Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “I never saw this woman before in my life, Officer,” Nigel said.

  “Likely story. Neighbors asked me to come hose you two down.”

  “Why not jump in?” Nikka asked.

  “Looks like the main event’s over. I always thought gentlemen rose when a lady entered the room.”

  “Me? I’m a wizened old anxiety case. No gentleman, either. Never learned to hunt or ride or insult waiters.”

  Nikka said, “I’m sorry, we would have waited, but I thought you’d still be working.”

  “No problem. Not in the mood.” Carlotta said abruptly, “I ducked out when I got copies of these.” She waved a handful of photographs. “Batch of results from the gravitational lens. Fresh from the noise-eraser program.”

  “Ah,” Nigel said, wondering why she had rushed over at precisely this moment, when she knew the two of them would be—but no, that was silly. Could Carlotta know them well enough to guess that Nikka would plan a playful seduction here? Well, he thought grudgingly, maybe so. With a bit better timing, she’d have interrupted them. And though they were still ostensibly on intimate terms, he realized Carlotta’s arrival would have embarrassed them all. Created more friction. And the net outcome would have been—what? Difficult to tell. He wondered if Carlotta knew what she was doing, or why. In any case, he certainly had no idea.

  “Planets galore,” Carlotta said. “Around Wolf 359, Ross 154, Luyten 789-6, Sigma 2398, Kapteyn’s Star—everywhere.”

  Dim dots near each star. Close-ups revealed rocky spheres, or gas giants, or bleak, Venuslike cloud worlds. “No Earths,” Carlotta noted.

  “With so many planets around each star,” Nikka said, “the odds for favorable life sites somewhere nearby are good.”

  “So goes the gospel,” Nigel said.

  Carlotta said, “There’s a lot of analysis behind it. Data, too.”

  “Yes. Perfectly plausible data.”

  “Come off it,” Carlotta said. “You want to explain everything, using a couple of minutes of garbled talk with the Snark, none of it verified—”

  “Unverified, yes, for want of trying. Ted won’t allocate the resources to interpret the EM language. We could learn a hell of a—”

  “God, the computer memory needed to hold all that and process it—I did the study, I should know. Using shipboard systems, we wouldn’t have space left to store a lunch menu.”

  Nikka said mildly, “I expect the Earthside teams will—”

  “Ha!” Nigel exploded. “They’re busy with Swarmer and Skimmer studies. Banging their heads against the same sort of wall that’s between us and the dolphins. Pointless!”

  “Look,” Carlotta said, “Ted worked over my projections real carefully, he conferred with everybody concerned, it was a good decision. They heard you out, they really gave you every consideration. You keep up this cranky griping, everybody’ll start believing what Ted said the other … .” She stopped.

  “Ah, yes. Ted’s always hard on people who’ve left the room.”

  “And you aren’t?” Carlotta said sourly.

  “Can’t stand close-mindedness, is all.”

  “You’re more close-minded than Ted, for gossakes!”

  Nikka said firmly, “No, he’s not!”

  Nigel smiled wanly. “Maybe reality isn’t my strong suit.”

  “Ted has to balance pressures,” Carlotta said. “You’re respected, that goes without saying, and if you’d just give him some public support—”

  Nigel boomed out in a pompous voice, “Speak into the microphone, just say you’re happy, Ivan, in spite of some regrettable things you’ve done, and we’ll take care of the publicity.”

  Carlotta sniffed. “You’re missing the point.”

  “Probably. Been off my feed lately. This rack of bones could use a tune-up.”

  Nikka said carefully, “Meaning?”

  “Look at my last job rating. I’m sure Ted’s memorized it.”

  Nikka said, “You’re exaggerating. Ted hasn’t got time—”

  “No, he’s right,” Carlotta said. “Ted’s probably ‘building a file,’ as the administrators say.”

  Nikka said, “But health problems aren’t grounds for—”

  “If a majority of our esteemed crewmates think it is, then it is, period.” Nigel said. His face sagged with an inward-looking fatigue.

  Nikka said softly, “They might put you in the Slots, then?”

  “Slotting might bring you back up to specs for a manual job,” Carlotta said thoughtfully.

