The Sunborn (45 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
Living with it had made her see its beauty—stark, subtle, and old beyond measure. A flickering cold glow of plasma discharges. The diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices; a thin fog breath of supercooled helium, whirling in intricate, coded motion: these were the wonders of the Deep, as she now knew them.
Shanna sighed, then smiled. “There have got to be a thousand doctoral theses in understanding that—what did you call it?—skimpy biological substructure. Ha! So true! Instigator just kludged together bits of essentials, rudimentary chem, plus mechanics. Run it all with electrical currents—hey, that’s what makes the Beings tick over, too—and let ’er rip. What an experiment! A whole world to tinker with! And all to understand how the inner planets might work.”
“What was its point?” Julia shook her head. “Alien goals…”
“To figure out what might be on Mars?”
“Um. We can’t suppose that beings with lifetimes in the billion-year range could even be bothered with the mayfly issues of humans. They think
long
—and probably knew that Incursor got hung up there, sunk into the crust, way back when Mars was young. Still…”
“What?”
“I wonder if they picked up radio and TV from Earth.”
“Ummm. Could be. So we—more than a century ago—started all this?”
Julia shrugged. “Why haven’t they said so, then?”
“Hey, they’re aliens. Maybe they’ve been working on Pluto since the Roman Empire. Or far longer. Some things we may never figure out.”
Julia sat back and stretched. “I learned that lesson, in a different way, on Mars.”
Shanna reached across the table. “Look—let’s bury the hatchets, okay? I envied you, right. But now I’m over it.”
“Done.” They shook hands.
The two women gazed at each other, smiling, each liking the idea of not saying anything. The moment stretched, then eased away. Shanna stood. “Y’know, we were doing pretty well there…until I realized that we don’t have what it takes to make this deal go.”
“True.” Julia, too, stood. “I’m just happy we aren’t fighting anymore.”
“Me, too. If only we had some idea of what to tell the Beings—”
A knock on the door. Viktor edged it open. “Have had crazy idea.”
THE TINY ONES
<
A
FTER ALL
,
>
R
ECORDER SAID
,
Instigator sent.
Recorder was skeptical.
Instigator admitted,
Recorder said,
Joy countered,
A gliding silence, then: Recorder said.
too dangerous,> Joy said.
EIGHT-FOLD HELIX
A
MIND ONCE STRETCHED
by a new idea never goes back to its same size. So Julia thought as
High Flyer
departed, rich again with water chiseled from the iceteroids.
Proserpina
had left days before, following a long arc sunward that
High Flyer
would follow, at first, providing backup in case anything went wrong in the first stages of their joint deceleration.
To descend into the inner solar system requires gaining tens of kilometers per second of orbital speed. To acquire this, a ship fires its thrust against its present orbit and falls. From this plunge gravity gives it fresh speed, enough for a new orbit, closer to the sun. To lose and gain in this gravitational gavotte is the stuff of orbital mechanics, well understood by Newton himself. But making it happen moment by moment is both craft and art, especially while using a new class of interplanetary ship.
High Flyer
ran in hot mode. Passing through the throat, exposed to ceramic plates packed with uranium, its water burst into steam. In the last, longest section the plates were closer together, neutrons flew between them in torrents, and in striking the molecules of live steam blew them into plasma—ions and electrons, then shaped by magnetic fields into a blaring torch. The plume burst out behind
High Flyer
in a gauzy rosette.
Once free of orbit, the ship plunged down the gravitational gradient. Its nose pointed at the stars, and soon its speed was enough to billow the cloud behind it, forcing it out into a wide, scalding plane.
For weeks
High Flyer
fell, led downward by its own furious exhaust. To the human eye the ship’s long steel cylinder rode a hard, hot line of light that fanned out into a wide, fading skirt. But the plasma had spread so far its ions and electrons could not find each other again, and so remained lively, clinging to magnetic fields and spreading farther into a broad front—forcing its way into the inner solar system. A shield.
No human eye could see the long, tapered shape that followed behind
High Flyer.
Instigator had curled herself into her smallest possible tight helix, wrapping and rewrapping back upon herself. By now she knew that the tiny ones carried their self-information in a double helix form, and for this unprecedented task Instigator had shaped herself into an eightfold helix—slender, supple, feeding off whorls in
High Flyer’s
backwash.
Behind that vast plasma screen she was safe from the licking flares that boiled up in the solar wind. She sent signals back to the others of the Eight, full of both complaint and triumph.
Instigator sent,
Recorder replied,
Eater took moments from its own pursuits to propose,
Instigator received the fruits of their work as well. Linked, the Seven could hear the faint waves that seemed to come from all around them. Recorder said.
They all knew by now that all warmlife was mortal, compared with the immense duration of structures and geometries Beings knew. So for those tiny ones, meaning loomed large. To go gallantly into that final night—that was the deep, uniting urge of warmlife forms. To make their short spans matter.
