Across the Sea of Suns (31 page)
Now humanity could defend itself against asteroids or even worse weapons.
As long
, Nigel thought to himself,
as we can
recognize
them as weapons
.
Luyten 789–6 had only one world, circling near one of the two small suns, and it was devoured by fire.
As the probe swung near it, the spectral traces and photometry showed a pall of smoke and sheets of flame. The planet was Earth-size, comfortably warm, 80 percent ocean. Above the seas the oxygen content of the air was 25.4 percent, and over the continents, 23.7 percent.
It did not take much analysis to see what had happened. Warm surface temperatures made sea life abundant. Microorganisms there exhaled large amounts of oxygen. On Earth the same process ran, too, but oxygen was only 21 percent of the air.
The probability of forest fire nearly doubles with each 1 percent rise in oxygen. On the sole world of Luyten 789–6, the sea life poured oxygen into the forever burning tropical forests. Even Arctic tundra ignited. In the planet’s winter season plants grew despite the cold, driven by the high chemical reaction rates, and by processes in the soil. With summer came worldwide fires.
On Earth, methane belched up from mud ponds soaks oxygen from the air, keeping a stable balance. Somehow that mechanism had failed here. There was evidence from the chem sampling that this world was older than Earth; the grow-and-burn cycle had been running for billions of years. No animal life moved on the land; none could survive the fires. Yet a Watcher circled the world—impassive, scarred, and ancient.
“Carlotta!”
She turned. Nigel walked faster with obvious effort and caught up at a
Y
in the corridors. “Time for some talk?”
She grinned. “Sure. I’ve been wanting to bring something up myself. Just haven’t had an opportunity.”
They made their way to a viewpod that looked out on the base of the ship’s axis. Here the centrifugal gravity was low. Nigel’s face showed relief at the lessened strain. Beyond, they could see a globe of water ejected at the axis. People swam in it as it wobbled and flowed along the axis in free fall. They had thin rubber bands fixed to their ankles, in case they broke the surface tension and fell outward, Few did; they were adept fish, showering droplets and laughter.
“I miss that,” Nigel mused. “Haven’t done it for years.”
“Well, soon you’ll be able to again and we can—”
“No. I’ve been putting off my medical, but I can tell matters aren’t improving.”
“Chem?”
“Right. Radicals in the blood, so the body leaps to my defense”—a wry shrug—”and overcompensates.”
“Cancer.”
“That’s the homey name for it, yes. I’ve been doing a lot of blood filtering on my own—don’t look so shocked, it’s a simple trick, really—but I can’t get past the med-mon sniffer anymore.”
“Some therapy—”
He shook his head. “I know what Medical and Ted will say. I’m too much a bloody precious relic to risk. They’ll pop me into a Sleepslot until we’re Earthside.”
“Look, landfall at Ross is nearly a year away. I’m sure they’d let you last through that.”
“Um. Risk me dying from inadequate treatment? Unlikely.”
“You’re valuable to us, too. Didn’t Luyten 789–6 prove Walmsley’s Rule?”
“The first law of management is: Cover your ass. This shall ye honor before all else. Ted doesn’t want to haul me back to Earth a corpse.”
“You don’t want that either. There’s nothing you can do except take the luck you’re handed. Look, you know time in the Slots isn’t so bad. I’m going in myself for four months, next Friday.”
“What for?”
“I … A tune-up, sort of. I … We all three should talk about it, I guess …” She paused and then went on briskly. “You have no choice.”
“I’ve ducked by Medical before.”
She saw what he meant. “Uh-oh …”
“Right.” He grinned. “You took me out, put me on self-serve, remember, years ago? Do it again. Please.”
“I … You know I care for you, I still do, even if we aren’t … together now … but …”
“Please.”
“Do you really care that much about making landfall?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He surged up from his hammock chair and winced at sudden pain. He had not yet acquired all the habits of the elderly, the perception of unbalanced forces acting through fragile, brittle axes, in ankles, knees, elbows, spine. Carlotta studied him and sighed.