  Nigel sighed and shrugged.

  “Look.” Carlotta leaned forward. “At a minimum, it’ll make you live longer.”

  “And miss most of the voyage to Ross 128.”

  “Small price,” Carlotta said. “I don’t think you have to do it, though. You’ve got lots of sentiment behind you. They may all not agree with your theories, but the crew remembers all this started ’way back with the Snark and Mare Marginis and—”

  “I’ve told you before, I don’t want to win by pinning on my medals and parading round the ship.”

  “You want to convince them, right?” Carlotta said sharply. “Only they see things different. Well—”

  “Stop, you two,” Nikka said, lean and lithe and distant on the grass. “Nigel, if you go into the Slots, I’m going with you.”

  “What!” Carlotta jumped up.

  “I could use some repair myself.”

  “That’s not it.” Carlotta’s voice rose. “You want to stay with him even if he’s asleep!”

  “My medmon index isn’t very high, either,” Nikka said neutrally.

  “You’d leave me behind just to—”

  “Bloody hell, must you forever think in terms of yourself?” Nigel jerked his head irritably. “We wouldn’t be slotted for more than a few years at most.”

  “A few—! But us, our—”

  “I know,” Nikka said soothingly. “I’ve thought of that, and I’m sorry, but I must stay in good physical condition. It’s different when you’re old. Nigel, when he comes out, I won’t be very much use to him if I’m run down and—”

  “You—both of you—leave me—”

  Nigel nodded. “I have to. If Nikka follows—well, that’s her affair. We each still have some freedom, y’know.”

  “But I’ll be alone.”

  “It can’t he helped,” Nikka said firmly. “I’m going with him.”

  That was all she would ever say about the matter.

  PART SIX

  2084 DEEP SPACE

  ONE

  Nigel spun slowly in the Sleepslot. It was not true sleep, but rather a drifting, aimless dreaming. He felt faint tugs and ripples as the fluids moved him—massaging leathery muscles, caring for soft wrinkled tissues, ensuring a regular flow of blood and oxygen. The fluids kept his metabolic level a fraction above the shutoff point that would bring on death.

  It was like an achingly labored swimming, clutched in currents one could only dimly sense. He rested in the wetness, free of the labor of breath, lungs filled with a spongy stuff that fed healing fluids and sparkling oxygen directly into him. His skin shed a snow of flakes and grime, a torrent of impurity. Inside, cellular police searched for renegades.

  Dying, it had turned out, was often merely an inept response to the universe.

  The simplest way for the body to defend itself against invaders was by making antibodies. If that failed, evolution had forged a deeper response. It made killer lymphocytes, white cells that attached themselves to the invaders and made a template of them. They excreted specific, short-range toxins, varying the poison until it destroyed the invader. Long after the battle, the lymphocytes carried the template of this intruder, to recognize and kill on sight any returning enemy.

  But this immune response can err. That was why eating meat was dangerous. Unless the meat was well cooked, some raw portion would inevitably get into the body cavity, through holes in membranes. The lymphocytes then developed a killing response to animal protein, s
ince it was a nonhuman cell.

  The problem was that animal protein is very similar to human protein. As the lymphocytes drifted through the rivers of blood, finding and killing invaders, they sometimes changed. Radiation or heat could damage them. If the random changes made the animal-protein template resemble human protein, the lymphocytes could become confused. They would attack the body’s own cells. Cellular suicide. Cancer.

  With age the body developed more and more templates. The chances of a catastrophic error increased. To combat this, the body tried to develop so-called suppressor lymphocytes, which could control the killers and stop them from multiplying. Often this failed.

  No matter how many technical fixes could be arranged for heart troubles or organ failures, this irreducible knot of a problem remained. It was rooted in the very nature of the body’s age-old defenses.

  Evolution did not care if a preventive measure ran amok, once childbearing age passed. In fact, all the better. It was a simple way to clear the stage, once the actors had played their parts.

  The medicine of the twenty-first century was preoccupied with runaway immune response, with bodies that had become strangers to themselves.

