Across the Sea of Suns (3 page)

It spotted a gas giant in the right place to cause the star’s wobble, as seen from Earth. But the radio mumble came from an Earth-sized world nearer the star. The probe had been programmed to pass near the gas giant, since its orbit could be deduced from BD +36°2147’s slight rhythm. The other planet was exactly on the other side of the red dwarf star when the probe shot through, so the automatic devices, in a mad scramble to readjust, did not get much data.

Small, fast probes were cheap. The International Space Agency favored them. But they couldn’t respond flexibly, and game theory proved they were a bad strategic choice, in the face of unknown risks.

The best posture, the conflict metricians calculated, was reconnaissance in force:
Lancer.
So the three superpowers used their muscle and appropriated the just-finished Libration Colony project. ISA took the life zone inside the spinning asteroid world, tunneled more rooms in the rock, and added duralith thrust chambers that could bottle a fusion burn. The design was a copy of the
Mare Marginis
wreck and it worked well. They stirred the soils, planted crops, burrowed hallways, sliced rock, and fine-tuned a miniature ecology inside the hollowed-out ellipsoidal dome.

All this, to fly at velocities a hairline below light. Toward the red beacon of BD +36°2147, now renamed Ra. The word “Nile” in the transmission, while seemingly irrelevant and possibly a mistake—the error bars in the decoding were significant—became a pretext for invoking Egyptian mythology. The transmitting world was named Isis for the goddess of fertility. The outer gas giant was named for her son, Horus. The astronomical community took two years to decide all this, there were letters discussing the matter in the London
Times.
The engineers, of course, didn’t give a damn.

As they walked on through the fields grain rustled, and the dry rasping was like Kansas on a ripe fall day. Nigel shielded his eyes against the hard glare of the phosphors. The huge squares were regularly spaced in the curving floor of the dome, illuminating the fields on the opposite side, powering the ecology of
Lancer.
Wraparound lighting. The fusion burn in
Lancer’s
throat gave ample electricity for the phosphor panels, but to Nigel it still seemed like a wasteful squandering of photons.

Nikka interrupted his thoughts with, “What do you think is our best tactic?”

“Um?”

“We have to keep down criticism of us. Of our …”

“Decaying physical abilities.”

“Yes.”

“Right, then—we should work in modest jobs. Low profile.”

“Until we reach Isis.”

“Then—well, we maneuver ourselves into interesting work.”

“Don’t let them argue us into a desk job.”

“Right. Maybe we’ll have to be content with merely controlling robots or something, but—”

“No paper pushing.”

“Just so. Meanwhile—”

“Stave off the bastards.”

She smiled and repeated with some relish, “Stave off the bastards.”

Months before,
Lancer
had dropped a self-constructing radio net, letting it tumble away in the wake. Riding inside a cocoon of shock-ionized plasma, they could not make high-resolution radio maps.

The net uncurled and deployed. Alex controlled the servo’d antennas by remote, painstakingly assembling aperture synthesis maps of the Ra system. The star itself flared violently, sending tongues high into its corona. Detailed mapping of their target, Isis, took much longer.

Nikka prodded Nigel awake when their apartment Sec chimed. “Let me be,” he growled.

“Stop doing your croc-in-the-sun impersonation. It’s the Assembly review of the first Isis map. You wanted to see it.”

“Ah. I’d fancy that.”

Nikka tapped her wrist and the wall screen clicked on. She silenced Alex’s voice-over explanations and enlarged the map. Nigel peered at the round image. The Isis disk was a spaghetti scramble of contour lines.

“Planetary acne,” he said.

Nikka said, “Looks like a river valley system, there.”

“Couldn’t be. Trick of the eye, probably. This isn’t radar, remember. They’re picking up the Isis transmissions.”

“How can it come from all over the planet’?”

He squinted. “It
can’t.
The simple, efficient way to send across interstellar distances is with one fixed antenna.”

“Yes …” She combed back her sleek black hair with her fingers. “Or so we think.”

“Electromagnetic waves are culture-independent. Makes no sense to use lots of antennas.”

He tapped into the interactive-mode discussion, still lying in bed. No interesting ideas surfaced. “Wait’ll we’re closer,” he said.

Nikka dialed the map to max scale. “I
still
say it looks like a river valley.”

