Stranger Suns Read online

  Stranger Suns

  George Zebrowski

  1991

  This edition is dedicated to

  James Gunn and Pamela Pia,

  who looked out for me.

  I. THE STRENGTH OF SECRETS

  The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

  —Blaise Pascal

  1. INDUSTRIAL PARK

  Juan Obrion grasped the central guide bar and stopped his motion through the long tube leading from sleep quarters in the spinning wheel to the isolated work sphere, high above the hub. As usual, he had not slept well in the wheel's simulated half-g, waking up with the words centrifugal sleep begets coriolis dreams playing in his head, defying him to guess their meaning. They still seemed to mock him as he floated in place and peered out at the other components of the deteriorating industrial park orbiting a choking, warming Earth that would soon be able to support only the most obviously practical projects. Of the thirty bunched zero-g spheres, half had been empty since 2010. Four shuttles, abandoned six years later for lack of maintenance, drifted against the glow of early morning in the Pacific.

  He feared the slow dying of devotion within himself, the loss of his feeling for the work of science, which he had once hoped would liberate him from the mill of power, greed, and survival that sooner or later enslaved most people; even on the high road of ideals, death still waited along the way. Liberation was beginning to look like an open grave.

  He pulled up to a viewport so badly pitted by cosmic dust that it was impossible to see out. He tried to see a chaos pattern in the complex etchings, and was reminded of a letter by a Russian named Tasarov in a math journal, linking chaos and probability theory in a novel but untutored way. There's always a choice to do your best, he insisted to himself.

  He pushed over to the other side of the tube, and watched the regular shuttle dumping its hundred-thousand-pound load of radioactive waste into the last containment sphere. When it was sent on its way into the Sun, they would start filling the zero-g work spheres, which were now too old to renovate.

  He grasped the center bar again and pulled himself forward toward the door to the control room. Get a grip on yourself, he told himself as he reached it and pressed his palm to the key plate. We're all good people up here. Hard workers, all ten of us. Better times may come.

  The door lurched ajar, then slid open. He pulled himself inside, and tried to seem cheerful as he came up behind the stocky figure of his friend.

  Malachi Moede turned from the control panel and said, “Just about ready to use again.”

  Juan smiled. Malachi floated up, slipped a smoke from the pack in his shirt pocket, and scratched the cigarette on the low ceiling. The tip glowed red against his black skin as he took a drag, then exhaled toward the ventilator intake. “I'm quite sure it will work perfectly,” he said in his subdued British accent, which made even his most pointed remarks seem understated.

  Juan recalled again how often he had been reminded that his detector was not relieving the choke below or opening Sunspace for industrial development. The complaints reminded him of his dead father, who would have said that his son had built a toy with other people's money for his own amusement. “Maybe we'll skip a few growing pains if this rig puts us in touch with our alien brethren.” The bitter disbelief in his own voice disturbed him.

  Malachi took a deep drag and held the smoke for a moment before releasing it toward the grille. “Possibly the tachyon beams are very tight and miss our rig. We'll have to search more of the sky.”

  “Or no one is sending.”

  “We couldn't say that even after searching the whole sky.”

  “Maybe it's the rig,” Juan said, suppressing his desolate mood.

  “I checked it from top to bottom today. Mind if I stay for part of your shift?”

  Juan nodded, slipped into the control seat and strapped in, then opened the gyro controls. The screen's dark blue eye was blank as it came on; audio was silent. The magnetic field was a still pond waiting for a pebble to drop in. He reached out with a kind of lonely love and prayed for a faster-than-light particle to be absorbed, resonate with atomic particles in the field, and show up as an unmistakable jiggle on the display.

  Malachi's hand touched his shoulder. “Don't take it so hard, dear chap. You stare at that thing as if expecting to see into the mind of God.”

  Maybe there was no one out there at all, Juan thought, and humankind was alone in the universe. His project had only added a tachyon silence to the radio silence of the universe. He had built a tachyon detector which did not detect tachyons, and that would be enough for Titus Summet to close it down.

  He switched to a view of the shuttle pulling away from the dump sphere. As the orbiter dwindled, he found himself almost sympathizing with the ridicule that had been hurled against the tachyon project. Trying to eavesdrop on alien civilizations in the hope of picking up tech tips was like expecting to inherit wealth without knowing if one had rich relations. The basic scientific work for the detector was decades old; it would not yield new science without tachyons. A world fighting rising oceans, deforestation, ozone depletion, lack of clean air and water, and an increasingly better organized criminal class, could not afford altars to uncooperative gods. The cost of medical care for the aging, for the treatment of immune-system diseases, and the monitoring of the millions of drug-damaged individuals was increasing geometrically, as was the population. The only thing saving his project was its modest cost compared to the big ground-based projects.

  “Maybe I need a rest,” Juan said as he stared at the south polar icecap. It was bright in the sunlight. Clouds veiled the south Pacific. From a thousand kilometers out, no scars showed. A feeling of precariousness came over him. Something had dared to distinguish itself from the darkness—a vast planetary creature wrapped in gases, living on the Sun's streaming energy. What am I doing outside it, he asked, suddenly incredulous, even though he knew it was only his father again.

