Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (117 page)

He slid his hand away. ‘I’m going back to the pod, and up to the ship, and I’m going to get a little more drunk Do you want to come?’

She thought about it. ‘No. Send the pod down again. Some of the cabins here are made up; I can—’

There was a sparkling in the air before him. She stumbled back, disconcerted; Mark moved closer to her to watch.

Pixels - thumbnail cubes of light - tumbled over each other, casting glittering highlights from Brunel’s ancient machinery. They coalesced abruptly into the lifesize, semitransparent Virtual image of a human head: round, bald, cheerful. The face split into a grin. ‘Louise. Sorry to disturb you.’

‘Gillibrand. What in Lethe do
you
want? I thought you’d be unconscious by now.’

Sam Gillibrand, forty going on a hundred and fifty, was Louise’s chief assistant. ‘I was. But my nanobots were hooked up to the comms panel; they sobered me up fast when the message came in. Damn them.’ Gillibrand looked cheerful enough. ‘Oh, well; I’ll just have it all to do again, and—’

‘The comms panel? What was the message, Sam?’

Gillibrand’s grin became uncertain. ‘City Hall. There’s been a change to the flight plan.’ Gillibrand’s voice was high; heavily accented mid-American, and not really capable of conveying much drama. And yet Louise felt herself shudder when Gillibrand said: ‘We’re not going to Tau Ceti after all.’

T
he old woman leaned forward in her seat, beside Kevan Scholes.

The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the
Lightrider
, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere - the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere - a thin haze above it all.

Scholes couldn’t help but stare at his companion. Her posture was stiff, and her hands - neatly folded in her lap, over her seatbelt - were gaunt, the skin pocked by liver-spots and hanging loosely from the bones.
Like gloves
, he thought. She wore a simple silver-grey coverall whose only decoration was a small brooch pinned to the breast. The brooch depicted a stylized snake entwined around a golden ladder.

The little ship passed over a photosphere granule; Scholes watched absently as it unfolded beneath them. Hot hydrogen welled up from the Solar interior at a speed of half a mile a second, then spread out across the photosphere surface. This particular fount of gas was perhaps a thousand miles across, and, in its photosphere-hugging orbit, the
Lightrider
was travelling so rapidly that it had passed over the granule in a few minutes. And Scholes saw as he looked back that the granule was already beginning to disintegrate, the hydrogen spill at its heart dwindling. Individual granules persisted less than ten minutes, on average.

‘How beautiful this is,’ his companion said, gazing down at the Sunscape. ‘And how
complex -
how intricate, like some immense machine, perhaps, or even a world.’ She turned to him, her mouth - surrounded by its dense web of wrinkles - folded tight. ‘I can imagine whiling away my life, just watching the slow evolutions of that surface.’

Scholes looked across the teeming Sunscape. The photosphere was a mass of ponderous motion, resembling the surface of a slowly boiling liquid. The granules, individual convective cells, were themselves grouped into loose associations:
supergranules
, tens of thousands of miles across, roughly bounded by thin, shifting walls of stable gas. As he watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting suddenly across the Solar surface; neighbouring granules were pushed aside, so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar which was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

Scholes studied his companion. The sunlight underlit her face, deepening the lines and folds of loose flesh there. It made her look almost demonic - or like something out of a distant, unlamented past. She’d fallen silent now, watching him; some response was expected, and he sensed that his customary glib flippancy - which usually passed for conversation in the Solar habitat - wouldn’t do.

Not for her.

He summoned up a smile, with some difficulty. ‘Yes, it’s beautiful. But—’ Scholes had spent much of the last five years within a million miles of the Sun’s glowing surface, but even so had barely started to become accustomed to the eternal presence of the star. ‘It’s impossible to forget it’s
there . .
. Even when I’m in Thoth, with the walls opaqued - when I could really be anywhere in the System, I guess.’ He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed; her cold, rheumy eyes were on him, analytical. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain it any better.’

Was there a hint of a smile on that devastated face? ‘You needn’t be self-conscious.’