  Nigel dimly felt fluids slosh within him, seeking lymphocytes gone awry. Outside, the grasshopper world clacked on, Lancer edged close to light speed, and he thought of the cold world an intelligent machine must know: brittle, arid, a labyrinth of logic and careful design, stale space and geometric rigidities. Quite unlike the milky world that nurtured him here, smoothing the skin now crinkled like old butcher paper.

  This treatment would stretch his life-span, free oxygen to swarm through parts of his brain that now ebbed. But it meant years of nothingness, blunted by drugs, telescoped down to a mere self-perceived few days. Years subtracted from the pace of events.

  It was deeper than sleep, that great eraser. Like any new technology, it eased you through life, insulated you for a time from a brutal fact, and left you with a disquieting vision: that nature engraved mortality on its children by making them attack themselves.

  TWO

  2086

  Carlotta led them into the huge cavern where nothing was real. “This is it,” she said excited. “Surprised?”

  “Moderately,” Nigel said, though he wasn’t sure what moderation was any longer. Five days out of the Sleep-slots, and he still carried the wispy, dislocated air of not quite being fully present. An expected side effect, to be sure, but what he had seen around the ship had enhanced the effect. “Ted and the rest actually approved this?”

  Carlotta shrugged: “We aren’t getting much advice from Earth. There were signs of real morale problems, and the psych types thought—Look, Earthside predicted some fast sociocultural rates shipboard, fax?”

  “In five years?” Nikka asked quietly.

  “Can you fashion things change just for, you know, change itself? But look, you’ll get the mix. Come on.”

  They followed her. A couple took a tumble slide through purple ice crystals above. A hollow gong; the fine crystals dissolved into a rain of acrid fire. People passed by, rippling, and Nigel saw they had faces that shifted like holograms. Carlotta polarized herself into fundamentals and blended instantly with the dank, humid jungle that was forming around them. They sat at a table. A panther snarled. Nigel saw cat eyes gleaming beneath the folds of a wet elephant ear leaf.

  “Shows what a pack of smart lads can do when they’ve nothing to distract ’em,” Nigel said. Carlotta reappeared, wearing a pair of enhanced gloves. She casually lifted the table and the gloves glowed amber. “I was scanning the Earthside briefs,” he began, “and they—”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? That they can’t find out anything. Makes you wonder,” Carlotta said.

  Nigel nodded. The ocean invasion dominated the reports, but there were many political ramifications. There had been the customary Western tut-tutting over the latest purges in the Socialist African Union. Steam was leaking, with a shrill howl, from the New Marxism, which was getting encrusted with the same old blemishes—flagging zeal, increasingly brutal suppression of dissent, no economic miracles. Astonishingly, even the French intellectuals had abandoned them. A century or more of theory, from Fascism through worn-out Marx to PseudoCap, was finally yielding to the sociometric savants, surrendering the Grand Era of sweeping Theory to the comforting rule of Number.

  “I gather from the summaries that you’ve found no life sites, then?” Nigel asked.

  “Not yet. Hundreds of planets, either on the grav-lens or by probe, and—nothing.”

  “Um.” He glanced at Nikka. “Think I’ll take a walk.”

  “I’ll order drinks for us. Nikka, there’s a lot to catch up on, and …”

  Nigel passed through private iridescent clouds of yellow and pink and ruby. He became a flitting intruder in a stone courtyard; then a sandy beach; a star cluster; a swirling, tangled struggle between bronze, winged demons; a nineteenth-century office. He met a grinning panda bear with a tennis racket and waved away the animal’s whispered proposition. Someone offered him a drink; he slid it into his wrist and felt its tang.

  When he returned, three mugs of dark, odoriferous beer sat on the table. At the edge of their cloud sphere, a shabby trio played trumpet, bass, and drums. The air now held the flat, oily memory of yesterday’s fried food. The bartender held his post at a crude oak bar and glowered at them. Behind him, taped to a cloudy mirror, a stained sign read: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.

  “Do you suppose they mean us?” Nigel asked, trying to go along with matters.

  “I thought you’d like an old Earth locale. Look, I can update it if you—” She tapped her wrist and a 3-D sprang into life at Nikka’s elbow. The bar faded. A fat man was admiring a pile of eggs, delicately scrambled with cream sauce. He began ingesting them, sucking them up through a straw. Nigel looked closer and saw the man himself was made of garlicked spinach, oiled strands of tagliatelli, and his trousers were of pâté.

