The Sunborn

by Gregory Benford

  “Wiseguy! Interrupt.” Shanna explained what she wanted. It quickly got the idea and spoke in short bursts to Ark—who resent a chord-rich message to the zand.

  They all stopped short. “I don’t want them burned on the lander,” Shanna said to Jordin, who replaced her suit oxy bottles without a hitch.

  “Burned? I don’t want them eating it,” Jordin said.

  Then the zand began asking her questions, and the first one surprised her: Do you come from Lightgiver? As heralds?

  In the next few minutes Shanna and Jordin realized—all from their questions alone—that in addition to a society the zand had a rough-and-ready view of the world, an epic oral literature (though recited in microwaves), and something that resembled a religion. Even Wiseguy was shaken; it paused in its replies, something she had never heard it do before, not even in speed trials. It was learning not just an alien language but an alien mind.

  Agnostic though she was, the discovery moved her profoundly. Lightgiver. After all, she thought with a rush of compassion and nostalgia, we started out as sunworshipers, too.

  There were dark patches on the zand’s upper sides, and as the sun rose, these pulled back to reveal thick lenses. They looked like quartz—tough crystals for a rugged world. Their banquet of lichen done—she took a few samples for analysis, provoking a snort from a nearby zand—they lolled lazily in their long day. She and Jordin walked gingerly through them, peering into the quartz “eyes.” Their retinas were a brilliant blue with red wirelike filaments curling through and under. Convergent evolution seemed to have found yet another solution to the eye problem.

  Jordin said, “Y’know, I’ll bet these guys can see the sun the way we do.”

  Shanna had been snapping her own digitals. “Meaning?”

  “Our eyes are tiny in comparison. We’re forty times farther away from the sun here, so these quartz eyes are forty or so times bigger. They can resolve the point of the sun into a disk.”

  “Ah. So what’s our answer? Are we from Lightgiver?”

  “Well…you’re the cap’n, remember.” He grinned. “And the biologist.”

  She quickly said to Wiseguy, “Tell it: No. We are from a world like this. From nearer, uh, Lightgiver.”

  As soon and as tactfully as possible, Shanna got the interchange turned around, so that she was again asking the questions and the zand answering them.

  Discussing the sun was useful, too. They had a calendar concept of short and long warm-cold cycles that intrigued her. Obviously it corresponded with Pluto’s rotational day and centuries-long orbital “year”—an impressive feat of observation and deduction for people who lacked a technology. Shanna soon realized, however, that this idea was new to the zand—that, in fact, it had learned the information that very planetary day from an untutored genius it referred to as Old One. She pressed it further and learned the cold arithmetic. Ark said that this very day Old One had discoursed on such deep truths while floating over the “amber sea.”

  The moment she realized those numbers’ implication for the future of Pluto, she broke off. For the first time since she had been a very small child, she blinked back tears.

  Don’t waste our damn time on tears, Shanna sternly told herself. And certainly don’t weep in a space suit. But she remained silent, truly at a loss for what to say.

  Do not sad, the zand sent through Wiseguy. Lightgiver gives and Lightgiver takes; but it gives more than any; it is the Source of all life, here and in the Dark; exalt Lightgiver.

  “Incredible!” Shanna said to Jordin. “Wiseguy must be sending Ark pretty sophisticated stuff.”

  Jordin said, “Hard to believe Ark or Wiseguy can intuit our moods.”

  “And is trying to console us? Or just repeating some, well, theology.”

  Jordin said, “Unless Wiseguy’s imposing human categories on Ark’s language. Which seems likely—but how’ll we know?”

  Wiseguy told her that the zand did not use verb forms underlining existence itself—no words for are, is, be—so “sad” became a verb. She wondered what deeper philosophical chasm that linguistic detail revealed.

  “Apparently,” Wiseguy said, “we have settled an interesting philosophical question, one that arose with the SETI codes, before I was invented.”

  Startled, Shanna asked, “Which is…?”

  “Whether all intelligences would use intertranslatable symbol grammars.”

