by David Brin
And the place where it was leading us.
A gasp shuddered through the Plotting Room, as every Earthling expressed the same emotion at once.
“Oh, no,” groaned Lieutenant Tsh’t. “It c-can’t be!”
Dr. Gillian Baskin sighed.
“I don’t believe it! All that misery … just to wind up back here?”
Before me, starting to fill the forward screen, there stretched yet another sight I could barely describe at first. A structure of some kind, nearly black as space. Only when Gillian ordered further image enhancement did it stand forth from the background, glowing a deep shade of umber.
It looked roughly spherical, but spiky all around, like one of those burr seeds that stick to your leg fur when you go tramping-through undergrowth. I thought it must be another mammoth starship, looming frightfully close.
Then I realized — we were still barreling along at great speed, but its apparent size was changing only very slowly.
It must be really huge, I realized, shifting my imagination. Even bigger than the Zang ship!
That jaundiced globule cruised alongside Streaker, shivering in a way that made me nervous. Scratchy noises assailed us again through the loudspeakers, making the glavers sway their big heads, rolling bulbous eyes and moaning.
“They say that we must follow,” translated the Niss Machine.
Lieutenant Tsh’t stuttered.
“Sh-shall we try for the t-transfer point? We could turn quickly. Dive back in. Trust Kaa to—”
Gillian shook her head.
“The Zang wouldn’t let us get two meters.”
Her shoulders hunched in a human expression of misery that no hoon could mimic. Clearly, this jagged place was a familiar sight that no one aboard Streaker would have chosen to visit again.
I caught the eye of Sara Koolhan. For the first time, my fellow Jijoan seemed just as much at a loss as I. She blinked in apparent confusion, unable to grasp the immensity of this thing ahead of us.
A strange sound came from the only male human present. The mute one who never speaks — Emerson d’Anite. He had been especially quiet during the trip from Izmunuti, silently studying the strange colors of t-space, as if they carried more meaning than the words of his own kind.
Now, staring at the huge, prickly ball, his face expressed the same astonishment as his crewmates’ faces, intense emotion twisting the dark man’s wounded features. Sara moved quickly to Emerson’s side, taking his arm and speaking gently.
I recall thinking, If this place made the Terrans desperate enough to flee to Jijo, I’m not surprised they’re upset finding themselves right back here.
A familiar voice cried out behind me, in tones of awed delight.
“Uttergloss!”
I turned in time to see Huck come wheeling into the Plotting Room, waving all four of her agile g’Kek eyes toward the big screen.
“That thing looks so cool. What is it?”
Another pal reached the open door not far behind her. An urrish head snaked through at the end of a long, sinuous neck, its single nostril flaring at the unpleasant reek of Earthling fear.
Arriving from another direction, a red qheuen lunged his armored bulk rudely past Ur-ronn while she hesitated. Pincer-Tip’s vision cupola spun and he snapped his claws in excitement.
I should have expected it, of course. They weren’t invited, but if my friends share one instinct across all species boundaries, it’s a knack for finding trouble and charging straight for it.
“Hey, furry legs!” Huck snapped, nudging my flank with two waving eyestalks while the other pair strained to peer past the crowd. “Make your overstuffed carcass useful. Clear a way through these fishy things so I can see!”
Wincing, I hoped the dolphins were too busy to note her impertinence. Rather than disturb the crew, I bent down and grabbed Huck’s axle rims, grunting as I lifted her above the crowd for a better view. (A young g’Kek doesn’t weigh much, though at the time my back was still healing. It twinged each time she squirmed and spun from excitement.)
“What is that thing?” Huck repeated, gesturing toward the huge spiky ball.
Lieutenant Tsh’t raised her glossy head from the soft platform of her mechanical walker, aiming one dark eye at my g’Kek friend.
“It’ssss a place where we fishy things suffered greatly, before coming to your world.”
Had I been human, my ears would have burned with embarrassment. Being a hoon, my throat sac puffed with apologetic umbles. But Huck barged on without noticing.
