Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  So much for that life-needs-water crap.

  Yeah, why should it when a martini doesn’t?

  So these fellas, they go their whole lives without a drink. There’s water, sure, but not near the Eye. So the biosphere’s tapped this way to get energy out of the sulfates, poor bastards, livin’ on dust—

  Li’l suckers got to hump like bejeezus to make an erg.

  —in the wash of technical talk he steps back and studies Carlotta, sees pinched lines at her eyes and wishes he could unblock it. Easier, much easier, if the three of them could collapse into a comfortable, old-shoe life, each satisfied by a dimming echo of the initial passion they all had felt. She turns, visibly collecting words for a burst of talk—eyebrows knit, mouth purses, blunt tip of her nose dips a millimeter—and Nikka approaches, quicksilver changes ripple across Carlotta’s face, they touch casually, and Nigel remembers how they had been instinctively close from the beginning, sharing jobs, living together while Nigel was in the Sleepslots. They exchange a word, Carlotta glances at him, she makes the familiar stretching motion, the one she taught him to ease knotted muscles, and Nigel feels in her liquid grace why he has through the years narrowed his ability to see into others. It is simply too hard now, too involving. For Nikka and Carlotta, yes, but the thought of reaching this way into Ted or Alex or others—it is too dense and wearying. He had gotten it from the Marginis wreck and used it to get through the ISA Byzantium: chatting up power brokers, sensing what Lancer engineers meant as opposed to what they said, giving them the appearance of seasoned astronaut that they wanted. And he had liked it, been good at it. For years afterward he had remembered each welding inspector’s beaming mug. But now—He feels the reserves ebbing for this; he cannot muster it for a multifass or even a seminar. Insight comes only in flashes now anyway, and the sensitivity hurts when he rubs against the abrasive mysteries people carry inside. Carlotta pats Nikka on the arm absentmindedly, her attention caught again by a passing spate of jargon, and Nikka comes toward him—

  Carlotta was awfully tart when she arrived.

  Miffed at something perhaps.

  There’s nothing developing between her and Bob if that’s what you’re thinking.

  I’m not thinking at all actually.

  I don’t think she knows herself what’s bothering her; she can’t talk about it, but look at that forced way she’s laughing over there and how she keeps glancing over at us.

  Well look at it her way, we two’ve been together since the Pleistocene and she’s always going to be the last in, the odd number

  Funny, it’s easier to talk about her here than when we’re alone

  Ye olde multifass, everything comes out here—

  And you always mixing around, it looks like aimless walking—

  Walking yes, aimless no

  Eavesdropping?

  I, I like the mix—

  Thing is, they’re going such a long way around in biochem terms, using what they can get after the sunlight scatters around in all that dust. No UV gets through down at the surface to speak of. That poor li’l biosphere, they stack photons on top of each other somehow to get enough energy, then grab onto water near the ocean, split off the oxy, God what a lotta work

  Petrowski calcs that the biosphere’s older than our solar system, really old, been perkin’ along over five billion years, think ’bout that, figured it from the heavy element abundance—

  —dust transfers the energy to the bigger life-forms, uses mostly sulfide electron donors, quite a trick when you consider—

  —riding those winds, eating the goddamn dust, little bitsy microbes on their way from the Eye to the sea—

  —still think you’ve got the most beautiful ass honey of any guy who wears those maintenance overalls—

  Seems to me you people got a purty good handle on the biosphere, can’t see why you don’t pass on the touchdown option an’ let us get on with it.

