The Sunborn (37 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
Instead of talking, that blunt medium, she simply embraced him.
Took him to bed. Made love and made it matter.
There is always something ultimately fatal about sex. How did that poem go…?
What use to rise and rise? Rise a man a thousand mornings Yet down at last he lies, And then the man is wise. |
But it doesn’t have to be so, she realized.
Something clicked.
“I’ve got it!” she said.
“I thought you just had,” Viktor said, lounging, grinning.
“No, not that—I mean I understand.”
He snorted. “Having done experiment, we now get theory?”
“No, the magnetic things, creatures, whatever. They can reconnect their field lines, the way the Earth’s magnetic fields do after they’ve been battered by a solar windstorm. They can rebuild! So they don’t have to die.”
“Everything dies. Is evolution.”
“Not evolution out here! They don’t
have
to die. Imagine a creature that from the very beginning, however they first were born, had the ability to tailor its cells, its basic units.”
He blinked. “Animals do not know they will die—is almost definition of animal, right?”
“Animals, yes. And maybe that’s the big difference between us and these things. We fought them off. But to them this may have just been a maneuver, a temporary loss—nothing really important.”
“I thought the scans showed that we wasted the magnetic bastards.”
“No, just that some of their field structures—those arcades and archipelagoes, remember?—they glowed and seethed and then—
zap!
—they were gone.”
“We maybe killed them—it—whatever. Da.”
“No, we didn’t. Damaged but not dead.”
“So this stuff I see on all the screens, closing in on us—it’s the same things? The Beings?”
“Creatures, yes. And they know what happened, they were there. We can negotiate with them.”
“They seem not interested in negotiation.”
“That first appearance in the ship, it seemed to want to connect with us. It mirrored my movements.”
“Second time, though—”
“Maybe that was a mistake, a miscalculation. How could they understand what is dangerous to us and what isn’t? They don’t even have solid bodies! Electrical discharges sustain life to them.”
“We can kill them with plasma? Disrupt their electromagnetic fields maybe.”
“But they won’t be dead! So to them all life is a negotiation, ’cause they never die.”
“All measures are temporary?” He wrinkled his forehead.
“In a way we can’t ever know, yeah. Everything’s temporary. Like the weather. The only thing that ever lasts is them.”
Viktor arched his heavy black eyebrows, bemused. “Interesting theory, m’dear. Makes our job out here maybe easier, though.”
His words jerked her out of her gauzy speculations. “What?”
“Bow shock coming closer and closer, and these things may be the cause. And we cannot hope to kill them.”
She nodded. “But they have killed one of us.”
“We have a job to do, and if we keep letting them damage us…”
Julia sighed. “We have to let them know that we mean business? I had hoped we could learn…”
“In way, makes communication job easier. We can damage them but not kill. So they learn.”
“Learn to…fear us?”
“Maybe best to think of them as animals—who don’t know about death, either. But they can learn to respect.”
She eyed him. The analogy to animals had a point. “Veronique…”
Viktor frowned. “Da. We are small, they large. They may respect us if we can hurt them.”
FREE RADICALS
“I’
VE GOT IT FIGURED
,”
Jordin called joyously. “I know what makes those lichen possible.”
Shanna was carefully maneuvering the captured Darksider toward the factory complex, using slight shoves across the soft starlit plain. But she, too, had wondered at the puzzle of how anything managed to live on a dab of ice under lower illumination than a flashlight. “Oh? Fill me in.”
“My chem-sampler ’bot—it’s fished up a whole soup of stuff, yeah—but the telltale is, this iceball is
rich.
”
“Um.” The Darksider was twitching, but her ’bot had it in three claws and wasn’t letting go. Whatever had made Darksiders, it had little appreciation for gravity. Her ’bot, on the other hand, could maneuver in a full Earth g if it had to. It was maybe a hundred times stronger than the Darksider, and she had to be careful not to cave in the Darksider carapace with too swift a movement. The two machines scooted slowly toward the spindly dark factory. “Uh, yeah?”
“It’s richer than Earthside ocean water. See, thing is, this iceball has been here in the dark many billions of years, doing nothing but sopping up cosmic rays. Free energy. The high-energy cosmic rays barrel into it and create ionized atoms. On Earth it’s warm enough that they find each other right away and recombine. Not here. The radicals stay frozen, ready for the lichen stuff to eat.”
“Yummy.” She brought the ’bot over the horizon, made it survey for suspicious movement, then went ahead. None of the Darksiders parked in front of the factory showed any reaction.
Like most tech guys, Jordin took any vague murmur as encouragement. “So the simple molecules can sometimes find others, build up more complex stuff—just like in our ocean, only at 50 degrees Kelvin. Amazing!”
She slowed and lowered the ’bot. A long moment of sliding silence, only her own breath rasping in her ears. No reaction from the lined-up Darksiders. So she let hers go. The captured ’bot settled to the surface, taking a full minute during which Shanna concentrated for any sign of reaction among the others. Jordin was talking organic chemistry, carbon and its many friends, her least favorite subject in university, and it went right by her.
