The Sunborn (41 page)

(Chill, Dusk) (Mirk, Sunless) (Ring, Forceful)

“Maybe that’s the Six the later messages refer to,” Mary Kay said.

Julia pursed her lips, pointing at correlation functions displayed in three dimensions. These showed where in the sky paired signals came from, and when. “But look. Later there are paired signals, linking two others.”

(Dusk, Forceful)

Viktor leaned over her shoulder. “Look at earlier source-points. We killed Chill, I bet.”

“Not killed,” Mary Kay said. “Maybe wounded. See these later signals with its identity tags? Weak, but there.”

Viktor studied the three-dimensional functions. “But not paired with the Forceful tag. So they…broke up?”

Julia had put more pairs on the screen. “Maybe these are the Eight?”

(Instigator, Bright) (Recorder, Quiet) (Joy, Solemn) (Vain, Eater)

“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?”

“Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said.

Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”

Julia said, “In our biology, having two sexes lets us blend traits in each generation, always shuffling the cards to get another hand. Maybe they’re making use of that.”

Viktor shrugged skeptically. “Don’t need to make new ones, if they live forever. Not that I think they do. Got to be accidents, bad luck—the only universal maybe.”

Julia nodded sourly. “We haven’t a clue how life works out here.”

They all looked at each other and nodded. More and more it seemed that nothing from traditional Darwinian theory applied to these huge beasts. Viktor argued that the Beings’ habitat was unlimited. They could fill the regions between the stars. So the lessons learned from Earth’s bounded biosphere might not apply at all.

Wiseguy had picked up discussions among the Beings about something called Distants, who were apparently behind the low-level signals that came rolling in from all directions. These murmurings were so far impossible to decipher and might be in another language entirely than that used by the Beings they knew. These were continuous across the sky, unlike those of the Eight and Six, whose long, curling songs came from local patches in the sky.

“The Distants apparently lie beyond what the Beings term ‘the desert between the suns’—or so I infer, in preliminary fashion,” Wiseguy said. Julia wondered if it had deliberately obsequious subprogramming.

“Interstellar?” Mary Kay blinked. “Beings around other stars?”

Viktor shrugged. “No reason our star should be special. Is Copernican principle.”

Wiseguy had no opinion. Apparently this level of inference was beyond its capacity. However, Wiseguy did feel that the opposite faction, the Inbounds, wanted to “deal.”

“Um. Means…?” Viktor asked.

Wiseguy said formally, “They say ‘to help them get to Hotness and understand it,’ approximately.”

“Um. Means…?” Viktor asked.

Wiseguy processed silently, then: “The inner region—planets. And something called the Fount.”

Julia said, “How? To help them get beyond just developing the zand?”

“Apparently.” Wiseguy had programs that made it seem to be carrying on a conversation, though “apparently” signaled a certain level of probability they could look up on a scale.

“You asked them the big question about the bow shock moving?”

“Of course, madam. They say there is a diffuse molecular cloud pressing against the solar wind. It is half a light-year thick, along the axis of the sun’s velocity. The Beings have known it was coming, at an angle across the sun’s orbit around the galactic center, for quite some time. Apparently.”

Julia sighed. Measuring the physical problem was one of their major mission goals, and this sounded like very bad news. “And this pressure—once the molecular cloud fully arrives, how far in will the bow shock go?”

Wiseguy said blandly—and Julia thought,
Of course, it has nothing at stake!
—“They say, inward of ‘the circled one,’ which seems to mean Saturn.”

“When?” Viktor asked.

“In about a century. It is like the weather, local conditions not well predicted, but the climate overall—”

Viktor said crisply to Julia, “Let us get word to Earthside about this—quick.”

Part of Julia wanted to say, Yes,
we only have a century to go,
but she resisted.

“I have,” Wiseguy said, to their surprise, “as part of my retrieval architecture. This sharpens the data. Using the information from the Beings, we received a projection done by the U.S. National Science Foundation Heliopause Working Group. It says that incursion of the hydrogen wall to within the Saturn orbit would introduce molecular hydrogen into the Earth’s atmosphere, by diffusion, to an unacceptable level.”

