Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“Me? Ooh! Sorry.” Star seemed startled, but she grinned at Celine. “How are yer, mam? Still got Calvin Coolidge’s seat down there, have yer?”

“It hasn’t been used by anyone since you,” Celine said gravely.

Star cackled. “Don’t wonder, if they know what he did in it. Dirty old beast! Whadyer want to know, mam? I wasn’t list’ning too close.”

“Why weren’t we all killed by the particle storm? You’re supposed to be the expert. And don’t say that if we had all been killed, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.”

“Never thought of that.” Star blinked. “Anyway, I’m not the expert. I was the dummy on this one, just as bad as the rest of yer.”

Celine heard Nick Lopez snigger behind her. “But you understand it, Star. Can’t you explain it?”

“No, mam. I mean, I could explain. But Wilmer oughter do it. He was the one figgered it out, so it’s like his, not mine.”

“But he’s not there.”

“No, mam, because he’s here. Hey, Wilmer. Tell ’em.”

Celine groaned as Wilmer appeared in the field of view. It was always nice to see a former colleague, not to mention a long-ago lover, but she had tons of work to do before the day ended. She had been hoping for a quick explanation and a rapid advance to other topics.

“We got most of it right.” Wilmer wasn’t being defensive; he didn’t think in those terms. He simply wanted to be accurate. “I mean, we got most of it right eventually. But not on the first shot.

“Star gave us a good theory as to how Alpha C could go supernova. We knew the particle beam was heading in our direction, and it didn’t seem that could have happened by accident. And when we had the Sniffer data we realized that the particles didn’t travel separately, they were tied together in big bundles of a few trillion each. Soon as we had a chance to grab some, Star could start to play around with ’em. Their behavior turned out to be peculiar.”

“Funny little buggers,” Star added. “Put a bundle in some place at a humongous temperature, it don’t give a damn. Sits there, totally comfortable. Surround it with cool matter and lots of slow-moving free electrons, though, an’ it’s buggered. It falls apart.”

“When we knew that,” Wilmer went on, “we still didn’t see how it helped us to guard against them. We went ahead with a redesigned defense to divert particle bundles, but we didn’t seem any closer to real understanding. We didn’t know what was going on with the Alpha Centauri supernova, or why it happened.”

He paused and looked thoughtful.

“And we still don’t know why it happened,” Nick Lopez said softly behind Celine. “And at this rate we never will. Tell him to get a move on.”

Celine knew better. She sat and waited, and at last Wilmer went on. “Then we got newer Sniffer data, and knew we were really in trouble. The particle beam wasn’t just coming our way, it was converging, homing in on us. That’s when me and Star decided we — meaning humans — were really up shit creek. The way the beam was narrowing as it approached the solar system, we’d be hit with a whole load of particles, far more than we’d ever expected. Far more than the new defense system could cope with. Far too much for Earth to stand, or for Sky City.”

Nick Lopez, behind Celine, muttered, “So we all died.”

Celine said patiently, “But it wasn’t too much for Earth, or for Sky City. We’re still here. How did that happen?”

“Because me and Star, we took two correct facts, added an assumption, and drew a false conclusion.” Wilmer shook his head woefully. “Not Star’s fault, mine. I ought to be old enough to know better. Let’s do the facts. First fact: The Alpha Centauri supernova didn’t just happen. It was made to happen.”

“Something hardly anybody in the world believes,” Celine said.

“True. But that doesn’t make it any less a fact. And it’s not what caused our problem. Second fact: The particle beam was converging. The number of bundles per unit volume was increasing instead of decreasing as the beam came closer, and the devastation it could cause was that much greater. And now the assumption: Human beings are important.”

Everyone in the Oval Office jerked to attention. Celine said, “I hope that’s not what you mean by a false assumption. If so, you won’t find anybody here in the Oval Office who agrees with you.”

“Then I’m glad I’m not in the Oval Office.” Wilmer held up his hand. “Don’t get starchy on me; I’m going to explain. I had this thought when I was by myself and the particle storm was sluicing through Sky City. I thought, if I had the science and the technology to make a supernova happen, would I waste a whole star system just to wipe out a lot of silly buggers like me? Of course I wouldn’t. I’ve heard all the talk, that something tuned in on our radio signals over the past century and a half and decided to do away with us. I can’t buy that. I mean, the media programs are bad, but they’re not that bad.

“Once you decide the human race isn’t important enough to be worth killing, you stop saying, ’Something’s out to get me,’ and you draw a different conclusion. Not the wrong conclusion, the one that me and Star made, that the particle beam was converging on Earth. The right conclusion: Whatever made the supernova and the particle beam hasn’t the slightest interest in Earth. The beam was converging on Sol. The Sun was the target, and the only target. And what saved us — what made the difference between total extinction and a near miss — is Earth’s distance from the Sun. We’re alive because all but a tiny fraction of the particle bundles went to their intended destination: Sol. The convergence worked almost all the time. We got the failures, the misses.”

Celine said, a moment before her brain caught up with her tongue, “You mean the particle bundles were designed to destroy the Sun?”

“Of course they weren’t.” Wilmer stared at her in amazement. “Destroy the Sun? That’s barmy. Star, got that bottle with you? Show it off there, would you?”

Star rummaged in the bag hung over her shoulder and pulled out a glossy metal canister about eight inches long. She held it up so that everyone could get a view of it and said, “Ta-daa!”

“Particle bundles.” Wilmer took it from her. “In here. Quite stable, they’re kept away from ordinary matter using electromagnetic field suspension. Harmless. Harmless here, and on the Sun. They wouldn’t destroy it. Why would they want to, when they live inside stars?”

Bruno Colombo said, “You talk as though the things in there are alive!”

It was his turn to receive Wilmer’s withering stare.

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. Depends how you define alive. Me and Star, we’ve been wrong too often and too recently to stick our necks out. But let’s say we feel sure that the Alpha Centauri supernova was designed to spread these particle bundles to other stars. We don’t know how they’re aimed, or what they do when they get there. But I’d make a case for saying anything that propagates itself in an intentional way qualifies to be thought of as alive.”

“And sentient?” Bruno Colombo was out to restore his good name. “If they are, and they are able to produce a supernova, think what we might learn from them.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” Wilmer peered at the bottle. “The bundles in here would be more like spores, or seeds. How much high-tech information would you get from a human sperm? I don’t think it’d produce the theory of relativity, or tell you how to send an expedition to Mars. And if one of these little beggars could tell us anything, I don’t know if I’d trust it. They’re a star form, we’re a planet form. We might not have much in common.”