The Sunborn (43 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
The Proto tucked these within it, for study and use. It was willing to learn from anything it encountered. It did not know the concept of genetics, but it would, in time.
TORQUES
“T
HEY
’
RE GONE
,” K
ILLINGS SAID
.
“No emissions from nearby.”
They all groaned, rose, stretched. It had been four tense hours. Slowly they had reversed the tumbling rotation and reduced the torque on their living cylinder. Through all this they all kept watch at their stations, remembering that the attack had come out of nowhere. The coffee machine had emptied long ago.
Days before, Viktor had remarked in passing on the basic physics the Six had used. But it was difficult to see how they could have prepared. They were all exhausted and glad to be alive.
Julia took a break and spent half a day by herself. The sliding sheets of water in her meditation room were perfect for her mood. Mars had been a quiet place, so now the ship’s unending background noise had to be shut out. In her quiet room the embedded electronics threw a calming white-noise blanket. These days Earthside’s pressing populations walled themselves off behind thickening barricades of earplugs, triple-glazed windows, and sound-canceling electronics. She wondered uneasily if this meant she was becoming more akin to Earthside urban dwellers, whose lives got more deadened, like permanent cotton in the ears.
After some simple rest time, and before her watch came up, she made herself go through the big list of incoming vids. Those from Axelrod were diplomatic but kept returning to his idea of bringing back both zand and Darksiders. “Fah!” she said, shutting it off.
The next, from Praknor, was even less promising. More data and description of the Marsmat phenomenon. Somehow she was not in a mood to get back to the subject that had obsessed her for decades. Something tugged at her attention, a vague, ghostly shadow of an idea. She felt the gnawing suspicion that ultimate reality lay elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, sensed just beyond the glow cast by the mind’s conscious campfire, heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet…
She prowled through the sliding sheets of data and graphs and listened to the water sheets falling in the distance, and then there came…a moment.
Hours later Julia said, “Wiseguy, we’re all here, connected. Ready.”
Julia kept her voice steady, though she could
feel
Shanna’s heavy presence even over the comm link. Was it her imagination, or, in the seemingly endless cross talk as Julia tried to get across her revelation, did Shanna try to import some of Julia’s ideas into her own “biospherics model” for Pluto? (Leave it to Shanna to use whatever was the current Earthside jargon.). From the edge in Shanna’s voice, that woman was kicking herself for not making the connections Julia had just explained to them all.
But how could she have? Shanna hadn’t spent decades slogging away at the Marsmat problem.
“Bring on the Beings, then,” Killings said enthusiastically.
“I am staging through the introductory greetings,” Wiseguy said in its usual warm, male, though somehow flat tone. “They still must have explained that your individual names do not bespeak qualities.”
Viktor said, “You said this before. So how do you do it?”
The short pause was unusual for Wiseguy. “I…assign qualities to you.”
“Oh?” Jordin said dryly. “What’s mine?”
“Jordin Kare is Steadfast.”
“Um,” Jordin said, “gotta agree with that.”
Then all the rest of the crew wanted to know theirs. Julia was Introspective, Viktor was Victory, and so on. Julia wondered how the intricately linked software had decided on their qualities. Voice tones? Diction? For that matter, how did people do it with each other?
This took moments, provoking both laughter and dismay. Julia marveled at how Wiseguy, a self-learning system, had gained personality as they interacted with it. Maybe this was a lesson in itself, she mused. The Beings were magnetic structures that embodied—somehow—information, memory, architectures of personality. With names! They self-organized and adapted and learned, and very little of it seemed to be described well by the Darwinian mechanisms she had learned. The rising, self-making storm they had witnessed, borne out by the sun, had made her rethink her whole conception of life. And then, to think anew about the decades on Mars.
Julie said, “I want to talk to Instigator first.”
“Done,” Wiseguy said quickly, as if the artificial intelligence was glad to get beyond the names.
“Instigator, we want you and the Eight to know that we have found Incursor.”
A PATH INTO THE HOTNESS
F
ORCEFUL SAID NO
. The actual message rendered literally used both hierarchies and webbed cross-correlations, and so had to be squashed to resemble a human sentence:
{[leaving] | [unbreakable]
[scorn] | [pity]
[[binary rebuke]] ~ [negation]}
Instigator replied,
Joy and Solemn sent together, to stress their point.
to free Incursor from such a humiliating snare,> Forceful shot back.
Bright insisted,
Forceful sent a seethe of amused contempt.
Recorder observed,
Sunless said,
Recorder’s helicity-mate, Quiet, sent,
Forceful began,
Forceful seldom paused when interrupted, but this time:
Forceful asked,
Forceful let two full transit-times between the Beings pass, making a long silence.
Forceful sent fretted wave packets, no discernible content beyond a foul mood.
Recorder slowly murmured,
And so Vain sent them again to consider the deepest dilemmas that confronted Beings. Of course, they did not fear Death—an idea almost wholly theoretical—precisely because it was very rare.
Instead, they had all through their long lives suffered the Diminishment, losing whorls and thus fractions of memory and self. Such was life. To trim intelligently was ideal; to do it brutally was subtraction. But neither of these was the theoretical absolute…was Death. That province no one knew—by definition of Being.
And yet to this end Chill had now delivered himself.
