The Sunborn (31 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
Julia reminded herself that it was only because they were out here, beyond the dense plasmas blown out by the effervescent sun, that they could detect anything at all in this region of the electromagnetic spectrum. By accident
High Flyer
had strung its antenna elements along its great length, so they were seeing with an “eye” effectively hundreds of meters long. Yet even such an aperture could sense wavelengths of many kilometers only dimly. But they had detected those waves, and that had changed everything.
The great virtue of discovery, she mused, is that it raises more wondrous questions than it answers. She had a quick image of humanity’s perceptual universe, expanding outward in a sphere from the sun. To be sure, they came to understand what lay in that increasing sphere’s volume, in time. But the price—or reward—was that the surface of that sphere, the edge of the unknown, also increased. There was more known, but always more to be known.
Yes,
she thought,
and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.
She thought of the actual sphere of the solar wind and wondered if the sun at its center kept these huge beings at bay. Not so long ago, humans kept wolves prowling at the rim of their campfires—but not venturing farther in—out of fear. Did something like that keep these huge beasts from plunging into the realm of the planets?
And if so, should a mere ship venture into that dim twilight beyond the fiery campfire, where truly gigantic wolves might lurk?
TINY THINGS
<
T
HEY ARE COMING
,> Serene sent from afar. She was cautious and wanted no part of any strange tiny things that intruded.
Instigator said, her intonation deflecting criticism.
Mirk’s signal worked with worried low notes.
Instigator said sharply,
Mirk sent,
A chorus of voices agreed. Subharmonics made a droning chorus of dread.
Recorder said slowly, as bespoke its age,
SPIDER NET
V
IKTOR WAS IRKED
.
“Damn! We’re flying straight, straight as arrow—and they’re not.”
Julia sat down in the parallel acceleration couch and for some reason, staring at the sprawled array of data and indicators and views fore and aft, remembered when she had been a teenager and had lived in a comfortably neat world, had believed utterly in the civilizing power of fresh lipstick and combed hair and not talking out of turn. Things had changed.
“Not being proper and orderly?” she asked him lightly.
“Making this plasma wire trick hard to work.”
“They’re not holding to course?”
“Getting buffeted, they say. Lighter ship, could be so.”
“Display the net?” Julia asked Veronique. She did.
Proserpina
was jiggling slightly, yes. The ships were thousands of kilometers apart, two piercing flames in the obsidian void.
Proserpina’s
fission glow was muted, its plasma not long lived.
High Flyer’s
flared brilliant blue-white behind them, fusion plasma alive with a vibrant incandescence formerly seen only in the hidden hearts of suns.
Except—at higher resolution the image picked out tendrils of snaky blue, each a thread connecting the ships. A spider net of plasma strands, the only way to listen to the deeps beyond. A grid for receiving waves of a scale no one had ever contemplated until now.
Their plan had been worked out by myriad plasma physicists sweating over test chambers and calculating pads, back Earthside. The first idea had been to eject a wire with tiny rockets at both ends. Fired off, they would uncoil the wire from a central processor and power supply, all left in
High Flyer’s
wake.
When the rockets played out, they would detach, leaving a wire a thousand kilometers long. This would unfurl the largest simple dipole antenna humanity had ever made. In the 1890s Marconi had made simple antennas like this, though those were about the size of himself—and he had changed the world. This time, a mere 150 years later, they might use such an antenna to discover beings beyond the imagination of anyone in the nineteenth century—except, that is, H. G. Wells.
It had been a pleasant image when Julia first heard of it. Stringing wire, like the radio pioneers. But too awkward, the engineers decided; too…well, massive. Even hair-thin wires thousands of klicks long add up.
So their ships carried plasma guns, not wires. The guns were marvels of artifice, able to emit steady streams of barium ions and their court jesters, the electrons. These beams ran from
High Flyer
to
Proserpina,
slender and elegant.
