Sundiver

by David Brin

  Jacob’s arm fell. He no longer had the strength to hold it up. There was no use in keeping his eyes closed, anyway. He opened them to see Culla, kneeling a meter away. Only the red eyes and gleaming white teeth showed through the thick stomach.

  “Cu . . . Culla . . .” he gasped Wheezing, the words sounded like tiny, failing gears. “Give up now, this is your last chance. I’m. . . warning you . . .”

  Tania would have liked that, he thought. It was almost as good a parting shot as hers had been. He hoped Helene had heard it.

  Parting shot? Hell, why not give Culla one! Even if he cuts my throat or drills a hole into my brain through my eyelids, I’ll still have time to give him a present!

  He pulled the flesh-foam sprayer out of his belt and started to raise it. He’d give Culla such a spraying! Even if it meant he’d die at that instant by laser instead of by decapitation.

  Excruciating pain burst like steel needle through his left eye. It felt like a lightning bolt crashing all the way to the back of his head and out the other side. At that same instant he pressed the release and held it in the direction Culla’s head had been.

  29. ABSORPTION

  Helene lifted her eyes briefly as the ship rose past the toroid herd on the left.

  The greens and blues were faded, eaten by the distance. Still the beasts shone like tiny incandescent rings, specks of life ordered in their miniscule convoy, dwarfed by the immensity of the chromosphere.

  The herdsmen were already too far away to be seen.

  The herd passed behind the dark bulk of the filament, out of sight.

  Helene smiled. If only we still had our maser link, she thought. They could have seen how hard we tried. They would have known that the Solarians didn’t kill us, as some will think. They tried to help us. We talked to them!

  She bent to answer two alarms at once.

  Dr. Martine wandered aimlessly behind her and the copilot. The parapsychologist was rational, but not very coherent. She had only just returned from the opposite end of topside. She walked unevenly and muttered softly under her breath.

  Martine had enough sense to stay out of their hair, thank Ifni! But she refused to strap herself in. Helene hesitated to ask her to go around to flip-side. In her present condition the good doctor wouldn’t be much help.

  There was a stench in the air. Helene’s flip-side monitors showed only a thick billowing cloud of smoke. There had been shouting and sounds of a terrible fracas just minutes ago. Twice the intercoms had carried the sound of someone screaming. Just moments ago came a shriek that could have waked the dead. Then silence.

  The only emotion she allowed herself was a detached sense of pride. The fact that the fight had lasted so long was a tribute to them, especially to Jacob. Culla’s weapons should have finished them off quickly.

  Of course it wasn’t likely they’d succeeded. She’d have heard something by now. She clamped a lid on her feelings and told herself she was shivering because of the cold.

  It had dropped to five Celsius. The less efficient her reactions got, as she tired, the more she weighted the cold side of the Refrigerator-Laser’s increasingly erratic swing. The hot side would be disaster.

  She answered a shift in the E.M. field that threatened to leave a window in the XUV band. It subsided nicely under her delicate control and continued to hold.

  The Refer Laser groaned as it sucked heat in from the chromosphere then back out and downward as x-rays. They climbed with agonizing slowness.

  Then an alarm clanged. It wasn’t a drift-warning, it was the cry of a ship dying.

  The stink was terrible! Worse, it was freezing. Someone nearby was shivering and coughing at the same time. Dimly, Jacob became aware that it was himself.

  He came erect in a fit of hacking that set his body trembling. For long moments after he got it under control he just sat, wondering numbly how he was alive.

  The smoke had begun to clear slightly near the deck. Shreds and tendrils drifted past him toward the whining air compressors.

  The fact that he could see at all was amazing. He brought his right hand up to touch his left eye. It was open, blind. But it was whole! He closed the lid and touched it over and over with his three fingers. The eye was still there, and the brain behind it . . .saved by the thick smoke and the depletion of Culla’s energy supply.

  Culla! Jacob swung his head about to scan for the alien. He felt a wave of nausea come on and rode it out as he peered around himself.

  A slender white hand lay on the floor, two meters away, exposed by the opening cloud of smoke. The air cleared a little more and the rest of Culla’s body came into view.

