The Crystal Spheres

by David Brin

  The Crystal Spheres

  David Brin

  Every star in the Galaxy is enclosed in a transparent sphere which can be shattered only from within.

  Won Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1985.

  The Crystal Spheres

  by David Brin

  1

  It was just a luckychance that I had been defrosted when I was—the very year that farprobe 992573-aa4 reported back that it had found a goodstar with a shattered crystalsphere. I was one of only twelve deepspacers alivewarm at the time, so naturally I got to take part in the adventure.

  At first I knew nothing about it. When the flivver came, I was climbing the flanks of the Sicilian plateau, in the great valley a recent ice age had made of the Mediterranean Sea I had once known. I and five other newly awakened Sleepers had come to camp and tramp through this wonder while we acclimated to the times.

  We were a motley assortment from various eras, though none was older than I. We had just finished a visit to the once-sunken ruins of Atlantis, and were hiking out on a forest trail under the evening glow of the ringcity high overhead. In the centuries since I had last deepslept, the gleaming, flexisolid belt of habitindustry around our world had grown. In the middle latitudes, night was now a pale thing. Nearer the equator, there was little to distinguish it from day, so glorious was the lightribbon in the sky.

  Not that night could ever be the same as it had been when my grandfather was a child, even if every work of man were removed. For ever since the twenty-second century there had been the Shards, casting colors out where once there had been but galaxies and stars.

  No wonder no one had objected to the banishment of night from Earthsurface. Humanity out on the smallbodies might have to look upon the Shards, but Earthdwellers had no particular desire to gaze out upon those unpleasant reminders.

  Being only a year thawed, I wasn’t ready yet to even ask what century it was, let alone begin finding some passable profession for this life. Reawakened sleepers were generally given a decade or so to enjoy and explore the differences that had grown in the Earth and in the solar system before having to make any choices.

  This was especially true in deepspacers like me. The State—more ageless than any of its nearly immortal members—had a nostalgic affection for us strange ones, officers of a near-extinct service. When a deepspacer awakened, he or she was encouraged to go about the altered Terra without interference, seeking strangeness. He might even dream he was exploring another goodworld, where no man had ever trod, instead of breathing the same air that had been in his own lungs so many times, during so many ages past.

  I had expected to go my rebirthtrek unbothered. So it was with amazement, that evening on the forestflank of Sicily, that I saw a creamy-colored Sol-Gov flivver drop out of a bank of lacy clouds and drift toward the campsite, where my group of timecast wanderers had settled to doze and aimlessly gossip about the events of the day.

  We all stood and watched it come. The other campers looked at one another suspiciously as the flivver fell toward us. They wondered who was important enough to compel the ever-polite Worldcomps to break into our privacy, sending this teardrop down below the Palermo heights to parklands where it didn’t belong.

  I kept my secret feeling to myself. The thing had come for me. I knew it. Don’t ask me how. A deepspacer knows things. That is all.

  We who have been out beyond the shattered Shards of Sol’s broken crystalsphere, and have peered from the outside to see living worlds within faraway shells… We are the ones who have pressed our faces against the glass at the candy store, staring in at what we could not have. We are the ones who understand the depth of our deprivation, and the joke the Universe has played on us.

  The billions of our fellow humans—those who have never left Sol’s soft, yellow kindness—need psychists even to tell of the irreparable trauma they endure. Most people drift through their lives suffering only occasional bouts of greatdepression, easily treated, or ended with finalsleep.

  But we deepspacers have rattled the bars of our cage. We know our neuroses arise out of the Universe’s great jest.

  I stepped forward toward the clearing where the Sol-Gov flivver was settling. It gave my campmates someone to blame for the interruption. I could feel their burning stares.

  The beige teardrop opened, and out stepped a tall woman. She possessed a type of statuesque, austere beauty that had not been in fashion on Earth during any of my last four lives. Clearly she had never indulged in biosculpting.

  I admit freely that in that first instant I did not recognize her, though we had thrice been married over the slow waityears.

  The first thing I knew, the very first thing of all, was that she wore our uniform… the uniform of a Service that had been “moth-balled” (O quaint term!) thousands of years ago.

  Silver against dark blue, and eyes that matched… “Alice,” I breathed after a long moment. “Is it true at last?”

  She came forward and took my hand. She must have known how weak and tense I felt.

  “Yes, Joshua. One of the probes has found another cracked shell.”

  “There is no mistake? It’s a goodstar?”

  She nodded her head, saying yes with her eyes. Black ringlets framed her face, shimmering like the trail of a rocket.

  “The probe called a class-A alert.” She grinned. “There are Shards all around the star, shattered and glimmering like the Oort-sky of Sol. And the probe reports that there is a world within! One that we can touch!”

  I laughed out loud and pulled her to me. I could tell the campers behind me came from times when one did not do such things, for they muttered in consternation.

  “When? When did the news come?”

  “We found out months ago, just after you thawed. Worldcomp still said that we had to give you a year of wakeup, but I came the instant it was over. We have waited long enough, Joshua. Moishe Bok is taking out every deepspacer nowalive.

