Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (142 page)

‘Another astrophysicist’s dream,’ Mark said dryly. ‘You could learn more about the nature of stellar evolution just by standing there and
looking
, than in all the first five millennia of human astronomy.’

‘Yes. But what a price to pay.’

Once, from Jupiter’s orbit the Main Sequence Sun would have been a point source of light - distant, hot, yellow. Now, the Sun’s arc size had to be at least twenty degrees. Its bulk covered fully a fifth of Louise’s field of view: twenty times the width of the full Moon, as seen from Earth.

Jupiter was five AU from the Sun’s centre - an AU was an astronomical unit, the radius of Earth’s orbit. For the Sun to subtend such an angle, it must be two AU across, or more.

Two astronomical units
. In exploding out to become a giant, the Sun had swallowed the Earth, and the planets within Earth’s orbit - Venus, Mercury.

Spinner-of-Rope was studying her, concern mixing with curiosity behind those pale spectacles.

‘What are you thinking, Louise?’

‘This shouldn’t have happened for five billion more years,’ Louise said. Her throat was tight, and she found it difficult to keep her voice level. ‘The Sun was only halfway to turnoff - halfway through its stable lifecycle, on the Main Sequence.

‘
This shouldn’t have happened
. Somebody did this deliberately, robbing us of our future, our worlds - damn it, this was
our Sun
. . .’

‘Louise.’ Mark’s synthesized voice was brisk, urgent.

She breathed deeply, trying to put away her anger, her resentment, to focus on the present.

‘What is it?’

‘You’d better come back to the
Northern
. Morrow has found something . . . Something in the ice. He thinks it’s a spacecraft.’

‘
U
varov.
Uvarov
.’

Garry Uvarov jerked awake. It was dark. He tried to open his eyes ...

As always, in that first instant of wakefulness - even after all these years - he
forgot
. His blindness crowded in on him, a speckled darkness across his eyes, making every new waking a savage horror.

‘Garry. Are you awake?’

It was the solicitous voice of that fake person, Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Uvarov swung his head around, trying to locate the source of the artificial voice. It seemed to be all around him. He tried to speak; he felt his gummy mouth open with a pop, like a fish’s. ‘Mark Wu. Where are you, damn it?’

‘Right here.
Oh
.’ There was a second of silence. Then: ‘I’m here.’

Now the voice came from directly in front of him, from a precise, well-focused place.

‘Better,’ Uvarov growled.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mark said. ‘I hadn’t formed an image. I didn’t think—’

‘You didn’t
bother
,’ Uvarov snapped. ‘Because I can’t see you, you thought it was enough to float around me in the air like some damn spirit.’

‘I didn’t think it would be so important to you,’ Mark said.

‘No,’ Uvarov said. ‘To think of that would have been too much the
human
thing to do for an imprint like you, wouldn’t it?’

‘Do you need anything?’ Mark asked, with strained patience. ‘Some food, or—’

Nothing,’ Uvarov snapped. ‘This chair takes care of it all. With me, it’s in one end and out of the other, without even having to swallow.’ He stretched his lips and leered. ‘As you know. So why did you bother to ask after my health? Just to make me feel dependent?’

‘No.’ Mark sounded cool, but more certain of himself. ‘I thought to ask would be the
human
thing to do.’

Uvarov let himself cackle at that. ‘Touché.’

‘It’s just that you sleep for such a long time, Uvarov,’ Mark said dryly.

‘So would you, if you weren’t dead,’ Uvarov said briskly.

He could hear the rattle of his own breath, the subdued ticking of a huge old clock somewhere, here in the dining saloon of Louise’s old steam ship. Hauling this useless relic five megayears into the future had been, of course, an absurd thing to do, and it showed a fundamental weakness in the character of Louise Ye Armonk. But still, Uvarov had to admit, the textures of the old material - the painted walls, the mirrors, the polished wood of the two long tables -
sounded
wonderful.

‘I suppose you had a
reason
for waking me.’

‘Yes. The Sun maser probes—’

‘Yes?’

