Bridging Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  BETH’S METHOD FOR dealing with dueling confusions was... sleep. Soft, glorious slumber, inside the humming mothership feel of Sunseeker. It was near the end of her watch cycle, so she slipped into the tiny cabin she shared with Cliff, on the cylinder that gave full spin g.

  As was her lifelong habit, she slipped into a dreamy six hours of rest, the slumber cowling inducing sleep within moments. When she awoke their cabin was hot and Cliff lay beside her, snuggling close and aromatic, their overlapping cycles a bit off now in the press of work as they fell toward Glory.

  She rose, showered, listening to the purr of the ship. Pings, pongs and rattles told of Sunseeker’s steady deceleration. Then she went to the bridge and assumed Watch Officer status. Quick and sure, she had the Core Artilect report the latest observations of its Astro section. She saw Redwing had been using it while she slept. The whole-sky first, then. She automatically swept the sky for reassuring landmarks: a squashed Big Dipper, Southern Cross wrenched by the angle, a bright star in Cassiopeia – ah!

  It was Sol, of course. Brightest except for Sirius. All of human history summed up in a dot of light. A small spark of joy: We’ve made it.

  She checked the sleepers, crew to be revived soon, work that demanded care. The robos were simmering up the soon-to-be needed – slow, steady. She had unwrapped the mylar from Cliff herself, using her clout to resurrect her husband before bringing other crew back awake as Glory’s star, Excelsius, approached. Redwing stood more watches than anyone now, and he wanted to bring up all his central crew for the dive into the strange Glorian system. The whole ritual of resurrection from coldsleep meant hours of attention to catheters and sensors, to skin-sheets unwinding, drips and diagnostics, fluids bringing energy and the whole world back. Muscles, stimulated manually and electrically for years, needed the grunt labor of fighting gravity, so the hub was providing full Earth-g.

  The system was running well so she checked the Artilects, too. They had fresh reports. She shuffled through them, making some notes.

  She looked in on the Diaphanous, first Daphne, then Apollo. This pair of knotted plasma patterns had evolved from earlier strains both in fusion reactors and in the sun. Their evolution focused them on keeping their environment, and thus themselves, stable. Apollo was riding half a million miles out from Sunseeker at the frayed edge of their magnetic brake. Apollo was keeping pace easily, keeping watch... though the pattern was placid, as if he were dozing. Daphne was in Sunseeker’s motor, doing fine guidance of the interstellar plasma flow. Busy. Beth signaled Daphne, a handwave, but Daphne didn’t want to talk. It was hard to talk in any fashion to plasma beings. They were too different. Even the Artilects had trouble.

  In the mess with coffee and some aroma-rich fried insect pasta casserole. Beth could see Redwing hadn’t slept at all. He came in for coffee, eyes a bit bleary. “I upramped the magsail current.” Redwing’s rough voice was troubled; she had learned to read him through years of hardship. “We’re making over a thousand kilometers a second infall, so spiral braking can get us to Glory’s neighborhood inside a year. Plenty of time to study this grav transmitter.”

  A ping alert from the bridge.Redwing swung away to the Operations screen. “Making a mag field change, looks right,” he said and looked at her expectantly, eyebrows raised. “I’m taking us closer to the emitter as we go by.”

  “Really? You altered the mag field geometry?”

  Redwing shrugged. “It’s sailing, basically. I had the Artilects tell the Diaphanous pair to skew the field, cant us sideways some. Lengthens our infall arc, flattens our in-spiral. Helps out the drag factor, too. I want to know enough to report Earthside, and a close up view is essential.”

  She was used to the Captain’s way of off-handed announcement. “How close?”

  “Near as we need.” He blinked, his classic tell – he had cards to play yet.

  She had used her sleep time to make the Shipside Artilect pursue diagnostics on the plasma-lit grav wave system as Sunseeker fell inward, coming in at an angle toward the plasma blob. The Artilects had done the heavy lifting for her, so Beth opened with, “It’s a multiple charged black hole system. Our wave antennas have spread out to kilometer distances, port and starboard. That improved resolution allowed them to trace the wave intensity, tracking every one of the seventeen smaller-mass black holes. Here’s a sample of their orbits.”

