Sundiver

by David Brin

  That button had a label, he now saw. It read “E.T. Nutrient Synthesis.” Below the label a computer card stuck out from a data slot. The words “Pring: Dietary Supplement—Coumarin Protein Complex” were printed along the protruding end.

  Jacob looked quickly at Culla. The alien continued his explanation while he faced the Lyot window. Culla waved one arm toward the Sun’s Dantean brilliance to emphasize a point.

  “Thish ish now the red alpha line of Hydrogen,” he said. “A very useful shpectral line. Inshtead of being overwhelmed by huge amountsh of random light from all levelsh of the Shun, we can now look at only those regions where elemental Hydrogen absorbsh or emitsh more than normal. . .”

  Culla pointed to the Sun’s mottled surface. It was covered with dark reddish speckles and feathery arches.

  Jacob had read about them. The feathery arches were “filaments.” Viewed against space, at the solar limb, they were the prominences that had been seen since the first time a telescope was used during an eclipse. Culla apparently was explaining the way these objects were viewed head-on.

  Jacob considered. Throughout the voyage from Earth, Culla had refrained from eating his meals with the others. All he would do is sip an occasional vodka or beer with a straw. Although he had given no reasons, Jacob could only assume that the being had some cultural inhibition against eating in public.

  Come to think of it, he thought, with those mashies for teeth it could get a little messy. Apparently I’ve barged in while he’s having breakfast and he’s too polite to mention it.

  He glanced at the tablet which still lay in the cup in his hand. He dropped the pill into his jacket pocket and crumpled the cup into a nearby trash bin.

  Now he could see the button which was labeled “Coffee-Black.” He smiled ruefully. Maybe it would be best to skip the coffee and not run the risk of offending Culla. Although the E.T. had made no objections, he had kept his back turned while Jacob visited the food and beverage machines.

  Culla looked up as Jacob approached. He opened his mouth slightly and for an instant the human caught a glimpse of white porcelain.

  “Are you lesh . . . groggy, now?” the alien asked solicitously.

  “Yesh, uh yes, thanks . . . thanks also for the explanation. I always thought of the Sun as a pretty smooth place . .. except for Sunspots and prominences. But I guess it’s actually pretty complicated.”

  Culla nodded. “Doctor Kepler ish the expert. You will get a better explanation from him when you go on a dive wid ush.”

  Jacob smiled politely. How carefully these Galactic Emissaries were trained! When Culla nodded, was the gesture personally meaningful? Or was it something he had been taught to do at certain times and places around humans? Dive with us!?

  He decided not to ask Culla to repeat the remark. Better not to press my luck, he thought. He started to yawn. Just in time he remembered to stifle it behind his hand. No telling what a similar gesture would mean on the Pring home planet! “Well, Culla, I think I’m going to go back to my room and try for a little more sleep. Thanks for the talk.”

  “You are mosht entirely welcome, Jacob. Good night.”

  He shuffled down the hall and barely made it to bed before he was fast asleep.

  6. RETARDATION AND DIFFRACTION

  A soft, pearly light suffused through the ports, illuminating the faces of those who watched Mercury glide beneath the descending ship.

  Almost everyone who did not have a duty to perform was in the lounge, held to the row of viewing windows by the planet’s terrible beauty. Voices were hushed, and conversations settled into small groups gathered around each port. For the most part the only sound was a faint crackling which Jacob couldn’t identify.

  The surface of the planet was gouged and scratched with craters and long rills. The shadows cast by the mountains of Mercury were vacuum sharp in their blackness, set against bright silvers and browns. In many ways the place resembled the Earth’s moon.

  There were differences. In one area a whole piece had been torn off in some ancient cataclysm. The scar made a deep series of grooves on the side that faced the Sun. The terminator ran starkly along the edge of the indention, a sharp borderline of day and night.

