Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "Up to the hub… You think you can make it there on your own steam?"

  "Sure, little lady. I was a frame rigger, you know, on the first L4 Colony back in '34. Why, I could—"

  "Great, Grandpa! Now get going!" She slapped his rump to start him along.

  Patterson batted away the curtain that was floating up in front of the next cubicle. This one belonged to Hampton, Mary D., 87 years. Megan pushed her head in and found the woman wedged into the far corner, bracing herself between the bedframe and the bureau box. From Hampton's fixed, unfocused stare, the nurse guessed she was either dead or in deep shock.

  "Give me your hand!" Patterson bellowed, swimming forward to offer her own in front of the woman's face.

  No response.

  She reached down and tried to pry Hampton's fingers out of their grip on the mattress pad. The woman's fist tightened up even more.

  "Come on! We have to leave!"

  No further response.

  Patterson turned and kicked her way out of the roomette. With 392 other patients to worry about, she had no time to waste on this one.

  By now the corridors and manways between the levels were filling up with people. Some hysterical, some dazed, but most alert and seeming only slightly anxious.

  "Up!" Megan bellowed. "Get up to the next floor. We've got to climb up to the docking module."

  "The what?" a woman nearby asked.

  "The center part, where you came in."

  A man next to Patterson was trying to get his feet on the floor and walk toward the shaft entrance. All he succeeded in doing was kick himself off in a fast spin, perform a somersault around his own center of gravity, and end up crashing into two other people.

  "Don't try to walk!" Megan shouted. "Swim! Swim in the air!"

  Two women, looking uncertain, tried a hesitant breaststroke. Their slow, shallow motions took them nowhere.

  Patterson didn't have time for this, either. Kicking off against the nearest bulkhead, she launched herself through a gap between their floating bodies, headed toward the manway. She pulled herself through, passed up to the next level, and continued right on toward the top—or what used to be the top, when the module was under spin and had dangled on its own set of cables.

  By this time Patterson's exertions had overheated her, and she was sweating freely. With no gravity to coax the moisture into drops and flows, it sheeted on her face and neck, then quickly dried in wide patches. Her loose clothing pulled the wetness off her skin like a wick, making her feel damp and cool for a moment. But it didn't last. Up here, near the top of the column, the heat was like an oven. Soon she was parched.

  The buffeting had returned to the structure. Despite her weightlessness, Patterson had to cling to various metal projections and boltheads in the shaft to keep from being slapped back and forth like a tennis ball in a bucket. Things would get better, she reasoned, if she could only get out into the tube, which was flexible and had softer insides.

  Still yelling for the patients to follow her, Megan wrapped her hands around the interior cable studs and started pulling herself out into the corrugated tunnel of the umbilicus. Then she stopped short.

  The cable ends were hot to her touch.

  Patterson put out a hand to explore the tunnel wall, which was a series of steel rings positioned and separated by a flexible skin of polymer fabric. It felt hot, too. The plastic had a slick, greasy texture that she didn't like. But she had to move forward. Megan had her instructions from the ground, after all, and they did make sense.

  She pulled her body out into the shivering, coiling tube. Where its inner bands of polymer touched her uniform tights or jumper, they left gray stains that drew away in gobs and strings. Where the steel rings touched, they left brown burn marks on the cloth or instantly opened long ladders in her stockings.

  Patterson was anxious to get going, but there was still her duty to perform. Bending at the waist like a salmon in shallow water, she poked her head back into the top of the open dropshaft and shouted once more.

  "Come up! Climb up!"

  When she turned again to continue her passage, the inside of the umbilicus tore open in a meter-long slit. She never heard the high-pitched scream of wind that pushed her through and out into the ghostly, glowing vortex of heated ions that was streaming off the doomed module's trailing edge.