“Sheesh, it looks big!”
The dolphin emitted snorting laughter from her moist blowhole.
“You c-could say that. The shell encloses a volume of approximately thirty astrons, or a trillionth of a cubic parsec.”
Huck’s stalks expressed a blithe shrug.
“Huh! Whatever that means. I’ll tell you what it reminds me of. It looks like the spiny armor covering a desert clam!”
“Lookssss can be deceiving, young Jijoan,” Tsh’t answered. “That shell is soft enough to cut with a wooden spoon. If you approached and exhaled on it, the patch touched by your breath would boil away. Its average density is like a cloud in a snowstorm.”
That doesn’t sound too threatening, I pondered. Then I caught the startled look on Sara Koolhan’s face. Our young human sage frowned as her eyes darted back and forth, from data panels to the main screen, then to Tsh’t.
“The infrared … the reemission profiles … You’re not saying that thing actually contains—”
She stopped, unable to finish her sentence. The dolphin officer snickered.
“Indeed it does. A star resides at the heart of that soft confffection. That deceptive puff of p-poison ssssnow.
“Welcome, dear Jijoan friends. Welcome to the Fractal World.”
Lark
HE DIDN’T FEEL COLD. NOT EXACTLY. EVEN though, logically, he ought to.
A cloying mist surrounded Lark as membranes pressed against him from all sides, keeping his body bent nearly double, with knees up near his chin.
Lark felt as he imagined he might if someone crammed him back into the womb.
Soon another similarity grew apparent.
He wasn’t breathing anymore.
In fact, his mouth was sealed shut and swollen plugs filled both nostrils. The rhythmic expansion of his chest, the soft sigh of sweet air, these notable portions of life’s usual background … were gone!
With this realization, panic nearly engulfed Lark. A red haze obscured vision, narrowing to a tunnel as he struggled and thrashed. Though his body seemed reluctant at first, he obliged it to try inhaling … and achieved nothing.
He tried harder, commanding effort from his sluggish diaphragm and rib cage. Lark’s spine arched as he strained, until at last a scant trickle of gas slipped by one nose plug — perhaps only a few molecules—
— carrying an acrid stench!
Sudden paroxysms contorted Lark. Limbs churned and bowels convulsed as he tried voiding himself into the turbid surroundings.
Fortunately, his gut was empty — he had eaten little for days. A cottony feeling spread through his extremities like a drug, filling them with soothing numbness as the fit soon passed, leaving behind a lingering foul taste in his mouth.
Lark had learned a valuable lesson.
Next time you find yourself wrapped up in fetal position, crammed inside a stinking bag without an instinct to breathe, take a hint. Go with the flow.
Lark felt for a pulse and verified that his heart, at least, was still functioning. The persistent stinging in his sinuses — a noxious-familiar stench — was enough all by itself to verify that life went on, painful as it was.
Turning his head to look around, Lark soon noticed that his bag of confinement was just one of many floating in a much larger volume. Through the obscuring mist he made out other membranous sacks. Most held big, conical-shaped Jophur — tapered stacks of fatty rings that throbbed feebly while their basal leg segments pushed u
selessly, without any solid surface for traction. Some of the traekilike beings looked whole, but others had clearly been broken down to smaller stacks, or even individual rings.
Knotty cables, like the throbbing tendrils of a mulc spider, led away from each cell … including his own. In fact, one penetrated the nearby translucent wall, snaking around Lark’s left leg and terminating finally at his inner thigh, just below the groin.
The sight triggered a second wave of panic, which he fought this time by drawing on his best resource, his knowledge as a primitive scientist. Jijo might be a backwater, lacking the intellectual resources of the Five Galaxies, but you could still train a working mind from the pages of paper books.
Use what you know. Figure this out!
All right.
First thing … the cable piercing his leg appeared to target the femoral artery. Perhaps it was feeding on him, like some space-leech in a garish, pre-Contact scifi yarn. But that horror image seemed so silly that Lark suspected the truth was quite different.
