Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (43 page)

Far back in their history, in their founding tragedy, they had suffered some sort of biological catastrophe that had nearly driven the Ythri to extinction. More recently, in their first industrial age, the Ythri had suffered metals loss, since they had few in their planetary crust. Recovering, they had resolved to harvest fresh supplies from their own asteroid belt.

After all those millennia of suffering had come the slow Ythri revival. Through the long centuries of poverty they lost much of their historical legacy. Cities burned or collapsed in hardship, and with them their libraries. Especially they did not know any longer where the wormhole mouth was in their sky. But now they did have a hard-won, simple interplanetary civilization. When the jetting solar plasma marked the way, they could fly to where the virulent plasma glow told them the ancient wormhole mouth was. Their greatest lost heritage still orbited unused at the edges of their solar system, deep in the cold vaults of time.

“This is our destiny, a bloodpride age old,” Fraq said solemnly.

Now they could pursue an ancient goal—finding the Ark of Meaning launched by a primeval civilization, the Furians. The earlier Ythri culture had heard of it in the dying messages sent out in microwave—an attempt to pass on the genetic roots of life around a forlorn world now gone forever, devoured by the expansion of its sun into its red giant phase. That planet had fried, then been swallowed up in its last vast agony, by the plasma halo that wrapped it in a glowing funeral shroud.

“They launched many ships,” Fraq said. “Your system was blessed to receive one, long before your kind evolved.”

“So one is
here
?” Ruth asked, interrupting Fraq’s long tale. The Prefect frowned, stayed silent at her impoliteness.

“Bloodpride demands it,” Fraq said. “Our foremothers said to find the Ark was a Prime Need for life itself—to save a legacy of another evolution.”

“Then it’s like our SETI Library,” Ruth said. “Continuity with the long past. To understand what could be in our future.”

“You do not naturally fly,” Fraq said. “But you ken the deep long truths.”

“Perhaps we can share where this Ark might be?” the Prefect said.

“If you take us there, assuredly,” Fraq said. “Our ship cannot manage such a large vessel.”

“Why?” the Prefect asked.

“We fear it.”

Decades had passed, she knew, since this stone-faced Prefect had worked with the cryofiles. Ruth had spent years fathoming the labyrinth of those data-forests. The SETI Library held all transmissions received from the Galactic Complex. That host of innumerable societies had largely, flourished long before humanity was born on the dusty plains of Africa. Within those multidimensional databases, Ruth customarily spent her days. After the initial Ythri arrival, she had immersed herself in the Library.

The SETI files were a bewildering, largely impenetrable resource. The grandest possible intellectual scrap heap, she sometimes thought. But it could yield priceless ore.

Now that they knew where the Ythri star was, she found the earlier Ythri signals from records from the Long Now Cave. These were spectral data of irregular “pulsars” seen in 2100s and not again. Brief, compressed, they repeated only a few times. These, she found, were in fact SETI signals from the Ythri, nearly three hundred light years away. These flashes around 10 GHz were attempts to reach Earth, assuming a tech civilization might be there, based on the Ythri detection of the ozone line in our atmosphere. These were not understood during the decades following the Age of Appetite, when no one had puzzled out the economics of SETI contact, and so did not realize that short bursts were far more efficient as attention-getting signals. The smart strategy was to send lighthouse pulses, catch the attention of emerging societies, and direct them to a much lower power signal that carried detailed messages. Nobody in the slowly collapsing decades of the late 2100s and all of the 2200s caught on. Nor could they remotely afford to reply. The whole of humanity was putting out fires, sometimes literally.

Still, in the middle decades of the 2100s Earth had sent “slow boat” solar sails out into the Oort cloud, bound for Centauri and beyond. Making close solar passes in ‘sundiver’ mode got them up to 500 or 600 kilometers per second, a thousandth of
c
. In thousands of years they could arrive at stars, after dutifully passing data on interstellar space back to Earth. Most of these were still on the way, forlorn robot voyagers long outdated in their very mission.

But the Furians, as Fraq termed them, had thought on even longer perspectives before humans evolved. Ruth researched Fraq’s tale, and found it made sense.

The ancient Furian civilization had reached its end as their sun left the main sequence and became a red giant, its luminosity rising by a factor of a thousand. The swelling ruddy sphere doomed their world, but also brimmed with photons, a rich launcher for Furian solar sails. That dropped the time for an interstellar transit down to centuries. Sailcraft wouldn’t last forever in transit, when they might smack into a random rock. Best to keep the sailing time low.

But how could the sails slow down when they arrived? Their light sails would be nearly useless for getting captured into the gravity well of a main sequence star, with its puny sunlight. A magnetic sail, braking on the solar wind, could help, but not nearly enough. Without something more, the Arks the dying Furian world sent out would simply blow by their target stars.

