The Sunborn

by Gregory Benford

  Ring added.

  Recorder recoiled a bit from the chorus of derision.

  Forceful said.

  Dusk added,

  Someone farther out sent, without an identity signature,

  Recorder said patiently,

  Forceful sent striations red with disagreement.

  Recorder’s aura became uneasy.

  Forceful bristled, shimmering its outline.

  Recorder sent them all a picture of past ages. Images laced among them all—of eras when, under the Upstream’s rising pressure, the Cascade had pressed in upon the orbits of the giant worlds.

  Dusk added,

  Ring sent mournfully, tinged with a sad aura.

  They all knew that Ring was the closest relation to Incursor, lost long ago to inward, near the Hot—a tragic, historical agony.

  Instigator insisted.

  Ring said adamantly.

  Instigator said firmly.

  Dusk sent,

  Instigator said,

  Into the middle of this came a long, pleading note. It was Chill.

  Forceful sent, as custom required,

 

  A rustle of concern washed among the Beings, who had drawn nearer.

  Forceful said,

  Chill replied with a clear shame aura.

  Consternation swept through the Beings. This was a major step, one that left no doubt about Chill’s resolve.

  Dusk sent.

 

  Beings could fray, dissipate, then recompose. Feeding lustily in the Cascade ran the risk of such erosions. This was where the more primordial of Beings had learned the arts of suffering loss and then rebuilding themselves. By oozing soft currents, carefully using the eternal laws of induction and conduction, those early, rather dim intelligences had with agonizing slowness mastered Resurrection over Diminishment. The galaxy had spun in its eternal gyre fully fifteen times before the Beings had fathomed how to become immortal.

  But only if they wished. Resurrection soon—on a time scale whose long unit was that gyre—became of far greater significance. The Resurrection skills allowed Beings to manifest in fresh form. To choose Diminishment—not merely to suffer it from the outrageous surges of the Cascade or the magnetic insults of a passing molecular cloud—was an act of nobility and honor. It could lead to the highest status among all Beings, near and far.

  One’s fate in life, all Beings held, was set by deeds performed in past Manifestations. Previous wise acts yielded, in time, superior magnetic shapes in this present life. Bad or stupid acts gave the reverse—poor character, low status, even ruin.

  Since the Origin, Beings had passed through many Manifestations. Some traces of these past lives and deeds still lingered in core memory. Those feather-light remembrances were the breath of eternity, the high wisdom of previous selves.

  How beautiful life therefore was, and how sad. How fleeting, suspended in a limitless now that embodied all that had come before, but was still now, the only time one could change. Eternity stretched away in both time directions, while a Being was pinned to the moment. Such was the state of Being.

  Forceful sent.

  Chill insisted.

  Dusk said anxiously.

 

  Recorder said,

  Chill asked plaintively.

  Recorder said,

 

  Instigator fizzed with excitement.

  The other Beings sent cries and shimmering auras of alarm. Some fizzed with anger at the very idea.

  But Chill answered,

  13.

  BURNT-YELLOW FINGERS

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF the assault, Julia retreated into her meditations. After time in the sliding vapor world of her Japanese garden she knew what to do next.

  Years before, while adapting to Mars, she had discovered by Web browsing the melancholic poetry of A. E. Housman, an English poet dead now well over a century. A particular piece of that man’s wisdom she and Viktor had applied:

  Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad,

  ’Tis now the blood runs gold,

  And man and maid had best be glad

  Before the world is old.

  Sex, after all, was the flip side of death.

  So she and Victor had a ritual. They answered every brush with danger—and there were many, particularly in the years they held on together at Gusev—by making love, laughing, shouting out their joy in the moment, thumbing their noses at gloomy ol’ fate. Ah!—yes.

  Afterward they talked. The crew could keep track of the electromagnetic blizzard their plasma net was delivering. Proserpina was flying in clean formation now, so they could use all their gossamer plasma-web ability. Earthside was gobbling up the broadband data feed, analyzing, theorizing, decoding the long strings of mystery.

  They talked about mysteries, too. The discovery of life on Mars had ignited an ongoing debate Earthside, of course. The prevailing view now emerging was not that of the chattering classes of the long-dead twencen. Back then, all the smart folk thought that the universe was a pointless cosmic joke, on us.