  “Uh, I see.”

  “The answer seems to be yes. That is why I can so readily translate the zand language.”

  “Um.” Lightgiver gives and Lightgiver takes. The phrasing was startlingly familiar. The same damned, comfortless consolation she had heard preached at her grandmother’s rain-swept funeral.

  Remembering that moment of loss with a deep inward hurt, she forced it away. What could she say?

  After an awkward silence Ark said something Wiseguy rendered as, I need leave you for now.

  Another zand was peeling out Ark’s personal identification signal, with a slight tag-end modification. Traffic between the two zand became intense. Wiseguy did its best to interpret, humming with the effort in her ears.

  “Y’know, I had my doubts about using a program for first contact,” she said. “But it’s working.”

  “What choice did we have?” Jordin asked reasonably. “We can’t sit down here for weeks chatting away at our low, verbal bit rate.”

  “Right. For one thing we’d freeze our asses off.”

  This all became abundantly clear for the next two hours, when Wiseguy consulted them incessantly about ambiguities, context, syntax—the gray areas where human intuition might still outclass Wiseguy’s terabytes. The process was wearing, but at least she and Jordin could rove the land and get a feel for the cold twilight strangeness here.

  Finally Shanna turned the translator off. First things first, and even on Pluto there was such a thing as privacy. Wiseguy had no need to hear frail humans discussing their weaknesses.

  Jordin, ever the diplomat, began. “Y’know, it’s been hours…” Even on this 0.1-g world she was getting tired. The zand lolled, Lightgiver stroking their skins—which now flushed with an induced chemical radiance, harvesting the light. She took more digitals, thinking about how to guess the reaction—

  “Y’know…”

  “Yeah, right, let’s go.”

  Stamping their feet to help circulation, they prepped the lander for liftoff. Monotonously, as they had done Earthside a few thousand times, they went through the checklist. Tested the external cables. Rapped the valves to get them to open. Tried the mechanicals for freeze-up—and found two legs that would not retract. The joints took all of Jordin’s powerful heft to unjam them.

  Shanna lingered at the hatch and looked back—across the idyllic plain, the beach, the sea slick like a pink lake. Chances are, I’ll never be here again. Maybe the high point of my life…an incredible vista. She hoped the heat of launching, carried through this frigid air, would add to the sun’s thin rays and…and what? Maybe help induce a Birthing? She reminded herself that she was a biologist, here to understand, not take sides…Impossible.

  Too bad she could not transmit Wagner’s grand “Liebestod” to them, but even Wiseguy could only do so much. She lingered, held both by scientific curiosity and by a newfound affection. Then another miracle occurred, the way they do, matter-of-factly. Sections of carbon exoskeleton popped forth from the shiny skin of two nearby zand. Jerkily these carbon-black leaves articulated together, joined, swelled, puffed with visible effort into one great sphere.

  She knew—but could not say how—the two zand were flowing together, coupling as one being. Self-merge.

  Inside, checked and rechecked, they waited for the orbital resonance time with Proserpina to roll around. Each lay silent, immersed in thought. The lander went ping and pop with thermal stress.

  Jordin punched the firing keys. The lander rose up on its roaring tail of fiery steam.

  The experience had been surrealistic. Her b
iology training was shouting all during their time down there, This makes no sense. No life chemistry should work well at such low temperatures. Enzymes might, sluggishly, but no other biological machinery she knew. But the zand played on…

  Shanna’s eyes were dry now, and her next move was clear: I’ve got to talk to Old One.

  6.

  OLD ONE

  THEY SPENT A WEEK recovering from the first landing. ISA insisted that they “restart their sleep cycle,” which meant rest up. No problem; she and Jordin were exhausted.

  But recovery wasn’t as easy as when she’d been a teenager; they’d expended a lot of nervous energy. Still, she bounced out of the sack the first day back after six hours to find Jordin already back at work. He was fixing some gimpy gear and refitting the lander, filling supplies and kicking the tires. Engineers think of their equipment as extensions of themselves and often take care of it better than their own bodies.

