And, slowly, she began to understand.
This deliberate diversion of the photon flux into her wasn’t a threat, or an attempt to destroy her. Perhaps they thought she was injured, or even dying. They must be able to perceive radiant energy disappearing into her wormhole gullet. The birds were helping her — trying to supply her with more of what must seem to them to be her prerequisites for life.
The gift was useless, of course — in fact, given the increased strain on her refrigeration systems, worse than useless. But, she thought wryly, it’s the thought that counts.
The birds were trying to feed her.
Feeling strangely warmed, she accepted the gift of the photino birds with good grace.
As time wore on, she watched the Sun’s death proceed, with increasing pace. She felt an obscure, dark thrill as the huge physical processes unraveled around her.
The core, still plagued by the photino bird flocks, contracted and continued to heat up. At last, a temperature of tens of millions of degrees was reached in the layers of hydrogen surrounding the cankered core. A shell of fusing hydrogen ignited, outside the core, and began to burn its way out of the heart of the Sun. At first Lieserl wondered if the photino birds would try to quench this new shell of energy, as they had the hydrogen core. But they swept through the fusing shell, ignoring its brilliance. Helium ash was deposited by the shell onto the dead core; the core continued to grow in mass, collapsing still further under its own weight.
The heat energy emitted by the shell, with that of the inert, collapsing core, was greater than that which had been emitted by the original fusing core.
The Sun couldn’t sustain the increased heat output of its new heart. In an astonishingly short period it was forced to expand — to become giant.
Louise Ye Armonk stood on the forecastle deck of the Great Britain, peering down at the southern pole of Triton.
The Britain sailed through space half a mile above the satellite’s thin, gleaming cap of nitrogen ice; steam trailed through space, impossibly, from the ship’s single funnel. The ice cap curved beneath the prow of the ship as seamlessly as some huge eggshell. The southern hemisphere of Neptune’s largest moon was just entering its forty-year summer, and the ice cap was receding; when Louise tilted back her head she could see thin, high cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice streaming northwards on winds of evaporated pole material.
She walked across the deck, past the ship’s bell suspended in its elaborate cradle. The huge, misty bulk of Neptune was reflected in the bell’s gleaming surface, and Louise ran her hand over the cool contours of the shaped metal, making it rock gently; the multiple, amorphous images of Neptune slid gracefully across the metal.
From here the Sun was a bright star, a remote point of light; and the blue light of Neptune, eerily Earthlike, bathed the lines of the old ship, making her seem ethereal, not quite substantial — paradoxical, Louise reflected, since the Britain was actually the only real artifact in her sensorium at present.
As the Britain neared the ragged edge of Triton’s ice cap, a geyser blew, almost directly in front of the floating ship. Dark substrate material laced with nitrogen ice plumed into the air, rising ten miles from the plain; as it reached the thin, high altitude wind the plume turned through a right angle and streamed across the face of Triton. Louise walked to the lip of the forecastle deck and followed the line of the plume back down to the surface of the moon, where she could just see the fine crater in the ice at the plume’s base. The geyser was caused by the action of the sun’s heat on pockets of gas trapped beneath thin crusts of ice. Shards of ice were sprinkled around the site of the eruption, and some splinters still cartwheeled through the thin nitrogen atmosphere, slowly returning to the surface under the languid pull of Triton’s gravity.
This was one of her favorite Virtual dioramas, although it was actually one of the least familiar. The capability of her processors to generate these dioramas was huge, but not infinite; she’d deliberately kept the Neptune diorama in reserve, rationing its use over the unchanging centuries, to try to conserve its appeal.
It wasn’t hard to analyze why this particular Virtual scene appealed to her so much. The landscape of this remote moon was extraordinary and unfamiliar, and surprisingly full of change, fueled by the energies of distant Sol; and Neptune’s blue mass, with its traceries of nitrogen cirrus, was sufficiently Earthlike to prompt deep, almost buried feelings of nostalgia in her — and yet different enough that the references to Earth were almost subliminal, obscure enough that she was not tempted to descend into morbid longing. And -
Pixels swirled before her suddenly, a thousand self-orbiting blocks of light. Surprised, she almost stumbled; she gripped onto the rail at the edge of the deck for support.
The pixels coalesced with a soundless concussion into the image of Mark Wu. The projection was poor: the Virtual floated a few inches above the deck, and cast no shadow in Neptune’s pale light.
“Lethe’s waters,” Louise said, “don’t do that. You startled me.”
“I’m sorry,” Mark said. Even his voice was coarse and blocky, Louise noticed. “It was urgent. I had to interrupt you. I — ”
“And this projection’s lousy. What’s the matter with you?” Louise felt her mind slide comfortably into one of its familiar sets — what Mark called her analytical griping. She’d be able to while away a good chunk of the empty day interrogating the processor, picking over details of this representation of Mark. “You’re even floating above the deck, damn it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you start losing the illusion of solidity next. And — ”
“Louise. I said it was urgent.”
She found her voice trailing off, her concentration dissolving.
Mark stepped toward her, and his face enhanced visibly, fleshing out and gaining violet-blue tones of Neptunian light. The processors projecting Mark were obviously trying to help her through this interaction. But the rest of his body remained little more than a three-dimensional sketch — a sign that he was diverting most of the available processing power to another priority. “Louise,” Mark said, his voice soft but insistent. “Something’s happened. Something’s changed.”
“Changed?” Nothing’s changed — not significantly — for nearly a thousand years…
Mark smiled. “Your mouth is open.”
She swallowed. “I’m sorry. I think you’re going to have to give me a bit of time with this.”
“I’m going to turn off the diorama.”
She looked up with unreasonable panic at the remote face of Neptune. “Why?”
“Something’s happened, Louise — ”
“You said that already.”
“The lifedome.” His eyes were fixed on hers.
She felt dreamy, light, almost unconcerned, and she wondered if the nanobots working within her body were feeding her some subtle tranquilizer. “Tell me.”
“Someone is trying to use one of the ports in the lifedome base.” Mark’s eyes were deep, probing. “Do you understand, Louise? Can you hear what I’m saying?”
“Of course I can,” she snapped.