The Sunborn (36 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
“I think it’s just great that you’re following your nose out there,” he said grandly. “Find out how those Darksiders get made! We can use every scrap of detail. Take samples! Hell, take Darksiders! I told Shanna you’d be there to take them in charge.”
“What?” Julia shot back to the screen. “We haven’t even seen the damn things yet!”
“Maybe take whole iceteroid,” Viktor said sardonically.
“I’ve just been at a meeting of our backers, and they’re 100 percent behind you. Take every precaution, of course”—he beamed—“but take every opportunity, too!”
“Does really think we need pep talk?”
Julia nodded. “It’s all he can do. For executives you can’t just do nothing but wait. Not allowed.”
Viktor curled his lips in a knot and turned off the vid. “For this I, too, can wait. Until we are done.”
ICETEROID
T
HEIR NOZZLES BURNING SOFT
and pale at low drive levels, the two long cylinders swooped down toward the pale gray iceteroid.
The astro folks Earthside said there were over forty thousand iceteroids like this out in the dark, at least. Pluto wasn’t really a planet, they said, just the biggest of these “cometoids” that others wanted to call Plutinos—so maybe it wasn’t surprising that there was one fairly near the nose of the bow shock. Still, it was suspicious, because the blocky body
looked
odd. They expected the usual dirty-gray ice, but it was a dull green.
“Lots of current in the plasma around us, too,” Jordin reported.
“Reminds me of Pluto,” Shanna said, frowning. “Warmer than it should be—look, there’s a funny brownish haze around the thing. An atmosphere!”
“Now, that’s plain impossible,” Jordin said. “A chunk of ice can’t hold on to a gas at all.”
But it was there, all right. “Methane, the spectrum says,” Jordin admitted.
“One other thing…”
“What? It’s pretty thin stuff, not much of an atmosphere—”
“No, the spin.” Shanna pointed. “It isn’t.”
The chunky, potato-shaped mass held steady on the screen. Jordin said, “Ummm…maybe it’s really slow.”
“No, been tracking it for hours. Zero spin. Never saw a natural object that didn’t have some.”
They came gliding in carefully,
High Flyer
on the other side, to provide maximum coverage of this miniworld, which they had decided to call Iceball.
Shanna sent one of her bulky ’bots shuttling over to gingerly touch down.
Proserpina
had no need of water—they had refueled on Pluto’s glimmering ice fields—but Shanna wanted to see if further clues to the zand could he here. The incoming Darksider machines that dropped on Pluto had to come from somewhere, and Iceball was upstream of the currents from the bow shock. Somehow, all this diffuse energy had to fit together.
High Flyer
was deploying ’bot crews on the other side. Their teams set to, hauling out pipelines to melt ice and suck up water.
Proserpina
would have first crack at the science, then. Their spidery, many-armed ’bots hit gingerly in the microgravity, sinking anchor lines through the odd green-brown splashes that covered about half the ground. They had all crew available running ’bots, the comm air alive with fretful cross talk. Jordin ran the chemical analyzer ’bots, Shanna the patrol ’bots. Her point-of-view choice was a ’bot that didn’t anchor, jetting instead over the visibly curved, bumpy surface.
Bird ’bot,
she thought.
“Y’know, this is damned strange,” Jordin said on comm from his control pod.
“Tell me about it.” Shanna’s ’bot had arced over a brown crest. Beyond stood a complex construction, house-sized and spiky with contorted flanges, tubes, valves, chutes, and prongs like a big arc-welder rig. “Got an artifact here.”
“A Darksider?”
“Maybe the factory that made them.”
“A working factory?”
“I can see parts moving. Some dust in a column, spinning around. Purple sparks, too, jumping around inside the column. There are pipes, transparent pipes. With fluids pumping through them—liquids I can see shining by their own light.”
Jordin said, “Wow. Me, I’m getting boring readings on methane and ammonia and—wait, looks like maybe complex organics in the stew here, too.”
