Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  To his credit he just laughed. Then nodded. Time to change the subject, yes. “I saw in the Earthside feed they made a movie about you.”

  “Hadn’t noticed. Who played me?”

  “Nobody I knew of—hell, it was a century after we left!”

  “Maybe they ran out of material. No more photogenic wars left?”

  “Your movie opened, closed, the theaters fumigated, all trace forgotten in a month or so.”

  Another laugh and some champagne, then some pleasant nuzzling. Redwing exhaled lustily. “My, uh, gear hasn’t been, uh, used … for … gad … centuries. I’m like a statue you returned from the cold to revive.”

  Redwing relaxed utterly; the right time, then. Viviane said, “I don’t want to harsh our mellow, as we ancients used to say, but you told me I’d come back out just as we went down to the surface. I was looking forward to half rations, sleeping on the ground, roasting days, sweat, freezing nights, and making the acquaintance of such vermin as might appear.”

  His face furrowed. “Finding the grav wave detector changes our already vague plans. I dispatched some of the Diaphanous to study the region around it, report back. We’re edging into the solar system, doing a delta-v around a Neptune-sized planet now for recon. Sending Glory the whole agreed-upon spectrum of electromagnetic pings, math intro stuff, the works.”

  “And?” She felt his body stiffen at the question.

  “Nothing. Some scattered emissions from the system, but it blends into a buzz, not a reply.”

  Redwing sat up and waved a hand to alter the display wall: a long angular view of their target, Glory, shimmering in yellow sunlight. Their bow shock rippled the image, so they could not resolve the globe well, but there were indeed biosignatures. He swayed forward, shaggy head bowed, in a melancholy puzzlement at the amassed spectacle of these strange arcing worlds. “So I’m keeping on a bearing for the system. When we’re there, braking all the way, we’ll do a swing-by.”

  “Chancy.”

  “Can’t think what else to do. Silence has a thousand explanations.”

  TWO

  BRAKING

  Once he was alone, he had time to think. It took a while to get Viviane out of his mind, but it was somehow easier to work. Being horny for centuries had downsides.

  Now he had to plan the approach trajectory to the Glory mystery. Time to ramp up the big brake again. The ship had been braking for years now. They had breached the outer shell of pressure from Glory’s solar wind, the shock waves and rising magnetic fields. He had guided SunSeeker in along the long paraboloid of the solar bow shock, a rich lode of plasma that the magnetic brake liked.

  He and Cliff went through the run-up of current in the already deployed magsail. Galactic cosmic rays were fading as a hot stellar breeze bathed SunSeeker’s own magnetic plow. At 200 AU they were past the roiling heliopause, while the white-water slam of the termination shock loomed ahead. None of this could he fathom, except in spectra tuned to the songs of plasma oscillations. Sailing on a sea I cannot see …

  Very well; it was time, the projections said. “Upramp the magsail current,” Redwing said. The Shipside Artilect that integrated all systems from lesser Artilects began preparations, murmuring.

  Now he turned to their target. Glory was a brimming dot beside the hard starburn image. Its ivory pixels were no bigger to his eye than his first glimpse of Titan near Saturn’s beauties. Impossible to see detail, but the atmospheric chem of it was odd, as Beth had said.

  Getting into orbit around Glory itself would require an elegant cushion shot around its star, matching orbital elements out to five figures. Redwing had long respected the trade-offs of flyby delta-v, the dance between masses. The solar flyby to steal a few dozen kilometers per sec from SunSeeker would be tricky, too, if they were to avoid a rough blistering at the end of this long, chilly crossing.

  * * *

  Beth’s method for dealing with dueling confusions was … sleep.

  Soft, glorious slumber, inside the humming mother ship feel of SunSeeker. It was near the end of her watch cycle, so she slipped into the tiny cabin she shared with Cliff, on the cylinder that gave full spin g. As was her lifelong habit, she slipped into a dreamy six hours of rest, using the slumber cowling that induced sleep within mere moments. When she awoke, Cliff lay beside her, snuggling close and aromatic, their overlapping cycles a bit off now in the press of work as they fell toward Glory.

