Radio and microwave readouts jumped to the top of their scales. The external cams flared with light. Sheets of rippling electricity, swathing Proserpina’s hull and rebroadcasting like crazy. “What!”
Could any get in here? Flashes of light current? And how much microwave dosage was she getting?
Best get into her insul-suit—and fast. “Crew! Go to insul-suits.” She shucked her coverall and squirmed into antiradiation garb that looked like a silvery wetsuit. It clung coldly to her bare skin. Jordin came through a hatch, doing the same.
Banging. Thumps. Screeching metal on metal.
From inside.
“Oh damn! The Darksiders—” Shanna raced hand over hand, down a tube, around a corner. She could hear crew footsteps thumping in the corridors above. She slipped, hit the wall, rebounded from a bulkhead, swiveled—and stopped before the view port for the cold lab. Cracks snaked across the frosty circle.
The alien body inside had revived. Its tin-gray parts moved with jerky purpose. It jumped and jittered. A claw swung at the view port again and stopped. Shanna flinched away.
It—or the intelligence controlling it—must have realized what would happen if it broke out. Emerging into ship temperature, the rules of superconduction would be suspended. Ordinary electrical resistance would prevail. Heat would build up as its currents suddenly met resistance. Zap. Death by Ohm’s law.
She watched the thing jitter around uncertainly. The Darksider body must have reacted reflexively to the input surge DIS had tried. It came to life and automatically fought to escape. And then thought better of it… Now it stood motionless on the cold lab’s examination table amid the restraining straps’ tangled ruin. Shanna fancied that it glared.
“What’s up, DIS?” she asked.
“I am trying to integrate its behavior patterns with input.” The voice was coded to be male and warm, tailored to her tastes, but it still managed to come over as canned.
“Any ideas?” Jordin asked.
“It has some limited autonomy. I gather from inductively reading its inner currents that it is caught in a behavioral dead end.”
“Something like a logical loop?”
“Perhaps.”
Without being asked to, DIS had switched from lab analysis to dealing with the immediate emergency. Good ol’ DIS. The heating of the hull, its sensor monitors informed Shanna, affected the surface skin only. Those secondary, lightning-bright lower-frequency discharges were annoying—obviously she wasn’t going to finish her message to Earthside just yet—but nothing more than that.
“Jordin, keep an eye on it,” Shanna said. “I’ll brief the crew and check the hull.”
She relied on her training, got that done, then got herself calmed down. Getting her immediate adrenaline-pumping alarm to fade, her racing heart and gulping breath settled back to normal—with meditation skills, that took two minutes. Then came a wave of fierce joy.
She couldn’t reach out to the presumptive aloof denizens of the Oort cloud. But quite evidently something had come exploring on its own and touched them instead. Rippling currents along their hull, prodding its emissary Darksider ’bot.
What could do that? Time to gather the crew and do some brain-storming. The burden of being captain was the detail, but the reward was seeing the problems, having first crack at them. Maybe have a little party afterward to celebrate leaving Pluto orbit. They were all getting irritable, even the once amiable Jordin. So she gave herself one more minute and listened to good ol’ bombastic Wagner.
3.
INSTIGATOR
THOUGH THE GALAXY APPEARS to be a swirling pinwheel of light, most of it is nothing. Emptiness. Utter black oblivion.
Or so it seems to small mortal eyes. Yet huge resources abound in the dark. Entities move there, unseen. They witness the ebb and sway of worlds from far beyond. Their perspective is larger, longer. This is how they see the inner, warmer realm:
The forms of life that arise on planets, encased in flesh or carapace, in fur or fin, see the universe through a narrow slit of the spectrum, light’s brimming wealth.
Evolution prunes and whittles its subjects so they take advantage of the greatest flux their parent stars can offer. Seldom does planetary life evolve to sample the lazy, meter-long wavelengths of the radio or the pungent snap of X-rays.
So they do not witness the chaotic tumble of great plasma clouds between the stars. They see nothing hanging between the hard points of incandescent light, and so they falsely assume that what they call space is just that.
Yet stars, those brimming balls of radiance, continually spew forth matter which fills the void. The starwind streams out, expelled by snarling magnetic storms.
