Sundiver u-1

by David Brin

  The operator adjusted the height of the eyepiece for Helene deSilva.

  Jacob’s turn came then. He waited until the eyepiece was adjusted, then pressed his nose, cheek, and forehead against the stops and opened his eyes.

  A blue dot shone inside. Nothing else. It reminded Jacob of something, but he couldn’t focus on what. It seemed to turn around and sparkle as he looked, eluding analysis, like the shining of somebody’s soul.

  Then the musical tone told him his turn was over. He stepped back and made room, as Kepler came forward, leaning on Millie Marline’s arm. The scientist smiled as he passed Jacob.

  Now that’s what it reminded me of! he thought. The dot had been like a twinkle in a man’s eye.

  Oh well, it fits, Computers can just about think today. There are some that are supposed to have a sense of humor, even. Why not this as well? Give the computers eyes to flash, and arms to put akimbo. Let them cast meaningful glances or stares that would kill if only stares could. Why should they not, the machines, begin to take on the aspect of those whom they absorb?

  LaRoque submitted to the Reader, looking confident. When he finished, he sat aloof and silent under the gaze of Helene deSilva and several of her crew.

  The Base Commandant had refreshments brought in, as everyone connected with the Sundiver ships took his or her turn at the Reader. Many of the technicians grumbled at the interruption of their work. Jacob had to admit, as he watched the procession pass, that it was an awful lot of effort to go through. He had never thought Helene would want to check on everybody.

  DeSilva had offered a partial explanation in the elevator on the way up. After putting Kepler and LaRoque in separate cars, she had ridden with Jacob.

  “One thing confuses me,” he had said.

  “Only one thing?” she smiled grimly.

  “Well, one thing stands out. If Dr. Kepler accuses LaRoque of sabotaging Jeff’s ship, why does he object to taking Bubbacub and Fagin on a followup dive, whatever the result of this investigation? If LaRoque is guilty that would mean that the next dive will be perfectly safe with him out of the way.”

  DeSilva looked at him for a moment, pondering.

  “I guess if there’s anyone on this base I can confide In it’s you, Jacob. So I’ll tell you what I think.

  “Dr. Kepler never did want any E.T. help on this program. You’ll understand that I’m telling you this in strict confidence, but I’m afraid the usual balance between humanism and xenophilia that most spacemen get might have swung a bit too far in his case. His background makes him bitterly opposed to the Danikenite philosophy, and I suppose that converts into a partial distrust of aliens. Also, a lot of his colleagues have been thrown out of work by the Library. For a man who loves research as much as he, it must have been hard.

  “I’m not saying he’s a Skin or anything like that! He gets along with Fagin pretty well and manages to hide his feelings around other Eatees. But he might say that if one dangerous man got on Mercury, another could, and use our guests’ safety as an excuse to keep them off his ships.”

  “But Culla’s been on almost every dive.”

  DeSilva shrugged.

  “Culla doesn’t count. He’s a Client.

  “I do know one thing, though; I’m going to have to go over Dr. Kepler’s head if this proves out. Every man on this base is having his identity cheeked and Bubba-cub and Fagin go on the next dive if I have to shanghai them I’m not going to let the slightest rumor get around that human crews are unreliable!”

  She nodded with her jaw set. At the time Jacob thought her grimness was excessive. Though he could understand her feelings, it was a shame to masculinize those lovely features. At the same time he wondered if Helene was being totally candid on her own motivations.

  A man who stood waiting by the maser link tore off a slip of message tape and carried it to deSilva. There was a tense silence as everyone watched her read. Then, grimly, she motioned to several of the husky crewmen who stood by.

  “Place Mr. LaRoque under detention. He’s to be returned on the next ship out.”

  “On what charge!” LaRoque shouted. “You cannot do this, you, you Neanderthaler woman! I will see that you pay for this insult!”

  DeSilva looked down at him as if he were a form of insect. “For now the charge is illegal removal of a probationary transmitter. Other charges may be added later.”

  “Lies, lies!” LaRoque shrieked as he leapt up. A crewman seized his arm and pulled him, choking with rage, toward the elevators.

  DeSilva ignored them and turned to Jacob. “Mr. Demwa, the other ship will be ready in three hours. I’ll go tell the others.

  “We can sleep en route. Thanks again for the way you handled things downstairs.”

  She turned away before he could answer, giving orders in a low voice to crewmen who clustered about, efficiency masking her anger at the news: a Probationer in space!

  Jacob watched for a few minutes as the dome slowly emptied. A death, a wild chase, and now a felony. So what, he thought, if the only felony proven so far is one I’d probably commit if I ever became a P.P.… it does mean that there’s a good chance that LaRoque caused the death as well.

