Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  yeah that’s what makes the thread flexible, see it’s made up of little platelets all strung together, just a couple millimeters long max and they have some give in ’em

  don’t get it

  it’s a transistorized neural net, that’s why you can’t find any nerves in those tissues, that’s not bone or anything it’s a bunch of goddamn chips carrying info back an’ forth

  the blood vessels are so small they sure don’t get much oxy to the tissues this way

  we’re only a few centimeters in don’t jump to

  platelets I mean platelets of silicon migod ’at’s crazy how you going to lay down silicon in a body when

  down in the DNA, isn’t that obvious there are lots of ways to transfer nucleic acid information into protein structure and build up inorganic structures in parallel if the code is there

  sections of each I’ve got to have sections on each slice get Hendricks he can help, with all this pushing and shoving how’m I supposed to what’s that babble over there anyway we’re supposed to work not talk when

  the opportunity I mean

  these are electroplaques for sure, boron for p-type transistors, phosphorus for n-type, stimulated by the adjustments in potential in the tissues themselves, same as our nerves only with more control I’d say, like the difference between a semiconductor transistor and a plain wire, you can do a lot more that way than you can with simple nerves like ours, same as difference between those old vacuum tubes and a microchip at least

  hold that steady

  shit I’d swear that arm moved

  they’re pokin’ into it, I don’t wonder

  so it’s got both p-type and n-type transistors for different

  don’t you think we oughta back offa this till we understan’ whatinhell is

  Hendricks give me that bi-clamp I think there’s something else, looks like

  here, I’ll help you get it

  a myelin sheath sort of but thicker, got silicon plating it too here wait hold it there watch your

  yeah okay tissues awful dry here

  got to cut through hand me that

  okay wonder what

  something hard here som—

  The fierce, dry snap of it jerked heads up all around the huge carcass, as the man shuddered and shook violently, the voltage shooting through him and wrenching open his mouth, a rattle of breath escaping, and his assistant also shared the current for a moment as it surged, rooting him to the floor, and then the assistant’s hand, arm went into a spasm and slipped from the clamp he held so the current passed from him and he collapsed to the deck, unnoticed, for the first man now jerked and shook so violently everyone watched, frozen, and inside him the central pumping chambers of the heart, which had been starting to relax in their cycle, went into ventricular fibrillation, shaking and banging together and stopping the flow of blood, the man’s eyes rolling up, the current shooting through his arm to his feet and into the mass of the ship, the crowd around him still unmoving, staring, until at last a woman seized a plastform instrument and hit him, hard, freeing the hand, and the man fell loose upon the deck. Nikka dropped the instrument and knelt beside him. The room burst into babble.

  He sees there is nothing he can do of course yes as the man falls, puppet with cut strings, eyes rolled back, Nikka following through with the blow, always stroke through the ball his father had said, and Nigel sees what will happen next, the gasps and quaking thin astonishment around the huge body, the sudden clump of humans forming to get the man out and into a vacced-down and retrosterilized environment, so they can split the skinsuits and treat the charred flesh, probably saving the one man yes but not the other, it will take too long and it must have been high current, the most dangerous kind of discharge, it would have been easier if there had been only high voltage, but no that is—

  he blinks, sensing his own slow respiration and the rank scent of the shuffling, muttering, frightened people around him, their sudden bitter sweat fouling the air before they sense it themselves

  —that is unlikely, it had to be an electrical discharge appropriate to a biological system, low voltage, high current, stored somewhere perhaps in the electrochemical batteries they carried, the metallic salt fluids in insulated sacs, a very compact way to store energy on an oxy-poor, grim, red dust-smothered world, so the thing on the carry cart—

  Nigel steps back, letting the others crowd by him to see the similar milling and pointless released tension dissolve into busy action beyond the viewport, feeling in this nostril-flaring surge the human animal as a tribe—the thing is alive, alive but muted, it still must feel the prick of the outside but through a foggy blur of hibernation, a wise, aeon-old tactic, to let the internal furnace ebb, avoid the mammal’s peaks and excesses of hunger-driven desperation, to wait out the world, to subside into long watchful inactivity, that is what cool calculation would teach, not to he of the warm kind like us, not to be a slave to steady metabolism, not when the grinding of history is so slow, so fine

