Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  The balance would be wrong. He looked around for something massive. His eye stopped on the medfilter, set down and forgotten hours ago.

  Why not? Infernal thing, reminder of countless hours spent in its clutches. This was the last act, but still the thing could perhaps keep him alert, fight off the nausea if it returned. And he needed ballast. He fetched it and clamped it to the midsection of the frame, moving as quickly as he could.

  Very well. Time to go.

  He turned the manual controls and leaned back. A conveyor carried the frame into the lock. He found a way to clip his suit belt to the frame. Nigel punched in instructions for his suit as the lock sealed behind him. Air fled, pressure dropped, he braced himself—

  The outer lock irised open. Whoomp. The frame shot off the platform. Air broke into a gush of bubbles and the roar carried him out, tumbling. The floaters popped free and began to swell. He spun, weightless, the fulcrum of vectoring forces as his suit creaked and his ears popped and a shower of bubbles rose around him like a flock of bright birds. Then the dark descended.

  He came upright and saw the ship below, glistening. The floaters bobbed and sucked him upward. He had not thought through the balance of buoyancy and now saw he was too light.

  What the—Must be a misfire Nikka go back there check the

  He was rushing away from the glimmering ball of light. Farther below the smoldering fires of the stony reactor reddened the water. From this perspective they were remarkably similar pieces of technology.

  Bags are free? How’d that happen must’ve been

  Nikka answered, No I think wait

  Ted says we should back away from this don’t worry about the equipment might be a pressure malf anyway we should get clear fast let ExoBio get in on this

  He was rising too quickly. The frame would scoot all the way to the ice skin with so little weight to drag. Nigel suddenly realized that his suit could take extreme pressures, but could not adjust quickly to rapid changes in depth. If he kept rising—

  Carlos where is he I can’t

  Nigel’s ears popped. He stared upward at the floaters, swelling as they rose. Darkness cloaked him now as the ship fell away below. He did not dare show a light this close but he would need it to free one of the floaters. Now he could scarcely make out the bulk of them.

  You mean you think he

  The suit was bulky and awkward in the water and he had to search for the tabs on his left arm. He uncapped the spike and raised the arm. The third button should be—

  A bright blue line sliced the water. He fanned it, leaving behind curling wisps of steam. The laser cutter boiled away a thin column and found a floater. The bag crinkled, turned brown—

  Broke. Air gushed out. Nigel fired again, at the opposite floater. The beam churned the water soundlessly. It ate a thin, straight path, ghostly blue, haloed by steam. If the power ran out before—

  That’s crazy! Mierda seca, the old bastard’ll That suit can take it but listen to me damn it turn on the spots we can trace him

  The second floater burst. The beam leaped across the inside of it and punched a hole through the top. Nigel felt himself falling and then the frame slowed, still dropping. Equilibrium.

  I’ll call Ted he’ll.

  Later. See anything? There might be a suit light. Try the tracer.

  Something wrong no pickup I can see

  He can’t be beyond range this soon

  Look for yourself his code shows nonoperational. He doctored it before he left must be

  Floating, in an absence of space and light and weight. It was like the time on the slab, disconnected from the wearing of the world. Being in the high dark emptiness of space was much like the blank absorbing blackness here. His movements were sluggish, blunted by the unseen waters. No sound. When his boots struck the piping there came not a ringing but a muffled thud. He hung loosely to the frame and waited for something to come.

  Look Ted’s on the line says he’s too busy to worry about this old fart there’s news from Earth-side looks bad new assembly starting in a few minutes

  They can’t leave him out there call the teams on the surface get some more subs down here and

  Nikka, this is Ted. Admittedly Nigel was right about one thing looks like—I mean his Walmsley’s Rule and all that. That must be a Watcher and Operations tells me it’s showing signs of life now, probably in response to our ground teams so

  Then send down some submersibles damn it

  Look there’s too many things happening at once Nikka I don’t have time to hunt for that bastard right now let him stew

  He did it to stall for time don’t you see that

  Stupid move just makes us more pissed up here

  Ted I appeal to

  He’s acting like a horse’s ass over nothing. I’m through with all this shit of his! Maybe he thought he’d get some sympathy support this way but it won’t cut up here, I can tell you that in spades

  He sensed the running current taking him farther away from them. This was the farthest he had ever been, the natural tether. It was better to do it this way, in pursuit.

  I’m pulling you people out soon as I can and if he’s gone he’s just gone that’s it

  It will take hours

  Okay you can search for a while the assembly starts in ten minutes anyway but I warn you—look, if he’s patched in still he can hear this. Nigel, this is it man, the last

  He ignored the barking voice. Something more immediate disturbed him.

  Rippling currents. He ignited a small helmet phosphor. The bars of the frame leaped into being around him, yellow and stark.

  Nothing nearby. A tug, a fresh direction—

  Something glimmered. It grew. A ball of ruddy clouds. Swelling toward him, coming fast—

  Things moved inside. Specks in the clouds. Drifting dots. He tried to judge size but without perspective—

  The color. A smoldering red, dying embers—

  He held onto the pipes of the frame as the cage jiggled and surged sideways. Where had he seen—?

