by Ben Bova
The computer complied with a single wink of a green light. Within moments, Noura’s lovely face filled the bridge’s main display screen.
Aleyn sank into the command chair and found himself smiling at her. “I need you, dearest Noura. I need you to keep me sane.”
“I know,” she said, in the vibrant low voice that he loved. “I’m here with you, Aleyn. You’re not alone anymore.”
He fell asleep in the command chair, talking with the image of the woman he had left a thousand lightyears behind him. While he slept the ship’s life support system sprayjected into his bloodstream the nutritional equivalent of the meal he had not eaten.
The following morning Aleyn resumed his scan of the sphere. But now he had Noura to talk to.
“They don’t seem to know we’re out here,” Aleyn said. “No message, no probe—not even a warning to go away.”
“Perhaps there are no living people inside the sphere,” said Noura’s image from the comm screen at Aleyn’s right hand.
“No people?” He realized that her words were being formed by the computer, acting on the data in its own core and relaying its conclusions through the interactive Noura program.
“The sphere seems very old,” said Noura’s image, frowning slightly with concern.
Aleyn did not answer. He realized that she was right. The computer was drawing his attention to the obvious signs of the sphere’s enormous age.
He spiraled his ship closer, searching for a port through which he might enter, staring hard at the pictures the main display screens revealed, as if he could force the sphere to open a hatch for him if he just concentrated hard enough. Aleyn began to realize that the sphere truly was old—and it was falling into ruin. The gases venting into space were escaping from broken pipes. Many of the structures on the sphere’s outer surface seemed collapsed, broken, as if struck by meteors or simply decayed by eons of time.
“This was built before the Sun was born,” Aleyn murmured.
“Not that long ago,” replied Noura, voicing the computer’s calculation of erosion rates in vacuum caused by interstellar radiation and the rare wandering meteor. “Spectral analysis of the surface metal indicates an age no greater than two hundred million years.”
Aleyn grinned at her. “Is that all? Only two hundred million years? No older than the first amphibians to crawl out of the Earth’s seas?”
Noura’s image smiled back at him.
“Are they still in there?” he wondered. “Are the creatures who built this still living inside it?”
“They show no evidence of being there,” said Noura. “Since the sphere is so ancient, perhaps they no longer exist.”
“I can’t believe that. They must be there! They must be!”
For eight more days Aleyn bombarded the sphere with every wavelength his equipment could transmit: radio, microwave, infrared laser light, ultraviolet, X rays, gamma rays. Pulses and steady beams. Standard messages and simple mathematical formulas. No reaction from the sphere. He sprayed alpha particles and relativistic electrons across wide swaths of the sphere, to no avail.
“I don’t think anyone is alive inside,” said Noura’s image.
“How do we know where their receivers might be?” Aleyn countered. “Maybe their communications equipment in this area broke down. Maybe their main antennas are clear over on the other side.”
“It would take years to cover every square meter of its surface,” Noura pointed out.
Aleyn shrugged, almost happily. “We have years. We have centuries, if we need them. As long as you’re with me I don’t care how long it takes.”
Her face became serious. “Aleyn, remember that I am only an interactive program. You must not allow my presence to interfere with the objectives of your mission.”
He smiled grimly and fought down a surge of anger. After taking a deep, calming breath, Aleyn said to the image on the screen, “Noura, my darling, the main objective of this mission is to keep me away from you. Selwyn has accomplished that.”
“The major objective of this mission,” she said, in a slightly lecturing tone, “is to observe the instabilities of a turbulent G-class star and relay that data back to Earth.”
Aleyn jabbed a forefinger at the main display screen. “But we can’t even see the star. It’s inside the sphere.”
“Then we must find a way to get inside, as well.”
“Ah-hah! I knew you’d see it my way sooner or later.”
Aleyn programmed the computer to set up a polar orbit that would eventually carry the ship over every part of the gigantic sphere. The energy in the antimatter converters would last for millennia. Still, he extended the magnetic scoops to draw in the thin scattering of hydrogen atoms that drifted through the void between the stars. The gases vented by the sphere’s broken pipes undoubtedly contained hydrogen, as well. That would feed the fusion systems and provide input for the converters.
It was precisely when the engines fired to move the ship to its new orbit that the port began to open.
Aleyn barely caught it, out of the corner of his eye, as one of the auxiliary screens on his compact bridge showed a massive hatch swinging outward, etched sharply in bright blood-red light.
“Look!” he shouted.
Swiveling his command chair toward the screen, he ordered the ship’s sensors to focus on the port.
“Aleyn, you did it!” Noura’s image seemed equally excited.
The port yawned open like a gateway to hell, lurid red light beyond it.
Aleyn took manual control of the ship, broke it out of the new orbit it had barely established, and maneuvered it toward the opening port. It was kilometers wide, big enough to engulf a hundred ships like this one.
“Why now?” he asked. “Why did it stay closed when we were sending signals and probes to the sphere and open up only when we lighted the engines?”