  Bob it’s not that simple

  Lissen we let the specialists chip away at the thing ferever we’re gonna turn gray up here ’fore we ever get down and movin’

  Squeeze it a li’l an’ see what you get

  Tough ecology, man, I mean tough. This place’d be dead as Mars with just a little less sunlight and atmosphere. Bio’s creamin’ their jeans to see what else’s under that dust

  Too early to tell; we can’t see well enough to estimate the extent of the life pyramid

  Shit this all there is to drink gotta be sumpin’ better down at Nguyen’s

  Look at him makes you wonder how a muitifass can work with people getting carried away, drink and even drugs on a ship no less

  Him? They’re self-canceling, doncha see? Keeps things loose but when votin’ time rolls around they’re too fuzzed to care—

  You look at paramecia or your own sperm cells even they have this little whip,

  No thanks not my kind of thing

  flagella down there is your justly famous balls, my good man

  wigglin’ upstream like salmon. Story of my life

  and if this grack will let me finish, there are nine fibers on the outside of that whip to every one fiber on the inside

  she’s fine y’know wonderful but also great at takin’ the ol’ romance out of it

  and that ratio, that nine to one, is the same in thousands of organisms all over Earth and nobody has the slightest idea

  unoriginal God is the best explanation. He just got tired

  couldn’t you mumble a little softer I can still hear what you’re saying

  okay okay so tell us nine. to one

  we can’t see any obvious selective survival advantage for the nine-to-one ratio but who knows, still the easiest out is that ’way back at the beginning when sex started the nine to ones were just lucky is all and that ratio got locked in early

  kiss me quick I’m nine to one

  had too much sniffo already eh?

  love me love my ratio

  well you just keep on holding up that bulkhead it looks like hard work white the adults talk

  hark the queen speaketh

  so first thing I look for in the dust crawlies from Isis is the flagella, and sure enough—oh thanks, I’m having that rum stuff—sure enough I squint into the electron mike and there are the little whips going like mad, only when I splice some down it’s a seven to one, not our nine to one. So question is, what’s magic about odd ratios?

  only two cases hell honey not statistically meaningful

  still sounds suspicious to me

  could be that an odd ratio gives ’em edges to hold onto?

  so what’s the comparative advantage?

  more leverage with an odd ratio? maybe that way it’s easier to make your point even if the lady’s not interested

  talk about anthropocentric

  must be they need a good grip right Nigel?

  I never speculate on extraterrestrial pornography

  Well they use something to hold onto those dust motes while they’re riding the winds out from the Eye, up those mountains and down to the sea, chomping away on those sulfide electron donors

  then when the Eye winds turn near the seas the big cyclone pattern that’s when the dust falls

  Remarkable how fast his head clears I could almost follow that

  But do we need to decide basic mechanisms like that before a manned landing?

  There’s lots of biochem to study we can spend a year easy Not me Come now we’ve been in orbit for months already bloody long enough

  Much as we all love good, old Bob-boy I’d rather rely on Nigel’s judgment

  Thanks but isn’t that what this muitifass is about?

  Goddamn dust if we could only see more. That third flyback probe, it found lots of dust eaters dropping off near the seas but you know I keep thinking

  Yeah, seems like those li’l buggers are a planet-wide feeding system for the bigger life-forms, so we ought to look at who benefits

  Their function is carrying chemical energy you mean
, that’s all?

  Sure, they’ve sopped up photons at the Eye and made the right carbo-oxy compounds

  —which get dumped into the mountain valleys where those EMs are—

  right

  Strange kind of energy vector, moving biochem energy out from the Eye. Hard to see how a whole biosphere like that could evolve

  This isn’t New jersey m’ love

  I’ve noticed.

  Damnably low-grade process though, with that skimpy energy budget the deck’s stacked against the whole biosphere

  God’s ingenious

  Well he had longer to work on this one.

  Five-billion-year-old biosphere makes you wonder what could happen

  You two might talk to Bob over there about the exploration if you’ve the time—

  Sure come on soul mate

  Damn that sniffo’s some stuff isn’t it? Whattad I say?

  Just let me do the talking

  Nigel, Nigel, lemme tell you, I figure you can do somethin’, man I was so mad I felt like runnin’ over a toad with a power mower—

  Ted’s more the man to complain to, precious little I can do

  Sure but the right word in, y’know

  Can’t promise anything but if it’s a friendly ear you’re after

  C’mon you could have his job anytime we’d all vote for you.

