Across the Sea of Suns (2 page)

“Harsh words, Nigel. And of course completely untrue.”

Nigel smiled and laced his hands behind his neck, leaning back with elbows high, easing the quiet chorus of strain in his lower back muscles. “Not so far from the mark as you might think,” he said almost dreamily. “Not so far …” His mind flitted over old pictures: the alien incursion into the solar system, the pearly sphere of the
Snark,
an exploratory vessel he had met for only moments, beyond the Moon; the
Mare Marginis
wreck, a crushed eggshell that had fallen from the stars a million years ago; the webbed logic of the
Marginis
alien computer that had taught them how to build
Lancer.
He had been there, he had seen it, but now the pictures were faded.

Ted said solemnly, “I had hoped to impress you with the weight of opinion behind this vote. We’ll be in Isis space within months. The surface teams must begin practicing in earnest. I cannot in all good—”

“I’ll go on fallback status,” Nigel said casually.

“What?”

“Put me in the reserve exploration unit. There’ll be dead times when we’re on the surface, surely. Times when most of the crew is asleep or working on something else. You won’t want those servo’d modules standing idle on the surface, will you? I’ll simply hold down the position, keep watch until the real working crew comes back on control.”

“Ummmm. Well, it’s not exactly what I had—”

“I don’t give a ruddy toss for your plans, if you must know the truth. I’m offering a compromise.”

“Backup isn’t a full-time position.”

“I’ll do scutwork, then.”

“Well …”

“Hydro jobs. Agri, perhaps. Yes, I’d like that.”

He watched Ted savor this new possibility. The man treated the idea like a small quick animal, probably no threat but unpredictable, as likely to sink fangs into his thumb as it was to suddenly dart off in unexpected directions. Nigel was neither snake nor sturgeon, though, and Ted disliked things without labels. Behind
Lancer’s
cosmetic groupgov policy lurked these traditional top-down managers, with instincts as old as Tyre.

Ted’s smile suddenly reappeared. “Good. Good. Nigel, I’m happy you were able to see it our way.”

“Indeed.”

“Nigel.”

A weighty silence. “There’s something more, Ted.”

“Yes, there is. I think you ought to realize that you are kind of … distant … from your fellow crew members. That might have influenced this vote.”

“Different generation.”

Ted looked around at the flat, mute surfaces of the room. Most interiors in
Lancer
covered every wall with a crisp image of forest or ocean or mountains. Here there were severe angles and no ersatz exteriors. Ted seemed to find it unsettling. Nigel watched him shift his sitting again and tried to read what the man was thinking. It was becoming harder for Nigel to understand people like Ted without committing himself to the draining process of letting himself go into them completely. Then, too, Ted was an American. Nigel had lived in the United States a great portion of his life but he retained his English habits of mind. Many of the senior positions on
Lancer
were held by the affable American managerial types like Ted, and more than age differences separated Nigel from them.

“Look,” Ted began again, his voice resolute and factual, “we all know you’re … well, your neural activity was somehow maximized by the
Marginis
computer. So your sensory input, your processing, your data correlation—it can all occur on a lot of levels. Simultaneously. With clarity.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re going to seem a little odd, sure.” He smiled winningly. “But do you have to be so standoffish? I mean, if you even gave some sign of trying to get through to us about what it’s
like
, even, I think—”

“Tanaka and Xiaoping and Klein and Mauscher …” Nigel gave the names a drum-roll cadence. Those men had come after him and experimented with the alien
Marginis
computer net. They had all been altered, all thought differently, all reported seeing the world with an oblique intensity.

“Yes, I know their work,” Ted broke in. “Still—”

“You’ve read their descriptions. Seen the tapes.”

“Sure, but—”

“If it’s any help. I can’t make much out of that stuff, myself.”

“Really? I’d guess that you would all have a lot in common.”

“We do. For example, none of us talks very well about it.”

“Why not?”

“What’s the point? That’s scarcely the way to go.”

“The 3-D that Xiaoping made, that means a lot to us. If you—”

“But it doesn’t to
me
. And that fact itself is more important than anything else I can tell you.”