  The audio monitor sang out a high, varying tone.

  Juan switched back to the detector's blue eye. A twitching white line marched across the screen. “I'll get a fix,” he said, not daring to hope.

  “Look,” Malachi said, “the ripples measure to our predictions for a tachyon mass running into the detector.”

  Sweating, Juan leaned forward against his straps—but his hopes died. “The signal's coming straight up from the Antarctic.” He took a deep breath and switched to the main view of Earth, leaving the blue eye as a bottom-right insert. “Damn Summet, he's got a project of some kind down there!” He looked up at Malachi, who was scratching up another cigarette. “We've gone to a lot of effort to prevent anything else from triggering our detector. It's got to be an experiment generating tachyons.”

  Malachi coughed and slipped his cigarette into a wall slot. “If it's tachyons.”

  “What else could it be?”

  Malachi nodded reluctantly. “At least we'll prove to Summet that our detector works, and be able to send out more than radio messages. We'll show those shining galactic cultures that we can do more than put up smoke signals. They might have a rule about replying to radio folk, you know.”

  The line continued to dance with the steady repetition of its sound analog.

  “What are they doing down there?” Juan said.

  “Maybe we're supposed to receive while they send. He planned to surprise us, and see whether we knew what we were doing. Time to call him and say we've caught on.”

  * * *

  The director of UN Earth Resources Security stared blankly from the screen. “Juan, what are you talking about?” He ran a bony hand through his graying brown hair and scowled, bunching his thick eyebrows.

  “You tell me, Titus.”

&
nbsp; Even though UN-ERS was responsible for the safe development of Earth's energy and resources, it too often became a forum for political intrigues. Summet wielded great power, especially when he invoked fears of new ecodisasters; but much of the time he simply caved in to national interests, while claiming privately that he chose the issues on which to give ground, to save his influence for more important ones.

  Summet shifted his stocky frame in his chair, squinted, and said, “I don't know a thing about this, much as it would please you to think otherwise.” He shook his head and smiled. “Are you certain?”

  “All the physics I know says it's a faster-than-light signal.”

  Summet looked worried. “We do have teams down there, but nothing with tachyons.”

  “Maybe they're not telling you everything anymore.”

  “Impossible,” Summet said. “You'll have to investigate.”

  “But you have people there already.”

  “This is still your project, Juan. The exercise will do you good. You don't look well to me. Three months of low and zero-g is not good for you.”

  “Could it be a private or national group?”

  Summet shook his head. “I'd have known by now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Go find out.”

  “It could be embarrassing to you. You might have to continue my project.”

  “Don't hope for too much. You and Malachi take the next waste shuttle down to Brazil. Your documents will be waiting. I'll get you some help.”

  The screen winked off. Malachi drifted up from below the screen and scratched a fresh cigarette on the underpanel.

  “What do you think?” Juan asked.

  Malachi puffed and said, “He doesn't like being puzzled.”

  “When's the next shuttle?”

  “Three hours.”

  Juan switched back to the detector display. “We'll leave everything on feed to JPL.” The white line on the blue screen still danced in step with the varying high tone. It had to be tachyons, he told himself, whatever the source.

  2. A VOICE FROM THE COLD

  The Antarctic valley was a rocky bowl of snow and ice rimmed by mountains. Juan sensed a presence beneath his boots as he gazed up at the darkening blue sky. It was here, at the center of the fill, about forty meters down, according to the soundings. How long had it been here, and what had moved it to speak?

  Summet had been prompt in sending both the tons of equipment and crew needed to set up base camp around the site, and in recruiting two scientists to help with the investigation. The camp, a semicircle of long huts around the site, had been ready when he and Malachi arrived two hours ago, three weeks to the day after the discovery, impatient to start work after a week's delay in Miami.

  Juan retreated to the snow cab, climbing in next to Malachi, and they listened again to the radio relay of the signal from the detector. The audio analog of the tachyon stream was beginning to sound like an intermittent wail.

  “Somewhere just below us,” Malachi said.

  Juan sat back. “Reminds me of an alarm. Nothing but a prearranged meaning. What do you think Titus makes of this?”

  The Kenyan smiled from inside his parka hood and said, “There's a lot of guessing going on.” He chuckled. “Makes you happy, doesn't it?”

  The orange ball of the sun slipped below the peaks. The still landscape seemed ready for the six-month-long Antarctic winter night, now only days away.

  Malachi said, “Let's set the markers for the diggers.”

  * * *

  At twilight, the frozen continent seemed to draw its cold from the icy stars wheeling around the south pole. The semicircle of huts cast purple shadows across the azure-white plain as Juan hurried over to the snow cab. Downwind from the encampment, vapor from the smoke stacks was a fog bank rolling away across the snow. The industrial park was a swarm of bright stars rising in polar orbit from behind the molarlike mountains. He opened the cab door, pulled himself inside, and shut the door.

  He pumped the sticky radio switch three times, and finally got the relay of the tachyon wail from Polar Sat One. The signal was unchanged—something proud crying in an empty auditorium where the house lights were stars. He felt apprehensive. After ten years of struggle to build the tachyon receiver, this message from home might turn out to be a cruel joke.