Basic life support. I’m floating in a poison atmosphere, so they can’t let me breathe or eat or drink. They must be sending oxygen and nutrients directly to my blood.
Whoever “they” were.
As for the jiggling containers, Lark was enough of a field biologist to know sampling bags when he saw them. Although he could not laugh, a sense of ironic justice helped him put a wry perspective on the situation. He had put more than enough hapless creatures in confinement during his career as a naturalist, dissecting the complex interrelationships of living species on Jijo.
If nature passed out karma for such acts, Lark’s burden might merit a personal purgatory that looked something like this.
He strained harder to see through the mist, hoping not to find Ling among the captives. And yet, a pall of loneliness settled when he verified she was nowhere in sight.
Maybe she escaped from Rann and the Jophur, when these yellow monsters invaded the Polkjhy. If she made it to the Life Core, she might clamber through the jungle foliage and be safe in our old nest. For a while, at least.
He glimpsed walls beyond the murk, estimating this chamber to be larger than the meeting tree back in his home village. From certain visible furnishings and wall-mounted data units, he could tell it was still the Jophur dreadnought, but invaders had taken over this portion, filling it with their own nocuous atmosphere.
That ought to be a clue. The familiar-horrid scent. A toxicity that forbade inhaling. But Lark’s bruised mind drew no immediate conclusions. To a Jijoan — even a so-called “scientist”—all of space was a vast realm of terrible wonders.
Have they seized the whole vessel?
It seemed farfetched, given the power of mighty Jophur skygods, but Lark looked for some abstract solace in that prospect. Those traeki-cousins meant only bad news to all the Six Races of Jijo, especially the poor g’Kek. The best thing that could happen to his homeworld would be if battleship Polkjhy never reached home to report what it had found in an obscure corner of Galaxy Four.
And yet, this situation could hardly be expected to make him glad, or grateful to his new captors.
It took a while, but eventually Lark realized — some of them were nearby!
At first, he mistook the quivering shapes for lumps in the overall fog, somewhat denser than normal. But these particular patches remained compact and self-contained, though fluid in outline. He likened them to shifting heaps of pond scum … or else succinct thun-derheads, cruising imperiously among lesser clouds. Several of these amorphous-looking bodies clustered around a nearby sample bag, inspecting the Jophur prisoner within.
Inspecting? What makes you think that? Do you see any eyes? Or sensory organs of any kind?
The floating globs moved languidly, creeping through the dense medium by extending or writhing temporary arms or pseudopods. There did not seem to be any permanent organs or structures within their translucent skins, but a rhythmic movement of small, blobby subunits that came together, merged, or divided with a complexity he could only begin to follow.
He recalled an earlier amoebalike creature, much bigger than these — the invader who had burst through a ship’s bulkhead, scaring away Rann and the other pursuers who had Lark cornered. That one had seemed to look right at Lark, before swarming ahead rapidly to swallow him up.
What could they be? Did Ling ever mention anything like this? I don’t remember.…
All at once Lark knew where he had encountered the foul smell before. At Biblos … the Hall of Science … in a part of the great archive that had been cleared of bookshelves in order to set up a chemistry lab, where a small band of sages labored to recreate ancient secrets, financed and subsidized by the Jijoan Explosers Guild.
Trying to recover old skills, or even learn new things. The guild must have been full of heretics like Sara. Believers in “progress.”
I never thought of it before, but the Slope was rife with renegade thinking even weirder than my own. In time, we’d probably have had a religious schism — even civil war — if gods hadn’t come raining from the sky this year.
He thought about Harullen and Uthen, his chitinous friends, laid low by alien treachery. And about Dwer and Sara — safe at home, he hoped. For their sake alone, he would blow up this majestic vessel, if that meant Jijo could be shrouded once more in blessed obscurity.
Lark’s dour contemplations orbited from the melancholy past, around the cryptic present, and through a dubious future.
