“But is flickering—” He sucks his teeth. “You see it—wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between them and us?”
“Mmmm.”
“Some kind of filter.” Dix relaxes a bit. “Wouldn’t we’ve seen it, though? Wouldn’t the vons’ve hit it going down?”
I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. “What’s the current field-of-view for Eri’s forward scope?”
“Eighteen mikes,” the chimp reports. “At 428’s range, the cone is 3.34 lightsecs across.”
“Increase to a hundred lightsecs.”
The Eri’s-eye partition swells, obliterating the dissenting viewpoint. For a moment, the sun fills the Tank again, paints the whole bridge crimson. Then it dwindles as if devoured from within.
I notice some fuzz in the display. “Can you clear that noise?”
“It’s not noise,” the chimp reports. “It’s dust and molecular gas.”
I blink. “What’s the density?”
“Estimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter.”
Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. “Why so heavy?” Surely we’d have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood.
“I don’t know,” the chimp says.
I get the queasy feeling that I might. “Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared.”
Space grows ominously murky in the Tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-size now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.
“A thousand lightsecs,” I command.
“There,” Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the Tank, dark, clear, pristine. DHF428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded castoffs from companion stars whose convulsions spew gas and rads across light-years. But 428 is no nova remnant. It’s a red dwarf, placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable.
Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AU’s across. And for the fact that that bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about three hundred and fifty lightsecs from its primary and then just stops, its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be.
For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.
Numbers come back. “Chimp. I want false-color peaks at three hundred thirty-five, five hundred, and eight hundred nanometers.”
The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.
“It’s beautiful,” whispers my awestruck son.
“It’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.
Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore: branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell’s effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens, dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.
“So there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.”
“Yes,” the chimp says.
“But that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”
“No more than two millimeters. Probably less.”
“How so?”
“If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.”
“That’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”
“The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.”
It can’t be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze…
“Okay, let’s be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?”
“1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.
“That’s, uh…”
“Half the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.
I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“It’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking. It’s intelligent.”
“Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”
I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”
He frowns. “Chimp says—”
“Assume. Use your imagination.”
I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.
He looks like that a lot, I realize.
“If someone were signaling you,” I say, “then what would you do?”
“Signal…” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “…back?”
My son is an idiot.
“And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how—”
“Use the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between seven hundred and three thousand nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn’t matter if it’s just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.”
Okay, so my son is an idiot savant.
And he still looks unhappy—“But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?”—and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: he.
Dix takes my silence for amnesia. “Too simple, remember? Simple click train.”
I shake my head. There’s more information in that signal than the chimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn’t know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal, or, God forbid, a mentor.
Oh, it’s smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate sixty-digit primes in the blink of an eye. Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.
Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.
“It’s a deceleration curve,” I tell them both. “It keeps slowing down. Over and over again. That’s the message.”
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
And I think it’s meant for no one but us.
We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what’s the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won’t reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send.
Might as well hit the crypt in the meantime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I’m some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.