THREE

Isis was a red world.
Mars-tinged,
Nigel thought, staring down at it. But rich with air, cloud-choked.

One warm face forever pinned toward Ra, the other staring blank and frozen into the eternal cold: tide-locked. In the immemorial night the land groaned beneath vast blue glaciers. Half a planet, capped in ice.

Winds from the twilight fed the great, slumbering, white-crusted mountains, bringing breaths of fresh moisture. At the eternal dawn line where dim pink light licked, icebergs calved into a red ocean. The sea circled Isis, pole to pole, separating ice and land. It was pink and glinting, scratched by winds, dotted with orange-yellow clouds.

More sunward still, broad fans of waves battered at the base of steep, flinty chasms. The sea clawed at the rising ramparts of the one vast stained brown continent.

Fingers of water thrust inland, toward Ra. River valleys carved the gray granite, as if clutching the world’s face, to force it toward the fire. Fingers: poking at the Eye.

Channel #11:
“Yeah, that pattern, what’d I say, fits the theory. Perfect stress pattern there, you can see the normal faulting and graben at the poles—”

Channel #20:
“Jess a sec, theh ah no poles at all, an’. if unnerstan your calc, your equilibrium is wrong from step one—”

Channel #5:
“—Jeezus, check the chem inventory down there, I’d—”

Channel #11:
“No, I’ve got a whole continuum of theoretical equilibria I can use and this case fits in; it all works if we assume Isis formed rotating, with a bulge at the equator, and then when Ra spun it down that released the centrifugal energy, so Isis tried to readjust its surface to get rid of that pot belly, and you get fracturing in a global pattern—”

Channel #5:
“—too much absorption in those oceans, an’ some odd lines, lookit those spikes around 5480 angstroms, that’s not—”

Channel #18:
“Funny, the lakes in those highlands, partway out from the Eye, they’re blue, but the ocean is
pink.
I guess whatever—”

Channel #5:
“That’s fresh rainfall up there in the mountain passes, melted snow, it
should
look blue—”

Channel #11:
“—that leaves the equator free, see, so thrust faults split the dome pattern, and the energy got released toward the rim—”

Channel #20:
“Okay, no poles, your calc stipped a bound’ry layer an’ thahs what makes the calc work out. Those headwalls in the rim gouge pattern, see ’at? I guess they prove some kinda big crust relaxation when it slowed down, started a whole big tectonic process—

Channel #5:
“—the 5480 structure is just backscatter from the hills, must be, Nigel, ’cause that’s the iron silicate group clear as day, damn muddy day down there though, an’—”

Channel #11:
“—you get these compression networks that give those wrench faults, or lateral faults, I can see them on this IR blowup, here, lots of rifting, a whole morphology set up when the planet spun down—”

Channel #3:
“—but then what’re those ghastly spikes dead center of the polarization pattern, eh? You’re surely not going to ask me to believe a mud flat is giving us those spikes, are you? Scarcely. The
sea
is giving us those, and it has to have iron oxides to do that and give sufficient line strength—

Channel #18:
“Blue lakes means that whatever makes the seas red
doesn’t
operate at high altitudes—”

Channel #5:
“That’s garbage, there can’t be a height effect with that kind of gentle gradient, it just won’t support a—”

Channel #18:
“Okay, then it takes time to make the chemistry go, so by the time the rainfall has run down to the lowlands something’s—”

Channel #29:
“—he’d got that wrong
twice,
Christ, so I kinda shrug and mutter, nothing wrong with having nothing to say, sure but try not to say it out loud, and the sonabitch went straight to Gulvinch about it then—”

Channel #20:
“— intensifahs all ’at till the domed strata—yeah, ’at’s the ticket—they can’t support the shear stress an’ they rupture, all back unner that ice on the other hemisphere too I bet, uh-huh, an’ you get lotsa cyclin’ in the surface materials, rip open the seams ever’ couple hunnert thousan’ years, think what that does to the rep rate with the atmosphere when you bake out that iron exposed fresh ever’ time—”

Channel #5:
“Look, that’s one thing we
do
know: look at that spectrum, it would be a reducing atmosphere with all that iron, for sure, except the oxygen levels get pumped up, but even so it’s only around the two percent level, two percent 0
₂
, you can see that right here, look, it’s just a spike out on that wing, the line strengths are wrong, nothing like Earth, but I bet it’s the same damn process, the same way our air converted over from reducing billions of years back, trouble is it’s not much O
₂
is it? Not damn much if you want to breathe down there.”

