Across the Sea of Suns

One

Fire boils aft, pushing the ship close to the knife edge of light speed. Its magnetic throats dimple the smooth dipolar field.

—An arrow scratching across the black—

—blue-white exhaust plume of fizzing hydrogen—

—a granite-gray asteroid riding the roaring blowtorch—

It sucks in the interstellar dust. Mixes a caldron of isotopes. And spews them out the back, an ultraviolet flare in the swallowing abyss.

Inside, Nigel Walmsley was eating oysters.

The last of the wine, he thought moodily, peering into his cup. And it was. As nearly as ship’s rumor had it, nobody else had brought more than a bottle or so, and that had been well exhausted in the last two years.

He swirled the cup and swallowed the final chilled mouthful. The Pinot Chardonnay cut the faintly metallic taste of the oysters and left only the sea flavor and the succulent texture, a memory of Earth. He drank the last cold liquid from the shells and savored it. Eight light-years from Earth, the echo of the Gulf Stream faded.

“That’s the lot,” Nigel murmured.

“Uh … what?”

He realized he had been neglecting his guest. Ted had arrived unannounced, after all, and dead on the supper hour, as well. “I doubt I’ll be able to replace California Chardonnay, and certainly not oysters.”

“Oh. No, I suppose not. Are … are you sure the oysters were still okay?” Ted Landon shifted awkwardly.

“Considering they’ve been vac-stored for years, you mean?” Nigel shrugged. “We’ll see.” He lounged back on the tatami mat, nearly elbowing a lacquered lamp into oblivion. His nudity clearly bothered Ted. The man moved again, adjusting his cross-legged sitting position. Well, so be it; Nigel hadn’t had time yet to run out some chairs in the wood shop.

Ted’s tobacco pouch appeared. “Mind?” Nigel shook his head. During meals, he did, yes, but Ted probably knew that already. He knew everything. They had a personality profile on Nigel a yard long, even in ferrite storage. He’d seen it himself.

A slow, profound stuffing of the pipe. “Y’know, when I heard you were carving an apartment in the Low Amenity Area, I thought you’d be living pretty raw. But this looks great.”

Nigel nodded and studied the living room, trying to see it with Ted’s eyes.

—crimson vase, pale yellow flower sprouting, tray cupping single flake of smoldering incense, teakwood box, gossamer paper walls, oblique blades of yellow light drawing motes upward in the fanned air—wait until Ted had to excrete and found the loo, a hole lined with porcelain straight from Korea, closed with a wooden cover, on either side stepping-stones in the shape of feet for the slow learners: squat and deliver, why put a mask on a valuable moment of the day—

“What gives?” Nigel asked, lapsing into transatlantic shorthand.

Ted looked at him flatly, still slightly edgy. “I’m reorganizing staff.”

Aha. “You’re the new Works Manager.”

“That’s not the term, but—look, Nigel, there are some hard choices.”

“Indeed.”

Ted gave a smile, reassuring and broad but capable of vanishing, along with the flicker of one eyelid, as suddenly as it had come.

“You’ve been an ExOp so far.”

“Gridded, yes.” Nigel was too old to do the work directly, with his own muscle power. But his coordination and reflexes, enhanced by constant medservice, were still good. So they linked him by grid into servo’d robots that operated outside the ship.

“Well, y’see, there’s a big waiting list for that job classification. And you’re …”

“Too old,” Nigel said bluntly.

“Well, a lot of people think so. When the community vote came in—the vote on who’ll do what in Isis space—you got a lot of red flags.”

“Not surprising.”

“So I’m here to ask you to resign. Drop out of ExOp.”

“No.”

“What?”

Surely it couldn’t have been that difficult to follow. “No.”

“But community votes are pretty near binding.”

“No, they’re merely indicative. My fellow crewmen can’t give me the sack, zip, like that. You’re the command structure, Ted. Surely you know you can overrule anything short of an absolute majority in the community.”

“Well—”

“And with 1266 voting, I doubt a majority wanted me out of my slot. Most don’t know my work, or care.”

Ted had a small habit. He braced his jaw a bit and tightened his mouth, so slightly that Nigel could scarcely see the pressure whiten the red of his lips. Then he touched his front teeth together and rubbed them carefully back and forth, as though he were methodically sharpening them against each other. His jaw muscles rippled.

“Technically, Nigel, you’re right.”

