seen birds fly away from here, and come skimming down through the envelope to join the core-orbiting flock. So there must be birds beyond the Sun — significant flocks of them.
She realized now, with chilling clarity, that her unquestioned assumption that the birds were contained to just one star, coupled with her intrigued fascination with the birds themselves, had led her to justify the birds’ actions, in her own heart. It hadn’t even mattered to her that the result of the birds’ activity would be the death of Sol — perhaps, even, the extinction of man.
She quailed from this unwelcome insight into her own soul. She had once been human, after all; was she really so clinical, so alien?
The murder of Sol would have been bad enough. But in fact — the crew of the Northern had told her, in brutal and explicit detail — all across the sky, the stars were dying: ballooning into diseased giants, crumbling into dwarfs. The Universe was littered with planetary nebulae, supernovae ejecta and the other debris of dying stars, all rich with complex — and useless — heavy elements.
The photino birds were killing the stars: and not just the Sun, man’s star, but all of the stars, out as far as the Northern’s sensors could pick up.
Already, there was nowhere in the Universe for humans to run to.
And she, Lieserl — the Northern crew seemed to believe — should be doing more than leaking out wry little messages via her maser convection cells. She should be screaming warnings.
Through her complex feelings, a mixture of self-doubt and loneliness, anger erupted. After all, what right did the Northern crew have to criticize her even implicitly? She’d had no choice about this assignment — this immortal exile of hers in the heart of the Sun. She’d been allowed no life. And it wasn’t her who had shut down the telemetry link through the wormhole, during the Assimilation.
Why, after millions of years of abandonment, should she offer any loyalty to mankind?
And yet, she thought, the arrival of the Northern, and the fresh perspective of its crew, had made her take a colder, harder look at the birds — and at herself — than she had for a long time.
She pictured the shadow universe of dark matter: a universe which permeated, barely touching, the visible worlds men had once inhabited… And yet that image was misleading, she thought, for the dark matter was no shadow: it comprised most of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter was a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean.
The photino birds — and their unknowable dark matter cousins, perhaps as different from the birds as were the Qax from humanity — slid through the black waters like fish, blind and hidden.
But the small, shining fraction of baryonic matter seemed vital to th
e dark matter creatures. It was a catalyst for the chains of events which sustained their species.
For a start, dark matter could not form stars. And the birds seemed to need the gravity wells of baryonic stars.
When a clump of baryonic gas collapsed under gravity, electromagnetic radiation carried away much of the heat produced — it was as if the radiation cooled the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud eventually balanced the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium was found: a star formed.
But dark matter could not produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of the radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, trapped much more of its heat of contraction. As a result, much larger clouds — larger than galaxies — were the equilibrium form for dark matter.
So the early Universe had been populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it had been a cosmos almost without structure.
Then the baryonic matter had gathered, and the stars began to implode — to shine. Lieserl imagined the first stars sparking to life across the cosmos, tiny pinprick gravity wells in the smooth oceans of dark matter.
The photino birds lived off a trickle of proton-photino interactions, which fed them with a slow, steady drip of energy. And to get a sufficient flow of energy the birds needed dense matter — densities which could not have formed without baryonic structures.
And the birds’ dependence on baryonic matter extended further. She knew that the birds needed templates of baryonic material even to reproduce.
So baryonic-matter stars had given the photino birds their very being, and now fed them and enabled them to reproduce.
Lieserl brooded. A fine hypothesis. But why, then, should the birds be so eager to kill off their mother-stars?
Once more the chatter of the humans from the Northern passed through her sensorium, barely registering. They were asking her more questions — requesting more detailed forecasts of the likely future evolution of the suffering Sun.
She sailed moodily around the core, thinking about stars and the photino birds.
And her mind made connections it had failed to complete before in millions of years.
At last, she saw it: the full, bleak picture.
And, suddenly, it seemed urgent — terribly urgent — to answer the humans’ questions about the future.
She hurried to the base of her convection cells.
The shower’s needle-sharp jets of water sprayed over Louise’s skin. She floated there at the center of the shower cubicle, listening to the shrill gurgle of the water as it was pumped out of the booth. She lifted her arms up and let the water play over her belly and chest; it was hot enough, the pressure sufficiently high, to make her battered old skin tingle, as if it were being worked over by a thousand tiny masseurs.
She hated being in zero-gee. She always had, and she hated it still; she even loathed having to have a pump to suck the water out of her shower for her. She’d insisted on having this shower installed, curtained off in one corner of the life-lounge, as her one concession to luxury — no, damn it, she thought, this is no luxury; the shower is my concession to what’s left of my humanity.
A hot shower was one of the few sensual experiences that had remained vivid, as she’d got so absurdly old. High-pressure, steaming water could still cut through the patina of age which deadened her skin.
There was hardly anything else left. Since her sense of smell had finally packed up, eating had become a process of basic refuelling, to be endured rather than enjoyed. And, apart from her Virtuals, nothing much stimulated her mentally; it would take more than a thousand-year life to exhaust the libraries of mankind, but she’d long since wearied of the ancient, frozen thoughts of others, rendered irrelevant by the death of the Sun.
She turned off the spigot. Hot air gushed down around her, drying her rapidly. When the droplets had stopped floating off her skin she pulled back the shower curtain.
