Now the voice came from directly in front of him, from a precise, well-focused place.
“Better,” Uvarov growled.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I hadn’t formed an image. I didn’t think — ”
“You didn’t bother,” Uvarov snapped. “Because I can’t see you, you thought it was enough to float around me in the air like some damn spirit.”
“I didn’t think it would be so important to you,” Mark said.
“No,” Uvarov said. “To think of that would have been too much the human thing to do for an imprint like you, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you need anything?” Mark asked, with strained patience. “Some food, or — ”
“Nothing,” Uvarov snapped. “This chair takes care of it all. With me, it’s in one end and out of the other, without even having to swallow.” He stretched his lips and leered. “As you know. So why did you bother to ask after my health? Just to make me feel dependent?”
“No.” Mark sounded cool, but more certain of himself. “I thought to ask would be the human thing to do.”
Uvarov let himself cackle at that. “Touché.”
“It’s just that you sleep for such a long time, Uvarov,” Mark said drily.
“So would you, if you weren’t dead,” Uvarov said briskly.
He could hear the rattle of his own breath, the subdued ticking of a huge old clock somewhere, here in the dining saloon of Louise’s old steam ship. Hauling this useless relic five megayears into the future had been, of course, an absurd thing to do, and it showed a fundamental weakness in the character of Louise Ye Armonk. But still, Uvarov had to admit, the textures of the old material — the painted walls, the mirrors, the polished wood of the two long tables — sounded wonderful.
“I suppose you had a reason for waking me.”
“Yes. The Sun maser probes — ”
“Yes?”
“We’re starting to get meaningful data, Uvarov.” Now Mark sounded excited, but Uvarov never let himself forget that every inflection of this AI’s voice was a mere artifice.
Still, despite this cynical calculation, Uvarov too began to feel a distinct stirring of interest — of wonder. Meaningful data?
The maser radiation was coming from hot-spots on the photosphere itself patches of intense maser brightness, equivalent to tens of millions of degrees of temperature, against a background cooler than the surface of the yellow Sun had once been. The convection mechanism underlying the maser flares’ coherent pathways fired the radiation pulses off tangentially to the photosphere. So the Northern had sent out small probes to skim the swollen, diffuse surface of the photosphere, sailing into the paths of the surface-grazing maser beams.
“Tell me about the data.”
“It’s a repeating group, Uvarov. Broadcast on maser wavelengths, from within what’s left of the Sun… Uvarov, I think it’s a signal.”
They hadn’t learned much about the Solar System, in the year since their clumsy, limping arrival from out of the past. So many of the worlds of man simply didn’t exist any more.
Still, in the quiet time before the arrival of the Northern at Jupiter, Uvarov and the AI construct had performed some general surveys of the Solar System what was left of it. And they’d found a few oddities…
There was what looked like one solid artifact — Morrow’s anomalous object buried in the ice of Callisto. And, apart from that, there were just three sources of what could be interpreted as intelligently directed signals: this maser stuff from the Sun, the fading beacon from the edge of the System, and — strangest and most intriguing of all, to Garry Uvarov — those strange pulses of gravity radiation from the direction of Sagittarius.
Uvarov had done a little private study, on the structure of the Universe in the direction of Sagittarius. Interestingly enough, he learned, the cosmic structure called the Great Attractor was to be found there, right at the place the photino beam was pointing. The Attractor was a huge mass concentration: the source of galactic streaming, for hundreds of millions of light-years’ distance around. Could the Attractor be connected to the g-waves?
And then there was all that strange photino activity in and around the Sun.
The data was patchy and difficult to interpret — after all, dark matter was, almost by definition, virtually impossible to study… but there was something strange there.
Uvarov thought he’d detected a streaming.
There was a steady flow, of photino structures, out of the heart of the Sol giant… and on out of the Solar System. It was a beam of photinos aimed like a beacon, out of Sol — and straight toward the source of the anomalous gravity waves in Sagittarius.
Something was happening in Sagittarius — something huge, and wonderful, and strange. And, somehow, impossibly, it was connected to whatever was taking place in the heart of the poor, suffering Sun.
…The Virtual, Mark Armonk, was talking to him again. Or perhaps at him, Uvarov thought sourly.
“I wish you’d pay attention, Uvarov — ”
“Without me to talk to, you’d lapse into non-sentience, devoid of independent will,” Uvarov pointed out. “So spare me the lectures.”
Mark ground out, “The Sun, Uvarov. The photosphere maser radiation is standard stuff — generated by silicon monoxide at 43 Gigahertz. There are natural mechanisms for generating such signatures. But in this case, we’ve found hints of modulation of the silicon monoxide stuff… deliberate modulation.
“We’ve found structure everywhere, Uvarov.” Again that fake excitement in Mark’s voice; Uvarov felt his irritation grow. Mark went on, “There is structure in the amplitude of the beams, their intensity, phasing, polarization — even in the Doppler shifting of the signals. Uvarov, someone — or something — is in there, trying to signal out with modulated natural masers, as hard as they can. I’m trying to resolve it, but…”
Uvarov strove to shift in his chair, vainly trying to find a more comfortable posture — a prize he’d been seeking for the best part of a thousand years, with as much assiduousness as Jason had once sought his Fleece, he thought. How pathetic, how limited he was!
He tried to ignore his body, to fix his analytical abilities — his imagination — on the concept of an intelligence within the Sun…
But it was so difficult.
His mind wandered once more. He thought of his forest colony. He thought of Spinner-of-Rope.
Sometimes Uvarov wondered how much better young people might have fared, if they’d been given this opportunity to study and learn, with this strange, battered Universe as an intellectual playground. How much more might youth have unearthed, with its fresh eyes and minds, than he could!
It had already been fifty years since — in his misguided, temporary lunacy — he had inspired his forest children to undertake their hazardous journey out of the lifedome. Fifty years: once most of a human lifetime, he thought — and yet, now, scarcely an interlude in his own, absurdly long life, stuck as he was in this moldering cocoon of a body.
So even Spinner-of-Rope, Arrow Maker’s wise-ass daughter, must be — what, sixty five chronological? Seventy, maybe? An old woman already. But still, thanks to AS-freezing, she’d retained the features — and much of the outlook, as far as he could tell — of a child.