  She rose, showered, listening to the purr of the ship. Pings, pongs, and rattles told of SunSeeker’s steady deceleration. Then she went to the bridge and assumed watch officer status. Quick and sure, she had the Core Artilect report the latest observations of its Astro section. She saw Redwing had been using it while she slept. Always on watch. Not easy, being captain.

  She checked the sleepers, crew to be revived soon, work that demanded care. The robos were simmering up the soon-to-be needed—slow, steady. Weeks before, she had unwrapped the Mylar from Cliff by herself, using her clout to resurrect her husband before bringing other crew back awake as Glory’s star Excelsius approached. Redwing stood more watches than anyone now, and he wanted to bring up all his central crew for the dive into the strange Glorian system. After Cliff came Viviane. The whole ritual of resurrection from cold sleep meant hours of attention to the catheters and sensors, skin-sheets unwinding, drips and diagnostics, fluids bringing energy and the whole world back. The muscles, stimulated manually and electrically for years, needed the grunt labor of fighting gravity, so the hub was providing full Earth-g.

  The system was running well, so she checked the Artilects, too. They had fresh reports. She shuffled through them, noting some nuggets.

  She looked in on the Diaphanous, first Daphne, then Apollo. This pair of knotted plasma patterns had evolved from earlier strains in the Bowl star’s magnetosphere. The Bowl Builders had forced them through artificial selection into their essential Bowl job: maintaining the jet that ran the whole system. Beth could still barely grasp the eons of effort that must have taken, while the Bowl slowly grew.

  Their evolution focused the Diaphanous on keeping their environment, and thus themselves, stable. Apollo was riding half a million miles out from SunSeeker, at the frayed edge of their magnetic brake. Apollo was keeping pace easily, keeping watch … though the pattern was placid, as if he were dozing. Daphne was in SunSeeker’s motor, doing fine guidance of the interstellar plasma flow. Busy. Beth signaled Daphne, a hand wave, but she didn’t want to talk to them. It was hard to talk to plasma beings. They were too different. Even the Artilects had trouble.

  In the mess with coffee and some aroma-rich fried-insect pasta casserole, Beth could see Redwing hadn’t slept at all. He came in for coffee, eyes a bit bleary. “I upramped the magsail current.” Redwing’s rough voice was troubled; she had learned to read him through years of hardship. “We’re making over a thousand kilometers a second infall, so spiral-braking can get us to Glory neighborhood inside a year. Plenty of time to study this grav transmitter.”

  “Viviane hasn’t appeared much yet,” Beth said. “Prob’ly needs more downtime.”

  “I had her report,” Redwing said, coffee mug in his face so she could not read his expression. She had heard rumors about some hanky-panky—to use a fossil term—between those two. Viviane was at the high end of the birth curve, even with updated tech. Maybe they’d been getting a head start? “Seemed to be coming along okay. I sent her to rest up, to do a lot of background updating in her cabin, so she knows about the Bowl, the Diaphanous, gets acquainted with Artilects again.”

  A ping alert from the bridge. Redwing swung away to the operations screen. “Making a mag field change, looks right,” he said, and looked at her expectantly, eyebrows raised. “I’m taking us closer to the emitter as we go by.”

  “Really? You altered the mag field geometry?”

  Redwing shrugged. “It’s sailing, basically. I had the Artilects tell the Diaphanous pair to skew the field, cant us sideways some. Lengthens our infall arc,
flattens our in-spiral. Helps out the drag factor, too. I want to know enough to report Earthside, and a close-up view is essential.”

  She was used to the captain’s way of offhand announcement. “How close?”

  “Near as we need.” He blinked, his classic tell—he had cards to play yet.

  She had used her sleep time to make the Shipside Artilect pursue diagnostics on the plasma-lit grav wave system as SunSeeker fell inward, coming in at an angle toward the plasma blob. The Artilects had done the heavy lifting for her, so Beth opened with, “It’s a multiple charged black hole system. Our wave antennas have spread out to kilometer distances, port and starboard. That improved resolution allowed them to trace the wave intensity, tracking every one of the seventeen smaller-mass black holes. Here’s a sample of their orbits.”