  Down there, in places where shadow did not fall, a rain of seven different types of fire fell. Protons, x-rays spun off from the planet’s magnetosphere and the simple blinding sunshine itself mixed with other deadly things to make the surface of Mercury as unlike the moon as anyplace could be.

  It seemed like a place where one could find ghosts. A purgatory.

  He remembered a line from an ancient pre-Haiku Japanese poem that he had read only a month before:

  More sad thoughts crowd into my mind When evening comes; for then, Appears your phantom shape -- Speaking as I have known you speak.

  “Did you say something?”

  Jacob started from the mild: trance and saw Dwayne Kepler standing next to him.

  “No, nothing much. Here’s your jacket.” He handed the folded garment to Kepler, who took it with a grin.

  “Sorry, but biology strikes at the most unromantic times. In real life space travelers have to go to the bathroom too. Bubbacub seems to find this velour fabric irresistible. Every time I put my jacket down to do something I come back to find that he’s gone to sleep on it. I’m going to have to purchase some for him when we get back to Earth. Now what were we talking about before I left?”

  Jacob pointed down at the surface below. “I was just thinking . . . now I understand why astronauts call the moon “The Playpen.’ You certainly have to be more cautious here.”

  Kepler nodded. “Yes, but it’s a whole lot better than working on some stupid ‘make-work’ project at home!” Kepler paused for a moment, as if he were about to go on to say something scathing. But the passion leaked away before he could continue. He turned to the port and gestured at the view below. “The early observers, Antoniodi and Schiaparelli, called this area Charit Regio. That huge ancient crater over there is Goethe.” He pointed to a jumble of darker material in a bright plain. “It’s very close to the North Pole, and underneath it is the network of caves that makes Hermes Base possible.”

  Kepler was the perfect picture, now, of the dignified scholarly gentleman, except for the times when one end or the other of his long sandy-colored moustache was in his mouth. His nervousness appeared to ease as they approached Mercury and the Sundiver Base where he was boss.

  But at times during the trip, particularly when a conversation turned to uplift or the Library, Kepler’s face took on the expression of a man with a great deal to say and no way to say it. It was a nervous, embarrassed look, as if he were afraid of expressing his opinions out of fear of rebuke.

  After some pondering, Jacob thought he knew part of the reason. Although the Sundiver chief had said nothing explicit to give himself away, Jacob was convinced that Dwayne Kepler was religious.

  In the midst of the Shirt-Skin controversy and Contact with extraterrestrials, organized religion had been torn apart.

  The Danikenites proselytized their faith in some great (but not omnipotent) race of beings that had intervened in man’s development and might do so again. The followers of the Neolithic Ethic preached the palpable presence of the “spirit of man.”

  And the mere existence of thousands of space-traveling races, few professing anything similar to the tenets of the old faiths of earth, did grievous harm to concepts of an all-powerful, anthropomorphic God.

  Most of the formal creeds had either co-opted one side or another in the Shirt-Skin conflict or devolved into philosophical theism. The armies of the faithful had mostly flocked to other banners, and those who remained were quiet amid all of the uproar.

  Jacob had often wondered if they were waiting for a Sign.

  If Kepler were a Believer, it would explain some of his caution. There was enough unemployment among scientists these days. Kepler wouldn’t want to risk adding his own name to the rolls by getting a reputation as a fanatic.<
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  Jacob thought it a shame that the man felt that way. It would have been interesting to hear his views. But he respected Kepler’s obvious wish for privacy in that area.

  What attracted Jacob’s professional interest was the way in which the, isolation might have contributed to Kepler’s mental problems. Something more than just a philosophical quandary was at work in the man’s mind, something that now and then impaired his effectiveness as a leader and his self-confidence as a scientist.

  Martine, the psychologist, was often with Kepler, reminding him regularly to take his medication from < the vials of diverse, multicolored pills that he carried’ in his pockets.

  Jacob felt old habits coming back, undulled by recent quiet months at the Center for Uplift. He wanted to know what those pills were, almost as much as he wished to know what Mildred Martine’s real job was on Sundiver.