  The specks did not drift aimlessly. The clouds were in fact hillsides and the dots walked on them, slowly, amid swirls of dust. They were large, stately, with four smoothly articulating legs—

  EMs.

  But not the huge-headed beasts he knew. These were slim, tall, graceful in their grave pacing.

  Not EMs, not without the radio-dish heads and the awkward carapace that housed the reworked guts.

  These were what the EMs had been before.

  Before the asteroid rain crushed their biosphere. Before they had to remake themselves into something the Watchers would pass as perhaps machinelike.

  They were inside a vast ball, fully five kilometers across. Inside were hills, streams, dusty clouds, high forests of blue and brown. It reminded him of those childhood toys which, shaken, show a winter scene with descending snow. Only here the liquid was outside, and within moved a trapped world of air and growth. The sphere’s shell glowed, casting ruddy light inward. Above it, dark masses. Ballast? Stabilizers?

  It began to dwindle, The currents were sweeping him past, taking him away. He fired his laser beam over his head, making a blue arc. One of the tall moving figures seemed to pause, to look outward.

  Had they seen him? Did they know what had happened to their race back on the home world? Deformed, beaten down but still going on—

  Of course they knew something. They must be the remnants of an earlier age, a time when their world sent out ships and explored the nearby stars. They had taken shelter inside this moon.

  So close! He knew their descendants, could tell them that the home world hung on still. If he could make a sign, some gesture across the abyss—

  The red world shrank rapidly. He waved once, forlornly, and rested heavily against the medfilter. The chance had slipped by him.

  He closed his eyes and let time pass. The image of the tall, grave creatures faded slowly.

  FOUR

  Something moved.

/>   He jerked awake. Nigel shook himself and wondered how long he had been asleep. The suit warmed him, made him comfortable even in this cold murk. He had been trying to fit the pieces together …

  See anything of him?

  No. Damn all, how could he get so far so fast?

  He wondered why they could not pick him up on long-range sonar. Surely he could not have drifted that far away, not with them following the same currents he did.

  Look at this video image from Earthside. One of those things in orbit, looks hell of a lot like a Watcher.

  If he was close enough to pick up their general craft transmissions, they had to see him. Unless something was behind him, so they couldn’t pick up his image against it.

  Movement again.

  He clicked on a helmet phosphor. The sharp outline and colors of the floater frame leaped out at him. The medfilter, shiny aluminum pipes, floaters billowing above him …

  Something beyond. Something in the shadows.

  A huge wall coming at him out of the blackness.

  Gray pores. Speckled bands of red and purple.

  A vast oval opening in the wall of flesh, rimmed with ridges of cartilage.

  It brushed against the frame. Suckers in its side clasped the support rods. Slick brown tendrils curled about the metal.

  Tasting? Whatever, the motion stopped. Nigel waited. He shook the frame. The grip tightened.

  It didn’t seem to want to eat him. Was it studying him somehow? Best to wait and see.

  He heard nothing from Carlos and Nikka. The bulk of this thing must be blocking them.

  Time ticked by. He felt the old weakness slide into him, the sign of his body going awry again. Sudden activity, without rest, had thrown his chemistry out of balance. He surveyed the huge creature that gripped the frame, and wondered if it knew he was here. Or what kind of thing he might be.

  Weakly:

  How we going to find him in this?

  Lot of floating junk. Follow the currents, keep away from that big stuff.

  He had known they had to be out here, hanging away from the strange intruding craft that spewed fumes and whined and bucked against the currents instead of following them.

  The gamble was that they would not have a history of intrusions like that, that the Watcher had not sent down craft that cracked the ice and searched out life wherever it could be found, that the Watcher would wait in its rigid orbit and peer downward and know that as long as life kept inside its shell of ice it was harmless. The Watchers were patient and abiding and knew more of life than men, knew that it could arise wherever energy passed through a chemical environment and drove the processes that made a mockery of entropy, building up order.

  This was the secret that Pocks had to teach: that at a moon’s core, nuclear isotopes collected and sputtered and delivered up their warmth to an ocean of elemental matter, and that was enough.

  Eventually molecules would snag other links and make a crude copy, driven in this inward ocean to grow, clustered around the mock sun at the core of the world, amid crushing pressures and stinging dark, without lightning to hasten the brew or streaming baths of light from the sky, but merely and simply from the silent churn of nuclear decay, the way life springs from a heap of moist humus in a forgotten back corner, making use of energy from below in an ocean capped by ice, thermal cells mixing the chemicals which sought each other in their passion—at first plants innocent of photosynthesis, and then predators and prey who basked in the rich streams of life that were born amid the continual upwelling of free radicals. Sulfur compounds, like those bubbling from the volcanic vents in Earth’s oceans, could metabolize this brawling jungle with restless energy.