A human hand dipped into this gale from a spacecraft would snatch up only a few tens of molecules. By the time the thinning gale reaches the rim of the solar system, the density drops to a thousandth of that handful. Then this billowing wraith wind thins further—and meets the colder, denser fog that hangs between the stars.
There, between sun space and interstellar space, the comets coast, waiting for a chance collision to begin their weary inward journeys. Something happens in that realm that is no mere meaningless dance of matter and energy. Though invisible to human eyes, the banks of clotted plasma moving there are complex and forbidding. And alive.
Seen in an immense radio lens, the vast reaches would seem to have knots and puckerings, swirls and crevasses. Here the particles thicken, there they disperse into gossamer nothingness. And moving amid this shifting structure are thicker clots still. Some huge eye, sensing radio waves a kilometer long, would see them as incandescently rich. Their skins would shine where magnetic constrictions pinch and comb their intricate internal streamings. Filaments like glistening hair would wave and shimmer in the slow sway of ancient, energetic ions.
An even larger “eye” could hear the booming calls and muted, tinkling cadences of their conversations. Their talk began before the birth of the arrogant star nearby, now blaring away its substance in winds and magnetic whorls.
These Beings are unseeable by anything that evolved on simple, raw planets. They live through the adroit weaving of electrical currents. They feed on the electric potentials that trickle through the comet clouds. Their interiors are highly ionized plasmas, filigrees of ions and electrons in their eternal deft dance, long strands smoldering and hissing with soft energies. Moving at tens of kilometers per second, these inner cores sweep up magnetic fields and harness the induced electrical fields.
Even the best astronomy of small, planet-bound, chemically driven intelligences could only glimpse the momentary flaring of these plasma veins. The larger arteries and organs of the Beings would be beyond all but truly immense radio eyes—certainly far larger than anything contemplated by humans, even after the rocket-powered breakout into their own solar system. Each of the Beings stretches across a light-day of thick plasma and molecules.
If the entire solar system, including dim Pluto, were reduced to the size of a human fingertip, the bulk of the Oort cloud of iceballs would lie ten yards away from that finger. Yet these spaces could still encompass only a few hundred of the Beings, and have for billions of years.
Bodies so vast must run by delegation. A pulsing stomach busy digesting induced currents cannot know immediately that a distant molecular arm hungers for this spark of life. The intelligences that evolved to govern this huge bulk then resemble parliaments rather than dictatorships.
Yet even assemblies have names. And must at times speak with one voice.
The habit of these particular Beings had long been to assign names by the principal traits each displayed—age-old but not immutable. Still, to other intelligences these traits themselves were mysterious, fundamentally unfathomable. To represent them by the signs and conventions of mortal discourse is to falsify.
Further, over the yawning eons, Beings formed linked pairs, an electromagnetic yin and yang. This proved to have greater stability, since countercurrents repulsed, keeping
nearby Beings from merging destructively. Most moved and grazed on upwelling fresh fields, in company with a Being of opposite polarity. Assigning the linkmates gender, as she or he, is a human convention only.
Outlining the unknown begins with a gesture toward the known. To convey even a sliver of the flavor, though, demands simplification. One must remember that the gift and curse of language is to render complexity into clarity, through a simplicity that must lose much. This can make profundity appear commonplace. Yet it must be.
What follows should best be understood as singing.
From Ring, Forceful’s grim linkmate, came ringing agreement. A quick chorus of assent forked forth from Mirk and Chill, their social offspring, now grown beyond the early stage of Protos. Beings shaped natural, recently born Protos into members of their community.
The young ones liked the far, cold reaches of the Vastness beyond all stars; it kept them agreeably out of reach. Soon, despite the time delay that waves took to span these reaches, came assents from them and their linkmates, Sunless and Dusk. These were echoing calls, hollow-sounding and rich in bass ion harmonics.
They formed a block of six: Forceful and Ring, their Protos Mirk and Chill, and their Protos’ linkmates Dusk and Sunless. Thus far they had been able to outweigh with firm argument the others, the Eight, who still wanted to press on. That faction desired to plunge in past the outermost planet’s eccentric orbit and into the hot lower depths.
