Poul Anderson - Renascence

“Hm, I should think that scenario depends quite a bit on the planet’s personal magnetic field. How strong is it?… Hold on!” Guthrie exclaimed. “Something damn funny here.”

She glanced at the data and gasped.

The field was not simple or steady. Nor did its pulsations follow the shudders that passed through the black hole disc and out across space. It choired. Around a stable half gauss, which must arise from the core, vibrated electronic voices, faint but multi-millionfold. Intricate harmonics went from horizon to horizon, around the curve of the globe. Digitals blinked, one-null-null-one-one-one… beyond counting. Thermocells registered scores of points whose cold suggested cryogenics underground. Fluctuant radio bands soughed in the heavens—

“Don’t just float there,” Guthrie croaked to the ship. “Give us a real look.”

It heard, without knowing that it heard, although the command he sent down the circuits was what it responded to. Magnified imagery brought the surface within optical meters. Guthrie and Demeter saw.

Crystalline. No better word came to them. Valleys, plains, hills, mountainsides bore an endless intricacy of shapes. A coral reef might give a hint of description, here reaching aloft, there hugging the ground, convoluted, porous, sometimes blockily massive, sometimes clockwork delicate, always more fantastic than dreams. But these forms were generally sharp-edged, angular, akin to spar, quartz, pyrites, shards of glass, facets on jewels. Among their murky hues, occasional mirror brightnesses flung light back to space. And surely the totality of them reached deeply downward.

During an orbit and an orbit, the watchers learned that weirdness did not cover the entire globe. Extensive regions of it, amounting to about a fourth, were ordinary rock, regolith, dust scudding before chill winds. “Around the meteor craters especially,” Guthrie muttered. “That might explain why they’re few. The rest have been… eaten, converted. Sites rich in minerals? Those that are left may be poor, unless the thing simply hasn’t gotten to them yet.” “What is it?” For a time Demeter lay mute, until she blurted, “A monstrous artifact? Who could have built it?”

Guthrie shrugged phantom shoulders and put bravado in his ghost-voice. “I dunno. But 1 kind of doubt that. To me, this hasn’t got the look of anything serving a purpose. Individual structures, yeah, but no overall coordination. At least, that’s my first impression.”

“Those signals—”

“Are they signals? Communication? Let’s do whatever analysis we can.”

Eagerness flamed. “If it is intelligent, we’ll call to it!”

“Yeah? If it is a cybercosm, do we necessarily want it to know about us?”

She made no answer. He felt her remembering what has engulfed Earth. Not that that is evil in itself; but our worlds are biocosms.

“No, I don’t suppose it can be,” she said at last. A hope, a fear?

The ship kept orbit. Its receivers drank in the emissions from the planet. Its computers ran through the data, over and over, seeking patterns that could mean awareness. Information is equivalent to negative entropy. But billions of gigabits must be sifted to determine how often the statistically improbable occurred and what its nature was.

Guthrie and Demeter made what observations they were able to. They studied, thought, discussed. Setting the clues they got alongside that which astronomers at home had learned and conjectured, they began to sketch out a history of this system.

Closely determined at close range, the black hole’s mass indicated how large the original star must have been, and thus the manner of its perishing. The ship had automatically collected data on its surroundings as it traveled. Although the nebula given off in the early stages of death had dissipated, traces remained in the interstellar medium, and the shock wave of the supernova was still clearly identifiable. Calculation forward from theory and extrapolation backward from fact converged on a date for that moment of ultimate violence; about a billion years ago.

While part of the ejected matter was falling back as astrophysicist Packer had proposed, it was insufficient for the accretion disc. The bulk of that came from gas in orbit, approximately normal to the axis of rotation. Every such orbit would have decayed by now, except that as an atom approached, the radiation turned it into plasma, which the electromagnetic fields accelerated. This slowed but did not stop inward spiraling. The disc had once been far brighter. In less than another billion years, it would be nearly extinct.

Even so, the quantity involved was immense. Guthrie’s notion that a small, close-in companion had been destroyed could well be right. A cloud that was dense by cosmic standards must formerly have extended for tens of astronomical units. Perhaps that explained how new planets had formed. Or perhaps it explained how the remnants of old ones had moved inward. Geology on the ground ought to show which was true—or that both were false.

In either case, the surface that Guthrie and Demeter saw had to be comparatively fresh. Whether it grew incandescent from the crashing together of planetesimals or from a billow of fire that seared away its outer layers, an object this size would not cool off soon.

Despite that, elaborate formations decked it, where intricate electrical processes went on. The power clearly came from the disc, with possibly a geothermal component. The electricity could not be a direct result of resonance or induction. It was too complex, and it showed itself to have multitudinous points of origin, where energy was somehow concentrated. Yet the emissions were not messages. There were no transmitters, only leakages. Analysis revealed no codes; apparently the complexity was just a question of innumerable impulses in immense variety.

“What is it?” Demeter puzzled. “Why is it?”

“You know the Universe hasn’t got any ‘why,’ ” Guthrie said.

“Apart from what sentient life makes,” she reminded him.

His being caressed hers. “Thanks for that,” he said.

While they waited, they had not devoted themselves entirely to science. At intervals the mind must rest, it must dream. It must remember. From their private databanks, he and she evoked years reaching back through millennia—

—Anson Guthrie, whose Fireball Enterprises gave humankind its first real bridgehead beyond Earth and whose download led an exodus of rebels to Alpha Centauri. The need for an intelligence to guide and make strong the ecology they precariously sowed. Kyra Davis and Eiko Tamura, whose downloads went into the creation of Demeter Mother, tinged by what Guthrie recalled of his wife who died on Earth. The oneness she slowly gained with life, the knowledge and feeling, until at last she could do what had been impossible until then: download from Guthrie’s neural network to a living body built around his genome. Her later shaping of a mate for him, who was her mortal self. And thus the opening of the stars, as ships bore quiescent programs to worlds prepared for new flesh. Lifespan after lifespan, the same souls housed over and over, now in organic form, now inorganic, but always aware and always, they hoped, growing toward a measure of wisdom—and multiple, the number of their avatars no longer knowable—

—I call this to your mind precisely because it is so familiar. Until we have ourselves been reborn, we shall not understand it, and not until we have had many rebirths shall we discern the full meaning of it. Meanwhile we should think upon it.

As nearly as disembodied minds may, Guthrie and Demeter relived the centuries of their love. I have glimpsed it in my father and my mother, who are among their incarnations. It is strong and it is strange; for beneath the ordinariness he wears like armor, he is the eternal hero, while she half remembers how again and again she has been a Life Mother. But the ways in which they shared it, these particular two who sought to the black hole, that concerns no one else.