Diamonds in the Sky

by Mike Brotherton, Ed.

  * * *

  Though David and Ellen, with the wisdom of ages at their disposal, discussed billions of options through parallel optical channels at near lightspeed, the question was simple:

  Would it bother the dance of the cosmos if we help? Ellen asked. Modani has befriended us, with no interference on our part, for a perfectly moral and sentient reason. That makes it different; a friend is not a specimen. This matters to me!

  But the supernova! David replied. Why save someone now, only to have them die even more painfully of radiation poisoning? Or do we try to stop a supernova, too and alter the evolution of an entire galaxy?

  David, this galaxy will evolve anyway. Maybe not the same way, but so what? Anyway, by the laws of chaos, even the littlest conscious thing we do might eventually change things more than a supernova. Besides, delaying a supernova would be an interesting project. I’m not sure even we could do that!

  There might be another way to handle the Supernova, David replied, but Modani and his people would have to be mentally strong enough to learn, very quickly, that the universe is much different than it has always been to them. We may have to destroy their culture to save their lives.

  Perhaps not. The first step is Sani’s illness. Let the new patterns form from there.

  * * *

  “Pardon us, Gentle Modani. I am Daiffidi and my mate, Ellani,” the silvercrest gestured to his companion, “is a physician of some ability, and I know a thing or two as well. Perhaps we could help you, who have been generous with your advice for us.”

  The gold moved her hands and produced a seaflyer by some conjuror’s trick. Modani thought momentarily that these people were just the type of charlatans that should be avoided at all costs. But then the seaflyer quietly and purposefully flew on toward the hut. What conjuror could make it do that? Despite his rational philosophy, he did not dismiss the gods entirely; he had only a lack of evidence. But here might be evidence! He pranced nervously.

  The one called Ellani read this tension and sang the song of jest. “Forgive my theatrics, Gentleone, but that bird was, well, part of me. It will look in on Sani to see if we need to make haste. Please don’t worry; it only looks like magic. We have much to tell you, friend.”

  They claimed no magic, but what art could do that! “Much indeed!” he stammered, “But we should hurry.”

  Ellani only fluffed comfortingly. “Sani is asleep and does not suffer now.”

  How could she know? Modani wondered. But he led them at a normal pace.

  * * *

  Once at the hut, Daiffidi took up immediately with the young ones. Modani and Ellani went behind the rude curtain, where the gull perched on the rim of the sleep basket in which Sani curled. Ellani held out a hand. “Your lessons begin now, Gentleone.”

  Ellani displayed a posture of simplicity to him, and the bird flew to her hand.

  It dissolved into a sphere of white and melted into her hand, which became empty as if the bird had never existed. It was too much.

  Modani fell upon the floor and wailed in the minor key of abjection, his mental universe crashing down around him as he uttered the formulas he had learned as a youth. “Forgive my unbelief, I pray. Forgive my lack of sacrifices. It is my fault, not Sani’s; curse me, not the one who is faultless.”

  But the presumed god, Ellani, fluffed in disappointment and frustration, crest down in despair at his obeisance.

  “No, no,” she protested. “We are just very ancient people who have learned a few wonderful tricks through the ages.”

  Modani looked up, crest splayed in embarrassment.

  Ellani smoothed it as a parent would a nestling’s.

  * * *

  A thousand astronomical units away in the heart of the distended red star, nuclei roared from collision to collision like lions caged in desperately little space. The worst of these rattlings made their torturous way through dense stagnant plasma to the outer layers of the star. Free of the compressed core, the eruption burst forth and roiled the great distended atmosphere. Gas slopped gas over its gravitational border and spiraled onto its dying white dwarf companion.

  A lesser star might have gone nova and blown off the excess in a self-extinguishing spasm, but this white dwarf was heavy and drank deep from its companion; the infalling hydrogen and helium sustained a stellar atmosphere thick enough for a gently pulsing fusion reaction. A few kilometers deeper, the helium ash of this fusion, fused into carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon. Below that, the core of the white dwarf, already dangerously massive and degenerate, grew even heavier.

  David and Ellen’s telescopes noted the flickering, and updated their model. It could not be too long now — a billion seconds, perhaps.

  * * *

  Ellen saw Sani stir from her fog of pain. A brief ripple of uncertainty went through Sani’s crest and Ellen took her hand from Modani’s crest. “I’m afraid I’ve disturbed your mate.”

  The Tha-Li woman made a gesture of unconcern. “My pardon, Gentleone, but what did you do?”

  Crest and featherfur rising in hopeful anticipation, Ellani produced and absorbed the seaflyer.

  “Marvelous!” Sani even managed a chirp of delight. “How did you do it?”

  A volume of infrared communication passed between Ellen and David in a millisecond; it was review — they had already made their decision.

