Across the Sea of Suns (25 page)
Nigel wondered how, in as carefully managed a society as this, “lurkey” had become the accepted slang for lousy turkey.
He worked on the lurkey itself, it was a huge, sweaty mass, aslosh in nutrients. It grew so quickly that a team had to cut slices, using servo arms, so the meat didn’t outrun its chem supplies. Pseudolife, with all genetic checks on excess deftly edited out. Malthus, exponentiated.
When he had the time he used some of his precious store of wood, shaping and planing the boards until they had a satin finish. Sawdust exuded its sweet weight into the impersonal ship’s air. He scavenged some of the forced-growth cellulose stands from the greenhouses, and worked the soft chunks with earnest energy, hammering and planing and using the ripsaw for texture in the speckled grain. There was not much strength in the stuff but it would make furniture. It reminded him that he, too, was three-quarters water, rushing and subsiding according to the hollow knocking in his veins, a hydrostatic being. With a pinch of salt added, to signify his origin.
Every spring when he was a boy, Nigel remembered, he had gone for hikes in the wet meadows. There and in the roadside ditches he would hear a small, shrilling chorus which sounded for all the world like an endlessly repeated, “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here.” Frogs, confident little fellows, announcing their occupancy of that particular ecological niche. He suspected that now, to some greater ear than ours, man’s expanding bubble of radio babble must make a similar ringing that billowed but a short way into the night. Only when nearby would it be bothersome, when one could pick out one strident voice at a time.
From the heights of the nearby cloaked hills, the frogs blended, not too badly, with all the other ambitious voices that, in croaks and chirrups, were saying the same thing—
We’re here, we’re here
. A bicyclist, intent on his destination, might wheel through the frog chorus, sensing it was there but giving it no attention, not trying to make out the myriad voices. A truly advanced civilization in the galaxy would probably do the same thing to the soft buzz of radio, or to the occasional flyby probe humming, mosquitolike, past its ear.
Others might take a casual slap at such a passing irritant. Or even call for pest control.
Wolf 359 was a dim M8 star with only a tiny nearby volume capable of supporting life. Yet a world orbited there, one remarkably similar to the one around Epsilon Eridani: small, bleak, with a thin wisp of atmosphere. Not ancient, like the skyhook world, but there were signs that once it had been inhabited. No biosphere remained. The small lakes were drying up. The M-class stars are the longest lived of all, and the spectra of Wolf 359 said it was as old as the galaxy. There were aeons enough for life to arise beneath this lukewarm sun.
And time for it to die. The air and land carried traces of the chemical imbalances which are the very minimal definition of life. These signs were slowly ebbing away, but they argued for a biosphere that must have existed within the last few million years.
Around the small planet there were two moons. One was quite sizable, barely bound to its primary. The other was smaller, perhaps a few kilometers across. It had odd markings here and there, markings which might be natural results of meteorite bombardment over time, and then again might not. The probe caught only a fleeting glimpse of it as it arced around the brown and weathered world below, and then went on. It passed by a large gas giant planet on its way out of the system.
God this is really dog work, measuring this and analyzing that, all for the astro types
the banded planet coming in from the left
Yeah when you think about it what difference does it make, they’re summing the same data base back Earthside
vast and yellow
Keep totting it up, you never know
a sprinkling of light in the plane of rotation
Okay okay God Nigel just ’cause you’re team head doesn’t mean you can’t kid around a
points of brilliance, some white and others ruddy with the reflected glow of the giant world
Yeah I know her
the probe swooping in for a boosting rendezvous
Works in agro I think, bunks over in P4
on a timed flyby of two moons
Not a looker but I hear
falling powerless
Ol Aarons said, Buck teeth? She could eat an apple through a tennis racket an’ the whole crowd they
sipping of the stellar winds and calibrating particle energies, plasma density, UV flux
Lavera you’re falling behind
now closing on the first moon
Funny getting a lot of backscattered light from the rotation plane an ice disk probably it’s pretty cold this far out
grids deploying, lenses swinging to face the oncoming pocked and speckled face
Hey I’ve resolved that so-called ice disk it’s not grains at all it’s a long string of stuff, pretty evenly spaced like beads on a string, pearls really ‘cause they’re pretty white an’ the radar says they’re smooth, no backscatter in the centimeter wavelengths deep rutted valleys
cast long shadows at the blue terminator
Lot of little sources in the plane, but only out from this moon, I mean there aren’t any farther in
a crust of ice streaked black
Probe’s passing close to one of ’em in few minutes
no craters
First flash looks like some structure kinda oblong must be an asteroid or maybe a broken-up moon tidal forces maybe pulled it apart and left all this crap drifting in toward the primary
a gray dot of light like the others swelling
I should think not
elongated
Yeah why?