  Martine was still an enigma to Jacob. In all of their conversations aboard ship he failed to penetrate the woman’s damnable friendly detachment. Her amused condescension toward him was just as pronounced as Dr. Kepler’s exaggerated confidence in him. The dark woman’s thoughts were elsewhere.

  Martine and LaRoque hardly glanced out their port. Instead, Martine was talking about her research into the effects of color and glare on psychotic behavior. Jacob had heard about this at the Ensenada meeting. One of the first things Martine had done on joining Sundiver was to have environmental psychogenic effects brought to a minimum, in case the “phenomena” turned out to be a stress-illusion.

  Her friendship with LaRoque had grown over the trip out as she listened, rapt, to story after contradicting story about lost civilizations and ancient visitors to Earth. LaRoque responded to the attention by calling up the eloquence for which he was famous. Several times their private conversations in the lounge had gathered crowds. Jacob listened in a couple of times, himself. LaRoque could evoke a great deal of sensitivity when he tried.

  Still Jacob felt less comfortable around the man than he did with any of the other passengers. He preferred the company of more straightforward beings, such as Culla. Jacob had come to like the alien. Notwithstanding the huge complex eyes and incredible dental work, the Pring had tastes akin to his on a wide range of subjects.

  Culla had been full of ingenuous questions about Earth and humans, most of all regarding the way humans treated their client races. When he learned that Jacob had actually participated in the project to raise chimpanzees, dolphins and, recently, dogs and gorillas, to full sapiency, he began to treat Jacob with even more respect.

  Culla never once referred to Earth’s technology as archaic or obsolete, although everyone knew that it was unique in the galaxy for its quaintness. No other race in living memory had, after all, had to invent everything itself from ground zero. The Library saw to that. Culla was enthusiastic about the benefits the Library would bring to his human and chimpanzee friends.

  Once, the E.T. followed Jacob into the ship’s gymnasium and watched, rapt, with those huge red oculars, as Jacob went into one of his marathon conditioning sessions, one of several during the trip out from Earth. During rests Jacob found that the Pring had already learned the art of telling off-color jokes. The Pring race must have similar sexual mores to those of contemporary humanity, for the punchline “. . . now we’re only haggling over the price,” seemed to have the same meaning for both.

  It was the jokes more than anything else that made Jacob realize how very far away from home the slender Pring diplomat was. He wondered if Culla was as lonely as he would be in that situation.

  In their subsequent discussion of whether Tuborg or L-5 was the best brand of beer, Jacob had to struggle to remember that this was an alien, not a lisping, overly polite human being. But the lesson had been brought home when, in the course of a conversation, they found themselves separated by a sudden, unbridgeable gap; Jacob had told a story about Earth’s old class struggles that Culla failed to understand. He tried to illustrate the point of it with a Chinese proverb: “A peasant always hangs himself in his landlord’s doorway.”

  The alien’s eyes suddenly became bright and Jacob for the first time heard an agitated clacking coming from Culla’s mouth. Jacob had stared for a moment, then moved quickly to change the subject.

  All things considered, however, Culla had the closest thing to a human sense of humor of any extraterrestrial he had met. Fagin excepted, of course.

  Now, as they approached the landing, the Pring stood silently near his Patron—his expression, and Bubbacub’s, once again unreadable.

  Kepler tapped him gently on the arm. The scientist pointed at the port. “Pretty soon, now, the Captain will tighten up the Stasis Screens and begin to cut down the rate at which she lets space-time leak in. You’ll find the effects interesting.”

  “I thought the ship sort of let the fabric of space slip past it, like riding a surfboard into a beach.”

  Kepler smiled.

  “No, Mr. Demwa. That’s a common fallacy. Space-surfing is just a phrase used by popularizers. When I speak of space-time I’m not talking about a ‘fabric.’ Space is not a material.

