Sundiver

by David Brin

  Jacob put a hand out in front of his eyes and blinked in wonder. So this is what it’s like, he thought somewhat irrelevantly, inside a rainbow!

  As suddenly as it came, the light show disappeared. The red Sun was back, and with it the filament, the sunspot far below, and the spinning toruses.

  But the Ghosts were gone. They had returned to the giant magnetovore and once more danced as almost unseen dots about its rim.

  “It . . . it blasted us with its laser!” the pilot said. “They never did that before!”

  “One never came that close before in its normal shape, either,” Helene deSilva said. “But I’m not sure what either action is supposed to mean.”

  “Do you think it meant to harm us?” Dr. Martine spoke hesitantly. “Maybe that’s-how they started with Jeffrey!”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was a warning. . .”

  “Or maybe it just wanted to get back to work,” Jacob said. “We were in almost the opposite direction as the big magnetovore out there. You’ll notice that all of its companions went back at the same time.”

  DeSilva shook her head.

  “I don’t know. I guess we’ll be all right if we just stay here and watch. Let’s see what they do when they finish with the calving.”

  Ahead of them, the big torus began to wobble more as it spun. The dark and light bands along its rim became more pronounced, the darker becoming narrow strictures and the lighter bands ballooning outward with each oscillation.

  Twice Jacob saw groups of bright herdsmen jet away to head off a magnetovore that came too close, like sheepdogs at the heels of a wayward ram, as others stayed with the ewe.

  The wobble deepened and the dark bands grew tighter. The green laser light, scattered below the big torus, dimmed. Finally it disappeared.

  The Ghosts moved in. As the big one’s nutation reached an almost horizontal pitch, they gathered at the rim to somehow seize it and complete the turnover with a sudden jerk.

  The behemoth BOW spun lazily on an axis perpendicular to the magnetic field. For a moment the position held, until the creature suddenly began to fall apart.

  Like a necklace with a broken string, the torus split where one of the dark bands tightened to nothing. One by one, as the parent body spun slowly, the light bands, now small individual doughnut shapes themselves, were flung free, each as it rotated to the place where the break occurred. One at a time, they were cast upwards, along the invisible lines of magnetic flux, until they ran like beads across the sky. Of the Big One, the parent, nothing remained.

  About fifty of the little doughnut shapes spun dizzyingly in a protecting swarm of bright blue herdsmen. They precessed uncertainly and, from the center of each, a tiny green glow flickered tentatively.

  In spite of their careful watch, the ghosts lost several of their erratic charges. Some of the infants, more active than their peers, jetted out of the queue. A brief burst of green brilliance took one baby magnetovore out of the protected area and toward one of the adults that lurked nearby. Jacob hoped it would continue toward the ship. If only the adult torus would get out of the way!

  As if it heard his thoughts, the adult began to drop away below the oncoming path of the juvenile. Its rim pulsed with green-blue diamonds as the newborn passed overhead.

  Suddenly the torus leaped upward on a column of green plasma. Too late, the juvenile tried to flee. It turned its feeble torch toward its pursuer’s rim as it jetted away.

  The adult was undeterred. In a moment the baby was overtaken, drawn down into its elder’s pulsing central hole and consumed in a flash of vapor.

  Jacob realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out and it felt like a sigh.

  The babies were now arranged in orderly ranks by their mentors. They began to move away from the herd slowly, while a few herdsmen stayed to keep the adults in line. Jacob watched the brilliant little rings of light until a thick wisp of filament floated in to cut off his view.

  “Now we start earning our pay,” Helene deSilva whispered. She turned to the pilot. ‘”Keep the remaining herdsmen aligned with the deck-plane. And ask Culla to please keep his eyes peeled. I want to know if anything comes in from the nadir.”

  Eyes peeled! Jacob suppressed an involuntary shudder, and firmly said no when his imagination tried to present an image. What kind of an era did this fern come from!

  “Okay,” the Commandant said. “Let’s approach slowly.”

  “Do you think they’ll notice we waited until they were through with the calving?” Jacob asked.