Channel #6:
“It’s
both
forms, open your eyes, lay that one over the other and it jumps right out at you—”

Channel #3:
“Ah, ferrous and ferric. Both. So there’s a lot of oxygen down there, as much as Earth, but it’s tied up in the iron.”

Channel #29:
“—nothing I could say would—”

Channel #20:
“—so see this fits what the backscatter boys say, the faultin’ rips up the goddamn turf so much the iron gets reprocessed alla time an’ the air, it jess can’t hold onto its oxygen, the water jess runs off ever’ time it rains an’ the sea, it’s jess this solution a ferrous crap, ’at’s where th’ O
₂
is, man I tell you—”

Channel #56:
“That jocko over in P4 has got some crazy idea, lissen to him, thinks it’s all iron, but give a gear at this, in the big spot there, see that big volcano, that’s sulfur for sure, big spouts of it coming out reg’lar as Maybelle, sulfur volcanoes smack in the middle of the Eye, and if that doesn’t tie up a lot of oxy, with those winds, I mean, we measured gusting velocity from the action-frame zats and they’ll mix the whole damn atmosphere in two, maybe three years, so you’ve got sulfur oxide all down there, that’s what the Eye
is
, that’s not sand dunes, not silicon dioxide, it’s
sulfur
dioxide—”

The picture sharpened as computers edited out random refractions from the clotted air below. Isis swam nearer.

Yellow. A dry, ancient yellow. Smooth sands of it, shimmering, flecked with tan ridges of weathered rock. The Eye peered at Ra, which hung forever directly overhead. Out from the hard-baked center, the subsolar point, swept winds heavy with pungent acid dust. Dunes marched before the winds in ranks a hundred kilometers long. Slowly they swerved as the air currents circled, following a trade-wind pattern, returning to the blistered pupil of the Eye, surging in a timeless cycle.

The Eye’s edge faded into russet, then into brown. A hint of moisture; scrub desert. Rumpled red hills built into a concentric ring of mountains: socket of the Eye. Snow dotted the peaks white. High valleys cupped cold air over the steel-blue sheen of lakes.

The steady rub of the Eye winds had smoothed the land. The breeze stirred up pink dust, thick sheets that poured over the high mountain slopes and down, out-ward from the Eye, filling the valleys with a roiling haze. Only in the shifting spots where neither clods nor dust lay upon the land could the distant telescopes see the dry plains and carved valleys of Isis.

The single, immense, concentric mountain range was intricate and fault cut. Muddy rivers ran down the broad slopes, away from the Eye, toward the planet-circling sea. Farther from the Eye, scrub desert yielded to matted vegetation. Brown grass. Something like trees. Shades of brown, of pinks and grays and pale orange.

A fine dust hung in the lower air, fuzzing optical images, stealing definition. Only in the infrared was the seeing good enough to distinguish objects in the five-meter scale range. Large flora. Bands of vegetation crowding the snaking rivers.

The IR peered down and picked out detail. Dark beds of plant life in the sea. Grasslands. And then, movement.

“ReppleDex, this is Command. You guys got that system up yet, or do we kick ass out there?”

We got good definition in the radio right now, Ted. Give it a
—

“I’m looking at it, Alex. What we want is the interferometry—”

“They’re point sources, aren’t they?”

“Nigel, this is Ted. Get off the comm lines.”

“I’m a consultant, remember? Just eavesdropping, anyway.”

“Okay, so long as you don’t get in the way of—Hey, RD, when can we have—”

He’s right, Ted, we still can’t resolve the sources. They’re damned small. Any really big dish we could see at a range of one AU, so I’d think by now we shoulda picked up
—

“Okay, okay, that’s interesting. But—”

—
and the reason we’ve never been able to make sense out of the signals, we’ve got that figured now
—

“Oh? What?”

There are these point sources, maybe a million of ’em, but they’re not transmitting together. I mean, they’re not in synch phase-locked. All the sources are trying to send the same stuff but they’re all a little behind or a little ahead of each other, so it gets muddied up.