“Please, yes. In case we have to…well, run for it.”
Shanna said, “You sure flip-flop. I thought you were the one who wanted to zap them.”
“I, we, do—but something I remember…”
Then the screens brimmed again with furious activity. In the whorls of magnetic turbulence she saw again a spinning, spitting torus—the shape she remembered from Hawaii, when she had blown bubbles and seen them shape magically into airy toroids; in the core of her own fusion rocket, the magnetic torus that kindled ions—a geometry so sought by nature that it appeared in vastly different places. Now it condensed into an immense, wobbly doughnut shape. Both ships speared through the hole of it.
“Like a noose that can choke us,” Viktor said sourly. He turned back to work on reboosting their fusion core.
“Or…” Julia let the word hang in the tense air.
“The toroid,” Shanna said. “They’re making themselves, all of them, into one huge—”
“They’re echoing us,” Jordin whispered.
Julia watched the giant structure form, a curve thousands of kilometers long. Capable of pressing against their ships, yes. Or doing another job?
“They echoed our human shapes.”
“And killed Veronique.” Shanna’s lips pressed so thin they turned white.
“Yes…still…” Julia was guessing, but it felt right, and she had learned to shoot such rapids with no qualm. “Now they’re echoing our fusion doughnut. But it’s their shape as well this time. So they know there is some sort of basic kinship between us. A love of geometry—particularly of geometry that works.”
Viktor laughed dryly. “Euclid would be pleased. His language!”
A call from Mary Kay interrupted. “We’ve gotten low-frequency communication from somebody. Big wave train. DIS put Wiseguy to work on it.” She paused. “High Flyer, are you getting it, too?”
“Yeah, big amplitude.”
Long, coasting minutes… Mary Kay said, “They say they’ll withdraw a bit. Want to speak among themselves.”
Julia shrugged. “I wonder if we can eavesdrop?” Viktor nodded.
Mary Kay said, “They’ve put up some sort of…well, screen. A blob of plasma, wrapped around us. Both ships.”
Shanna sent, “We’re seeing that, too. Wow, it’s building in density.”
Jordin came on. “Maybe that’s to give them some privacy. If they talk to each other in low frequencies, it won’t come through that blob because the plasma frequency is higher. Just like Earth’s ionosphere—we can’t receive low-frequency stuff through that, either.”
Viktor said, “How long they want talk?”
Mary Kay said, “There’s a phrase here, Wiseguy just delivered. ‘Half period of small world.’ What’s that?”
Viktor said, “Hope is not orbital period—that’s centuries. Must mean rotation—few days.”
“Well, at least it buys us time.” Julia shrugged. “Let Earthside worry for a while.”
At dinner they slurped up the meaty stew ravenously and crawled into bed. Julia was exhausted. More like completely drained. Looking at Viktor, she could tell that he was, too.
“I wonder if the Beings sleep?” she asked, yawning.
“No reason. No day or night out here. So they talk for next few days. About us.”
“Thing is,” she said, “I can still do a hard day, maybe two in a row, but then I’ve got to recoup.”
Viktor grunted assent. “Not youngsters anymore, the two of us. Wish for more of Mars Effect. But remember motto: age and cunning can defeat youth and strength anytime.”
She drained the last of her hot cocoa and snuggled down into the covers. “Unfortunately we’re on the same side as the youth and strength brigade. We’re supposed to cooperate with them.”
Viktor was looking blearily at a laptop screen. “Speaking of which, we got urgent message from Praknor. Too busy earlier to look at it.”
The last thing Julia heard before slipping into blackness was Viktor’s quizzical tone. “Big things happening on Mars, same time as here.”
PART IV
COSMIC UNREST
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 behaviour of stars and galaxies?
—Eugene Parker,
Cosmical Magnetic Fields
1.
UNIVERSALS
BOTH SHIPS HAD TO wait weeks, through long and sometimes tedious translations, to discover the truth—or at least a version of it.
Astronauts are obviously not ambassadors, nor are they experts in linguistics. But they made do.
Slowly the complexity of Being society emerged—often through misunderstandings. Wiseguy groused—unusually vexed, but then, it was a truly advanced self-learning program—that matters were made more difficult by the Beings’ habit of using no particular word order in clauses that made up conditional statements. Everything seemed to depend on everything else, so a sentence could mix up word order, and yet to the Beings it meant the same thing.
Perhaps this came from their having no sharp boundaries, so flow and flux were the basics of life, not barriers. Some human senses are like this: we feel that metals are cool even if they’re as warm as the room, because we sense the rate of heat loss, not the temperature itself. Yet the Beings could count. They knew basic arithmetic and were whizzes with an intuitive feel for calculus, particularly integrals. For gigayears they had been integrating fluxes that nourished them.