  She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they thought we were just a timid form of adult torus. Perhaps they don’t even remember our earlier visits.”

  “Or Jeff’s?”

  “Or even Jeff’s. It wouldn’t do to assume too much. Oh, I believe Dr. Martine when she says her machines register a basic intelligence. But what does that mean? In an environment like this .. . even more simple than an ocean on earth, what reason would a race have to develop a functioning semantic skill? Or memory? Those threatening gestures we saw on previous dives don’t necessarily indicate a lot of brains.

  “They might be like dolphins were before we started genetic experiments a few hundred years ago, lots of intelligence and no mental ambition at all. Hell, we should have brought in people like you, from the Center for Uplift, long ago!”

  “You’re talking as if evolved intelligence is the only route,” he smiled. “Galactic opinion aside for the moment, shouldn’t you at least consider another possibility?”

  “You mean that the Ghosts might have once been uplifted!?” deSilva looked shocked for a moment. Then the idea soaked in and she leaped on the implications, her eyes sharp. “But if that were the case, then there’d have to have been. . .”

  She was interrupted by the pilot.

  “Sir, they’re starting to move.”’

  The Ghosts fluttered in the hot, wispy gas. Blue and green highlights rippled along the surface of each as it hovered lazily, a hundred thousand kilometers above the photosphere. They retreated from the ship slowly, allowing the separation to diminish, until a faint corona of white could be seen surrounding every one.

  Jacob felt Fagin come up beside him on his left.

  “It would be sad,” the Kanten fluted softly, “if such beauty were found sullied by a crime. I could have great trouble sensing evil while struck in awe.”

  Jacob nodded slowly.

  “Angels are bright . . .” he began. But of course, Fagin knew the rest.

  Angels are bright, though the brightest fell.

  Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,

  Still grace must look so.

  “Culla says they’re about to do something?* fthe pilot peered ahead with a hand over his ear. “ “^ •’

  A wisp of darker gas from the filament moved swiftly into the area, momentarily blocking off the view of the Ghosts. When it cleared, all but one had moved farther away.

  That one waited as the ship edged slowly closer. It looked different, semi-transparent, bigger and bluer. And simpler. It looked stiff and did not ripple like the others. It moved more deliberately.

  An ambassador, Jacob thought.

  The Solarian rose slowly as they neared.

  “Keep him edge-on,” deSilva said. “Don’t lose instrument contact!”

  The pilot glanced up at her grimly, and turned back to his instruments with tight lips. The ship started to rotate.

  The alien rose faster and drew near. The fan-shaped body seemed to beat against the plasma like a bird trying to gain altitude.

  “It’s toying with us,” deSilva muttered.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it doesn’t have to work that hard to stay overhead.” She asked the pilot to speed up the rotation.

  The Sun rose on the right and crept toward the zenith. The Ghost continued to beat toward a position overhead, even though it had to be spinning upside down along with the ship. The Sun rolled overhead and then set. Th
en it rose and set again in less than a minute.

  The alien stayed overhead.

  The spin accelerated. Jacob gritted his teeth and resisted an urge to grab Fagin’s trunk for balance as the ship experienced day and night in seconds. He felt hot, for the first time since the journey to the Sun began. The Ghost stayed maddeningly overhead and the photosphere blasted on and off like a flashing lamp.

  “Okay, give it up.” deSilva said.

  The spinning slowed. Jacob swayed as they came to complete rest. He felt as if a cool breeze was washing his body. First heat, then chills: Am I going to be ill? he wondered.

  “It won,” deSilva said. “It always does, but it was worth a try. Just once I’d like to try that, with the Refrigerator Laser operating though!” She glanced at the alien overhead. “I wonder what would happen when he got near a fraction of the speed of light.”

  “You mean you had our refrigerator turned off just then?” Now Jacob couldn’t help it. He touched Fagin’s trunk lightly.

  “Sure,” the Commander said. “You don’t think we want to fry dozens of innocent toruses and herdsmen do you? That’s why we were under a time limit. Otherwise we could have tried to line him up with the rim instruments till hell froze over!” She glared up at the Ghost.

