Heaven's Reach (22 page)

The sight triggered a second wave of panic, which he fought this time by drawing on his best resource, his knowledge as a primitive scientist. Jijo might be a backwater, lacking the intellectual resources of the Five Galaxies, but you could still train a working mind from the pages of paper books.

Use what you know. Figure this out!

All right.

First thing … the cable piercing his leg appeared to target the femoral artery. Perhaps it was feeding
on
him, like some space-leech in a garish, pre-Contact scifi yarn. But that horror image seemed so silly that Lark suspected the truth was quite different.

Basic life support. I'm floating in a poison atmosphere, so they can't let me breathe or eat or drink. They must be sending oxygen and nutrients directly to my blood.

Whoever “they” were.

As for the jiggling containers, Lark was enough of a field biologist to know
sampling bags
when he saw them. Although he could not laugh, a sense of ironic justice helped him put a wry perspective on the situation. He had put more than enough hapless creatures in confinement during his career as a naturalist, dissecting the complex interrelationships of living species on Jijo.

If nature passed out karma for such acts, Lark's burden might merit a personal purgatory that looked something like this.

He strained harder to see through the mist, hoping not to find Ling among the captives. And yet, a pall of loneliness settled when he verified she was nowhere in sight.

Maybe she escaped from Rann and the Jophur, when these yellow monsters invaded the
Polkjhy.
If she made it to the Life Core, she might clamber through the jungle foliage and be safe in our old nest. For a while, at least.

He glimpsed walls beyond the murk, estimating this
chamber to be larger than the meeting tree back in his home village. From certain visible furnishings and wall-mounted data units, he could tell it was still the Jophur dreadnought, but invaders had taken over this portion, filling it with their own nocuous atmosphere.

That ought to be a clue. The familiar-horrid scent. A toxicity that forbade inhaling. But Lark's bruised mind drew no immediate conclusions. To a Jijoan—even a so-called “scientist”—all of space was a vast realm of terrible wonders.

Have they seized the whole vessel?

It seemed farfetched, given the power of mighty Jophur skygods, but Lark looked for some abstract solace in that prospect. Those traeki-cousins meant only bad news to all the Six Races of Jijo, especially the poor g'Kek. The best thing that could happen to his homeworld would be if battleship
Polkjhy
never reached home to report what it had found in an obscure corner of Galaxy Four.

And yet, this situation could hardly be expected to make him glad, or grateful to his new captors.

It took a while, but eventually Lark realized—some of them were nearby!

At first, he mistook the quivering shapes for lumps in the overall fog, somewhat denser than normal. But these particular patches remained compact and self-contained, though fluid in outline. He likened them to shifting heaps of pond scum … or else succinct thun-derheads, cruising imperiously among lesser clouds. Several of these amorphous-looking bodies clustered around a nearby sample bag, inspecting the Jophur prisoner within.

Inspecting? What makes you think that? Do you see any eyes? Or sensory organs of any kind?

The floating globs moved languidly, creeping through the dense medium by extending or writhing temporary arms or pseudopods. There did not seem to be any permanent organs or structures within their translucent skins, but a rhythmic movement of small, blobby subunits that came together, merged, or divided with a complexity he could only begin to follow.

He recalled an earlier amoebalike creature, much bigger than these—the invader who had burst through a ship's bulkhead, scaring away Rann and the other pursuers who had Lark cornered. That one had seemed to look right at Lark, before swarming ahead rapidly to swallow him up.

What could they be? Did Ling ever mention anything like this? I don't remember.…

All at once Lark knew where he had encountered the foul smell before. At Biblos … the Hall of Science … in a part of the great archive that had been cleared of bookshelves in order to set up a chemistry lab, where a small band of sages labored to recreate ancient secrets, financed and subsidized by the Jijoan Explosers Guild.

Trying to recover old skills, or even learn new things. The guild must have been full of heretics like Sara. Believers in “progress.”

I never thought of it before, but the Slope was rife with renegade thinking even weirder than my own. In time, we'd probably have had a religious schism—even civil war—if gods hadn't come raining from the sky this year.

He thought about Harullen and Uthen, his chitinous friends, laid low by alien treachery. And about Dwer and Sara—safe at home, he hoped. For their sake alone, he would blow up this majestic vessel, if that meant Jijo could be shrouded once more in blessed obscurity.

Lark's dour contemplations orbited from the melancholy past, around the cryptic present, and through a dubious future.

Time advanced, though he had no way of measuring it except by counting heartbeats. That grew tedious, after a while, but he kept at it, just to keep his hand in.

I'm alive! The creatures in charge here must find me interesting, in some way.

Lark planned on stoking that interest, whatever it took.

Alvin's Journal

W
ELCOME, DEAR JIJOAN FRIENDS. WELCOME TO
the Fractal World.”

That line would have been a great place to finish this journal entry.

The moment had an eerie, intense drama. I could sense the tragic letdown of the
Streaker
crew, having fled all the way to Jijo's hellish deeps, and lost many comrades, only to wind up back at the very spot that had caused them so much pain in the first place.