‘We’re starting to get meaningful data, Uvarov.’ Now Mark sounded excited, but Uvarov never let himself forget that every inflection of this AI’s voice was a mere artifice.

Still, despite this cynical calculation, Uvarov too began to feel a distinct stirring of interest - of wonder.
Meaningful data?

The maser radiation was coming from hot-spots on the photosphere itself - patches of intense maser brightness, equivalent to tens of millions of degrees of temperature, against a background cooler than the surface of the yellow Sun had once been. The convection mechanism underlying the maser flares’ coherent pathways fired the radiation pulses off tangentially to the photosphere. So the
Northern
had sent out small probes to skim the swollen, diffuse surface of the photosphere, sailing into the paths of the surface-grazing maser beams.

‘Tell me about the data.’

‘It’s a repeating group, Uvarov. Broadcast on maser wavelengths, from within what’s left of the Sun . . . Uvarov, I think it’s a
signal
.’

They hadn’t learned much about the Solar System, in the year since their clumsy, limping arrival from out of the past. So many of the worlds of man simply didn’t exist any more.

Still, in the quiet time before the arrival of the
Northern
at Jupiter, Uvarov and the AI construct had performed some general surveys of the Solar System - what was left of it. And they’d found a few oddities . . .

There was what looked like one solid artifact - Morrow’s anomalous object buried in the ice of Callisto. And, apart from that, there were just three sources of what could be interpreted as intelligently directed signals: this maser stuff from the Sun, the fading beacon from the edge of the System, and - strangest and most intriguing of all, to Garry Uvarov - those strange pulses of gravity radiation from the direction of Sagittarius.

Uvarov had done a little private study, on the structure of the Universe in the direction of Sagittarius. Interestingly enough, he learned, the cosmic structure called the
Great Attractor
was to be found there, right at the place the photino beam was pointing. The Attractor was a huge mass concentration: the source of galactic streaming, for hundreds of millions of light-years’ distance around. Could the Attractor be connected to the g-waves?

And then there was all that strange photino activity in and around the Sun.

The data was patchy and difficult to interpret - after all, dark matter was, almost by definition, virtually impossible to study . . . but there
was
something strange there.

Uvarov thought he’d detected a
streaming.

There was a steady flow, of photino structures, out of the heart of the Sol giant . . . and on out of the Solar System. It was a beam of photinos aimed like a beacon, out of Sol - and straight towards the source of the anomalous gravity waves in Sagittarius.

Something was happening in Sagittarius - something huge, and wonderful, and strange. And, somehow, impossibly, it was connected to whatever was taking place in the heart of the poor, suffering Sun.

. . . The Virtual, Mark Armonk, was talking to him again. Or perhaps
at
him, Uvarov thought sourly.

‘I wish you’d pay attention, Uvarov—’

‘Without me to talk to, you’d lapse into non-sentience, devoid of independent will,’ Uvarov pointed out. ‘So spare me the lectures.’

Mark ground out, ‘The
Sun
, Uvarov. The photosphere maser radiation is standard stuff - generated by silicon monoxide at 43 Gigahertz. There are natural mechanisms for generating such signatures. But in this case, we’ve found hints of
modulation
of the silicon monoxide stuff . . . deliberate modulation.

‘We’ve found structure
everywhere
, Uvarov.’ Again that fake excitement in Mark’s voice; Uvarov felt his irritation grow. Mark went on, ‘There is structure in the amplitude of the beams, their intensity, phasing, polarization - even in the Doppler shifting of the signals. Uvarov, someone - or something - is
in there
, trying to signal out with modulated natural masers, as hard as they can. I’m trying to resolve it, but . . .’

Uvarov strove to shift in his chair, vainly trying to find a more comfortable posture - a prize he’d been seeking for the best part of a thousand years, with as much assiduousness as Jason had once sought his Fleece, he thought. How
pathetic
, how limited he was!

He tried to ignore his body, to fix his analytical abilities - his imagination - on the concept of an intelligence within the Sun . . .

But it was so difficult.

His mind wandered once more. He thought of his forest colony. He thought of Spinner-of-Rope.