  Redwing frowned. “These we get from the plasma wave signatures?”

  “Yes, the Artilects can back-fill the orbits from the emissions. That’s why they’re a bit blurred. There are more, too, coming through as our antennas give us more data.”

  “These black holes are how big?”

  “They’re tiny, less than a centimeter across – which we got from their mass.”

  “And their masses from their orbital periods?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Impressive,” the somewhat bedraggled Captain said.

  “The bigger mass, the center of this system, has maybe ten to twenty times an Earth mass, so it’s about ten centimeters across. The others are basically very large charged particles. They come swooping down on long ellipses, eccentricities of 0.99. Their orbits look like straight lines. The Astro Artilects think something controls their paths with very large electromagnetic fields. That avoids collisions among the holes. But then something swerves them a little, just a touch – so the near misses generate intense gravitational waves at closest approach – what the Astros call the hole-periastron.”

  Redwing knew that space-time could wrap itself around a dead star and cloak it into a black hole, or jiggle like a fat belly and send out waves that were both compressive and tortional – but that was all he knew.

  “I looked back at Earthside’s take on the patterns.” He waved a hand and words hung in the air. She read that, The waveforms resemble not mergers of black holes or neutron stars, but signatures that oscillate with chirps, ring-downs and overlaid complexities.

  “They say this is a simple one. Plenty more are worse.”

  Redwing chuckled. “Get this.” Perhaps the effect is fictional, made up somehow to deceive us.

  She snorted. “Fictional? Maybe Earthside language has changed? Facts never have to be plausible; fiction does.”

  “So that makes the holes give off those squeeze-stretch waves?” This observation exhausted his reservoir of terms.

  Beth pointed to a 3D image. “See, the black holes orbit in about three days and then –” The image flicked forward, a smaller hole swooping down in a tight arc around the larger one – which was also doing its little circular loop. “We detect high-amplitude plasma waves zooming up, during the close flyby of each one. They’re making the holes jitter back and forth.”

  She watched Redwing use his skeptical face to hide that he had no idea. “So?”

  She plunged in. “When the holes are close – just tens of kilometers! – that’s when they radiate powerful gravitational waves. So the Glorians choose that moment to jiggle the smaller holes back and forth. That gets them tidal forces as well, amping the signal, adding harmonics. That’s how they impose a signal – make a grav wave telegraph. They can do amplitude and frequency modulation, just like ordinary AM and FM radio.”

  “Ah.” He studied Beth’s intent gaze, moving from the dancing orbits of the holes, back to Redwing. Something was up. “And...?”

  “I think we should go in there, size up the situation.”

  “Into the black hole orbits?” Redwing did not try to keep the alarm from his voice.

  “Right. We’re mag-braking right now to the max. Tickle the torch, we can glide by this grav wave system. That is what you planned, right?”

  Redwing chuckled. “Didn’t mention it, but yes. That’s why I tacked us toward this system. Seemed pretty safe.”

  Her turn to smile. “Because there’s so little mass around here?”

  “Right. The Glorians must’ve cleaned out this part of their Oort Cloud, maybe their Kuiper belt, too. To build this. That
means less chance of smacking into some debris around the grav wave volume, see? They would’ve thrown whatever leftovers they had into the holes, once they had ’em built up – to amp their signal strength.”

  She sat, toasted him with a cup of their faux-coffee. “I’d missed that point. Sounds right.”

  He frowned. “But! Our mission target is Glory. The black hole system just makes our situation more precarious. Out here, knowing damn near nothing, we’re as vulnerable as three-legged antelopes in lion territory. How’re we going to learn more, just flying by?”

  Beth smiled. “We’ll use the Diaphanous.”

  REDWING KNEW THAT among Sunseeker’s crew there was always someone who was a bigger geek about any topic than you were. But the ultimate geeks were the Artilects, who knew much you didn’t want to know, but had none of the social skills to guess what you did.

