“Nobody except us.”
“Yes,” Louise growled. “And what can we offer them now?”
“What about the beacon?”
“I shut it down,” Louise said softly. “It’s served no purpose… not for five million years.”
Spinner sat in her Xeelee-crafted cabin, watching the grim little tomb of ice turn beneath her prow. “Louise? Where to now?”
“The inner System. I think I’ve had it with all this bleakness and dark. Spinner-of-Rope, let’s go to Saturn.”
19
Surrounded by swooping photino birds, Lieserl sailed around the core of the Sun. She let hydrogen light play across her face, warming her.
The helium core, surrounded by the blazing hydrogen shell scorching its way out through the thinning layers, continued to grow in the steady hail of ash from the shell. Inhomogeneities in the giant’s envelope — clouds and clumps of gas, bounded by ropes of magnetic flux — moved across the face of the core, and the core-star actually cast shadows outwards, high up into the expanding envelope.
The photino birds swept, oblivious, through the shining fusion shell and on into the inert core itself. Lieserl watched as a group of the birds broke away and sailed off and out, to their unknowable destination beyond the Sun. She studied the birds. Had their rate of activity increased? She had the vague impression of a greater urgency about the birds’ swooping orbits, their eternal dips into the core.
Maybe the birds knew the ancient human spacecraft, the Northern, was here. Maybe they were reacting to the humans’ presence… It seemed fanciful — but was it possible?
The processes unfolding around the Sun were quite remarkably beautiful. In fact, she reflected now, every stage of the Sun’s evolution had been beautiful whether accelerated by the photino birds or not. It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process.
Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?
She smiled at herself. Ironic. Here she was, an AI five million years old, accusing herself of too much anthropomorphism…
But, she thought uneasily, perhaps her true fault lay in not enough anthropomorphism.
The sudden communication from the humans outside — the whispers of maser light which had trickled down the flanks of the huge, dumb convection cells — had shaken her to her soul.
She’d undertaken her cycle of messages, she suspected strongly, because she was driven to it by some sinister bit of programming, buried deep within her: not out of choice, or because she believed she might actually get a reply. So she’d packed her data with pictures of herself, and small, ironic jokes — all intended, she supposed, to signal to herself that this wasn’t reaclass="underline" that it was all a game, unworthy of being taken seriously because there was no one left out there to hear.
Well, it seemed now, she’d been wrong. These people — of her own era, roughly, preserved by relativistic time dilation in their strange ship, the Great Northern — had returned to the Solar System.
And they were — she’d come to believe — people who didn’t approve of her.
They hadn’t said as much, explicitly. But she suspected an inner coldness was there, buried in the long communications they exchanged with her.
They thought she’d lost her objectivity — forgotten the reason she was placed in here in the first place. They thought she’d become an ineffectual observer, seduced by the rhythmic beauty of the photino birds.
Lieserl was some form of traitor, perhaps.
For the truth was — in the eyes of the men and women of the Northern — the photino birds were deadly. The birds were anti-human. They were killing the Sun.
They couldn’t understand how Lieserl could not be aware of this stark enmity.
She closed her eyes and hugged her knees; the hydrogen shell, fusing at ten million degrees, felt like warm summer Sunlight on her Virtual face. She’d watched the photino birds do their slow, patient work, year after year, leaching away the Sun’s fusion energy in slow, deadly, dribbles. She’d come to understand that the birds were killing the Sun — and yet she’d never thought really to wonder what was happening outside the Sun, in other stars. Had she vaguely assumed that the photino birds were somehow native to the Sun, like a localized infection? — But that couldn’t be, of course, for she’d seen birds fly away from here, and come skimming down through the envelope to join the core-orbiting flock. So there must be birds beyond the Sun — significant flocks of them.
She realized now, with chilling clarity, that her unquestioned assumption that the birds were contained to just one star, coupled with her intrigued fascination with the birds themselves, had led her to justify the birds’ actions, in her own heart. It hadn’t even mattered to her that the result of the birds’ activity would be the death of Sol — perhaps, even, the extinction of man.
She quailed from this unwelcome insight into her own soul. She had once been human, after all; was she really so clinical, so alien?
The murder of Sol would have been bad enough. But in fact — the crew of the Northern had told her, in brutal and explicit detail — all across the sky, the stars were dying: ballooning into diseased giants, crumbling into dwarfs. The Universe was littered with planetary nebulae, supernovae ejecta and the other debris of dying stars, all rich with complex — and useless — heavy elements.
The photino birds were killing the stars: and not just the Sun, man’s star, but all of the stars, out as far as the Northern’s sensors could pick up.
Already, there was nowhere in the Universe for humans to run to.
And she, Lieserl — the Northern crew seemed to believe — should be doing more than leaking out wry little messages via her maser convection cells. She should be screaming warnings.
Through her complex feelings, a mixture of self-doubt and loneliness, anger erupted. After all, what right did the Northern crew have to criticize her even implicitly? She’d had no choice about this assignment — this immortal exile of hers in the heart of the Sun. She’d been allowed no life. And it wasn’t her who had shut down the telemetry link through the wormhole, during the Assimilation.
Why, after millions of years of abandonment, should she offer any loyalty to mankind?
And yet, she thought, the arrival of the Northern, and the fresh perspective of its crew, had made her take a colder, harder look at the birds — and at herself — than she had for a long time.
She pictured the shadow universe of dark matter: a universe which permeated, barely touching, the visible worlds men had once inhabited… And yet that image was misleading, she thought, for the dark matter was no shadow: it comprised most of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter was a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean.
The photino birds — and their unknowable dark matter cousins, perhaps as different from the birds as were the Qax from humanity — slid through the black waters like fish, blind and hidden.