The Sunborn (38 page)

“We’ve got it up, sure.” Shanna frowned. “Why, what’s—”

“So we’ll know where we’re shooting.”

Shanna sucked in a dry breath, made herself breathe out—
calm, calm
—and nodded to the rest of the crew. Their eyes were white.

Jordin muttered under his breath and sprang to the central position on the bridge. They both strapped in as other crew dashed to their stations. Shanna watched the screens anxiously as the ship rattled and creaked with stresses.

Jordin and Mary Kay got the full software running, calibrated. Shanna studied the images. Was Julia right? She sensed the hand of Viktor in this shift.

On the screens the fluxes whirled and merged, mere digital analogs of a reality no human eye could grasp—beings bigger than continents, sweeping in on them like furious tornadoes with a grudge. Or were they? She felt them all swept forward, emissaries in a collision of beings that neither side could have foreseen.
And I thought the zand were exotic!

Pluto had been a lot easier.

J
ULIA FELT HER SHIP
shudder. Considering its immense length and mass, this spoke powerfully of the net pressure even a filmy, lacelike filigree of magnetic field could exert.

“Let’s go!” she ordered Viktor. “Give them some prop wash.”

High Flyer
surged onward, a relentless kick in the pants, accelerating on jetting coils of fresh, snarling plasma. The mottled iceball fell away. Far off,
Proserpina,
too, flared and followed. Between them snaked forth bright electron beams, marked by their gauzy radiance where they excited the clotted hydrogen that backed up from the raging bow shock. Starlight sprinkled the ship as auroral fires danced along its flanks. Energies born of magnetic fields pressed at them.

“I’m getting a lot of that same low-frequency hash,” Viktor said.

“The high-power stuff that started all this?”

“
Da,
is same.” He looked significantly at her. “Your creatures.”

“Hey, they’re not
mine.
” Though she had to admit to herself that she didn’t want to kill them. Still—“They’re drawing in close?”

“I’m not getting a good image.” Viktor thumbed over to the
Proserpina
link. “Send latest, eh, Jordin?”

Their screens brimmed with twisting shapes—slow, smooth. Julia had learned to make out structures in the shifting magnetic topo maps, like looking down on hills that kept moving around, growing taller or shorter, restless blobs. “Bunching up at our tail, looks like,” Julia said.

“Time to spring trap?”

Julia wondered. Poking them with the fusion drive’s lance might just get more of her crew killed. She doubted that anything could dismember such moving mountain-sized things for long. She called out, “Shanna! Come alongside us—we’ll have to use both torches.”

“Mine’s a lot less cutting than yours,” Shanna sent back. They were both gunning it and weaving together in programmed dodges, to throw off their pursuers. But flies can’t dodge trucks, as many windshields have proved. Julia could see big bunched masses of high magnetic fields converging on both ships.

“Let’s get close together, then turn our thrust at the maximum field points,” Julia said.

The idea of dueling with such beasties was laughable, and both their ships were like lumbering tank ships. But Viktor sent
High Flyer
into a long curve toward
Proserpina.

“Punch that way!” Shanna called. “DIS—navigation override: DEC 48, RA 23.”

They seared the sky together.

Fuming, the magnetic whorls backed away. But the ships could perform this gravity-free gavotte only so long—then their plumes drove them apart. Long minutes ticked by as both crews watched their screens. Nobody moved, not even to get coffee. The magnetic stresses crept back in. Feelers filled the spaces.

“Damn!” Viktor said.

“We can’t do this forever,” Julia said.

“They’ll figure out a new trick,” Shanna said. “This is their turf.”

Julia took a long breath of the ship’s dry air, smelling the sweaty fear around her. Nobody spoke.

She had to get them out of this trap, this endless cycle of violence and terror.
“That is not the point,” the fish said.

“Yes, but how to break the…” She pursed her lips.
Some problems just curve back in upon themselves, and that is the only solution.

Was that it?
The figure that curves upon itself.

She said to Viktor, “The fusion equilibrium, it’s a torus, right?”

He was busy, and his fingers danced in useless, fretful patterns. “Is working fine, don’t worry.”

“Can you clean the system now?” she pressed him.