“Neutrinos, perhaps,” said Noura, with the wisdom of the ship’s computer. “The fusion thrusters generate a shower of neutrinos when they fire. The neutrinos must have penetrated the sphere’s shell and activated sensors inside.”
“Inside,” Aleyn echoed, his voice shaking.
With trembling hands Aleyn set all his comm channels on automatic to make certain that every bit of data that the ship’s sensors received was sent back Earthward. Then he aimed his ship squarely at the center of the yawning port and fired its thrusters one more time.
It seemed as if they stood still while the burning-hot alien sphere moved up to engulf them and swallowed them alive.
The port widened and widened as they approached until its vast expanse filled Aleyn’s screens with a sullen, smoldering red glow. The temperature gauges began to climb steadily upward. Aleyn called up the life-support display and saw that the system was drawing much more energy than usual, adjusting the heat shielding and internal cooling systems to withstand the furnacelike conditions outside the ship’s hull.
“It’s like stepping into Dante’s inferno,” Aleyn muttered.
With a smile that was meant to be reassuring, Noura said, “The cooling systems can withstand temperatures of this magnitude for hundreds of hours.”
He smiled back at her. “My beloved, sometimes you talk like a computer.”
“It’s the best I can do under the circumstances.”
The port was several hundred kilometers thick. Aleyn’s screens showed heavily ribbed metal, dulled and pitted with age, as they cruised slowly through.
“This must be the thickness of the sphere’s shell,” he said. Noura agreed with a nod.
Once they finally cleared the port he could see the interior of the sphere. A vast metallic plain extended in all directions around him, glowing red hot. Aleyn focused the ship’s sensors on the inner surface and saw a jumble of shapes: stumps of towers blackened and melted down, shattered remains of what must have been buildings, twisted guideways that disappeared entirely in places where enormous pools of metal glittered in the gloomy red light.
“It
looks like the roadway melted and then the metal solidified again afterward,” said Aleyn.
“Yes,” Noura said. “A tremendous pulse of heat destroyed everything.”
The sphere was so huge that it seemed almost perfectly flat from this perspective. Aleyn punched at his controls, calling up as many different views as the sensors could display. Nothing but the burnt and blackened remains of what must have been a gigantic city. No sign of movement. No sign of life.
“Did they kill themselves off in a war?” Aleyn wondered aloud.
“No,” said Noura. “Listen.”
Aleyn turned toward her screen. “What?”
“Listen.”
“I don’t—” Then he realized that he did hear something. A faint whispering, like the rush of a breeze through a young forest. But this was pulsating irregularly, gasping, almost like the labored breath of a dying old man.
“What is it?”
“There is an atmosphere here within this shell,” said Noura.
Aleyn shook his head. “Couldn’t be. How could they open a hatch to space if . . .”
But the computer had already sampled the atmosphere the ship was flying through. Noura’s voice spoke what the other display screens showed in alphanumerics:
“We are immersed in an atmosphere that consists of sixty-two percent hydrogen ions, thirty-four percent helium ions, two percent carbon, one percent oxygen, and traces of other ions.”
Aleyn stared at her screen.
“Atmospheric density is four ten-thousandths of Earth standard sea-level density.” Noura spoke what the other screens displayed. “Temperature outside the ship’s hull is ten thousand degrees, kinetic.”
“We’re inside the star’s chromosphere,” Aleyn whispered.
“Yes, and we’re cruising deeper into it. The cooling systems will not be able to handle the heat levels deeper inside the star.”
For the first time Noura’s image appeared worried.
Aleyn turned to the control board and called up an image of the star on the main screen. It was a glowering, seething ball of red flame, huge and distended, churning angrily, spotted with ugly dark blotches and twisting filaments that seemed to writhe on its surface like souls in torment and then sink back again into the ocean of fire.
The sound outside the ship’s hull seemed louder as Aleyn stared at the screen, fascinated, hypnotized. It was the sound of the star, he realized; the tortured, irregular pulse beat of a dying star.
“We’re too late,” he whispered at last. “This star has already exploded at least once. It killed off the civilization that built the sphere. Burned them all to a cinder.”
“It will destroy us too if we go much deeper,” said Noura.
What of it? Aleyn thought. This entire mission is a failure. We’ll never gain the knowledge that I thought we could get from studying this star. It’s past the period of turbulence that we need to observe. The mission has failed. I have failed. There’s nothing on Earth for me to go back to. No one in the Hundred Worlds for me to go back to.
“Aleyn!” Noura’s voice was urgent. “We must change course and leave the sphere. Outside temperatures will overwhelm the cooling systems within a few dozen hours if we don’t.”
“What of it? We can die together.”
“No, Aleyn. Life is too valuable to throw away. Don’t you see that?”
“All I see is the hopelessness of everything. What difference if I live or die? What will I accomplish by struggling to survive?”
“Is that what you want?” Noura asked. “To die?”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t that what Selwyn wants, to be rid of you forever?”
“He is rid of me. Even if I go back to Earth the two of you will have been dead for more than a thousand years.”