“Y’know what I think? This is somebody’s workshop.”
“Like Pluto, you mean. Yeah. Sure ain’t natural.”
“Hey, the fluids are awfully bright. I wonder if they’re—well, metals? In some kind of plasma discharge, not solid—but metals, yes.”
Jordin’s doubtful tone was clear even over the raspy comm. “You got spectra?”
“Here.” She shot the data over and was gratified when, in less than a minute, he replied, “Yep, there’s iron and nickel and copper. Uranium, too.”
“So it’s—what, a plasma foundry?”
“Yeah. Here, where ambient’s, lemme see—wow!—46 Kelvin!”
“And we thought
we
were engineers.”
Shanna watched as a scoop slowly descended from the porcupine-like structure. With a huge claw it scooped up material from a tray and deposited the man-sized pile in a hopper. Something sucked the material into a cylinder, and some actinic flashes came from the studded walls of it. Then the tray began moving away on invisible jets, lifting and sailing over the horizon.
Shanna made her ’bot lift some dirty ice a meter and let go. The ice took an eerie minute to fall, straight down. “Y’know, the zero spin makes sense. Moving something takes nearly nothing, and it’s easy to get it to drop where you want, when there’s no rotation to mess you up.”
“Easy if you’re a machine calibrated that low, yeah,” Jordin said. “Not easy for our 1-g reflexes.”
“This”—in an instant she was sure of it—“this must be where the Darksiders get made.”
“Yeah?” Disbelief colored Jordin’s voice. He sent his ’bot scooting after the loaded tray. Spindly and light and as big as it was, it still moved well. “Let’s see.”
From the ’bot point of view the gray ice shot by below. Small gas bursts altered its straight-line path to curve around the close horizon. Jordin was hard put to keep the tray-flyer in view. The ice here was crusty, spattered with brown. Then something new bulked up, large, a tangled structure rising over the horizon’s icy rim. Columns of moving, electric-blue dust whirled in the vacuum, somehow confined. They passed through the dark struts and corridors of the—
Well,
Shanna thought,
might as well call it a factory; it sure looks like one
—and electric-green arcs flashed every few seconds, sending weird shadows stretching across the plain and up through the twisted towers above.
“Look there,” Jordin said.
The flying tray had disappeared somewhere into the labyrinth. On the dirty ground at the factory’s edge stood half a dozen constructions, in various stages of assembly. Small machines worked over them. “I’ll bet when they’re finished, they’ll be Darksiders.”
“No bet—good call.” They watched silently as myriad small machines prowled the strange, shadowy structure.
One passed nearby, and Jordin did a quick spectral scan. “I wondered how they handled seeing. Those big eyes are calcium carbonate.”
Julia came in, voice faint. “Can’t be. That’s the stuff of the white cliffs of Dover. Biological.”
Shanna made a superior smirk. “Plenty of nonbio chemical ways to make it, though. Trilobite eyes were made of it, 400 million years ago. There’s a transparent, crystalline form, and the trilobites used that—a unique invention, never duplicated later. So somebody designed these to use calcite crystals. Maybe they work better at really low temperatures.”
Julia’s voice was etched in doubt. “Oh? Never heard that.”
Jordin seemed to sense the edgy tension rising, and said quickly, “So trilobites and these things could both give you a stony stare, huh?”
The women laughed, maybe a little too much.
They got to work, taking pictures and working their way through the complex. Shanna liked immersing herself in the shadowy lanes and weird worked architectures, losing herself to the strangeness of it. Ice crunching, the ’bot’s clanking. An hour went by without her noticing it, in part because their link to Julia dropped out and she could work without always thinking about the other woman. But then—
“Hey down there!” It was Julia on comm. “We’re in good range again.”
“Can’t talk much,” Shanna said. “We’re watching the natives.” She sent a cam-view attachment on a sideband and was gratified to hear Julia’s gasp.
