What does a billion-year-old galactic culture know, he thought, about the deep fundamental levels that all sentient species seem to have in common? Apparently they don’t know everything, for the Galactics still operate on this plane of reality. And I know for a fact that at least some of them don’t have any more telepathy than I do.
There were rumors that older species periodically faded away from the galaxy; sometimes from natural attrition of war or apathy, but also occasionally by simply “stepping off”… disappearing into interests and behavior that have no meaning to their clients or neighbors.
Why does our Branch Library have nothing on these events, or even on the practical aspects of psi?
Jacob frowned and locked his two hands together. No, he decided. I’m going to leave Bubbacub’s trunk alone!
Helene deSilva’s voice came on again over the intercom.
“We will be approaching the target area in thirty minutes. Those who wish may now approach the Pilot Board to get a good view of our destination.”
The rest of the Sun seemed to dim slightly as their eyes adapted to the added brightness of the area. The faculae were bright pinpoints, flashing on and off far below in sudden brilliance. At some indeterminable distance, a great sunspot group stretched away. The nearest spot looked like an open pit mine, a sunken recess in the grainy “surface” of the photosphere. The dark Umbra was very still, but the penumbral regions around the sunspot’s rim rippled incessantly outward, like wavelets spreading from a pebble thrown into a lake. The border was vague, like a plucked piano string, vibrating.
Above and all around, the huge shape of a filament tangle loomed. It had to be one of the biggest things that Jacob had ever seen. Following the lines of magnetic fields that merged, twisted, and looped around one another, giant clouds swirled and flowed. A strand emerged from nothingness, rose, twisted around another, and then disappeared into “thin air.”
All around them now was a swirl of smaller shapes; almost invisible, but excluding the comforting black of space in an overall pink haze.
Jacob wondered what a literary man would make of this scene. For all of his egregious — perhaps murderous faults — LaRoque had a reputation built on a beautiful facility with words. Jacob had read several of his articles and enjoyed the flowing prose, while perhaps laughing at the man’s conclusions. Here was a scene that demanded a poet, whatever his politics. He thought it a pity that LaRoque wasn’t here… for more than one reason.
“Our instruments have picked up a source of anomalous polarized light. That’s where we start our search.”
Culla stepped up to the lip of the deck and stared intently at a position pointed out to him by a crewman.
Jacob asked the Commandant what he was doing.
“Culla can detect color far more accurately than we,” deSilva said. “He can see differences in wave length down to about an angstrom or so. Also he’s somehow able to retain the phase of the light he sees. Some interference phenomenon, I suppose. But it makes him really handy at spotting the coherent light these laser beasties put out. He’s almost always the first one to see them.”
Culla’s mashies clacked together once. He pointed with a slender band.
“It ish there,” he stated. “There are many points of light. It ish a large herd, and I believe that there are sheperdsh there ash well.”
DeSilva smiled, as the ship hastened its approach.
15. OF LIFE AND DEATH…
In the center of the filament, the Sunship moved like a fish caught in a swift current. The current was electrical, and the tide that swept the mirrored sphere along was a magnetized plasma of incredible complexity.
Lumps and streaming shreds of ionized gas seared thither and back, twisted by the forces that their very passage created. Flows of glowing matter popped suddenly in and out of visibility, as the Doppler effect took the emission lines of the gas into and then out of coincidence with the spectral line being used for observation.
The ship swooped through the turbulent chromospheric crosswinds, tacking on the plasma forces by subtle shifts in its own magnetic shields… sailing with sheets made of almost corporeal mathematics. Lightning fast furling and thickening of those shields of force — allowing the tug of the conflicting eddies to be felt in one direction and not another — helped to cut down the buffeting dealt out by the storm.
Those same shields kept out most of the screaming heat, diverting the rest into tolerable forms. What got through was sucked up into a chamber to drive the Refrigerator Laser, the kidney whose filtered waste-flow was a stream of x-rays which clove aside even the plasma in its path.
Still, these were mere inventions of Earthmen. It was the science of the Galactics that made the Sun-ship graceful and safe. Gravity fields held back the amorous, crushing pull of the Sun so the ship fell or flew at will. The pounding forces of the center of the filament were absorbed or neutralized, and duration itself was altered by time-compression.
In relation to a fixed position on the Sun (if such a tiling existed), it was swept along the magnetic arch at thousands of miles per hour. But relative to the surrounding clouds, the ship seemed to poke its way slowly, pursuing a quarry seen in glimpses.
Jacob watched the chase with half an eye, and kept Culla in sight the rest of the time. The slender alien was the ship’s lookout. He stood by the helmsman, eyes glowing and arm pointing into the murk.
Culla’s directions were only a little better than those given by the ship’s own instruments, but the instruments were difficult for Jacob to read. He appreciated having someone there to show passengers, as well as crew, the way to look.
For an hour they’d chased after specks that glowed in the distant haze. The specks were extremely faint, in the blue and green lines deSilva had ordered opened, but occasionally a burst of greenish light stabbed out from one or another, like a searchlight that suddenly took in the ship and then swept past.
Now the glimpses occurred more frequently. There were at least a hundred of the objects, all about the same size. Jacob looked at the Proximity Meter. Seven hundred kilometers.
At two hundred their shape became clear. Each of the “magnetic grazers” was a torus. At this range the colony looked like a large collection of tiny blue wedding rings. Every little ring was aligned the same way, along the filamentary arch.
“They line up along the magnetic field where it’s most intense,” deSilva said. “And spin on their axes to generate an electric current. Heaven knows how they get from one active region to another when the fields shift. We’re still trying to figure out what keeps them together.”
Toward the edge of the crowd a few toruses wobbled slowly as they spun. Processing.
Suddenly, for an instant, the ship was bathed by a sharp green glow. Then the ochre hue returned. The pilot looked up at Jacob.
“We just passed through the laser tail of one torus. An occasional shot like that doesn’t do any harm,” he said. “But if we were coming up from behind and below the main herd we might have had trouble!”
A clump of dark plasma, either cooler or moving much faster than the surrounding gas, passed in front of the ship, blocking their view.
“What purpose does the laser serve?” Jacob asked.
DeSilva shrugged. “Dynamic stability? Propulsion? Possibly they use it for cooling like we do. I suppose there might even be solid matter in their makeup, if that were true.
“Whatever the purpose, it sure is powerful to punch green light through these red-tuned screens. That’s the only reason we discovered them. Big as they are, they’re like pollen blowing in the wind down here. We could search for a million years and never find a toroid, without the laser for a trace. They’re invisible in the hydrogen alpha, so to observe them better, we opened up a couple of bands in the green and blue. Naturally we won’t be opening the wavelength that laser’s tuned to! The lines we choose are quiet and optically thick, so whatever you see that’s green or blue comes from a beastie. It should come as a pleasant change.”