Only a minority of them were interested in the Hotness, which seemed to mean the realm of planets and sun. Most were engaged in conversations or works that even the Beings could ill describe. Wiseguy finally gave up trying to translate into human terms, though the closest approximation seemed to be “the Long Dance.”
So with plenty of Earthside computational help, they let Wiseguy assume a role in the dialogue, one that Dr. Jensen christened “Gofer to the Beings”—with only slight irony. Wiseguy’s orders were to focus on the bow shock problem.
“Got a call in from Shanna,” Julia heard in her headphones, from the watch officer, Doug Killings. “Forwarding.”
Julia sighed. She was trying to keep their ships working together well, but Shanna wasn’t making it easy. When Shanna came on, she started right in: “I’m picking up a lot of movement from some of those Beings, the ones who pulled farther out.”
“So?” Julia was trying to thread her way through a lot of Wiseguy results and did not like her concentration broken.
“Ukizi broke the Dopplers down. There’s some spikes, looks like small, fast things.”
“Um. So?”
“Well, anything new makes me recall what happened before. Veronique.”
Julia said stiffly, “She was in my crew. I’ll take responsibility.”
“Not what I meant. Be warned, is all.”
“Roger. Out.” The old pilot-spacer jargon worked well if you wanted to be abrupt.
Julia sighed with relief. Back to Wiseguy. Wow, was this dense stuff. The program’s most probable interpretation was that the Beings were not instigators of the bow shock intrusion—even though one of them went by that name and seemed to have earned it. Instigator had started the whole agenda of duplicating “hot” life on Pluto.
Earthside had a consensus theory for the Beings, garnered both from Being talk and from their movements. Whole teams had followed the gusher of data the two ships had sent back, and applied vast computer resources. From that trove they had tracked the Beings’ movements using the High Flyer and Proserpina radars. With more intricate work Earthside had outlined them and picked up features of their geometry, all seen by their plasma wave emissions. These last sounded in audio like fizzing howls played against a basso background.
Legions of “experts” (whatever that meant) had profiled fr
om this lode. The Beings, they thought, were opportunists. Every now and then, the Beings said, clots and clouds drifting in the realm between the stars would wander into the path of the Hotness, which apparently meant the sun. Those big clouds had increased density and mass and smacked into the prow of the solar system. For a “short while”—which seemed to mean centuries—the interstellar wilderness where the Beings thrived would press inward. Most Beings avoided that turbulent zone. But this local group relished the chance to feast on an enhanced Cascade—their harvesting of incoming energy.
So they ventured inward. And fed. And instigated.
It was not clear why. Certainly the turbulent zone where the solar wind met the interstellar plasma was ripe with energy. And as that boundary, the “heliopause,” bulged in, forced by the increased interstellar pressure, the Beings moved with it.
Perfectly natural, follow the food. But why the Pluto experiment? Julia felt that they were just born curious. Maybe that was a universal, too, among intelligent creatures. Perhaps curiosity was how they got smart.
Shanna, in her role of discoverer of Plutonian life, thought there was some ancient driver. She asked Wiseguy to scan carefully the Beings’ word choices, for terms like “ancient,” “epoch,” “age span,” “eon.” “I think they want to find out where they came from,” she had said. “Which seems to be ‘the Fount,’ whatever that is.”
“Somewhere in the solar system?” Viktor had scowled doubtfully at Shanna’s screen image.
“That’s what they say—I think. These codes in Wiseguy aren’t perfect.”
“Unlike her,” Viktor said out of range of the microphones.
The codes were fast but blunt, yes, but in time they served. One thing was clear: the Beings seemed troubled. Some of their party had departed in a rage. These Earthside had identified by their “color”—low-frequency emissions, apparently leakage from their interior thoughts. The Beings left behind kept up a running debate—on which High Flyer and Proserpina eavesdropped, with Earthside’s legions kibitzing—about what to do. Some felt they should break off contact because it was dangerous, new, frightening. New opinions came in daily, from Beings so distant that the light travel time was just getting to them.
This was another clue that the Beings had an ornately complex society, which one might well expect, given that their apparent age was 3 or 4 billion years. This Wiseguy eavesdropped from conversations; their time scale used as a unit circuits of the sun around the galaxy, which is about 250 million years. Not much younger than the sun itself. And at least one, called Recorder, said it had been around back then.
This conclusion had taken a while to check and even longer to get used to. They had invited Shanna and some of her crew for a discussion of it.
“Cannot be creatures who live forever,” Viktor maintained.
