Spinneret

by Timothy Zahn

  “Before that comes the question of his capturing us,” Meredith said dryly.

  “Won’t he run out of fuel first? A couple-three days of constant acceleration—”

  “Won’t bother him. The Rooshrike gave me the specs to Ctencri courier ships a few months back; it turns out they’re designed for long-range insystem work as well as interstellar.”

  “Oh.” Hafner pursed his lips. “I don’t suppose we’re armed or anything.”

  “I doubt it. Maybe Carmen can program a little more speed for us.” He stood up, paused as Hafner touched his arm.

  “Did you know Msuya could follow us?” the scientist asked quietly. “In other words, do you have a plan?”

  “Afraid not,” Meredith shook his head. “I thought he’d see us emerge from Olympus, but I expected to be long gone into hyperspace before he could do anything about it. We’ll just have to hope it takes him long enough to figure out how to perform deep-space piracy for us to reach our jump point.”

  “If not, we break out the cutlasses?”

  Meredith gave him a reassuring smile and moved off.

  “You’re just making this harder on yourselves,” Msuya growled, the distortions caused by the Spinner speaker not quite masking the other’s rage. “You obviously can’t control your ship well enough to escape, and it’s clear your star drive’s broken. I assure you I’m quite willing to disable you if I have to.”

  “If you really wanted to shoot us down, you could have done so anytime in the past eight hours,” Meredith reminded him. Their talk had been going on sporadically for nearly that long now, and he, for one, was getting sick of hashing over the same territory. But as long as Msuya was reluctant to damage his prize—and as long as the odd gravitational effects from the lifeboat’s drive continued to make a boarding dangerous for both ships—the impasse was a remarkably stable entity. “As I’ve said before, if you can’t offer suitable guarantees for our safety, we’d just as soon go down with the ship.”

  “You talk very casually of throwing your lives away,” the UN official spat out. He, apparently, was getting impatient as well. “Let me tell you a secret: sacrificing yourselves will no longer protect the Spinneret’s secrets. We—I—know everything you do about the operation of your precious machine.”

  “Yes, Dr. Williams has been telling us about your little spy network. Not a particularly clever setup, you know—I’m sure the CIA or KGB could have designed something better for you.”

  There was a moment of silence, and in the gap Carmen snapped her fingers twice. Meredith looked at her; she pointed urgently to his seat belts and then to the screen. Against the navigation grid had appeared two spots that flickered back and forth from red to orange; directly between them sat the Lorraine-cross course indicator. Meredith raised his eyebrows questioningly, got an uneasy shrug in return, and began strapping in.

  “So you know about that, do you?” Msuya said at last. “Well, it’ll do you no good. Arrest them—execute them if it makes you feel any better—but understand that all I need to control the Spinneret is already in my hands.”

  In front of Meredith, the viewport opaqued. “This must be it,” Carmen muttered tightly.

  “Good-bye, Msuya,” Meredith said. “We’ll look for you when we get back.”

  “Meredith—!”

  From somewhere aft came a shriek like a parrot being smothered in cotton; an instant later Msuya’s voice was cut off as a brief wave of vertigo threatened to turn Meredith’s stomach. The nausea subsided … and when the viewports cleared again a dull red sun the size of a basketball sat directly in their path.

  “Well,” Meredith said, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “I think we’re here.”

  “Wherever ‘here’ is,” Perez said, climbing stiffly out of his seat and coming forward to peer over Carmen’s shoulder. “What was that scream just before the gravity jumped? It sounded like we were losing the whole tail section.”

  “I don’t know.” Carmen indicated a readout. “But the local-grav indicator went crazy right then.”

  “How crazy?” Hafner asked. “Like we’d skimmed the edge of a small black hole?”

  “Is that what those two spots on the screen were?” Carmen asked.

  “Two?” Hafner frowned.

  “Wait a minute,” Perez growled. “Are you saying we just flew through a black hole?”

  “The course marker went between the two spots,” Meredith told him, “so we probably didn’t hit either one. Though why we had to get even that close, I don’t know.”

