The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  Half awake, Lissa sat by the rail, her sleeping bag around her shoulders. Shot after shot of rocky surface came up on the big screen and passed away, revealing nothing. The drones made their endless patterns, casting bright beams of light across the black, pitted surface.

  “Drink,” Susan said, handing her a cup of coffee as she sat down next to her.

  “Thanks,” Lissa replied, taking the cup even though she never drank coffee. She sipped, glancing at Susan. Her friend looked tired and exasperated. “Just leave me here,” Lissa said. “I can manage.”

  “You shouldn’t punish yourself like this,” Susan said sternly. “If Alek is gone, you’ll have to face it sooner or later.”

  Lissa dropped her cup. The hot liquid burned in her lap, but she ignored it.

  “I’m sorry,” Susan whispered.

  Dr. Shastri came in from the hall. Lissa looked up at him. He was looking at her in a kindly way, not quite smiling, not quite serious. He thinks I’m going crazy, Lissa thought.

  “May I suggest that the two of you go up to the tachyon project for a while. It’s coming along splendidly, and I know that you’d like to be there when scanning starts. Someone will inform you as soon as the shuttle is found.”

  Lissa tensed with hope. He sounded so sure that it would be found. Maybe he already knew something. She searched his face for a clue. He smiled.

  “That’s a good idea,” Susan said, standing up.

  Lissa got up slowly, noticing the coffee stain on her coveralls. She felt light on her feet, as if she were dreaming.

  “I’ll be there later,” Dr. Shastri said. He turned and went back out into the hall.

  “Come on,” Susan said.

  Lissa glanced down into the pit. Nothing had changed on the big screen. She turned and followed Susan out into the passageway.

  They got into the first available cab. Susan punched in their destination, and the small, open vehicle whirred away, taking them down the length of the asteroid. Lissa stared at the overhead lights in the distance. They appeared from above the inward curve of the passageway in a constant stream of bright circles. The land of the hollow was above them, she thought; the stars lay below her feet, beyond the asteroid’s outer crust. Up and down would be defined in this way, she thought compulsively, as long as the asteroid continued to spin and the centrifugal effect mimicked gravity.

  The passage turned gently to the right. A cab passed them in the other direction. Lissa looked over at Susan and smiled. Susan smiled back uncertainly as the cab slowed gracefully and stopped.

  They got out and went through the automatic doors into a crowded gallery. Some thirty people sat at work stations in the control pit below, facing a giant screen. The gallery itself was filled to capacity with observers, and suddenly Lissa knew that the search for Alek’s shuttle was not very important to the project. Whatever happened, the life and purpose of the asteroid community would go on.

  Susan found two seats in the back row.

  “We’re going to turn on the receiver!” a woman’s voice boomed over the speakers, breaking the tension that had been building.

  “About time!” someone shouted back.

  “They’ve had a bad time of it here,” Susan whispered. “One bug after another in the equipment. All kinds of false signals and annoying noise.”

  “I know,” Lissa said. Against all her feelings, she found herself waiting with the crowd and caring about what would happen next. If there were tachyon communications going on in the galaxy, or even beyond, they might be picked up instantly. Thousands or even millions of light-years might mean nothing to these superfast particles, assuming the detector was good enough to snag them.

  She took a deep breath, knowing suddenly that this was a special moment—the first chance to learn if radio was in fact only a primitive means of communication. It still seemed right to her, it had always seemed right to her, that radio was too slow, and that only a faster-than-light means of communication made any sense for a star-traveling civilization. Tachyons could not travel slower than the speed of light. Three hundred thousand kilometers per second was their slowest possible speed, and no one knew what their maximum might be.

  She thought again of the containment sphere at the forward end of the asteroid, where the small black hole was imprisoned within a powerful magnetic field; and she imagined a pond waiting for a pebble to drop in and send out waves in all directions. The magnetic field would jiggle when the tiny black hole swallowed a tachyon, because it would be impossible for the black hole to stand still as it gobbled the particle, and that would shake the very sensitive magnetic field. The shaking would show up as colored lines on the blue screen in this control pit. The problem had been to prevent anything else but a tachyon from disturbing the field, or at least to know what those inputs were and allow for them. One thing was sure: No random disturbance would look like an intelligent signal for long. Enough work had been done to predict what a tachyon’s ripple would do to the containment-wall coils as the field jiggled. The colored line would dance as a visual analog of the jiggling field. A sound analog would be created by a synthesizer.

  “Here we go,” the woman’s voice announced. “The sphere is rotating.”

  The sphere, Lissa remembered, was set up so that particles might be captured across a meridian running from the sphere’s north to south poles. One rotation would cover the whole sky, except where the asteroid itself might block reception.

  The crowd in the gallery held its breath.

  “Nothing,” the woman’s voice announced finally. “I’m afraid we’re not getting any kind of feed into our instruments. We’ll check our equipment and try again. It shouldn’t take more than a half hour.”

  Lissa let out a nervous sigh and sat back. It might take longer than that, she suspected, and it was still possible that no one out there was using tachyons as a means of communication. Suddenly, Dr. Shastri sat down next to her.