And so perhaps their duty to each other, to other warmlife, however odd or repellent, was to make the random universe have meaning, even for the momentary, passing minds clustering near the sheltering suns.
There was more work for the Beings as well.
A great Toroid of Beings was condensing, drawing strength to itself by hoarding magnetic fields. It tightened slowly into a knot, a tight gathering of fields that bunched against the inner rim of the bow shock.
Slowly, carefully, the Beings
shoved.
To ordinary eyes it was a battle between invisible forces. Their collective ram pressure agonizingly pushed against the bow shock. It would take years to slow the inward brute pressure. Decades more to begin to nudge it back outward. It would be an epochal struggle, for the pressure of the incoming rogue molecular cloud was vast and abiding.
It would be the work of…well, epochs, age spans, eons. It was a debt to be paid.
The Beings understood that this was needed. For now. For the tiny lifetimes of the chemical motes.
Julia said to Viktor, “We’ve got to finish that transmission to Praknor.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Must?”
“Must.”
“Is biology. Politics. You do.”
So she set up the recorder and piped in the latest data and gave the opening speech. She seemed to have spent most of her life now talking to the snouts of cameras, imagining her audience, trying to keep it perky and interesting and always wondering if it worked. She hoped Praknor would have the sense to edit before retransmitting to Earth.
“We’re coming back—you heard. Not going to be all fair dinkum with you, I’m sure, but it’s got to be.” Might as well be direct. “We’re guiding in, like a tugboat into a harbor, a
Queen Mary
of a Being, bigger than Mars itself. We hope it will help us talk to the true animating intelligence behind the Marsmat.”
Cut, pause. This was going to be tricky. Best to face it directly.
“The discovery of the Being called Incursor on Mars is going to be a tremendous shock to the entire community of Marsmat researchers, of course. Imagine spending twenty years studying something only to find that it is only a puppet for some other life-form. Gad! Lewis Carroll posed the problem a long time ago, in a poem titled ‘The Hunting of the Snark.’ What if the Snark turns out to be a Boojum instead?”
Praknor, loyal Consortium factotum that she was, would give this to Earthside for broadcast as an “intimate chat” with the Queen of Mars. Better be a bit more diplomatic. Translation: cover your scientific ass. Oh well, can always edit…
“Just occurred to me—how will the
Marsmat@Home
people react? Here they’ve been dutifully letting their online computers be used to compute the cross-correlations and filter functions of the ever-growing Marsmat data. Now we find that the Marsmat has been linked to a magnetic intelligence. We haven’t been studying a microbial system alone. I can hear it now—‘All that science, wrong, wasted!’ Only it’s not.”
She shrugged. “Y’see, that’s how science works. You make a model, you test it, then something flies in from offside—sorry, soccer jargon—and you think again. I remember all the worry about what we biologists call quorum sensing. That occurs when bacteria kick out light signals, or chemical signals, to ‘know’ each other. See if they are many or just a few. We spent
years
fretting if the Marsmat’s big pulses of light were quorum sensing.”
She stopped, took a drink. Where was this going? Well, she didn’t know. But that was the joy of it, right? Step forward, part the veil.
“None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams. We were wrong for decades about the Marsmat. Wrong! It’s something we hadn’t thought of. The glows and displays come from a magnetic-microbial collaboration way beyond our experience on Earth. And until a short while ago, no one would have recognized the Beings as life-forms
at all.
”
How to say this? “We make our theories, but they are bounded by—surprise!—ourselves. Natural selection turns out to work without molecules or direct reproduction—no sex, either!—or maybe even death. Darwin had only one case to study—Earth—and he sure came up with a big idea. But maybe collaboration is not just the Holy Rule for the Marsmat. Maybe it’s a bigger idea.”
She cut the feed and took a swig from her orange juice. Viktor was hunched over, running some more regression analysis data on his wall screen, so she tiptoed over to the refrig and slipped out the vodka and added some to her healthful juice.
About time. This is work, thinking aloud…
“A Being came to a Mars that was warm and wet, maybe 3 billion years ago. It got caught. Went native. Helped the microbials to grow up. Meanwhile, Mars and Earth were in a mutual slugfest, throwing meteorites back and forth, carrying cells and microbe passengers, screwing with each other, fertilizing each other.”
She took a taste of the enhanced orange juice and thought,
Okay, Viktor, all this sex talk, I’ve got a li’l plan for something to do later.
“So we’re all a collaboration. Between things that would look like neon lights the size of the solar system, if our eyes could see them at all, and the stuff that grows between your toes, and us—the primate princesses.”
She wondered how she had come this far, from far Adelaide. The whole universe seemed
connected.
“Think of all the new research this opens up. Biology is never going to look the same.”
The great magnetic envelope flexed like a great, coiled snake.
Instigator hugged the plasma shield provided by the braking fusion rocket. The plasma winds from the Fount howled at her edges, stripping away minor fringes of herself.
Joy! I am descending into the Hotness. A noble quest. What might this grand expedition bring?