Diamonds in the Sky

by Mike Brotherton, Ed.

  “You too, Modani?’ Ellani asked. He nodded. What had he to fear?

  But, before his eyes, their perfect Li bodies melted into a hairless, fleshy lipped, biped half again his size, with a bulging skull and odd flesh protuberances. He was prepared, intellectually, for the difference, the alienness. But he had been thoroughly imprinted with the old fears of devils, monsters and jealous gods as a young Li, and his featherfur fluffed out involuntarily, embarrassing him. In spite of himself, he backed away.

  Dosni’s crest was relaxed, however, and his eyes were bright and curious. He asked Daiffidi and Ellani many questions, which they answered without embarrassment, which Modani had always been too deferential to pose. But Modani made no effort to stay his son. His own reluctance to ask personal questions was the imprint of a more cautious time and a more stern upbringing.

  “Father, I need to go back to my own house, now,” Dosni said at last, long toward midnight. Modani nodded in assent. Dosni lived with his young mate a short trot down the trail, not a dangerous journey even in these times, and there was work to be done tomorrow.

  So, to Modani’s relief, Daiffidi and Ellani resumed their Li form and they all made farewells to Dosni. Afterwards, the four remaining friends went into Modani’s house and settled down and pushed sucking needles through the skins of fermented tholfruit.

  “What promise did you mean,” Modani finally asked, slightly less inhibited and still unclear as to what Daiffidi’s greeting statement had meant.

  “We promised to save Sani’s life,” he answered, simply.

  “But you did!” Sani chirped.

  “For the tissue-thin slice of a world line. We can do much better than that, but there is a cost to an indefinite life span which is very hard to explain. You must imagine yourselves going on without end, and ask yourselves if that is what you really want.”

  “I think I understand,” Sani chirped in low, thoughtful tones, “that to live in such a manner is both its own blessing and its own curse. I know the blessing, but what is the curse?”

  “There is,” Ellen added softly, “some wisdom in your myth of a musician who wished for wings, and, having her wish granted, loved flying so much that she never used her hands again…”

  “…and so became the mother of all flying things,” Modani added. “I think I understand the dilemma. In fact, by just making the offer you have put us in it, have you not? For if we refuse now, our end becomes not simply an inevitability, but a form of suicide.”

  “My mate!” Sani interjected. “That’s not fair to our friends. Daiffidi, we have suspected for some time that you could do this for us,” her crest made an ironic half rise and settled, “or to us. And we have not asked. Someone could call that a form of suicide — being too polite to ask for our lives. Well, I am curious and want to know more than I have life in which to learn. How is it with you? What is the problem?”

  “We all exist,” Daiffidi said, “as patterns of data and logic, systems of input and output which can include biological parts or not. It doesn’t matter as long as the same sensory input leads to the same conscious image. We can exist in any calculating machine that is large enough, and for Ellani and me, these assemblages of nanocells give us the greatest independent physical capability.

  “We worry about why we keep going, whether our existence serves any significant purpose. Can anything in an infinite cosmos claim to be significant? We accumulate knowledge, but it all falls within known bounds — it is like numbering all the points on a line. But however pointless existence is, there never seems sufficient reason to stop existing.” He flipped his crest in a yes-and-no gesture. “So we go on.”

  “It’s a logical trap, really, but I doubt it is possible to appreciate the full complexity of it without having the logical resources we have.”

  “We shouldn’t be too discouraging,” Ellani added. “We don’t worry when we don’t want to worry, we don’t feel sad if it isn’t convenient, and we’ve had an awful lot of fun. This living forever isn’t bad at all, but it is a decision you need to make, and, in our experience, it’s a decision that doesn’t get unmade.”

  Sani closed her eyes completely, then opened them again. “I’m not sure.”

  Modani’s featherfur bristled again with memories of village stories about immortal ghouls that sucked life fluids from the living like juice from a tholfruit. “Gentleones,” he said, “I am overcome. Forgive me if I absent myself a moment for nature and to find the rightful place for my featherfur.”

  Everyone nodded at him and he left the group to be alone in his garden for a few moments, fertilizing this and that. He told himself over and over that this strange offer was from his dearest friends. Sani and he could live forever. But at a price — a price that would clearly mean giving up much of what he thought he knew about life. Could he do that? Could he embrace such a strange future?

  The larger moon hung low in the east, a bright crescent the size of a child’s kicking ball held at arm’s length; they had stayed up late and the sun would soon rise. Modani had no trouble in seeing the craters and mountains on the back side, nor the minuscule disks of the nearer wanderers; it was as if there was more light. His hindquarters shifted involuntarily and his crest rose.

  Slowly he looked up. The tiny red disk which did not move was now a brilliant beacon, a searing point of light in the west that cast its own shadow.

  Keeping himself as calm as he could, he turned toward the house and called out.

