The Sunborn

by Gregory Benford

  And yet to this end Chill had now delivered himself.

  The Beings found Chill’s motivations mysterious. Perhaps some state of depression had forced him to Die? Some considered him deranged. Others felt that choosing Death meant, obviously, that some higher state was thus made available. Creation simply would not permit intelligences to stop. Perhaps, these said, the whispers heard from the Distants were, in fact, from those now living on another plane.

  This was one of the primary reasons cited by the Outbounds for their agenda—particularly by Forceful, who now sent,

  This reply sent rippling, complex waveforms among the Eight and the Six alike (though the Six were Five, with Chill gone). Their vexed talk pivoted around a paradox at the core of their existence. The bow shock turbulence could shear off parts of Beings, here in the most lively zone, the Cascade. But it also energized fresh whorls—giving food plus building materials. Beings could tease these into self-sustained magnetic cells, to stock more memory, more “body,” more skills. The ultimate source of the shock wall was the sun’s momentum as it orbited the mass of the inner galaxy. So the Beings owed both their origin and their growth to the remorseless momentum of that sole scintillating dot, the Fount, brimming with promise.

 

  The Six, now the Four—(Mirk, Sunless) (Ring, Forceful)—set off to swim through the desert between suns. The voyage would be long, and quite probably they would not survive. The wastes before them held shadowy presences, legendary pitfalls, and the unending terror of the shadowy unknown. All this they knew.

  Their seething plasma wakes throbbed as they steadily stroked outward. They chose, of course, to move laterally, crosswise to the unending torrent from upstream, where the interstellar gas and plasma came brawling in from the stars. Never swim against the current. They all knew that the distances were immense, the spans of time daunting even for the Beings. But the Eight sensed something fundamental, as did those lesser (and far more numerous) Beings who hung back from the Cascade. From them rose a long, rolling chorus in farewell salute. They all knew that after an age-old debate the issue was settled. Most would stay, but the Outbounds had the courage to go.

  Though perhaps its end would never be known to the Eight, an epoch voyage had begun.

  10.

  THE SUNBORN MAGNETICS

  JULIA SAT AND WATCHED as the spectral monitors—set in the microwave and radio ranges, to pick up the avalanche of talk from the Beings—sprayed their arrays onto screens. The solar storm had passed, carrying the Proto into the outer reaches. There it might survive, grow, self-organize in the filmy reaches far beyond the raw rub of matter. The society of Beings would tend to it. After all, the Sunborn were their future.

  So much. She sighed, suddenly tired. “I hope this convinces them,” she said wanly.

  Viktor patted her hand, concerned. His forehead wrinkled, and his eyelids fluttered, holding back emotion before the rest of the crew. “You sent the entire lot of data we got from the Marsmat, so is all you can do. Was brilliant, when you saw that the waveforms in the Mars-mat correlated with the Beings’ language. And that this Incursor, lost in the inner planets, was trapped. So might still be there. Have a signature, anchored in the crust of Mars. Electromagnetic waves, they do not lie.”

  The rest of the watch crew—those not doing maintenance, anyway—nodded silently. They were waiting, too. For her to explain the Leap.

  That a Being, sunk into the crust of Mars somehow, billions of years ago, would find a link to the emergent biological forms there. That somehow—what labyrinths remained to explore in this!—the Being had learned to squeeze rock with its magnetic fields. It used that ability to provoke other currents in the crust. That the electric potentials it produced would resonate with the microbial mats covering the early, warm and wet period of Mars. That a symbiosis would arise. That a collaboration—a dance?—would come from such strange musics. So much…all in one leap. The unconscious, doing all the heavy lifting…

  Killings asked quietly, earnestly, “How’d you know that the low-frequency emissions from Mars—stuff you’ve been seeing for decades—was related? I mean, assuming it is.”

  Julia threw her head back—not tossing her hair, no; she hated that—and thought. How had she seen it? Not a clue… Okay—“Not a clue. It just came to me.”