Sometimes Uvarov wondered how much better
young
people might have fared, if they’d been given this opportunity to study and learn, with this strange, battered Universe as an intellectual playground. How much more might youth have unearthed, with its fresh eyes and minds, than
he
could!

It had already been fifty years since - in his misguided, temporary lunacy - he had inspired his forest children to undertake their hazardous journey out of the lifedome.
Fifty years:
once most of a human lifetime, he thought - and yet, now, scarcely an interlude in his own, absurdly long life, stuck as he was in this mouldering cocoon of a body.

So even Spinner-of-Rope, Arrow Maker’s wise-ass daughter, must be - what, sixty-five chronological? Seventy, maybe? An old woman already. But still, thanks to AS-freezing, she’d retained the features - and much of the outlook, as far as he could tell - of a child.

He felt a great sorrow weigh upon him. Of course his experiment was lost, now; his carefully developed gene pool was already polluted by interbreeding, no doubt, between the forest folk and the Paradoxa-controlled Decks, and his immortal strain was overwhelmed by AS treatments.

But the progress he had made was still there, he thought; the
genes
were there, dormant, ready. And when -
if -
the inhabitants of the
Northern
got through this time of trouble, when they reached whatever new world waited for them,
then
the great experiment could begin anew.

But in the meantime . . .

He thought again of Spinner-of-Rope, a girl-woman who had grown up among trees and leaves, now walking through the wreckage of the Solar System.

Uvarov had made many mistakes. Well, he’d had
time
to. But he could be proud of this, if nothing else: that to this era of universal desolation and ruin, he - Garry Uvarov - had restored at least a semblance of the freshness of youth.

‘ . . . Uvarov,’ Mark said.

Uvarov turned. The Al’s synthesized voice sounded different - oddly flat, devoid of expression.
None of that damn fake intonation, then
, Uvarov thought with faint triumph. It was as if the Virtual’s processing power had, briefly, been diverted somewhere else. Something had
happened.

‘Well? What is it?’

‘I’ve done it. I’ve resolved the signal - the information in the maser pulses. There’s an image, forming in the data desk . . .’

‘An image?
Tell me
, damn you.’

It was a woman’s face (Mark said), crudely sketched in pixels of colour. A
human
face. The woman was aged about sixty-five physical; she had short-cropped, sandy hair, a strong nose, a wide, upturned mouth, and large, vulnerable eyes.

Her lips were moving.

‘
A woman’s face -
after five million years, transmitted out on maser signals from the heart of a Sun rendered into a red giant? I don’t believe it.’

Mark was silent for a moment. ‘Believe what you want. I think she’s trying to say something. But we don’t have sound yet.’

‘How very inconvenient.’

‘Wait . . . Ah. Here it comes.’

Now Uvarov
heard
it, heard the voice of the impossible image from the past. At first the timbre was broken up, the words virtually indecipherable, and, so Mark informed him, badly out of synchronization with the moving lips.

Then, after a few minutes - and with considerable signal enhancement from the data desk processors - the message cleared.

‘Lethe,’ Mark said. ‘I even recognize the language . . .’

Against the dull red backdrop of the ruined, inflated Sun, the accretion disc of the Jovian black hole sparkled, huge and threatening.

Once more a pod from the
Northern
carried Spinner-of-Rope - alone, this time - down to the surface of Callisto. Spinner twisted to look down through the glass walls of the little pod; as she moved, biomedical sensors within her suit slid over her skin, disconcerting.

The craft from within the ice, dug up and splayed out against the surface by a team of autonomous ‘bots, was like a bird, with night-dark wings a hundred yards long trailing back from a small central body. The wing material looked fragile, insubstantial. The ice of Callisto seemed to show through the wings’ trailing edges.

Louise and Mark had told her that the craft was alien technology. And it had a
hyperdrive
, they thought . . .

She scratched at her shoulder, where one of Mark’s damned biosensors was digging particularly uncomfortably into her flesh. When she landed, Louise was damn well going to have to tell her why she’d been buttoned up like this.