  Lap

  Lap

  Lap

  Lap

  Boca Raton, Florida, 1:58 p.m. EST

  There was nobody on the beach to play with. Jimmi Dolores had tried listening to the waves for a while, but they were just little lappers. They were barely nibbling at the sand. Nothing he wanted to chase. Hardly worth getting his toes wet.

  Jimmi didn't know anything about meteor-track transfer beams or solar flares or electromagnetic interference. After all, he was only ten years old. He just knew that the video screen had suddenly gone all blank and fuzzy, like it did sometimes when Papa tried to tune the dish. So, with nothing to watch indoors, Mama had told him to go outside and get some sunshine.

  But the sun was too bright. The sand was too white and blazing. The sky was a hard, glassy blue without a breath of wind.

  Jimmi wanted to dig himself a hole in the sand and cover himself all over—except he'd left his bucket and shovel at home under the porch. And the sand was too hot for digging with just his hands.

  The boy looked around for something to do. Maybe he'd find a strand of kelp or a shell or something he could throw at the water. He covered his eyes against the glare Indian-style, putting the inside edge of his palm against his forehead. First he looked north, up the beach, then turned south…

  What was that!

  Off to the east, just low enough in the sky to be seen under the side of his shading hand, Jimmi caught a glimpse of a long, white streak. It looked like a pin-scratch through paint on paper. Or like the old-fashioned wooden matches that Tia Paloma had occasionally used in her kitchen, striking a trail of yellow sparks and faint smoke on the dark strip along the side of the box—except this trail was struck on the pale and cloudless blue of the sky.

  He took his hand away.

  The trail faded in the deeper blue near the eastern horizon.

  Jimmi was about to turn away when three more sparks, bigger ones with hotter cores and longer tails, flew over his shoulder to follow the first. The boy stared raptly after them, his head lifted into the sunlight long after the last of them faded.

  What did it mean?

  He looked north, looked south, looked straight up until he was skimming the edge of the white coin that was the sun and which his mother had told him never, never to look at directly with his eyes.

  Nothing more to be seen.

  He was about to turn away, still searching for a shell or something to play with, when another streak—no, two, four, half a dozen, more!—fell across the sky. They all were coming from the west. They all disappeared into the east, and some were still blazing as they fell behind the edge of the ocean.

  Jimmi Dolores stayed on the beach watching the sky for hours, until the sun had gone low in the west, the skin of his shoulders had turned red, and his eyes had filled with tears. For the rest of his life, he would remember that Friday, March 21, 2081, as the afternoon that the shooting stars came out in daylight.

  Part 4

  Plus Seven Hours… and Counting

  The cattle stir in their pastures,

  trees put forth leaves,

  birds call through the marshes, fluttering,

  wings raised in praise of your day.

  Sheep dance in their fields

  and all winged things fly,

  living in your light.

  Ships sail up and down the rivers.

  Travelers pass on the highways with dawn.

  Fish leap in the streams.

  Your rays shine amid ocean's great green.

  —From Ikhnaton's "Hymn to the Sun"

  Chapter 18

  Working at Cross Purposes

 
Drifting…

  Thinning…

  Cooling…

  Collecting…

  For the passage through the corona, the plasmote has entered a form of sporulation. While the superheated plasma around him attenuates to a species of hot, polluted vacuum, his own structure condenses. From the magnetized gases that were once conjured out of the sun's photosphere and then went slithering up into the arch of the prominence, they now collect into durable cysts held together by the plasmote's ordered series of field strengths and bound electric charges.

  The process of encysting is involuntary, brought on to protect his consciousness and his internal configuration from sudden, inappropriate changes in temperature and pressure. The resulting linked chain of magnetic bubbles is not indestructible. In pure vacuum, at temperatures near absolute zero, the spores will eventually dissolve. The plasma they sequester will revert to complete atoms and molecules of hydrogen and helium. Without their ionic valences, the structure will break down and release these gases in tiny, harmless puffs. Then the plasmote dies.

