by David Brin
Here the temperature suddenly plummets to its minimum, a “mere” few thousand degrees. The pulsing of the photospheric cells send ripples of gravitation upwards through the chromosphere, subtly strumming chords of space-time across millions of kilometers, and charged particles, riding the crests of Alfven waves, sweep outward in a mighty wind.
This was the domain of Sundiver. In the chromosphere, the Sun’s magnetic fields play games of tag, and simple chemical compounds ephemerally brew. One can see, if the right bands are chosen, for tremendous distances. And there is a lot to see.
Kepler was in his element, now. In the darkened room his hair and moustache glowed reddish in the light given off by the tank. His voice was confident as he used a slender rod to point out features of the chromosphere for his audience.
He told the story of the sunspot cycle, the alternating rhythm of high and low magnetic activity that flips polarity every eleven years. Magnetic fields “pop out” of the Sun to form complicated loops in the chromosphere — loops which could sometimes be traced by looking at the paths of the dark filaments in hydrogen light.
The filaments twisted around the field lines and glowed with complex induced electric currents. In close up they-looked less feathery than Jacob had at first thought. Bright and dark red strips knotted around one another all along the length of the arch, sometimes swirling in complicated patterns until some tightening knot squeezed closed and splattered bright droplets away like hot grease from a skillet.
It was numbingly beautiful, although! the red monochrome eventually made Jacob’s eyes hurt. He looked away from the tank and rested by staring at the wall of the viewing room.
The two days since Jeffrey had waved good-bye and taken his ship off to the Sun were mixed pleasure and frustration for Jacob. They had certainly been busy.
He saw the Hermetian mines yesterday. The great layered flows that filled huge hollowed caverns north of the base with smooth rainbowed crusts of pure metal startled Jacob with their beauty, and he stared in awe at the dwarfed machines and men that ate at their flanks. He would carry with him always the amazement he felt… at both the loveliness of the giant field of frozen melt and at the temerity of the tiny men who dared to disturb it for its treasure.
Also enjoyable was an afternoon spent in the company of Helene deSilva. In the lounge of her apartment she broke the seal on a bottle of alien brandy whose worth Jacob didn’t dare to calculate, and shared it all with him.
In a few hours he came to like the Base Commandant for her wit and the range of her interests, as well as for her pleasantly archaic flirtatious charm. They exchanged stories of peripheral interest, saving, by mute agreement, the best for later. He told her about his work with Makakai, to her delight, explaining how he persuaded the young dolphin — by means of hypnosis, bribery (letting her play with “toys” such as the waldo-whales), and love — to concentrate on the kind of abstract thought that humans used, instead of (or in addition to) the cetacean Dreaming.
He described how the whale dream, in turn, was slowly becoming understood… using Hopi and Australian Aborigine philosophies to help translate that totally alien world view into something vaguely accessible to a human mind.
Helene deSilva had a way of listening that drew the words out of Jacob. When he finished his story she radiated satisfaction, then reciprocated with a tale about a dark star that nearly stood his hair on end.
She spoke of the Calypso as if it were mother, child, and lover all in one. The ship and its crew had been her world for only three years, subjective time, but on the return to Earth they became a link with the past. Of those she had left behind on Earth, on her first voyage out, only the youngest had lived to see Calypso’s return. And they were now old.
When an interim assignment with Sundiver had been offered, she had jumped at the opportunity. While the scientific adventure of the solar expedition, plus a chance to gain some command experience, were probably reasons enough, Jacob thought he could sense another reason behind her choice.
Although she tried not to show it, Helene apparently disapproved of both extremes of behavior for which returning star ship crewmen were famous: — cloistered insularity of boisterous hedonism. There was a core of… “shyness” could be the only word to describe it… which peeked out from beneath both the articulate and competent outer persona and the laughing, playful inner woman. Jacob looked forward to finding out more about her during his stay on Mercury.
But the dinner was postponed. Dr. Kepler had called a formal banquet and, in the manner of such things, Jacob had little to think about all evening, while everyone bent over backwards being polite and flattering.
But the biggest frustration came from Sundiver itself.
Jacob tried questioning deSilva, Culla, and perhaps a dozen base engineers, getting about the same answer each time.
“Of course, Mr. Demwa, but wouldn’t ft be better to talk about it after Dr. Kepler’s presentation? It’ll be so much clearer then…”
It became very suspicious.
The pile of Library documents still sat In his room. He read from the pile for an hour at a time, in a normal state of consciousness. While he slogged through the pile, isolated fragments jumped into familiarity as soon as he read them.
…nor is it understood why the Pring are a binocular species, since no other indigenous life form on their planet has more than one eye. It is generally assumed that these and other differences are the result of genetic manipulation by the Pila colonists. Although the Pila are reluctant to answer questions from any but officials from the Institutes, they do admit to having altered the Pring from a brachiating, arboreal animal to a sophont capable of walking and serving in their farms and cities.
