Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  More couples stopped at their table, recognized them, and shook hands warmly. Nigel could remember most of their names; their odd clothes or hair or altered faces seemed not so important after he’d heard the customary didja-have-a-good-sleep, how’s-tricks-with-Nikka, say-let’s-have-y’all-ovah-foah-dinner-real-soon style of conversation. They were people he still knew pretty well. Displaced in time a bit, yes, and caught up in a novelty-first social air he could not comprehend, quite. In time, no doubt …

  And yet, and yet—

  Many more of them now worked in Interactive Mode, computer-linked to the vast machines that churned in Lancer’s bowels. They maintained the fusion fire aft, repaired the life-support apparatus, sensed the flow of water and gas that kept the biosphere regulated. Over the years this had changed them. They talked as though they were always listening for a distant voice, half-heard, that murmured just beyond the hearing of the moment. They rubbed the big raw sockets at hip and elbow and shoulder, where the constellations of motor nerves gathered. They thought differently, talked little, seemed to lean on each word as though it should have more significance than it possibly—to Nigel—could. He discovered that when they wished to learn something, they exchanged cerebral templates with someone who knew the material. The technique had been transmitted from Earth three years before. A techno-summary package came in over the radio link each four months, now, to bring up to parallel specs with Earth.

  Nigel smiled and laughed and filed it all away for future pondering. The chasm vibrated with clashing holo-audio fantasies, competing gaudy beams of light, raw scents in the breeze. Nikka and Carlotta mingled with the increasing crowd. Bob Millard came by, an unaltered face Nigel was glad to see. Whatever he might think of Bob’s handling of the Isis exploration, the man’s easy hospitality was welcome. They both made passing jokes about the fads around them and then Bob put in casually, “Been lookin’ over your medmon specs jess t’day. Pretty good.”

  “Um. They spruced up my detoxifying mix, cleaned out the ol’ bloodstream. Seems to’ve helped the muscles and ligaments and so on.” Nigel kept his voice light, airy.

  “Your motor response is back up. Surprisin’. You lookin’ to do manual work again?”

  A suitable pause. “Would like to, yes.”

  “Got a job down the drive throat. Scrapin’ off the accumulated crud, freein’ up the fluxlife.” He raised an eyebrow.

  Nigel nodded. “I’m on.” This still moment passed, and the party swept on around them.

  Later, Nigel said pensively, “Must say, I hadn’t expected that.”

  “A manual job?” Carlotta nodded. “I told Ted you wanted to get your hands dirty again. There’s plenty of scutwork to go around. Older this ship gets, more it takes. Ted must’ve put it through the Work Council.”

  “Without my asking, even?”

  “Look, it’s been years since you two were picking at each other. Ted’s bighearted.”

  Nigel nodded to himself, trying to come to terms with the erased years. Time had blurred and softened everything. He had to remember that these were different people and he could not carry over the old emotions. “Anachronistic thinking,” he muttered.

  “Yeah. Fresh start, Nigel. You did real well in the Slots—you look great.”

  “I hope I can handle the work.”

  “Sure, you can. Bob wouldn’t sign you on if the med reports weren’t okay.”

  Nigel nodded again. Fresh start. He felt a vivid surge of joy. “So bring me up to date. What else is new?”

  THREE

  Procyon was a gleaming white F5 star with an insignificant dull binary companion. The flyby ship tallied the planets and tasted the stellar wind, before plunging close to the only interesting Earth-size world. It was mottled and cloud-speckled. An ocean wrapped the planet from pole to pole, there was no land. The vast sea showed odd chemical emission lines. The probe checked and rechecked and, in a cybernetic storm of confusion, relayed the answer: This world was awash in oil. Had the reserves in the rock been pressed out onto the surface? Or did organic chemicals in the air condense this way? It was low-quality crude, brackish and high in sulfur. It ran in tides and twisted into funnels beneath furious storms. Evaporation of water ran the weather cycle, but oil was the important surface fluid.

  Nothing lived in that sea.

  No stony sphere orbited the world.