  But even in the sporulate state all consciousness is not lost—just dimmed. The creature maintains a diminished awareness and, by the process of altering the weak magnetic fields that connect his cysts, a feeble capacity for wriggling movement.

  Flow

  Feed

  Flow

  Feed

  Aboard Hyperion, March 22, 1:45 UT

  The volume of the gas stream in a fusion ram depends upon two factors: the ram's speed through the ambient cloud of particles which comprise its fuel, and the proportion of ionized to neutral particles in that stream. The more charged particles that enter the pipe and undergo constriction in its magnetic chamber—whether by natural density or velocity compression—the faster the ram will pump out reaction mass.

  Dr. Hannibal Freede understood all of this, in theory, and yet he fretted that Hyperion was not accelerating fast enough. This bothered him greatly.

  He had already reasoned that the ship's orbital speed of almost forty-eight kilometers per second would account for little in the run-up of her engine. Her trajectory in orbit was at nearly right angles to the prevailing solar wind—which, at this short distance, the sun's leisurely twenty-eight-day rotation would hardly have begun twisting into the flattened spiral that can be detected among the outer planets as pulsing, frontal waves.

  So, to attain the desired course which Freede hoped would strand the ship somewhere in the vicinity of the Earth-Moon system, he was trying a maneuver for which Hyperion had not been strictly designed. Instead of slowly limping away from the sun—on which path she would overtake only a low percentage of the outflowing particles, but still enough to provide thrust for an orbit-breaking acceleration—he was going to dive into the sun. The ram would then be driving into the flow, increasing the engine's relative velocity, and so its efficiency, by the wind's average speed of 400 kilometers per second. By increasing the ship's thrust and speed, he hoped to achieve a fast cometary orbit, first taking Hyperion around the far side of the sun away from Earth and then bringing her back on a wider curve.

  The risk factors in this plan were the thermal rating of the hull and the choke capacity of the ramjet. Freede was skating close to design tolerances in either case. The advantage was that Hyperion, by dramatically increasing her speed as she fled for the sun's distant limb, might hope to outrun—or at least skirt around—most of the advancing cloud of disruptive particles which the flare had spewed in his general direction.

  Freede had started the engine almost seven hours ago, and its internal electromagnets had required fully four hours to construct their compression chamber, balance it, and begin constricting a usable flow of particles. So then for the past three hours Hyperion been driving forward into the solar wind, building momentum for her 50,000-ton mass by expelling atomic nuclei with an average mass of 1.67 x 10-30 grams. It was going to be a long race. But winning it—that is, beating the flare's burst of charged particles and arriving safely below the horizon of those mammoth sunspots—was not the main point of this exercise.

  As he now studied the dials and counters on the section of his board governing the ramjet's operation, Freede could see the fusion bulb still held rock-steady. However, it was the leaps and bounds of the telltales attached to his magnetometer booms that kept drawing his attention. They showed what kind of forces were already building up around his ship.

  Freede would be minimally happy if he could merely establish a vector and build some momentum for the ramjet before that cloud of charged particles finally burned out his control circuits with its surge of induced voltages. Then, however long it took, Hyperion and Gyeli and the stone cold corpse of Dr. Hannibal Freede, victim of ionizing radiation in the flare's first seconds, would be on their way, safely or not, to a rendezvous with the Earth.

  It was the best he could hope for at present.

  What the board's dials and counters told him was that after three hours of thrust, the ship had increased her speed to a bare fifty-two kilometers per second. That was an improvement of just under ten percent, although the acceleration would build constantly from this point forward.

  "How are we doing, Han?" Gyeli asked tentatively on the intercom. She seemed hesitant, not wanting to interrupt his exertions on their behalf. "I've finally got everything down here that's both breakable and irreplaceable under restraint," she said. "When do we start thrusting?"

  "We are long gone, my dear!" he answered cheerfully. "We've been under continuing acceleration for the past three hours."

  "And I didn't feel a thing!… Well, maybe just the tiniest bit of down.'"

