Across the Sea of Suns Read online

  So much for the predictive power of science. Yet they should have guessed something of the sort, Nigel muses.

  With Ra fixed in the sky, all regions of the planet would have a steady level of illumination. Only the eccentricity of the Isis orbit would make Ra sway slightly through the year, a mild wobble. In the constant pattern of shadow and light, or amid the dust storms and fine mist, the ability to probe, radarlike, would be valuable to a predator. Ordinary eyes—passive, easily blinded by the dust—would be less useful. And in the wan light of the terminator zone, prey with optically sensitive eyes would be nearly blind, even more vulnerable.

  But the crucial ability was, as always, killing. So the logic of evolution has pressed the radio eye into service. With oxygen at a premium, chasing down prey could easily exhaust an EM’s energy reserves, making it vulnerable. Far better to fry a target and approach it cautiously. The radio eye could probe, identify, and kill—and then probe again, listening for telltale signs that the targets nervous system had gone out of business. All this, without coming close enough to risk the prey’s claws or horns or hooves. So with evolution’s marvelous economy, the eye did everything; seeing, talking, killing, even cooking. And the mind behind the eye struggled to improve perception, resolution, accuracy. The eye and the mind must have evolved together, perhaps in a bootstrapping loop like the hand/mind link in man.

  Nigel, they’re drifting your way.

  “As I expected,” he mutters to himself.

  What? What’s that? Look, if you have something in mind, Nigel, I would just as soon not have Bob jumping down our throats about—

  “Quite. Worry not, friend Daffler. I’m simply here to see what I can see.”

  There will be plenty of guys down here in an hour. You tell them what to look for and—

  “I’m not quite sure myself.”

  Pebbles rattle against his plates and the land heaves beneath him, an orange flare burst through the shrouding dust, and Nigel sees the descending streams of orange again, bigger now, spilling down the burnished rock faces hundreds of meters above.

  Jeez, it’s picking up again. That western face might slip down any moment, I’d say.

  “Geology’s not your department, Daffler. You’re the comm man. I’m the jack-of-all-trades.”

  Well, yes, but simple—

  “Nothing down here is simple. Mind the EMs, eh? They’re having a go.”

  What? Oh, I see. They’re heading toward you. Straight for that flank of the ridge.

  “Right. You can scarcely ask me to maneuver around them, not since Bob’s warned us off close contact until the big team arrives.”

  Uh, yes. But—

  “Closing down now, if you don’t mind. I want to be sure I’m not seen.”

  Uh-huh, Daffler grunts suspiciously, but his carrier falls silent.

  Nigel is alone in the sleeting amber light as the low murmur of the mountain comes to him through his treads and he listens intently to the muted sputters and chiming beeps that make up the EM conversations and songs and continual probings, the microwave scattering through the canyons and washes of this bleak land. He thumbs on the radio map sent down from Lancer and studies the gathering dots that shamble toward him.

  A small animal scurries by, frightened, and Nigel marvels that the little thing—eyeless, pea-brained—can sniff the EMs at this range, and know enough to flee.

  The EM body itself may serve as a big antenna, the bones acting as low-conductivity pickups, so that to the EM there is a vague sense of smaller beings approaching. Otherwise they would be vulnerable to parasites and ingenious throat-slitters, who could mount them and be invisible. But somehow the whole-body antenna must “see” small predators so the EMs can fry them, step on them, pluck them off. Perhaps under selection pressure the brain had developed some aperture synthesis technique, like the widely separated radio antennas on Earth that have an “eye” the effective size of their separation. And did their spines serve as tuning coils?

  Nigel clanks into a narrow gully as the EM specks approach. He wants his performance to be beyond criticism by Bob and the rest, to seem a perfectly responsible pattern in view of the EM movements, and so he draws back into the gully, toward an outcropping of blue-green rock.

