Gregory Benford: Across the Sea of Suns

As they walked on through the fields grain rustled, and the dry rasping was like Kansas on a ripe fall day. Nigel shielded his eyes against the hard glare of the phosphors. The huge squares were regularly spaced in the curving floor of the dome, illuminating the fields on the opposite side, powering the ecology of Lancer. Wraparound lighting. The fusion burn in Lancer’s throat gave ample electricity for the phosphor panels, but to Nigel it still seemed like a wasteful squandering of photons.

Nikka interrupted his thoughts with, “What do you think is our best tactic?”

“Um?”

“We have to keep down criticism of us. Of our …”

“Decaying physical abilities.”

“Yes.”

“Right, then—we should work in modest jobs. Low profile.”

“Until we reach Isis.”

“Then—well, we maneuver ourselves into interesting work.”

“Don’t let them argue us into a desk job.”

“Right. Maybe we’ll have to be content with merely controlling robots or something, but—”

“No paper pushing.”

“Just so. Meanwhile—”

“Stave off the bastards.”

She smiled and repeated with some relish, “Stave off the bastards.”

Months before, Lancer had dropped a self-constructing radio net, letting it tumble away in the wake. Riding inside a cocoon of shock-ionized plasma, they could not make high-resolution radio maps.

The net uncurled and deployed. Alex controlled the servo’d antennas by remote, painstakingly assembling aperture synthesis maps of the Ra system. The star itself flared violently, sending tongues high into its corona. Detailed mapping of their target, Isis, took much longer.

Nikka prodded Nigel awake when their apartment Sec chimed. “Let me be,” he growled.

“Stop doing your croc-in-the-sun impersonation. It’s the Assembly review of the first Isis map. You wanted to see it.”

“Ah. I’d fancy that.”

Nikka tapped her wrist and the wall screen clicked on. She silenced Alex’s voice-over explanations and enlarged the map. Nigel peered at the round image. The Isis disk was a spaghetti scramble of contour lines.

“Planetary acne,” he said.

Nikka said, “Looks like a river valley system, there.”

“Couldn’t be. Trick of the eye, probably. This isn’t radar, remember. They’re picking up the Isis transmissions.”

“How can it come from all over the planet’?”

He squinted. “It can’t. The simple, efficient way to send across interstellar distances is with one fixed antenna.”

“Yes …” She combed back her sleek black hair with her fingers. “Or so we think.”

“Electromagnetic waves are culture-independent. Makes no sense to use lots of antennas.”

He tapped into the interactive-mode discussion, still lying in bed. No interesting ideas surfaced. “Wait’ll we’re closer,” he said.

Nikka dialed the map to max scale. “I still say it looks like a river valley.”

Isis was a red world. Mars-tinged, Nigel thought, staring down at it. But rich with air, cloud-choked.

One warm face forever pinned toward Ra, the other staring blank and frozen into the eternal cold: tide-locked. In the immemorial night the land groaned beneath vast blue glaciers. Half a planet, capped in ice.

Winds from the twilight fed the great, slumbering, white-crusted mountains, bringing breaths of fresh moisture. At the eternal dawn line where dim pink light licked, icebergs calved into a red ocean. The sea circled Isis, pole to pole, separating ice and land. It was pink and glinting, scratched by winds, dotted with orange-yellow clouds.

More sunward still, broad fans of waves battered at the base of steep, flinty chasms. The sea clawed at the rising ramparts of the one vast stained brown continent.

Fingers of water thrust inland, toward Ra. River valleys carved the gray granite, as if clutching the world’s face, to force it toward the fire. Fingers: poking at the Eye.

Channel #11:“Yeah, that pattern, what’d I say, fits the theory. Perfect stress pattern there, you can see the normal faulting and graben at the poles—”

Channel #20:“Jess a sec, theh ah no poles at all, an’. if unnerstan your calc, your equilibrium is wrong from step one—”

Channel #5:“—Jeezus, check the chem inventory down there, I’d—”

Channel #11:“No, I’ve got a whole continuum of theoretical equilibria I can use and this case fits in; it all works if we assume Isis formed rotating, with a bulge at the equator, and then when Ra spun it down that released the centrifugal energy, so Isis tried to readjust its surface to get rid of that pot belly, and you get fracturing in a global pattern—”

Channel #5:“—too much absorption in those oceans, an’ some odd lines, lookit those spikes around 5480 angstroms, that’s not—”

Channel #18:“Funny, the lakes in those highlands, partway out from the Eye, they’re blue, but the ocean is pink. I guess whatever—”

Channel #5:“That’s fresh rainfall up there in the mountain passes, melted snow, it should look blue—”

Channel #11:“—that leaves the equator free, see, so thrust faults split the dome pattern, and the energy got released toward the rim—”

Channel #20:“Okay, no poles, your calc stipped a bound’ry layer an’ thahs what makes the calc work out. Those headwalls in the rim gouge pattern, see ’at? I guess they prove some kinda big crust relaxation when it slowed down, started a whole big tectonic process—

Channel #5:“—the 5480 structure is just backscatter from the hills, must be, Nigel, ’cause that’s the iron silicate group clear as day, damn muddy day down there though, an’—”

Channel #11:“—you get these compression networks that give those wrench faults, or lateral faults, I can see them on this IR blowup, here, lots of rifting, a whole morphology set up when the planet spun down—”

Channel #3:“—but then what’re those ghastly spikes dead center of the polarization pattern, eh? You’re surely not going to ask me to believe a mud flat is giving us those spikes, are you? Scarcely. The sea is giving us those, and it has to have iron oxides to do that and give sufficient line strength—

Channel #18:“Blue lakes means that whatever makes the seas red doesn’t operate at high altitudes—”

Channel #5:“That’s garbage, there can’t be a height effect with that kind of gentle gradient, it just won’t support a—”

Channel #18:“Okay, then it takes time to make the chemistry go, so by the time the rainfall has run down to the lowlands something’s—”

Channel #29:“—he’d got that wrong twice, Christ, so I kinda shrug and mutter, nothing wrong with having nothing to say, sure but try not to say it out loud, and the sonabitch went straight to Gulvinch about it then—”

Channel #20:“— intensifahs all ’at till the domed strata—yeah, ’at’s the ticket—they can’t support the shear stress an’ they rupture, all back unner that ice on the other hemisphere too I bet, uh-huh, an’ you get lotsa cyclin’ in the surface materials, rip open the seams ever’ couple hunnert thousan’ years, think what that does to the rep rate with the atmosphere when you bake out that iron exposed fresh ever’ time—”

Channel #5:“Look, that’s one thing we do know: look at that spectrum, it would be a reducing atmosphere with all that iron, for sure, except the oxygen levels get pumped up, but even so it’s only around the two percent level, two percent 0 2, you can see that right here, look, it’s just a spike out on that wing, the line strengths are wrong, nothing like Earth, but I bet it’s the same damn process, the same way our air converted over from reducing billions of years back, trouble is it’s not much O 2is it? Not damn much if you want to breathe down there.”