The Sunborn

by Gregory Benford

  Julia felt a lurch. “What’s that?”

  Viktor said nothing as his fingers flew over the control board. Julia felt a strumming vibration through the deck. “We’re tilting,” Viktor said. “Something maybe hit us.”

  But the pressure seals were fine, and there had been no audible impact. Vibrations in the deck got deep, strong. “What could have happened?” Killings sent on comm.

  “We’re getting a shove from side,” Viktor said on general comm. He threw a starfield up on the main screen, the view from the forward ’scope. Slowly the center mark crept toward the right. “Is tipping us.”

  The deck began shuddering. A low note sounded. High Flyer’s nose was turning faster now, and the starfield slid visibly to the right. But the short, rotating drum of the living quarters fought the change. It was like holding a turning bicycle wheel by its axis and then trying to tilt it, Julia thought. Angular momentum didn’t want to change. At the axis the coupling collar was protesting. Bearings ground against a fluid universal joint and shed vibrations into the whole ship.

  “Not built to take this quick tipping,” Viktor muttered as he worked at the board.

  Killings said from the status board, “Mechanical linkage is getting stressed. We’re going out of performance range.”

  “Whatever’s tipping us, it’s steady.” Viktor’s voice had gotten tight, not a good sign. “Not impact, no. Something else.”

  Jordin’s voice came in, flat and calming. “I can see you tumbling. There’s a lot of magnetic field built up on your port side. All that, acting like a pressure on the ship’s metal.”

  “So Beings are tipping us over.” Viktor now spoke in his calm, deliberate voice. “Mystery solved. But what to do?”

  Killings said, “Step on the gas.”

  Nobody said anything. Killings went on, “We fire up the reactor, pulse-start it, get up to high specific impulse. We’ll follow a spiral path, getting larger as we accelerate. A moving target. That’ll make it hard to push against us.”

  Elegant. Viktor muttered thanks and got to work. Julia felt the rumble of fluids moving from their aft water tanks. The water was a good, thick absorber, blocking any reactor radiation. It captured the vagrant neutrons that spilled out as the reactor shot up in temperature, ready within less than a minute for fuel. The thumping pumps fed the hot chambers streams of water, and she visualized the gushers bursting into superheated steam, a hundred meters behind them. A pleasantly reassuring push eased her down into her acceleration couch. “Here we go,” Viktor said, running the reactor temperature to a high spike.

  They gained velocity slowly at first. The magnetic side pressure kept pace, still rotating their nose to the right, but within minutes this began to work in their favor.

  “Y’see,” Killings said eagerly, “the faster we spin, the more our exhaust turns against the pressure that’s pushing us to rotate.”

  “Beings behind this, now they get burned,” Viktor said gleefully. He notched up the reactor, and the ship rumbled around them. To Julia it felt like the stirrings of a great beast, roused from slumber.

  She felt tremors run through the ship. They were rotating more now, and she felt the local gravity shift. She closed her eyes, but that just made her feel dizzy. She glanced around and saw that others were holding on to their couch arms and gritting teeth. If this kept on, they would soon not even be able to walk.

  Abruptly she recalled the harrowing moments—decades ago, but leaping fresh to mind—during the aerobraking of the first Mars expedition. Just like then, her mind stopped thinking about ideas and spoke in declaratives. That noise! That shaking! I’m going to die!

  She clenched her teeth and forced that away. Focused—

  Jordin sent, “Seeing some movement in the magnetic pressure zone. Kinda cloudy…”

  On-screen he sent a mixed image, ordinary optical plus a radio topo map. The ship was tumbling visibly now, its bright yellow-green plume forking around behind it. Turbulent horsetails of it sliced through the magnetic cloud topo lines. The natural resultant of the force vectors made High Flyer into a pinwheel, spinning in ever-larger arcs as it spat hard, hot plasma.

  “Getting a big increase of cyclotron emission,” Jordin sent.

  Julia could see it in the all-channel summary. Spikes, quick high flurries, broadband rumbles. Silently, in bands no human ear could sense, a great howl arose from the densely packed Six.

  7.

  PROTO

  FORCEFUL CRIED OUT in pain.

  A searing, cutting edge swept through them. The Six were entwined, to exert the maximum leverage on the tiny traveling machine. It had been exciting at first, to work together—a closer merge than any had ever attempted—and then to start the object tumbling, end over end, as Mirk had foreseen it would.

  Now the tiny machine spat back. Because the Six were so immersed in each other, they could not quickly flee. Mirk took the first cut, as ions fried down his field lines. The particles soon found his tucked-in recesses, where electrical potentials held lodes of knowledge and skill. These shorted out in ruby, snapping bursts. Mirk felt a sheet of pain shoot through his side, and heard the cries as small parts of himself seared away.

  Ring cried.

  Ring screamed as currents stung it. Sunless and Dusk jerked away from Ring, knowing they were next. The searing sliced into them as they struggled to free their entwined lines of force.