  Now the Martian experience—delving into whether weird, world-spanning, and ornate molds were sentient—had op
ened the plausible case that the universe was a meaningful entity. Increasingly it seemed to be made down at the lawmaker’s level to generate life and then minds. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably to yield forth systems that evolution drove to construct models of the external world. Inevitably those models worked better if they had a model of…well, models. Themselves. A sense of self.

  So if even archaebacteria could evolve in Martian caverns into thinking beings, then a whole landscape of mind opened. Admittedly the Marsmat had rather inscrutable traits. Still, the tantalizing suggestion had emerged, from all their fieldwork. Could evolution yield up, along strange paths, beings who could discern truth, apprehend beauty? Maybe even yearn for goodness and define evil, experience mystery, and feel love? Even allowing for the human habit of projecting their minds’ traits onto other species, that was a compelling possibility, to just about everybody. Yet Julia had to remind herself that yearning was not proof.

  Viktor was, of course, ever the skeptic. “What of these things that try to disable my ship?”

  Julia grinned, suitably relaxed. “We’re on their turf. Remember, when Leif Eriksson landed in the New World, the first thing to meet him was a flight of arrows.”

  Viktor scowled. “These things, big as buildings—already I see on Net that ignorant people Earthside think these are gods or something!”

  Julia poked him and wrestled around among the bedding until she was sitting on top of him. “So what if they do?”

  Viktor snorted. “Is childish. People want gods who pay attention to them, is all.”

  She held his wrists down and demanded, “You mean, can humans claim any spiritual special status? Compared with what?”

  He gave her a broad, silent smile that said he could easily tumble her off but wouldn’t. She persisted, “Look, we both came out of a Christian background.”

  “Not me! Was brought up to be proper atheist.”

  “Yes, another gift of the Soviets.” She remembered the church her family had attended, pillars and vaulting white as plaster, like a cast around the broken bone of faith. Still…“Christianity has the most to lose from intelligent aliens, right? Jesus was our savior. Dolphins and gorillas and supersmart aliens—he didn’t die for them.”

  “Um.” Viktor sighed, resigned to a discussion. “Jesus was God’s only son, yes?”

  “The Bible says so.”

  “So unless God has the same son go around to every planet…”

  “Or wherever these things we’ve found live—”

  “Dying at every one of them? I am no expert, but—seems cruel.”

  “Worse, it means part of God has to go around dying all the time.”

  “Am glad I’m not a theologian.”

  “Me, too. I looked up this stuff, and there’s even a quotation about Christianity and extraterrestrials from Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary—over two centuries old! He said”—she glanced at her notepad, on their side table—“Let’s see, He who thinks he believes in both has thought but little of either. Ouch!”

  “I wonder if is right way to think of intelligence, anyway. These big creatures—have consciousness maybe, but how about ethics? Sin?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’ll fear death. Sin? Hell, I don’t believe in that! And ethics—well, sure, in the sense of social rules.”

  “Social rule is like take off hat when enter room. Ethics, you need philosophy.”

  “Okay, any social being will need some philosophy. But—”

  “I am social, do not need philosophy.”

  She grinned. “You only think you don’t. We don’t know how to think about ETs, that’s for sure. Can one become a Muslim? A Jew?”

  Viktor gave her a soulful look, big brown eyes liquid in the hard incandescent light. “Your meditation, the Japanese thing—it’s about this?”

  She sat back uncomfortably. “I suppose. The Buddhists and Hindus seem the least threatened by advanced aliens—they took the Marsmat in stride, remember?”

  “Does idea of alien Jew make sense?”

  “To who? Maybe not to us. But they do have a big, open idea of God.”

  Viktor frowned and grunted skeptically. “Those Baptist and evangelical guys who attacked the Marsmat finding…”

  “Right, they’re the opposite. But they’ve been losing out lately, Earthside.”

  “So now we have a big God, coming out of cosmic evolution, give us the biological universe? Better than the supernatural one of the ancient Near East, sure.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “Only, makes me wonder. These things we find—are they extraterrestrials?”

  She paused. “Oh, I see—do they have a planet?”

  “Maybe they live on iceballs, maybe not. Hard to see how they get so big, on small worlds.”

  She frowned. “But they must’ve.”

  “Or are they maybe this big God you talk about?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “This God might show up in person—wrong word, but you know what I mean—sometime.”

  “Now? Here?” She chuckled uneasily.

  “God needs only be better than we are. Not perfect.”