The unique Pring dental arrangement had its origin in their previous state as tree grazers. It evolved as a method for scraping off the high-nutrient outer bark of their planet’s trees; that bark serving in the place of fruit as a fertilization-spore spreading organ for many of the plants on Pring…
So that was the background behind Culla’s weird dentation! Knowing their purpose somehow made a mental image of the Pring’s mashies less disgusting. The fact that their function was vegetarian was downright reassuring.
It was interesting to note, while re-reading the article, how good a job the Branch Library had done with this report. The original had probably been written scores, if not hundreds of light years away from Earth, and long before Contact. The semantics machines at the Branch in La Paz were obviously getting the knack of converting alien words and meanings into English sentences that made sense, though, of course, something might have been lost in the translation.
The fact that the Institute of the Libraries had been forced to ask for human help in programming those machines, after those first disastrous attempts just after Contact, was a source of some small satisfaction. Used to translating for species whose languages all derived from the same general Tradition, the E.T.’s had been boggled, at first, by the “flighty and imprecise” structure of all human languages.
They had moaned (or chirped or zithered or flapped) in despair at the extent to which English, in particular, had declined into a state of sublime, contextually discursive, disorder. Latin, or even better, late Neolithic Indo-European, with its highly organized structure of declensions, and cases, would have been preferred. Humans obstinately refused to change their lingua franca for the sake of the Library, (though both Skins and Shirts began studying Indo-European for fun — each for their own reasons) and instead sent their brightest mels and fems to help the helpful aliens adjust.
The Pring serve in the cities and farms of nearly all Pil planets, except for the home planet, Pila. The sun of Pila, an F3 dwarf, is apparently too bright for this generation of uplifted Pring. (The Pring sun is F7.) This is the reason given for continuing genetic research on the Pring visual system by the Pila, long after their Uplift license would normally have expired…
… have only allowed the Pring to colonize class A w
orlds, devoid of life and requiring terraforming, but free of use restrictions by the Institutes of Tradition and Migration. Having taken leadership in several Jihads, the Pila apparently don’t wish to have their Clients in a position to embarrass them by mishandling an older, living world…
The data on Culla’s race spoke volumes about Galactic Civilization. It was fascinating, but the manipulation it told of made him uncomfortable. Inexplicably, he felt personally responsible.
It was at this stage in the re-reading that the summons to Dr. Kepler’s long awaited talk arrived.
Now he sat in the viewing room, and wondered when the man would get to the point. What were the magnetovores? And what did people mean when they mentioned a “second type” of Solarian… that played tag with Sunships and made threatening gestures to their crews in anthropomorphic shapes?
Jacob looked back at the holo-tank.
The filament Kepler chose had grown to fill the tank and then expanded until the viewer felt himself visually immersed in the feathery, fiery mass. Details became clearer — twisted clumps that meant a tightening of magnetic field lines, wisps that came and went like vapor as movement dopplered the hot gasses into and out of the camera’s visible band, and clusters of bright pinpoints that danced at the distant edge of vision.
Kepler kept up a running monologue, sometimes getting too technical for Jacob, but always returning to simple metaphors. His voice had become firm and confident, and he clearly enjoyed giving the show.
Kepler gestured at one of the nearby plasma streamers: a thick, twisted strand of dark red, coiling around a few painfully bright pinpoints.
“These were first thought to be your usual compressional hot spots,” he said. “Until we took a second look at them. Then we found that the spectrum was all wrong.”
Kepler used a control at the base of his pointer to zoom in on the center of the sub-filament.
The bright points grew. Smaller dots became visible as the image expanded.
“Now you’ll recall,” Kepler said, “that the hot spots we saw earlier still looked red, albeit a very bright red. That’s because the ship’s filters, at the time these pix were taken, were tuned only to let in a very narrow spectral band, centered on hydrogen alpha. You can see, even now, the thing that caught our interest.” Indeed I do, Jacob thought. The bright points were a brilliant shade of green! They nickered like blinkers and they had the color of emeralds.
“Now there are a couple of bands in the green and blue that are cut out less efficiently than most, by the filter. But the alpha line usually washes these out entirely with distance. Besides, this green isn’t even one of those bands!
“You can imagine our consternation, of course. No thermal light source could have sent that color through these screens. In order to get through, the light from these objects had to be not only incredibly bright, but totally monochromatic as well, with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees!”
Jacob straightened up from the slumped posture he had assumed during the talk, interested at last.
“In other words,” Kepler went on. “They had to be lasers.”
“There are ways in which lasing action can occur naturally in a star,” Kepler said. “But no one had ever seen it happen in our Sun before, so we went in to investigate. And what we found was the most incredible form of life anyone could imagine!”
The scientist twisted the control on his pointer and the field of view began to shift.
A soft chime sounded from the front row of the audience. Helene deSilva could be seen picking up a telephone receiver. She spoke softly into the instrument.
Kepler concentrated on his demonstration. Slowly the bright points grew in the tank until they resolved into tiny rings of light, still too small to make out in detail.
Suddenly Jacob could make out the murmur of deSilva’s voice as she spoke into the phone.
Even Kepler stopped what he was doing and waited as she shot hushed questions to the person on the other end.