  “Sani. Gentleones, it has started…”

  * * *

  A white dwarf is a small target. Tides stretched the planet one way and squeezed in another. Great magnetic fields formed and whipped up an uncontrollable magnetic storm. Radiation from both sides lanced through David and Ellen faster than they could repair themselves. Still they fought to keep it on course.

  The dwarf flared and the planet broke, disrupted as billions of atmospheres of pressure blasted through its ends. All became plasma, trapped in fields beyond any control. There would be no escape. To preserve themselves for a few more moments, they contracted to an essential core and used the mass and energy of their dying outer layers to cool the inner layers.

  Have we succeeded, David?

  I think so, but it all depends on how advanced the dwarf’s core is, and how much matter we will blow away from it. Thoughts were harder now, as cells struggled to contain damage and redundant pathways were lost.

  We are evaporating, Ellen observed. It seems strange. I wish we could send this experience to the other David and Ellen.

  If we could, we would send ourselves. Since we can’t, the logic is that we accept what must happen, and enjoy it. I think they will understand and be happy for us. Since we are them, we would understand in their place. That is all they need to know; that it can be done. They will know that… that last logical barrier to will can be broken.

  David, I’m losing memories. I’ll hold onto you until the last.

  And I will hold onto you. So, after a hundred million years, to end. I am at peace. And free. Free… Farewell.

  Farewell.

  * * *

  Photons ran rampant inside the white dwarf, chipping off pieces of nuclei here and there, which were gobbled up by larger, more stable nuclei. Here, a neon nucleus collided with a helium nucleus head on, and before they could disentangle themselves, a neutron stole away with their excess energy, and a magnesium nucleus was born.

  An iron core started to form, the harbinger of catastrophe imminent. Iron had no excess energy to give in support of the hungry masses pressing upon it. The star began to shrink, compress, and burn hotter. Soon the remaining nuclear fuel would detonate. Immediately. Devastatingly.

  But on the surface, triggered by the disintegrating planet with far more hydrogen and helium than the white dwarf could digest in its usual incremental manner, another explosion was already in progress, throwing matter out and away. A glowing cloud, bright as a million suns, fled out from the white dwarf. The influx st
opped. The star stopped growing poised on the brink of disaster.

  On Tha-Li, four beings watched the sky.

  * * *

  “You should go to the shelters,” Daiffidi said.

  Modani’s beak dipped to him in negation. “We have agreed to leave the space for younger Tha-Li. I feel, one way or another, we are done with this world. Now, tell me. The travels we have made with you, the gardens we have grown together, the troubles we have taken to fend off robbers without killing them,” Sani asked. “If we became like you, would we remember all of this?”

  “Yes, you will,” said Ellen, “and more, much more.”

  They were silent for a long time, watching the new sun burn. Then Sani’s crest raised slowly in a coy humor. “Will I be able to mate again with my Modani?”

  Ellen smiled. “For eternity, if you want.”

  Her crest rose high, her eyes went open and bright. “Then, yes, take us with you.”

  Afterword:

  This story was first published in an anthology, The Age of Reason, edited by Kurt Roth, at SFF.net in 1999. In addition to making supernova astrophysics an experimental science it touches on some of the “big issues,” like “what does it all mean?” and “where are we going?”

  I was asked to briefly elaborate on some of the science in the story. Hopefully the following will prove useful, or at least point people in the right direction.

  A hundred thousand years before Sani’s cancer took hold, the great blue disk and ultraviolet arms of the majestic Whirlpool galaxy filled David Martin’s field of view.

  The Whirlpool galaxy is about 23 million light years away, south of the tip of the Big Dipper’s handle. It is about half the mass of the Milky Way and 70% of its diameter. Assuming David is traveling near the speed of light, he is only a little more distant from the galaxy than the visible spiral is wide. Google “Whirlpool Galaxy.”

  Orienting the superconducting loops in every nanocell of his body…

  David and Ellen’s personalities reside in a swarm of trillions of “nanocells.” These are conceived to be roughly the size of biological cells, but made of much sturdier stuff, and not permanently specialized. Linked as a data processing system, they form a supercomputer. As a physical system, the cells can join each other in almost any imaginable configuration. Read Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and project.

  …he tacked against the faint plasma breeze of the galaxy’s central black hole, gradually bending his path toward his chosen decelerator.

  Curious, David and Ellen reconfigured themselves into a great conducting loop and soared in the plasma currents of the cluster…

  When a charged particle (the “plasma breeze”) encounters a magnetic field, it is deflected one way, and, action equaling reaction, the object generating the field is pushed in the other. A current loop creates a magnetic field with a north and south pole, much like a bar magnet’s.

  Most of a billion years of experience was set carefully aside from conscious thought so that they could enjoy real-universe sensation again.

  Emulated emotions, such as boredom, can be turned off, when inconvenient. In this case, the fun of experiencing something anew can be lived over and over.