“If you’d just—”

“Very well. Look, there are four states of consciousness. There’s
Aha!
and
Yum-yum
and
Oy vey!
But most of the time there’s
Ho-hum.
” Nigel grinned madly.

“Okay, okay. I should know better.” Ted smiled wanly. He sipped the dregs of his tea. Nigel shifted position, taking less of his weight on the knobby end of his spine. This apartment was farther out from
Lancer
’s spin axis, so the local centrifugal tug was stronger than at his old digs in the dome. As he moved his skin crinkled and folded like a bag used too long. He was still sinewy, but he knew better than anyone how his muscles were tightening, growing stringy and uncertain. He looked at the blotchy red freckles on his hands and allowed himself a sigh. Ted would misinterpret the sound, but what the hell.

Ted chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that. Hu-hum, yes. Hey, look,” he said brightly, preparing to leave, “your response on this job thing was first-class. Glad it worked out. Glad we stopped the problem before it got, well, harder.”

Nigel smiled, knowing they hadn’t stopped anything at all.

TWO

“What do you think Ted really means?” Nikka said.

They strolled along a path that wrapped all the way around the inside of the dome. The best part was a hundred-meter patch of forest, dense with pines and oaks and leafy bushes. It may have been his imagination, but the air seemed better there, less stale.

“Probably no more than he says. For now.”

“Do you think they’ll do the same to me?”

A fine mist drifted over the treetops, obscuring the fields which hung directly over their heads. In the distance, along the axis, Nigel could make out the other side of the dome. Cottonball clouds accumulated along the zero-g axis of the dome, and through them he could see a distant green carpet, so far away only the Euclidean scratches of the planting rows were apparent: a garden zone.

“He said nothing about it.” Nigel turned to her, spreading his hands. “And at any rate, whatever for?”

“Next to you, I’m the oldest crew member.”

“But, blast it!—you’re not
old.”

“Nigel, we’re two decades ahead of anybody else in the crew.”

He shrugged. “My work requires motor skills. And they’re dead right, I’m getting stiff and awkward. But you’re a general handy type. There’s no—”

“Your years in the Slowslots retarded all that.”

“Some. Not a lot.”

Nikka walked faster, her vexed energy coming out in a particular irked way she had of swinging her hips into her stride. She was still in marvelous condition, he thought. Her straight black hair was drawn back in a Spartan sheath above her lidded, open face. It joined a natural cascade at the crown, to become a jaunty black torrent down half her back. Nigel forced himself to look at her as though she were a stranger, trying for Ted’s perspective. With age her skin had stretched tight over her high cheekbones. She didn’t have her full strength any longer, granted, or the gloss of early middle age she’d once had. But she was a fine, slim edifice that showed no signs of sinking squat and Earthward.

She breathed in the air with obvious relish. It was better here, near the plants and algae vats. If you closed your eyes you could very nearly think you were in a genuine forest. You could blot out the muted bass rumble of the unending fusion flame.

“Nigel, it seems so
long
,” she said suddenly, plaintively.

He nodded. Twelve years since
Lancer
fired its drop-away accelerators and boosted achingly up to light speed. He took her hand and squeezed. They had all passed the vast tracts of time with their work, with study, with experiments like the Slowslots, with astronomical observations. But the years had weight and presence.

Lancer
was a rush job.

In 2041 a giant radio net, laced across the far side of the Moon, picked up an odd signal. It was a weak, shifting pattern, amplitude-modulated. It came in sharp at 120 megahertz, smack in the middle of the commercial radio band. Originally, the farside radio grid had been strung to carry out astrophysical studies in the low-frequency range, down to the 10 kilohertz region. The designers at Goldstone, Bonn and Beijing had only recently installed gear to take the system up into the megahertz range, because the jammed commercial bands were so noisy now that sensitive astrophysical work was impossible from Earth’s surface. The Moon made an effective shield.

The emission pattern had, as the jargon went, significant nonrandom elements. Patterns would rise out of the galactic background radio noise and then, before the sequence of amplitude modulations could form a coherent pattern, the dim electromagnetic tremor faded.

