For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.
Numbers come back. “Chimp. I want false-color peaks at 335, 500 and 800 nanometers.”
The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.
“It’s beautiful,” whispers my awestruck son.
“It’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.
Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore: branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell’s effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens, dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.
“So there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.”
“Yes,” the chimp says.
“But that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”
“No more than two millimeters. Probably less.”
“How so?”
“If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.”
“That’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”
“The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.”
It can’t be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze…
“Okay, let’s be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?”
“1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.
“That’s, uh…”
“Half the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.
I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“It’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking. It’s intelligent.”
“Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”
I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”
He frowns. “Chimp says—”
“Assume. Use your imagination.”
I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.
He looks like that a lot, I realize.
“If someone were signaling you,” I say, “then what would you do?”
“Signal…” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “…back?”
My son is an idiot.
“And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how—”
“Use the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between 700 and 3000 nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand Watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn’t matter if it’s just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.”
Okay, so my son is an idiot savant.
And he still looks unhappy—“But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?”—and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: He.
Dix takes my silence for amnesia. “Too simple, remember? Simple click train.”
I shake my head. There’s more information in that signal than the chimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn’t know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal or, God forbid, a mentor.
Oh, it’s smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate million-digit primes in the blink of an eye. Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.
Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.
“It’s a deceleration curve,” I tell them both. “It keeps slowing down. Over and over again. That’s the message.”
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
And I think it’s meant for no one but us.
We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what’s the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won’t reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send.
Might as well hit the crypt in the meantime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I’m some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.
But I set my alarm to wake up alone.
I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp’s dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years nobody’s scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It’s a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiary days of our Great Struggle.
There’s still something—comforting, I guess—about that blind, endless stare. I’m reluctant to venture out where the chimp’s nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterised. Childish, I know. The damn thing already knows I’m up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there’s no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it’s not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of détente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each other to the end of time.
After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.
So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri’s silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me—but it does not break the silence.
Dix.
A strange one, that. Not that you’d expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn’t even know what side he’s on. He doesn’t even seem to know he has to choose a side. It’s almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously, believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!
Rah.
Whoever raised him didn’t do a great job. Not that I blame them; it can’t have been much fun having a child underfoot during a build, and none of us were selected for our parenting skills. Even if bots changed the diapers and VR handled the infodumps, socialising a toddler couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a good time. I’d have probably just chucked the little bastard out an airlock.