Time advanced, though he had no way of measuring it except by counting heartbeats. That grew tedious, after a while, but he kept at it, just to keep his hand in.
I’m alive! The creatures in charge here must find me interesting, in some way.
Lark planned on stoking that interest, whatever it took.
Alvin’s Journal
WELCOME, DEAR JIJOAN FRIENDS. WELCOME TO the Fractal World.”
That line would have been a great place to finish this journal entry.
The moment had an eerie, intense drama. I could sense the tragic letdown of the Streaker crew, having fled all the way to Jijo’s hellish deeps, and lost many comrades, only to wind up back at the very spot that had caused them so much pain in the first place.
But what happened next made all that seem to pale, like a shadow blasted by lightning.
“Maybe it’sss a different criswell structure,” suggested Akeakemai, one of the dolphin technical officers, calling from the bridge. “After all, there’s supposed to be millions of them, in just this galaxy alone.”
But that wishful hope shattered when Tsh’t confirmed the star configurations.
“Besides. What are the chances another criswell would sit this close to a transfer point? Most lie in remote globular clusters.
“No,” the lieutenant went on. “Our Zang friends have brought us back for s-sssome bloody reason … may they vaporize and burn for it.”
We four kids from Wuphon gathered at one end of the Plotting Room to compare notes. Ur-ronn communicated with her friends in Engineering. Her urrish lisp grew stronger as she became more excited, explaining what she had learned about the spiky ball.
“It is hollow, with a radius avout three tines as wide as Jijo’s orvit, centered on a little red dwarf star. It is all jagged vecause that creates the highest surface area to radiate heat to surface. And it’s just like that on the inside too, where the uneven surface catches every ray of light from the star!”
“Actually, a simple sphere would accomplish that,” explained the Niss Machine in professorial tones. A pictorial image appeared, showing a hollow shell surrounding a bright crimson pinpoint.
“Some pre-Contact Earthlings actually prophesied such things, calling them—”
“Dyson spheres!” Huck shouted.
We all stared at her. She twisted several vision-stalks in a shrug.
“C’mon guys. Catch up on your classic scifi.”
Hoons think more slowly than g’Keks, but I nodded at last.
�
�Hr-rm, yes. I recall seeing them mentioned in novels by … hr-r … Shaw and Allen. But the idea seemed too fantastic ever to take serious …”
My voice trailed off. Of course, seeing is believing.
“As I was about to explain,” the Niss continued, somewhat huffily, “the simple Dyson sphere concept missed an essential geometric requirement of a stellar enclosure. Allow me to illustrate.”
A new pictorial replaced the smooth ball with a prickly one — like a knob of quill-coral dredged up by a fishing scoop. The computer-generated image split open before our eyes, exposing a wide central void where the tiny star shone. Only now a multitude of knifelike protrusions jutted inward as well, crisscrossing like the competing branches of a riotous rain forest.
“Latter-day Earthlings call this a criswell structure. The spikiness creates a fractal shape, of dimension approximately two point four. The interior has a bit more folding, where the purpose is to maximize total surface area getting some exposure to sunlight, even if it comes at a glancing angle.”
“Why?” Pincer-Tip asked.
“To maximize the number of windows, of course,” answered the Niss, as if that explained everything.
“Energy is the chief limiting factor here. This small sun puts out approximately ten to the thirty ergs per second. By capturing all of that, and allowing each inhabitant a generous megawatt of power to use, this abode can adequately serve a population exceeding one hundred thousand billion sapient beings. At lower per capita power use, it would support more than ten quadrillions.”
We all stared. For once, even Huck was stunned to complete silence.
I struggled for some way to wrap my poor, slow thoughts around such numbers.
Put it this way. If every citizen of the Six Races of Jijo were suddenly to have each cell of his or her body transformed into a full-sized sapient being, the total would still fall short of the kind of census the Niss described. It far surpassed the count of every star and life-bearing planet in all five galaxies.
(I figured all this out later, of course. At the time, it taxed my stunned brain to do more than stare.)