  A burst of orange throws shadows before him. He pauses at the mottled blue-green place, puzzled, remembering, but the second flash blinds him and then comes a crashing, stones shower him, a rough roar makes him peer upward where the mountain belches clouds and flames, long streams of lava now pouring from the sagging mouth of the fresh crater, huge jets of steam gushing forth into the banks of dust, the moisture clearing the air before it, the sulfur oxides now falling into the valley beyond, where they will feed the scrub plants and weak little animals, the bottom of the food chain which the EMs tap, and have been tapping for a vast long time now, though how long the geologists cannot say, with the crust of Isis always churning and destroying all evidence of the past.

  Nigel turns back to the mottling, curious, reaches down—and suddenly sees the EM, sluggish but steady, legs jerking, coming dead toward him. The big head is fixed directly at him and Nigel hopes his radio blanket looks to the EM like a boring, typical rock. He inches backward, shuts down all carrier waves, braces—

  But the EM halts, ignoring Nigel, head swiveling, and cants itself, settling downward, thrusting the lumpy black knobs in its abdomen, lowering itself until they make contact with the blue-green veins in the rock.

  Its waxy skin ripples, it settles farther, the glazed blue of its skin begins to pulse with other colors, as soft purples seep from the abdomen, and Nigel reminds himself that in the Ra light this purple is in a fact a green, a biochem flag of a porphyrin derivative, but the colors wash away the thought as magentas and hard yellows and sprays of red curl across the body of the EM, flowing as boom the volcano above rips light through the hovering sheets of fine dust, a stream of lava splits the rock face fifty meters away with a sudden lance of orange, and the EM trembles, trembles, tilts lower, seems to shake with a kind of lust and hunger, not noticing the second and then a third large shape that emerge from the slow, spattering rain that now begins to fall, fat dollops of moist sulfur oxides, drops that streak the approaching, lurching shapes as they lower themselves in turn to the outcropping, ponderous, their mircrowaves filling and merging with a new and stronger weave, the scattershot clicks and barks of radio-shifting as the ground surges and a crashing explosion high up the mountain pours light into the gully, the EMs signal now, flowing into song, their boxlike heads tilting, scanning, a steady note emerging now as Nigel recognizes the long, low tone that is from the old Earth-side radio show.

  They are joining together to point at the sky and send the slow mournful impulse that will wed with the other millions of EMs and stretch across the light-years toward the Earth, a mere dot in the sky that so long ago seemed to speak to these time-weary creatures.

  A shower of bright orange blossoms at the abdomen of each EM. Sparks cut the air. Nigel backs away.

  A crackling fills his pickups and the EM fugue grows, the huge bodies rocking slightly as the air cracks and snaps with energy, dancing singing joy forever, brimming, flying, the lava crashing over the ridge, prickly heat pours from it, and Nigel sees suddenly how the EMs live for this moment, the single time when they have enough swelling, filling life to burst forth and claw up at the sky that holds a speck of hope and promise, some possibility beyond the smothering sameness of their twilight rusting world.

  They seek the volcanoes for food, not for warmth. The lava flows down thousands of meters of mountainside, a hot metallic conductor falling in the strong magnetic field of Isis, cutting the magnetic field lines and generating currents, electric fields, a vast circuit that cannot close easily because the rock around the lava is inert, a poor conductor, and so the electrical current builds as the lava flows, cutting across more field lines, gathering energy until it strikes a seam of metal-rich ore and suddenly the circuit can close, it is shorted,
the vast currents run through the blue-green rock layers, seeking a return channel to the top of the mountain, to complete the loop, blind current following Faraday’s remorseless law.

  As the currents find their way through metallic corridors, wandering, the EMs tap into an outcropping of the seam and drink of the rushing river of electrons, sucking in to charge their capacitor banks, feasting, spilling it into radio waves as they celebrate this renewal of themselves. They soak from the land itself the high-quality energy, without having to undergo the slow and painstaking process of finding chemical foods, digesting them, transferring molecular binding energy into stored electrical potentials.

