Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8) (3 page)

Querlak looked around a little more without finding any other clues to what had happened. For a minute the TS widely expanded itself by adding more members to see if even more intelligence could elucidate the event, but without success. Whatever had torn up the plant and left the trail was a mystery, whether it was a sigma, a device, or a natural phenomenon. However, the high intelligence TS concluded that understanding what had happened was important enough to be worth sending Querlak after it. With a mental shrug Querlak rose into the air and began to follow the strange trail blown from the dust on the ring crossing road. As that task required little cleverness, the TS disbanded as she flew along the roadway. The loss of the TS again left Querlak with a vague pang of regret over her loss of intellect.

***

Ell’s AI Allan said, “Sigwald has encountered fields with a different crop.”

Ell glanced up at her HUD and saw that the fields were indeed a lighter green. The plants looked like large grass, reminding her of grain crops on earth. Again there was a trough of rotting matter just rimward of the field. “Let’s stop and look at it.” Ell’s car was nearly to
the little house Shan shared with Ryan. There she wouldn’t have access to a waldo controller for direct control of Sigwald. She could go back to her house or to D5R but didn’t want to.

Allan let Sigwald coast to a stop and shut off the compressed air jets on the bottom of his feet. The hovercraft effect of the jets
gone, Sigwald’s feet settled to the roadway.

Ell asked Allan to have Sigwald turn around, scanning the surroundings. Back a ways she could see the darker green plants
Sigwald had first encountered. Distantly she noticed that the jets on Sigwald’s feet had left a trail in the dust on the road. For a moment she wondered if she should break the trail by having Sigwald fly higher for a while. Then she decided that that would be pointless. After all, she wanted to meet the inhabitants. It would be counterproductive to hide Sigwald’s presence.

Ell asked
Allan to have Sigwald reach out and pull the top of one of the plants toward himself. A tufted brown section at the top had multiple pods which, when crushed, exuded a crumbly brown paste. Without direct control over the waldo, every step of this took time as Ell verbally directed Sigwald through Allan. Then it required even more time for Ell to give instructions correcting clumsy moves and misunderstandings about what she had intended for Sigwald to do. AIs were great at moving things like cars and planes from one mapped GPS destination to another. Moving the hand on a waldo to accomplish a new 3D task remained far more difficult. An AI could repeat a move that had been done once by a human and do it
perfectly
over and over. But figuring out how to reach out and grab something and move it in a specific manner when told to, a simple task for the human brain, remained difficult for an AI.

The leaves
of this new type of plant began a little below the fruiting tuft. They seemed a little wider than typical wheat or oat leaves but narrower than corn leaves. Ell was about to have Sigwald try to pull a plant up and look at the roots when the door of her car opened and Shan leaned down, “Is something wrong?”

Ell smiled up at him. He looked concerned. She held up a finger to get him to wait a second. To Allan she said, “Put a specimen in the DNA assay kit
, then keep going the same direction you were going before.” She stepped up out of the car and put her arms around Shan’s neck, “Hey there Mr. Fiancé.”

“Hey there yourself. I saw your car pull up and thought you’d be right in to give me the affection I need… Ten minutes later you’re
still
sitting out here in your car!” He frowned, “Something happening on Tau Ceti?”

Ell blinked and tilted her head questioningly, wondering why he was asking about Tau Ceti.

“You know, ‘cause you’re ‘getting DNA specimens’ and ‘going the same direction.’”

“Oh… yeah.” Ell said, feeling guilty for letting him continue thinking that she’d been talking about Tau Ceti. She didn’t want to keep secrets from Shan, but so far she hadn’t told anyone but Emma about the Sigma Draconis ringworld. She kind of regretted telling Emma and had no idea what she’d do when people began demanding to know what she’d found
on worlds around other stars. On the other hand, she trusted Shan with her life and could use someone to talk to about the ringworld and its implications. She grinned and leaned into him as they walked up the brick path to his little house. “Did you make me a nice dinner?”

Shan watched bemusedly as Raquel ate three of the large fish tacos he’d made.

“These are great!” she said, then leaned forward on her elbows to look into his eyes. “I need some advice.”

He shrugged. “Sure. What can
I
give
you
advice on?”

“Well, first, I apologize for letting you think I was talking about Tau Ceti out there in my car. Actually, I was talking to Allan about Sigma Draconis.”

“Really? I didn’t know you’d reached any other stars.”

“Well, we’ve reached a world around Alpha Centauri. It has life on it but doesn’t seem to have anything multicellular.
At least not that we can see from orbit. We’ve actually got some rockets nearing several other stars that don’t even have reasonably sized planets in the liquid water zone. We’re thinking of offering those rockets as viewing platforms to astronomers who might want to simply observe those systems optically.”

Shan narrowed his eyes, “But it sounds like Sigma Draconis has more advanced life. Is it intelligent?”

“Shan, they’ve built a ringworld.”

“My God! All the way around the sun, like in Niven’s book?”

“Oh, no! Niven’s ringworld wouldn’t have maintained a stable orbit and it would have to have been built out of material with absolutely impossible tensile strength. There are countless things on Niven’s ringworld that are not only impossible with current tech but will probably never be possible. No, the Sigma Draconis ring is only 20,000 kilometers in diameter. It’s turning eight revolutions per day. It could be constructed with carbon nanotubes or graphene, if you could make enough of those carbon allotropes.”

“Holy crap Raquel! That’s still
freaking
enormous! A circumference of 63,000 kilometers! How wide is it?”

“About 5,000 kilometers.”

“So that’s what… 315 million square kilometers of surface!?”

Ell nodded. “About 60% the surface area of the earth.
A
lot
bigger than their homeworld.”