  The E.T.’s face was burned, catastrophically. Black crusts of seared foam hung in shreds from the remnants of the huge oculars. A sizzling blue liquid seeped from large cracks in the sides.

  Culla was obviously dead.

  Jacob crawled forward. First he had to check on LaRoque. Then Fagin. Yes, that was the way to do it.

  Then hurry and get someone down here who can work the computer panel. . . if there was still a chance to reverse the damage Culla’d done.

  He found LaRoque by following the man’s moans. He was several meters past Culla, sitting up and holding his head. He looked up blearily.

  “Oooh . . . Demwa, is that you? Do not answer. Your voice might blow my poor delicate head away!”

  “Are you . . . all right, LaRoque?”

  LaRoque nodded. “We are both alive so Culla must not be, no? He left his job on us incomplete so we may merely wish we were dead. Mon Dieu! You look like spaghetti! Do I look like that!”

  Whatever the effects of the fight, it had brought back the man’s appetite for words.

  “Come on, LaRoque. Help me up. We still have work to do.”

  LaRoque started to rise, then wavered. He clutched Jacob’s shoulder to keep his balance. Jacob choked back tears of pain. Jerkily, they helped each other up and onto their feet.

  The firebrands must have burned out, because the chamber was rapidly clearing. Wisps of smoke trailed in the air, though, hanging before their faces as they staggered along the dome in a clockwise direction.

  Once they encountered the P-laser beam, a thin, straight tracery in their way. Unable to go over or under, they went through. Jacob winced as the beam stitched a bloody line along the outside of his right thigh and the inside of his left. They continued.

  When they found Fagin, the Kanten was comatose. A faint sound came from the blowhole and the silver chimes tinkled, but there was no answer to their questions. When they tried to move him they found it impossible. Sharp claws had emerged from Fagin’s root pods and dug into the tough springy material of the deck. There were dozens, and no way to loosen them.

  Jacob had other business to tend to. Reluctantly, he led LaRoque around the Kanten. They staggered toward the hatchway in the side of the dome.

  Jacob gasped for breath next to the intercom.

  “Hel. . . Helene . . .”

  He waited. But no one answered. He could hear, faintly, his own words echoing from topside. So he knew it wasn’t the mechanism. What was wrong?

  “Helene, can you hear me! Culla’s dead! We’re pretty badly torn up . . . though. You . . . you or Chen come down . . . down and fix . . .”

  The cold air blasting from the Refer Laser sent him into a fit of shivering. He couldn’t talk anymore. With LaRoque helping, he stumbled up past the duct and fell to the sloping floor of the gravity-loop.

  He fell into a fit of coughing, lying on his side to favor his burned back. Slowly the hacking subsided, leaving him raw and aching in his chest.

  He fought off sleep. Rest. Just rest here a moment, then over and around to topside. Find out what’s wrong.

  His arms and legs sent tremors of sharp pain up to his brain. There were too many and his mind was too unfocused to cut all the messages off. It felt as though one of his ribs was cracked, probably from the struggle with Culla.

  All of this paled beside the throbbing
burden of the left side of his head. He felt as if he was carrying a hot coal there.

  The deck of the gravity-loop felt strange. The tight, wraparound g-field should have pulled evenly along his body. Instead it seemed to swell like the surface of the ocean, rippling under his back with tiny wavelets of lightness and weight.

  Obviously something was wrong. But it actually felt good, like a lullaby. Sleep would be so nice.

  “Jacob! Thank God!” Helene’s voice boomed around him, but still it sounded far away—friendly, definitely, warm—but also irrelevant.

  “No time to talk! Come up here quick, darling! The g-fields are going! I’m sending Martine, but . . . ” There was a clattering and the voice cut off.

  It would have been nice to see Helene again, he thought dimly. Sleep invaded in force this time. For a while he thought of nothing.

  He dreamt of Sisyphus, the man cursed forever to roll a boulder up an endless hill. Jacob thought he had a way to be tricky about it. He had a way to make the hill think it was flat while still looking like a hill. He’d done it before.