  They had to be debriefed. Shanna recorded a quick summary, mostly commentary on the real-time data feed they had sent. Jordin grumbled and did the same. There were the mandatory media appetites to feed, too—a contractual obligation. Thanks, Dad. The Consortium’s race to Mars two decades back had built an enduring public for space, sold as real-time, you-are-there exploration.

  As soon as possible, she got beyond Proserpina’s daily details and found time to think the easiest way—by pulling extra time on watch.

  A darkness deeper than she had ever seen crept across Pluto. Night here, without Charon’s glow, had no planets dotting the sky, only the distant sharp stars. At the terminator line shadows stretched, jagged black profiles of the ridgelines torn by pressure from the ice. The warming had somehow shoved fresh peaks into the gathering atmosphere, ragged and sharp. Since there was atmosphere far thicker and denser than anybody had expected, stars seen from the surface were not unwinking points; they flickered and glittered as on crisp nights at high altitudes on Earth. Near the magnetic poles she watched swirling blue auroral glows cloak the plains where fogs rose even at night. When Proserpina had first arrived, Earthside openly doubted the images they sent back. Clouds? Open bodies of liquid? Impossible…

  Despite all their discoveries, the basic mystery had only deepened. What was delivering such heat to the icelands?

  Shanna turned off the interior lights so she could see subtle shadings in the crust. It was her nighttime watch, by preference. All the crew were asleep but for her. Proserpina swung serenely about the forbidding crescent of a world that made no sense. As a biologist she was adrift on seas of speculation, as vast as the pewter-gray methane lakes that winked where the sunlight struck.

  The dashboard clock’s blinking crimson obediently reminded her that she should have filed another report, but she had skipped it, letting Mary Kay file a nominal status check and mission parameter index. Even billions of miles away there was paperwork.

  A Pluto day lasts 6.4 Earth days, so by the time Proserpina was fully functional, the zand were just about to wake up again. During the Pluto night Proserpina requested permission to drop small, rugged microwave sensors around the zand gathering areas. Earthside fretted and argued but after a mere several days, agreed.

  Down they went. Most survived and began picking up zand cross talk. By eavesdropping, it did not take long to find the Old One, because it was the subject of many conversations. Old One proved to be not just old but huge—three times bigger than any zand they had seen. The Old One seemed to be a different kind of creature—though in high-resolution optical observation from Proserpina it did look much like the zand. Or else the zand, like some Earth species, simply kept growing all their lives, so a big zand was an ancient one.

  Wiseguy was grinding at the river of zand-talk data, steadily incoming from the eavesdropping sensors. The program thought the “structure coefficients” of the microwave banter suggested a sophisticated language and extensive knowledge, both about Pluto and about their own social codes.

  Very well; but why was it there? Why such intelligence in this oddly barren place?

  After days of threading through the Old One’s conversations they hit a startling level of complexity. Shanna had scanned through Wiseguy’s interpretations, and they astounded. Here, all rolled into one, was the Aristotle, the Bacon, the Galileo, maybe even the Einstein of the zand species. Or else it was the latest in a long line of huge intellects, their knowledge handed down through many generations.

  Shanna immediately requested Earthside’s permission to speak directly to Old One. Again delay. Arguments. Some theorists thought that Proserpina had already gone too far in “interfering” with the zand. Unforgivable, one senior biologist proclaimed in a public screed. But then, they’d said the same about interactions with the Marsmat, too. Those who always advocated going slow didn’t understand that people who did not live forever wanted some closure in their lifetimes. And that windows of opportunity had a way of slamming shut; ask Leif Eriksson.

  After more days ISA agreed. Down went a complex microwave relay, positioned near the Old One. Jordin had labored over it, adding a small nuclear thermal generator, packing in layers to insulate the electronics against the forbidding cold. Then Wiseguy made their overtures.