“Fine, then.”

“But your sense of community must lead you to see that active opposition by a significant minority is, well, contrary to the long-term interests of our mission and—”

“Bloody hell!”

Again Ted made his teeth-sharpening motion, jaw muscles flexing. “The alternative job I think you’ll find quite attractive.”

“What is it?”

“Heavy foundry work.”

Fusing the asteroid rock, prestressing struts, using laser cutters and e-beams. “Socketed?”

“Uh, yes, of course.”

They hooked you into the big machines, connected you at hip and knee and elbow and wrist, the delicate electronic interface matching directly to your nerves. And you sensed the machine, you felt the machine, you worked the machine, you served the machine, you were the machine. “No.”

“You’ve been using that word a lot lately, Nigel.”

“It’s terribly economical.”

Ted sighed—spontaneous, or calculated? Hard to tell—and clapped his big hands to his knees. The zazen position was uncomfortable for him, even with his shoes off. For some reason most guests adopted that position, even though Nigel usually sprawled on the cushions. Perhaps they felt the rectangular simplicity of this Oriental room suggested a spine-straightening discipline to its inhabitants. To Nigel it suggested just the opposite.

“Nigel, I know you won’t like leaving external operations, but I think after you made the switch to foundry work, you’d feel—”

“Like a canceled stamp.”

Ted’s face reddened suddenly. “Damn it, I expect sacrifice from everyone on board! When I ask you to change jobs, elementary—”

Nigel waved him to silence. He had found that a particularly abrupt gesture, ending in a thrust forefinger, nearly always stopped Ted’s rapid-fire attacks. A valuable trick. “And if I don’t comply? The Slowslots?”

This had the intended effect. Dragging the Slowslots suddenly to stage center raised the stakes. This in turn disturbed the controlled way administrators liked to negotiate, and also brought floating to Ted’s mind the fact that Nigel had helped develop the Slowslots as a volunteer guinea pig; he had already paid dues that were more than metaphorical.

“Nigel …” Ted drawled, shaking his head soberly. “I’m surprised you would think in those terms. No one in the Lancer community wants to stick you into a sleep box. Your friends are simply trying to tell you that perhaps it is time to step aside from the tasks that require reflexes, skill, and stamina which—let’s face the facts—you’re gradually losing. We all—”

“Right. In other words, they’ve always seen my appointment to a real, working exo job as a political fish thrown to a 3-D-elevated seal.”

“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.

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 0₂, 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 O₂ 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’ O₂ 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.

“Beats the hell out of me, why somebody’d pick that way for interstellar communication.”

“Alex, what is the length over which the signals are correlated?”

“Nigel, I asked you—”

“Leave off a bit, eh? Alex?”

Well, lemme run this here … Yeah, the spatial correlation length is about thirty klicks, maybe a little more.

“How does it fit in with the topography?”

Here, plug me in on that multichannel, Ted, and—Yeah, there it is.

“Does it follow the valley profiles?”

Uh, yeah. Sort of. Sources are strung out along the valleys. Not many in the mountains.

“The valleys are where the best living is. The water. Over to you, Ted.”

“Many thanks, Nigel. It is nice to get a word in now and then. Let me get this straight, Alex. If you scan the interferometer across the valley, you find the signal is coherent. All the point sources are sending together?”

Correct.

“But if you go to the next valley, the sources are sending something slightly ahead or behind of the first valley?”

Yeah. That’s what’s so goddamn strange. The bit rate is still low, too. And the sources, they’re not steady.

“How so?”

Well, every few minutes one of ’em will drop out. A new one comes in every now and then, too, so the number is about constant.

“Huh. Look, Alex, I called to ask about the outflyer dish. You were going to have it on line by 1400 hours, and that’s come and gone. We need that bigger base line to get the definition we need, and we damn well need it now.”

“Give it a rest, Ted.”

“Nigel, I thought you—”

“Merely kibitzing, if you please. I’m sure Alex will have matters cleared up at his end if you cease ragging him about it. I wanted to take a moment to review all this, Ted. You’ve got the optical and IR profiles right in front of you, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, you can come down here to Command and see them if you want.”

“Already have. I’m sticking to this console, to use the self-programming capabilities. Anyway, Command is crowded.”