  Cries, angry and fearful, shot through them all. At close range their emissions directly pressed against the bodies of each other, fevering the vacuum with calls.

  There came a larger, booming tone, the Summed Voice of the Eight.

  Forceful countered, scrambling away from the agony that clawed at it.

 

  A silence. In fact, the Six had thought the Proto, a New One, would be far enough away from the struggle. But now that the machine was slinging plasma at high speed in all directions, nothing was safe.

  The call went up from each. All thought of tumbling the machine now fled from them.

  Forceful yanked free. Now it could expand its view beyond the constricted focus necessary to press against the tiny machine. All around, for several light-seconds, the sky worked with the snaking strands of the Proto. On its long birthing flight up from the Fount, through the hazards of the planets and the vagaries of the storm, this Proto had left behind the shattered, dying shards of many thousands.

  Selection had pruned away all but the robust. First came the simple forms, fields twined together and barely capable of self-organization. During their growth—as the great storms drove them outward, away from the strong trapping fields of the planets, and at last free of the roving turbulences of the Hotness—they competed with each other. Fields curled and died, plasmas fizzed and fought. Most structures died. The better were able to digest the energies and field strengths of the lesser. But as the survivor Protos approached the Cascade, they dimly became aware of its threat. The churning vortices there could break a Proto and splatter it into rivulets. Some slowed, avoiding the whipping violence ahead.

  Forceful vaguely recalled doing that, so long ago. Few Protos who shot through the Cascade lived.

  And this one now—it brimmed with bristly intelligence, knowing itself for the first time. It reached out with tendrils of coiling flux, felt and heard…and braked. It slowed, gaining the time to assemble itself all the better.

  To one side it sensed the brute energies of young plasma. It had not dealt with these virulent eating swarms since its first moments. Then, an enormous solar arch had ripped open at its top and spilled out whorls and cusps of magnetic field. Most of these died within seconds, eaten through by blind gouts of plasma. Many of the young knots screamed in waves of magnetic flux…and fell silent f
orever.

  This Proto remembered that. It began to move sluggishly away from the pinwheel gusher of voracious plasma. But slowly, as it was tired from the long voyage.

  Mirk called, though still racked with fevered pains.

  But the Six were gnarled and fevered, frayed and damaged. They oozed sluggishly away from the searing torch that played among them. Panicked, they babbled and fled.

  All but Chill. Diminished, feeble, it was now a thin disk of spinning fields and chilly plasma. It skated upon the virulent energies now all around it, catching waves and stealing a morsel of momentum where it could. The Six had not brought it to bear upon turning the tiny machine; Chill was far too weak to matter.

  It hung spinning in the sky where the plasma arc cut. Slowly it dragged itself up the field lines, trying to maintain its own coherence. Memories flitted through it, dim shadows of a past it could barely recall. Yet it knew the struggle around it mattered, and above all the Proto must survive.

  Here came the arc, on another revolution. Again the plume bit and seared away part of Mirk. Again the plasma jutted out toward the Proto beyond—and Chill thrust itself forward. In its webbed lattices valences shorted out. Potentials burned and died.

  The snakes of exhaust plasma sparked and ate and in turn died.

  Chill had time for one last signal, a simple waveform of ripples that ran out along the stretched field lines of its outer carapace.

  I go to the True End. Make my death worthy…

  In moments Chill lost structure, decaying by fitful inductance. Fragments spun away. Loops of coherent fields drifted into the tides of flux.

  The Proto moved away now, seeking distance from the deadly pin-wheel. It sensed its new world dimly, but enough to know danger and pain.

  The pressure of Chill’s destruction flung out shards of memory. Kernels of skills arced away, driven by the energies of dying. Some small, faster motes of this wreckage caught up to the Proto. Knots of magnetic structure sped by, some snagging in the Proto’s diffuse fields, buzzing like flies caught in a web. The Proto reached out with burgeoning strength and spooled them in. Here were age-old recollections, shards of times long past.

  The Proto tucked these within it, for study and use. It was willing to learn from anything it encountered. It did not know the concept of genetics, but it would, in time.

  8.

  TORQUES

  “THEY’RE GONE,” KILLINGS SAID. “No emissions from nearby.”

  They all groaned, rose, stretched. It had been four tense hours. Slowly they had reversed the tumbling rotation and reduced the torque on their living cylinder. Through all this they all kept watch at their stations, remembering that the attack had come out of nowhere. The coffee machine had emptied long ago.

  Days before, Viktor had remarked in passing on the basic physics the Six had used. But it was difficult to see how they could have prepared. They were all exhausted and glad to be alive.