  But battered, worn craft circled it. The probe raced by one and glimpsed a tin-colored, boxy thing. It had solar sails, partly unfurled. None of the grimy ships gave the slightest sign that they had noticed the passing intruder.

  There were thousands of them in orbit. A few descended to the surface as the probe watched. A few fought up from launch pads floating on the sea. When these finished their arc up, they deployed immense, tear-shaped bags. They assumed long-lived orbits and their engines’ orange plumes ebbed into nothing.

  Parking orbits. From the rate of launch it was simple to estimate how long the thousands of craft had been accumulating: several centuries. Their cargo was clearly oil; the probe resolved spidery pumping stations afloat below.

  The convoy was waiting, perhaps until each ship was filled. But where would they go? There was nothing else in the Procyon system except gas giant planets and dead moons. How long would it take them to reach any further destination?

  Nigel lies mute and blind and pinned in his couch and for a moment feels nothing but the numb silence. It collects in him, blotting out the dim rub of the snouts which cling like lampreys to his nerves and muscles, amplifying every movement, a pressing embrace, and—

  —spang—

  —he slips free of the mooring cables, a rush of sight-sound-taste-touch washes over him, so strong and sudden a welter of senses that he jerks with the impact. He is servo’d to a thing like an eel that swims and flips and dives into a howling dance of protons. His body lies three hundred meters away, safely behind slabs of rock. But the eel is his, the eel is him. It shudders and jerks and twists, skating across sleek strands of magnetic plains. To Nigel, it is like swimming.

  The torrent gusts around him and he feels its pinprick breath—autumn leaves that burn. In a blinding orange glare Nigel swoops, feeling his power over the servo’d robot grow as he gets the feel of it. The shiny craft is wrapped in a cocoon of looping magnetic fields that turn the protons away, sending them gyrating in a mad gavotte, so the heavy particles cannot crunch and flare against the slick baked skin.

  Nigel flexes the skin, supple and strong, and slips through the magnetic turbulence ahead. He feels the magnetic lines of force stretch like rubber bands. He banks and accelerates.

  Streams of protons play upon him. They make glancing collisions with each other but do not react. The repulsion between them is too great, and so this plasma cannot make them burn, cannot thrust them together with enough violence. Slapping together mere nude protons is like trying to burn wet wood. Something more is needed or else the ship’s throat will fail to harvest the simple hydrogen atoms, fail to kindle it into energy.

  There—In the howling storm Nigel sees the blue dots that are the keys, the catalyst: carbon nuclei, hovering like sea gulls in an updraft.

  Split-image phosphors gleam, marking his way. He swims in the streaming blue-white glow, through a murky storm of fusing ions. He watches plumes of carbon nuclei striking the swarms of protons, wedding them to form the heavier nitrogen nuclei. The torrent swirls and screams at Nigel’s skin and in his sensors he sees and feels and tastes the lumpy, sluggish nitrogen as it finds a fresh incoming proton and with the fleshy smack of fusion the two stick, they hold, they wobble like raindrops—falling together—merging—ballooning into a new nucleus, heavier still: oxygen.

  But the green pinpoints of oxygen are unstable. These fragile forms split instantly. Jets of new particles spew through the surrounding glow—neutrinos, ruddy photons of light, and slower, darker, there come the heavy daughters of the marriage: a swollen, burnt-gold cloud. A wobbling, heavier isotope of nitrogen.

/>   Onward the process flies. Each nucleus collides millions of times with the others in a fleck-shot swirl like glowing snowflakes. All in the space of a heartbeat. Flakes ride the magnetic field lines. Gamma rays flare and sputter among the blundering motes like fitful fire-flies. Nuclear fire lights the long roaring corridor that is the ship’s main drive.

  Nigel swims, the white-hot sparks breaking over him like foam. Ahead he sees the violet points of nitrogen and hears them crack into carbon plus an alpha particle. So in the end the long cascade gives forth the carbon that catalyzed it, carbon that will begin again its life in the whistling blizzard of protons coming in from the forward maw of the ship.