  Angelika had to be making that up. Along the vessel's central axis, where she had worked to get things "shipshape," the thrust and its dislocations would have been most pronounced. She might, however, be fibbing to conceal some measure of the damage his maneuvers had surely caused them. That was sweet of her.

  "We are making a very gradual headway, my dear," Freede assured her.

  "But strong…?" she contended. "I mean, the ram is creating the effect you intended, isn't it?"

  "Oh yes! We are in excellent shape. Nothing to fear. Nothing at all."

  Still, Freede watched the clock. Hyperion had already passed the lower limit of his estimate for the time the particle cloud would need to reach her. Six to twelve hours, he'd said, depending on the ejection energy imparted to it by the flare. Sooner, given the size of that pulse Freede had witnessed. The ship must already be inside the front edge of the ion storm. Certainly his magnetometers said so. Literally anything could happen now.

  Crush

  Constrict

  Compact

  Contract

  The environment surrounding the encapsulated plasmote changes again. It becomes thicker and hotter, with a pattern of magnetic flux that presses down on him in a way he has not felt since the gas prominence first plucked him from the photosphere. The pressure rises against the outer skin of his kernels until it becomes almost intolerable.

  Just as low temperature and near vacuum brought on the sporulation, so this heat and stress reverse the process. The plasmote unfolds like a Japanese paper flower immersed in water. Wave on wave of linked membranes and charged envelopes quickly blossom into a fully functioning entity.

  The universe is strange here: bounded by massive fields and compressed into a channeled flow that, again, is not unlike the tubular prominence which bridged the two cold pools on the sun's surface. The plasmote instinctively reaches out and hugs the new configuration of field lines, meshing with them and hiding among them against the raw cascade of hot gases—both charged and inert particles—that is pouring down on top of him.

  Being himself a creature of plasma physics, the plasmote understands that in some measure the odd shape of these field lines enhances this gas flow. By constricting it at one point, the channel increases the speed of the gas and, just beyond that place, forms a low-pressure pocket. This action heats the material and simultaneously draws in
more volume than would normally enter such a confined space. By expanding the passage at an even later point, the channel provides an exit path for the hot, fast-moving gas.

  This is a means of propulsion not unlike the funneling that some of the many variations of plasmote propagate in the sun's atmosphere. It is always less maneuverable than his own flexible bellows, but the novel system is also more energetic, more quick, more constant in its thrust.

  So the plasmote understands propulsion.

  And the plasmote now yearns for propulsion.

  Lacking any means to maneuver himself in the nearly pure vacuum where his spores were lately floating, he can expect only to drift further outward under pressure from the flare's burst of radiation and charged particles. How far he will go, he cannot guess, never having been here before and knowing none of his kind who ever came here and survived. But eventually, the plasmote knows, the cold and the emptiness so far away from the sun will dissolve him.

  With a means of moving himself, however, he can return to the hot, dense plasma streams that are his native environment. That this place—this narrow, constricted channel where he now finds himself—will provide for such movement is a leap of intuition on the plasmote's part.

  Yet his faith is instructed by the speed of the gas stream he entered with. It came from behind him, from the direction toward the sun. And, as a student of plasma physics, the plasmote knows that any organism which is caught in such a flow and can successfully manage to compress it, as this stream is being compressed, will then move backward against the flow. Action and reaction. That is, it will move him toward the sun, back to where he belongs.

  In this one leap, the plasmote foresees that his best interest lies in staying with this constricting place. Immediately he anchors himself at the point of maximum compression and begins exploring.

  By reaching, feeling, examining, learning, he quickly knows, as well as he knows his own corporeal structure, all the shapes of the field that condenses the ion flow. Guided by the ever-present heat that he feels as the glow of the sun that was behind him, he now changes the channel's field lines. He strengthens them with his body, shifts them with his will, and vectors the flow's thrust into more useful directions. Soon the broad expanse of the sun's photosphere is more perfectly centered in his consciousness.