  Viktor slapped her knee. “My girl! ‘Just came to me.’ Means she looks at everything, lets it cook—presto!”

  She beamed. “Uh, right.” Nobody knew where ideas came from, so what was the difference? Certainly Wiseguy’s spectral breakdowns had been crucial. She had stared at them for hours. Days later, for a break, she had looked at the regression analysis data Praknor had sent along, mostly for Viktor. It was a compilation of years of the magnetic “noise” in the southern Martian hemisphere. Then she had slept, woken up, did routine work…and it came together. The hard work was always done by the unconscious, while you’re doing something else.

  And here they all were, waiting for the Beings to respond. She said, “Let’s do a systems check and inventory while we wait.”

  It helped keep her mind off matters. An hour passed, and it was as she had feared: they had expended more water these last weeks than planned. Going for broke. The spiraling-out maneuver to stop their tumbling had cost a good deal.

  They all groaned at the news. “Need to melt more ice if we are to keep going,” Viktor said.

  Killings made a face. “Working the ’bots on that ultra-cold ice is a bitch. It’ll take weeks—we lost two ’bots last time, the heavy-duty drilling ones that’re hard to fix.”

  “Can cannibalize for parts,” Viktor said. “But right—is pain in posterior.”

  “Unless…” Killings was shy about making suggestions, but this time his eyes were resolute. “Unless we cut the mission short. We can do a big burn out here, drop fast into the inner solar system.”

  They all looked at each other, eyes wary. A pregnant silence…

  And Wiseguy said, “The Eight say that they recognize the Mars signals. It is their Incursor.”

  They cheered. “And it asks for help freeing itself. There is a long story about its expedition into the Hotness and how it tried to inspect signs of life on the fourth planet.”

  “On surface?” Viktor shook his head. “Is none.”

  “There was once,” Killings said, nodding toward Julia. “You found those fossil plants, right?”

  Julia said, “They were from around 4 billion years ago.”

  “So this Incursor has been caught in the Mars crust for that long?” Viktor blinked. “Then it had a hand—okay, is way wrong image, has no hands—in evolution of Marsmat?”

  Julia whispered, “So the sentience of the mat is not just a result of simple evolution. It’s a…collaboration. Between these things and simple microbes.”

  “Operates through the piezoelectric, I bet,” Viktor said. “That’s what nearly fried me, back in Vent R. Squeeze rock—which can do if you are made of magnetic fields, and strong ones—and that drives current.”

  Julia smiled. “So when you nearly got electrocuted, it was Incursor answering.”

  “Um,” Killings said. “Bone-crushing handshake.”

  Wiseguy said, “The Eight now refer to their kind as the Sunborn Magnetics.”

  “That’s a synonym for Beings?” Viktor asked.

  “Apparently,” Wiseguy said. “And they have a proposition. They want you to help them reach Incursor.”

  Viktor frowned. “They are big, strong. Can’t they just go to Mars?”

  Wiseguy answered, after a pause that probably meant it was going back to the Beings for confirmation, “It is too dangerous for them. The solar wind streaming out carries magnetic turbulence—‘vortex pain,’ as I translate it—that tears these Beings to shreds.”

  “How did this Incursor get so far in?” Viktor persisted.

  “They say it used a ‘buffer’ of pla
sma, forced ahead of it. The plasma came from a huge comet that Incursor evaporated, to provide a shield for it.”

  “And it still got caught? So others, they are afraid. Humph.” Viktor gave them all a canny look. “We told them about bow shock, okay. We want it not coming into solar system. They might bargain for that?”

  “So I gather,” Wiseguy said. “Though the Beings have an ornate system of ideas about deals. They do exchange plasma or information or skills—apparently their major commodities, though something called helicity is bigger than all those.”

  “I looked into that,” Killings said. “It prob’ly means giving a twist to a magnetic field. Helicity helps make a snaky tube, which can better confine plasma. There’s plenty helicity in our own li’l ol’ fusion reactor, sitting a hundred meters away.”