“How thick is it?”

“Can’t tell, but even if it were only five meters thick, that would still require 1.6 million cubic kilometers of carbon assuming they built it out of graphene.”

Shan closed his eyes, “That kind of engineering… that’s just plain scary,” he whispered.

Ell raised an eyebrow, “You’re telling me.”

“So, is the life there DNA based?”

“The first specimen, a plant, was.” Ell glanced up at her HUD. “Oh, and the second plant was DNA based too. Seems like the DNA molecule is pretty ubiquitous.”

“What are the intelligent beings like?”

“Haven’t seen one yet.”

“Really? They built a ringworld
but aren’t living there?”

Ell shrugged, “I don’t know. So far all Sigwald has encountered are fields of what appear to be crops. At first they seemed to only be one type, but he’s just encountered a second kind of plant.”

“Sigwald?”

“My name for the waldo that’s actually on the ringworld.”

He got a distant look, “Maybe the plants are intelligent?”

Ell shrugged, “Can’
t rule that out, but the plants we’ve seen don’t have hands. How would they build a ringworld?”

“Can I see?”

Ell ported the video from Sigwald to Shan’s HUD and he leaned back, flabbergasted as the view from Sigwald raced along the road between the fields. A road that shot arrow straight into the distance until even the transparent atmosphere had deflected enough light that nothing could be seen but a bluish haze. High in the far distance he thought perhaps he could see a wall rising up above the haze. “Is the bottom of the ring flat from side to side?”

“No, it’s dished
some toward the middle. In just a few minutes the sun will go down and you’ll be able to see the other side of the ring because that side’ll be the one lit by the sun. You’ll be able to see that there appears to be a blue circle sea running along the middle of the ring. That would fit with the middle being the deepest part of the ring. Water would run from the rims down to the central circle sea. A typical weather cycle could then evaporate water out of the sea. The water vapor would rise and move to the higher edges of the ring. When the air got to the higher altitudes near the rimwalls it would precipitate out as rain and start running back downhill across the fields again.”

Shan glanced around the edges of the field of view in Sigwald’s camera, seeing some clouds he hadn’t paid attention to before. “Wouldn’t rain wash all the soil down to the sea without tectonics to raise some land again?”

Quietly Ell said, “I think the ring’s like a huge hydroponic system. No real soil, other than the composting of previous crops to release soluble nutrients. They
must
have some way to pump nutrient elements back out to the edge of the ring because the water cycle alone
would
take all the nutrients out to the sea like you said. Of course, breakdown of the un-harvested plant matter in the composting would provide a lot of those nutrients.”

Ringshadow—Ell didn’t think it was dark enough to call
it “sunset”—swept over Sigwald. Ell had Allan tip his head back so Shan could look up at the other side of the ring, now so much more visible.

“Wow! That’s… impressive. But so uniform, kinda uninspired. I’d like to think that if we’d built it, it wouldn’t be so
… monotonous.”

“Me too.” Ell
almost whispered. “It’s hard to imagine what circumstance would cause them to build something like this. Is it
just
a farm?”

“Hey, there’s something happening up ahead to the left.”

Ell had Allan turn Sigwald’s head that way. They could see dust rising from something. “Shall we head over that way and have a look?

“Yeah
.”

Allan slowed Sigwald and turned him to the left at the next intersection, then right again. Several such turns brought Sigwald fairly close to the disturbance. Slowing further the waldo crept around the next corner and stopped. They looked on in astonishment. A huge machine hung like a bridge
all the way across the field. It hung from an impossibly lightweight looking spidery frame with huge spindly wheels that were rolling along the roads on each side of the field. A box in the middle looked like it might hold an operator. The dust they’d seen rose from the leading edge which was sucking in the tufted tops of the grain-like plants. Whatever processing it was doing to the tufts generated the dust, apparently fine plant debris. Behind the trailing edge of the huge machine all the plants—not just the tufts—were gone! As they watched, the machine stopped over the trough at the rimward edge of the field and disgorged a huge mass of vegetable matter. It appeared to be the chopped residue of the plants the machine had pulled up from the field. After a moment the machine resumed moving. It crossed the rimwall paralleling circle-road to the next field.

As they stared after the machine they heard a flapping noise from behind Sigwald. 

When Sigwald’s head had turned they saw their first sigma.

Querlak had nearly despaired of catching whatever was leaving the trail blown from the road’s dust. She had decided it must be moving at least as fast as her best flying speed, perhaps faster. Leaving her assigned inspection task would cost her unless she could demonstrate that a greater value to the sigmas had come from her pursuit. If she never caught the perpetrator of the plant damage, or if it had already been caught by someone else by the time she arrived, this detour of hers would be a total loss. While considering whether to turn back she briefly missed the fact that the trail in the dust had turned left. She saw the deviation just as she passed the intersection and had to fly back across the corner of the field. She found the trail again and followed it right at the next intersection.

Then left again, and right after that. The diagonal
travel the repeated turns produced took Querlak toward a harvester. She wondered if her fugitive intended to intersect with the harvester or if the chosen direction was accidental.

At the
next intersection Querlak’s eye caught on the huge harvester and she almost missed the small metallic object in the road. Just before overflying it she saw it and back beat her wings. Halted, she sank to the road behind the… thing? Wide eyed with surprise, Querlak immediately sent out a request for links and quickly established a TS with seven members. In human terms this boosted her IQ from about 70 to about 107. With this increased clarity, Querlak studied the object. It appeared to be made mostly of metal! Stationary now, the trail of disturbed dust led right up to it, indicating that it was indeed what Querlak had been following. It must have been moving moments ago.