“What are they?” Julia whispered.
“Minions,” Jordin whispered back. “I always wanted to use that word, and these sure seem to fit.”
“Minions of what?”
“The magnetic beasts, I’ll bet,” Shanna said. “Certainly not the other way around. Ever since I saw my first zand, I was sure it couldn’t be natural. I mean, couldn’t have arisen and evolved on Pluto.”
Jordin made his ’bot extend a tool, effectively pointing to a team of three small devices that skimmed out from the edifice, over the ice, and then swarmed around a partially finished Darksider. “Right, no way. There’s not the complexity of a natural biosphere. No pyramid of life, nothing. Just raw materials and…machines.”
“Ummm,” Julia said. “Like a biosphere designed by something that didn’t know the steps?”
“Or wanted to cut to the chase,” Shanna said.
“Something in a hurry,” Jordin said. His breath came fast over the comm, but his voice was calm.
“Now the diplomacy begins,” Shanna said. “We’re on the ground, might as well introduce ourselves.”
“Think they’ll notice?” Jordin asked quietly. “They’ve sure ignored us so far.”
“Look,” Julia said, “ants crawling across your desk don’t know they’re interrupting a superior being reading e-mail. They don’t notice you at all.”
Shanna nodded. “So we use something they will notice.”
Julia asked, “What? We don’t—”
“We hauled it all the way from Pluto, and it’s been itching to get out. Let’s deploy that Darksider I caught.”
TOROIDS
F
ORCEFUL HURT
. He paused to summon energies. <…that I did not suffer more… Diminishment.>
Forceful sent sourly.
WANJINA
J
ULIA TOOK A LONG
break from the ’bot-controlling job and walked to her private preserve. The water collection went on, most of the crew running the ’bots…and she needed to think. There was something brewing here, events moving too fast, and she needed to be centered to fathom it. She shut out her ship’s eternal hum and concentrated.
The sliding sheets of water again caught the projected scenes she had not seen in person now for decades. One of the obliging, scanty comforts of Mars had been its sometimes eerie similarity to the great red interior of Australia, where she grew up.
So she called up in the walls around her the abrupt scarps of sandstone in Australia, the lashing rains pouring over them, and shortly after, the scorching summer turning the rock to furnace heat. Yet the grand rocks looked redder after the rare rains, standing out in sunsets against lush grasses as wide swags of pearly cloud hung over the flood-plain. In the northwest she had once seen wall paintings of spiritual beings,
Wanjina,
with huge eyes and no mouths—beings who saw all but judged nothing.
The memory came to her abruptly. The human legends of higher creatures
who saw all but judged nothing
—
yes.
The pressing human need, embodied in legends of goblins and angels and golems and trolls and faeries and so many—the need to find another voice in this indifferent universe.
Was it so demented? Pathetic?
And now here was the possibility.
But how to talk?
She remembered a classic story from Kyoto lore.
Two men were watching a beautiful pool and the koi fish that swam just below its calm, clear surface.
“The fish are happy,” said one man.
The other asked, “How can you possibly know?”
“How can you know if I know?”
“How can you know I cannot?”
“That is not the point,” the fish said.
So how to think about this?
Expect the unexpected.
Sighing, she left the security of her personal space and trudged out into the command deck. Viktor was there, dealing with details as their complex sensorium sampled and delved and fidgeted with the immense landscape presented by the panoply of sensors
High Flyer
carried. The new software gave them a holistic view of things never glimpsed by the human eye: magnetic fields, plasma fluxes, the slow clash of pressures and shock waves at the boundary of Things Solar and Things Stellar. Humans had evolved in the flat dry plains of Africa, and their sensory inputs (to use a computer freak’s terms) were of a blithe Euclidian geometry in obliging finite spaces, flat planes, and simple forms. Human eyes were not made for the surge and suck of such three-dimensional turbulence. But they tried.