  “Indeed.” From its tone Julia wondered if Wiseguy was enough of a persona to get irked when interrupted. “Customarily, when exchange occurs, they also shear off fragments of their own minds, duplicate these, and embed them in each other.”

  Julia was startled. “So each becomes slightly like the other?”

  “Apparently.” Wiseguy paused. “It seems more like a moral act than a commercial one.”

  “So…” Viktor stared off into space, thinking. “We get inner solar system protected if we can get them to Incursor. Then what do they do?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps free it? Wait—” Wiseguy again asked the Beings, and Julia thought how odd were these simple conversations.

  Even a Being the size of the Earth could think across its entire body at the same speed that synapses convey blips of thought across the human brain. Far larger Beings thought more slowly. One the size of the distance of the Earth from the sun, an astronomical unit, could trickle a thought across itself in under ten minutes. Since Beings of such a scale seldom confronted problems that demanded instant attention, this had not been a problem in their evolution. Until now.

  “They will be content to visit Incursor. Saving it comes later.” Wiseguy itself seemed awed by the scale of this idea. “They speak now of time scales greater than millennia, just to think over the matter.”

  Viktor asked, “And if we don’t—can’t!—help them get to Mars, then what?”

  “Then they will not move the bow shock.” Wiseguy spoke as though this were perfectly reasonable, a disagreement between gentlemen. “The shock wall is now close enough to Pluto to drive the electrical ecology there. To move it back will kill the life-forms there, the zand.”

  “Okay,” Julia said. “So it can keep the shock there, save the zand. But no farther. Deal?”

  Wiseguy took a long time to speak with the Beings. They all watched the microwave and radio spectral screens anxiously. These spiked and roiled—plainly much was being said. Julia felt intensely how thin and fragile a tendril they were here, poked far out into the deep darkness, dwelling in a place evolution had never designed them for at all. And yet this realm was connected to Mars in a way they would never have guessed, if they had not come here. All human history had been that way. Of the three types of chimpanzee, the first two—ordinary chimp and bonobo—never left Africa. But the humans came from those who did, always pressing against the far horizon.

  Climb to a distant peak and look back and see the landscape anew.

  Then Wiseguy said, “Deal.”

  11.

  THE DEEP

  SHANNA LOOKED ACROSS THE table at Julia and thought, The deal with utter aliens was easier to strike than this one will be. We humans know too much about each other. Chimp rivalries. Julia has made yet another goddamn discovery, and now she’ll lord it over me…forever.

  Viktor was working in the main cabin, and Shanna had asked for this little side cabin for just the two of them. For weeks the crews of both ships had been tiptoeing around the clash between the two women, but now Julia had asked Shanna to come over for a “powwow”—with no further explanation.

  Shanna sipped her tea and watched Julia line up her pen and notebook in just the right, rigid order and say, “We’ve got to act together on this.”

  “Seems to me you’ve been acting all on your own just fine,” Shanna shot back. “Making big discoveries. Co-opting Wiseguy’s running time—nice work-around with Earthside on that, by the way, so I didn’t hear a word until I get orders to let High Flyer have ‘as much time as it takes’—without saying what ‘it’ was.”

  She stopped; her words had come out in a torrent.

  Julia nodded. Silence. Then: “I admit, I had advantages. But you, after all, are the daughter of Axelrod the Great.”

  “I did take advantage of that out here,” Shanna said sternly, “but only to hold my rank of captain.”

  “I know. But now maybe you should use it.”

  “Why?” Shanna looked guardedly at the calm woman across the narrow gray table and wondered if Julia could be trusted. She would give this a few minutes, tops.

  “Because neither ship can stay much longer. Your mission is already nominally over turnaround time. ISA will start barking, if they haven’t already. And we’ve expended more water than we thought we’d need, so we’re right at full ‘on-site duration,’ as they say in ISA-speak.”

  Shanna said, “I think we can stick it out a bit longer. Cut rations—”

  “Can, maybe. Should, no. There’s too much at stake.”

