Flare
Roger Zelazny and Tomas T. Thomas
This book is dedicated with respect and admiration
to the memory of GEORGE R. STEWART...
His work abides.
Part 1
Minus Ten Million Years… and Counting
The day comes lovely to the sky's edge,
living Aton, opener of life's gate.
Rising at the eastern rim of the world,
you fill the lands with your glory....
Great, glowing, high above the Earth,
you send rays to brighten the land,
filling with light all that you have made.
You are Re, making all things captive,
binding them with your love.
Distant, you shed your light upon us.
Striding on high, your footprints are the day.
—From "Hymn to the Sun" by Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (later Ikhnaton)
Chapter 1
Concatenating Bangs
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
Or whatever the sound might be when two hydrogen nuclei—in effect, a pair of stripped protons—collide repeatedly at pressures of two hundred billion atmospheres and temperatures of fifteen million degrees Kelvin.
Conditions of such pressure and temperature exist within the cores of G-type yellow stars. However, the scales for measuring them, expressed in "atmospheres" and "degrees," only have relevance to the temporary environmental stability of a small green planet which orbits at one hundred and fifty million kilometers from the surface of such a star.
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
Protons are tough little nuts, even under such extremes of temperature and pressure. Each one is welded together as a simple combination of quarks, which are various and not simple at all. Quarks are, depending on your point of view, either the building blocks of matter, or the slippery interface between matter and energy. Take your pick.
Because protons have a positive charge—a descriptive quality of matter that, again, only has relevance in an Earthside laboratory or an electronic circuit—and because particles having similar charges repel each other with a ferocity beyond all human understanding, the colliding protons immediately spring apart, unscathed.
In fact, any single proton must collide, on average, forty trillion trillion times with one of its associates before anything will happen. At the rate of one hundred million collisions per second, under the jostlings of extreme pressure and with the agitations of extreme temperature, one proton in the star's core will suffer a physical change once in fourteen billion years. On average. And fourteen billion years is three times longer than the star itself is likely to remain active. So the average proton, loose in a star's core, can expect to lead a hectic but otherwise uneventful life. Such as it is.
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
Pong!
But once in forty trillion trillion times, a collision will fuse the two protons together. One of them sheds its charge with the release of a positron (or positively charged electron) and a neutrino (which is like a little fragment of subatomic glue), becoming a bare neutron. Because positively and neutrally charged particles can stick together, they do, forming a nucleus of deuterium. This is called "heavy" hydrogen because the nucleus is freighted with an unaccustomed neutron.
Anyone might suppose that, because the instance of fusion is so rare among protons, the next step might be dissolution. With the next jostling ping!, in the next hundred-millionth of a second, the deuterium nucleus will fall apart. Then, from the dense crowd of particles surrounding it, the neutron will collect its positron and neutrino, which cannot have gone far in such a short time; it will patch itself together and resume its life as a proton.
But that is not what happens. The proton-neutron marriage endures for an average of six seconds, or only six hundred million more collisions, before another proton joins up.
BANG!
This collision leaves each of the partners individually unchanged, but releases a unit of energy—the chargeless, massless photon, vibrating at the extreme frequencies of gamma radiation. This photon goes on its way, leaving a ménage à trois, the helium nucleus. This is called "light" helium because it's missing a second neutron to complete its normal structure.
After another million years or so of further bumping on the crowded proton dancefloor, two of these light helium nuclei will themselves chance to collide. Their collective four protons and two neutrons will swing around each other, dos-si-dos, and form a new configuration. This will be a stable nucleus of regular helium—with two protons, two neutrons—and a pair of free protons, which go back into the dance and begin looking for other partners.
Meanwhile, the photon that had emerged from the second fusion collision radiating like a gamma ray will take part in no more combinations. The positron that was ejected from the first collision will soon meet a free electron, its antiparticle, in the plasma soup and annihilate it. The product of this mutual destruction is a pair of energetic photons, which are also radiating up in the gamma region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
So, in all, while six protons slowly turn themselves into a helium nucleus and a pair of stragglers down in the core of an average yellow star, three high-energy photons are created and released.
Three tiny sparks of light are produced in three separate collisions that are relatively widely spaced over time and distance, among trillions of other collisions that produce not so much visible energy as our archetypal ping! These tiny sparks spring forth into a crush of matter so dense and opaque that atoms themselves must shed their electron clouds and flow as a kinetic plasma. Is it any wonder that the core of a G-type yellow is blacker than the darkest edge of space?
Blacker, but not colder. These three energetic protons will contribute their energy to the heat of the star's core as they pass, bouncing off protons and light helium nuclei alike, on their way through the shuffling crowd.