  A joyful strumming life swells and pours into the EMs. Nigel sees in the jagged leaping orange sparks the last link, sees how Isis swings around Ra, the long ellipse taking it now closer, now farther from its star, so that the tidal force first stretches and then compresses Isis, kneading and heating the planetary core like a thick pastry. The energy coming from the orbital angular momentum of the Isis-Ra system, an eternal energy source, endlessly churning the crust of Isis, subducting metals in the soil and then in turn thrusting them, molten, from the mouths of the mountains, the iron-rich rivers snaking and seeking the center of the planet again, driving currents, stripping electrons from the iron, a vast and perpetual generator changing gravitational energy to useful electrical forms, an energy which no other creature than the EMs can tap, giving them the edge they need on this sluggish rust-world, making possible their radio eye and with it a steady survey of the sky, searching for an answering strum of electromagnetic song, a vigil that had gone on now for aeons without machines or computers or the army of mindless servants men have made to help them. Here these creatures had harnessed the grinding workings of the planets themselves, all to survive, all to call a plaintive note into a still and silent sky.

  Nigel moves softly away from them, lingering to see the solemn chorusing shapes, singing, bathed in bright sparking bonfires of electrowealth burning through the dusty murk, like rockets straining to lift off, where forever three or more shall gather together a syllable will be cast out into the night, and smiling, Nigel knows that the time has finally come to answer.

  EIGHT

  Ted Landon was pulling the meeting toward a reluctant conclusion. Nigel watched him, reflecting. Ted called up reports from the exploration teams, from planetary survey, from the subsection on Ra, from inboard systems. A flat wallscreen displayed alternatives; Ted went through the suggested missions, assigning weighted returns-versus-risks factors. Each time a section leader digressed into detail, or shifted the topic, Ted brought him back into line. The staccato cadences by which he disciplined came from his nervous system, immutable.

  “Well, the big sweep we tried two days back—following on the Walmsley-Daffler discoveries—doesn’t seem to have paid off. Am I right?” Raised eyebrows, inquiring looks around the table. Nods. Nigel nodded, too, for indeed the men and women who swarmed over that volcanic zone had not learned anything more of importance. The EM “villages” were simple shelters and little more. Some of the caves held piles of artfully worked rock; others were bare, with only alcoves clogged with EM droppings to mark their use. In a few, elaborate designs were scratched into the walls and filled with scraps of superconducting stuff. To the EMs these might be art; just as easily, the complex spirals and jagged lines might be history, literature, or graffiti.

  Ted segued smoothly into a summary of other missions on Isis surface. They were tracing the outline of a complex ecology, but there were still large holes to fill in. What happened to the ancient EM cities? Why were there no other semiconductor-type nervous systems in the Isis ecology?

  “All very interesting,” Ted said mildly. “But to many of us”—his eyes swept the length of the table—“the standout puzzle is the two satellites. How did they get there? Are they all that is left of the EM technology? Why—”

  “Look,” Nigel interrupted, “it’s clear where you’re headed. You want to pay a visit.”

  “Well, you’re jumping the gun again, Nigel, but yes. We do.”

  “That’s too flaming dangerous.”

  “They’re ancient, Nigel. Spectrophotometry shows the artificial component of those satellites—the metals, any-way—were smelted and formed well over a million years ago.”

  “Old doesn’t mean dead.”

  “Nigel, I know what you’re angling for.” Ted smiled sympathetically, his manner becoming milder. Nigel wondered how much of it was a controlled response. “You want first contact. The EMs still don’t know we’re here, if our tricks have functioned adequately—I’m pretty sure your radio blanket notion has worked out, Bob—and I want to keep it that way. Our directives, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone here, are to stay invisible until we fully understand the situation.”

  “Pretty clear,” Bob said laconically.

  “Until you inquire into the definition of ‘fully understand,’ perhaps so,” Nigel retorted. “But we’ve seen the EMs. They’ve tried to catch our attention already. And we don’t know bugger all about the satellites.”