The lounge was basic — it contained little more than this shower, a small galley, a sleeping cocoon and her data desk with its processor bank. Lashed up in haste from sections of the Northern’s hull material, the lounge was a squat cylinder five yards across, crouched on the shoulders of the Xeelee craft like a malevolent parasite — utterly spoiling the lines of the delicate nightfighter, Louise had thought regretfully. The walls of the lounge were opaqued to a featureless gray, making the lounge rather dingy and claustrophobic. And the place was a mess. Bits of her clothing drifted around in the air, crumpled and soiled, and she was conscious of a stale smell. She really ought to clean up; she knew she utterly lacked the obsessive neatness needed to survive for long in zero gee.
She reached for a towel drifting in the air close by. She rubbed herself vigorously, relishing the feeling of the rough fabric on her skin. A mere blast of air never left her feeling really dry.
The feel of the warm towel on her skin made her think, distantly, about sex.
She’d always had a sour public persona: people saw her as an engineer obsessed with her job, with building things out there. But there was more to her than that — there were elements which Mark had recognized and treasured during their marriage. Sex had always been important to her: not just for the physical pleasure of it but also for what it symbolized: something deep and old within her, an echo of the ancient sea whose traces humans still carried, even now. The contrast of that oceanic experience with her work had made her more complete, she thought.
After she and Mark had reconciled — tentatively, grudgingly, in recognition of their joint isolation in the Northern — they had revived their vigorous sex life. And it had been good, remaining vital for a long time. Longer than either of them had a right to expect, she supposed. She wrapped the towel around her back and began to rub at her buttocks. Maybe if Mark had stayed alive -
The lounge walls snapped to transparency; space darkness flooded over her.
Louise cried out and pulled the towel around her body.
From her comms desk came the sound of laughter.
She scrambled in a locker for fresh clothes. The door of the jury-rigged locker jammed and she hauled at it, swearing, aware of the towel slipping around her.
“By Lethe’s waters, Spinner, what do you think you’re doing?”
Louise could just make out Spinner’s cage, a box of winking lights at the prow of the nightfighter. A shadow moved across the lights — Spinner, probably, twisting in her couch to take a mocking look at her. “I’m sorry. I knew you’d be embarrassed.”
Louise had found a coverall; now she thrust her legs into it. “Then why,” she said angrily, “did you invade my privacy by doing it?”
“What difference does it make? Louise, there’s no one to see; we’re a billion miles from the nearest living soul. And you’re a thousand years old. You really ought to rid yourself of these taboos.”
“But they’re my taboos,” Louise hissed. “I happen to like them, and they make a difference to me. If you ever get to my age, Spinner-of-Rope, maybe you’ll learn a little tolerance.”
“Well, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t de-opaque your walls just to catch you with your pants off.” She sounded mischievous.
Suspiciously, Louise asked, “Why, then?”
“Because — ” Spinner hesitated.
“Because what?”
“Look ahead.”
There was a point of light, far ahead, beyond Spinner’s cage: a point that ballooned, now, exploding at her face -
Saturn, plummeting out of emptiness at her.
Louise cried out and buried her face in her hands.
“Because,” Spinner said softly, “we’re there. I thought you’d enjoy watching our arrival.”
Louise opened her fingers, cautiously.
Steady, orange-brown light shone into her cabin: the light of a planet, illuminated by the bloated body of its Sun.
Spinner was laughing softly.
Louise said slowly, “Spinner — if this is Saturn — where are the rings?”
The planet itself was the same swollen mass of hydrogen and helium, with its core of rock twenty times as massive as Earth intact, deep within it. Elaborate cloud systems still wound around the globe, like watercolor streaks of brown and gold, just as she remembered. And the largest moon, Titan, was still there.
But the rings had gone.
Louise hurried to her data desk.
“…Louise? Are you all right?”
From the surface of the city-world of Titan, the rings had been a line of light, geometrically precise, vivid against the autumn gold of Saturn…
Louise made herself reply. “I think I’m mourning the rings, Spinner. They were the most beautiful sight in the Solar System. Who would smash up such harmless, magnificent beauty? And, damn it, they were ours.”
“But,” said Spinner, “there is a ring here. I can see it. Look…”
Following Spinner’s directions, Louise studied her data desk.
The ring showed up as a faint band across the stars, a shadow against the swollen, imperturbable bulk of the planet itself.
Once, three ice moons had circled outside the orbit of Titan: Iapetus, Hyperion and retrograde Phoebe. All that was left of those three moons was this trail of rubble. Thin, colorless, with no evidence of structure, the ring of ice chunks, glowing red in the light of the dying Sun, circled the planet at about sixty planetary radii, a pale ghost of its glorious predecessor.
And where were the other moons?
Louise paged through her data desk. Once, Saturn had had seventeen satellites. Now — as far as she could tell from their orbits — only Titan and Enceladus remained. And there wasn’t much left of Enceladus at all; the little moon still swung through an orbit around four planetary radii from Saturn, but its path was much more elliptical than before. Its surface — always broken, uneven — had been left as rubble. There was no sign of the small human outposts which had once sparkled against the shadows of its curved ridges and cratered plains.
The rest of the moons — even the harmless, ten-mile-wide islands of water ice had gone.
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