  As much as he disliked the man, he had never thought him capable of cold-blooded murder, in spite of those wicked swipes with the plastic cudgel.

  At the back of his mind Jacob could feel his other half rubbing hands gleefully… amorally delighted at the mysterious twists and turns the Sundiver case had taken and clamoring now to be set loose. Forget it.

  Dr. Martine approached him near the elevator. She appeared to be in shock.

  “Jacob… you, you don’t think Pierre could kill that silly little fellow, do you? I mean, he likes chimpanzees!”

  “I’m sorry, but the evidence seems to point that way. I don’t like the Probation Laws any more than you do. But people who are assigned that status are capable of easy violence, and for Mr. LaRoque to remove his transmitter is against the law.

  “But don’t worry, they’ll work it all out on Earth. LaRoque is sure to get a fair hearing.”

  “But… he’s already being unfairly accused!” she blurted. “He’s not a Probationer, and he’s not a murderer! I can prove it!”

  “That’s great! Do you have evidence here?”

  He frowned suddenly. “But the transmission from Earth said he was a Probationer!”

  She bit her lip, looking away from his eyes. “The transmission was a forgery.”

  Jacob felt pity for her. Now the supremely confident psychologist was stammering and grasping at farfetched ideas in her shock. It was degrading and he wished he was elsewhere.

  “You have proof that the maser message was a lie? Can I see it?”

  Martine looked up at him. Suddenly she seemed very unsure, as if wondering whether to say more.

  “The… the crew here. Did you actually see the message? That woman… she only read it to us. She and the others hate Pierre…”

  Her voice trailed off weakly, as if she knew her argument was thin. After all, Jacob thought, could the Commandant have faked reading from a piece of tape and known for certain that no one would ask to see it? Or, for that matter, would she place LaRoque in a position to sue her for every penny she’d earned in seventy years, just for a grudge?

  Or had Martine been about to say something else?

  “Why don’t you go down to your quarters and get some rest,” he said gently, “and don’t worry about Mr. LaRoque. They’ll need more evidence than they have now to convict him of a murder in a court on Earth.”

  Martine let him lead her into the elevator. There, Jacob looked back. DeSilva was busy with her crew, Kepler had been taken below. Culla stood morosely near Fagin, the two of them towering over everyone else in the chamber, under the great yellow disc of the Sun.

  He wondered, as the door closed, whether this was really a good way to begin a journey.

  PART V

  Life is an extension of the physical world. Biological system
s have unique properties, but they nevertheless must obey the constraints imposed by the physical and chemical properties of the environment and of the organisms themselves… evolution solutions to biological problems are… influenced by the physico-chemical environment.

  Robert E. Ricklefs

  Ecology Chiron Press

  14. THE DEEPEST OCEAN

  Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob’s parents were born — before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy — old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.

  They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.

  In America’s “Indian Summer” nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space — a more durable probe couldn’t be much of a challenge!

  Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.

  Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. Heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.

  The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. “Why don’t you refrigerate?” she asked. “You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another.”

  Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.

  “Who said anything about equalizing?” the Belle of Cambridge replied. “You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren’t.”

  “And that part will burn up!” one colleague said. “Yes, but we can make a chain of these ‘heat dumps,’ ” said another engineer, slightly more bright. “And then we can drop them off, one by one…”

  “No, no you don’t quite understand.” The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.

  ’Here!” She pointed to the inner circle. “You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere.”

  “And how,” asked a renowned physicist, “do you expect to do that?”

  Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. “Why I’m surprised at all of you!” she said. “You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!”

  Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.

  That era came to an end with Contact. But soon a new type of Sunship was born.

  Jacob thought about Tina Merchant He wondered if the great lady would have been proud, or merely bemused, to stand on the deck of a Sunship and cruise calmly through the worst tempests of this irascible star. She might have said “Of course I” But how could she have known that an alien science would have to be added to her own for men to ride those storms?

  To Jacob the mixture didn’t inspire confidence.

  He knew, of course that a couple of dozen successful descents had been made in this ship. There was no reason to think that this trip would be dangerous.

  Except that another ship, the scaled-down replica of this one, had mysteriously failed just three days before.

  Jeff’s ship was probably now a drifting cloud of dissolving cermet fragments and ionized gases, scattered through millions of cubic miles in the solar maelstrom. Jacob tried to imagine the storms of the chromosphere the way the chimp scientist saw them in the last instant of his life, unprotected by the space-time fields.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed them gently. He had been staring at the Sun, blinking too seldom.

