John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

"Yes, what? Yes, you agree to wed me, or yes, you didn't answer the question?" "Yes!"

"Which yes?"

But, at that moment, the disembarking klaxon sounded, and their thrones grew up around them to embrace them in protective layers, and so he did not hear her answer.

The Phoenix Exultant closed hatches, shut valves, withdrew fuel arms and tethers, paused, and then dropped like a falling spear down from the dock into the swirling madness of the whirlpool of fire underneath.

The pressure was at once inconceivable, and the mir-rors on the bridge grew dark. No outside view was possible, by light or radar or X-ray, because the density of plasma was so great, at once turning the medium opaque.

The great ship was being pulled downward between two granule currents. The hot substances, a thousand miles to her left and right, were flowing upward, and a relative layer of coolness was pulling her irresistibly down and down.

Daphne said, "Why does it look dark? Aren't we entering the upper layers of the sun?"

Phaethon said, "We are presently passing from the photosphere to the convective zone. This is one of the cooler parts of the sun, the outer fifteen percent of the core. There are more ions in the plasma outside than occur more deeply, and they are blocking the photon radiation. Most of the nuclear heat here is being carried by convection currents. But the mirrors are dark only because the environment is homogenous. Lower, we should achieve a different ratio of gamma and X-ray radiations, we can formulate some sort of picture. Here ..."

A mirror lit to show a darkness interrupted by a vertical white line. The line trembled slightly, "What's that?" "A view from my aft cameras, an ultra-high-frequency picture. That line of fire is the discharge from the main drive. I might be able to adjust the picture to make the turbulence caused by our wake visible. The rest of the picture is black because our sun does not generate any cosmic rays at this high wavelength. My drive is hotter than our environment, which is why the plasma is not rushing backward into the drive tubes."

Daphne stared at the pitch-black forward mirrors, the shivering white line in the aft view. "It's not much to look at, is it?" she said in a subdued tone. Something of the lightheartedness of the Champagne moment a moment past was gone. Phaethon's face and tone had become cold, intent, rock steady. Time went by. An hour. Two hours. Daphne shut off her sense of time with orders to wake her when something changed.

She woke when they were deeper. Back-pressure estimations from the drive showed that the subduction current had carried the Phoenix Exultant far, far lower than any prior probe had gone. They were, perhaps, a thousand kilometers or so above the radiative layer, moving through a medium so dense that light required untold centuries to cross the space, so thick that even the Phoenix, driving with all the force of her main drives, was crawling forward at a speed measured in kilometers per hour.

There was a chattering hiss from one of the mirrors nearby.

"What is that?" Daphne asked. Phaethon said, "The ghost-particle array is still giving off periodic bursts. That was the most recent one. I cannot interpret the codes embedded in the ghost array, but I think it is using neutrino sources from distant quasars as orientation points, and is continuing to track where the Silent Phoenix (as I call her) might be. I cannot block out the transmissions with my drives open. But since I want the Silent Phoenix to find us, I don't really mind." Daphne looked at him skeptically. "This really is a crazy idea, isn't it? There is something out there in all that fiery darkness, looking for us, an enemy hunting us?"

"Maybe. Unless the enemy left a long, long time ago, and we've been chasing shadows all this time."

Daphne looked around at the shining golden chamber of the bridge, jewel bright. Then she glanced at the mirrors showing the outside: utter blackness. She shivered.

"I'm going back into null," she said. "Wake me if anything exciting happens."

Phaethon, his eyes fixed on the featureless darkness of one of the mirrors, nodded.

Time passed.

Daphne woke again. "What day is it? Have I missed the Transcendence?"

"It's only been two hours while you slept."

"What happened? Why did you wake me?"

"Ah! Something exciting. While you were asleep, I did some tests on the ghost array, and I think I can pick up neutrino deflections with it."

Daphne blinked. "Oh."

" 'Oh'? All you have to say is 'oh'?"

"Oh. Please define the word 'exciting' as you are using it, so there will be no ambiguities in our future communications."

"Well, I did this so you could have something to look at while we are waiting to be attacked."

"Dear, did I ever tell you that there is something about you which really does remind me of Atkins?"

"Look at these mirrors. There. I can use a filter to calculate heat gradients from neutrino discharges...."

The black forward scene was now broken by sparks or stars. Little discharges of intense white light, pinpoints or shimmers like heat lighting, now gave the darkness a three-dimensional aspect, like seeing lightning through storm clouds, or watching the flows of molten lead in some deep, pressurized furnace. Below and beyond the field of sparks, like a fire in the far background, was a dull angry red color, reflecting from the boils and currents of what seemed intervening streams or clouds of darkness.

Phaethon said, "Those sparks are called Vanguard events, named after their discoverer. The number and volume of hydrogen fusions here is so great that, at times, by accident, neutrons fuse into superheavy particle pairs, but which decay instantly back into simpler particles, releasing neutrinos and other weak particles back into the medium. We're at the boundary of the radiative layer. The medium here is dense enough that even some of those weak particles are trapped and fused, which all adds to the general entropy. Farther down, toward the core, Vanguard events are much more common. Here is a longer-ranged view..."

And she saw, down beyond the haze of iron red, a shading toward orange, and yellow-white, all knotted with snakelike writhings of black and blue-black, colder areas raining through the endless nuclear storm.

He said, "This view is actually several hours old. Photons are blocked here, absorbed and reabsorbed endlessly; but even photinos and protinos are slowed by the density."

The view was hellish. She said, "Can't you give these gradient images a nicer color? Taupe maybe, or lime green?"

A shiver ran through the room at that moment, and a sound like clicking and screaming. Phaethon's face went blank, and his helmet came up out of his gorget and folded over to cover his face.

Daphne said, "I don't think I like this___Why did I volunteer to come along here again... ?" And emergency paramaterial fields snapped a cocoon in place around her, while superdense material poured forth from high-speed spigots in the ceiling, to flood the bridge.

It was dark in the cocoon. When she looked into the ships dreaming, to see what was going on, her time tense sped up enormously. Phaethon had activated his emergency personality, and had sped himself up to the highest level his system could tolerate. In order to see what it was he was doing, Daphne's high-speed per-ionality (called Rajas Guna, a prana she had acquired back when she lived with the Warlocks) equalized her time sense.

Phaethon was at the center of a huge flow of information, like a fly trapped in a web of light. The stresses and pressures on the hull were higher than he had predicted. Helion had never created a vortex as large as the one he had made to send this ship toward the core; it had created a back pressure or countercurrent of some sort, a region of turbulence where the convective zone met the radiative zone.