Their own electrical currents provided the magnetic fields that confined them to threads a bare centimeter wide. Unlike bulky wires, which can stretch quite little, twist only a bit, and often break, these plasma beams inherited the infinite flexibility of magnetic fields. These wrapped themselves around the currents that passed between ships. The bands of invisible magnetic loops could flex and swerve and contort to accommodate the varying distances between the huge spaceships. They kept contact going.
But they were also simply current carriers, like wires, only far more insubstantial and vulnerable. They worked as the effective wires of an antenna, stretched between the speeding ships at velocities of tens of kilometers per second.
These plasma pinches could pick up the waves incoming from the outer reaches, just as ordinary wires could. Processors aboard both ships then deciphered the oscillations in current and voltage as signals. H. G. Wells had never thought of this, much less Marconi.
“But what could make
Proserpina
jounce around?” Julia asked. “This is empty vacuum, after all.”
“Not quite,” Veronique said. “We’re getting close to the bow shock. Ah yes—there, that ruby glow ahead.” Diffuse radiance filled half the sky.
“But that’s just where the plasmas meet. Thin stuff.”
“Put it into a resonant wave, just about the size of your ship, and the effect piles up,” Veronique said. “Like wind forcing oscillations in a bridge. Acting all along the side of
Proserpina,
it can hit that resonance. Or maybe just as bad, it’s like a steady wind on a car. The faster we go, the bigger the effect.”
“Ummm.” Julia frowned, alarmed.
A threat in empty space?
“Should we dive straight into the nose of the bow shock?”
“Da. Is closest part, the nose,” Viktor said. “Like the prow of a ship, bow shock spreads out from it. We want to know what’s up, best place to go.”
Julia reminded herself that Viktor was captain, even if she was sleeping with him. She would keep her worries to herself for now. “If it can shove
Proserpina
around that way…”
“We are much bigger, heavier.” Viktor grinned wickedly. “So is
Proserpina.
May lose the antenna, yes, but need the shock data. And will be fun. First persons to cross into interstellar space!”
Julia laughed. “Once a pilot, always one,” she whispered to Veronique, not so soft he wouldn’t hear.
“Not just for thrill,” Viktor said soberly.
“You haven’t forgotten that we’re down to 28 percent on water?” Veronique said timidly.
Viktor glowered. “Of course not. We can run another month on that.”
Veronique said evenly, “We’re not supposed to run less than 20 percent.”
“We’ll find iceteroid, no problem,” Viktor said decisively.
“I thought they were supposed to be pretty far apart out here,” Julia put in. “We passed one a couple weeks back, though.”
Viktor said bearishly, “We do not turn back.”
“I didn’t mean we should,” Veronique said. “Just—”
“After we blow the nose”—Julia grinned at him as she said it—“we’ll look for some ice to melt down.”
With a curt nod Viktor said gruffly, “What I had in mind.”
Julia could see that even after more than a year of crewing with them, Veronique was still working out how to deal with a married couple who could read each other’s every unspoken cue.
“Check spectrum locus, eh?” Viktor said, pretty obviously trying to change the subject.
Veronique called up the mapping their plasma-net antenna was making. Spotty, but the conclusion was clear: “Most of the really long wavelength stuff is coming from around the nose,” Veronique said.
“It’s not just noise?” Julia asked.
In answer Veronique flipped on the audio. Long, humming chords. Thin leitmotifs atop that, skittering down the scale. A spray of sharp notes like harsh shouts in a distant fog.
“Working on the decoding?” Viktor asked, eyes never leaving the displays.
“You bet,” Veronique said crisply. “I think I can break it into words soon.”
“Words already? You’re using just the SETI codes?” Julia asked wonderingly.
“Well, with a bit of spin of my own.” Veronique grinned. “I think the other side is making it easy for us.”
“The…source?”
“Sources. Near as I can tell, there are plenty of them.”
Julia blinked. “You can tell them apart?”
“Except the rude ones. They talk over the others.”