  With the help of the carbon, an interstellar hydrogen atom has built itself up from mere proton to, finally, an alpha particle—a stable clump of two neutrons and two protons. The alpha particle is the point of it all. It flees from the blurring storm, carrying the energy that fusion affords. The ruby-rich interstellar gas is now wedded, proton to proton, with carbon as the matchmaker.

  Nigel feels a rising electric field pluck at him. He moves to shed his excess charge. To carry a cloak of electrons here is fatal. Upstream lies the chewing gullet of the ramscoop, where incoming protons are sucked in, their kinetic power stolen from them by the electric fields. There the particles are slowed, brought to rest inside the ship, their streaming energy stored in capacitors.

  A cyclone shrieks behind him. Nigel swims sideways toward the walls of the combustion chamber. The nuclear burn that flares around him is never pure, cannot be pure because the junk of the cosmos pours through here, like barley meal laced with grains of granite. The incoming atomic rain spatters constantly over the fluxlife walls, killing the organic superconductor strands there. Nigel pushes against the rubbery magnetic fields and swoops along the mottled yellow-blue crust of the walls. In the flickering lightning glow of infrared and ultraviolet he sees the scaly muck that deadens the magnetic fields and slows the nuclear burn in the throat. He flexes, wriggles, and turns the eellike form. This brings the electron beam gun around at millimeter range.

  He fires. A brittle crackling leaps out onto the scaly wall. The tongue bites and gouges. Flakes bubble up like tar, blacken, and finally roast off. The rushing proton stream washes the flakes away, revealing the gunmetal blue beneath. Now the exposed superconducting threads can begin their own slow pruning of themselves, life casting out its dead. Their long organic chain molecules can feed and grow anew. As Nigel cuts and turns and carves he watches the spindly fibers coil loose and drift in eddies. Finally they spin away into the erasing proton storm. The dead fibers sputter and flash where the incoming protons strike them and then with a rumble in his acoustic pickup coils he sees them swept away.

  Something tugs at him. Ahead lies the puckered scoop where energetic alpha particles shoot by. They dart like luminous jade wasps. The scoop sucks them in. Inside they will be collected, drained of energy, inducing megawatts of power for the ship. The ship will drink their last drop of momentum and leave them behind, a wake of broken atoms.

  Suddenly he spins to the left—Jesus, how can—he thinks—and the scoop fields lash him. A megavolt per meter of churning electrical vortex snatches at him. Huge, quick, relentless, it clutches at his shiny surfaces. The scoop opening is a plunging, howling mouth. Jets of glowing atoms whirl by him, mocking. The walls near him counter his motion by increasing their magnetic fields. Lines of force stretch and bunch.

  How did this—is all he has time to think before a searing spot blooms nearby. His presence so near the scoop has upset the combination rates there. If the reaction gets out of control it can burn through the chamber vessel, through the asteroid rock beyond, and spike with acrid fire into the ship, toward the life dome.

  A brassy roar. The scoop sucks at his heels. Ions run white-hot. A warning knot strikes him. Tangled magnetic ropes grope for him, clotting around the shiny skin.

  Panic squeezes his throat. Desperately he fires his electron beam gun against the wall, hoping it will give him a push, a fresh vector—

  Not enough. Orange ions blossom and rage and swell around him—another death.

  “Pretty bad,” Ted Landon said. Nigel tried to focus. Therapy devices nuzzled and stroked him like mechanical lovers. He could make out Ted’s scowl, and he said in the direction of the blurred image, “What … I tried to … get back to mooring …”

  “You didn’t make it.”

  Nigel lay back and let feelings seep into consciousness. His body felt worn and numb. “The … ”

  “Destroyed, lost. Tracer shows it hit the wall. Thing is, you got a big retrofeed shock to your central nervous system when it blew.”

  “I can’t … body doesn’t feel the same.”

  “It won’t, for a while. So say the medics, anyway. Thing is, we never had this exact injury before. The other guys got out of those surges. You should’ve been able to get away from it. Nothing special about that surge.”