Julia was impressed with Wiseguy’s abilities. Then she realized that it was undoubtedly using all Earthside computational reserves, allowing for the time delay and working well ahead of the mere humans. Linked with those resources, even with an hours-long hindrance, it had vast abilities. Plus the time to be submissive… Earthside had “adjusted” the
Proserpina
Wiseguy that had been snippy to her.

“And all this is already heating up all the Earthside media, right?”

“Yes. Such implications are impossible to suppress in—”

“I know, I know.” Never mind that the bow shock was a gossamer brush of a delicate veil, compared with the brute momentum of planets. Panic would spread, anyway, in the hothouse media. But sullen mass and inertia were not the full story, because a steady rain of molecular hydrogen, drifting down into Earth’s air, would combine with the free oxygen to make steam. That would heat the atmosphere’s outer layers, sopping up oxygen, adding to the warming already stirring the air, worsening the clashes of climate.

“That analysis, it’s certain?”

“To six sigmas of reliability, I believe.” Wiseguy always used statistical measures. “The molecular hydrogen will combine with oxygen, generating a flooding rainfall and reduced breathable oxygen. I have the chemical rate equations available—”

“No need,” Julia said. “It sounds bad enough.”

“They speak of an earlier Being called Incursor. It went into the Hotness, they say, and never returned.”

“What was it after?” Viktor asked.

“Knowledge. It wanted to understand the Fount—though what that is seems unclear, except that it is in the Hotness.”

“Fount? A planet?” Viktor asked.

“They do not seem to know. Or else it is a…excuse the use of a human term here…metaphor.”

“Look, cultural exchange time is over,” Viktor said adamantly. “To business, yes? Earthside wants to know how we can stop bow shock from moving in. Can these Beings do anything about it?”

Wiseguy’s voice was still flat, unemotional. “I do not know. They do not seem to have tried before. To them it is now a boon.”

Mary Kay asked, “Why?”

“The bow shock moves in, toward Pluto, where one called Instigator has been for a long time conducting its ‘experiments’ in ‘warmlife,’ which I suppose means the zands. And maybe us.”

“Pluto’s sure not very warm,” Julia said.

“It was the best they could do…” Wiseguy’s words were coming slower now, as the discussion taxed its inferential processors. This was the boundary where an artificial intelligence was strained to its limits. “…to understand how life could arise in such…for them…bizarre places. Planets.”

Julia snapped her fingers. “To make Pluto work, they needed energy.”

“They have not mentioned this,” Wiseguy said circumspectly.

Viktor beamed, slapped Julia on the shoulder. “That is it,
yes.
The bow shock moves in, there is plenty electrodynamic energy. Close to Pluto, easy to use. So they make the currents run into the planet, instead of around the bow. Feeds warmth—and electrical sparks—to the planet.”

Wiseguy had nothing to say beyond “I must consider…” Slowness signaled its limitations. It began reviewing its interpretations of the slabs of Being cross talk, and Viktor told it to process on its own.

Julia nodded. “They need the bow shock energy to run Pluto. So they won’t want that to change.”

Viktor nodded ruefully. “They have no reason to help us.”

Mary Kay said, “We can talk to them, ask for help.” Fine crackles of static blurred her words.

Viktor’s eyebrows arched. “They might not bite. What if they decide their research is more important than our lives? What will we do then?”

Julia said, “The Eight seemed sympathetic when the Six attacked us.”

Viktor said, “But the Eight run the Pluto experiment.”

Nobody had anything to say to that.

When Julia ended the session with Wiseguy and
Proserpina,
she returned to their quarters. On the wall screen prompt was a new message from Axelrod. She sighed and punched it in. But after the first few seconds of identification data there was only hash. She called the bridge.

“Yes, sir, Cap’n,” Killings said, brow lined with worry. “Your message got cut off. We lost transmission with Earthside eighteen minutes ago.”

“Why?”

“There’s a big solar storm brewing. It’s swept past Earth already and is blocking our lower-frequency links. You want I should send Earth-side a prompt, saying we want that last vid on higher frequencies? They’re pretty crowded with system telemetry, but I could get some room at 7.8 gigs, if you say, Cap’n.”