  Ted laced his fingers and turned his palms up, a diffuse gesture Nigel recognized as meaning What are you trying to say? with a hint of irritation, a sign all at the table would get, while simultaneously Ted said calmly, completely without any irked tone in his voice, “Surely a well-preserved artifact will tell us more about the high period of this civilization—”

  “If it’s from here, yes.”

  Ted’s eyes widened theatrically. “You think the Snark came from here? Or the Marginis wreck?”

  “Of course not. However, in the absence of knowledge—”

  “That absence is precisely why I feel—as does the majority of this panel, I take it—that we should keep our distance from the EMs for a while.” The section leaders around the table agreed with silent nods.

  “They aren’t nearly as potentially dangerous to this mission,” Nigel said. “And they’re native life-forms. We have things in common, we must. Any opportunity for our kind of life to communicate—”

  “Our kind?”

  “The machine civilizations are out here somewhere, too.”

  “Ummm.” Ted made a show of considering the point. “How prevalent do you think life is, Nigel?”

  A sticky point. Isis was the sole source of artificial transmissions that astronomers had found in over half a century of cupping an ear to every conceivable part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Nigel paused a moment and then said, “Reasonably.”

  “Oh? Why the radio silence, then? Except for Isis?”

  “Ever been to a cocktail party where the person who’s unsure of himself babbles away? And everyone else keeps quiet?”

  Ted smiled. “Lord protect me from analogies. The galaxy isn’t a cocktail party.”

  Nigel smiled, too. He had no way of reversing the decision here, but he could show the flag. “Probably. But I think it’s not an open house, either.”

  “Well, let’s knock on a door and see,” Ted replied.

  Nigel found Nikka and Carlotta cooking an elaborate concoction at the apartment. They were peppering slivers of white meat and rolling them in scented oils. There were savories to fold in and each woman worked solemnly, deftly, the myriad small decisions provoking a phrase here, an extended deliberation there, all weaving a bond he knew well. Not the right moment to break in.

  He volunteered to chop vegetables. He took out his intensity on onions and carrots and broccoli and had a cup of coffee. The first fruit of the “season” was in so he made a salad, following Carlotta’s directions, composing a light, spicy sesame oil for it. The first citrus had come ripe the day before, greeted by a little ritual. Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges had rolled over the witnessing crowd, echoing in the cavern. Someone had salted the clouds that formed on the axis, so that crimson and jade streamers coasted in ghostly straight lines overhead, up the spine of the ship.

  Finally, at a lull he said, “I just heard
the news.”

  “Oh,” Nikka said, understanding.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d volunteered for the satellite mission?”

  “Volunteer? I didn’t. I’m on the list for rotating assignments.”

  “They thought it was better for morale,” Carlotta put in, “if we just let the personnel optimization program pick the mission crew. Fairer, too.”

  “Oh, yes, we must be fair, mustn’t we? A fabulously stupid idea,” he said.

  “Everybody’s dying to get out of the ship,” Carlotta said.

  “It might well turn out precisely that way,” he said sourly.

  Nikka said, “I thought it was better if I simply let the news come up as usual. I nearly told you before—”

  “Well, then, nearly thank you.”

  “It’s my chance to do something!”

  “I don’t want you risking it.”

  Nikka said defiantly, “I take my chances, just as you do.”

  “You’ll be on the servo’d equipment, the manifest says.”

  “Yes. Operating the mobile detectors.”

  “How close to the satellite?”

  “A few kilometers.”

  “I don’t like it. Ted’s going ahead with this without thinking it through.”

  Carlotta put down a whisk beater and said, “You can’t run Nikka’s life.”

  He looked steadily at her. “And you cannot expect me not to care.”

  “Madre! You really want to fight over this?” Carlotta asked.

  “Diplomacy seems to have broken down.”

  Nikka said mildly, “This mission is planned, there are backups, every contingency—”

  “We’re blasted ignorant. Too ignorant.”

  “The satellite rock looks to be about the same age as the last major craters on Isis, correct?” Nikka asked lightly, to soften matters.

  “So?”