  “It … got by me, I suppose. I won’t let it happen … ”

  “I’m afraid this takes you permanently off manual tasks, Nigel. No way I can let you stay on the roster.”

  He could think of nothing to say, and in any case he could hardly sort out the confusion of distorted impulses his senses brought him. He gazed out the exop door. People were clustered around, listening as a medic talked in a low whisper. He felt tears trickling down his face. He had lost something, some inner equilibrium; his body was not the same tuned instrument he had come to take so easily. A wracking sob came from him. He searched among the people and in the back, a point of calming rest in the bunched faces, he found Nikka. She smiled.

  FOUR

  Nigel’s recovery was slow. It was a long time before he could work again in the fields, harvesting, grunting with the effort and trying not to show it. But he liked the work and kept at it. It reminded him of moments in his past when, intent on some worrisome task, he would by chance press a finger to his wrist and feel, like a sudden reminder, the patient throb of his pulse, a steady note that lifted him out of fretful details.

  But his internal confusion did not go away. He was enough of a mechanistic thinker to see that sudden jolts to the entire body could act on the mind in unknown ways. The glacial steadiness and resolve he had had since Marginis was now faltering, leaving him with strange, drifting anxieties.

  About his own mental states he had never had any theories. He had refused to endorse mystical savants back Earthside. That lot had quite neatly done a job on Alexandria, thank you. More to the point, he could not speak for anyone else. Things happened to you and you learned from them whether you knew it or not but a pretense of a common interior landscape which could be described, a bloody touring book of the soul—that was a lie. No flat formulas could capture the human interior. Kafka, that gnarled spirit, was right: Life is defined by the closed spaces of the self.

  That was why he had all along declined to become a savant figure himself, interpreter of the long-dead aliens of the Marginis wreck. He would have lost himself that way, when the whole point was to remain a man, to stay in the gritty world and experience it directly, avoiding abstractions. He knew that this made him appear increasingly isolated, cranky, out of step with the younger crew. But he did little to temper this, and used what pull he could when Nikka drew an assignment working on Lancer’s skin, to repair the ramscoop fields. Ted Landon made the quite reasonable point that he could not run a ship according to the loves of the crew. Nigel retorted that with the frequency of sex changes in the crew, it was bloody difficult to tell who was inclined to do what, and to whom. It came to him, then, why Ted smiled benignly on all the self-alteration that was so fashionable in Lancer.

  “He’s got the game down, clean and simple,” Nigel said to Carlotta one evening. “People cloning new tissues, people socketed into machines more and more to up efficiency—so’s they can have more time off for their pursuits, preoccupation. My God! In a fad-driven society like Lancer, Ted looks reassuringly stead
y. Marvelous, ol’ Ted—let him keep a hand on the helm while we go off and console ourselves for the long voyage.”

  Carlotta shook her head. “Makes no sense. The directives on involution therapy—that’s the term, don’t wrinkle your nose—came from Earthside. Ted had nothing to do with—”

  “Nonsense. Look at that thing you’re drinking. Carbonated cherry frappé, seething along with microicebergs of orange floating in it. Where’d the resources for that come from?”

  She stirred the silky drink. “Chem section, I guess.”

  “Fine old Ted could stop such diversions if he wanted, never mind Earth. No, he’s in favor of a holiday air, a regression into—”

  “Regression! Look, You may think—”

  “Yes, I do. Surely we needn’t go into it?”

  “It’s hard for me to see how you can deny a person a right to, a chance to … to find new definitions of themselves.”

  “I’m simply trying to understand friend Ted. I’m aware that sex change became common Earthside as a method of helping adolescents with their sexual adjustments. And that the pursuit of variety has made it much the fashion back there. But here—”

  “I think it’s pretty great of Ted and the others to allow use of ship’s resources for it. That certainly shows him in a, a fair-minded light.”

  “Or alternatively, in an engagingly frank and surprisingly open-minded light. It’s always one light or another with him, you’ll find.”