  “Actually, as we approach a planetary singularity -- a distortion in space caused by a planet—we must adopt a constantly changing metric, or set of parameters by which we measure space and time. It’s as if nature wants us to gradually change the length of our meter sticks and the pace of our clocks whenever we get close to a mass.”

  “I take it the Captain is controlling our approach by allowing this change to take place slowly?”

  “Exactly right! In the old days, of course, the adaptation was more violent. One adapted one’s metric either by braking continuously with rockets until touchdown, or by crashing into the planet. Now we just roll up excess metric like a bolt of cloth in stasis. Ah! There goes that ‘material’ analogy again!”

  Kepler grinned.

  “One of the useful by-products of this is commercial grade neutronium, but the main purpose is to get us down safely.”

  “So when we finally start stuffing space into a bag, what will we see?”

  Kepler pointed to the port.

  “You can see it happening now.”

  Outside, the stars were going out. The tremendous spray of bright pinpoints which even the darkened screens had let through slowly faded as they watched. Soon only a few were left, weak and ochre colored against the blackness.

  The planet below changed as well.

  The light reflected from Mercury’s surface was no longer hot and brittle. It took on an orange tint. The surface was quite dark now.

  And it was getting closer, too. Slowly, but visibly, the horizon flattened. Surface objects only barely discerned earlier came into focus as the Bradbury settled lower.

  Large craters opened up to show smaller craters within. As the ship descended past the ragged edge of one of these, Jacob saw it too was covered with still smaller pits, each similar in shape to the larger ones.

  The tiny planet’s horizon disappeared behind a range of mountains, and Jacob lost all perspective. With every minute of descent the ground below looked the same. How could you tell how high up. you were? Is that thing just below us a mountain, or a boulder, or are we going to touch down in just a second or two and is it just a rock?

  He sensed nearness. The gray shadows and orange outcrops seemed close enough to touch.

  Expecting the ship to come to rest at any moment, he was surprised when a hole in the ground rushed up to engulf them.

  As they prepared to disembark, Jacob remembered with a shock what he had been doing when he slipped into a light trance earlier, holding Kepler’s jacket during the descent.

  Surreptitiously, and with great skill, he had picked Kepler’s pockets, taking a sample of every medication and removing a small pencil stub without smudging the fingerprints. They made a neat lump in Jacob’s side pocket now, too small to stand out against the taper of his jacket.

  So it’s started already, he groaned.

  Jacob�
��s jaw tightened.

  This time, he thought, I’m going to solve it myself!

  I don’t need help from my alter ego. I’m not going to go around breaking and entering!

  He struck his balled fist against his thigh to drive out the itchy, satisfied feeling in his fingers.

  PART III

  The transition region between the corona and

  photosphere (the surface of the sun as seen in white

  light) appears during an eclipse as a bright red

  ring around the sun, and is therefore called the

  chromosphere. When the chromosphere is examined

  closely, it is seen to be not a homogeneous layer

  but a rapidly changing filamentary structure. The

  term “burning prairie” has been used to describe it

  Numerous short-lived jets called “spicules” are

  continuously shooting up to heights of several

  thousand kilometers. The red color is due to the

  dominance of radiation in the H-alpha line of

  hydrogen. The problems of understanding what

  is going on in such a complex region are great....

  Harold Zirin

  7. INTERFERENCE

  When Dr. Martine left her quarters and took service corridors to the E.T. Environments Section, she thought of herself as using discretion, not stealth. Pipes and communications cables clung, stapled, to the rough unfinished walls. The Hermetian stone glistened with condensation and gave off an odor of wet rock as her footsteps rang down the fused path ahead of her.

  She arrived at a pressure-sealed door with a green overhead light, the back entrance to one alien’s residence. When she pressed the sensing cell next to it, the door opened immediately.

  A bright, greenish-tinted light spilled out—the reproduced sunshine of a star many parsecs distant. She shielded her eyes with one hand while with the other she took a pair of sunglasses from her hip pouch, and put them on to look into the room.