  Shanna looked at the wall screen behind Julia and thought. It showed one optical ’scope’s view of Pluto hanging in darkness, its crescent fevered with an air now coppery with snaking light. Once, in what now seemed to be the far past, she had puzzled from orbit over such filigrees. Now she knew that the Being called Instigator was at work, driving huge planetary currents to unimaginable ends.

  “I want to stay here, study the zand,” she said. “You’re a biologist, you—”

  “You can’t sustain yourselves without supplies.”

  “You transferred quite a few. We can hold here another half year—”

  “And then go home. But at greater risk.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Dad.”

  Julia bridled at this, her lips twisting. “Just the opposite, in the long run. I’ve dealt with him as much as you have, and almost as long.”

  “He sees the zand as zoo exhibits.” She did not try to keep the scorn from her voice.

  “True—but we can use that.”

  “What?”

  “Look.” Julia spread her hands. “Face it, the zand are something biologists never met before: an artificial species.”

  Reluctantly Shanna admitted, “Yes…but…”

  “We have to study the zand and the Beings together—because that’s the fundamental system.”

  “So?” Shanna had come prepared for a fight, but this was a seminar.

  “So we work toward a permanent station here. With you as head.”

  The idea dazzled, but she narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Why are you being this way?”

  To her credit Julia looked genuinely puzzled. Good acting, or had Shanna misunderstood the Queen of Mars? “I’m trying to heal a breach,” Julia said. “I propose that we agree to dislike and disagree with each other. Fair enough. But we have to know that we must work together against a common enemy.”

  “What? The Beings?”

  “No, Earth.”

  Shanna tossed her hair in frustration and caught the look in Julia’s eyes. “What is it?”

  Stiffly: “I have always disliked women throwing their long hair about like that.”

  Shanna’s eyes widened. “That’s…so…”

  “Stupid, yes, I quite agree. Left over from school days in Adelaide, alas. But my hair won’t work well at length, so I suppose it has become an automatic reaction.”

  “Based on…envy,” Shanna said in disbelief.

  “I suppose.”

  “All this time I envied you, Queen of Mars and all.”

  “Queen?” Julia laughed, not merrily. “Why not prisoner? I can’t go back home to Earth ever ag
ain.”

  “Well, could’ve fooled me. That first meeting of ours—”

  “Yes, awful. Dreadful cockup.”

  “Cock what?”

  “Aussie slang.” She grinned. “Nothing to do with cocks. Look—” Julia sat forward across the table, hands clasped. “Whatever we think of each other, we must be allies. A few dozen of us out here, ten billion back there—”

  “Lousy odds.”

  “—but we have the biggest discovery in history. Axelrod wants Darksiders, thinking his Consortium buddies can lift a lot of technology tricks from them.”

  “Yeah, just like for the zand, a ‘profit center’ to—”

  “So let’s give them to him.”

  “Huh?” Shanna sat back, shocked.

  “These aren’t species out here, they’re products.”

  Shanna flared, eyes widening. “They’re living beings, intelligent.”

  “But it’s a manufactured intelligence, installed in them.”

  “So we meekly hand them over?”

  “We bargain, using them,” Julia said. “For a permanent station here, working on the zand and Darksiders and the Beings who’re behind it all. We knit together those with the Marsmat.”

  “Unified biology, of some sort.”

  “There’s truly no term for this yet, is there?”

  Shanna ticked off items on her right hand. “I’ve been thinking. The evolution of the Beings is actually pretty Darwinian. There’s plenty of variation, right? You think they’re emitted as those Protos, some sort of self-organized embryo structures from the sun. Then there is immense selection pressure on them as they move out through the solar system. Maybe you really have the analog of sexual reproduction in the way the pairs of opposite-helicity Beings mentor the young Protos. Providing some plasma and information from both partners to the youngster, right? Pretty damn close to recombination of genetic information from the parents in a fertilized egg.”