“Okay, okay. If you’d wait for the input like the rest of the crew—”

I was wondering if you’d considered the implications, Ted. No trace of cities. No urban areas. No big straight features, no fields or roads. And the EM transmissions are weak, except for that interstellar signal.”

“Yeah. Damn funny. But maybe they’re living underground, using all the land for agriculture, and they use cables for info transfer. Hell, we do that back on Earth. We wasted power on atmospheric transmissions only in the start-up days of radio and TV.”

“Even agriculture has a signature, this close. We could see croplands.”

“Maybe so, maybe so.”

“I’ve been cross-correlating Alex’s prelim fixes on the radio sources—the EM points, he calls ’em for electromagnetic—with the IR. Anyone in Command done that?”

“Uh, I don’t—”

“I’d like to check my work. There are signal-to-noise problems and I’ve been using the self-programming subsystems to unfold it—”

“No, look, Nigel, we’ve been too busy to try all that yet. I’d suggest—”

“Point is, some of the EM points and the IR points are the same.”

“Which ones?”

“There’s the rub. It’s the moving IR sources, looks like.”

“The ones we got variable fixes on? I don’t under—”

“What I’m saying, Ted, is that the radio transmitters give off heat as well. And most important, they’re moving.”

“Well, I don’t—”

Hey we’ve got this whole rig up, but you guys got to keep aligned with us or we’ll have shit to show for it when—

“Alex, this is Ted, give us an overlay of your mapping. I want to match it—”

With the IR?

“Uh, yes.”

Nigel was flimming me about that stuff. Wanted the early results. I just repped and verified the points he asked about. They’re variable. Slow, but moving.

“You’re sure?”

Yeah. The IR points are pretty weak, almost fuzzed out by the thermal landscape background Jenkins told me they were probably small volcanic vents—

“Not bloody likely.”

“Since when did you become a geologist? Look, the dust and crap down there, nobody can be sure of that IR.”

“Right. We have to go down and see.”

“That’s a little premature, Nigel. We’re standing off at a safe distance. Going to surface mode now would violate our guidelines, and you know it.”

“Dead right I know it. But that’s what we’ll have to do.”

Four

Ted arrived at Nigel and Nikka’s apartment a little late. He carried his usual prop, a clipboard jammed with notes. Nigel steered him first to the bar, then into the deep-cradled cushions of their new couch. Ted eased into it as if uncertain of its reliability; with its slanting legs and oblique joints, it looked rickety. Nigel had designed it for their apartment’s low gravity, using the wood he had in his personal mass allotment. He was the only person in Lancer with high-quality oak, and he had carefully carved this, polishing it with the oil of his hands.

“Wish you’d come down to Command to talk,” Ted began.

“It’s a jam down there.”

“Yeah, pretty busy. No wonder you stay home, low gravity, plenty of rest—”

Alex knocked; Nigel waved him in. Alex was a heavy, balding man, face dark with fatigue. He sat down on the couch like a man dumping a weight off his back. Muscles rippled in his shoulders as he flexed them, seeking an alert posture in the deep couch. Nigel had designed it to thwart such aims; finally Alex relaxed into it.

“Whoosh!” Alex puffed. “I been worshipin’ those consoles like an acolyte.”

“Drink?”

“Just make me go to sleep.”

“You’ve brought them, though?” Ted prompted.

“Sure. I piped ’em down to your input here. They’re waitin on your screen.”

Nigel said a soft “Thanks,” and thumbed on their flat. The screen filled with a grid. Small white dots peppered the green field. “These are your time-stepped maps, Alex?” Nigel prompted.

“Yeah, weeks’ worth. I followed ’em one by one. Talk about your low bit rate—”

Ted smiled and put his hands on his knees. “Well, it’s first-class work, Alex, all of it. First-class.”

Nikka sat zazen beside Nigel, studying the men. “But the message?” she asked. “That’s what everyone’s waiting for, enough phase-coherent signal to tell—”

“We’ve got it.” The words came out dry and tired.

“You have?” Nigel said, surprised.

“Yeah. It’s not all that hard, once you unnerstan’ that there are maybe one, two million, sources on at once. Each winks on and off, but what they’re doin’ is trying to boost the signal up by, well, ever’body chippin’ in.”

Ted said carefully, “We haven’t released the information yet because it’s well, disturbing. But Alex has cracked it, that we’re sure of. Until—”

Alex said wearily, emphatically, “It’s a 1956 Arthur Godfrey show.”