  “First,” Ellen said, “we must be the greatest secret of your lives, because what we are and what we have would change the pattern of your race. So please hold all this down the gut. Understood?”

  Modani nodded, but Sani’s crest rose a bit.

  “Would that be so awful? I knit, but while I dream of many patterns, only a few get finished. The children need to eat,” she clicked apologetically. “I think what our culture might become on its own is like some big pattern in the future, which we may or may not finish. Is so abstract a thing worth the hunger of even one child?”

  “It is a hard choice, Sani,” Ellani agreed. “Yes, some pattern will develop regardless. But think of the millions of lives that have been spent through your history to get you this far. And look at your priests and kings; some are good men, no doubt, but would you trust most of their lot with the abilities we have? Or would you have us reign like gods, picking, choosing, disciplining and inevitably remaking you into our image?”

  Sani’s crest fell back. After a long silence, she said. “I understand. But I ask you, whatever you are, to pity the children who may die.”

  Ellani nodded gravely. “We promised we would save Sani, and that means save your world as well. It’s a somewhat bigger project than you can now understand, but, Modani, if you and your family will keep our secret, we will do it.”

  Modani held still for several heartbeats to show contemplation, then flicked his crest in agreement.

  Ellani’s featherfur suggested motherly understanding. “And yes, Sani, we pity all those who suffer and die. We were once flesh and blood, just as you are…”

  * * *

  Everyone watched the operation, magnified and displayed on a large flat screen grown by David, who narrated for the wide-eyed tall-crested young ones.

  Ellen laid a finger on Sani’s tumor, and sent some of her nanocells in through the pores under Sani’s featherfur. Using ultrasound, she found the nerves and blood vessels that served the tumor. At incredible speeds, her nanocell constructs severed and cauterized the vessels, starving the tumor. She found where the tumor was pressing Sani’s spine, and busily ate it away, sending the debris into a limbic vein system. Normal cells began dividing immediately to replace the tumor.

  Something in their past evolution prepared the Tha-Li for massive cell replacement. David noted.

  Li is passing through a spiral arm and has drifted through young star clusters for millions of years, she replied. More than one supernova may have helped select survivors.

  Ellen made a special nanocell that included a diamond stylus to serve as her tool, and then, atom by atom, she charted the prote
ins of a cancer cell and found out how it was fooling Sani’s immune system. She sent nanocells to the organ which ran Sani’s immunological defenses and made a few slight improvements. With their chemical blindfolds removed, Sani’s own scavenger cells attacked the cancer cells with impressive efficiency.

  Job done, Ellen’s nanocells rushed back to her finger, and her host’s beaks clicked with surprise and happiness.

  “What,” Sani inquired following all the congratulations, “is it like to have such powers?”

  “It is,” David answered, “like having an almost infinite set of choices and trying to decide what to do, or not do with them. You worry about the non-choices forever.”

  Sani’s crest fell a bit. “You don’t sound entirely happy,” she clucked.

  Ellen gently stroked the featherfur on Sani’s forehead, and cooed. “Don’t worry. We can tell ourselves to be happy, or even tell ourselves to just not think about it. Then everything is fine.”

  * * *

  A thousand astronomical units away, another David and Ellen reformed themselves in the cells of their communications base. They shared anticipation. The best part of splitting themselves this way would be the thrill of discovery when they rejoined the selves still on Li. Being two places at once was nothing particularly new to them, but this would be a significant separation in distance.

  They expanded the communications base’s thermonuclear powerplant and diverted work to an ultra-efficient microwave transmitter with the capacity of thousands of terawatts. When it was done, David and Ellen formed themselves into netlike fabric, spread themselves in front of the beam and were thrown toward the incipient supernova by a blast of microwaves too big to pass through the tiny holes of their net.

  The universe contracted all around, and the great angry red star, now blue-shifted into the x-ray spectrum, rushed toward them as their own tiny microscopic lasers twinkled, acting in unison to urge the odd atom or dust mote out of their way.

  Even a hundred astronomical units out, David and Ellen saw that the space around the red giant was rich in matter. Approaching from the white dwarf side, the accretion disk looked like a dark line against the surface of the reddish giant star, except where it was closest to the white dwarf and hottest. To sensors shielded from the direct light of the stars, space was filled with the reddish glow of discarded atoms.

  Many of these atoms were already ionized by the ultraviolet part of the white dwarf’s spectrum, so, to their magnetic field, it was like falling into another pillow, or diving into molasses.

  It’s going to be very, very close, David.

  Yes; there is perhaps already enough mass in the accretion disk.

  But not on the star itself. It’s still below Chandrasekhar’s limit. If we were to ignite it now, in a nova, it would blow the disk and some of the companion’s atmosphere away.

  And there’d be a little time even after it passes the limit?

  Maybe, Ellen. But the timing depends on things inside the white dwarf we cannot possibly know. We’ll have to control things in real time.