  Julia took a break and spent half a day by herself. The sliding sheets of water in her meditation room were perfect for her mood. Mars had been a quiet place, so now the ship’s unending background noise had to be shut out. In her quiet room the embedded electronics threw a calming white-noise blanket. These days Earthside’s pressing populations walled themselves off behind thickening barricades of earplugs, triple-glazed windows, and sound-canceling electronics. She wondered uneasily if this meant she was becoming more akin to Earthside urban dwellers, whose lives got more deadened, like permanent cotton in the ears.

  After some simple rest time, and before her watch came up, she made herself go through the big list of incoming vids. Those from Axelrod were diplomatic but kept returning to his idea of bringing back both zand and Darksiders. “Fah!” she said, shutting it off.

  The next, from Praknor, was even less promising. More data and description of the Marsmat phenomenon. Somehow she was not in a mood to get back to the subject that had obsessed her for decades. Something tugged at her attention, a vague, ghostly shadow of an idea. She felt the gnawing suspicion that ultimate reality lay elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, sensed just beyond the glow cast by the mind’s conscious campfire, heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet…

  She prowled through the sliding sheets of data and graphs and listened to the water sheets falling in the distance, and then there came…a moment.

  Hours later Julia said, “Wiseguy, we’re all here, connected. Ready.”

  Julia kept her voice steady, though she could feel Shanna’s heavy presence even over the comm link. Was it her imagination, or, in the seemingly endless cross talk as Julia tried to get across her revelation, did Shanna try to import some of Julia’s ideas into her own “biospherics model” for Pluto? (Leave it to Shanna to use whatever was the current Earthside jargon.). From the edge in Shanna’s voice, that woman was kicking herself for not making the connections Julia had just explained to them all.

  But how could she have? Shanna hadn’t spent decades slogging away at the Marsmat problem.

  “Bring on the Beings, then,” Killings said enthusiastically.

  “I am staging through the introductory greetings,” Wiseguy said in its usual warm, male, though somehow flat tone. “They still must have explained that your individual names do not bespeak qualities.”

  Viktor said, “You said this before. So how do you do it?”

  The short pause was unusual for Wiseguy. “I…assign qualities to you.”

  “Oh?” Jordin said dryly. “What’s mine?”

  “Jordin Kare is Steadfast.”

  “Um,” Jordin said, “gotta agree with that.”

  Then all the rest of the crew wanted to know theirs. Julia was Introspective, Viktor was Victory, and so on. Julia wondered how the intricately linked software had decided on their qualities. Voice tones? Diction? For that matter, how did people do it with each other?

  This took moments, provoking both laughter and dismay. Julia marveled at how Wiseguy, a self-learning system, had gained personality as they interacted with it. Maybe this was a lesson in itself, she mused. The Beings were magnetic structures that embodied—somehow—information, memory, architectures of personality. With names! They self-organized and adapted and learned, and very little of it seemed to be described well by the Darwinian mechanisms she had learned. The rising, self-making storm they had witnessed, borne out by the sun, had made her rethink her whole conception of life. And then, to think anew about the decades on Mars.

  Julie said, “I want to talk to Instigator first.”

  “Done,” Wiseguy said quickly, as if the artificial intelligence was glad to get beyond the names.

  “Instigator, we want you and the Eight to know that we have found Incursor.”

  9.

  A PATH INTO THE HOTNESS

  FORCEFUL SAID NO. The actual message rendered literally used both hierarchies and webbed cross-correlations, and so had to be squashed to resemble a human sentence:

  {[leaving] | [unbreakable]

  [scorn] | [pity]

  [[binary rebuke]] ~ [negation]}

  Instigator replied,

  Forceful said.

  Joy and Solemn sent together, to stress their point.

  Forceful shot back.

  Bright insisted,

  Forceful sent a seethe of amused contempt.

  Quiet sighed, nearly inaudible.

  Recorder observed,

 
Sunless said,

  Recorder’s helicity-mate, Quiet, sent,

  Forceful began,

  Dusk sent.

  Forceful seldom paused when interrupted, but this time:

 

  Forceful asked,

 

  Forceful let two full transit-times between the Beings pass, making a long silence.

  Dusk’s tone carried a hard edge no Being had heard from her before. These events had changed Dusk, and they no longer knew her.

  Forceful sent fretted wave packets, no discernible content beyond a foul mood.

  Recorder slowly murmured,

  Vain sent—a Being who seldom spoke, like Quiet. But when it did, the Eight listened. Vain was paired in helicity with Eater—who was feasting on the fringes of whorls now stripping off the edges of the fresh solar storm—and so all understood that this was some form of consensual voice for the both of them.

  And so Vain sent them again to consider the deepest dilemmas that confronted Beings. Of course, they did not fear Death—an idea almost wholly theoretical—precisely because it was very rare.

  Instead, they had all through their long lives suffered the Diminishment, losing whorls and thus fractions of memory and self. Such was life. To trim intelligently was ideal; to do it brutally was subtraction. But neither of these was the theoretical absolute…was Death. That province no one knew—by definition of Being.