In this pitch and toss of photons moving back and forth across the core, none has a preference for direction. Each photon strikes a larger particle and rebounds—or, in technical terms, is absorbed and immediately reradiated—like wild dancers slamming their way across the floor. Their direction is random. That is, none can choose to move toward the sidelines and spin away from the dance. And anyway, each photon will move only a fraction of a centimeter—one more measure valid only in Earthly terms—before striking another particle and reradiating in another direction.
While none of these photons has the thought of escaping the core and moving out into the star's higher layers, still some—a small fraction—happen to do just that. These represent the "excess" energy in the core; that is, the amount of heat greater than is needed to keep up the pressure and hold the core from collapsing under the inward push of gravity from the overlying material. These few excess photons do reach the dancefloor's sidelines and are shed upward, toward the star's surface.
In the dense, opaque layers above the core, each photon continues the game of absorption and reradiation, bouncing one step forward and two steps back. And as the photon encounters the cooler layers above, it may also lose some of its energy; the frequency of its vibration becomes slower, its wavelength longer. On average. A few photons may maintain their potency over the long haul, but not all of them, certainly. In general, gamma rays at the core become x-rays in the intervening layers, then ultraviolet rays just below the surface, and then mostly visible light—again an Earthly, human term—at the surface.
In the outer region, about two-thirds of the way to the surface, the stellar gases cool from fifteen million degrees to about two million. These cool gases be
come nearly opaque, so the distance that any photon can travel by bouncing around becomes insignificant. At the same time, however, in this region the temperature difference between the bottom, innermost layers and the top, outermost layers becomes much greater. Also, the cooler gases throughout this region are less dense, and so less stable. Thus, hotter material from the star's innermost depths flies upward like steam bubbles in a saucepan, in a process called "convection." This action then drives the cooler, relatively denser material near the star's surface downward in an endless, rolling boil.
So, in the opaque region of the star's interior, the photons stop traveling by their bounces over centimeters and fractions; instead they ride with the roiling atoms of the convection layer. It is as if they were taking express elevators up to the surface regions of the sun.
Any single photon—or, to be precise, the track of multiply absorbed and reradiated photons—spends about ten million years in passing from an initial fusion collision in the core to its visible-light escape at the surface. For most of this immense time, the photon is bouncing forward and back in the packed interior, and for a shorter time the photon rises effortlessly in dark columns of boiling gas.
At the surface these columns—like thunderhead cells along a stormfront, or bubbles rising in a pot of porridge—shape the outward face of the sun. These upwelling fountains of gas form flattened, mushroom caps that are the size of the Earthly state of Texas. Existing in constant motion, these columns thrust up the spicules of hot gas which feed the chromosphere; they also push around the magnetically active regions which control the shape of the superheated solar corona.
In short, these granulated columns of rising gas direct the divergent flow of electromagnetic energies that most affects the lives of humans on that little green world. If not for the movement of these convection cells beneath the surface, the star would shed its energy in a single, impartial, uniform glow.
In fact, that was how, for thousands of years, the humans of that green world thought about their "daystar," their sun, their god Aton: as a single, unchanging beacon, uniform in its benevolence, unswerving in its outpourings, impartial in its gift of energy, consistent in its love.
Of course, they were wrong.
Ping!
Pang!
Pong!
Pong!
The initiatory collision of one proton with another—that once-in-a-forty-trillion-trillion event which sheds a positronic charge and ultimately gives birth to a triplet of wandering photons—is only the usual sequence in the sun's core. It represents, over time, only the average of all possible interactions.
This dance of separate particles and photons is controlled by the workings of probability, a science which will be much studied on the small green planet. Probability and the laws of chance say that, over all time, in the universe taken as a whole, the high points and the low match up and cancel each other out. They level all possible experiences to a nice, stable median point in a smooth curve.
But this is only one picture of reality. It's a working conceptual definition—not reality itself.
Now and then, here and there, the framework of probability breaks down. Sometimes the real world swings wide and deep in establishing that balanced median. And so, in that particular time and place, the long run and the universe as a whole are temporarily forgotten.
More and more of those initial ping-collisions may happen to produce many more nuclei of deuterium and loose photons than the forty-trillion-trillionth of a chance would indicate. At that point, the consequences can be immediate and astounding.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Then highly unusual things can start happening.
Chapter 2
The Dolphin League
Have news!
Good fortune!
Glad tidings!
Good news!
Among the convection cells in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere, the creature slides, buoyant as a soap bubble. He passes the rising columns of superheated gases and the falling sheets of freshly cooled gases, all the while maintaining his equilibrium.