  “Possibly the high gravity gradient’s needed to trigger their star drive mechanism,” Hafner suggested thoughtfully. “And if that’s true, it would explain why there are so few jump points listed on the boat’s map.”

  “It does?” Carmen frowned. “… Oh. There aren’t going to be many systems with even a single black hole nearby, let alone a pair. So Astra was picked for the Spinneret for no better reason than its accessibility?”

  “With maybe a minor point being its proximity to an asteroid belt. They may have brought down some of the bigger asteroids themselves.” Hafner craned his head to see out the viewport. “Any idea where Spinnerhome is out there?”

  “It doesn’t show on the displays yet. But the boat seems to know where it’s going.”

  “Then it may be confused,” Perez said softly. “This isn’t the Spinners’ system.”

  Meredith spun to look at him. “What?”

  Perez gestured toward the viewport. “The sun in the cavern is yellow.”

  For a long minute there was dead silence in the room. “Maybe it’s a double star system,” Loretta offered at last. “With a yellow star behind, where we can’t see it.”

  “In that case we should be veering to go around the red one,” Perez pointed out.

  “Maybe we will, once we build up more speed,” Carmen said.

  “Maybe,” Perez said darkly. “Maybe not.”

  Meredith broke the silence that followed. “There’s no point in worrying about it now. We’re all dog-tired; let’s go aft and find somewhere to sleep. In a few hours we’ll have a better idea what the boat’s got in mind.”

  The main passenger section consisted of three airline-type cabins, each with twenty tall, thin chairs that flattened out into beds. By unspoken agreement they all stayed together, stretching out in the five beds closest to the forward door. One by one, with little conversation, they went to sleep.

  Meredith was the first to wake, six hours later, and when he padded to the control room he found Carmen’s hunch had been correct. The red sun, noticeably larger, was now sitting off their port bow, while the screen indicated a course that would come perilously close to the edge but clearly miss it. Bringing forward one of the supply boxes, he improvised a table and was setting out five field-ration breakfasts when the others drifted in.

  “So Dr. Williams was right after all,” Perez said grudgingly after surveying the situation. “Any sign of the other sun yet?”

  “Not that I could see,” Meredith said, waving Loretta to the seat beside him. He didn’t blame the others for being cool toward her, but it was about time to put a stop to that nonsense. He was opening his mouth to do so when Perez suddenly yelped.

  “Hey! What was that?”

  “What?” Carmen asked, joining him.

  “A flash of yellow near the middle of the sun,” he said, pointing. “Just for a second.”

  “A solar flare?” Meredith ventured.

  “Doesn’t sound like it,” Hafner grunted, struggling to get out of his seat. Loretta moved to help him. “Flares are hot spots, all right, but a yellow burst from a red sun seems pretty excessive. Whereabouts was it?”

  “A little below the center—there! There goes another one!”

  This one lasted several seconds before winking out as abruptly as it had appeared. “That is damned odd,” Meredith agreed uneasily. “Carmen, is there some way you can get spectrum or intensity data on those?”


  Carmen was peering at the translator screen. “I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing anything like that in the manual. Of course, I wasn’t looking for it either.”

  “Dr. Williams, help her,” Meredith ordered. “The rest of you keep an eye on the sun.”

  They counted twelve more of the brief flashes before Carmen and Loretta found a spectrometer program for the boat’s sensors. It was, unfortunately, useless for their purposes, lacking any fine-directional capability.

  “Could there be a ring of asteroids grazing the surface?” Perez suggested. “Maybe the flares occur when one of them impacts.”

  “They’re still too short-lived for that,” Hafner shook his head. “Besides, there’s no real ‘surface’ to a star; just a steadily thinning atmosphere.”

  “Sure there’s a surface,” Perez retorted. “I can see it.”

  “You what!”

  “Sure. Watch the edge—the stars disappear right behind it.”