  “Anything, any news?” she asked as her throat tightened.

  He shook his head. “No, nothing yet.” He patted her hand. “How about here?”

  “Equipment foul-up of some kind,” she managed to say. “They’re fixing it now.” Dr. Shastri sat back and waited.

  “I have the impression,” he said after a few moments, and without looking at her, “that a circumstance was created long ago for our civilization, or for the possibility of its emergence, a circumstance that may be a judgment about us. It’s a judgment that is renewed against us every X number of years, and can be proven wrong only if we survive long enough to learn its nature. Do you have any ideas about what I’m describing, Lissa?”

  She knew at once that he was trying to distract her from worrying about Alek, but at the same time she knew how she would answer his question.

  “Yes, I think so,” she began. “You suspect that someone doesn’t want too many civilizations spreading through the galaxy. It would be a simple matter for an advanced technical culture to affect a solar system’s cometary halo in a regular way, thus aborting the possible rise of intelligence. But we’ve found a radio source, which, among other things, may be warning us of the danger from our own halo. This suggests that someone is trying to help us, while others are trying to keep us from developing. And the use of radio suggests that they wanted to warn us quietly, not too directly, with the aim of making us work for what we find out. It may be that the same intelligences that are trying to stop us are also helping us. Maybe they think we have some promise and deserve a sporting chance.”

  Dr. Shastri glanced at her and smiled. “So you surmise that there may be galactic weeders and nurturers. Why?”

  Susan was looking at her with concern, Lissa noticed. A few people in the surrounding seats were turning to follow the discussion.

  “There may be a number of reasons,” Lissa said.

  “What’s the best one, in your view?” Dr. Shastri demanded.

  “Well, it’s easy to see,” Lissa continued, “that if many civilizations are comin
g up from, say, the background of G-type stars, then the first such civilization to achieve interstellar travel could sweep the galaxy in less than thirty million years, perhaps even faster if we make other assumptions. If that can happen, then contact between the mobile and the sun-bound cultures brings the less-developed culture’s growth to a halt. The more-developed culture’s ideas are adopted, and the only thing that would make the lesser culture interesting, namely its further individual development, is destroyed. Now it’s possible that the first culture to sweep the galaxy learned this when it found itself surrounded, in time, by images of itself, in the form of cultures it had influenced a billion years earlier. So it began to nurture individual cultures, or worlds where life might develop, by keeping them from bursting the bounds of their solar systems, by letting them be destroyed by periodic catastrophes. This kind of thinning of cultures prevents the galaxy from being choked with intelligent life. However, the ice ages caused by cometary collisions would slow life’s development without completely stopping it. A time would come when a variety of cultures would have a chance to shine. Emergence onto the galactic stage might be a slow process, based on the careful exchange of technical and ecological information—information that would help the culture control its darker side, so that other intelligences might benefit from its unique outlooks.”

  “But that means that some cultures would die and never rise,” Dr. Shastri said.

  Lissa nodded. “Of course. But consider that the weeders might have seen great tragedies in other galaxies. Imagine whole galaxies used up for resources and only one culture to show for it.”

  Dr. Shastri nodded.

  “It sounds very hard, very mean,” Susan said.

  “But they wouldn’t see it that way at all,” Lissa insisted, knowing exactly what she would say next. “They would witness life coming up, growing into self-awareness and tragedy at the same time, and they would look for a way to help civilizations grow up less mean, more individual and ethical—and contacting such civilizations directly would not be the way to do it, since that would destroy the individuality that we might develop if left alone, which is all that they would find interesting in us. So, by slowing us down, they preserve the galaxy’s resources, and by isolating us they preserve our individuality. Maybe they’ve also seen countless cultures perish in nuclear wars and from technological catastrophes, and there may be more that die in these ways than from intervention.”

  “And where are we?” Susan asked.

  “Somewhere in between, I hope,” Lissa replied.

  “Maybe we’ll make it and maybe we won’t.”

  “Go on,” Dr. Shastri said.

  “Okay—the fact that we’ve received what appears to be a warning, via a radio transmitter placed so close to our Sun, suggests that opinion may be divided about us. Among the weeders there may be secret nurturers. Or maybe a nearby civilization sent the probe to prod us. Don’t you see? Any kind of interstellar message, however puzzling, will have a shaping effect on a culture.” Lissa looked at the faces around her. “Well,” she said finally, “this is all conjecture.” And she remembered that Alek was still lost, probably dead, and she had launched into all this talk to make herself forget, if only for a few minutes.

  “Yes, it is speculation,” Dr. Shastri said. “But we do have the radio source, and we think we’ve understood one picture from it. And if we discover tachyon communications going back and forth across the galaxy, that will strengthen the possibility that Lissa is describing an actual state of affairs. Perhaps not exactly, but something like it. A number of us have speculated about these things, but this young woman seems to be able to do it on her own, with only the smallest hints, as naturally as breathing. The fact that we’ve been contacted by radio while a more advanced form of communication may exist suggests that someone wanted to make sure we got the message, and couldn’t count on our being able to receive or send tachyons.”

