Stephen Baxter - Space

You might have expected ETs to show up with eyes.

The Chaera communicated by movement, their rippling surfaces sending low-frequency acoustic signals through the fluid in which they swam. In the tank, lasers scanned the Chaera’s surface constantly, picking up the movements and affording translations.

Interspecies translation was actually getting easier, after the first experience with the Gaijin. A kind of meta-language had been evolved, an interface that served as a translation buffer between ET “languages” and every human tongue. The meta-language was founded on concepts — space, time, number — that had to be common to any sentient species embedded in three-dimensional space and subject to physical law, and it had verbal, mathematical, and diagrammatic components; to Madeleine’s lay understanding it seemed to be a fusion of Latin and Lincos.

Madeleine felt an odd kinship with the spinning, curious creature, a creature that might have come from Earth, much more sympathetic than any Gaijin. And if we have found you so quickly, perhaps we will find less strangeness out there than we expect.

“What is it saying?” Ben asked.

Virtual Nemoto translated. “The Chaera saw the disc unfolding. ‘What a spectacle. I am the envy of generations…’ ”

Mini black holes, Madeleine learned, were typically the mass of Jupiter. Too small to have been formed by processes of stellar collapse, they were created a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, baked in the fireball at the birth of the universe.

Mini black holes, then, seemed to be well understood. The oddity here was to find such a hole in a neat circular orbit around this Sun-like star.

“And the real surprise,” virtual Nemoto said, “was the discovery, by the Gaijin, of life, infesting the accretion disc of a mini black hole. The Chaera. It seems that this black hole is God for the Chaera.”

“They worship a black hole?” Madeleine asked.

“Evidently,” Nemoto said impatiently. “If the translation programs are working. If it’s possible to correlate concepts like ‘God’ and ‘worship’ across species barriers.”

Ben murmured wordlessly. Madeleine looked over his shoulder.

In the central glare of the accretion disc, there was something surrounding the black hole, embedding it.

The black hole was set into a netlike structure that started just outside the Schwarzschild radius and extended kilometers. The structure was a regular solid of twenty triangular faces.

“It’s an icosahedron,” Ben said. “My God, it is so obviously artificial. The largest possible Platonic solid. Triumphantly three-dimensional.”

Madeleine couldn’t make out any framework within the icosahedron, or any reinforcement for its edges; it was a structure of sheets of almost transparent film, each triangle hundreds of meters wide. The glow of the flower-ship’s hungry ramscoop shone and sparkled from the multiple facets.

“It must be mighty strong to maintain its structure against the hole’s gravity, the tides,” Ben said. “It seems to be directing the flow of matter from the accretion disc into the event horizon…”

It was a jewel-box setting for a black hole. A comparative veteran of interstellar exploration, Madeleine felt stunned.

The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

“Time to pay the fare,” Nemoto said. “Are we ready to speak to God?”

Madeleine turned to Ben. “We didn’t know about this. Maybe we should think about what we’re doing here.”

He shrugged. “Nemoto is right. It is not our mission.” He began the operations they’d rehearsed.

Reluctantly, Madeleine worked a console to unship the first of the old X-ray lasers; the monitors showed it unfolding from its mount like a shabby flower.

The self-directed laser dove into the heart of the system, heading for its closest approach to the hole.

“Three, two, one,” Ben murmured.

There was a flash of light, pure white, that shone through the Service Module’s ports.

Various instruments showed surges of particles and electromagnetic radiation. The laser’s fission-bomb power source had worked. The shielding of Ancestor seemed adequate.

The X-ray beam washed over the surface of “God.” The net structure stirred, like a sleeping snake.

The Chaera quivered.

Ben was watching the false-color images. “Madeleine. Look.”

The surface of “God” was alive with motion; the icosahedral netting was bunching itself around a single, brooding point, like skin crinkling around an eye.

“I can give you a rough translation from the Chaera,” Nemoto said. “ ‘She heard us.’ ”

Madeleine asked, “ ‘She’?”

“God, of course. ‘If I have succeeded… then I will be the most honored of my race. Fame, wealth, my choice of mates — ’ ”

Madeleine laughed sourly. “And, of course, religious fulfillment.”

Ben monitored a surge of X-ray photons and high-energy particles coming from the hole — and the core at the center of the crinkled net exploded. A pillar of radiation punched through the accretion disc like a fist.

The Chaera wobbled around its tank.

“ ‘God is shouting,’ ” Nemoto said. She peered out of her biopro monitor tank, her wizened virtual face creased with doubt.

The beam blinked out, leaving a trail of churning junk.

The flower-ship entered a long, powered orbit that would take it, for a time, away from the black hole and in toward the primary star and its inner system. Madeleine and Ben watched the black hole and its enigmatic artifact recede to a toylike glimmer.

The Chaera inhabited the accretion disc’s larger fragments.

In the Ancestor ’s recorded images, Chaera were everywhere, spinning like frisbees over the surface of their worldlets, or whipping through the accretion mush to a neighboring fragment, or basking like lizards, their undersides turned up to the black hole.

The beam from “God” had left a track of glowing debris through the accretion disc, like flesh scorched by hot iron. The track ended in a knot of larger fragments.

In the optical imager, jellyfish bodies drifted like soot flakes.

“Let me get this straight,” Madeleine said. “The Chaera have evolved to feed off the X-radiation from the black hole… from ‘God.’ Is that right?”

“Evolved or adapted. So it seems,” Nemoto said dryly. “ ‘God provides us in all things.’ ”

“So the Chaera try to… shout… to ‘God,’ ” Ben said. “Some of them pray. Some of them build great artifacts to sparkle at Her. Like worshiping the Sun, praying for dawn. Basically they’re trying to stimulate X-radiation bursts. All the Gaijin have done is to sell them a more effective communication mechanism.”

“A better prayer wheel,” Madeleine murmured. “But what are the Gaijin interested in here? The black-hole artifact?”

“Possibly,” Nemoto said. “Or perhaps the Chaera’s religion. The Gaijin seem unhealthily obsessed with such illogical belief systems.”

“But,” Madeleine said, “that X-ray laser delivers orders of magnitude more energy into the artifact than anything the Chaera could manage. It looks as if the energy of the pulse they get in return is magnified in proportion. Perhaps the Chaera don’t understand what they’re dealing with, here.”

Nemoto translated. “ ‘God’s holy shout shatters worlds.’ ”

The main star was very Sunlike. Madeleine, filled with complex doubts about her mission, pressed her hand to the window, trying to feel its warmth, hungering for simple physical pleasure.

There was just one planet here. It was a little larger than the Earth, and it followed a neat circular path through the star’s habitable zone, the region within which an Earthlike planet could orbit.