Julia was tired of endless data. “No, I don’t really want to see it. When—”

Viktor said, “So…we are on our own.”

His slow, studied words gave her pause. “How soon will the storm be over?”

“It’s a big one—unusual, too—so nobody knows.” Killings was apologetic, one corner of his mouth fretting.

“Not your fault, y’know. Come this far,” she said, “you’d think we wouldn’t be worrying about Earthside’s weather.”

T
HE TORRENT OF SOLAR
wind drew their attention, mostly because it did the same to the Beings. Of the Six they had heard nothing but murky signals, probably (the Eight said) deliberately muffled and shielded. The Eight were like distracted dinner partners, digging into the main entree and neglecting conversation. For the first time in a while the crews of both ships had time to stop and think. Julia, though, spent her time looking at the display screens. There, with
High Flyer’s
antennas turned back toward the inner solar system, she could see the show.

To live on Earth or even Mars was to give the sun a bit too much importance. Here it was just the brightest of the stars, not a disk. And now, Julia mused, they knew that electricity, not sunlight, fed the distant glow of Pluto. Solids were deeply cold out here, but the filmy plasmas worked with raging energies. Their equivalent temperatures were measured in the thousands of degrees, and there lay the necessity for life to harvest this bounty.

She close-upped the sun and saw there the shadowy speckles that had cast out such a withering gale. These were the ruins of solar coronal arches, dark only by contrast with the brilliance around them, but still hotter than any furnace. Yet these were the remnants of a fury that had peaked months before. The gout of plasma it exploded into space had been traveling nearly a year. From there the snarling knots came climbing up the gravity gradient of the star, through the orbits of the planets, onward without losing a fraction of their power.

Only when it intersected the tightbeams between
High Flyer
and Earth did they know of its arrival. On it came, a roiling smear now detectable only in the radio, yet glowing with the power of a billion hydrogen bombs. She could see from the Doppler readings that its speed was now several hundred kilometers per second, and so it had been plowing outward for months, undiminished and evolving. It was an oval blob, fraying at the edges but radiating halos of plasma fizz. She could see it by its own emissions.

As it approached, finer structure appeared in the shorter wavelengths. Intricate coils bigger than worlds, shattering explosions—all testified to the recombining energy of the fields. The plasma inside it was the junior partner now to the festering field energies. Their radars were hopeless, compared with the bright fountains coming off the blob. It spun, trailing ragged arms bigger than planets. Julia thought for a moment that it looked like a troubled hurricane seen from orbit. The next moment it was more like a spiral nebula shining forth, twisting and changing before her eyes, as if she were suspended in time like a god of eternity.

She wondered if this mass could do damage to
High Flyer.
The ship was drifting under no thrust, its squat living cylinder rotating to provide onboard centrifugal gravity, and was running its reactor only for power. Working with Jordin and Viktor from the emission signatures, she was able to estimate the density. She gave a dry chuckle. Though it blared with furious energies in the high microwave frequencies, it was less massive than the gauzy glows inside neon lights. Its voyage out through the planets had thinned its anger. If it had struck a slab of Earth’s air, the collision would have crushed it.

The stormy blob was nearly to Pluto, and she thought she could see the onrushing apparition swell as it spun. Storms fought across it, but the structure held. By sliding up in frequency she could cut in through the spiraling arms and see more fine detail toward its core. These frequency bands showed rivers of flame tracing out their paths, wriggling and flaring in gleaming drops bigger than Pluto. Shorter wavelengths brought knotty images, gnarled in tight echoes of the overall structure. Small spirals were spinning off a furious, dense core. It was as if the overall structure was making tiny, incandescent eddies that in their turn evolved into coherent knots.

“Viktor,” she called. “Look at the ninety-gigahertz image when you have a chance.”

He was watch officer and had scheduled a detailed interrogation of the ship’s systems, conducted using telepresence from the bridge. So it was several moments before his voice said in her headphones, “Same shape. Been visible for minutes. Implies—what?—some nodules hold together, if they have it?”

“You’d think the little ones would get sheared into pieces,” Julia said. “Look at all the turbulence around them.”