  Closing one eye, Meredith held his hand up to cut out as much of the sun’s glare as he could. Sure enough, the stars disappeared behind the edge with no preliminary dimming that he could detect. Shifting his gaze, he found himself looking into Hafner’s eyes. “Are you thinking the same thing I am?” the geologist asked carefully.

  Meredith’s mouth felt a little dry. “It’s impossible,” he said. “The size alone—no, it can’t possibly be.”

  “What can’t be?” Carmen demanded.

  Hafner waved at the viewport. “That’s not a star,” he said quietly. “It’s a gigantic artifact. A sphere, enclosing the Spinner sun … and probably Spinnerhome, as well.”

  Chapter 33

  “IT’S CALLED A DYSON sphere,” Hafner explained, the dull throbbing in his head and leg forming an odd counterpoint to the giddy feeling of unreality seeping into his brain. After the Spinneret he’d thought he could handle anything. But this—“It was supposed to be a way for a civilization to trap all the energy from its sun. Odds are that thing’s made of sheets of cable material, supported by a framework of the cables themselves.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Meredith murmured. “That would explain what they needed a planetworth of cable for, wouldn’t it?”

  “Possibly,” Carmen said slowly. “But it doesn’t explain why they left the Spinneret running.”

  “We’re back to them assuming they’d be coming back when they left,” Hafner agreed. Something was gnawing at the back of his brain, something about that huge artifact that seemed wrong. But he couldn’t place it. “I gather the boat’s heading for a passage through the sphere. Colonel, you mentioned last night you brought a telescope along?”

  “A small one, yes.” Meredith turned away from the viewport. “Perez, give me a hand and we’ll set it up in here.”

  The two men left, and Carmen and Loretta resumed their examination of the boat’s manual. Easing into the seat beside Carmen, Hafner stretched out his leg and tried to nail down what was bothering him.

  He hadn’t succeeded by the time Meredith and Perez had the telescope set up between the two control panel seats … but an hour later, as Carmen was calling attention to a curious flattening of the sphere’s limb, he got at least a piece of it.

  “Best guess is that the sphere wasn’t finished and that we’re coming up on the uncompleted edge,” Meredith was suggesting as Hafner limped over from the side viewport to the group huddled by the telescope.

  “Seems silly to start a project that size and then not finish it,” Carmen said.

  “Their Congress must’ve cut the funding,” Meredith said dryly, eliciting a snort from Perez.

  “Or maybe they discovered it wasn’t working,” Hafner offered. “A superconductor like cable material would be great for collecting light and particle energies, but I’m not at all sure how you’d then turn the heat into something useful.!’

  “What’s wrong with thermocouples?” Perez asked.

  “You need a temperature difference somewhere for those to work,” Meredith said. “As a matter of fact, it seems to me that almost all energy-extraction schemes require an energy differential.”

  “Maybe they know a method that doesn’t,” Loretta suggested. “After all, they built at least half the sphere before they quit.”

  “The Poms told me the radiation spectrum from cable material lacks some lines,” Carmen said doubtfully. “Could something like that be the ‘cool’ part of the extraction cycle?”

  Meredith shrugged. “That’s as good a guess as any. Maybe we’ll know better when we get a look at the inner surface.”

  “There’s something else, though,” Hafner muttered. “Something else that’s not right. …”

  “Well, when you think of it, let us know,” Meredith said, peering through the telescope. Carmen, is there anything like an emergency beacon aboard that we ought to trigger?”

  “It’s already on,” Loretta told him, pointing to one of the indicators. “I believe it’s been going since we got here.”

  “And no response. Doesn’t look very promising.”

  Unnoticed, Hafner returned to the side port and his thoughts … and as he stared at the bright red sphere a disturbing idea slowly began to take shape. An interpretation so wildly improbable, in fact, that he spent the next two hours searching his memory for something—anything—with which to refute it. Instead, everything he knew about the Spinners and their cable merely strengthened the theory. But there’s still so much I don’t know, he told himself when he finally gave up the effort. Better not to tell anyone else. Not just yet. …

  He spent the rest of the day struggling to hide his feelings from the others. Fortunately, everyone was so busy discussing and observing the sphere that they didn’t seem to notice his silence. When, during dinner, Carmen did, he passed it off as temporary discomfort in his leg. She didn’t press the point then; but when they all returned to the passenger cabin that evening she casually took the bed next to his, and a few minutes after Meredith turned down the lights he sensed her lean over the narrow gap separating them.