  Leave a relay?

  Maybe…

  I am not afraid, they told each other.

  The fall through the giant’s hot sticky plasma breath toward their ticking cosmic time bomb would take years, but there was no help for that. It was, in fact, enough time for even their long lives to pass before them in detail.

  * * *

  Modani’s crest stayed rigidly poised between up and down as Daiffidi explained the danger from the tiny red disk in the sky that did not move. The telescope made it easier, but still, it was a stretch of comprehension. What he grasped was that stars could explode in big ways and small ways, and that the tiny white speck next to the disk that did not move could explode in either way. It was particularly hard to understand that that tiny point was heaver than the huge red egg.

  But he had no basis for questioning his benefactors as Daiffidi told them how to build shelters that would protect them if the star exploded in the small way. They would need to live underground as a separate sun scorched the land for a few weeks.

  “We should survive that,” Sani remarked, full of the confidence of restored health. “Especially if we take seed stock into the shelters with us.”

  Modani touched her bill with his. “I think there is more. Daiffidi, there is no guarantee, is there, that such preparations will be sufficient? In the worst case, if the star explodes the large way, what will it be like?”

  For one of the few times in the year Modani had known him, Daiffidi hesitated. “There will be burning,” he finally said. “The neutrinos themselves won’t quite kill you this far away, but some of the atoms throughout your world will become radioactive. A gravitational wave will flex the planet. The temperature of your planet’s mantle will increase a degree or so. Magma will start moving.

  “A few days later, a blast will reach you. X-rays and Gamma rays will cascade into your upper atmosphere and it will appear to burn. A blast of photons will scorch your planet’s surface. But no one will be here. In the far reaches of your planetary system, we are preparing a fleet to take you to a new world before that happens. You’ll have a badly shocked culture, but better that then none at all.”

  But Modani resisted that thought. “What would happen if we stay with our ancestors?”

  Daiffidi showed discomfort. “Things will seem to back off for a bit, but silent invisible and lethal particles will sweep through as the star dims to merely the brightness of another sun in your sky. Within a week of that the star will become a visible hairy globe that will increase in brightness again until, for several weeks, it floods you with a million times your own sun’s brilliance. The deep sea shelters will last the longest, but we think the oceans may boil away, eventually. It will take years to dim; the planet’s surface will be cleansed of everything.”

  So they would all become Daiffidi and Ellani’s foundlings, shorn of their world, their history rendered quaint and meaningless. A great emptiness came over Modani.

  “Don’t give up hope yet,” Ellani said.

  * * *

  David and Ellen fell on the moon of a subgiant planet in a delicate resonance orbit that skirted the edge of the red hot vacuum disk around the two stars. They began immediately to devour the moon. In an hour, their two hundred kilograms of nanocells became four hundred. In three days, they became as massive as a small moon themselves. They spread themselves out in a great sheet of matter, balancing between gravity and photons, shielding the planet from the glare of the star, drinking in the wind from the disk and channeled it down to the planet, using the energy of its fall to the surface to run a vast refrigerator, pumping heat out the other side.

  In a month, the planet had gained enough mass to affect its orbit. In two months, the resonance was broken and it was on a trajectory which would take it first through the outer layers of the red giant and then onward toward the white dwarf.

  * * *

  On a crisp clear night, Modani watched the star and tried to imagine what was happening. He felt a confusion of feelings. Yes, he felt pride in the telescopes he had built which had shown exploding stars and discredited the cult of Drua, but that had been Daiffidi and Ellani’s knowledge. And he felt pride in the shelters built in caves and in great tubes on the sea floor. But he and Sani were too healthy and active for their age, something which had began to attract notice as their friends passed on. Little by little, they had withdrawn and now kept to themselves and their small fields. Thus it was a surprise to have folk approach from out of the night. But caution turned to happiness when Daiffidi, Ellani, and Dosni identified themselves.

  “The years treat you well, Gentleones,” he greeted them, touching beaks with all.

  “Ah, years ignore us, but you have fought them well. And Sani?”

  “Still in the race, thanks to you. But we both see the finish line.”

  He brought them in, and helped Sani up off her blanket to let her touch beaks with neck unbent.

&nbs
p; “We understand. That is what we’ve come to talk to you about. We think Dosni is well prepared to take over your duties. And we have a promise to keep.”

  “Ah, elders,” Dosni said, “To speak of promises reminds me of my mate at home. But before I go, I have a request. You have told us you were once flesh and blood, like us. What did you look like?” Dosni’s eyes reflected the sunset from the hut’s single window, and so seemed to glow with curiosity. Modani flicked his crest in amusement at his son’s insatiable thirst for the new.

  “Do you promise not to be afraid?” Ellani replied — part in jest, Modani thought.

  The young one’s featherfur ruffled down in embarrassed assent.