  As they left the region, they reformed themselves into a thousand telescopes, which they spread into a globular constellation a hundred million kilometers across; a giant’s eye…

  David and Ellen can see Sani’s world by forming a large optical synthetic aperture telescope. The wider the telescope, the smaller the objects it can see. For the mathematically inclined, R ≈ 1.22 L/A where R is the resolution in radians. L is the wavelength of light and A is the telescope aperture. To get actual size, rather than the angular size, multiply by the distance to the object. In visible light (a wavelength of 500 nm, or 5 E-7 m), a one-meter-wide telescope would be able to resolve objects 5 E-7 radians apart. A 100 million kilometer-wide telescope (1E11 m) might resolve 5 km sources at 100,000 light years. That’s ideally — the source must provide enough photons for all the elements of the array to combine, which limits this trick to bright objects.

  There! An old ruddy, overinflated windbag of a star circled a white dwarf grown heavy from the giant’s effluvia. If it grew heavy enough, it would explode as a supernov…

  The white dwarf would become a “Type Ia” supernova. Wikipedia has a good article.

  More massive stars form ultra dense iron cores by fusion reactions of lighter elements. The cores collapse when they become more massive than Chandrasekhar’s limit (Google “Chandrasekhar”), about 1.4 solar masses, starting a process that leads to the explosion we see and a neutron star remnant.

  A Type Ia may not go that way. A Type Ia supernova starts out as a white dwarf a little less than Chandrasekhar’s limit which then gains mass — generally hydrogen and helium from a nearby companion star that is losing mass in its red giant stage. This forms a layer on top of the carbon and oxygen “ash” from previous fusion reactions. As the white dwarf gets close to Chandrasekhar’s limit, the picture gets unclear. But the fusion reactions that create heavier elements may happen all at once in a thermonuclear explosion that “deflagrates” the star before it can collapse into a neutron star. Since this always happens at about the same mass, and produces supernovae of about the same brightness (about 5 billion times solar luminosity at peak), Type 1a supernovae can be used as “standard candles” to gauge the size of the universe. Google “standard candles.”

  …before they had moved out of the Mind of Mars to seek adventure in the real cosmos with nanocell bodies.

  In this future history, the Mind of Mars is a supercomputer on the moon Phobos in which billions of human-descended Martians live as computer programs in virtual worlds of their own choosing. They can go back and forth from biological, or other technological bodies, at will. It’s mentioned in After the Vikings (ScorpiusDigital.com).

  Close enough to the orange star for heavy tides, it had a large moon locked in synchronous orbit of about a day and a half. The star’s gravity tried to stretch the system, adding orbital energy which the tides in the planet’s ocean tried to take away, pounding on its continents — neither, David thought, would win their argument in the lifetime of the orange-tinted star.

  Imagine our moon in a geosynchronous orbit like communications satellites! We wouldn’t have the twice daily lunar tides, but we would still have solar tides, which are about half as strong. Modani’s world is closer to its dimmer, but not that much less massive, sun. Its solar tides are about as strong as our combined lunar and solar tides.

  Reaching the star, they parachuted through its ionic wind, slowed to a planetary pace, and drank in the light of the star, giving trillions of trillions of tiny flywheels their fill.

  A nanoscale flywheel composed of a single molecule is very strong per unit weight and can store much more energy than any conceivable chemical battery.

  We may have to destroy their culture to save their lives.

  When nuclear scientist Enrico Fermi realized that both alien civilizations and interstellar travel were at least physically possible, if not easy, with sufficiently advanced technology, he asked “Where are they?” One possible answer is that they are or have been here, but are very careful to avoid disturbing our culture — the way a human scientist might not interfere with a colony of chimpanzees. In “Star Trek” lore, this is called “the Prime Directive.”

  Daiffidi told them how to build shelters that would protect them if the star exploded. They would need to live underground as a separate sun scorched the land for a few weeks.

  To prevent the supernova, David and Ellen must trigger an “ordinary” nova, burning away the hydrogen and helium accumulating on the surface of the white dwarf. The result will be in the top range of ordinary nova luminosity, around a million Suns.

  “…In the worst case, if the star explodes the large way, what will it be like? … the first radiation to escape the star will be neutrinos… The temperature of your planet’s mantle will incre
ase a degree or so, almost instantly. Magma will start moving.

  Maybe.

  The nuclear reactions in the current model of a Type Ia supernova would still produce a lot of neutrinos, though maybe not as much as a core collapse. I’ve gone a bit beyond what I can show quantitatively here, though we have to allow some new astronomical discoveries to the hundred million years or so between our time and the story’s!

  “…seconds later, a blast of photons will scorch your planet’s surface…”

  There should be a gamma ray burst as the shock wave reaches the white dwarf’s surface. The “star” rapidly expands and, over the next few weeks, a huge ball of vaporized and highly radioactive nickel and iron will provide most of the energy. Big explosions take time.

  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.”