  Again, the touching turn of phrase. Jacob wasn’t sure whether the woman’s fascination lay in her more straightforward qualities or in this way she had with quaint expressions. In any event, the overheating and subsequent cool breezes were explained. For a time the heat of the Sun had been allowed to leak in.

  I’m glad that’s all it was, he thought.

  16. . . . AND APPARITIONS

  “All we get is a dim picture,” the crewman said. “The stasis screens must be bending the Ghost’s image somehow because it looks warped . . . like it’s refracted at an angle through a lens.”

  “Anyway,” he shrugged as he passed the photos around. “This is the best we can do with a hand-held camera.”

  DeSilva looked at the picture in her hand. It showed a blue, streaky caricature of a man, a stick figure with spindly legs, long arms, and big, splayed hands. The photograph had been taken just before the hands had balled into fists, crude but identifiable.

  When his turn came, Jacob concentrated on the face. The eyes were empty holes, as was the ragged mouth. In the photograph they looked black but Jacob recalled that the crimson of the chromosphere had been the real color. The eyes burned red and the maw worked as if mouthing vicious oaths, all in red.

  “One thing, though,” the crewman went on. “The guy’s transparent. The H-alpha panes right through. We only notice it in the eyes and mouth because the blue he’s putting out doesn’t swamp it there. But as far as we can tell, his body doesn’t block any of it.’”

  “Well, that’s your definition of a Ghost if I ever heard one,” Jacob said, and handed the picture back.

  Glancing up again, for the hundredth time, he asked, “Are you sure the solarian is coming back?”

  “It always has,” deSilva said. “It was never satisfied with just one round of insults before.”

  Nearby, Martine and Bubbacub rested, ready to put on their helmets if the alien reappeared. Culla, relieved of his duties on the flip-side, lay in a couch, sucking slowly on a liquitube containing a blue beverage. The big eyes were glossy now. and he looked tired.

  “I guess we all should lie down,” deSilva said. “It won’t do to break our necks looking up. That’s where the Ghost will be when he shows.”

  Jacob chose a seat next to Culla, so he could watch Bubbacub and Martine at work.

  The two had little time to do much during the first appearance. No sooner had the Sun Ghost taken a position near the zenith than it had changed into the manlike, threatening shape. Martine hardly got her headset adjusted before the creature leered, shook a balled image of a fist, and then faded away.

  But Bubbacub had time to check his ka-ngrl. He announced that the Solarian was not using the particularly potent type of psi the machine was designed to detect and counteract. Not then at least. The little Pil left it turned on anyway, just in case.

  Jacob rested back in the seat, and touched the button that allowed it to recline slowly until he looked up at the pink, feathery sky overhead.

  It was a relief to learn that the pi-ngrli power was not at work here. But if not, what was the reason for the Ghost’s strange behavior? Idly, he wondered again if LaRoque might have been right. . . that the Solarians knew how to make themselves partly understood because they knew humans from days gone by. Surely men never visited the Sun in the past, but did plasma creatures once go to Earth, and even nurture civilization there? It sounded preposterous, but then, so did Sundiver.

  Another thought: If LaRoque was not responsible for the destruction of Jeff’s ship, then the Ghosts might be capable of killing them all at any time.

  If so, Jacob hoped the journalist-astronaut was right about the rest of it; that the Solarians would feel more restraint in dealing with humans, Pila, and Kan-ten than they had toward a chimpanzee.

  Jacob considered trying his own hand at telepathy when the creature next appeared. He’d been tested once and found to have no psi talent, despite extraordinary hypnotic and memory skills, but maybe he should try anyway.

  A movement to his left caught his eye. Culla, staring at a point in front of him and forty-five degrees to zenith, lifted a deck-mike to his lips.

  “Captain,” he said, “I believe it ish coming back.” The Pring’s voice echoed around the ship. “Try angles 120 by 30 degrees.”

  Culla put the mike down. The flexible cord drew it back into a slot, next to his slender right hand and the now-empty beverage tube.