  Redwing frowned. “These we get from the plasma wave signatures?”

  “Yes, the Artilects can backfill the orbits from the emissions. There are more, too, coming through as our antennas give us more data.”

  “These black holes are how big?”

  “They’re tiny, less than a centimeter across—which we get from their mass, using the black hole radius formula.”

  “And their masses from their orbital periods?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Impressive,” the somewhat bedraggled captain said.

  “The bigger mass, the center of this system, has maybe ten to twenty times an Earth mass, so it’s about ten centimeters across. The others are basically very large charged particles. They come swooping down on long ellipses, eccentricities of 0.99. Their orbits look like straight lines. The Astro Artilects think something controls their paths with very large electromagnetic fields. That avoids collisions among the holes. But then something swerves them a little, just a touch—so the near misses generate intense gravitational waves at closest approach—what the astros call the ‘hole-periastron.’”

  Redwing knew that space-time could wrap itself around a dead star and cloak it into a black hole, or jiggle like a fat belly and send out waves that were both compressive and tortional—but that was all he knew.

  “I looked back at Earthside’s take on the patterns.” He waved a hand, and words hung in the air. She read that THE WAVEFORMS RESEMBLE NOT MERGERS OF BLACK HOLES OR NEUTRON STARS, BUT SIGNATURES THAT OSCILLATE WITH CHIRPS, RING-DOWNS, AND OVERLAID COMPLEXITIES.

  “They say this is a simple one. Plenty more are worse.”

  Redwing chuckled. “Get this.” PERHAPS THE EFFECT IS FICTIONAL, MADE UP SOMEHOW TO DECEIVE US.

  She smiled, too. “Fictional? Maybe Earthside language has changed? Facts never have to be plausible; fiction does.”

  “So that makes the holes give off those squeeze-stretch waves?” This observation exhausted his reservoir of terms.

  Beth pointed to a 3-D image. “See, the black holes orbit in about three days and then—” The image flicked forward, a smaller hole swooping down in a tight arc around the larger one—which was also doing its little circular loop. “We detect high-amplitude plasma waves zooming up, during the close flyby of each one. They’re making the holes jitter back and forth.”

  She watched Redwing use his skeptical face to hide that he had no idea. “So?”

  She plunged in. “When the holes are close—just tens of kilometers!—that’s when they radiate powerful gravitational waves. So the Glorians choose that moment to jiggle the smaller holes back and forth. That gets them tidal forces as well, amping the signal, adding harmonics. That’s how they impose a signal—make a grav wave telegraph. They can do amplitude and frequency modulation, just like ordinary AM and FM radio.”

  “Ah.” He studied Beth’s intent gaze, moving from the dancing orbits of the holes, back to Redwing. Something was up. “And…?”

  “I think we should go in there, size up the situation.”

  “Into the black hole orbits?” Redwing did not try to keep the alarm from his voice.

  “Right. We’re mag-braking right now to the max. Tickle the torch, we can glide by this grav wave system. That is what you planned, right?”

  Redwing chuckled once more. “Didn’t mention it, but yes. That’s why I tacked us toward this system. Seemed pretty safe.”

  Her turn to smile. “Because there’s so little mass around here?”

  “Right. The Glorians must’ve cleaned out their Oort cloud, maybe their Kuiper belt, too. To build this. That means less chance of smacking into some debris around the grav wave volume, see? They would’ve thrown whatever leftovers they had into the holes, once they had ’em built up—to amp their signal strength.”

  She sat, toasted him with a cup of their faux coffee. “I’d missed that point. Sounds right.”

  He frowned. “But! Our mission target is Glory. The black hole system just makes our situation more precarious. Out here, knowing damn near nothing, we’re as vulnerable as three-legged antelopes in lion territory. How’re we going to learn more, just flying by at five hundred kilometers a second?”

  Again, Beth smiled. “We’ll use the Diaphanous.”

  THREE

  THE DIAPHANOUS

  Redwing knew that among SunSeeker’s crew there is always someone who is a bigger geek about any topic than you are. But the ultimate geeks were the Artilects, who knew much you didn’t want to know, but also had none of the social skills to guess what you wanted.

