But then, so had she been programmed by her species — and so, to some extent, had every human who had ever lived, she thought. It was all a question of degree.
And anyway, would it really be so terrible, to be a photino bird?
With species-objective programming must come an immense fund of wisdom. The youngest photino bird would come to awareness with an expanded set of racial memories and drivers surely beyond the comprehension of any human.
Phillida had boasted that she — Lieserl — would become, with her close and accurate control of her memories and the functions of her mind, the most conscious human who had ever lived. Maybe that was once true. But, even at the height of her powers, Lieserl’s degree of awareness was surely a mere candle compared to the immense conscious power available to the humblest of the photino birds.
And perhaps, she thought wistfully, these birds were all components of some extended group-mind — perhaps to analyze the consciousness of any individual bird would be as meaningless as to study the awareness of a single component in her own processing banks, or one neuron in the brain of a conventional human.
Perhaps.
But that didn’t seem important to Lieserl, compared to the sense of belonging the birds must share.
Lieserl, the eternal outsider, watched the birds sweep past her in their lively, coordinated flights. She felt awe — and something else: envy.
She pulled away from the shrinking core of the Sun, out through the searing hydrogen-fusing shell, and soared up into the envelope — the bloated, gaseous mantle that the outer forty percent of giant-Sun’s mass had become. The envelope was a universe of thin gas — so thin, she imagined, that if she tried hard enough she could see out through these teeming layers, to the stars beyond (or what was left of them).
The Sun was a red giant. It had become a pocket cosmos in itself, with its own star — the hydrogen-fusion shell around the dead core — blazing at the center of this clogged, gas-filled space. But the outer layers, the mantle, had become so swollen that they utterly dwarfed the core. In fact, the dimensions of the Sun were like those of an atom, she realized, with the shrunken, blazing core occupying the same proportion of space within its mantle-cloud as did the nucleus of an atom within its cloud of electrons.
The photino birds clustered around the Sun’s shrinking heart, sipping relentlessly at its energy store. She was outside the bulk of the flock now although some outriders still swept past her, on their way into the flock from the Universe outside. With a new feeling of detachment, she started to experience a deepening sense of disquiet at the activities of the birds. From this perspective, the birds seemed like carrion, she thought, or tiny, malevolent parasites.
Restless, disturbed, Lieserl moved through the huge envelope. There was structure here, even in this immense volume, she saw. The photosphere of the new red giant — its huge, glowing surface — had actually become less opaque to radiation; its temperature had fallen so far that electrons had recombined with nuclei, increasing the transparency of the surface layers. So — even though its surface temperature had dropped — the Sun was actually radiating more energy, overall, than it had done before its swelling.
To fuel this increased luminosity, immense convection cycles had started — cells which spanned millions of miles, and which would persist for hundreds of days. The convection cycles dug deep into the mantle to haul energy out of the core regions to be pumped out to space — and along with the energy dredging, Lieserl saw, the convection was changing the composition of the Sun, polluting the outer regions with nucleosynthesis products like nitrogen-14, dug out of the core regions.
Coherent maser radiation flashed along the flanks of the convection cells, startling her with its intensity.
As she traveled through the thin gas she felt a faint buffeting, a rocking of the exotic-matter framework of her Interface.
There was turbulence here. The convection process wasn’t perfectly efficient, and energy, struggling to escape from the inner regions, was forced to dissipate itself in a complex, space-filling array of turbulent cells. The Sun’s magnetic field was affected by this turbulence. She saw how the flux was pushed out of the interior of the cells, to form fine sheets across the cells’ surfaces — but the sheets were unstable, and they burst like sheets of soap film, leaving ropes of flux at the intersections of the turbulence cells. Lieserl swam through a million-mile mesh of the magnetic flux ropes.
It was bizarre to think that — if she wished — she could travel out as far as the old orbital radius of Earth, without ever leaving the substance of the Sun.
Lieserl knew — with remote, abstract sadness — that the inner planets, out as far as Earth, must have been consumed in the Sun’s cooling, red-tinged mantle. She remembered her brief, golden childhood: the sparkling beaches of the Aegean, the sharp, enticing scent of the sea, the feel of sand between her babyish toes. Perhaps humans, somewhere, were still enjoying such experiences.
But Earth, the only world she had known, was gone forever.
13
“Arrow Maker, tell me what you see. Can you see the stars?”
Arrow Maker looked down, through the pod hull. “I don’t understand.”
Uvarov’s voice, disembodied, became ragged; Arrow Maker imagined the old man thrashing feebly beneath his blanket. “Can you see Sol? You should be able to, by now. Arrow Maker — is Earth there? Is — ”
“No.”
“Maker — ”
“No.”
Arrow Maker shouted the last word, and Uvarov subsided.
The illuminated lip of the port had passed right over the pod now; it was visible to Maker as a frame of light above his head. The outer darkness had enclosed the pod… No, he was thinking about this in the wrong way. The darkness was the Universe; as if in some obscene, mechanical birth, the pod had been expelled from the lifedome into the dark.
The base of the lifedome hung over him like a huge belly of glass and metal, receding slowly, its curvature becoming apparent. And through it — distorted, rendered misty by the base material — he made out the light-filled interior of the dome. He could see bits of detaiclass="underline" elevator shafts from the decks above, control consoles like the one at which he’d left Spinner, Morrow and Uvarov — why, if he had eyes sharp enough, he could probably look up now and see the soles of his daughter’s feet.
Suddenly the reality of it hit him. He had traveled outside the lifedome. He was beyond its protective hull — perhaps the first human to have ventured outside in half a millennium — and now he was suspended in the emptiness which made up most of the forbidding, lifeless Universe.
“Arrow Maker. Talk to us.”
Arrow Maker laughed, his voice shrill in his own ears. “I’m suspended in a glass bubble, surrounded by emptiness. I can see the lifedome. It’s like — ”
“Like what?” Morrow’s voice, sounding intrigued.
“Like a box of light. Quite — beautiful. But very fragile-looking…”
Uvarov cut in, “Oh, give me strength. What else, Arrow Maker?”
Arrow Maker twisted his head, to left and right.
To the right of the pod, an immense pillar of sculpted metal swept through space. It was huge, quite dwarfing the pod, like the trunk of some bizarre artificial tree. It merged seamlessly with the lifedome, and it was encrusted with cups, ribs and flowers of shaped metal.