  “That means that they must not be watching us all that closely,” Lissa said, feeling a bit embarrassed by Dr. Shastri’s comments about her. He was not only suggesting that her original work was years away, but that she had a great gift for chasing ideas upother people’s paths. It seemed to her that there had been a hint of critical doubt in his voice. Maybe this was all she would ever be able to do. Everything was so much harder than she had imagined.

  Suddenly she felt drained. Dr. Shastri had succeeded, engaging one part of her mind while another was screaming with outrage over the loss of Alek. Her intelligence had been teased, even delighted, while her emotions were crushing her, preparing her for the loss of someone she loved.

  She touched her forehead and felt sweat. Her throat was dry. “I can’t stay anymore,” she whispered to Susan. “I’m going back to see.” Dr. Shastri was looking at her with concern as she struggled to her feet.

  “I’ll help you,” Susan said, taking her arm.

  “We’re ready to try again!” a man’s voice announced over the speakers.

  The screen in the pit lit up into a bright blue and began to flicker. Lissa saw the look of interest return to Susan’s face. “You stay,” Lissa said. “I’ll go myself.”

  But then the room fell quiet as the screen showed a dozen multicolored lines, all dancing like strange snakes seeking to wrap themselves around each other.

  Lissa almost turned away, but the sudden understanding of what she was seeing stopped her. She watched with wonder and curiosity as the lines danced; more lines appeared, superimposing themselves on the previous ones as if struggling to weave a fabric of some kind. These, she realized, were tachyon signals hurrying between galactic civilizations, exchanging the only thing in the universe worth trading—information, knowledge, unique viewpoints about the nature of life and the universe.

  “Our Sun seems to be a tachyon crossroads,” the man’s voice announced, “a focus of some kind.”

  “That’s very curious,” Lissa heard Dr. Shastri say.

  The galaxy was alive with the gossip of civilizations, she realized. Conversations were going on at immense speed between vast centers of power and culture. And yet someone had bothered to send Earth a smoke signal!

  How the radio buoy had arrived on the outskirts of the solar system, no one would probably ever know. Lissa felt a moment of awe and pity. Alek was not as important as this new development; it would change all human history forever.

  But suddenly she knew that she would trade it all for a message telling her that he was safe. If he were found, she would never let him leave her again. She stumbled past Dr. Shastri and rushed out into the passageway.

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  19

  Lissa felt torn as the cab whisked her back toward the search-and-rescue center. It would have been wonderful to have seen the great success of the tachyon receiver with Alek by her side. But somewhere he was fighting for his life, dying under a cold, starry sky; he might already be dead, his body rigid and unfeeling.

  It can’t be, she shouted within herself as the cab pulled over. She got out and rushed into the screen room. Only one person was on duty as she approached the rail and gazed again at the black moon. The technician below was watching a small screen, on which the drama of the tachyon reception was still unfolding.

  Lissa sat down again by the railing and stared at the black moon. Alek had to he down there somewhere.

  The drones had simply missed him. It was as simple as that.

  She closed her eyes and felt the pressure of tears welling up inside her.

  No, she told herself again,he’s not dead.I won’t cry yet . She adjusted her legs into a cross-legged position and settled down to wait, thinking that there was something cold-hearted about the way Dr. Shastri had tried to distract her. He was only thinking of the future, of course, of what would endure, balancing personal concerns against a greater good, and there would always be conflict and cruelty in that. Was it possible to love without worry and complications, to see other people without barriers, to feel their thou
ghts as clearly as one’s own, and not be hurt?

  Her mind wandered back to the story of the weeders and nurturers that had emerged in her discussion with Dr. Shastri. Maybe other things were true, and fit the scanty facts just as well. Perhaps across billions of years, natural catastrophes destroyed intelligent life constantly. High civilizations might have lived and died on the same worlds several times. Add to this the possibility of self-destruction through nuclear war or ecological disaster, and it became clear that living technical civilizations might be very scarce. Maybe species with interstellar capability routinely searched out intelligent life and tried to prevent its destruction through subtle forms of contact—ways of shaping a culture without endangering its individual development, by getting it accustomed to the idea of cultures beyond its sunspace without direct confrontation, by giving warning but no advanced knowledge, by stimulating thought …

  She worried again about the danger from the cometary halo. Even Earth’s Sunspace culture would not be able to deal with the rain of thousands of comets into the inner solar system. Many would miss the planets, but those that hit Earth, Mars, and Venus would inflict irreparable damage to the ecologies of those worlds, not to mention loss of life. Would the industrial capacity of Sunspace ever be equal to such a bombardment, even if warned a century in advance? The Sunspace habitats, being potentially mobile, would probably survive, but it would be a vastly diminished humanity that would gaze upon the ruins of the natural planets.

  Lissa stared at the big screen as she thought. The black moon’s northern hemisphere filled the whole frame. A light flickered in the northeast quadrant. She blinked and saw it wink on and off.

  “Did you see that?” she shouted to the technician below.

  He didn’t answer. She saw that he was hunched over his panel, listening intently.

  “Did you see!” Lissa repeated.

  He raised his hand for her to be quiet. “I’m picking up old-style code! Deciphering now!”