“Monitoring systems are better now,” she said. “The programs and data bases trigger decision algorithms fairly high up in the sentience pyramid. I would have to …”
He hung on her next words. She bit her lip. “Look, I’m not saying it’ll work. I can get close, but—”
“I appreciate that, luv. But close counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades. I need to get out from under them for
sure
. Something they can’t trace.”
She sighed. “The things you ask for, Jesus, I didn’t know you were this bad off. Thought you were skimming a fra-poff, sure, but real
cancer
—Lord, that’s supposed to be
fix
able.”
He blinked wearily. “The older the body, the more rickety the immune response gets. That’s what all the aging diseases are, I suppose. Inappropriate response. The easiest way to kill a living thing is to get it to do most of the damage to itself. Merely add the right outside irritant …” His voice trailed off. Silently Carlotta rose to embrace him.
“Y’know, you said once that intelligence is the ability to learn from other people’s mistakes.” Carlotta studied him gravely. “You sure as hell aren’t. Why not pack it in, eh?”
He smiled defiantly. “I paid my admission. I want to see how the movie ends.”
He went for long walks through
Lancer
, seeing little of it. Instead, he tried to recall Earth, to forget the rumors of influence peddling and maneuverings on shipboard that might, finally, decide his fate. He remembered the last place he had gone before boarding
Lancer
: Venice. Nikka was visiting her family so he was left alone, ambling down gray flagstone streets with no footpaths. Men charged along them, pushing barrows and shouting.
“Le gambe!”
—which Nigel dutifully looked up in his dictionary and found meant “Legs!” a rather abrupt warning. It reminded him of the American “Heads up!” which was used when the appropriate response was precisely the opposite.
He let himself be tugged by crowds into Saint Mark’s Square, amid their chatter and dark round eyes. At the height of Venetian power the square had been named II Broglio, intrigue, because from 10:00 A.M. to noon only the nobles were allowed to meet there and hatch their plots. He thought of Ted and Bob, bland names which hid riddles.
He went inside the vast, hollow spaces of the basilica. From the high bulbous domes gold saints stared down at the masses of working, breathing carbon chemistry below. He climbed. The upper walkways brought these spiritual heroes closer, revealing them to be made of chips of blue and rose and white, a millimeter deep.
The rising spaces reminded him of the small cylinder worlds, just big enough to make a man feel dwarfed. Architects had been trying for that effect for millennia. He remembered that originally the pyramids outside Alexandria—
she was lying sprawled, unconscious, the life draining
—he cut off the thought.
The basilica walls were encrusted with Constantinople sculptures and Holy Land jewels. Booty of the Crusades. The desire for huge surroundings seemed to run in parallel with the lust for vast voyages, for causes, and for stacks of stone to remember them by.
Look, see what I did!
Future schoolchildren would goggle, to be sure—and then bow their reverent heads back to their ice creams.
Outside, waves slapped against the quay, playful, throwing spray in his eyes to remind him of how big they had been farther out where the ocean was still deep and blue. He wondered,
What drew such crowds to this place?
Then, seeing the marble standing luminous before the sea, it was suddenly clear. Here men had come, fleeing barbarism. Once they had tamed the sea and traded on it, they built stone statements, denying that the outcome was ever in doubt. These mobs knew that he saw, and preferred the cool stone, tight streets, and arched bridges that asserted the rule of geometry over the waves. These carved boxes of marble should, must,
would
, outlast the sea’s random rub.
On Ascension Day the Doge, the Venetian ruler, would sail out from the city in his gilded state galley, to throw a ring overboard, symbolizing the wedding of Venice to the waters. But in the end the marriage was not valid, because it lacked the consent of the bride. Venice clung to its carved rock and waned.
He still did as much manual work as he could, but the jobs seemed harder and the weakness came on him earlier in the day. He did analysis and routine jobs of maintenance, to keep busy and justify his presence, if only to himself. His digestion got worse. His muscles were always sore in the mornings and he felt a general unsteadiness. The worsening was blissfully gradual. He saw, ruefully, that he had reacted to it as most do. First you blame minor illnesses rather than age, and claim that pretty soon you will be up and about and back to tending the crops. He made this observation to Nikka many times and finally, afterward, she would become silent, and he would spend a restless night. He was going to the stars, but evolution’s need for mortality reached him even here.