Only once before had any Being ventured into those treacherous regions. The ancient, woeful tale of Incursor had taught the Beings not to venture inward.
That Incursor had been brave was never doubted. In the Beings’ early era, when they first evolved to consciousness in the bow shock, much had been ventured. Incursor’s aim had been to fathom fully their own origins. He had voyaged inward, in an expedition assisted by many Beings, a faction known still as the Inbounds. Incursor discovered much, but in studying an inner world he became lost. Legends spoke of occasional bursts of Incursor’s unique voice, but the messages were tangled in the starwind and never lasted long. Sobered by this, the Beings took as an article of faith the Outbound view—that exploration of the stars was their destiny.
But the Inbounds never quite gave up. Instigator had slowly marshaled her strength. For long eras she had worked to understand how life of any kind could arise inward, and her experiments were renowned. Instigator’s findings were already revered by Beings around distant stars.
And now the balance had been thrown even further the way of the Inbound Eight, by disaster.
Rumors had whispered in from distant Beings—remote even by their own vast standards for measuring space—who fed near the older stars. Strange tales indeed. Stories of the surfaces of many little rocky worlds tucked in close to stars, which had lately been rotting into life. Here “lately” meant on the proper scale of high intelligences—the time needed by a star to trace out its orbit around the center of the galaxy itself. A respectable time.
The words from the stars spoke of a low, obscene, hot life. Solids. Not powered by the clean transformations of electromotive force, but by the clumsy building up and tearing down of molecules.
These rot-born beasts were swamps. They seethed with the messy contaminants that made up the cometary iceballs. Their spectral signals the Beings had deduced from their explorations of the icy motes that would, on occasion, loop in and out of planetary systems, swinging into lethal zones where heat clawed at them.
Forceful shot back,
Instigator sent fluttering coils of turbulence at this insult.
Even in this argument they and Mirk and Chill followed the ancient convention, that subordinate generations spoke as one. If they disagreed among themselves, they remained silent—which was often a blessing, their elders strongly believed.
Forceful rejected this in plumes of incandescent effrontery.
Ominously Instigator coiled portions of herself into dark striations.
Instigator shot back.
Instigator purled off portions of herself to show disarming openness.
Forceful sent coils of skepticism.
Recorder showed startled puzzlement.
Recorder sent rumbling bass notes of discordance.
Recorder sent firmly,
Instigator said.
Derisive laughter came, but in such long wavelengths that the Being—or Beings—who
sent it could not be resolved, even using the antennas of the largest of them, Recorder. Vexing, but Recorder had suffered such insouciance before.
4.
THE SOLAR RAMPARTS
SHANNA GAZED at the pale crescent of Pluto falling behind. Its moon, Charon, looked outsize, fat. It was, at about half Pluto’s diameter. Thirty years ago, the astronomers said, it was just an iceball. Now it brimmed with a filigree of warming nitrogen and water, as Pluto did. Pale gas rimmed both crescents.
The source of the energy that drove this lay farther out from Pluto. And Uziki, the shy physics type, had found out how. After Ferrari’s death, the remaining five had reshuffled duties to cover the tasks. Her original crew position was in engineering and computers, but she had a Ph.D. in plasmas. She had found that the energy came in subtly, as electrical currents in a thin plasma column, pointing straight in toward the sun.
The nuclear drive rumbled hard at her back, rattling the decks. Proserpina was now riding along that column’s outer sheath. The plasma physicists Earthside thought they could learn a lot about how the whole mechanism worked by looking at the conditions at its boundaries, for some reason.
Not her field of expertise, but it made sense—something was confining the current flow, shaping it neatly toward Pluto. What lay at the other end of this mechanism nobody had even guessed, so far. Something big and strange, for sure.
“Picking up a lot of turbulence,” Jordin said from the side couch.
“Plasma waves?”
“Yeah, a lot like the stuff coming from the bow shock zone up ahead, I’d say.”
“Low frequency? Like Voyager picked up?” About plasma physics she knew at least enough to ask questions, but not much more.
“Sure is. Pressure waves, running down this sheath, keeping the currents nicely aligned.”
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