  The Diaphanous were the ultimate airy tech. They were self organizing magnetic fields, smart minds with bellies full of plasma. Pursuit of controlled fusion power gave Earth the means to stop fossil fuel use in the late 21st Century – and then a totally unexpected technology emerged – smart toroids. It turned out the Sun itself held self-reproducing, helically coiled beings who could think. They had to. The turbulent energies of Earth’s star had fed the evolution of stable structures. Their most primitive form was the giant solar arch. When it broke apart, the colossal twisted fields spun off stable donuts of intricately coiled magnetic fields. Plasma waves rode these rubbery strands, flexings that could store memory and structures that evolved as well. Take a donut, snarl it savagely, and it breaks into two donuts, each carrying information in its store of waves and supple fields. Some of these intricate sequences each toroid shared, parent and child. Moving magnetic fields fed electric arcs, which could in turn write signals into the fine-grained structures of moving magnetic energy. Reproduction with some fidelity to design. Toroids lived to twist and reproduce again, some not: selection.

  This whole pageant of evolution marched on in ionized gases, going since the Sun formed. The process strained Redwing’s imagination, but the Diaphanous were very real.

  Their Diaphanous pack ran and rode Sunseeker’s core motor. They shaped the magnetic geometry and exhaust parameters, while clinging to the ship and its scoop geometry. Redwing thought of them as sheepdogs that just happened to be made of ions and electrons, invisible but potent. They communicated, in limited fashion. They’d never tried such a lark before – a ride to the stars! Redwing suspected humanity would never truly know their motives. So what? Did people understand their cats?

  “The slings and arrows of outrageous astrophysics,” Beth had joked long ago, as they trained the pairs who tended their own ramscoop drive. The leaders were Apollo and Daphne, along with their ‘children’ – lesser toroids who learned and worked in some sort of social pyramid of ionized intelligences.

  Beth leaned forward as they watched a graphic of the ship’s plasma configurations. “I want to have some Diaphanous along beside our flitter. They can monitor our fusion drive while the flitter nosedives into the grav plasma cloud.”

  Redwing adjusted the 3D and in the air came images of fluid fluxes merging in eddies, of magnetic webs turning in fat toroids – all in intricate yellow lines against a pale blue background. This was a dance where flow was more important than barriers. Dancers could knot off, twist, and so make a new coil of field. Embedding information with magnetic ripples led to reproduction of traits. From that sprang intelligence, or at least awareness. The Diaphanous spawned their Lessers as augments to their own intelligences, sometimes just memory alone. A Darwinnowing of use flowed through the flaring engines of Sunseeker. Only the commanding toroids lasted, apparently forever, unless their energy source failed.

  Redwing disliked uncertainty, as any Captain should – but to explore this system demanded a deft use of opportunity. And... Who else better to govern magnetic machinery and penetrate the grav wave cloud than magnetic beings?

  CLIFF CAME IN for breakfast and knew from the faces of Beth and Redwing that something big and contentious was up. He got some of the pasta casserole, snappy with spices; Beth was always good at these lean-mean meals. He savored some with coffee while they filled him in. He was a bit blurry but couldn’t resist asking the obvious. “Who flies the flitter?”

  “Artilects,” Redwing said.

  “The flitter minds are navigation ’Lects,” Cliff said, slurping at a purple protein shake; the recently awakened were always furiously hungry. “Not smart enough to size up an unknown situation.”

  Redwing bristled. “We can install better ’Lects.”

  Cliff shook his head. “Can’t just spin them in – takes time. How long till rendezvous?”

  Redwing frowned. “Nearly two days.”

  “Not enough.” Cliff was a biologist but still engineer enough to know the basics. “Besides, I’ve worked with Daphne and Apollo, running trials of the flitter burn, to know how to deal with them. They’re not just handy horses, y’know.”

  Redwing shook his head. “There’s no real autodoc on the flitter, just a kit. Too risky.”

  Beth jerked her head, irritated. “It’s a short mission.”

  They had already used the translator com to ask if the Diaphanous could sprout off portions of themselves to ‘ride shotgun’ – a phrase Redwing summoned up from old movies, and was surprised that Beth understood – on the fusion flitter, Explorer.

  Cliff smiled. “Remember, ‘That’s for us to find out,’ you said.”

  Beth shook her head. “No shotguns. Look, we’ve got Apollo and Daphne ready to go. The lesser toroids know our drive. Let them run us for a while – good training. Tell them it’s a temporary promotion.”