“What?” Nikka said. “You mean … literally?”

“Yeah. It’s a slow, slow playback of a radio comedy broadcast in 1956.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nigel said with relish.

Ted began: “We’ve been trying to place this in a context, to understand—”

“So—we’ve come—!” Nigel erupted with laughter. The others sat, blinking, stunned. He roared on merrily, tears squeezing from under his eyelids. For a long moment the others were stiffly silent. Then they began to shift position awkwardly, looking at one another. Nikka slowly smiled. At last Nigel descended to a chuckle, gasped for breath, and seemed to notice them again.

“The Bracewell hypothesis!”

Ted nodded. “Some of us have ventured that explanation, but I feel it’s too early—”

“Christ, it’s obvious! Those poor sods down there are intelligent, no mistake about that.”

Nikka interjected, “But no more so than Dr. Bracewell.”

“Right,” Nigel said, “because they’ve bit upon his same idea.” He spread his hands, palms up, open and obvious. “They picked up weak radio signals from us. Mulled them over. To get our attention, they figured the smartest strategy was, send back the same thing. Not some clever mathematical code or TV picture—hell, they can’t pick up TV, much less 3-D.”

“Well …” Ted shifted among the pillows. “We’ve checked with our entertainment discs—an enormous file. The voice profile matches that of Arthur Godfrey, the most popular entertainer of the 1950s in the USA.”

“Dead on,” Nigel said. “A crummy, old, fleabag radio show. Scandalously banal. Something we’d recognize.” He laughed again. “Ah, old Bracewell, would that thou could be with us now. …”

Alex growled. “Depressing, you ask me. Come all this way, find out we’re listening to ourselves.”

Ted patted Alex’s thick shoulder. “Look, this is a fantastic discovery. You’re just tired.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Alex sighed.

“You’ve got something more, then, Alex?” Nigel said lightly.

Alex brightened. “Uh, yeah, I had to track individual sources of the radio to get a phase fix. I figured, hell, might as well get ’em all. Just a rep-rate problem, following all those emitters on a time-sharing basis.”

“Here.” Ted tapped his own wrist comm and the flat screen stirred to life. The white dots began to move, some winking on and off. “These EMs are also hefty infrared sources. From their body heat, I guess. They’re alive, and apparently each carries a transmitter.”

“Perhaps a nomad culture?” Nikka said softly.

“Well, we’ve thought about that. They don’t have fixed transmitters, that’s for sure, but as for why—”

“Naw” Alex put in. “I got a few that don’t move.”

“Oh?” Ted asked, puzzled. “Is your resolution good enough to be—”

“Yeah, look, see that?” Alex lurched to his feet and walked to the flat. He pointed to a cluster of dots that did not join in the slow snowflake swirl. “These aren’t goin’ anywhere. I can tell for sure ’cause they’ve got little individual signatures in the radio spectrum, if you look close. Li’l shifts in the phase and amplitude, stuff like that.”

Nikka studied the dots as they moved in jagged little jumps. “A few remain still. Perhaps they are old? They no longer take part in the nomadic cycle?”

“Doesn’t look nomadic to me,” Nigel said. “They aren’t moving all together. Look how well spaced they are. They don’t cluster.”

Ted nodded. “Correct. They move through the valley systems, Alex thinks. Sometimes they follow the dust clouds, sometimes not.”

“Any optical fix yet?” Nigel asked.

Ted shook his head. “Dust, clouds, damn dim sunlight in the first place …”

“What is the next step, then? We cannot stand out here in the dark forever,” Nikka declared firmly.

Ted said, “Well, our resolution is—”

“About as good as it’s gonna get,” Alex said.

Nikka said mildly, “Then perhaps it is time for the surface probes?”

The vessels fell, crisp and clean. Winds scorched them; billowy parachutes eased their fall. The slumbering world below was mottled and cloud-shrouded. In some lacing valleys the dryness of the sulfur dust prevailed. There, brackish ponds greeted the first flyback probe.

In the wetter valleys the dust rolled over damper air beneath. Mud fell from the sky. The sluggish rivers were clogged with it. Twisted yellow weeds sprouted on the banks and curious, small creatures scuttled for safety when the second probe popped and murmured and thrust forth a jerking, ratcheting scoop.

