Stephen Baxter - Space

She looked inward. “I’m still Madeleine. I’m still conscious.” But then, she reflected, I would think so, wouldn’t I? Maybe I’m not truly conscious. Maybe I just think I am.

The ship surged as the flower scoop thumped into pockets of richly ionized gas; the universe was, rudely, intruding into philosophy.

“I don’t understand how come the Saddle Point wasn’t out on some remote rim, like in the Solar System.”

“Meacher, the gravitational map of this binary system is complex, a lot more than Sol’s. There is a solar focus point close to each of the system’s points of gravitational equilibrium. We emerged from L4, the stable Lagrange point that precedes the neutron star in its orbit, and that’s where we’ll return.”

“There must be other foci, on the rim of the system. Other Saddle Points that would be a lot safer to use.”

“Sure.” Virtual Frank grinned. “But the Gaijin aren’t human, remember. They seem to have utter confidence in their technology, their shielding, the reliability and control of their ramjets. We have to assume that the Gaijin know what they’re doing…”

Madeleine turned to the consoles. Soon her monitors showed that data was starting to come in on hydrogen alpha emission, ultraviolet line spectra, ultraviolet and X-ray imaging, spectrography of the active regions, zodiacal light, spectroheliographs. Training and practice took over as she went into the routine tasks, and as she worked, some of her awe went away.

“Meacher. Look ahead.”

She reached for the periscope again. She looked at the approaching horizon — over which dawn was breaking. Dawn, on a star?

A great pulse of torn gas fled toward her over the horizon. It subsided in great arcs to the star’s surface, the battered atoms flailing in the star’s magnetic field — and again, a few seconds later — and once again, at deadly regular intervals. And the breaths of plasma grew more violent.

“My God, Frank.”

“Neutron star rise,” Paulis said gently. “Just watch. Watch and learn. And remember, for all of us.”

The neutron star came over the horizon now, stalking disdainfully over its companion’s surface, their separation only a third that between the Earth and its Moon. The primary rose in a yearning tide as the neutron star passed, glowing gas forming a column that snaked up, no more than a few hundred meters across at its neck. Great lumps of glowing material tore free and swirled inward to a central point, a tiny object of such unbearable brightness that the periscope covered it with a patch of protective darkness.

And then the explosion came.

Blackness.

Madeleine flinched. “What the hell—”

The smart periscope had blanked over. The darkness cleared slowly, revealing a cloud of scattered debris through which the neutron star sailed serenely.

“That’s a burster,” Paulis said dryly.

The cloak of matter around the neutron star was building up again.

Flash.

The periscope blacked out once more.

“You’ll get used to it,” Paulis said. “It comes every fourteen seconds, regular as your heartbeat. An X-ray flash bright enough to be seen from Earth.”

She studied her instruments. The data was flowing in, raw, uninterpreted. “Paulis, I’m no double-dome. Tell me what’s happening. The primary’s star-stuff—”

Flash.

“ — fuses when it hits the neutron star, right?”

“Yes. Hydrogen from the primary fuses to helium as it trickles to the neutron star’s surface. In seconds, the helium collects over the crust into a kind of atmosphere, meters thick. But it is a transient atmosphere that abruptly fuses further, into carbon and oxygen and other complex molecules—”

Flash.

“ — blasting away residual hydrogen as it does so.”

The neutron star roared toward the flower-ship, dragging its great hump of star-stuff beneath it, and—

Flash.

— bellowing out its fusion yells. The Gaijin pulled the flower-ship’s petals in farther; the mouth of the ram closed to a tight circle.

A circle that dipped toward the neutron star.

“What are they doing?”

“Try not to be afraid, Meacher.”

The flower-ship swooped closer to the primary; red vacuoles fled beneath Madeleine like crowding fish. She sailed beneath the neutron star, skirting the mouth of fire it tore open in the flesh of the primary.

Her body decided it was time for a fresh bout of space adaptation syndrome.

The waste management station was another shuttle-era veteran, and it took some operating. When she came out, she opened her medical kit and took a scopalomine/Dexidrene.

“Meacher, you’re entitled to a little nausea. You’re earning us a firsthand view of a neutron star. I’m proud of you.”

“Frank, I’ve been flying for twenty years, fifteen professionally. I’ve flown to the edge of space. I have never had a ride like this.”

“Of course not. No human has, in all of history.”

“No human except Reid Malenfant.”

“Yes. Except him.”

She looked inside herself, and found, despite the queasiness, she was hooked.

Maybe it didn’t matter what she would find, back home. Maybe she would choose to go on, like Reid Malenfant. Submit herself to the beautiful blue pain, over and over. And travel on to places like this…

“Listen, Meacher. You’ll have to prepare yourself for the next encounter with the burster. The neutron star’s orbit around its parent is only eleven minutes.” His image seemed to be breaking up.

“Frank, I think I’m losing you.”

“No. I’m just diverting a lot of processing resources right now… I have something odd, from that neutron star flyby. I need some input from you.”

“What kind of input?”

“Interpretation. Look at this.”

He brought up an image of the neutron star, at X-ray wavelengths. He picked out a section of the surface and expanded it. Bands of pixels swept over the image, enhancing and augmenting.

“Do you know anything about neutron stars, Meacher? A neutron star is the by-product of a supernova — the violent, final collapse of a massive star at the end of its life. This specimen is as heavy as the Sun, but only around twenty kilometers wide. The matter in the interior is degenerate, the electron shells of its atoms collapsed by the pressure. The surface gravity is billions of g, although normal matter — bound by atomic bonds — can exist there. The surface is actually rigid, a metallic crust.”

She looked more closely at the image. There were hexagons, faintly visible. “Looks like there are patterns on the surface of the neutron star.”

“Yeah,” Paulis said. “Now look at this.”

He flicked to other wavelengths. The things showed up at optical frequencies, even: patterns of tidy hexagons each a meteror so across. In a series of shots shown in chronological order, she could see how the patterns were actually spreading, their sixfold symmetry growing over the crystalline surface of the neutron star.

Growing, to her unscientific mind, like a virus. Or a bacterial colony.

Life, she thought, and she dissolved into wonder.

“The Gaijin don’t seem surprised,” virtual Frank said.

“Really?”

“Life emerges everywhere it can. So they say… The star creatures’ metabolism is based on atomic bonds. Just as is ours — yours. Their growth paths follow the flux lines of the neutron star’s magnetic field, which is enormously powerful. Evidently the complex heavy atoms deposited by the fusion processes assist and stimulate their development. But eventually—”

“I think I can guess.”

On multiple softscreens, hexagons split and multiplied into patterns of bewildering complexity, ever changing. The images grew more blurred as the star’s rudimentary, and transient, atmosphere built up.