Do the Sun Ghosts while away the aeons as our cetaceans do? he wondered. By singing?
Neither have machines (or any of the neurotic hurry that machines bring — including the sickness of ambition?), because neither have the means. Whales have no hands and cannot use fire. Sun Ghosts have no solid matter and too much fire.
Has it been a blessing for them or a curse?
(Ask the humpback, as he moans in the stillness underwater. Probably, he won’t bother to answer, but someday he may add the question to his song.)
“You’re just in time. I was about to call,” the Captain motioned ahead into the pink haze.
A dozen or more of the toroids spun in front of them colorfully.
This group was different. Instead of drifting passively they moved about, jostling for position around something deep in the middle of the crowd. One nearby torus, only a mile distant, moved aside and then Jacob could see the object of their attention.
The magnetovore was larger than the others. Instead of the changing, multifaceted geometric shapes, dark and light bands alternated around its circuit, and it wobbled lazily while its surface rippled. Its neighbors milled about on all sides but at a distance, as if held back by some deterrent.
DeSilva gave a command. The pilot touched a control and the ship turned, righting itself so the photosphere soon was beneath them once more. Jacob was relieved. Whatever the ship’s fields told him, having the Sun on his left made him feel sideways.
The magnetovore Jacob thought of as “Big One” spun, apparently oblivious to its retinue. It moved sluggishly, with a pronounced wobble.
The white halo that bathed every other torus flickered dimly around the edges of this one, like a dying-flame. The dark and light bands pulsed with an uneven undulation.
Each pulse evoked a response in the surrounding crowd of toroids. Rim patterns sharpened starkly in bright blue diamonds and spirals as each magnetovore kept its own backbeat to Big One’s slowly strengthening rhythm.
Suddenly, the nearest of the attendant toruses rushed toward the banded Big One, sending bright green flashes of light along its spinning path.
From around the gravid torus, a score of brilliant blue dots flew up toward the intruder. They were in front of: it in an instant, dancing, like shimmering drops of water on a hot skillet, next to its ponderous hulk. The bright dots began to push it back, nipping and teasing, it seemed, until it was almost below the ship.
The ship turned under the pilot’s hand to present its edge to the nearest of the sparkling motes, only a kilometer away. Then, for the. first time, Jacob could clearly see the life forms that were called Sun Ghosts.
It floated like a wraith, delicately, as if the chromospheric winds were a breeze to be taken with barely a flutter, as different from the firm, spinning, dervish-like toruses as a butterfly is from a whirling top.
It looked like a jellyfish, or like a brilliantly blue bath towel flapping in the wind as it hung on a clothesline. Possibly it was more an octopus, with ephemeral appendages that flickered in and out of existence along its ragged edges. Sometimes it looked to Jacob like a patch of the surface of the sea itself, somehow skimmed up and moved here, maintained in its liquid, tidal movement by a miracle.
The ghost rippled. It moved toward the Sunship, slowly, for a minute. Then it stopped.
It’s looking at us too, Jacob thought.
For a moment they regarded one another, the crew of water beings, in their ship, and the Ghost.
Then the creature turned so that its flat surface was toward the Sunship. Suddenly, a flash of brilliant multicolored light washed the deck. The screens kept the glare bearable, but the pale red of the chromosphere was banished.
Jacob put a hand out in front of his eyes and blinked in wonder. So this is what it’s like, he thought somewhat irrelevantly, inside a rainbow!
As suddenly as it came, the light show disappeared. The red Sun was back, and with it the filament, the sunspot far below, and the spinning toruses.
But the Ghosts were gone. They had returned to the giant magnetovore and once more danced as almost unseen dots about its rim.
“It… it blasted us with its laser!” the pilot said. “They never did that before!”
“One never came that close before in its normal shape, either,” Helene deSilva said. “But I’m not sure what either action is supposed to mean.” ;
“Do you think it meant to harm us?” Dr. Martine spoke hesitantly. “Maybe that’s-how they started with Jeffrey!”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a warning…”
“Or maybe it just wanted to get back to work,” Jacob said. “We were in almost the opposite direction as the big magnetovore out there. You’ll notice that all of its companions went back at the same time.”
DeSilva shook her head.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll be all right if we just stay here and watch. Let’s see what they do when they finish with the calving.”
Ahead of them, the big torus began to wobble more as it spun. The dark and light bands along its rim became more pronounced, the darker becoming narrow strictures and the lighter bands ballooning outward with each oscillation.
Twice Jacob saw groups of bright herdsmen jet away to head off a magnetovore that came too close, like sheepdogs at the heels of a wayward ram, as others stayed with the ewe.
The wobble deepened and the dark bands grew tighter. The green laser light, scattered below the big torus, dimmed. Finally it disappeared.
The Ghosts moved in. As the big one’s nutation reached an almost horizontal pitch, they gathered at the rim to somehow seize it and complete the turnover with a sudden jerk.
The behemoth BOW spun lazily on an axis perpendicular to the magnetic field. For a moment the position held, until the creature suddenly began to fall apart.
Like a necklace with a broken string, the torus split where one of the dark bands tightened to nothing. One by one, as the parent body spun slowly, the light bands, now small individual doughnut shapes themselves, were flung free, each as it rotated to the place where the break occurred. One at a time, they were cast upwards, along the invisible lines of magnetic flux, until they ran like beads across the sky. Of the Big One, the parent, nothing remained.
About fifty of the little doughnut shapes spun dizzyingly in a protecting swarm of bright blue herdsmen. They precessed uncertainly and, from the center of each, a tiny green glow flickered tentatively.
In spite of their careful watch, the ghosts lest several of their erratic charges. Some of the infants, more active than their peers, jetted out of the queue. A brief burst of green brilliance took one baby magnetovore out of the protected area and toward one of the adults that lurked nearby. Jacob hoped it would continue toward the ship. If only the adult torus would get out of the way!
As if it heard his thoughts, the adult began to drop away below the oncoming path of the juvenile. Its rim pulsed with green-blue diamonds as the newborn passed overhead.
Suddenly the torus leaped upward on a column of green plasma. Too late, the juvenile tried to flee. It turned its feeble torch toward its pursuer’s rim as it jetted away.
The adult was undeterred. In a moment the baby was overtaken, drawn down into its elder’s pulsing central hole and consumed in a flash of vapor.
Jacob realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out and it felt like a sigh.
The babies were now arranged in orderly ranks by their mentors. They began to move away from the herd slowly, while a few herdsmen stayed to keep the adults in line. Jacob watched the brilliant little rings of light until a thick wisp of filament floated in to cut off his view.