Viktor nodded. “Too many of us like that.”
Julia was amazed. Decoding the low-frequency, long-wavelength signals had been a feat of intellectual daring. After all, what could humans share with them? If the things that made the signals were large, in the depths of space beyond stars, maybe they were not even used to stable structures. She sat back and mused.
One could think of them as being like jelly creatures maybe, awash in a dark environment. They might not think mainly in terms of numbers, but of geometry. Their mathematics would be mostly topology, reflecting their concern with overall sensed structure rather than counting or size. They would lack combustion and crystallography but would begin their science on a firm foundation of fluid mechanics, of flows and qualitative senses.
But others Earthside argued that no matter what the environment, creatures that made it in a harsh place would evolve basic ideas like objects, causes, and goals. Still…what objects were hundreds of kilometers in size? Iceballs, all right, but creatures? And what about causes? Even in quantum mechanics the idea wasn’t crystal clear.
Still, every environment had limits. Scarcity would bite, forcing the idea of realizable goals. Hardship would reward those who caused goals to come to pass, acting on whatever objects the vast creatures could see.
So maybe there were universals among intelligences, even if a bit abstract. The critical point had come with the realization that the harmonic structure of sound had a numerical key, that the notes of the scale were the ratios of whole numbers. This unlocked the code.
Do-re-mi,
a child’s rhyme, had turned out to be fundamental.
A noted twencen physicist, Richard Feynman, once said, to the horror of some philosophers, that “the glory of mathematics is that we do not have to say what we are talking about.” So sense could fly on the wings of mathematics, of encoding, without having to point to common, shared objects—chairs, sunsets, bodies—to make a sentence that made sense.
Beyond that, the argument descended into ornate relays of mathematics. Or maybe it ascended; anyway, Julia could not navigate the logic.
“What are they saying?” she asked.
“Sounds like…” Veronique paused. “Maybe warnings. Maybe threats.”
Viktor grimaced. “Hard to know which I would prefer.”
“Wiseguy is having problems. Context related. But it can translate to know they’re talking—singing—about danger.”
Julia had a momentary vision—an intuition, but from where?—of a spongy, swarming thing like a cloud. Yet also a thing of currents and whirling motion, a thinking tornado. And a thin extruded tendril of it—hesitant, flexing, touching, feeling…inward. A giant’s rub.
CASCADE
T
HE ETERNAL COOL GALE
came howling in from Upstream. To meet it, a constant roar of the starwind came soaring out from the eternal, prickly Hot.
Sheets of heavy spray slashed at the Beings as they came to feed. Hot plasma streamers curled and smashed howling against their outer wings. The curling waves were steep and breaking into coils. Some of these gnawing whorls were large enough to engulf an entire Being, and when one did, it carried the hapless, rubbery shape of intense magnetic order down a slope of ravening turbulence, to dash it into rivulets that scoured its hide.
Then the Being would be buried gloriously in the food it sought—gorged on it, lacerated by the very energies it needed to live. This paradox dwelled at the center of their art and philosophy, the contradiction between feeding and being ravaged.
At the worst, not merely to be flayed by the frying of dying magnetic fields but to be cut, seared, feathered, and frayed. Diminished.
Most Beings knew how to skirt the worst of it, skating the edge while absorbing magnetic whorls and digesting them into stronger fields within themselves. They valued the helicity above all, the twisted fields that carried the tight strands like rubber bands, that enabled a Being to confine itself. Sinew gave strength.
Yet the awesome power of the Cascade never deterred, for this was the peak joy for them all. They rolled and basked and breached in the slide of the interstellar plasma, a torrent eternally incoming, smashing against the resolute wind from the distant Hot.
Together as always, Mirk and Sunless were hogging over the crests of blithe helicity, sliding down their slick slopes. Their very perimeters sagged and staggered under the chop, absorbing energies and being seared by them, a thousand eating tongues forking into their magnetic skin.