  He laughed and Cliff knew the Captain would agree. Even though it meant a human would have to go. Or two.

  REDWING ALREADY REGRETTED giving the Diaphanous pair those names, long ago. It made them into people, somehow, when they weren’t – like cats. “You want to dive near, so those two can sling into the plasma cloud, right? What if we lose them?” Redwing’s tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick.

  Beth got up and paced. “They’re volunteers. We have the six others, the ones Apollo and Daphne call the Lessers.”

  “We’re at max deceleration now – it drops as the cube of our velocity, y’know. So we need to lose every klick per sec we can.”

  With a flick of her wrist inboard Beth called up their trajectory arc, a long yellow line on the wall screen. Sunseeker was a pulsing red dot at the edge of the Excelsius outer system. Its engines were reversed now, firing its fusion-lit plume against its descent. Its mag scoop flared broader than ever, shown in the shimmering air as an orange fluted web. Just as with solar sails, magnetic sails can tack. If a magnetic sail orients at an angle relative to the solar wind, charged particles are deflected preferentially to one side and the magnetic sail is pushed laterally. “Apollo and Daphne are bored! And we’ve got just this one chance to look inside the grav wave emitter, while we skim past.”

  Redwing felt alarm bells going off, but she had a point.

  THEIR TIME BURNED away. They had to do some fast work on Explorer in the Logistics module. Daphne stabilized the low-burn modes in the reactor while Apollo got their streamlines out of the mag nozzle all neatly aligned.

  Other work, too. In the Longsleep module they finished bringing up another crew member, Zhai, who got right into handling the comm deck. Zhai was small, fast, sharp – and thrilled to be in on an adventure none of them had ever contemplated.

  Beth knew she needed time with Cliff before they flew Explorer. She had helped him come up out of the long dark cold of decades-long sleep and into her warming arms. She had massaged his sore self, rubbed skin with aroma-rich lotions, and soothed away the panic that raced across his face, coming up out of the troubled dreams that the cold kindled. His fear came in fluttering eyelids, vagrant jitters in his face. Then his eyes focused, squinted, and she saw
him back with her again, a slow smile.

  Ten hours before they launched, they worked off their tension together. This mission was certainly dangerous but they both hungered to get out of the ship, to do. Best to be relaxed, then.

  They finished their biozone work in the hydroponics swamp, rich in lichen and ripe greens. Then the buzzing insect ranch, ants and crawlers and space-bred protein bugs. Done, they went straight to the Sundlaug they had reserved for two hours. Sundlaug was an Icelandic name for a hot water public pool, which somehow became the term for spherical pools in zero-g developed across many solar system habitats.

  They hurried to the zero-g center of Sunseeker. Long before they had learned that the hydroponics and animal farms were not enough. There was no nature in a starship, however lean and elegant and deft it was, but for the hydroponics and this: so the closest strong natural feeling you got you was an orgasm.

  Sunseeker’s Spherical Pool was ornate in its lightweight way. Beside the big bubble was a wallscreen. By accessing their external cameras they could both keep a lazy sort of watch, floating within the outer surface-tension skin and seeing the universe pass in review. He plunged into the ten-meter diameter, exciting the fluorescent microbes whose sprinkles of amber glow tracked the contained currents. She arrowed past him. The shimmering warmth coiled around her in a way water under grav could not. She hung suspended and kissed Cliff’s foot as he passed, grinning madly. Kick, stroke, and she was back in air barely in time, gasping. The sphere shuddered and flexed with their swimming, spraying some droplets of its own across the view of distant Glory, a pale cool dot.

  Hanging there in an ocean of night, waves lapping over them at the pool’s edge, they made love. Each time with him lately, since they came out of the cold, she felt a new depth, an unexpected flavoring. They converged, his head between her thighs, the zero gee making every angle easily realized amid the moist waves and salt musk. He was lean, muscles coiled as diamond-sharp stars drifted behind him. New heat rose between them as she fluttered her tongue. Their bodies said what their words could not. Energy rippled along their skins, somehow liberated by the weightless liquid grace of movement. She felt her own knotted confusions somehow focus in a convulsed thrust, a geometry they yearned for. Yes, here was their center.