Of course, the atmosphere is not really a gas made up of free-roaming atoms and molecules. At its ambient temperature of about 5,800 degrees, the sun's photosphere is far too hot for that. The heat strips the simple molecules of their atomic structure, reducing them to a plasma, a bath of charged particles: ions, positively charged protons and hydrogen nuclei, negatively charged electrons. All of them shudder and dance under the bombardment of high-energy photons. The photosphere is a fluxing soup of activity and potential.
Warmth!
Flow!
Energy!
Lift!
Against the blast-furnace, jet-engine, fire-bell scream of hot plasma rising from the convective zone, the creature's voice booms out in organized subsonics. The mechanism for these pulsing cries is a simple bladder, twanged rhythmically against the relatively lighter mass of the surrounding plasma.
The wonder is that any structure can exist in that high-energy hell. But between the dense, hot, gamma-ray core and the thin, still hotter, visible-light corona lies this region of comparative stability. Here the attraction between positive ion and negative ion can occasionally override the disruptions of pressure and heat.
Electrons and protons align themselves, negative to positive, under a static charge—not quite an atomic bonding but not a fluid plasma, either. Call it a confederation of potentials and influences. And call the creature a "plasmote." The seed of his structure is a magnetic field, of which many and varied configurations race and swirl through the solar atmosphere.
Once joined, these ion webs build to form membranes and envelopes, pockets of quiet against the storms of gamma energy, magnetic flux, and convective flow. So the plasmotes harbor regions of greater and lesser density, achieving sustainable dimensions in the writhing soup. They accomplish their motility with the pump and thrust of bellows or the thrash of a loose and raveling ion whip, depending on their individual natures.
And deeper within the relative quiet of the plasmotes' envelopes, more subtle structures are allowed to form and grow. The deep silence of these pockets enables coded sequences, yes-and-no, on-and-off, which carry and maintain a complex matrix of information. Scores of captured neutrons interrupt and punctuate these numerical values and strings, giving them phrasing and meaning. The free energy flux of gamma radiation, rising from below, excites these coded sequences, passing electron pointers through them and directly driving the processes of consciousness.
The plasmote is a creature of pure, scintillating awareness, with his only available expression in voice and movement. His only activity is to propel himself ahead of his world's delights and dangers, crying news of them, so that others of his kind may hear and respond.
Cold!
Flow!
Plunge!
Danger!
If the plasmote finds delight in the upwelling lamination of warm, energy-laden juices surrounding a rising column of gas, then his greatest danger is found in the narrower regions on either side.
To venture too far within the column, seeking out its radiant core, is to risk disruption of the plasmote's delicate membranes and sacs. There the turbulent fountain of unequal pressures yields rending velocities and certain death.
But to venture too far outside the column is to risk capture by the downdraft of cooled material that moves within the interstices between the rising, granular cells. These convection drafts can carry the plasmote down toward the core, where rising temperature and pressure will as surely interrupt his tender, magnetically oriented structure.
So, like booming dolphins of the temperate zone, the plasmotes navigate the hexagonal borders of the convection fountains. There they pass, exulting in stability and warning each other of the perils at hand on either side.
Come!
Feel!
Expand!
Rejoice!
Like dolphins
and whales, the plasmotes gambol in the photosphere and know no equal to themselves. They exist in many forms: as pulsing sacks, writhing whips, or funneling jets, as contemplative, near-stationary billows full of densely matching logics, or as hyperactive kites with almost no logic at all. But all plasmotes are concurrent. All are viable. And all are mutually exclusive, mutually supportive.
The plasmotes form no families or tribes, no states or principalities. They share no secrets, create no religions, forge no bonds, work no magic. They build no lasting relationships among themselves other than a joyous passing acquaintance.
No plasmote has ever been seen to be born of another, either by partition or conjunction. None, in fact, has ever been created anew. Neither has one ever died of old age, or disease, or the stresses of movement and life. None has died at all—except by a carelessness that leads to sudden rupture on one side or to the long plunge into pressure and heat and darkness on the other.
The sun boasts no lesser forms from which these beings might have evolved. No plasmites, as it were. So there exist no backwater swamps of obsolete, failed plasmotes. And they can find no fresh spawning ground for hopeful, future plasmotes. These simple beings have only the rupture and the plunge, and the safe path they dance between those alternatives.
The plasmotes can trace no evolution in themselves, nor have any idea of how or where they come from. Like dolphins and whales, they are simply unique in their environment. A thoughtful observer then might wonder if their antecedents were introduced from another place, another time. But if this is so, the plasmotes do not remember or record it. They only swim forward, singing.
Chapter 3
On the Green World
Ramapithecus
Australopithecus
Pithecanthropus erectus
Homo neanderthalensis
East Africa, circa One Million B.C.
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