“Anything would be welcome but this damned red.”
The ship passed through the dark matter and suddenly they were almost among the creatures.
Jacob gulped and closed his eyes momentarily. When he looked again, he found that he couldn’t swallow. On top of three days of unbelievable sights, what he saw left him helpless before a powerful tremor of emotion.
If a group of fish “is called a “school” for its discipline, and several lions comprise a “pride,” named for their attitude, Jacob decided that the cluster of solar-beings could only be called a “flare.” So intense was its brilliance that its members seemed to shine against black space.
The nearer toroids shone with the colors of an Earth spring. Only with distance did the colors fade. Pale green shimmered below their axes, where laser light scattered in the plasma.
Around all of them sparkled a diffuse halo of white light.
“Synchrotron radiation,” a crewman said. “Those babies must really be spinning! I’m picking up a big flux at l00KeV!”
Four hundred meters across and more than 2,000 distant, the nearest toroid spun madly. Around its rim geometric shapes flew past like beads on a necklace, changing, so that deep blue diamonds became purple sinuous bands, circuiting a brilliant emerald ring, all within seconds.
The Sunship captain stood by the Pilot Board, eyes darting from indicator to gauge and alert to every detail. To glance at her was to watch a softened version of the show outside the ship, for the fluxious, iridescent colors of the nearest toroid bathed her face and her white uniform and were thereby tamed and diffused for the second half of the trip to Jacob’s eye. First faintly, then more brightly as green and blue mixed with and drove out the pink, the colors sparkled each time she looked up and smiled.
Suddenly, the blueness swelled as a burst of exuberance from the toroid coincided with an intricate display of patterns, like a weaving of ganglia around the ring-beast’s rim.
The performance was peerless. Arteries erupted in green and twined with veins drawn in pulsing, chaste blue. These throbbed in counterpoint, then grew like gravid vines, peeling back to release clouds of tiny triangles — sprays of two dimensional pollen that scattered in a multitude of miniscule three-point collisions around the non-Euclidian body of the torus. At once the motif became isosceles, and the doughnut-rim became a cacophote of sides and angles.
The display reached a peak of intensity, then receded. The rim patterns became less bright and the torus backed away, finding a place to spin among its fellows as the red started to return, pushing out greens and blues from the deck of the ship and from the faces of the watchers.
“That was a greeting,” Helene deSilva said finally. “There are skeptics back on Earth who still think that the magnetovores are just some form of magnetic aberration. Let them come and see for themselves, then. We are witnessing life. Clearly the Creator accepts few limits to the range of his handiwork.”
She touched the pilot’s shoulder lightly. His hands moved on his controls and the ship began to bank away.
Jacob agreed with Helene, though her logic was unscientific. He had no doubts that the toroids were alive. The creature’s display, whether it was a greeting or simply a territorial response to the presence of the ship, had been a sign of something vital, if not sentient.
The anachronistic reference to a supreme deity had sounded oddly fitting to the beauty of the moment.
The Commandant spoke again into Tier microphone as the flare of magnetovores fell back and the deck turned.
“Now we go hunting ghosts.
“Remember, we aren’t really here to study the magnetovores but their predators. A constant watch is to be maintained by the crew for any sign of these elusive creatures. Since they have been sighted as often by accident as not, it would be appreciated if everyone helped. Please report anything extraordinary to me.
DeSilva and Culla held a conference. The alien nodded slowly, an occasional flash of white between huge gums betraying his excitement. Finally, he set off around the curve of the central dome.
DeSilva explained that she had sent Culla to the other side of the deck, flip-side, where normally only Instruments stood, to act as a lookout in case the laser beings should appear from the nadir, where the rim-mounted detectors could not reach them.
“We’ve had a number of zenith sightings,” deSilva repeated. “And these have often been the most interesting cases, such as when we saw anthropomorphic shapes.”
“And the shapes always disappeared before the ship could be turned?” Jacob asked.
“Or the beasts would turn with us to stay overhead. It was infuriating! But that gave us the first clue that psi might be involved. After all, whatever their motives, how could they know about our way of placing instruments at the rim of a disc and follow our movements so precisely, without knowing what we intended to do?”
Jacob frowned in thought. “But why not put a few cameras up here? Certainly it wouldn’t be much of a chore?”
“No, not much of a chore,” deSilva agreed. “But the support and dive crews didn’t want to disturb the ship’s original symmetry. We would have to put another conduit through the deck to the main recording computer, and Culla assured us that this would eliminate whatever small ability we might have to maneuver in a stasis-failure… though that ability is probably negligible anyway. Witness what happened to poor Jeff.
“Jeffrey’s ship, the small one you toured on Mercury, was designed from the start to carry recorders aimed at zenith and nadir. His was the only one with this modification. We’ll have to make do with the rim instruments, our eyes, and a few hand-held cameras.”
“And the psi experiments,” Jacob pointed out.
DeSilva nodded expressionlessly.
“Yes, we are all hoping to make friendly contact, of course.”
“Excuse me, Captain.”
The pilot looked up from his instruments. He held a button speaker to his ear. “Culla says there’s a color difference at the upper north end of the herd. It might be a calving.”
DeSilva nodded.
“Okay. Proceed along a north tangent to the field flux. Rise with the herd as you make your way around and don’t get close enough to spook them.”
The ship began to bank at a new angle. The Sun rose on the left until it became a wall that stretched up and ahead to infinity. A faint luminescence twisted away from them, down toward the photosphere below. The sparkling trail paralleled the alignment of the herd of toruses.
That’s the path of superionization our Refrigerator Laser left when we were pointed that way,” deSilva said. “It must be a couple of hundred kilometers long.”
“The laser is that strong?”
“Well, we have to get rid of a lot of heat. And the whole idea is to heat up a small part of the Sun. Otherwise the refrigerator wouldn’t work. Incidentally, that’s another reason why we’re so careful not to let the herd get ahead of or behind us.”
Jacob felt momentarily awed.
“When win we be in sight of… what was it he said? A calving?”