  From his point of view, on one of the observation couches flush with the deck, he could see almost an entire hemisphere of the Sun. Half of the sky was filled by a feathery, slowly shifting ball of soft reds and blacks and whites. In hydrogen light, everything glowed in shades of crimson; the faint, delicate arch of a prominence, standing out against space at the star’s rim; the dark, twisting bands of filaments; and the sunken, blackish sunspots with their umbral depths and penumbral flows.

  The topography of the Sun had almost infinite variety and texture. From flickers too fast to follow with the eye, to slow majestic turnings, all he could see was in motion.

  Although the major features changed little from one hour to the next, Jacob could now make out countless lesser movements. The quickest were the pulsations of forests of tall slender “spicules” around the edges of great mottled cells. The pulses took place within seconds. Each spicule, he knew, covered thousands of square miles.

  Jacob had spent time at the telescope on the Flip-side of the Sunship, watching the flickering spikes of superheated plasma jetting up out of the photosphere like quick waving fountains, flinging free of the Sun’s gravity great rolling waves of sound and matter that became the corona and the solar wind.

  Within the spicule fences, the huge granulation cells pulsed in complicated rhythm as heat from below finished its million-year journey of convection to escape suddenly as light.

  These, in turn, bunched together in gigantic cells, whose oscillations were the basic modes of the almost perfectly spherical Sun — the ringing of a stellar bell.

  Above all this, like a broad deep sea rolling over the ocean floor, flowed the chromosphere.

  The analogy could be overstated, but one could think of the turbulent areas above the spicules as coral reefs, and of the rows of stately, feathery filaments,, tracing everywhere the paths of magnetic fields, as beds of kelp, gently swaying with the tide. No matter that each pink arch was many times the size of Earth!

  Once more Jacob tore his eyes away from the boiling sphere. I’m going to be useless for anything if I keep staring like this, he thought. I wonder how the others resist it?

  The entire observation floor was visible from his position, except for a small section on the other side of the forty-foot dome at the Center.

  An opening grew in the side of the central dome and light spilled out into the deck. Silhouetted, a man emerged, followed by a tall woman. Jacob didn’t have to wait for his eyes to adapt to know the outline of Commandant deSilva.

  Helene smiled as she walked over and sat cross-legged next to his couch.

  “Good morning, Mr. Demwa. I hope you had a good night’s sleep. It’ll be a busy day.”

  Jacob laughed. “That’s three times in one breath you’ve talked as if there was anything called night here. You don’t have to keep up the fiction, like providing this sunrise here.” He nodded to where the Sun covered half of the sky.

  “Rotation of the ship to make eight hours of night allows groundlubbers a chance to sleep,” she said.

  “You needn’t have worried,” Jacob said. “I can catch Zee’s anytime. It’s my most valuable talent?’

  Helena’s smile widened. “It was no Inconvenience. But, now that you mention it, it’s always been a tradition of Helionauts to rotate the ship once before final descent and call it night.”

  “You have traditions already? After only two years?”

  “Oh this tradition is much older than that! It dates back to when nobody could imagine any ot
her way to visit the Sun but…” She paused.

  Jacob groaned out loud.

  “But to go at night, when it isn’t so hot!”

  “You figured it out!”

  “Filimentary, my dear Watson.”

  It was her turn to groan. “Actually, we are building up some feeling of tradition among those who have gone down to Helios. We make up the Fire-Eaters Club. You’ll be initiated back on Mercury. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the initiation consists of… but I hope you can swim!”

  “I don’t see any place to hide, Commandant. I’ll be proud to be a Fire-Eater.”

  “Good! And don’t forget, you still owe me that story about how you saved the Finnila Needle. I never did tell you how glad I was to see that old monstrosity when the Calypso returned, and I want to hear about it from the man who preserved it.”

  Jacob stared past the Sunship Commandant. For a moment he thought he could hear a wind whistling, and someone calling… a voice crying out indecipherable words as somebody fell… He shook himself.

  “Oh, I’ll save it for you. It’s much too personal to talk about in one of those story-swaps. There was someone else involved in saving the needles, someone you might like to hear about.”

  There was something in Helene deSilva’s expression, something compassionate, that implied she already knew about what had happened to him at Ecuador, and would let him tell about it in his own good time.

  “I’m looking forward to it. And I’ve finally thought of one for you. It’s about the ‘song-birds’ of Omnivarium. It seems the planet is so silent that the human settlers have to be very careful lest the birds start mimicking any noise they make. This has an interesting effect on the settler’s lovemaking behavior, particularly among the women, depending on whether they want to advertise their partner’s ‘abilities’ in the age-old fashion or remain, discreet!