Green greeted the third probe, where water had won a permanent victory. The roiling dust blew in nearby mountain passes, but did not eddy and fall here. For this spherical, inquisitive probe the feast of life was more rich. And richer still was the land toward the seas.

The flyback strategy was smash-and-grab. They were instructed to boost at the first sign of anything large. Thus the fifth probe took only one lingering view of the approaching EM creature which had been drawn by its whooshing crash. But the image was clear: a huge thing, leathery, unclothed. Three thin arms rode above the tangle of stiff legs. An awesome head.

It carried nothing. No tools. No radio transmitter.

It had no eyes.

Instead, there was a chunky, rectangular slot in the huge head, a meter across. It turned toward the probe, just as the boosters fired to fling the black cylinder skyward. The probe radio registered a burst of noise, a crisp sputter. Then the landscape dwindled below and the thick pink clouds of Isis consumed the EM creature.

But the spiky rattle in the radio spectrum had come from the creature itself. That much was sure.

Five

Preliminary exploration inched on. Nigel tried to hasten matters, but he had long ago learned the uselessness of trying to put body English on the universe.

Instead, he worked in the fields and tanks, making the fat vegetables swell under ultraviolet phosphors. Rubbery plants stretched tall, driven not by nature’s cruel competition but by well-runed DNA, stepchild of laboratories. Amid these cathedral trees of 99 percent usable, man-centered life, he walked with a slow shuffle, hoarding his energy. The other men and women on the agri team did their work with a quick, efficient energy, but they flagged at the end of the shift, more from boredom than fatigue. Nigel did it slowly because he liked the musk and raw damp of the soil, the click of the hoe, the lofting high into the air of a bundle of rattling dry stalks.

The aliens had given him that. The ability, the oddly tilted sensitivity, had been in him—was in everybody—and the blinding moments in direct contact with the Mare Marginis computer, in the splintered alien ship, had set it loose. In the first years afterward, the stink of enlightenment had followed him everywhere. Before, the dripping of water from a thick-lipped stonework urn had been a restful, pretty sight, nothing more. Then, after the Mare Marginis ship, the same dripping had become a wonderful thing, packed with meaning. Now, at last, it was a dripping into a thick-lipped urn again.

He had talked about that, occasionally, and the words had been distorted and ramified and defined into oblivion. He knew, but others didn’t, that he really could not speak for anyone else, could not penetrate to the experience so that others felt it. Things happened to you and you learned from them, but the pretense of a common interior landscape which one could cart—nonsense. Nothing captured it. He had seen the usual menu of savants, with their crystallized formulas, but they seemed no different. He listened to those Tao and Buddha and Zen phrases, like great blue-white blocks of luminous granite through which pale blades of light seeped, cool and from a distant place, eternally true and forever, immutable and as useful as alabaster statues in a town square.

So he had been grateful when others finally left him alone. He had worked and he did the Slotsleep job, submitting himself to the trial runs with the calm of a domesticated animal. But the alphabet jumble of organizations—ISA, then UNDSA, then ANDP—they were machines, not people. And machines have no need to forget. So to them he was an odd bird with a certain fame and fading glory. He had been in the space program since his early twenties. He had taken part in the series of discoveries that led to the bleak Mare Marginis plain and to the encounter with the alien computer. That made his name useful to the ISA.

It also meant they had to let him go on Lancer. He had put in years of developing Slotsleep, trimming seventeen years from his span. He had done it for the value of research, yes, to bring the stars within range of the extended human life-span. But he had also spent the years floating in the milky rich fluids to keep his own effective age down, so the alphabet agencies could not use age alone as a weapon against him.

The flaw in the logic, he saw, was that after launch, the Lancer crew could do whatever they liked about task assignments. Now he had to maneuver.

He knew what he was and that they should not make a ceramic saint out of him … but still, the illusion had its uses. They gave him more privacy than the usual crew member, let him and Nikka carve a flesh apartment for themselves in Lancer’s rock. And the privacy gave him time to think.

Nigel straightened up from his gardening. He felt a twinge in his back and then a sudden lacing pain. The shock of it made him drop three tomatoes he had plucked. He winced and grimaced and then, before anyone saw the look, made his face go blank. The pain ebbed. He bent carefully to pick up the dusty tomatoes. Traitor muscles along his spine stretched and protested. He let the pain come flooding in, feeling it fully and so disarming it. Enough for today. A legend should not display back problems if he could help it.