The Sunborn (33 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
“What’ll we do?” Julia asked.
We went looking for dragons, and now we found them.
“We can’t tumble like this forever. The plasma antenna grid—it’s out of commission, like this.”
“These things won’t go away, I bet,” Veronique said. “What are they?”
“Dragons,” Julia said. “Dragons in the night.”
Viktor grimaced. “So we punch back. I’ll fire a small side jet, rotate on the other axis, take our aft around on them.”
Julia saw what he meant as his hands traced a command system into being in the space before him. A faint rumbling began. The ship began to slide sideways, or that’s how it felt to her. Multiple-axis accelerations had never been her strong point in training, and that had been decades ago. Her head spun, her stomach lurched. Yet she felt awe at the presence of these immense…things.
Viktor glanced at her, frowned in concern. “Is okay?”
Julia said softly, “I’m glad somebody knows what to do.”
“I try, is all.” He winked.
The sliding feeling got worse, and something strummed deeply, amid more popping noises.
“Ready power up?” Viktor called to Veronique. “We be fast now.”
“Roger.”
The surge made Julia’s gorge rise. Whirling, wrenching—she held on.
“
High Flyer
, coming in on port approach,” came Shanna’s clear voice. “We’re out at 1,237 klicks, closing slow. Gather you have trouble.”
“Something we can’t see with eyes, yes,” Viktor called back. “But on-screen…”
“Dragons,” Julia said. “Stay well clear of the plasma emission zone, Shanna.”
Viktor brought up a picture with
Proserpina’s
bright flare at its center. Wisps of ivory luminescence crawled across the image, blurred as if out of focus. “To port. Acquiring your close-upped image. Your burn looks stable.”
“Right, but between us there’re some vague shapes,” Shanna said. “Like worms, coiling around each other.”
“Plasma discharges, I’ll bet,” Veronique said. “I saw some, back in the days when I did lab work at Caltech. They’re diffuse, like a neon light, but they’re long threads. Means there must be pretty powerful magnetic fields around them.”
“Ummmm,” Viktor murmured, staring at the traceries that moved like kelp in the slow wash of tides. “Magnetic pressure we can counter with plasma pressure, right?”
“Good idea,” Shanna said sharply. “Bringing our tail around.”
“Da.”
Proserpina’s
image began rotating. The bright flare of its drive glared as it came around to point in their direction. Julia could see filigrees of exhaust licking out across the great distance, moving at tens of kilometers per second, to judge by the scale. Where the wash of it struck, the threads of ivory plasma shredded, blown apart. Their soft glow dissolved.
“Got them!” Shanna called.
“Copy that. Pour it on,” Viktor called happily. “I’m bringing ours around, too.”
More lurching. A nasty rumble in the deck. Julia hung on.
HARD PLASMA
<
I
T CUTS
!
>
M
IRK CRIED
.
Mirk called,
Forceful reported calmly.
They were all withdrawing, trailing some fields they would lose in their haste. The example of Chill had brought caution to them all.
Mirk sent,
Their pursuit had carried them safely upstream of the roaring Cascade, but they still felt vibrations and shocks from it reverberate through their bodies.
A long silence hung between them. Each mended its skin and currents, rebuilding where hard plasma had torn raw gouts in filmy magnetic structures. In the quiet, upstream from the thunder and boom of the Cascade, a faint whispering came to them. Jittery spikes came from the two tiny cold things.
Sunless sent a slick burst of layered nuances, piling language into stacks.
Recorder sent a long, thoughtful roll of waves, whose import was,
Mirth greeted this.
Dusk dismissed the idea.
Recorder recoiled a bit from the chorus of derision.
Dusk added,
Someone farther out sent, without an identity signature,
Recorder said patiently,
Forceful sent striations red with disagreement.
Recorder’s aura became uneasy.
Forceful bristled, shimmering its outline.
They all knew that Ring was the closest relation to Incursor, lost long ago to inward, near the Hot—a tragic, historical agony.
Dusk sent,
was a triumph! For which it paid dearly.>
Instigator said,
Into the middle of this came a long, pleading note. It was Chill.