  The introductions and first dialogues went surprisingly well. It was almost as if the creature were expecting them. Talking to it over microwave proved dizzying. Shanna instructed Wiseguy to stop fidgeting over pronouns—which the Old One seemed to feel were irrelevant—and other such minor grammatical distinctions. She went for the big, conceptual lumps. From the speed and insight of the Old One’s answers she felt the presence of a vast intellect. The zand had produced such intricate, quick thoughts! All with no written language or notational system or even a telescope, much less a computer.

  Any biologist would ask the obvious: where did such intelligence come from? This skimpy environment, with few microbes and almost no fauna bigger than her thumb, seemed inadequate. At least primate intelligence had arisen in a broad, diverse biosphere…but maybe that wasn’t necessary.

  The Old One was the premier zand philosopher-scientist, and it had the advantage of time. It had lived, if Wiseguy’s own beginning conversations with it were right, more than four hundred Earth years. As for how old the zand were—well, the Old One had shied away from saying. Maybe it didn’t know.

  Old One had blithely skipped most of the semantic and conceptual preliminaries she and Wiseguy had gone through with Ark. These guys learn! In fact, the native savant—its bulky, walruslike body already appearing on T-shirts Earthside—shortly had started communicating directly with the Discursive and Integrative System.

  “Dis” was the Greek equivalent of Pluto, so the project’s choice of acronyms was entirely appropriate. Their DIS metaprogram was a superstructure above Wiseguy, tasked with integrating results with the whole architecture of their onboard computing. Olympians, keeping their own counsel, for now.

  Wiseguy had ceased including Shanna in the interchange most of the time. That would have slowed them down, and Shanna did need sleep now and then. Old One didn’t seem to, so the large zand and Wiseguy exchanged sallies of semantic battle without a break. She didn’t like this, but that’s how advanced systems worked, a century into the computer revolution. Machines didn’t bother slow-mo humans unless necessary.

  And Old One, unlike some geniuses Shanna had known on Earth, had tact. When she awoke and came back into the loop, it had abruptly halted its data rate with Wiseguy. Abandoning what must have been for it a heady conversational brew, it deftly brought her up to date. As soon as she began a series of questions, it knew what she wanted to ask.

  Yes, it said—her vitamin hypothesis did, after a fashion, fit the facts. The zand suffered from what amounted to nutritional deficiencies. Analogous to Earth species, they needed trace elements for full health and strength, even for survival. The remedy lay, in a sense, close at hand—and in another way frustratingly, tantalizingly far off.

  That was why Old One had philosophic
ally resigned itself to die in the next few day-cycles. It had readily volunteered this fact, as though they would understand. After all, weren’t they also from Lightgiver, or at least in its neighborhood? They knew all, yes? Surely they could tell that another wave of Darksiders was coming, this time to bring a tide of death?

  Lights often streaked across Pluto’s somber heavens. Some of them pounded into the ice or plunged into the sea as what Old One called skystones. As soon as she heard the translated anthology word—a common translators’ programming trick, nailing terms together as an approximation—Shanna knew whence they came: the cometary Oort cloud. That great gray swarm surrounds the solar system to a depth of a third of a light-year. Inconceivably vast, its inner edge intersects the orbits of Pluto and Neptune. Pluto, nearer the cloud than Earth and shielded by less atmosphere, is far more vulnerable to hammering by meteoric debris.

  But something malignant fell from the sky, too, and then roved the surface, killing zand.

  Shanna’s mind had skated ahead of even Wiseguy, slapping pieces of the puzzle together. The zand’s life was even more precarious than she had imagined. Only by sheer cosmic accident—or as they would have said, by the mercy of Lightgiver—had a stray comet never pulverized Rendezvous. Or sent a tidal wave to roll over the zand during their breakfasting or at Birthing.

  She thought about that in light of Pluto’s long but odd history. Many astronomers thought it had started life as a moon of Uranus, later liberated by some impact or else by the slow tugs of gravity from some other passing body. Somehow the world had gotten free.

  Maybe the origin of life here, and evolution, had started then. Maybe. Only by another accident—or miracle; give the zand their nod—had they survived the Oort cloud bombardment—