  He killed the radio, shoved out through the door, and jogged back to quarters, trying to clear his mind of irrational suspicions. When he entered the antechamber to the large hut, he felt better. He took off his parka and went through the inner door.

  Lena Dravic, Magnus Rassmussen, and Malachi were drinking coffee at the table in the center of the bare room, which was divided into bunk alcoves along the two walls. “Still there?” Lena asked.

  “No change.” He sat down and poured himself a steaming cup, admiring her high cheekbones and short, sandy blond hair. She made him feel anxious. “By the way, Lena, where did Summet steal you from?” He sipped slowly, wondering if she was attracted to him, or if he was only flattering himself; he had never been able to trust his feelings about women.

  Her face flushed, and he realized that his question might be taken as an insult. She might be touchy about her work. He avoided her questioning blue eyes.

  “Didn't he tell you?” she said with a slight accent. Summet had mentioned that she was Norwegian.

  “No,” Juan said, “and I don't go looking up someone's records without their approval. What were you doing?” He tried to sound sympathetic, then realized that her name was not Norwegian. Maybe she was using a husband's name.

  “Drug biology,” she said, “up in the orbital isolation cluster, making immune formulas so our leaders can stay in office longer. I'd rather be researching, but it's not possible yet.” She gave a slight shrug. “I could be spared.”

  “I didn't mean to be rude,” Juan said, glancing at Malachi and Rassmussen.

  “I know.” She smiled, but for all he could tell she might be hiding her dislike of him.

  Rassmussen cleared his throat and sat back in his chair, which was too small for his lean, wiry frame. “I pity Summet. A failed scientist, he went into politics just in time.”

  “What do you do?” Malachi asked the older man.

  “I'm just about retired, but I consult. Titus insisted I owed him this one. I used to inspect electronics for the UN, mostly weapons-monitoring gear.” He scratched the white stubble on his head and smiled apologetically. “I wanted physics, and had quite a bit of it, with the chance for more, but administration and straightforward applications of theory paid better.”

  “What do you think we're dealing with here?” Juan asked.

  Rassmussen shrugged. “Not tachyons.”

  “Why not?” Juan asked.

  Rassmussen smiled. “I'd check your detector for spurious input.”

  Damn technicians, Juan thought, and a burned-out one at that. They always think they know more physics than anyone.

  “What do you think we'll dig up?” Juan asked.

  “It'll be something natural,” Rassmussen said.

  “Ah, but it will count for so much if it's tachyons,” Malachi said.

  “Obviously,” Rassmussen replied, picking up his cup.

  “Summet has been threatening to close down the tachyon listening project,” Malachi continued, “and it hasn't been a month since we got the equipment working properly.”

  Rassmussen smiled again. “In that case, let's hope.” Juan felt uneasy.

  “I do hope it comes out right for you, Dr. Obrion,” Lena said. He looked directly at her, and she met his gaze.

  “Summet can't be all bad,” Rassmussen added, “if he supported your work at all.”

  Juan sighed. “It's crazy, receiving tachyons from a source on Earth. It'll be embarrassing if it's something natural.”

  “But it does suggest that your detector works,” Lena said encouragingly. “A natural source of tachyons would be quite a discovery by itself.”

  “If we
're picking up tachyons.”

  “If your calculations say you are,” Rassmussen said, “then stick to your data and don't listen to me.”

  “Thanks,” Juan replied.

  “What would you like it to be?” Rassmussen asked.

  Juan did not reply. Lena said, “We'll know soon enough,” still gazing at him with interest. He took a long sip of his coffee, feeling uneasy and full of doubt.

  Malachi stood up. “We should get some sleep.”

  * * *

  By noon, one heavy digger had gone down thirty meters and shattered its rotary blade against something harder than itself; by midafternoon the same thing happened in a spot seventy-five meters away. Two big scoops were brought out from the copters and set to dig between the holes. Gradually, the site became one large excavation, with ramps leading down from north and south.

  Floodlights were set up as the Antarctic night closed in. A second shift of workers replaced the first; backup equipment was readied. Summet had been both efficient and generous, Juan thought as he watched a small scoop roll down into the pit and pick at the hard ice, looking like a giant insect in the blue-white glare of the heavy lamps.

  Malachi came up beside him. Suddenly there was an agonized grinding sound and the scoop stopped, its digger's claw poised over something dark. The operator looked up at them.

  They went down the ramp, made their way around the scoop's giant treads, and squatted down for a close look. Juan felt the black surface with his gloved hand, restraining his growing excitement, then took out his geologist's hammer.

  “A trapped whale?” Malachi said jokingly.

  Juan struck lightly. “Seems metallic.”

  Malachi knelt down next to him. “This doesn't belong to anyone we know,” he said, pulling the hood of his parka closer around her head.

  “We'll widen the dig from here,” Juan said.

  * * *

  “Juan, wake up!” Lena shouted, shaking him. He didn't remember coming inside to sleep, only that he had suddenly been very tired. “There's an opening.”