  “Joshua, we want you to come. We need you. Our expedition leaves in three days. Will you join us?”

  She need not have asked. We embraced again. And this time I had to blink back tears.

  Of recent weeks, as I wandered, I had pondered what profession I would pursue in this life. But joy of joys, it never occurred to me I would be a deepspacer again! I would wear the uniform once more, and fartravel to the stars!

  2

  The project was under a total news blackout. The Sol-Gov psychists were of the opinion that the race could not stand another disappointment. They feared an epidemic of greatdepression, and a few of them even tried to stop us from mounting the expedition.

  Fortunately, the Worldcomps remembered their ancient promise. We deepspacers long ago agreed to stop exploring, and raising people’s hopes with our efforts. In return, the billion robot farprobes were sent out, and we would be allowed to go investigate any report they sent back of a cracked shell.

  By the time Alice and I arrived at Charon, the others had almost finished recommissioning the ship we were to take. I had hoped we would be using the Robert Rodgers, or Ponce de León, two ships I had once commanded. But they had chosen instead to use the old Pelenor. She would be big enough for the purposes we had in mind, without being unwieldy.

  Sol-Gov tugs were loading about ten thousand corpsicles even as the shuttle carrying Alice and me passed Pluto and began rendezvous maneuvers. Out here, ten percent of the way to the Edge, the Shards glimmered with a brightsheen of indescribable colors. I let Alice do the piloting, and stared out at the glowing fragments of Sol’s shattered crystalsphere.

  When my grandfather was a boy, Charon had been a site of similar activity. Thousands of excited men and women had clustered around an asteroid ship half the size of the little moon itself,
taking aboard a virtual ark of hopeful would-be colonists, their animals, and their goods.

  Those early explorers knew they would never see their final destination. But they were not sad. They suffered from no great-depression. Those people launched forth in their so-primitive first starship full of hope for their great-grandchildren—and for the world which their sensitive telescopes had proved circled, green and pleasant, around the star Tau Ceti.

  Ten thousand waityears later, I looked out at the mammoth Yards of Charon as we passed overhead. Rank on serried rank of starships lay berthed below. Over the millennia, thousands had been built, from generation ships and hiberna-barges to ram-shippers and greatstrutted wormhole-divers.

  They all lay below, all except the few that were destroyed in accidents, or whose crews killed themselves in despair. They had all come back to Charon, failures.

  I looked at the most ancient hulks, the generation ships, and thought about the day of my grandfather’s youth, when the Seeker cruised blithely over the Edge, and collided at one percent of light speed with the inner face of Sol’s crystalsphere.

  They never knew what hit them, that firstcrew.

  They had begun to pass through the outermost shoals of the solar system… the Oort Cloud, where billions of comets drifted like puffs of snow in the sun’s weakened grasp.

  Seeker’s instruments sought through the sparse cloud, touching isolated, drifting balls of ice. The would-be colonists planned to keep busy doing science throughout the long passage. Among the questions they wanted to solve on their way was the mystery of the comets’ mass.

  Why was it, astronomers had asked for centuries, that virtually all of these icy bodies were nearly the same size—a few miles across?

  Seeker’s instruments ploughed for knowledge. Little did her pilots know she would reap the Joke of the Gods.

  When she collided with the crystalsphere, it bowed outward with her over a span of lightminutes. Seeker had time for a frantic lasercast back to Earth. They only knew that something strange was happening. Something had begun tearing them apart, even as the fabric of space itself seemed to rend!

  Then the crystalsphere shattered.

  And where there had once been ten billion comets, now there were ten quadrillion.

  Nobody ever found the wreckage of Seeker. Perhaps she had vaporized. Almost half the human race died in the battle against the comets, and by the time the planets were safe again, centuries later, Seeker was long gone.

  We never did find out how, by what accident, she managed to crack the shell. There are still those who contend that it was the crew’s ignorance that crystalspheres even existed that enabled them to achieve what had forever since seemed so impossible.

  Now the Shards illuminate the sky. Sol shines within a halo of light, reflected by the ten quadrillion comets… the mark of the only goodstar accessible to man.

  “We’re coming in,” Alice told me. I sat up in my seat and watched her nimble hands dance across the panel. Then Pelenor drifted into view.

  The great globe shone dully in the light from the Shards. Already the nimbus of her drives caused space around her to shimmer.

  The Sol-Gov tugs had finished loading the colonists abroad, and were departing. The ten thousand corpsicles would require little tending during our mission, so we dozen deepspacers would be free to explore. But if the goodstar did, indeed, shine into an accessible goodworld, we would awaken the men and women from frozen-sleep and deliver them to their new home.

  No doubt the Worldcomps chose well these sleepers to be potential colonists. Still, we were under orders that none of them should be awakened unless a colony was possible. Perhaps this trip would turn out to be just another disappointment, in which case the corpsicles were never to know that they had been on a journey twenty thousand parsecs and back.

  “Let’s dock,” I said eagerly. “I want to get going.”

  Alice smiled. “Always the impatient one. The deepspacer’s deepspacer. Give it a day or two, Joshua. We’ll be winging out of the nest soon enough.”