Forceful sent, as custom required,
A rustle of concern washed among the Beings, who had drawn nearer.
Forceful said,
Chill replied with a clear shame aura.
Consternation swept through the Beings. This was a major step, one that left no doubt about Chill’s resolve.
Beings could fray, dissipate, then recompose. Feeding lustily in the Cascade ran the risk of such erosions. This was where the more primordial of Beings had learned the arts of suffering loss and then rebuilding themselves. By oozing soft currents, carefully using the eternal laws of induction and conduction, those early, rather dim intelligences had with agonizing slowness mastered Resurrection over Diminishment. The galaxy had spun in its eternal gyre fully fifteen times before the Beings had fathomed how to become immortal.
But only if they wished. Resurrection soon—on a time scale whose long unit was that gyre—became of far greater significance. The Resurrection skills allowed Beings to manifest in fresh form. To choose Diminishment—not merely to
suffer
it from the outrageous surges of the Cascade or the magnetic insults of a passing molecular cloud—was an act of nobility and honor. It could lead to the highest status among all Beings, near and far.
One’s fate in life, all Beings held, was set by deeds performed in past Manifestations. Previous wise acts yielded, in time, superior magnetic shapes in this present life. Bad or stupid acts gave the reverse—poor character, low status, even ruin.
Since the Origin, Beings had passed through many Manifestations. Some traces of these past lives and deeds still lingered in core memory. Those feather-light remembrances were the breath of eternity, the high wisdom of previous selves.
How beautiful life therefore was, and how sad. How fleeting, suspended in a limitless
now
that embodied all that had come before, but was still now, the only time one could change. Eternity stretched away in both time directions, while a Being was pinned to the moment. Such was the state of Being.
Forceful sent.
Chill insisted.
Recorder said,
Recorder said,
Instigator fizzed with excitement.
The other Beings sent cries and shimmering auras of alarm. Some fizzed with anger at the very idea.
But Chill answered,
BURNT-YELLOW FINGERS
I
N THE AFTERMATH OF
the assault, Julia retreated into her meditations. After time in the sliding vapor world of her Japanese garden she knew what to do next.
Years before, while adapting to Mars, she had discovered by Web browsing the melancholic poetry of A. E. Housman, an English poet dead now well over a century. A particular piece of that man’s wisdom she and Viktor had applied:
Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad, ’Tis now the blood runs gold, And man and maid had best be glad Before the world is old. |
Sex, after all, was the flip side of death.
So she and Victor had a ritual. They answered every brush with danger—and there were many, particularly in the years they held on together at Gusev—by making love, laughing, shouting out their joy in the moment, thumbing their noses at gloomy ol’ fate.
Ah!—yes.
Afterward they talked. The crew could keep track of the electromagnetic blizzard their plasma net was delivering.
Proserpina
was flying in clean formation now, so they could use all their gossamer plasma-web ability. Earthside was gobbling up the broadband data feed, analyzing, theorizing, decoding the long strings of mystery.
They talked about mysteries, too. The discovery of life on Mars had ignited an ongoing debate Earthside, of course. The prevailing view now emerging was not that of the chattering classes of the long-dead twencen. Back then, all the smart folk thought that the universe was a pointless cosmic joke, on us.
Now the Martian experience—delving into whether weird, world-spanning, and ornate molds were sentient—had opened the plausible case that the universe was a meaningful entity. Increasingly it seemed to be made down at the lawmaker’s level to generate life and then minds. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably to yield forth systems that evolution drove to construct models of the external world. Inevitably those models worked better if they had a model of…well, models. Themselves. A sense of self.
So if even archaebacteria could evolve in Martian caverns into thinking beings, then a whole landscape of mind opened. Admittedly the Marsmat had rather inscrutable traits. Still, the tantalizing suggestion had emerged, from all their fieldwork. Could evolution yield up, along strange paths, beings who could discern truth, apprehend beauty? Maybe even yearn for goodness and define evil, experience mystery, and feel love? Even allowing for the human habit of projecting their minds’ traits onto other species, that was a compelling possibility, to just about everybody. Yet Julia had to remind herself that yearning was not proof.