  Nonsense, step over this way the noise is dreadful now what was the—

  He values the cascade of impressions more than anything. He drifts down carved rock corridors, in and out of rooms, never lingering long—

  —yes, I know him, he’s from GHQ, works with Ted, kind of nice but homely as hell—

  —uh-huh, ugliness like that is nature’s contraceptive, I figure. Forget it. You got anybody else in mind, though, the night is young even if I’m not—

  —She came over to me and positively whispered all of it to me in one gush which was a kind of tribute when you think about it, coming from a woman who obviously hasn’t found much in the world it was necessary to whisper about—

  —Evolution goes all sorts of ways, that’s why I don’t think we’ll puzzle out the radio sources just by peeking at the basic biochem, not when we got such lousy resolution through all that damned dust. I mean, all kinds of things are selected for, right? You and me are myopic because the nearsighted males couldn’t hunt so good, so they stayed home while the bruisers went out running down meat. Just hanging around the caves and painting the walls and gettin’ a little on the side in the heat of the day. Never mind all that strong pair-bonding stuff they always tell you; fact is, you never know who the father is and that’s why a male strategy of spreading it around as much as you can pays off. So it gets selected for. Hell, it feels good—that’s the sure sign; evolution doesn’t read our rule books, she’s got her own—

  —think you’ve had enough? That rum isn’t rum, it’s spidmeer and you’re starting to look like a lobster—

  —we need more recon down there skip this biochem piffle—

  —yeah, right, way I see it is, we got a surplus a genius an a shortage of guts aroun’ ’ere—

  —an oxidation-reduction cycle,’s what it is, down there in that dust they’re playin’ the same ol’ game we are, only not so profitable. Higher up the chain from those dust eaters there’s gotta be starch production using that crummy low-cal sunlight. Leaves oxy as leftovers, an’ that’s what the EMs gotta breathe, but damned if I know how anything could live off that—

  —I don’t see why she has to bite my head off just over a spilled sample container— —You get us contaminated with those Isis spores I’ll vac you so fast—

  —well I didn’t why should I look I don’t. think you can say that just like that—

  —Could be wrong but some body left off the seals.

  —then don’t look at me when you—

  —call this a multifass well, this may shape you up for a vote but nobody’s talking about what I want

  —part of it’s to find out what the goddamn issue is if you’d just listen fer once—

  —I was saying, when the smaller animals breathe they have this little sac, kind of an air trap, and it filters the dust out of the air before they hit the inward stroke to suck in a lungful—

  —Real slow, about two breaths a minute, I’ve seen it

  —No bigger’n your finger, intricate li’l things, damn fine design for eatin’ up those dust-huggin’ fellas. Then the ones fat as your hand, they’re lunchin’ off the finger-sized guys

  —Him? Just a passing thing, yer ol’ hump ‘n’ hustle is all—

  —Come on Elinor no civilized woman ever regrets a pleasure and this is going to be—

  —so while you guys are grandstanding it with the survey, somebody’s taking out the garbage, getting meals, agronomists and skiffers, all scutwork, so at least we’d like to be in on what’s comin’ out instead of flashin’ on it in the weeklies you squirt Earthside—

  —I still say you stack up your shipcred, you can get your tail upholstered the way he did, just give the usual squeeze to Dexter in medmon, they’ll slip you in, won’t be more than a hairline scar nobody’ll notice in the dark

  He eased over into the group around Ted Landon and waited until a break came. It still all came through to him as overlapping voices, so even his own sounded involuntary, part of a stream.

  —Ted, we’ve got to go down there and have a look.

  —Hold your horses, gosh, this isn’t the best place to go over the technical details, Nigel; if you came to the briefings you’d be more up to speed—

  —They take too long, never understood why you call them briefings, but I do run through the tapes.

  —Glad to hear that, and of course we are doing a study of all the ramifications, looking for a safe way to do it.

  —Seems a trifle obvious, actually.