  “I see… Never mind who made the whole universe, maybe there are bigger minds than ours already in it?” She laughed, head tilted back. “So until the Creator shows up, we can get by worshiping something that’s better than us?”

  “We are at edge of solar system. Maybe once we get out of our cage, we get a prize.”

  “Hmmm… And you said you didn’t deal in theology.”

  An alarm clanged. Their comm beeped. Hiroshi said, “We’re getting a lot of high voltages in the plasma net. Big signals.”

  “How’s drive?” Viktor demanded.

  “Running hot and smooth,” Veronique said.

  “Coming!” Viktor called.

  They hustled into clothes and got up to the bridge double time. The audio piping in a spectral summary of the electromagnetics was blaring through the spaces where the entire crew was on duty. Julia said, “Turn it down,” and from the lower frequencies came again the strange symphony she had heard, haunting in its sense of meanings layered in harmonics.

  “Big voltages in the whole antenna system,” Veronique said tersely.

  “Damn!” Hiroshi waved his hands in the active control space, trying to keep ahead of the surges. Viktor barked orders to them and the other crew, all in their work pods. A sour smell of tension crept into Julia’s nostrils, and the scent was not all her own.

  “We’re getting feed-through,” Veronique called. “Something’s putting big inductive voltages in the whole damn plasma array.”

  Viktor blinked. “How far away is Proserpina?”

  Veronique rapped out, “One thousand seventy-three klicks.”

  “What can put voltages all along a plasma conductor that long?” Veronique asked.

  Nobody answered. The visible control display surged with red readings. “We’re getting in deep here,” Julia said softly.

  Veronique cried, “Systems crash!”

  Hiroshi leaped up. “I can’t shut down the antenna systems at all. It’s feeding back into us—”

  A yellow arc cut through the space before them. They all bailed out of their couches and lay flat on the deck as the snapping, curling discharge twisted in the air above. Viktor called, “Stay down! It’s some high-voltage phenom—”

  The crackling thing snarled around itself. Sparks hissed into the air. Coils flexed, spitting hard orange light. When a coil approached the metal walls, it veered back, snaking into the open space. A smell like burned carbon filled the air. The foot of it flared into blue-white, keeping contact with the wall terminals where the antenna systems all fed. Julia watched it, keeping flat on her back.

  Viktor said, “To break down air, the voltage is—”

  “Megavolts,” Veronique snapped. “Stay flat. Stick your head up, it’ll draw current, fry you.”

  “They—it—is trying to kill us,” Hiroshi said through c
lenched teeth.

  The audio raged. Sparks snapped. Nobody moved. Then the discharge arched and twisted and abruptly split. Yellow-green strands shaped into…

  “Human shape!” Viktor said. “Making…like us.”

  The shape was like a bad cartoon, never holding true for long. Elongated legs, wobbly head, arms that flailed about in crimson disorder, hands jutting out, flailing, and then collapsing into sizzle and flicker.

  Julia felt her heart thump. “They can see us! So they’re sending us an echo, an image to—make some kind of…communication?”

  The figure wriggled and sputtered. Julia raised her right hand slightly into the singed air. A long moment. Then slowly, agonizingly, the figure moved, too. It raised its left hand, mirror image. Wavered. The hand flexed, and with a feeling of visible effort, shaped itself carefully into…fingers. Thumb. The skin of it was yellow-bright, surging like the surface of the sun in hot brilliance. Meanwhile, the body faded into a pale ivory discharge, an electrical fog flickering on and off as if barely able to sustain the sizzling voltage.

  The Marsmat did something like this. Somehow they know we are visual animals. Maybe this is a universal way to make contact. Get into the other’s frame of perception…

  Julia slowly flexed her fingers. The echoing fingers moved, too, suffused in a waxy, saffron-mellow glow. It hovered in the air unsteadily, holding pattern, all energies focused on the shimmering, burnt-yellow hand.

  “Let’s try—,” Viktor began.

  The arc snapped off. There was nothing in the air but a harsh, nose-stinging stench.

  Veronique was sobbing softly. Hiroshi jumped up and turned in all directions but could see nothing to do. Somehow there was in the space an aching sense of vacancy.

  Viktor patted Veronique on the shoulder, her mouth open and working but unable to say anything.

  Hiroshi said, “They…want to talk?”

  “Talk?” Julia recalled what Viktor had said: This God might show up in person sometime. She laughed with a high, nervous edge.

  14.

  STICK-OUTS