But what happened next made all that seem to pale, like a shadow blasted by lightning.

“Maybe it'sss a different criswell structure,”
suggested Akeakemai, one of the dolphin technical officers, calling from the bridge.
“After all, there's supposed to be millions of them, in just this galaxy alone.”

But that wishful hope shattered when Tsh't confirmed the star configurations.

“Besides. What are the chances another criswell would sit this close to a transfer point? Most lie in remote globular clusters.

“No,” the lieutenant went on. “Our Zang friends have brought us back for s-sssome bloody reason … may they vaporize and burn for it.”

We four kids from Wuphon gathered at one end of the Plotting Room to compare notes. Ur-ronn communicated with her friends in Engineering. Her urrish lisp grew stronger as she became more excited, explaining what she had learned about the spiky ball.

“It is hollow, with a radius avout three tines as wide as Jijo's orvit, centered on a little red dwarf star. It is all jagged vecause that creates the highest surface area to
radiate heat to surface. And it's just like that on the inside too, where the uneven surface catches every ray of light from the star!”

“Actually, a simple sphere would accomplish that,”
explained the Niss Machine in professorial tones. A pictorial image appeared, showing a hollow shell surrounding a bright crimson pinpoint.

“Some pre-Contact Earthlings actually prophesied such things, calling them—”

“Dyson spheres!” Huck shouted.

We all stared at her. She twisted several vision-stalks in a shrug.

“C'mon guys. Catch up on your classic scifi.”

Hoons think more slowly than g'Keks, but I nodded at last.

“Hr-rm, yes. I recall seeing them mentioned in novels by … hr-r … Shaw and Allen. But the idea seemed too fantastic ever to take serious …”

My voice trailed off. Of course, seeing is believing.

“As I was about to explain,”
the Niss continued, somewhat huffily,
“the simple Dyson sphere concept missed an essential geometric requirement of a stellar enclosure. Allow me to illustrate.”

A new pictorial replaced the smooth ball with a prickly one—like a knob of quill-coral dredged up by a fishing scoop. The computer-generated image split open before our eyes, exposing a wide central void where the tiny star shone. Only now a multitude of knifelike protrusions jutted
inward
as well, crisscrossing like the competing branches of a riotous rain forest.

“
Latter-day Earthlings call this a
criswell structure.
The spikiness creates a
fractal
shape, of dimension approximately two point four. The interior has a bit more folding, where the purpose is to maximize total surface area getting some exposure to sunlight, even if it comes at a glancing angle.”

“Why?” Pincer-Tip asked.

“To maximize the number of windows, of course,”
answered the Niss, as if that explained everything.

“Energy is the chief limiting factor here. This small sun puts out approximately ten to the thirty ergs per
second. By capturing all of that, and allowing each inhabitant a generous megawatt of power to use, this abode can adequately serve a population exceeding one hundred thousand billion sapient beings. At lower per capita power use, it would support more than ten quadrillions.”

We all stared. For once, even Huck was stunned to complete silence.

I struggled for some way to wrap my poor, slow thoughts around such numbers.

Put it this way. If every citizen of the Six Races of Jijo were suddenly to have each
cell
of his or her body transformed into a full-sized sapient being, the total would still fall short of the kind of census the Niss described. It far surpassed the count of every star and life-bearing planet in all five galaxies.

(I figured all this out later, of course. At the time, it taxed my stunned brain to do more than stare.)

Ur-ronn recovered first.

“It sounds … 
crowded
,” she suggested.

“Actually, population levels are constrained by energy and sun-facing surface area. By contrast, volume for living space is not a serious limitation. Accommodations would be fairly roomy. Each sovereign entity could have a private chamber larger than the entire volcano you Jijoans call Mount Guenn.”

“Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh …” Pincer-Tip stuttered from five leg vents at once, summing up my own reaction at the time. “P-p-people
made
this thing … t-t-to live in?”

The Niss hologram curled into a spinning abstraction of meshed lines that somehow conveyed amusement.

“These inhabitants might consider the term ‘people' insultingly pejorative, my dear young barbarian. In fact, most of them are classified as higher entities than you or me. Fractal colonies are primarily occupied by members of the Retired Order of Life. In this place—and about a billion other structures like it, scattered across the Five Galaxies—elder races live out their quiet years in relative peace, freed from the bickering noise and fractious disputes of younger clans.”

A nearby dolphin snorted derisively, though at that
moment I did not grasp the bitter irony of the Niss Machine's words.

Sara Koolhan wandered back to join our group.

“But what is it
made of
?” the young sage asked. “What kind of materials could possibly support anything so huge?”

The pictorial image zoomed, focusing our view on one small segment of a cutaway edge. From a basically circular arc, craggy shapes projected both toward the star and away from it, splitting into branches, then sub-branches, and so on till the eye lost track of the smallest. Faceted chambers filled every enclosed volume.

“The inner surface is built largely of spun carbon, harvested from various sources, like the star itself Hydrogen-helium fusion reactors produced more, over the course of many millions of years. Carbon can withstand direct sunlight. Moreover, it is strong in centrifugal tension.