Gregory Benford The Sunborn

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that metals are cool even if they're as warm as the room, because we sense the
rate of heat loss, not the temperature itself. Yet the Beings could count.
They knew basic arithmetic and were whizzes with an intuitive feel for
calculus, particularly integrals.
For gigayears they had been integrating fluxes that nourished them.
Only a minority of them were interested in the Hotness, which seemed to mean
the realm of planets and sun. Most were engaged in conversations or works that
even the Beings could ill describe. Wiseguy finally gave up trying to
translate into human terms, though the closest approximation seemed to be "the
Long Dance."
So with plenty of Earthside computational help, they let Wiseguy assume a role
in the dialogue, one that
Dr. Jensen christened "Gofer to the Beings"-with only slight irony. Wiseguy's
orders were to focus on the bow shock problem.
"Got a call in from Shanna," Julia heard in her headphones, from the watch
officer, Doug Killings.
"Forwarding."
Julia sighed. She was trying to keep their ships working together well, but
Shanna wasn't making it easy.
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When Shanna came on, she started right in: "I'm picking up a lot of movement
from some of those
Beings, the ones who pulled farther out."
"So?" Julia was trying to thread her way through a lot of Wiseguy results and
did not like her concentration broken.
"Ukizi broke the Dopplers down. There's some spikes, looks like small, fast
things."
"Um. So?"
"Well, anything new makes me recall what happened before. Veronique."
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Julia said stiffly, "She was in my crew. I'll take responsibility."
"Not what I meant. Be warned, is all."
"Roger. Out." The old pilot-spacer jargon worked well if you wanted to be
abrupt.
Julia sighed with relief. Back to Wiseguy. Wow, was this dense stuff. The
program's most probable interpretation was that the Beings were not
instigators of the bow shock intrusion-even though one of them went by that
name and seemed to have earned it. Instigator had started the whole agenda of
duplicating "hot" life on Pluto.
Earthside had a consensus theory for the Beings, garnered both from Being talk
and from their movements. Whole teams had followed the gusher of data the two
ships had sent back, and applied vast computer resources. From that trove they
had tracked the Beings' movements using the
High Flyer and
Proserpina radars. With more intricate work Earthside had outlined them and
picked up features of their geometry, all seen by their plasma wave emissions.
These last sounded in audio like fizzing howls played against a basso
background.
Legions of "experts" (whatever that meant) had profiled from this lode. The
Beings, they thought, were opportunists. Every now and then, the Beings said,
clots and clouds drifting in the realm between the stars would wander into the
path of the Hotness, which apparently meant the sun. Those big clouds had
increased density and mass and smacked into the prow of the solar system. For
a "short while"-which seemed to mean centuries-the interstellar wilderness
where the Beings thrived would press inward. Most
Beings avoided that turbulent zone. But this local group relished the chance
to feast on an enhanced
Cascade-their harvesting of incoming energy.
So they ventured inward. And fed. And instigated.
It was not clear why. Certainly the turbulent zone where the solar wind met
the interstellar plasma was ripe with energy. And as that boundary, the
"heliopause," bulged in, forced by the increased interstellar pressure, the
Beings moved with it.
Perfectly natural, follow the food.
But why the Pluto experiment? Julia felt that they were just born curious.
Maybe that was a universal, too, among intelligent creatures. Perhaps
curiosity was how they got smart.
Shanna, in her role of discoverer of Plutonian life, thought there was some
ancient driver. She asked
Wiseguy to scan carefully the Beings' word choices, for terms like "ancient,"
"epoch," "age span," "eon."
"I think they want to find out where they came from," she had said. "Which
seems to be 'the Fount,'
whatever that is."
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"Somewhere in the solar system?" Viktor had scowled doubtfully at Shanna's
screen image.
"That's what they say-I think. These codes in Wiseguy aren't perfect."
"Unlike her," Viktor said out of range of the microphones.
The codes were fast but blunt, yes, but in time they served. One thing was
clear: the Beings seemed troubled. Some of their party had departed in a rage.
These Earthside had identified by their "color"- low-
frequency emissions, apparently leakage from their interior thoughts. The
Beings left behind kept up a running debate-on which
High Flyer and
Proserpina eavesdropped, with Earthside's legions kibitzing-
about what to do. Some felt they should break off contact because it was
dangerous, new, frightening.
New opinions came in daily, from Beings so distant that the light travel time
was just getting to them.
This was another clue that the Beings had an ornately complex society, which
one might well expect, given that their apparent age was 3 or 4 billion years.
This Wiseguy eavesdropped from conversations;
their time scale used as a unit circuits of the sun around the galaxy, which
is about 250 million years.
Not much younger than the sun itself. And at least one, called Recorder, said
it had been around back then.
This conclusion had taken a while to check and even longer to get used to.
They had invited Shanna and some of her crew for a discussion of it.
"Cannot be creatures who live forever," Viktor maintained.
Shanna and Julia agreed, which surprised them both-brows furrowed, eyes
carefully not looking at each other-even though they were both biologists.
"Evolution always trades off long-term traits against short-
term advantage," Shanna had said, her tone implying that she had not expected
this from Viktor. "That's why we age."
Viktor had shaken his head. "We wear out, is all." He had sprained his foot
the day before doing some repair work and illustrated his thesis by limping
across the dayroom deck.
Julia said helpfully, "Look at our hearts. They work fine for a while, when
we're mating and bringing up children, but then they get clogged and fail."
Viktor grinned. "I know theory. But these Beings, they say they do not
reproduce."
Both the women biologists blinked at this. How a Being could arise without
natural selection through reproduction was a mystery. Even beyond carbon-based
molecules, the principles were supposed to be universal. "This feels pretty
damned anti-Darwinian," Shanna called it, shaking her head. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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