The Beings found Chill’s motivations mysterious. Perhaps some state of depression had forced him to Die? Some considered him deranged. Others felt that choosing Death meant, obviously, that some higher state was thus made available. Creation simply would not permit intelligences to
stop.
Perhaps, these said, the whispers heard from the Distants were, in fact, from those now living on another plane.
This was one of the primary reasons cited by the Outbounds for their agenda—particularly by Forceful, who now sent,
This reply sent rippling, complex waveforms among the Eight and the Six alike (though the Six were Five, with Chill gone). Their vexed talk pivoted around a paradox at the core of their existence. The bow shock turbulence could shear off parts of Beings, here in the most lively zone, the Cascade. But it also energized fresh whorls—giving food plus building materials. Beings could tease these into self-sustained magnetic cells, to stock more memory, more “body,” more skills. The ultimate source of the shock wall was the sun’s momentum as it orbited the mass of the inner galaxy. So the Beings owed both their origin and their growth to the remorseless momentum of that sole scintillating dot, the Fount, brimming with promise.
The Six, now the Four—(Mirk, Sunless) (Ring, Forceful)—set off to swim through the desert between suns. The voyage would be long, and quite probably they would not survive. The wastes before them held shadowy presences, legendary pitfalls, and the unending terror of the shadowy unknown. All this they knew.
Their seething plasma wakes throbbed as they steadily stroked outward. They chose, of course, to move laterally, crosswise to the unending torrent from upstream, where the interstellar gas and plasma came brawling in from the stars. Never swim against the current. They all knew that the distances were immense, the spans of time daunting even for the Beings. But the Eight sensed something fundamental, as did those lesser (and far more numerous) Beings who hung back from the Cascade. From them rose a long, rolling chorus in farewell salute. They all knew that after an age-old debate the issue was settled. Most would stay, but the Outbounds had the courage to go.
Though perhaps its end would never be known to the Eight, an epoch voyage had begun.
THE SUNBORN MAGNETICS
J
ULIA SAT AND WATCHED
as the spectral monitors—set in the microwave and radio ranges, to pick up the avalanche of talk from the Beings—sprayed their arrays onto screens. The solar storm had passed, carrying the Proto into the outer reaches. There it might survive, grow, self-organize in the filmy reaches far beyond the raw rub of matter. The society of Beings would tend to it. After all, the Sunborn were their future.
So much.
She sighed, suddenly tired. “I hope this convinces them,” she said wanly.
Viktor patted her hand, concerned. His forehead wrinkled, and his eyelids fluttered, holding back emotion before the rest of the crew. “You sent the entire lot of data we got from the Marsmat, so is all you can do. Was brilliant, when you saw that the waveforms in the Mars-mat correlated with the Beings’ language. And that this Incursor, lost in the inner planets, was trapped. So might still be there. Have a signature, anchored in the crust of Mars. Electromagnetic waves, they do not lie.”
The rest of the watch crew—those not doing maintenance, anyway—nodded silently. They were waiting, too. For her to explain the Leap.
That a Being, sunk into the crust of Mars somehow, billions of years ago, would find a link to the emergent biological forms there. That somehow—what labyrinths remained to explore in this!—the Being had learned to squeeze rock with its magnetic fields. It used that ability to provoke other currents in the crust. That the electric potentials it produced would resonate with the microbial mats covering the early, warm and wet period of Mars. That a symbiosis would arise. That a collaboration—a dance?—would come from such strange musics. So much…all in one leap. The unconscious, doing all the heavy lifting…
Killings asked quietly, earnestly, “How’d you know that the low-frequency emissions from Mars—stuff you’ve been seeing for decades—was related? I mean, assuming it is.”
Julia threw her head back—not tossing her hair, no; she hated that—and thought. How
had
she seen it? Not a clue… Okay—“Not a clue. It just came to me.”
Viktor slapped her knee. “My girl! ‘Just came to me.’ Means she looks at everything, lets it cook—presto!”
She beamed. “Uh, right.” Nobody knew where ideas came from, so what was the difference? Certainly Wiseguy’s spectral breakdowns had been crucial. She had stared at them for hours. Days later, for a break, she had looked at the regression analysis data Praknor had sent along, mostly for Viktor. It was a compilation of years of the magnetic “noise” in the southern Martian hemisphere. Then she had slept, woken up, did routine work…and it came together. The hard work was always done by the unconscious, while you’re doing something else.
And here they all were, waiting for the Beings to respond. She said, “Let’s do a systems check and inventory while we wait.”
It helped keep her mind off matters. An hour passed, and it was as she had feared: they had expended more water these last weeks than planned.
Going for broke.
The spiraling-out maneuver to stop their tumbling had cost a good deal.
They all groaned at the news. “Need to melt more ice if we are to keep going,” Viktor said.
Killings made a face. “Working the ’bots on that ultra-cold ice is a bitch. It’ll take weeks—we lost two ’bots last time, the heavy-duty drilling ones that’re hard to fix.”
“Can cannibalize for parts,” Viktor said. “But right—is pain in posterior.”
“Unless…” Killings was shy about making suggestions, but this time his eyes were resolute. “Unless we cut the mission short. We can do a big burn out here, drop fast into the inner solar system.”
They all looked at each other, eyes wary. A pregnant silence…