  “You all right, Peter?” she whispered. “You’re quieter than I’ve ever seen you.”

  In the darkness he shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do,” he whispered back. “If I’m right … and we’ll know in a day or two.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No. Not until I know for sure.”

  She didn’t say any more, but a moment later her hand reached across to touch his. He gripped it tightly … and, eventually, fell asleep.

  By morning the sphere filled nearly half the sky, giving a bright red glow to everything within range of a viewport and triggering a low hum that Carmen finally identified as the boat’s cooling system. The light was too intense for telescopic viewing to be safe, but Perez discovered that by using a piece of cardboard with a small piece cut out, enough of the glare could be eliminated to see the holes through which glimpses of the true sun had earlier been visible. In all he located twenty-eight gaps of various sizes, their positioning on the surface following no pattern anyone could detect. For a while there was a lively discussion of their possible function, but it eventually died from lack of data. Hafner stayed out of the discussion; for him, the gaps merely added to his gloom.

  And two hours after lunch the lifeboat rounded the ragged edge and entered the sphere.

  “You know,” Carmen said, shaking her head slowly, “I don’t think I really believed Peter was right … until now.”

  There were murmurs of agreement; and even Hafner found his depression lifted temporarily by the sheer grandeur of the sight. This side glowed, too, but its intensity was considerably muted, as if the Spinners had coated their superconducting material with something to send the light outward. Attached to the sphere they could see clumps of rock spaced at regular intervals in all directions; on the very closest the telescope was just able to pick out spiderweb-thin lines leading outward like latitude-longitude markings on a globe.

  “Asteroids,�
� Meredith identified the rocks, shading his eyes as he peered farther away down the vast curved surface. “Held in place by a framework of Spinneret cable. So that’s why they needed something that strong—they’ve got to support umpteen tons of rock against the sphere’s rotation.”

  “Ideal for the job, too,” Perez murmured. “Flexible enough that you don’t need to smooth out the asteroid much to make good contact.”

  “What are they for?” Loretta breathed. “The asteroids, I mean.”

  “Customs ports, maybe,” Perez suggested. “Those holes must have been how ships were going to get in and out when the sphere was finished.”

  “More likely they were where the antigrav stabilizers were located,” Hafner spoke up. “Even rotating, the sphere’s position isn’t really stable; they’d need some way to make periodic corrections.” He hesitated. “And they must also be where the sphere’s heaters are set up.”

  They all turned to face him. “The what?” Perez asked.

  Hafner took a deep breath. “We were wrong about the sphere’s purpose. Even if it collected and radiated every bit of the interior sun’s light, it couldn’t possibly get any hotter than about three hundred degrees absolute—room temperature, essentially. But in fact it’s at least ten times that hot. There’s no way that could happen without a massive input of energy.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Perez snorted. “You must have made some order-of-magnitude error.”

  Hafner shook his head. “I almost wish I had. But it’s a perfectly straightforward Stefan-Boltzmann calculation.”

  “All right, then, let’s assume you’re right,” Meredith said. “Can you give a reason why they’d go to that kind of trouble?”

  “It wasn’t just to heat their planet up,” Hafner said. It was odd, a small observer in his brain noted, how even now he avoided simply coming out and saying it. “Orbiting reflectors could have done that. A smaller sphere would have done if they’d decided they wanted a red sky. It wasn’t built to live on; they wouldn’t have needed to heat it like that and I suspect we’ll find the main shell is too thin to support much weight.” He paused. “Colonel Meredith … what would you do if you knew there was an enemy looking for your position and you didn’t have the strength to fight him?”