  The Diaphanous were the ultimate airy tech. They were self-organizing magnetic fields, smart minds with bellies full of plasma. Pursuit of controlled fusion power gave Earth the means to stop fossil fuel use in the late twenty-first century—and then a totally unexpected technology emerged—smart toroids. It turned out the Sun itself held self-reproducing, helically coiled beings who could think. They had to. The turbulent energies of Earth’s star had fed the evolution of stable structures. Their most primitive form was the giant solar arch. When it broke apart, the colossal twisted fields spun off stable doughnuts of intricately coiled magnetic fields. Plasma waves rode these rubbery strands—flexings that could store memory and structures that evolved as well. Take a doughnut, snarl it savagely—and it broke into two doughnuts, each carrying information in its store of waves and supple fields. Moving magnetic fields fed electric arcs, which could in turn write signals into the fine-grained structures of moving magnetic energy.

  This whole pageant of evolution, marching on in ionized gases, going since the Sun formed—the process strained Redwing’s imagination. But the Diaphanous were surely real.

  Their Diaphanous pack ran and rode SunSeeker’s core motor. They shaped the magnetic geometry and exhaust parameters, while clinging to the ship and its scoop geometry. Redwing thought of them as sheepdogs that just happened to be made of ions and electrons, invisible but potent. They communicated, in limited fashion. They’d never tried such a lark before—a ride to the stars! Redwing suspected humanity would never truly know their motives. So what? Did people understand their cats?

  “The slings and arrows of outrageous astrophysics,” Beth had joked long ago, as they trained the pairs who tended their own ramscoop drive. The leaders were Apollo and Daphne, along with their “children”—lesser toroids who learned and worked in some sort of social pyramid of ionized intelligences.

  Beth leaned forward as they watched a graphic of the ship’s plasma configurations. “I want to have some Diaphanous along beside our flitter. They can monitor our fusion drive while the flitter nosedives into the grav plasma cloud.”

  Redwing adjusted the 3-D, and in the air came images of fluid fluxes merging in eddies, of magnetic webs turning in fat toroids—all in intricate yellow lines against a pale blue background. This was a dance where flow was more important than barriers. Dancers could knot off, twist, and so make a new coil of field. Embedding information with magnetic ripples led to reproduction of traits. From that sprang intelligence, or at least awareness. The Diaphanous spawned their Lessers as augments to their own intelligences, sometimes just memory alone. A Darwinnowing of use
flowed through the flaring engines of SunSeeker. Only the commanding toroids lasted, apparently forever, unless their energy source failed.

  Redwing disliked uncertainty, as any captain should—but to explore this system demanded a deft use of opportunity. And … Who else better to govern magnetic machinery and penetrate the grav wave cloud than magnetic beings?

  * * *

  Cliff came in for breakfast and knew from the faces of Beth and Redwing that something big and contentious was up. Viviane was sitting in a side booth, eating steadily and ignoring them, or seeming to. He got some of the pasta casserole, snappy with spices; Beth was always good at these lean-mean meals. He savored some with the coffee while they filled him in. He was a bit blurry but couldn’t resist asking the obvious. “Who flies the flitter?”

  “Artilects,” Redwing said.

  “The flitter minds are Navigation ’Lects,” Cliff said, slurping at a purple protein shake; the recently awakened were always furiously hungry. “Not smart enough to size up an unknown situation.”

  Redwing bristled. “We can install better ’Lects.”

  Cliff shook his head. “Can’t just spin them in—takes time. How long till rendezvous?”

  Redwing frowned. “Nearly two days.”

  “Not enough.” Cliff was a biologist, but engineer enough to know the basics. “Besides, I’ve worked with Daphne and Apollo, running trials of the flitter burn, to know how to deal with them. They’re not just handy horses, y’know.”

  Now Redwing shook his head. “There’s no real autodoc on the flitter, just a kit. Too risky.”

  Beth jerked her head, irritated. “It’s a short mission.”

  They had already used the translator comm to ask if the Diaphanous could sprout off portions of themselves to “ride shotgun” on the fusion flitter, Explorer.

  Cliff smiled. “Remember, ‘That’s for us to find out,’ you said.”