  But this time the hill was angry. It was covered with ants that climbed up onto his body and bit him all over, painfully. A wasp was laying its eggs in his eye.

  What’s more, it was cheating. The hill was sticky in places and didn’t want to let him go. Elsewhere it was slippery and his body was too light to get a grip on its surface. It heaved with sickening unevenness.

  He didn’t remember anything in the rules about crawling, either. But that seemed to be part of it. At least it helped the traction.

  The boulder helped too. He only had to push it a little. Mostly it crawled on its own. That was nice, but he wished it wouldn’t moan so. Boulders shouldn’t moan. Especially not in French. It wasn’t fair to make him listen to it.

  He awakened, wearily, in sight of a hatchway. Which hatchway he wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t very smoky.

  Outside, beyond the deck, he could see the beginnings of a blackness, a transparency, returning to the red haze of the chromosphere.

  Was that a horizon, out there? An edge to the Sun? The flat photosphere stretched out on ahead, a feathery carpet of crimson and black flame. In its depths it crawled with tiny movements. It pulsed, and filaments sewed elongated patterns above brightly waving jets.

  Waving. Back and forth, on and on, Sol waved before his eyes.

  Millie Martine stood in the doorway, with her fist up near her mouth and an expression of horror on her face.

  He wanted to reassure her. Everything was all right. It would be from now on. Mr. Hyde was dead, wasn’t he? Jacob remembered seeing him somewhere, in the rubble of his castle. His face was burned up and his eyes were gone and he gave off a terrible stink.

  Then something reached up and grabbed him. Down was now towards the hatchway. There was a steep slope in between. He tumbled forward and never remembered crashing to a halt just outside the door.

  PART X

  A lovely thing to see

  through the paper window’s holes the Galaxy.

  Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)

  30. OPACITY

  Commissioner Abatsoglou: “Then it would be a fair statement to say that all of the Library-designed systems failed, before the end?”

  Professor Kepler: “Yes, Commissioner. Every one eventually deteriorated to uselessness. The only mechanisms still working at the last were components designed on Earth, by terrestrial personnel. Mechanisms which, I might add, were declared superfluous and unnecessary by Pil Bubbacub and many others during construction.”

  C.A.: “You aren’t implying that Bubbacub knew in advance . . .”

  P.K.: “No, of course not. In his own way he was as much a dupe as the rest of us. His opposition was based solely on esthetics. He didn’t want Galactic time-compression and gravity-control systems crammed into a ceramic shell and linked to an archaic cooling system.

  “The reflection fields and the Refrigerator Laser were based on physical laws known by humans back in the twentieth century. Naturally he objected to our ‘superstitious’ insistence on building a ship around them, not only because the Galactic systems made them redundant, but also because he considered pre-contact Earth science to be a pathetic accumulation of half-truths and mumbo-jumbo.”

  C.A.: “The ‘mumbo jumbo’ worked when the new stuff failed, though.”

  P.K.: “In all fairness, Commissioner, I’d have to say that that was a lucky break. The saboteur believed they’d make no difference, so he didn’t try to wreck them, at first. He was denied an opportunity to correct his error.”

  Commissioner Montes: “There’s one thing I don’t understand, Dr. Kepler. I’m sure some of my associates here share my mystification. I understand the Sunship Captain’s use of the Refrigerator-Laser to blast out of the chromosphere. But to do so she had to boost at an acceleration greater than the surface gravity of the Sun! Now they could get away with this as long as the internal gravity fields held. But what happened when they failed? Weren’t they immediately subjected to a force that would squash them flat?”

  P.K.: “Not immediately. Failure came in stages; first the fine-tuned fields used to maintain the gravity-loop tunnel to the instrument hemisphere, ‘flip-side,’ then the automatic turbulence adjustment, and finally a gradual loss of the major field which compensated internally for the pull of the Sun. By the time the latter failed, they had already reached the lower corona. Captain deSilva was ready when it happened.

  “She knew that to climb straight out after internal compensation failed would be suicide, though she considered doing it anyway to get her records out to us. The alternative was to allow the ship to fall, braking only enough to impose on the occupants about three gees or so.