Kevan Scholes had volunteered for this assignment - a simple three-hour orbital tour with this mysterious woman who, a few days earlier, had been brought to Thoth, the freefall habitat at the centre of the wormhole project. It should have been little more than a sightseeing jaunt - and a chance to learn more about this ancient woman, and perhaps about the true goals of Paradoxa’s wormhole project itself.

And besides, it was a break from his own work. Scholes was supervising the assembly of one vertex of a wormhole Interface from exotic matter components. When the wormhole was complete, one of its pair of tetrahedral Interfaces would be left in close orbit around the Sun. The other, packed with an ambitious AI complex, would be dropped into the Sun itself.

The work was well paid, though demanding; but it was dull, routine, lacking fulfilment. So a break was welcome . . . But he had not expected to be so disconcerted by this extraordinary woman.

He tried again. ‘You see, we’re all scientists or engineers here,’ he said. ‘A sense of wonder isn’t a prerequisite for a job on this project - it’s probably a handicap, actually. But that’s a
star
out there, after all: nearly a million miles across -
five light-seconds
- and with the mass of three hundred thousand Earths. Even when I can’t see it, I know it’s there; it’s like a psychic pressure, perhaps.’

She nodded and turned her face to the Sun once more. ‘Which is why we find speculation about its destruction so extraordinarily distressing. And, of course, to some extent we are actually
within
the body of the Sun itself. Isn’t that true?’

‘I guess so. There’s no simple definition of where the Sun ends; there’s just a fall-off of density, steep at first, then becoming less dramatic once you’re outside the photosphere . . . Let me show you.’

He touched his data slate, and the semisentient hull suppressed the photosphere’s glow. In its new false colours the Sunscape became suffused with deep crimsons and purples; the granules seethed like the clustering mouths of undersea volcanoes.

‘My word,’ she murmured. ‘It’s like a landscape from a medieval hell.’

‘Look up,’ Scholes said.

She did so, and gasped.

The chromosphere was a soft, featureless mist around the ship. And the corona - the Sun’s outer atmosphere, extending many Solar diameters beyond the photosphere - was a cathedral of gas above them, easily visible now that the photosphere light was suppressed. There were ribbons, streamers of high density in that gas; it was like an immense, slow explosion all around them, expanding as if to fill space.

‘There’s so much
structure
,’ she said. She stared upwards, her watery eyes wide and unblinking. Scholes felt disquieted by her intensity. He restored the transparency of the hull, so that the corona was overwhelmed once more.

A sunspot - deep black at its heart, giving an impression of a wound in the Sun’s hide, of immense depth - unfolded beneath them, ponderously.

‘We seem to be travelling so
slowly
,’ she said.

He smiled. ‘We’re in free orbit around the Sun. We’re actually travelling at three hundred miles a
second
.’

He saw her eyes widen.

He said gently, ‘I know. It takes a little while to get used to the
scale
of the Sun. It’s not a planet. If the Earth were at the centre of the Sun, the whole of the Moon’s orbit would be contained within the Sun’s bulk . . .’

They were directly over the spot now; its central umbra was like a wound in the Sun’s glowing flesh, deep black, with the penumbra a wide, grey bruise around it. This was the largest of a small, interconnected family of spots, Scholes saw now; they looked like splashes of paint against the photosphere, and their penumbrae were linked by causeways of greyness. The spot complex passed beneath them, a landscape wrought in shades of grey.

‘It’s like a tunnel,’ Lieserl said. ‘I imagine I can see into it, right down into the heart of the Sun.’

‘That’s an illusion, I’m afraid. The spot is dark only by contrast with the surrounding regions. If a major spot complex could be cut out of the Sun and left hanging in space, it would be as bright as the full Moon, seen from Earth.’

‘But still, the illusion of depth is startling.’

Now the spot complex was passing beneath them, rapidly becoming foreshortened.

Scholes said uncertainly, ‘Of course you understand that what you see of the Sun, here, is a false-colour rendering by the hull of the
Lightrider
. The ‘
Rider
’s hull is actually almost perfectly reflective. Excess heat is dumped into space with high-energy lasers fixed to the hull: the ‘
Rider
refrigerates itself, effectively. In fact, if you could see the ship from outside it would actually be glowing more brightly than the photosphere itself . . .’ Scholes was uncomfortably aware that he was jabbering.