Shanna and Julia agreed, which surprised them both—brows furrowed, eyes carefully not looking at each other—even though they were both biologists. “Evolution always trades off long-term traits against short-term advantage,” Shanna had said, her tone implying that she had not expected this from Viktor. “That’s why we age.”
Viktor had shaken his head. “We wear out, is all.” He had sprained his foot the day before doing some repair work and illustrated his thesis by limping across the dayroom deck.
Julia said helpfully, “Look at our hearts. They work fine for a while, when we’re mating and bringing up children, but then they get clogged and fail.”
Viktor grinned. “I know theory. But these Beings, they say they do not reproduce.”
Both the women biologists blinked at this. How a Being could arise without natural selection through reproduction was a mystery. Even beyond carbon-based molecules, the principles were supposed to be universal. “This feels pretty damned anti-Darwinian,” Shanna called it, shaking her head.
“But they are here.” Viktor grinned again.
“Must be they started off growing from some kernel,” Julia ventured. “Their growth was selected for.”
“Um.” Viktor was not convinced; his mouth twisted at both sides, in opposite directions. “So they get smarter when get bigger? Or started smart?”
“Traits evolve,” Shanna said, “they don’t just pop out full-blown. Each step has to give the organism some incremental advantage.”
“Oh?” Viktor shrugged. “Maybe Darwin not so universal.”
The biologists agreed to leave the theory for later. Viktor judged this to be a victory, though it was unclear for whom, and brought out some champagne he had hidden deep in the bowels of High Flyer. “Hard times lately,” he observed. The sound of popping corks pleased everyone.
2.
MASS IS BRUTE
FORCEFUL COILED ITSELF about a metallic slab of matter—gingerly, gingerly. The mass tumbled in blackness, glinting with ice. Yet the Beings could sense its hardness, its slow-yielding mass.
Sunless sent,
To Sunless this place was already uncomfortably warm. They had abandoned the others, then followed an arc around, to harvest energies near the Cascade. Then they converged, conversing softly, planning, gathering their strengths. Plasma gnawed at their boundaries, irksome and itching. The Six spiraled near each other restlessly, some light-minutes away from the solid ships. Sunless and Forceful had broken off from the Eight as soon as the solids sent a confirming signal, the small shape of a toroid—the basic form of Being life.
Now there would follow some tedious and disagreeable exchange of signals—talk, talk, talk, endlessly. The Eight would debate the meaning of such motes knowing the toroid, and whether this in some elemental way meant that motes could attain the status of Beings. Such ideas were too much for the Six. They seethed with impatience.
Forceful had gone to the rest of the Six and made his case. If their goal of Outbounding was ever to come to pass, they would need the Eight. But Instigator had captured the attention of the Eight with its dangerous experiments on the cold world. Now the vermin from the Hotness threatened them all. The case was clear:
Dusk, now Forceful’s new pair-partner, had necessarily gone along, but remained quiet. Ring and Serene were distant, pondering matters. Mirk, now paired with Sunless, was similarly reluctant. Out of politeness Forceful dragged along the forlorn, shrunken Chill. Though Forceful had mentored Chill, Forceful bristled with spires of pinched, angry energy as it towed the pale and withered, Diminished Chill. None could bear to see the ragged shreds of murmuring plasma that festered from Chill’s boundaries, pathetic and diseased.
Forceful asked them all with due formality and quite politely: would they join in another attack?
No. Somehow the novelty of the moment had shattered the Six.
But not Sunless and Forceful. Each seethed with rage, sending snarled traceries down their field lines.
Forceful spat as he worked. Forceful had shaped itself, cupping its speech to broadcast outward. Those Beings farther out would hear his fury song. Perhaps they could be allies in future.
From the outer reaches came a calming song.
Forceful fumed and did not deign to answer. It radiated a fury pure and righteous.
Sunless replied in a voice studied and calm.
Forceful continued to work but let no sign of this mix with its radiations. His tone was lofty, in case the Eight heard.
This provoked relieved mirth from the Six. Forceful always knew how to shift discussions in its favor, winning with charm. He fumed, ripe with thoughts now, burning his stored reserves in his fury.
Sunless knew to let Forceful talk. Now she slid in with,
The two Beings were in essence flexing fields. Only in long-term memory did they have need for a realm, tucked in deep inside themselves, for permanent fields that could hold memory for the ages. There, static arrays held fixed their core personalities, built up over billions of years. External forces could destroy these. Indeed, a Being named Thoughtful, legendary in wisdom, had been rendered stupid by a passing shard of cold matter that sliced through its central web of magnetically hoarded memory. Such a mass as the one Forceful now grasped, tugging it and slinging it about, uncertain but angry.
The Sunborn Page 30