“Not only that, the ice has plenty of uranium 235 in it. Another energy stock. That’s what this fungus stuff we see is doing—burrowing through the ice, collecting the U-235. Uses it for warmth, eats the organic compounds left by the cosmic rays—it’s a whole ecology. Ice worms crawl around and gobble up the fungus.”
“I don’t see any gobbling going on,” Shanna said warily. Her Darksider was shuffling forward toward its kin. “Things’re pretty slow out here.”
“Well, sure,” Jordin said with undiminished enthusiasm. “Low temperatures—but lots of time, maybe since the galaxy formed 10 billion years ago. The turtle beats the hare—it’s wonderful.”
“Hey, they haven’t beaten
us
yet.”
The Darksider convention was in slow motion. Hers lifted one of its odd, X-shaped grapplers and touched one of the others. A pale yellow spark arced. Nobody moved. Then another spark, but this time from the other Darksider to hers. “And they look like they’re communicating with jolts of electricity.”
This interested Jordin enough that he tapped into her ’bot sensorium. “Ummm, makes sense, kinda. So damn cold here you have to give somebody a smack just to get their attention.”
Shanna blinked. The Darksiders suddenly moved, forming a circle. They projected arrays of wires above their “heads”—knobby tool assemblies, really—and a sudden crackling came into her ears. “They’re sending something in microwaves,” she said. “A…buzzing.”
“Sure,” Jordin said happily. “They’re talking to their gods.”
“What?” She got the sudden impression that her Darksider had sent a status report, and now all of them were…praying? “No, maybe just reporting in.”
PLASMA DRAGONS
F
ORCEFUL SAID FIRMLY
,
Mirk added,
Instigator sent reassurance underlain with perplexity.
Ring shot back,
Instigator sent subtonics of admission-with-riposte:
Recorder said formally,
Instigator retorted,
Recorder spiked back,
They awaited a reply, but Instigator paused, puzzlement creeping into its emission.
Dusk ventured,
Instigator answered,
A tremor swept through them all, detected as fast ripples in the basic background magnetic field. The spatter of this fizzy noise sobered them.
Instigator said mildly, hoping to calm them all,
CREATURES AS GAUZY AS LACE
“T
HEY
’
RE COMING
!” J
ORDIN CALLED
.
“The big guys for sure. Lots of strong magnetic waves on the ship antennas.”
Shanna was watching the ’bots maneuver on dirty ice. “Damn! I want to see what they do next.”
“Look, the Beings made those.”
“Sure, but we can
see
the Darksiders.”
“Darksiders’ve called down their makers, I’ll bet.” Jordin was agitated. He pulled out of his sensorium hood and said directly to her, a meter away, “We’d better tuck in, and pronto.”
“Okay.” Shanna jerked her head out of the confines of the sensorium hood and looked around. In the mild, air-conditioned deck nothing seemed awry. Yet she knew huge things were coming, creatures as gauzy as lace but as deadly as a viper. “What’ll we—”
The deck shook. Circuits in the wall fizzed with overload currents.
“Julia!” she called. “What’re you—”
“It’s slamming us around. Hard.” Julia’s voice over comm had lost her usual calm, Great Lady of Space tone. That alone shook Shanna. “We’ve got to damage these damned things!”
“Damage?” Shanna felt a quick burst of irritation. She had felt that way, sure, but—“They’re trying to communicate! I think they’re monitoring this Darksider, learning from it. Even Veronique’s death, that might have been—”
“You don’t know any of this.”
“I…call it intuition.”
Julia’s tone was cool. “I felt the same way as you, but we must remember. They’ve done us damage, invaded a ship. They’re quite probably behind the bow shock that’s moving in. Viktor has convinced me that we have to put our mission first.”
You never know what goes on inside a marriage…
“We don’t know that they’re behind the bow shock phenomenon.” Shanna struggled to keep this civil.
“We can’t kill them, I think. They’ve killed one of us. We have to make a show of force.”
“I don’t agree.”
“We’re under orders from Earthside to stop the bow shock from moving farther in, if I—we—possibly can.”
“Thanks for adding the ‘we,’ Cap’n.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Sarcasm is just one more service we offer out here—to newcomers.”
Julia’s voice was suddenly tight, controlled. “Captain, you
will
assist us.
High Flyer
has overall command of this expedition.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“And Viktor agrees with me.”
“I’m so surprised.”
Julia ignored this gibe. “I want us to coordinate our thrust vectors. To bring our exhaust plumes to bear on the same volume of space. That should maximize—”
“We’ve got to
talk
to them. I damn well didn’t spend a year on Pluto to see you just come in and—”
“You
will
comply, Captain. Switch on your full screens—I noticed from your internals that you’ve been too busy arguing with me to tend to business—and run the new software we got from Earthside. The signal-to-noise enhancer. So you can envision the magnetic structures.”