“What?” he sputtered. “We do that only to go to shutdown.”

“I know. You pulse the top magnetic fields, force the toroid down through the magnetic nozzle.”

“But only to finish the burn!”

“Do it.”

“What?” Disbelief.

“Now.”

He peered at her for a long moment. “It is our defense, the exhaust—”

“They gave us a humanlike figure. We could show them something like themselves. It’s all we’ve got.”

“But the danger! Will take time to reconfigure the drive, stabilize—”

“Now. Please.”

It took more long minutes, but he did it. The great circulating doughnut shape squeezed downward, heating further as it compressed through the knothole of the curved magnetic nozzle, and popped free.

It was hotter than the ordinary exhaust and brimmed with fresh virulence, burning saturation holes in their aft view screens. The doughnut expanded, cooled, and traceries worked along its slick surface. All this they witnessed on the same grid display that showed the magnetic structures. The toroid was small, tiny compared with the Beings. But it grew. Dimmed, cooled, but swelled as its magnetic field lines tried to straighten out. The plasma inside cooled, recombined, gave off a flash of blue light.

Shanna called, “What the hell is this?”

“Calculated risk.” Julia said it forcefully, but she was suddenly full of doubts. She had acted on impulse, on a hunch. She had done that on Mars before, and it had worked. But here…

She whispered, “Viktor, better start building a fresh toroid.”

“I will have to reset the induction coils, prime the Marshall guns—”

“Please, yes. In case we have to…well, run for it.”

Shanna said, “You sure flip-flop. I thought you were the one who wanted to zap them.”

“I, we, do—but something I remember…”

Then the screens brimmed again with furious activity. In the whorls of magnetic turbulence she saw again a spinning, spitting torus—the shape she remembered from Hawaii, when she had blown bubbles and seen them shape magically into airy toroids; in the core of her own fusion rocket, the magnetic torus that kindled ions—a geometry so sought by nature that it appeared in vastly different places. Now it condensed into an immense, wobbly doughnut shape. Both ships speared through the hole of it.

“Like a noose that can choke us,” Viktor said sourly. He turned back to work on reboosting their fusion core.

“Or…” Julia let the word hang in the tense air.

“The toroid,” Shanna said. “They’re making themselves, all of them, into one huge—”

“They’re echoing us,” Jordin whispered.

Julia watched the giant structure form, a curve thousands of kilometers long. Capable of pressing against their ships, yes. Or doing another job?

“They echoed our human shapes.”

“And killed Veronique.” Shanna’s lips pressed so thin they turned white.

“Yes…still…” Julia was guessing, but it felt right, and she had learned to shoot such rapids with no qualm. “Now they’re echoing our fusion doughnut. But it’s
their
shape as well this time. So they know there is some sort of basic kinship between us. A love of geometry—particularly of geometry that works.”

Viktor laughed dryly. “Euclid would be pleased. His language!”

A call from Mary Kay interrupted. “We’ve gotten low-frequency communication from somebody. Big wave train. DIS put Wiseguy to work on it.” She paused. “
High Flyer,
are you getting it, too?”

“Yeah, big amplitude.”

Long, coasting minutes… Mary Kay said, “They say they’ll withdraw a bit. Want to speak among themselves.”

Julia shrugged. “I wonder if we can eavesdrop?” Viktor nodded.

Mary Kay said, “They’ve put up some sort of…well, screen. A blob of plasma, wrapped around us. Both ships.”

Shanna sent, “We’re seeing that, too. Wow, it’s building in density.”

Jordin came on. “Maybe that’s to give them some privacy. If they talk to each other in low frequencies, it won’t come through that blob because the plasma frequency is higher. Just like Earth’s ionosphere—we can’t receive low-frequency stuff through that, either.”

Viktor said, “How long they want talk?”

Mary Kay said, “There’s a phrase here, Wiseguy just delivered. ‘Half period of small world.’ What’s that?”

Viktor said, “Hope is not orbital period—that’s centuries. Must mean rotation—few days.”

“Well, at least it buys us time.” Julia shrugged. “Let Earthside worry for a while.”