‘I think I follow.’ She waved her claw-like hand, delicately, at the glowing surface. ‘But the features are real, of course. Like the spot complex.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
Lethe
, he thought suddenly.
Am I patronizing her
?

His brief had been to show this strange old woman the sights - to give her the VIP tour. But he knew nothing about her - it was quite possible she knew far more about the subjects he was describing than he did.

The Paradoxa Collegiate was notoriously secretive: about the goals of this Solar wormhole project, and the role the old woman would play in it . . . although everyone knew, from the way she had been handled since arriving in near-Solar space - as if she was as fragile and precious as an eggshell - that this woman was somehow the key to the whole thing.

But how much did she
know
?

He watched her birdlike face carefully. The way her grey hair had been swept back into a small, hard bun made her strong-nosed face even more gaunt and threatening than it might otherwise have been.

She asked, ‘And is this refrigeration process how the wormhole probe is going to work - to become able to penetrate the Sun itself?’

He hesitated. ‘Something like it, yes. The key to refrigerating a volume is to suck heat out of the volume faster than it’s allowed in. We’ll be taking Solar heat away from the AI complex out through the wormhole, and dumping it outside the Sun itself; actually we’re planning to use that energy as a secondary power source for Thoth . . .’

She shifted in her chair, stiff and cautious, as if afraid of breaking something. ‘Dr Scholes, tell me. Will we be leaving freefall?’

The question was surprising. He looked at her. ‘During this flight, in the
Lightrider
?’

She returned his look calmly, waiting.

‘We’re actually in free orbit around the Sun; this close to the surface the period is about three hours . . . We’ll make a complete orbit. Then we’ll climb back out to Thoth . . . But we’ll proceed the whole way at low acceleration; you should barely feel a thing. Why do you ask?’ He hesitated. ‘Are you uncomfortable? ’

‘No. But I would be if we started to ramp up the gees. I’m a little more fragile than I used to be, you see.’ Her tone was baffling - self-deprecating, wistful, perhaps with a hint of resentment.

He nodded and turned away, unsure how to respond.

‘Oh, dear.’ Unexpectedly, she was smiling, revealing small, yellow-gold teeth. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Scholes. I suspect I’m intimidating you.’

‘A little, yes.’ He grinned.

‘You really don’t know what to make of me, do you?’

He spread his hands. ‘The trouble is, frankly, I’m not sure how much you know.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t want to feel I’m patronizing you, by—’

‘Don’t feel that.’ Unexpectedly she let her hand rest on his; her fingers felt like dried twigs, but her palm was surprisingly warm, leathery. ‘You’re fulfilling the request I made, for this trip, very well. Assume I know nothing; you can treat me as an empty-headed tourist.’ Her smile turned into a grin, almost mischievous; suddenly she seemed much less
alien
, in Scholes’ eyes. ‘As ignorant as a visiting politician, or Paradoxa high-up, even. Tell me about sunspots, for instance.’

He laughed. ‘All right . . . To understand that, you need to know how the Sun is put together.’

The Sun was a thing of layers, like a Chinese box.

At the Sun’s heart was an immense fusion reactor, extending across two hundred thousand miles. This core region - contained within just a quarter of the Sun’s diameter - provided nearly all the Sun’s luminosity, the energy which caused the Sun to shine.

Beyond the fusing core, the Sun consisted of a thinning plasma. Photons - packets of radiation emitted from the core - worked their way through this radiative layer, on average travelling no more than an inch before bouncing off a nucleus or electron. It could take an individual photon millions of years to work its way through the crowd to the surface of the Sun.

Moving outwards from the core, the density, temperature and pressure of the plasma fell steadily, until at last - four-fifths of the way to the surface - electrons could cling to nuclei to form atoms - and, unlike the bare nuclei of the plasma, the atoms were able to
absorb
the energy of the photons.