  —the crowd now surges back from the port without thinking, round Os of mouths, rasping gasps, a quick heat in the brittle air as Nigel turns, guessing and sees the humans scattering away from the carry cart, Nikka well ahead, helping carry the injured men, glancing back now, eyes big through the helmet bubble, as the EM creature fills the comm lines with a buzzing rattle, a sighing chirrup, and with aching slowness lifts a leg, struggles, finds a purchase, turns the great rectangular head—ah yes, the longest axis can resolve all wavelengths shorter than its length, so to get the best vision, to sharpen the image, you rotate the head until the long edge is aligned with the direction you wish to sense, and by instinct the brain stores the image, clears away the fog of imprecision, and the head—wobbly, weak, roused only by a mortal threat, burning now its anaerobic reserves for a final battle—rotates again, the webbed and waxy skin catching the light, arms flailing for a grip, legs kicking for a fulcrum to tilt itself erect, another angry burst of radio noise through the comm lines

  —but this signal must be only for definition, perception, to see, Nigel reminds himself—

  it catches the cart’s edge, wrenches itself sideways, arms thrusting, head now tucked down, legs descending to the deck, heavy, soundless but for the hornet hum in the comm lines, and surges swiftly erect, towers in the bay

  —Nigel senses what it is like, the metal surfaces everywhere reflecting its pulses back, blinding it with scattered self as the thing sent out radar pulses to sense its world and at the same time named itself, the pulse was its signature, so now the universe so firm underfoot chanted and chattered the name back to him, the name shattered and unfeeling, not the way its fellows would return the song, no, but in the clanging, hard-edged manner of metal flinging the name back in rebuke and indifferent rejection, no sheltering sky silence overhead but instead a screaming piling on of echoes, voices and voices all chattering stuttering mindless chaos, hard and hostile, a shouting blankness

  It staggered. Eighteen minutes now, and it was still on its feet. The sticklike legs shook. It took a hesitant step, feeling the smooth stone deck for purchase. Slow, achingly slow. The head turned with the soft jerks, tilting this way and that. It was trying to sharpen its definition of this metal-lined world.

  “Look at ’ose knees tremble,” a man said nearby. Nigel eyed the man and his companions. They wore slick suits and carried heavy packs of equipment.

  “It’s running out of energy,” Nigel said to Ted, who was standing nearby, listening intently to his earplug comm.

  Ted nodded once, twice, and clicked off the comm. “That’s what we believe,” he said.

  “It was in some kind of dormant phase,” Nigel said. “It had emergency reserves, though, that’s obvious. Something—”

  “We’ll figure it out when we take it apart,” Ted said.

  “Take it …?”

  “Hendricks and Kafafahin are dead. Electrocuted.”

  “Um.”

  “Time to stop foolin’ aroun’,” said the red
-haired man.

  “I say, you can let the thing run down and simply be more careful next time. There’s no reason—”

  Ted turned abruptly toward Nigel. “You look yourself. Two men dead, I don’t take any more chances. Guidelines are, we fulfill the conventions on alien life-forms—big ones, anyway—unless human life is threatened.”

  “True enough. But—”

  “No buts, Nigel. Fritz”—Ted gestured to the red-haired man—”when it falls, give it five minutes before you go in. Then follow that prelim biopsy routine—the one they had as a fallback.”

  “There’s no need to kill it,” Nigel said evenly. “I think we can understand what caused that—”

  “I’m not risking it,” Ted said flatly. One side of his mouth twisted up in a humorless grin. “Keep back from it when you go in,” he called to the nearby squad. “No contact.”

  Nigel stepped between Ted and other men. If he could simply deflect the man’s attention from the preparations, slip some thought in on top of the adrenaline—“I believe if you’ll allow me to go in, I can sort out what’s happened. The thing must have storage points, internal capacitors. From the X rays we can locate them. Then I can short out the remaining—”

  “I’m not risking anybody for that thing. Particularly not you, Nigel.” A brittle smile.

  “If you’ll belay that order for a simple blasted ten minutes.”