two blobs of lighter gray separate from the central image
Why should debris of that type fetch up against this one moon? Seems some would get by it
the two dollops now resolving into circles
Damn funny formation
the angle shifts as the probe moves, coming closer, focusing, and abruptly a brilliant flare burns in the field of view
Whazzat so fast so
that the probe stops down the input, applying polarizers and filters
It’s reflection, reflected light from Wolf
359 until its motion carries it beyond and the light ebbs and it can see better the tiny control cabin at the exact point between the two huge sun sails
Must be using them to get some push
and behind it the dark mass of clotted ices and the restraining webbing that fixes this cargo in place
Launching out from that moon, you think?
the sails patiently catching the red photons of the distant sun and tilting so that the momentum they impart pushes the dusky ice gently out from the gas giant
Lavera take a line of sight on these things, work out their trajectory assuming for simplicity that something’s putting them out at regular intervals from that moon
for decades until the gravitional tug of the planet is balanced by the pull of the wan red star
Yeah they’re winding out all-right, nice little spiral
distant motes spread in a broad smooth curve
Only it stops farther out and they kinda bunch up
as they hesitate and then empty their small fuel reserves through low-thrust nozzles, outgassing vapor that has boiled from the surface of the ices they carry
an’ looks like they peel off an’ come back in movin’ pretty slow though
this time moving not in spirals but in long, low-energy hyperbolic orbits
an’ they start spreadin’ out pickin’ up speed I guess
plunging down in the grip of the banded orange-yellow world, past the roiling brown bands at a higher speed than they have ever known, correcting their courses under instructions from the distant ancient parent moon
I’m losin’ them after that, guess they string out gettin’ too far away to pick them up but they’re not gravitationally bound anymore I can tell that
falling free at last toward the inner world which began it all millions of years before
I should think with that little thrust the voyage
carrying valuable ice which will intersect the small planet’s orbit and plunge into the wisp of atmosphere
Right Nigel I make it five, six hunnert years to get into the inner system looks like that terratype is the target, too, or close to it
so that the sky begins to glow with a shower of small meteors, shedding vapor as they fall free
All this just to move chunks of ice?
the icebergs splitting into showers that sparkle in the night sky above an arid plain
I make the rate maybe one a month
the sky warms
an’ at that rate it’d take forty forevers to sock in an ocean
soft, moist breezes stir beneath a dim but perpetual sun
Agreed, but that is precisely how long they may very well have
the icebergs coming to aid a biosphere which is now long dead but can with the steady pressure of chemical laws begin again
What’s more, you’ll note there were lakes back on that forlorn little speck
the probe pivots and below a stark face rushes by
Point is, what’s sending them?
