Peter Watts: The Island

Still. An intelligent signal.

«Need more info,» Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.

I nod. «The vons.»

«Uh, what about them?»

«We set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It'd be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the on-site factories.»

His eyes go wide. For a moment he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. «Bleed too many resources away from the build, wouldn't it? «

«It would,» the chimp agrees.

I suppress a snort. «If you're so worried about meeting our construction benchmarks, Chimp, factor in the potential risk posed by an intelligence powerful enough to control the energy output of an entire sun.»

«I can't,» it admits. «I don't have enough information.»

«You don't have any information. About something that could probably stop this mission dead in its tracks if it wanted to. So maybe we should get some.»

«Okay. Vons reassigned.»

Confirmation glows from a convenient bulkhead, a complex sequence of dance instructions fired into the void. Six months from now a hundred self-replicating robots will waltz into a makeshift surveillance grid; four months after that, we might have something more than vacuum to debate in.

Dix eyes me as though I've just cast some kind of magic spell.

«It may run the ship,» I tell him, «but it's pretty fucking stupid. Sometimes you've just got to spell things out.»

He looks vaguely affronted, but there's no mistaking the surprise beneath. He didn't know that. He didn't know.

Who the hell's been raising him all this time? Whose problem is this?

Not mine.

«Call me in ten months,» I say. «I'm going back to bed.»

It's as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the tank, a swollen red orb that turns my son's face into a devil mask.

He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as if electrified. «Vons don't see it.»

I'm still a bit groggy from the thaw. «See wh —»

«The sequence! » His voice borders on panic. He sways back and forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

«Show me.»

Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri 's-eye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely-spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf's endless winking for merely human eyes.

Except it's only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.

«Chimp: any chance the grid just isn't sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?»

«No.»

«Huh.» I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.

«Doesn’t make sense ,» my son complains.

«It does,» I murmur, «if it's not the sun that's flickering.»

«But is flickering —» He sucks his teeth. «You can see it fl — wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between them and us?»

«Mmmm.»

«Some kind of filter .» Dix relaxes a bit. «Wouldn't we've seen it, though? Wouldn't the vons've hit it going down?»

I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. «What's the current field-of-view for Eri's forward scope?»

«Eighteen mikes,» the chimp reports. «At 428's range, the cone is three point three four lightsecs across.»

«Increase to a hundred lightsecs.»

The Eri's — eye partition swells, obliterating the dissenting viewpoint. For a moment the sun fills the tank again, paints the whole bridge crimson. Then it dwindles as if devoured from within.

I notice some fuzz in the display. «Can you clear that noise?»

«It's not noise,» the chimp reports. «It's dust and molecular gas.»

I blink. «What's the density?»

«Estimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter.»

Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. «Why so heavy?» Surely we'd have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood.

«I don't know,» the chimp says.

I get the queasy feeling that I might. «Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared.»

Space grows ominously murky in the tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-sized now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.

«A thousand lightsecs,» I command.

«There,» Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the tank, dark, clear, pristine. 428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded cast-offs from companion stars whose convulsions spew gas and rads across light years. But 428 is no nova remnant. It's a red dwarf , placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable.

Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AUs across. And for the fact that this bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about 350 lightsecs from its primary and then just stop s, its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be.

For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.

Numbers come back. «Chimp. I want false-color peaks at 335, 500 and 800 nanometers.»

The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly's wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.

«It's beautiful ,» whispers my awestruck son.

«It's photosynthetic,» I tell him.

Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore : branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell's effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens , dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.

«So there's a membrane of — of living tissue around that star,» I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. «A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star .»

«Yes,» the chimp says.

«But that's — Jesus, how thick would it be?»

«No more than two millimeters. Probably less.»

«How so?»

«If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.»

«That's assuming that its — cells, I guess — are like ours.»

«The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.»

It can't be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze…

«Okay, let's be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?»

«1.4 yottagrams,» Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.