  “No. Now pipe down and let me think.” Ted clenched his jaw and tightened his mouth, touching his teeth together. He rubbed them carefully back and forth, jaw muscles rippling.

  Abrupt movement through the port. Nigel watched the EM creature stagger, head wobbling. It kicked over an array of electronics. The arms waved uselessly, clutching at phantom reflected images from the walls, unable to find the key which could unlock this scrambled world.

  It fell.

  Equipment scattered in all direction. The tall figure toppled slowly, trying to catch itself, hold itself aloft. It could not find the balance. Its hands convulsed and the sharp nails at the end of the six tapered, knobby fingers struck sparks from the stone. Soundless. It kicked once, twice, shattering a biostorage unit.

  “Get ready,” Ted said, his voice thin and reedy.

  Nigel looked at the men and their tight, concentrated faces. He turned and walked away, tired and disgusted.

  Nigel thumbed the focus of the phase-contrast microscope. The bio folk had been over the tissue slices a thousand times and he had read their prelim report, but he wanted to see it for himself.

  The creature had many organ systems in common with earthly species. A liver, with double-membrane cells, ribosome-studded and intricate. A wrinkled gray brain. And the chunky body used the same economical cradling, bundles of tubes and support rods and swiveled sockets, now fanning out, now joining up.

  But evolution’s firm hand had brushed aside the inefficient chemical kindling that ran Earthside animals. The EMs stored electrical energy in big cylindrical capacitors and discharged it in bursts when needed. The capacitors were sheets of membrance with fine accordion pleats, all wrapped in a Turkish-towel texture, a pictorial tale of an epic struggle for surface. Each capacitor was a forest of smaller capacitors, all insulated and buffered so that a chance twist of the body could not discharge the precious hoard.

  Nigel clicked off the miscroscope. Once you had a glimmer of the idea, it seemed natural. Oxygen was in short supply down on Isis, with all the sulfur belching out to scavenge the air. So nature had used an entirely nonchemical method of making a big, energy-squandering animal. Don’t lock up energy in chemical bonds and carry the mass around with the body. Instead, eat whatever food you can find, and then process the chemicals, keeping the energy in separated positive and negative charges. The silicon-platelet “nerves” did some of that, and the odd-looking stomach carried the rest of the job.

  No one Earthside had ever anticipated an electrodynamic digestive cycle. Yet once you saw the logic …

  Nigel scratched his nose, bemused. It was all well and good to know the innards, but how did the EMs actually live? How had they got this way? The only clues would lie down there, in the raw, dim landscape.

  Bob Millard had set out new exploration-team schedules, in light of the discoveries from the EM death. Nigel had a secondary job in the exploration, teamed with a chap named Daffler. He scratched his nose again. Perhaps an opportunity would arise, he would glimpse some clue. Perhaps.

  SIX

  Rasping, clanking, clicking, Nigel picks up speed. Behind him Daffler is having trouble getting his left loco-motor to rev up. If he can get a lead on the man maybe Daffler will never catch up and Nigel can operate with some freedom, follow his nose—

  Hey wait up I said.

  “There’s something over this way—”

  I said wait up and I mean wait up. Look, Nigel, Millard made it pretty plain. You follow my on-site orders or else I shut you down.

  Nigel slows. He knew it wouldn’t work, but something in him made the attempt worthwhile, something lofting and playful that erupted when he again felt his stabilizers and locomotors bite into the crust of Isis. He senses that this will be his best chance, perhaps his only chance, to see the EMs as they are, not through 3-D or in dry reports, all of which distance him from the real experience and by selecting spectrum, data, site, slivers of information must always skew the flat facts of perception, and rob him.

  I’ve got this lateral housing secured now. Be with you.