  There was no point in reminding her that I had been latewaiting longer than she—indeed, longer than nearly any other human left alive. I kept my restlessness within and listened, in my head, to the music of the spheres.

  3

  In my time there were four ways known to cheat Einstein, and two ways to flat-out fool him. On our journey Pelenor used all of them. Our route was circuitous, from wormhole to quantumpoint to collapsar. By the time we arrived, I wondered how the deepprobe had ever gotten so far, let alone back, with its news.

  The find was in the nearby minor galaxy, Sculptor. It took us twelve years, shiptime, to get there.

  On the way we passed close to at least two hundred goodstars, glowing hotyellow, stable, and solitary. In every case there were signs of planets circling around. Several times we swept by close enough to catch glimpses, in our superscopes, of bright blue waterworks, circling invitingly like temptresses, forever out of reach.

  In the old days we would have mapped these places, excitedly standing off just outside the dangerzone, studying the Earth-like worlds with our instruments. We would have charted them carefully, against the day when mankind finally learned how to do on purpose what Seeker had accomplished in ignorance.

  Once we did stop, and lingered two lightdays away from a certain goodstar—just outside of its crystalsphere. Perhaps we were foolish to come so close, but we couldn’t help it. For there were modulated radio waves coming from the waterworld within!

  It was only the fourth time technological civilization had been found. We spent an excited year setting up robot watchers and recorders to study the phenomenon.

  But we did not bother trying to communicate. We knew, by now, what would happen. Any probe we sent in would collide with the crystalsphere around this goodstar. It would be crushed, ice precipitating upon it from all directions until it was destroyed and hidden under megatons of water—a newborn comet.

  Any focused beams we cast inward would cause a similar reaction, creating a reflecting mirror that blocked all efforts to communicate with the locals.

  Still, we could listen to their traffic. The crystalsphere was a one-way barrier to modulated light and radio, and intelligence of any form. But it let the noise the locals made escape.

  In this case, we soon concluded that it was another hive-race. The creatures had no interest in, or even conception of, spacetravel. Disappointed, we left our watchers in place and hurried on.

  Our target was obvious as soon as we arrived within a few light-weeks of the goal. Our excitement rose as we found that the probe had not lied. It was a goodstar—stable, old, companionless—and its friendly yellow glow diffracted through a pale, shimmering aura of ten quadrillion snowflakes… its shattered crystalsphere.

  “There’s a complete suite of planets,” announced Yen Ching, our cosmophysicist. His hands groped about in his holistank, touching in its murk what the ship’s instruments were able to decipher from this distance.

  “I can feel three gasgiants, about two million asteroid smallbodies, and”—he made us wait, while he felt carefully to make sure—“three littleworlds!”

  We cheered. With numbers like those, odds were that at least one of the rocky planets circled within the Lifezone.

  “Let me see… there’s one littleworld here that has—” Yen pulled his hand from the tank. He popped a finger in his mouth and tasted for a moment, rolling his eyes like a connoisseur savoring fine wine.

  “Water.” He smacked thoughtfully. “Yes! Plenty of water. I can taste life, too. Standard adenine-based carbolife. Hmmm. In fact, it’s chlorophyllic and left-handed!”

  In the excited, happy babble that followed, Moishe Bok, our captain, had to shout to be heard.

  “All right! People! Look, it’s clear none of us are going to get any sleep soon. Lifesciencer Taiga, have you prepared a list of corpsicles to thaw, in case we have found a goodworld?”

  Alice drew the list from her pocket.
“Ready, Moishe. I have biologists, technicians, planetologists, crystallographers… ”

  “You’d also better awaken a few archaeologists and Contacters,” Yen added dryly.

  We turned and saw that his hands were back in the holistank. His face bore a dreamy expression.

  “It took our civilization three thousand years to herd our asteroids into optimum orbits for space colonies. But compared with this system, we’re amateurs. Every smallbody orbiting this star has been transformed. They march around like ancient soldiers on a drillfield. I have never even imagined engineering on this scale.”

  Moishe’s gaze flickered to me. As executive officer, it would be my job to fight for the ship, if Pelenor found herself in trouble… and to destroy her if capture were inevitable.

  Long ago we had reached one conclusion. If goodstars without crystalspheres were rare, and dreamt of by a frustrated mankind, the same might hold for some other star-traveling race. If some other people had managed to break out of its shell, and now wandered about, like us, in search of another open goodstar, what would such a race think, upon detecting our ship?

  I know what we would think. We would think that the intruder had to come from somewhere… an open goodstar.

  My job was to make sure nobody ever followed Pelenor back to Earth.

  I nodded to my assistant, Yoko Murukami, who followed me to the armsglobe. We unfolded the firing panel and waited while Moishe ordered Pelenor piloted cautiously closer.

  Yoko looked at the panel dubiously. She obviously doubted the efficacy of even a mega-terawatt laser against technology of the scale described by Yen.

  I shrugged. We would find out soon. My duty was done the moment I flicked the arming switch and took hold of our deadman autodestruct. In the hours that passed, I watched the developments carefully, but could not help deepremembering.