Edmond Hamilton: Children of the Sun

Crying not with tongue or voice but with the power of his mind. And when he understood that he could speak that way he called again and again, darting this way and that across the burning oceans, heading the vast funnels of the solar storms.

“Carlin! Carlin!”

And someone answered. He heard the voice quite clearly in his mind or the part of his new being that was sensitive to the reception of thought.

“Who calls, little brother?”

Golden bright against the crimson chromosphere above, he saw winging toward him another of the Children of the Sun.

He went to meet the stranger. Wheeling and dancing like two incredible butterflies of flame they hovered above a burning river that ran across the face of the Sun. And they talked.

“Are you — were you Philip Carlin?”

“Philip Carlin? No. In human I was Thardis, chief physicist to Fer Roga, Lord of Vulcan. That was long ago.”

Silence, except for the booming thunders of the Sun.

“Tell me, little brother. You are new here?”

“Yes.”

“Do they still come then, the Bright Ones? Is the portal open still?”

“It has been lost and forgotten for many ages. And then he found it, who was my friend — and he came through. Do you know him, Thardis? Do you know of Philip Carlin?”

“No. My studies keep me much alone. Do you know, little brother, that I have almost attained the boundaries of pure thought? The greatest minds of the Empire said that was impossible. But I shall do it!”

Two flecks of living fire, whirling, tossing on the solar winds above the flaming river. And Thardis said, “What of the Empire? What of Vulcan? Was the portal forbidden and did our scientists forget?”

“It was forbidden”, Newton answered. “And then. .” He told Thardis slowly how the Old Empire had crashed and died, how its far-flung peoples had sunk into barbarism, how only yesterday as time goes in the universe they had climbed back part way up the ladder of knowledge.

He told Thardis many things and most of them were bitter and sad. But even as he told them he knew that to the other they were less than dreams. He had gone too far away into some strange distance of his own.

“So it is all gone”, mused Thardis. “The star-worlds, the captains, the many-throned kings. It is the law. You will learn it here, little brother. You will watch the cycle — birth and death and eternity — repeated forever in the heart of the Sun.”

His tenuous body rippled, poised for flight. “Farewell, little brother. Perhaps we shall meet again.”

“Wait! Wait “ cried Newton. “You do not understand. I can’t remain here. I must find my friend and then go back with him.”

“Go back?” repeated Thardis. “Ah, you are new! Once, I remember, I started to go back.”

His thought was silent for a long while and then it came again with a kind of sad amusement. “The little Sun Child, who is so very new! Come then, I shall help you find your friend.”

He led off across the tortured moving mountains of the Sun, across the lashing burning seas. Newton followed and as Thardis went he called and presently from out of the veils and clouds of fire came two others who joined them.

Thardis asked, “Do you know of one called Carlin? He is new.”

One did not but the other answered, “I know him. He bas gone deep into the inner fires to study the Sun’s life.”

“I will take you to him”, Thardis said to Newton. “Come.”

He dropped swiftly downward into the raging wilderness of flame. And Newton was afraid to follow.

Then he was ashamed. If Carlin had gone that way he could go. He plunged down after the fleeting Thardis.

The crested waves of holocaust reached up and received them and buried them in depths of smoky gold, shot through with gouts and shafts of blazing color. They entered a region of denser matter and to Newton it was like swimming under troubled waters, sensible of the pressure and the awful turmoil, blending his own substance with the medium that held him.

He clung close to Thardis. Gradually as they sank deeper and deeper beneath the surface the golden depths grew quieter, the flashing colors softer. Buried currents ran fiercely like rivers under the sea. Thardis entered one of these, breasting the mighty flowing force as a man walks against the wind, finding exhilaration in the battle.

Newton joined him, and felt his own strength surge in joyous pleasure.

The gold began to fade, gathering the diamond shards of color into itself, lightening, paling. Newton became aware of a glow ahead, more terrible than all the fires he had yet seen — a supernal whiteness so searing in its intensity that even his new senses found it hard to bear.

The patterned energy of his flame-like body was shaken by waves of awful force. He had been afraid before. Now he was beyond fear. He crept after Thardis like a child creeping to the feet of Creation. He would have stopped but Thardis led him on into the inmost solar furnace, into the living heart of the Sun.

And he who had been Philip Carlin was there, wrapped in a silent awe, watching the mystic terrible forges beating out the unthinkable energies of the death and renascence of matter.

Newton had no thought for Carlin now. The awful voices of creation were hammering against his senses, dazing them, numbing them. He shuddered beneath that godlike fury of sound. The stripped and fleeing atoms burst through him, filling him with an exalted pain. He too watched, lost utterly in a cosmic awe of his own.

Atomic change exploded ceaselessly here, thundering, throbbing — hydrogen flashing through all the shifting transformations of the carbon-nitrogen cycle to final helium, the residual energy bursting blindly outward in raving power.

Newton began to be aware of his own danger. He knew that if he stayed too long he would never go again. He was a scientist and this was the ultimate core of learning. He would remain, drunk and fascinated with the lure of knowledge, with the incredible life that could exist in this crucible of energy. He would remain forever, with the other Children of the Sun.

Temptation whispered, “Why go back? Why not remain, a clean, eternal flame, free to learn, free to live?”

He remembered the three who waited for him in the citadel and the promise he had made. And he forced himself with a bitter effort to speak. “Carlin! Philip Carlin!”

The other Sun Child stirred, and asked, “Who calls?”

And when he heard his rapt mind woke to emotion. “Curt Newton? You here? I had almost forgotten.”

Strange meeting of two friends no longer human, in the thundering solar fires! Newton forced himself to think only of his purpose. “I’ve come after you, Carlin! I followed you to bring you back!”

The other’s response was a fierce, instinctive recoil. “No! I will not go back!”

And Carlin’s thought raced eagerly. “Look — look about you! How could I leave? A million years from now, two million, when I have learned all I can. . No, Curt. No scientist could leave this!”

Newton felt the fatal force of that argument. He too felt the irresistible attraction of the undying life that had trapped men here for a million years.

He felt it — too strongly! He knew desperately that he must succumb to it unless he left quickly. The knowledge nerved him to clutch at the one persuasion that might still sway Carlin.

“But if you stay here all the knowledge you have gathered here will be lost forever! The secrets of the Sun, the key to the mysteries of the universe prisoned here with you, never to be known!”

He had been right. It was the one argument that could move this man whose life bad been spent in the gathering and interchange of knowledge. He felt the doubt, the turmoil, in Carlin’s shaken mind. The unwillingness and yet the strong tug of lifetime habits of mind.