  Nigel grins lightly, thinking of the cool stone interior of an English cathedral, the services he had dutifully endured there so long ago, a small boy still awed by rising columns of granite and the heavy solemn weight of the service itself, and the Lord be with you, Amen, and with thy spirit, the wafer burning his tongue with its bland consuming bond, promising that in the end he would rise up, a blood knot brimming from an eroded body, ready to take in the night, take, eat, this is my body and blood, eat everything, swallow a universe of dark that seeps in under doors into the warm orange of the family living room, his father sitting in that bobbing rocker, chewing his lip as he listened, rocking, rocking, stern, his son talking, tones deliberately muted lie the long flat notes coming from the organ as they take up the collection, coins ringing in the plates, granite smooth cool climbing up the air, rocker he says will go into rocket, only a t for an r, Father, Father who art in heaven, Father art in heaven now—

  Looks like they’re vectoring north again

  rouses Nigel and he calls up his faceplate web. Red dots. Time sweep shows them drifting up the valley, away from the gusty Eye winds. They are moving quickly. Faster, Alex says, than he has ever seen the EMs travel anywhere, at rates demanding more energy than the low-oxy environment would allow. Alex noticed the activity in this valley over a week ago. But other surface spots had priority, and by the time the big dish had focused on the region a new storm had moved in from the Eye. The valley was pocked with streaming volcanic vents. The dust swirled into the rising columns of heat, into air rich in water and ammonia and carbon dioxide.

  Nigel turns his opticals downward, to see his own hydrasteel carapace, where spatterings of brown mar the robot’s serial numbers, dribbling off in streaks toward the ground. It is raining mud. The sulfurous dust falls as it strikes the volcanic air. It seems odd that the EMs would prefer this slippery, rumbling valley of murk to the downslope valleys beyond where the water runs clear and the air carries only the fine mist of Eyedust that survives the moist volcanoes.

  Scoot down to the east, Nigel, I pick up some spiky microwave from there.

  He clatters over wet rocks and picks his way down a hillside. The illusion is getting better as the feedback loops lace him into the machine dynamicals better and better, the deft sure movement of the servos coming through to him as the broad feet smack down clump, clack, feeling to Nigel like striding over rough terrain in training boots, and even the stabilizers, whose ground grip translates into surges of calf muscles, thighs clenching and relaxing, spine ridin
g on its disks, arms swinging to keep the pace steady, steady, as the hydrasteel clanks through a blurred world, peering at shifting sheets of life-flecked dust, the thick air here a chemical factory driven in the end by the tidal forces that rip the land, thrusting up the Eye mountains, sawing through the caked layers of rock, poking vents into the high mountain valleys, everywhere flinging wet and grime skyward, cloaking the sky forever so the EMs have never known the stars, except perhaps for one night in a thousand years, when the dusts would fall and the silvery points would glimmer in the vastness, but the EMs had no eyes to see.

  Are you picking this up, Nigel? Some sputtering on two hundred megahertz.

  “Right, a trifle below sixteen degrees bearing from here.”

  I make it seventeen point two. Close.

  “Lets home on it.”

  He stamps down. The servos transpond the movement into a leap that takes him/it over a canyon of brown vegetation, bringing him down crump on a shoulder of burnished basalt. The feet skid but the robot rights itself in time. Five meters visibility in the optical. Rain fogs his lenses. He leaps again, getting a boost as the back hydraulics come in with a whoosh, and he skims over twisted blue-green stumps of plants—slimy, sagging under boughs thick with mud. The radio overlay sputters, orange-tinted vectors pointing dead ahead—not one source, he can see that now, but scattered blotches and patches of radio noise, emitting around two hundred megahertz but not frequency-fixed, some giving off prickly hisses, others booming out long patterns that Nigel’s step-down electronics shape into acoustic rattles, the whole bunch sounding like a crowd tromping on broken glass.

  Just checked with Alex. There are no EMs within a klick. This must be some other life-form.

  “Weak signal. That might explain why Alex can’t pick it up. But still …”

  Through the dusky swirl a rocky ledge appears. Nigel angles to the left, thumbing to IR. Visibility improves. He can see down a long canyon, dim in the bloodred wash of Ra light. “Rocks here look as though they’ve been worked.” He steps forward gingerly. No life-forms visible. The canyon walls are streaked and carved, long gouges weaving together. He switches back to two hundred megahertz and the snaps and pops leap out at him, coming from the cuts in the rock. “Looks like art, maybe.” The seams are lined with odd silvery stuff. Nigel reaches out a maniple, scratches it.