Stephen Baxter: Ring

Mark laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch was warm, firm, and as he’d no doubt intended — disconcertingly intimate. “So that’s why you’re running away.”

“I’d hardly call leaving on a one-way colonizing expedition to Tau Ceti ‘running away’.”

“Of course it is. Here is where you can achieve things — here, with the resources of a Solar System. You’re an engineer, damn it. What will you build on some planet of Tau Ceti? A real steam engine, maybe.”

“But — ” She struggled to find words that didn’t sound, even to her, like self justifying whines. “But maybe that would count for more, in the greater scheme of things, even than a dozen bigger and better Northerns. Do you see?”

“Not really.” His voice sounded flat, tired; perhaps he was letting himself sober up.

They stood for a while, in a silence broken only by their breathing. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Louise. I’m sorry you’re letting such moods spoil your night of triumph. But I’ve had enough; I feel as if I’ve been listening to that stuff for half my life.”

As usual when his mood turned like this, she was filled with regret. She tried to cover his hand, which still lay on her shoulder. “Mark — ”

He slid his hand away. “I’m going back to the pod, and up to the ship, and I’m going to get a little more drunk. Do you want to come?”

She thought about it. “No. Send the pod down again. Some of the cabins here are made up; I can — ”

There was a sparkling in the air before him. She stumbled back, disconcerted; Mark moved closer to her to watch.

Pixels — thumbnail cubes of light — tumbled over each other, casting glittering highlights from Brunel’s ancient machinery. They coalesced abruptly into the lifesize, semi-transparent Virtual image of a human head: round, bald, cheerful. The face split into a grin. “Louise. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Gillibrand. What in Lethe do you want? I thought you’d be unconscious by now.”

Sam Gillibrand, forty going on a hundred and fifty, was Louise’s chief assistant. “I was. But my nanobots were hooked up to the comms panel; they sobered me up fast when the message came in. Damn them.” Gillibrand looked cheerful enough. “Oh, well; I’ll just have it all to do again, and — ”

“The comms panel? What was the message, Sam?”

Gillibrand’s grin became uncertain. “City Hall. There’s been a change to the flight plan.” Gillibrand’s voice was high, heavily accented mid-American, and not really capable of conveying much drama. And yet Louise felt herself shudder when Gillibrand said: “We’re not going to Tau Ceti after all.”

The old woman leaned forward in her seat, beside Kevan Scholes.

The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere — the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere — a thin haze above it all.

Scholes couldn’t help but stare at his companion. Her posture was stiff, and her hands — neatly folded in her lap, over her seatbelt — were gaunt, the skin peeked by liver-spots and hanging loosely from the bones. Like gloves, he thought. She wore a simple silver-gray coverall whose only decoration was a small brooch pinned to the breast. The brooch depicted a stylized snake entwined around a golden ladder.

The little ship passed over a photosphere granule; Scholes watched absently as it unfolded beneath them. Hot hydrogen welled up from the Solar interior at a speed of half a mile a second, then spread out across the photosphere surface. This particular fount of gas was perhaps a thousand miles across, and, in its photosphere-hugging orbit, the Lightrider was traveling so rapidly that it had passed over the granule in a few minutes. And Scholes saw as he looked back that the granule was already beginning to disintegrate, the hydrogen spill at its heart dwindling. Individual granules persisted less than ten minutes, on average.

“How beautiful this is,” his companion said, gazing down at the Sunscape. “And how complex — how intricate, like some immense machine, perhaps, or even a world.” She turned to him, her mouth — surrounded by its dense web of wrinkles folded tight. “I can imagine whiling away my life, just watching the slow evolutions of that surface.”

Scholes looked across the teeming Sunscape. The photosphere was a mass of ponderous motion, resembling the surface of a slowly boiling liquid. The granules, individual convective cells, were themselves grouped into loose associations: supergranules, tens of thousands of miles across, roughly bounded by thin, shifting walls of stable gas. As he watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting suddenly across the Solar surface; neighboring granules were pushed aside, so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar which was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

Scholes studied his companion. The sunlight underlit her face, deepening the lines and folds of loose flesh there. It made her look almost demonic — or like something out of a distant, unlamented past. She’d fallen silent now, watching him; some response was expected, and he sensed that his customary glib flippancy — which usually passed for conversation in the Solar habitat — wouldn’t do.

Not for her.

He summoned up a smile, with some difficulty. “Yes, it’s beautiful. But — ” Scholes had spent much of the last five years within a million miles of the Sun’s glowing surface, but even so had barely started to become accustomed to the eternal presence of the star. “It’s impossible to forget it’s there… Even when I’m in Thoth, with the walls opaqued — when I could really be anywhere in the System, I guess.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed; her cold, rheumy eyes were on him, analytical. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain it any better.”

Was there a hint of a smile on that devastated face? “You needn’t be self conscious.”

Kevan Scholes had volunteered for this assignment — a simple three-hour orbital tour with this mysterious woman who, a few days earlier, had been brought to Thoth, the freefall habitat at the center of the wormhole project. It should have been little more than a sightseeing jaunt — and a chance to learn more about this ancient woman, and perhaps about the true goals of Superet’s wormhole project itself.

And besides, it was a break from his own work. Scholes was supervising the assembly of one vertex of a wormhole Interface from exotic matter components. When the wormhole was complete, one of its pair of tetrahedral Interfaces would be left in close orbit around the Sun. The other, packed with an ambitious AI complex, would be dropped into the Sun itself.

The work was well paid, though demanding; but it was dull, routine, lacking fulfillment. So a break was welcome… But he had not expected to be so disconcerted by this extraordinary woman.

He tried again. “You see, we’re all scientists or engineers here,” he said. “A sense of wonder isn’t a prerequisite for a job on this project — it’s probably a handicap, actually. But that’s a star out there, after all: nearly a million miles across — five light-seconds — and with the mass of three hundred thousand Earths. Even when I can’t see it, I know it’s there; it’s like a psychic pressure, perhaps.”

She nodded and turned her face to the Sun once more. “Which is why we find speculation about its destruction so extraordinarily distressing. And, of course, to some extent we are actually within the body of the Sun itself. Isn’t that true?”