Noura’s image remained silent, but the ship turned itself without Aleyn’s command and pointed its nose toward the port through which they had entered.
“The computer is programmed to save the ship and its data banks even if the pilot is incapacitated,” Noura said, almost apologetically.
Aleyn nodded. “I can’t even commit suicide.”
Smiling, Noura said, “I want you to live, my darling.”
He stared at her image for long moments, telling himself desperately that this was merely the computer speaking to him, using the ship’s data files and his personal holos to synthesize her picture and manner of speech. It was Noura’s face. Noura’s voice. But the computer’s mind.
She doesn’t care if I live, he told himself. It’s the data banks that are important.
With a shrug that admitted defeat, Aleyn put the nose-camera view on the main display screen. A shock of raw electricity slammed through him. He saw that the giant port through which they had entered the sphere was now firmly closed.
“We’re trapped,” he shouted.
“How could it close?” Noura’s image asked.
“You are not of the creators.”
It was a voice that came from the main display screen, deep and powerful. To Aleyn it sounded like the thunderclap of doom.
“Who said that?”
“You are not of the creators.”
“There’s someone alive in the sphere! Who are you?”
“Only the creators may return to their home. All others are forbidden.”
“We are a scientific investigation mission,” Noura’s voice replied, “from the planet—”
“I know you are from a worldling you call Earth. I can see from your navigational program where your home world is located.”
His heart racing wildly, Aleyn asked, “You can tap into our computer?”
“I have been studying you since you entered this world.”
Noura said swiftly, “Aleyn, he’s communicating through our own computer.”
“Who are you?” Aleyn asked.
“In your tongue, my name is Savant.”
“What are you?” asked Noura.
“I am the servant of the creators. They created me to survive, to guard, and to protect.”
“You’re a computer?” Aleyn guessed.
For half a heartbeat there was no response. Then, “I am a device that is as far beyond what you know of computers as your minds are beyond those of your household pets.”
With a giggle that trembled on the edge of hysteria, Aleyn said, “And you’re quite a modest little device, too, aren’t you?”
“My function is to survive, to guard, and to protect. I perform my function well.”
“Are there any of the creatures still remaining here?” Noura asked.
“No.”
“What happened to them?”
“Many departed when they realized the star would explode. Others remained here.”
“To try to prevent the star from exploding?” Aleyn suggested.
“That was not their way. They remained to await the final moments. They preferred to die in their homes, where they had always lived.”
“But they built you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To await the time when those who fled return to their home.”
“You mean they’re coming back?”
“There is no evidence of their return. My function is to survive, to guard, and to protect. If they ever return I shall serve them.”
“And help them to rebuild?”
“If they wish it so.”
Noura asked, “Do you have any idea of how long ago your creators left?”
“By measuring the decay of radioactive atoms I can count time. In your terms of reference, the creators fled approximately eighteen million years ago. The star’s first explosion took place eleven thousand years later.”
“First?” Aleyn asked. “There have been more?”
“Not yet. But very soon the next explosion will take place.”
“We must get out of here,” Noura said.
“That is not allowed.”
“Not—what do you mean?” For the firs
t time Aleyn felt fear burning along his veins.
“I am the servant of the creators. No others may enter or leave.”
“But you let us in!”
“To determine f you were of the creators. You are not. Therefore you may not leave.”
The fear ebbed away. In its place Aleyn felt the cold implacable hand of cosmic irony. With a sardonic smile he turned to Noura’s image.
“I won’t have to commit suicide now. This Savant is going to murder me.”
Noura’s image stared blankly at him. It had no answer.
Aleyn pulled himself up from the command chair and went back through the narrow corridor to the ship’s galley. He knew that the computer automatically spiced his food with tranquilizers and vitamins and anything else it felt he needed, based on its continuous scans of his physical and psychological condition. He no longer cared.
He ate numbly, hardly tasting the food. His mind swirled dizzyingly. An alien race. The discovery of a lifetime, of a dozen lifetimes, and he would not live to report it. But where did they go? Are they still out there, scattering through the galaxy in some desperate interstellar Diaspora?
Is that what the people of Earth should have done? Abandon their homeworld and flee among the stars? What makes humans so arrogant that they think they can reverse the course of a star’s evolution?
He went to his cabin as the miniature serving robots cleared the galley table. Stripping off his uniform, Aleyn was surprised to see that it was stained and rank with sweat. Fear? he wondered. Excitement? He felt neither at the moment. Nothing but numb exhaustion. The ship’s pharmacy was controlling his emotions now, he knew. Otherwise he’d be bashing his head against the metal bulkhead.
He crawled into the bunk and pulled the monolayer coverlet up to his chin, just as he used to do when he was a child.
“Noura,” he called.
Her face appeared on the screen at the foot of the bunk. “I’m here, Aleyn.”
“I wish you were,” he said. “I wish you truly were.”
“I am with you, my dearest. I am here with you.”
“No.” he said, a great wave of sadness washing over him. “You are merely a collection of data bits. My real Noura is on Earth, with Selwyn. Already dead, perhaps.”