plains cut in rectangular blocks, antlike black forms moving on designated roads to pick up their loads of ice and rock and return to a central smudge of tread-churned brown
Something that can use solar energy, must be to last this long
vast shining screens, a sprawl of manufacturing plants, all ice-crusted
The machines must be able to repair themselves by the same argument, build new ones like themselves when needed, guide the ones in flight
slow and steady, chipping at blue-veined mountains, loading electromagnetic slingshot launchers
Who’d set all this running? I mean what’s the point of
the ice has wrenched and split under the changing forces which came as weight was removed and the moon is cracked, faulted, and pitted as it is eaten
Whatever or whoever lived back there, on that planet, millions of years ago, and set this in motion
the machines keep on, gnawing and dying and being replaced
But they’re gone Nigel, the biosphere’s wiped
the probe swings by the ice moon and arrows past the gas giant, changing its momentum to boost outward for the next star hanging a dozen light-years away
Surely but those black specks don’t know that
the ramscoop cuts in
So they’re running on? Christ doesn’t make sense when whatever finished off a whole goddamn bio-sphere came through, I mean why not just knock off these little
rumbling, the magnetic fields reach out and grasp ions to flavor the new fusion fire
I’ll fancy we can’t say, from this trifling investment of fact but mind, there was a Watcher back there round that planet
the gas giant is blurred in its exhaust
Well might have been we didn’t get a good look an’ Landon says he doesn’t see that much similarity
leaving
Good enough, but how’s he to explain the other fact? the dead worlds far behind, the moon stirring What fact? I don’t
outward
That there was no Watcher round that moon
In 2045 Lancer had paused in its steady one-g acceleration out from Earth, long enough to deploy the largest telescope ever conceived. It was a gossamer-thin array of optical and microwave receivers, flung out like a fishing net. Nigel had worked for days helping to dispatch the sensors in the right order, avoiding the heavy work for fear it would show a spike of strain on his metabolic report.
Men and women cast their net to capture photons; the telescope itself was provided by the distant, white bright speck of their sun. Space is not flat, like the marble Italian foyers Galileo imagined, where his gliding blocks went on forever in ideal experiments carried out free of friction. The mass of those hypothetical blocks would stretch space itself, warp the obliging flat plane. Mass tugs at light. Forced into a curve, light will focus. The symmetry of three dimensions in turn shaped any sizable mass into a sphere, perfect for a lens. Each star was a huge refractor, a gravitational lens.
Lancer
dropped sensor nets, starting three light-days out from Sol. The nets gathered in photons like a spring harvest, compiling sharp images of distant stars, resolving detail a mere ten kilometers across. For each star the focal distance from the sun was different, and so the webs had to tack against the wind of particles blowing out from the sun, using the magnetic fields beyond the planets to trim and guide their long scalloping orbits.
Lancer
rumbled and forked a pure, blue-hot plasma arc, and pulled away from the gravitational lens that was its native star, leaving the colossal telescope behind. It would be six years before the first dim images would be finished. Ever since the sun had formed from infalling dust, pictures from worlds hundreds of parsecs away had been forming in the spaces far beyond the planets. Those focused stories, now forever lost, had run their courses on the gigantic hypothetical screen, the imaging plane. Through billions of years, until this moment, there had been no one in the theater to watch them.
Lancer’s
destination was a mild red dot known in the catalog as Ross 128. It was the sun’s twelfth nearest neighbor, an unremarkable M-5 star. Toward the end of the twentieth century some X-ray astronomers had studied it briefly, comparing the hard radiation from it with our Sun’s. It was a little more active, but once the solar physicists on a NASA grant had milked it, they forgot it. So did everybody else.
The gravitational lens array showed a full-sized solar system, though: five gas giants plus two Earth-sized worlds. A robot probe had reached Ross 128 about the time
Lancer
went into orbit around Ra. Something had silenced its transmissions as it entered the system.
Lancer
was “nearby.” It could study a system far better than any flyby could. Earthside thought that the death of the robot probe was worth a follow-up. Maybe it had smacked into a rock. Or maybe something wanted it to look that way.
Earthside’s strategy was to accumulate-astronomical information,
fast
, and stir it into the pot with data on the Swarmers and Skimmers. This was a compromise reached by the important space-faring nations, totally outside the aging carcass of the United Nations. The Asian faction wanted to push colonization of the nearby stars as soon as possible. That way, humanity would be dispersed. If the Swarmer-Skimmer fleet returned and destroyed humanity’s space resources, at least the race would be already spread among the stars, and relatively invulnerable.