The most likely explanation was some intermittent natural process, perhaps resembling Jupiter’s decametric sputtering. That radiation came from electron swarms in Jupiter’s magnetic belts. Waves passing through the belts made the electrons bunch together, so that they radiated like a natural antenna. Jupiter’s emissions had wavelengths hundreds of meters long, well below the megahertz range. To explain these new emissions, astronomers invoked a gas giant planet with much stronger magnetic fields, or higher electron densities.

When they pinpointed the source, this model made sense. It was BD +36°2147, a dim red star 8.1 light-years away, and it seemed to have a large planet. This was somewhat embarrassing.

The funding agency, ISA, wondered why a star that close had not been checked routinely for unusual emissions. An obvious explanation was that the action and the grants were in high-energy, spectacular objects—pulsars, quasars, radio jets. Also, the small, red stars were boring. They were hard to see and they led dull lives. BD +36°2147 had never been named. The scramble of letters and numbers simply meant that the star had appeared first in the Bonner Durchmeisterung catalog in the nineteenth century. The declination angle was +36 degrees and 2147 was a serial number in the catalog, related to the star’s other coordinate, Right Ascension,

From the star’s slight wobble, one could deduce that something large and dark was revolving around it. That was a perfectly logical candidate for the superJovian. Orbital optical telescopes had by this time found hundreds of dark companions around nearby stars, proving that planetary systems were fairly common, and ending a centuries-old argument.

The first unsettling fact came to light when ISA poked around in the old survey reports from Earth-based radio telescopes. It turned out that BD +36°2147
had
been observed, repeatedly. There had been no detectable emission. The present radio waves must have started sometime in the last three years.

The second surprise came along a few months later. For one rare two-minute interval, a strong wave pattern got through. The amplitude-modulated signal was a carrier wave, just like commercial AM radio. Filtered and speeded up and fed to an audio output, it quite clearly said the word “and.” Nothing more. A week later, another three minute portion said “Nile.” The big radio ear was now cupped continuously at BD +36°2147. Seven months later it picked up “after.”

The words came through with aching slowness. Some radio astronomers argued that this might be an odd way of cost cutting. As the signal faded in and out, a listener missing a piece of a long sound could still recognize the word. But this theory did not explain why the signal blurred and shifted so frustratingly. It was as though the distant station started transmitting one word and then changed to another before the first was finished.

The signals continued, occasionally coughing forth a fragment, a word, a syllable—but never enough for a clear message. Still, they had to be artificial. That killed the super Jovian magnetosphere theory. They kept to a fairly sharp frequency, though, and this proved useful.

Eight months of careful observations picked up a Doppler shift in the frequency. The shift repeated every twenty-nine days. The logical explanation was that the scattered pulses came from a planet, and that planet moved alternately toward and away from Earth as it orbited the red dwarf star. Optical observations fixed the star’s luminosity, and reliable theory then could give the star’s probable mass. It was 0.32 solar masses, an M2 star. Given the twenty-nine-day “year” of the planet, and the dwarf’s mass, Newton’s laws said the planet was nine times closer to its cool star than Earth was to the sun.

That was as far as observations from near-Earth could go. The radio teams spent years trying to see a Doppler shift from the revolution of the planet itself. It wasn’t there, but nobody expected it to be. A planet that close to its star would be locked with one face eternally sunward, due to the tidal tug between them. Earth’s Moon and the Galilean satellites of Jupiter were tide-locked to their planets, after all. Mercury would be locked toward the sun, but for the competing pull from the other planets.

But tide-locked worlds were deadly. Everybody knew that. One side would be seared and the other frozen. Who could survive such a place and erect a radio transmitter? Did they only live in the twilight band?

The only way to find out was to go and see. In 2029, ISA launched small relativistic probes on near-recon missions to BD +36°2147. One failed in a burst of gamma rays 136 light-years from Earth. The inboard diagnostics told a lot about the flare-up in the fusion burn, before the ship disintegrated. ISA adjusted the burn in the second probe and it survived, to dive past the BD +36°2147 system at 0.99 light speed.