  —Well, some are advocating an active recon mode— you know, where we use remote radar sensing to interrogate the internal biochem of the EMs for—

  —Sounds bloody awful.

  —Ah, there’s the alternative, a passive mode which I incidentally favor, which is to station servo’d eyes in well-sheltered spots, and watch the EMs if they pass nearby. We’ve had good staff review of that proposal.

  —Mere eyes? Use walkers. We’ll need mobility.

  —In the long run, sure. We’ve got walkers in the ready equipment. Lord, were prepared for anything Earthside could anticipate. There’re even submersibles in storage, in case Isis was an all-ocean planet.

  Bob appeared at Ted’s elbow and nodded vigorously.

  —Walkers? Ah like that bettern sittin’ still.

  —Ted, I should think it’s technically feasible to make a radio-reflecting blanket. One we could throw over a standard walker.

  —What about it, Bob?

  —Sure. You thinkin’ to calibrate them till they reflect the EMs’s own signals back?

  —Dead on. But scatter their pulses to the side, the same way ordinary rocks do.

  —Bettuh than hunckerin’ down, waitin’ for EMs to come strollin’ by.

  —Perhaps program the blanket in some way, make its reflectivity change with time? That way the EMs won’t register a same-shaped object following them about.

  —Mebbe possible. Have to look at the specs.

  —Grand. I’ll pitch in whatever talents I have.

  —Whoa there, Nigel. That’s Bob’s section. I can’t—

  —Fine then. Bob, I’m on for the first go.

  —Jess a minit now—

  —My idea, lads. I should get some fraction of the action, as the slang puts it.

  —I dunno about ground team. I mean, assumin’ the approach works. Dunno if you’re up to physical specs, Nigel.

  —Undoubtedly. But most of those walkers are servo’d, true?

  —Sure. Havta be. Can’t afford to put a big team on the ground. Ted’s Operations study showed—

  —That’s okay, Bob, don’t need to bother Nigel about details.
<
br />   —Must keep surveillance maximized, Ted. Your own study showed that.

  —How’d you get to read that part? It isn’t due for release until—

  —Mere rumor, I assure you.

  —Huh. Sounds like we got a big leak somewhere, Bob. Okay, since you got the dope anyway—We’ll land enough guys to service the equipment, then have teams From here servo’d to the hardware. Saves logistical problems. Five-hour shifts.

  —Good. But there’s bound to be dead time there. No one can take a lot of being tied into machines, not on that long a circuit, ship-to-surface. So peg up a short shift, occasional sods like me. We can stand watch, keep an eye for anything odd. Patrol duty.

  —Well, I don’t know as I like—

  —He’s got a point, Ted. Long’s he’s just standin’ watch, nothin’ special—

  —Thanks very much, Bob, I do appreciate it.

  —Hey, now, I didn’t say definite you could.

  —Awfully good of you.

  —Nigel, we’re out of the rum already and—

  —It’s not rum, luv, it’s spidmeer.

  —Hey, now—

  —Well, anyway we’re out and if you could—

  —Certainly. Brilliant interruption. You look as if you’re deplorably empty there, Bob, I’ll just nip in and get you—

  —But hey

  —No trouble really, Ted you ought to come have some of the—

  —Hey—

  TWO

  Nigel stirs restlessly, itchy from the encasing probes and pickups attached to him. He is moored to this electroneural net and feels the cramped capsule only dimly.

  He waits for Isis to unfurl into him. There— it begins. Throughout, he will be trapped in a suffocating machine’s clasp, but he is willing to set aside the unpleasant overtones of this in return for the experience it opens to him.

  There—

  He shuffles out of the storage and maintenance shed, his suit clanking. Hydraulics wheeze and he steps onto the crusted face of Isis.

  It is blurred browns and pinks, the dust whipping by with a lingering gusty ferocity as it slowly ebbs, the cyclone whirl from the Eye losing its force after these three days of lashing storm. Everywhere, a pink cloak. He can see perhaps ten meters in the optical, thirty in IR, in the UV nothing farther than his gloves.