Slowly he gathered, from slight elevations of eyelashes and side glances of friends, that his birthdays were not seen now as accomplishments, but as postponements. He looked for some weariness with life, with the doing of things, that would make the end less fearsome.
Surprisingly, perhaps gladly, he couldn’t find any.
Nigel looked from the prelim photos of Ross 128. “Pretty blurred,” he said to Nikka.
They’re from the gravitational telescope. Years old, of course—they’re working as fast as they can, but the light-travel delay—”
“Right.” He studied the hazy blobs. “Some Jovians, two terrestrials. Not bad.” Because
Lancer
had boosted to 0.98 light speed, these images were only a few months older than the first ones they had received, years ago, back at Isis. “Carlotta’s working on reprocessing this stuff, isn’t she? When will we get better—”
“She’s in the Slots.”
“What? I didn’t—How long?”
“Two weeks now.”
Nigel was startled. He hadn’t even noticed her absence. And he disliked abrupt changes like this, friends suddenly disappearing. “When do they uncork her?”
“Six months, I think.”
“We’ll be nearly at landfall then!”
Nikka looked up from her workpad. “Slots are R and R. She’ll come out refreshed, able to relieve somebody who’s been hustling to get ready for Ross.”
“Ummm.” He frowned. “Seems reasonable … but … I don’t like it.” He shook his head and went back to mulling over the prints. But he could not concentrate.
Warning gongs rang throughout
Lancer
. Nigel crossed his legs and ignored them. The ship was striking a dense dust cloud, and the ramscoop would either work or not, nothing he could do would matter. He slid a stick into the spine of a book and opened it. The stick overfilled the book, so he thumbed for the second projection and started reading on page 287.
And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain’t got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn’t get none from home
—
“Nigel!” his comm cried. He tapped his fingernail in answer. “Cut into shipspeak—fast.” It was Nikka, gone before he could reply. He punched into his flatscreen and overvocal and listened.
drive tube’s holding okay max’ed on momentum transport
betcher butt we’re gonna sail right through no prob
what’s the sci package picking up I’m gettin’ funny
it’s dropped clear of our wake now pickin’ up samples
look it that absorption line there, big fat one sittin’ at 2200 angstroms thick as your thumb
absorption cross section about 4 tim 10-
17
cm
2
yeah
I got the culprit right here, the sampler’s got a slide on now, looks like silicate grains only that’s no silicon line
average size right aroun’ 10-
5
cm I make it
Christ ’at stuff is peptides clear as a bell see those linkages
long chain stuff too all over the outer surface of those grains things are coated with it like an oil slick or somethin’
I don’t get it we’re seem’ amino acids in there too
those’re supposed to be dust particles what’s that stuff doing sticking to
look at that structure like a wall, long chains and the rest it’s a cell barrier got to be
doesn’t make sense
only use for a cell wall is to keep out your enemies
out here that means ultraviolet, UV’d blow those peptide chains to hell except for that li’l membrane there, bet it’s got silicon in it to block the UV
so peptides can stay inside the cell wall an’ link up an’ reproduce ’at’s the only thing logical I can make out
living stuff in clouds I don’t look it’s cold as a hoor’s tit out there what’s the thermodynamic driver for life
lots of IR around that’s how you saw that absorption line, same line that comes in most carbon complexes
see there in the middle that’s a silicate, the original piece of dust this cell started out on I bet
an’ two of ’em stickin’ together right there look the chains are migratin’ to the cell wall that’s it that’s it
my Gawd the density of ’em in here the ram-scoop is nearly chokin’ on ’em and the fluxlife is gettin’ barnacles of this goop all over we’re gonna have to clean up this mess
mess hell it’s reproducing cells man in these big clouds, there’s more mass in these clouds than in the goddamn stars for sure, look at all the dark patches in the night sky for sure it means there’s this peptide chem happenin’ everywhere …