  The red haze darkened briefly as a wisp of darker gas passed the ship. Then the Ghost was back, still small with distance but getting bigger as it approached.

  It was brighter this time, and more crisp around the edges. Soon, its blueness was almost painful to look at.

  It came once again as a stick figure of a man, the eyes and mouth glowing like coals as it hovered, half way up to zenith.

  For several long minutes it stayed there, doing nothing. The figure was definitely malevolent. He could feel it! Dr. Martine’s cursing brought him around, and he realized that he had been holding his breath.

  “Damn it!” she tore off her helmet. “There’s so much noise! One moment I think I’m onto something . . . a touch here and there . . . and then it’s gone!”

  “Do not bo-ther,” Bubbacub said. The clipped voice came from the Vodor, now lying on the deck next to the little Pil. Bubbacub had his own helmet on and stared intently with small black eyes at the Ghost

  “Hu-mans do not have the psi they use. Your attempt, in fact, does cause them pain and some of their anger.”

  Jacob swallowed quickly. “You’re in touch with them?” he and Martine asked almost at once.

  “Yes,” the mechanical voice said. “Do not bo-ther me.” Bubbacub’s eyes closed. “Tell me if it moves. Only if it moves!” After that they could get nothing from him.

  What’s he saying to it? Jacob wondered. He looked at the apparition. What can one say to a creature like that?

  Suddenly, the Solarian began to wave its “hands” and move its “mouth.” This time its features were more clear. There was none of the image warping they had seen at its first appearance. The creature must have learned to handle the stasis screens; one more example of its ability to adapt. Jacob didn’t want to think about what that implied about the safety of the ship.

  A flash of color drew Jacob’s attention to the left He groped on the panel next to him, then pulled up his deck-mike and switched it to personal.

  “Helene, look at about one eight by sixty-five. I think we’ve got more company.”

  “Yes,” deSilva’s voice quietly filled the area of the couch occupied by his head. “I see it. It seems to be in its standard form. Let’s see what it does.”

  The second Ghost approached, hesitantly, from th
e left. Its rippling, amorphous form was like a patch of oil on the surface of the ocean. Its shape was nothing like a man’s.

  Dr. Martine drew her breath in sharply when she saw the intruder and started to pull her helmet on.

  “Do you think we should arouse Bubbacub?” he asked quickly.

  She thought for a moment, then glanced up at the first Solarian. It still waved its “arms” but it hadn’t changed positions. Nor had Bubbacub. “He said to tell him if it moves,” she said.

  She looked up eagerly at the newcomer. “Maybe I should work on this new one and let him go on with the first one undisturbed.”

  Jacob wasn’t sure. So far Bubbacub was the only one to come up with anything positive. Marline’s motive for not informing him of the second Solarian was suspect. Was she envious of the Pil’s success?

  Oh well, Jacob shrugged, E.T.’s hate to be interrupted anyway.

  The newcomer approached cautiously, in short fits and starts, toward where its larger and brighter cousin performed its impersonation of an angry man.

  Jacob glanced at Culla.

  Should I tell him at least? He seems so intent on watching the first ghost. Why hasn’t Helene made an announcement? And where’s Fagin? I hope he’s not missing this.

  Somewhere above there was a Sash. Culla stirred.

  Jacob looked up. The newcomer was gone. The first Ghost slowly shrank back and faded away.

  “What happened,” Jacob asked. “I only turned away for a second. . .”

  “I don’t know, Friend-Jacob! I wash watching, to see if the being’sh visual behavior might betray some cluesh to itsh nature, when suddenly a shecond one came. The first one attacked the shecond with a bursht of light, and made it depart. Then it too shtarted to leave!”

  “You should have told me when new one came,” Bubbacub said. He was on his feet, the Vodor around his neck once more. “No mat-ter. I know all I need to know. I now re-port to hu-man deSilva.”

  He turned and left. Jacob scrambled to his feet to follow.

  Fagin awaited them, near deSilva and the Pilot Board. “Did you see it?” Jacob whispered.