She put the phone down, then, her face frozen in a mask of steel control. Jacob watched her rise and walk to where Kepler stood, nervously twisting his baton in his hands. The woman bent over slightly to whisper in Kepler’s ear, and the Sundiver director’s eyes closed once. When they reopened his expression was totally blank.
Suddenly everyone was talking at once. Culla left his seat in the front row to join deSilva. Jacob felt air rush by as Dr. Martine sped down the aisle to Kepler’s side.
Jacob rose to his feet and turned to Fagin, who stood in the aisle nearby. “Fagin, I’m going to find out what’s going on. Why don’t you wait here.”
“That will not be necessary,” the Kanten philosopher fluted.
“What do you mean?”
“I could overhear what was said to Commandant Human Helene deSilva over the telephone, Friend-Jacob. It is not good news.”
Jacob shouted inside. Always deadpan, you damn leafy eggplant egghead, of course it’s not good news!
“So what the hell is happening!” he asked.
“I grieve most sincerely, Friend-Jacob. It appears that Scientist-Chimpanzee Jeffrey’s Sunship has been destroyed in the chromosphere of your Sun!”
11. TURBULENCE
In the ochre light of the holo-tank, Dr. Martine stood by Kepler’s side, speaking his name over and over and passing her hand in front of his empty eyes. The audience milled onto the stage, jabbering. The alien Culla stood alone, facing Kepler, his great round head rolling slightly on his slender shoulders.
Jacob spoke to him.
“Culla…” The Pring didn’t seem to hear him. The huge eyes were dull and Jacob could hear a buzzing sound, like teeth chattering coming from behind Culla’s thick lips.
Jacob frowned at the grim red light pouring out of the holo-tank. He went to where Kepler stood in shock, to pry the controller rod gently from the man’s hands. Martine took no notice of him as she vainly tried to get Kepler’s attention.
After a couple of tentative twists on the controller, Jacob got the image to fade and brought the room lights back on. The situation seemed much easier to deal with now. The others must have sensed this as well, because the cacophony of voices subsided.
DeSilva looked up from the telephone and saw Jacob holding the controller. She smiled her thanks. Then she was back on the line shooting terse questions to the person at the other end.
A medical team arrived on the run with a stretcher. Under Dr. Martine’s guidance they laid Kepler in the fabric frame and gently bore him off through the crowd gathered at the door.
Jacob turned back to Culla. Fagin had managed to push a chair up behind the Library Representative and was trying to get him to sit down. The rustling of branches and high pitched flutings subsided when Jacob approached.
“He is, I believe, all right,” the Kanten said in a singsong voice. “He is a highly empathic individual, and I fear that he will grieve excessively over the loss of his friend Jeffrey. It is often the reaction of younger species to the death of another with whom one has become close.”
“Is there anything we should do? Can he hear us?” Culla’s eyes didn’t appear to be focused. But then Culla’s eyes never did tell Jacob anything. The chattering from inside the alien’s mouth went on. “I believe he can hear us,” Fagin answered. Jacob took hold of Culla’s arm. It felt very thin and soft. There didn’t appear to be any bone.
“Come on, Culla,” he said. “There’s a chair right behind you. You’d make us all feel a lot better if you’d sit down now.”
The alien tried to answer. The huge lips parted and suddenly the chattering was very loud. The coloration of his eyes changed slightly and the lips closed again. He nodded shakily and allowed himself to be guided to the chair. Slowly the round head came down into his slender hands.
Empathic or no, there was something eerie about the alien feeling this strongly about the death of a man — a chimpanzee — who would be, down to his fundamental body chemistry, always an alien; a being
whose fishlike far ancestors swam in different seas than his, and gaped in anaerobic surprise at the sunshine of a totally different star.
“May I have your attention please!” deSilva stood on the dais.
“For those of you who haven’t yet heard, preliminary reports Indicate that we may have lost Dr. Jeffrey’s ship in active region J-12, near Sunspot Jane. This is only a preliminary report, and further confirmation will have to wait until we can go over the telemetry we received up to the mishap.”
LaRoque waved from the far side of the room to attract the Commandant’s attention. In one hand he held a small steno-camera, a different model from the one taken from him in the Sunship Cavern. Jacob wondered why Kepler hadn’t returned the other one yet.
“Miss deSilva,” LaRoque cut in. “Will it be possible for the press to attend the telemetry review? There should be a public record.” In his excitement, LaRoque’s accent had virtually disappeared. Without it, the anachronistic appelation, “Miss deSilva,” sounded very odd.
She paused without looking directly at the man. The Witness Laws were very clear about denying access to a public record at news events without a “Seal” from the Agency for Secrets Registration. Even the ASR people, responsible for enforcing honesty above the law, were reluctant to allow it. LaRoque obviously had her cornered, but he wasn’t pushing. Yet.
“All right. The observing gallery above the Control Center can hold just about everybody who wants to come… except,” she glared at a cluster of base crewmen who had gathered near the door, “for people who have work to do.” She ended with a raised eyebrow. There was an immediate bustle of motion by the exit.
“We’ll gather in twenty minutes,” she concluded and stepped down.