  “Fortunately, there is a way to fall towards a gravity sink and still get away. What Helene did was to try for a hyperbolic escape orbit. Almost all of the laser thrust then went into giving the ship a tangent velocity as it fell back again.

  “In effect she duplicated the program that had been considered for manned dives decades before contact; a shallow orbit, using lasers- for thrust and cooling, and E.M. fields for protection. Only this dive was unintentional, and it wasn’t very shallow.”

  C.A.: “How close did they go?”

  P.K.: “Well, you’ll recall that they’d fallen twice before in all of the confusion: once when the g-thrust failed, and a second time when the Solarians lost their grip on the ship. Well during this third fall they came closer to the photosphere than on any of the previous occasions. They literally skimmed its surface.”

  C.A.: “But the turbulence, Doctor! Without internal gravity or time-compression, why wasn’t the ship smashed?”

  P.K.: “We learned a lot of solar physics from this inadvertent dive, sir. At least on this occasion the chromosphere was far less turbulent than anyone ever expected . . . that is anyone but a couple of my colleagues to whom I owe a few abject apologies . . . But I believe the most significant factor was the piloting of the ship. Helene quite simply did the impossible. The auto-recorder is being studied now by the TAASF people. The only thing greater than their delight with the tapes is their chagrin at not being able to give her a medal.” General Wade: “Yes, the condition of the crew was a cause of great distress to the TAASF rescue team. The ship looked like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow! With no one alive to tell what happened, you’ll understand our mystification until the tapes were played back.”

  Commissioner Nguyen: “I can imagine. You seldom expect to get a special shipment of snowballs from hell. Can we assume, Doctor, that the ship’s Commander weighted the heat pump system on the cold side for the obvious reason?”

  “In all honesty, Commissioner, I don’t believe we can. I think her reasoning was to keep the interior cold so that all of the records would survive. If the ReferLaser system erred too much the other way they’d have been fried. I believe her sole idea was to protect those tapes. She probably expected to come out of the Sun having roughly the consistency of
strawberry jam.

  “I don’t think the biological effects of freezing were on her mind.

  “You see, in many ways Helene was a bit of an innocent. She stayed up to date in her field but I don’t think she knew about the advances in cryosurgery we’ve made since her day. I think she’s going to be very surprised, a year from now, when she wakes up.

  “The others will probably take it as a routine miracle. Except for Mr. Demwa, of course. I don’t think Mr. Demwa would be surprised by anything . . . or consider his revival miraculous. The man is indestructible. I think by now, wherever his consciousness drifts in its frozen sleep, he knows it.”

  31. PROPAGATION

  In the springtime the whales go north again.

  Several of the grey humps that broached and spumed in the distance had not been born when he last stood on a shore and watched a California migration pass by. He wondered if any of the grey whales still sang “The Ballad of Jacob and the Sphinx.”

  Probably not. It never was a favorite of Greys anyway. The song was too irreverent, too . . . beluga for their sober temperament. The Greys were complacent snobs, but he loved them anyway.

  The air boomed with the noise of the breakers, crashing into the rocks at his feet. It was wet with sea water and filled his lungs with the paradoxical satiated-hungry feeling that others got from breathing deep in a bakery shop. There was a serenity that came with the pulse of the ocean, plus an expectation that the tide would always wash up changes.

  They’d given him a chair, at the hospital in Santa Barbara, but Jacob preferred the cane. It gave him less mobility, but the exercise would shorten his convalescence. Three months after waking up in that antiseptic organ factory had left him desperate to get back on his feet, and to experience something that was pleasantly, naturally dirty.

  Such as Helena’s way of talking. It defied all logic that a person born at the height of the old Bureaucracy would have so uninhibited a mouth as to make a Confederacy Citizen blush. But when Helene felt she was among friends her language became impressive and her vocabulary astonishing. She said that it came from being raised on a power satellite. Then she smiled and refused to explain any further until he reciprocated with acts she knew he wasn’t ready yet to perform. As if she was!