  The nature of life here was to be always rejected, forced up by the thermals, into the upper blackness, pushed away from the molecular fire, a biosphere doomed to seek the searing dark. When the core ebbed, the long radioactive half-lives done, there came cutting competition, a narrowing event like the ancient drought in Africa that had sharpened the wits of primates. As the crimson corefires damped, at first life must have merely fought for places near the bubbling fires, but in time some being saw that the heat could be clasped, moved, used to push—upward through the weightless rigid black, against the ice, and into it, and then beyond—scavenging the crusty rocks that held radioactives, seeking in the hostile vacuum and searing cold.

  There must have been a time when they struggled to understand their ice surface, perhaps managed to discover electricity and begin to tinker with radio, a time when the pre-EMs came, when the races met. A first, tenuous contact. But those first sputters announced their presence in a swelling bubble moving at light speed.

  So there appeared above in the brilliant night a gray thing ancient and knowing, which hurled down rock and pitted the icelands and drove the creatures back, forced them retreating through the vent into the inward sea, where now with crude tools they kept watch, their brute sciences used to cup some rock from the core and buoy it, to make the upwellings and warm spots in the crust that would keep the vents wide, allow a shred of possibility that these huge things needed and would not let slip from them.

  So the impasse came, with the slow tick of time running against these blind things, against the pre-EMs who had fled downward with them. For a while they would be safe from the passive Watcher. Ten kilometers of ice could stop any thermonuclear blast, absorb the slamming punch of an asteroid, withstand the furious bursting of its sun going nova—which the machine civilizations had used before in Aquila; Nigel knew that from the Marginis records, though the conventional astronomers had another explanation—and so the Watcher waited.

  Impasse. They remained, enduring and yet trapped, sealed into their bleak sea with the certainty that the stone above would win in the end. Without the freedom to crawl out, to learn the Newtonian web of laws that governed life in freedom from water but enslaved to gravity, they could not hope to match and destroy the Watcher.

  So in their songs there had to be tales of a brave and foolish time when gallant ones had sought the vacuum, been pounded and destroyed, and so dragged back down to make their tales and rage against the thing that waited at the top of the long vents. Yet the fact that they kept the vents open, tending them like fires that must never go out, meant that the tales still lived and the harsh judgment of history had not bowed them down, not driven them finally back to the core, where they would cluster about the embers and die.

  Okay keep looking but I tell you he’s gone.

  Stay at this depth, Carlos, I’m not leaving—

  Okay okay, but I want to hear the report.

  Shut up—hey—no light in the cabin!—I can’t see with—

  I just want to—

  Shut up

  He felt a slackness in his legs. Every movement took enormous energy. He reached over, got a grip on the medfilter. It looked okay. The plug-ins—

  He swore. The canister of interfaces was gone. The hoses where it clamped to the side were open, bare. Hitting this creature had ripped it away.

  So he was finished. Within an hour the buildup of residue in his blood would lead from nausea to spasms and then into a merciful coma. Without a receiving system, some fine-webbed fiber to accept the sludge that the medfilter leached from him, the device would not work.

  Nigel sighed. Betrayed in the end by a malf. No philosophical lesson here, unless it was the eternal one: We die from entropy.

  He peered down. No sign of the ship. He would call them now. If they could find him in time, all well and good. It had been a temporary gesture, irrational at best, an attempt, he now saw, to make some fleeting contact with the life he knew must lurk in the shadows beyond the lights. He smiled at his own folly. So—

  Something made him turn to the mottled, pitted hide beside him. It stretched away, filling half of space, mute as stone waiting for the chisel. He frowned.

  Jesus you hear that Madre Dios a war

  If there was the right kind of fiber under the skin …

&n
bsp; Ninety percent destruction a full nuclear exchange all four major powers Jesus

  Where’s the message from then

  Orbital stations they’re still alive but they say there’s no way they can continue transmission for long the power requirements are too much now but Jesus

  Nigel hung, letting the news wash over him, and for a long time could not think. Humanity driven to its knees. And by its own hand.

  Talk flooded through him, from the submersible and then a full comm from the Lancer meeting. He listened and yet the weight of it could not fully come to bear. His instinctive defenses blunted the news, the details, the train of numbers and blasted cities and death counts, of nations erased and lands turned to cinder.

  Slowly he began to move again. He blocked the stream of talk. He drew back into himself and made his hands do what he knew they had to do, despite the chaos of emotions that ran through him.

  Unclamp the medfilter. Cut some piping from the frame sharpen the pipe to a point, using the laser cutter.

  Attach the tubing. Issue start-up commands.

  Even at these pressures and in this chill, the system came up to full mode. He hooked it into the med inputs in his suit. A simple vein tap was enough for now.

  The wall of flesh glistened beneath his working phosphors. It writhed with soft hands of pale crimson and purple. Intricate patterns, arabesques of line and big, mottled patches. So he had been wrong: In this ocean that was a world lived something that could see such patterns, or else they would not have evolved. Perhaps the swift self-luminous thing they saw earlier? There had to be a vast, complex ecology here, schools of fish-like things to feed on, a pyramid of life. The submersible had probably frightened them away.

  He realized he was theorizing, delaying. The knowing of it released him from the storm of emotion he was repressing and he gave himself over to it.

  He drove the point of the pipe full into the mass of flesh. The movement cast a shadow, lunging and enormous across the plain.