At dinner they slurped up the meaty stew ravenously and crawled into bed. Julia was exhausted. More like completely drained. Looking at Viktor, she could tell that he was, too.

“I wonder if the Beings sleep?” she asked, yawning.

“No reason. No day or night out here. So they talk for next few days. About us.”

“Thing is,” she said, “I can still do a hard day, maybe two in a row, but then I’ve got to recoup.”

Viktor grunted assent. “Not youngsters anymore, the two of us. Wish for more of Mars Effect. But remember motto: age and cunning can defeat youth and strength anytime.”

She drained the last of her hot cocoa and snuggled down into the covers. “Unfortunately we’re on the same side as the youth and strength brigade. We’re supposed to cooperate with them.”

Viktor was looking blearily at a laptop screen. “Speaking of which, we got urgent message from Praknor. Too busy earlier to look at it.”

The last thing Julia heard before slipping into blackness was Viktor’s quizzical tone. “Big things happening on Mars, same time as here.”

It appears that the radical element responsible for the continuing thread of cosmic unrest is the magnetic field. What, then, is a magnetic field…that, like a biological form, is able to reproduce itself and carry on an active life in the general outflow of starlight, and from there alter the behaviour of stars and galaxies?

—Eugene Parker,
Cosmical Magnetic Fields

B
OTH SHIPS HAD TO
wait weeks, through long and sometimes tedious translations, to discover the truth—or at least a version of it.

Astronauts are obviously not ambassadors, nor are they experts in linguistics. But they made do.

Slowly the complexity of Being society emerged—often through misunderstandings. Wiseguy groused—unusually vexed, but then, it was a truly advanced self-learning program—that matters were made more difficult by the Beings’ habit of using no particular word order in clauses that made up conditional statements. Everything seemed to depend on everything else, so a sentence could mix up word order, and yet to the Beings it meant the same thing.

Perhaps this came from their having no sharp boundaries, so flow and flux were the basics of life, not barriers. Some human senses are like this: we feel that metals are cool even if they’re as warm as the room, because we sense the rate of heat loss, not the temperature itself. Yet the Beings could count. They knew basic arithmetic and were whizzes with an intuitive feel for calculus, particularly integrals. For gigayears they had been integrating fluxes that nourished them.

Only a minority of them were interested in the Hotness, which seemed to mean the realm of planets and sun. Most were engaged in conversations or works that even the Beings could ill describe. Wiseguy finally gave up trying to translate into human terms, though the closest approximation seemed to be “the Long Dance.”

So with plenty of Earthside computational help, they let Wiseguy assume a role in the dialogue, one that Dr. Jensen christened “Gofer to the Beings”—with only slight irony. Wiseguy’s orders were to focus on the bow shock problem.

“Got a call in from Shanna,” Julia heard in her headphones, from the watch officer, Doug Killings. “Forwarding.”

Julia sighed. She was trying to keep their ships working together well, but Shanna wasn’t making it easy. When Shanna came on, she started right in: “I’m picking up a lot of movement from some of those Beings, the ones who pulled farther out.”

“So?” Julia was trying to thread her way through a lot of Wiseguy results and did not like her concentration broken.

“Ukizi broke the Dopplers down. There’s some spikes, looks like small, fast things.”

“Um. So?”

“Well, anything new makes me recall what happened before. Veronique.”

Julia said stiffly, “She was in my crew. I’ll take responsibility.”

“Not what I meant. Be warned, is all.”

“Roger. Out.” The old pilot-spacer jargon worked well if you wanted to be abrupt.

Julia sighed with relief. Back to Wiseguy. Wow, was this dense stuff. The program’s most probable interpretation was that the Beings were not instigators of the bow shock intrusion—even though one of them went by that name and seemed to have earned it. Instigator had started the whole agenda of duplicating “hot” life on Pluto.

Earthside had a consensus theory for the Beings, garnered both from Being talk and from their movements. Whole teams had followed the gusher of data the two ships had sent back, and applied vast computer resources. From that trove they had tracked the Beings’ movements using the
High Flyer
and
Proserpina
radars. With more intricate work Earthside had outlined them and picked up features of their geometry, all seen by their plasma wave emissions. These last sounded in audio like fizzing howls played against a basso background.