  “Gluttony chic?” he asked, and turned to Nikka. “M’love, you’ve been out of the Slots for two months—how long does it take to get used to this?”

  “The point is,” Nikka explained slowly, “to not get accustomed. It’s supposed to add endless variety.”

  “This was Earth’s idea, too?”

  “Shipboard and Earthside worked it out together. There’s a new theory of variance-interaction—”

  “Spare me. This looks like a bloody amusement park.” Carlotta frowned and reached up to tune her hair from black to white. Nigel glanced around. Cloud spheres hung everywhere in the great gallery. Carlotta got up to greet a passing couple. She stood to one side, clutching one elbow, aloft on some new platform sandals like a frail, hoofed animal. Women standing that way seemed to feel more poised, but he reflected that to him it looked just the reverse.

  In the crowds Nigel saw men with hair grown all down their backs and in swirling spirals around their bodies; women with patchy skin pigment that shifted as he watched; men with breasts; women without hair.

  He shook his head. Carlotta introduced a couple and Nigel nodded, barely remembering them. There was some conversation he could not follow and they left. “Uh … I didn’t quite catch … ?”

  “That was Alex and David,” Carlotta said.

  “But … Alex …”

  “Well, he’s had the Change, of course.”

  “Changed sex?”

  “Just as an experiment. It’s completely reversible. About six months in the Slots, rearranging body mass and growing new glands and so on.”

  “But Alex … was such …”

  “Look,” Carlotta said, “he had a lot of personality facets he’d suppressed. That was clear, wasn’t it, from the stiff kind of way he went around?”

  “I thought he was simply disciplined, well organized.”

  “Look, a lot of engineers seem that way, but if you pry them open, take a look at the guts—”

  “Doesn’t seem possible, somehow, I …” Co
nfused, Nigel came halfway out of his seat, intending to go after Alex and … And what? he thought. Ask him how in God’s name he could come to do such a thing? Nigel stopped himself. It was a deeply personal matter, after all. He shouldn’t barge into what was undoubtedly a difficult time for Alex. He sat back down.

  “You look a little rocky,” Carlotta said sympathetically. He nodded mutely. Moments passed. Discordant music filtered in from other zones. The air became flavored with ozone and perfume. Nikka and Carlotta began to talk about crew members who were in new jobs, had new lovers, or otherwise had done something in the last five years worth chewing over. To Nigel this conversation sounded much like a catching-up over lukewarm gossip such as one might hear in any large office building. The ordinariness of it struck him. Who would have guessed that a starship plowing across the light-years would come to resemble, in its human dimension, any other bureaucratic barge? He let most of the detail slip by him and thus was brought up short when Nikka casually remarked that she had moved into Carlotta’s small cabin. She had lived there since she came out of Slotsleep, two months before.

  “Then you’ve done no work on getting our apartment back into order?” he asked.

  Nikka pursed her lips. “There’s been so much to see, to understand—Lancer is much more exciting now, Nigel, since all these changes.”

  “Indeed,” he said wryly.

  “And, I don’t know why, but Carlotta and I have had so much fun together. Of course, I was sad that we were not slated to come out of the Slots at the same time. But it did give me a chance to adjust to, to all this.” She waved a hand at the chasm.

  Carlotta smiled winningly. “And it’s been great to have you back.” She squeezed Nikka’s hand. “Both of you.”

  “I still can’t see why Lancer should need to have such, such …” Nigel let his voice trickle away. Carlotta went into a psychosocial explanation, in part the bounty of the last two decades of work Earthside, which had caught up to Lancer. He listened attentively, all the while wondering if his British background made it impossible for him to appreciate fully these rapid-fire swervings of the social matrix. His past was not merely a learned liking for afternoon tea, cold baths, cricket, a certain level of domestic discomfort, and the occasional patrician accent. There were currents in society that ran deeper and, he felt instinctively, could not be so casually deflected by a bit of dewy-eyed technology. You need not be a master of the Snow-called two cultures to see that.