The Furians, Fraq said, had identified stars with circling worlds known to have working biospheres, but that gave forth no SETI signals, no leakage of artificial emissions, nothing. Someday they might harbor intelligence, and the Arks could carry the life lore of the long-dead Furians down to the next generation of life in the galaxy. A biological legacy. Better than a funeral pyre, or a repeating microwave message touting Furian art and culture and religion to the cold stars.

The Furians knew that most stars are members of binary or multiple systems. Their Arks targeted binary systems with a red giant and a widely separated dwarf star. Ark sail vessels could use the red giant’s intense luminosity to decelerate, then sail on to the planetary system of the dwarf.

Librarians don’t just rely on hearsay; they check. Ruth checked Sol’s neighborhood.

She looked at red giant/dwarf star binaries within a hundred light years of Sol. There were four. Beta Aquila had a dwarf companion roughly 150 AU from the star. Astronomers had found in the 2100s that it had no planetary companions the size of Earth with working biospheres. The other three red giants—Epsilon Cygnus, Aldebaran, and Theta Ursa Major—also had no life-bearing worlds orbiting the red giants or the giants’ companion stars, as shown by looking at their atmospheric chemistries. So these were not good prospects for the dying Furian world. Apparently such life bearing pairs were unlikely.

The Furians’ star was a bit more than a hundred light years from Sol. So the Furians looked for happy coincidences instead.

Ruth shook her head in wonder. The Furians were smart. Roughly every 100,000 years, random orbital motions made stars drift by within two light years of Sol. By chance, a red giant was a few light years from Sol when the Furians launched their Ark sails. So they took advantage, she guessed, of the coincidence. It checked out with the astro simulations she ran.

About four million years ago, a red giant had passed by in stately splendor, lighting the sky of an Earth busy evolving mammals with a ruddy glow. Small primates scuttled beneath this glowing ember in the night, trying to stay alive. Perhaps some of them puzzled at the lights in that dark celestial bowl as the Furian probe made its passage, braking around the red giant. Then it set sail for the biosphere the Furians knew orbited the ordinary yellow dwarf star two light years away, Sol. The passage time at lower velocities would be dozens of centuries, but the Ark had time to play out its slow logic.

It had entered the solar system and, following instruction from a Furian society that had died on their burning world, took up orbit. What would stimulate it to activity again?

Fraq thought the Ark awaited a visit. Only an interplanetary civilization could reach it and understand its genetic heritage. The Ark orbited somewhere near Sol, awaiting a knock at its door.

The Ythris wanted to go there, harvest the heritage. With help from the evolved primates, and their SETI Library.

What had her mother used to say?
Adventure means opportunity.
Sure, Mom.

The Lunavator Bolo was running often and not fully booked, but they had to wait for the synchronous connection to the high velocity Flinger. And Fraq wanted to hunt. So . . . they wanted her to join in. More diplomatic social niceties, and for Ruth a command performance courtesy of the Prefect.

“You must hunt with them,” he said blandly. “They request it.”

“I nearly broke my neck last time.”

“You exaggerate. In any case, I instructed you to practice.”

“Practice flying, sure—that was fun. But hunting? How?”

“In the Verdant Void, of course. We have stocked it with animals that we believe will appeal to the Ythri instincts. They are carnivores and enjoy the sport of getting their own game.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“I don’t recall seeing that in your file.”

“I’m a recent convert.”

Did his eyes narrow by a millimeter? “How recently?”

Ten seconds ago,
she thought, but said, “Some time now.”

“That is of no matter. You will not have to eat what you help them catch.”

How would you know, freezeface? Have you hunted with them?
“I will do my best.”

He did not bother to smile. Indeed, she could not recall that he ever had. “Excellent.”

Fraq had taken perch some distance from her and the other Ythris. They all chose perches in the spire trees that grew near the Void walls, facing the kilometers of forest just below. When she gazed toward him he looked away quite deliberately. That fit the background inferences the translators had fed Ruth. Ythris were solitary types.

Fraq yawned his jaws widely and sent a long, howling call. Ythris echoed it, clashing their claw-hands together in a savage applause. They wore little clothing beyond a weapon belt and genital covers, for feathers guided their flight. In their preparing moments before she had seen and understood—the grooming, preening, trembling with hot-eyed desire for the hunt.

The Ythri were moving appetites, the translators said, carnivorous except for a sweet tooth for fruits. Carnivores needed larger regions per individual than herbivores or omnivores, even though meat has more calories per kilo than vegetable matter. A pride of lions needed a lot of antelope, and antelope needed a lot of land to graze.

They had emerged from a long drought on their largest continent, forcing the ancestors from deep forests, out onto savannahs. They grew larger and sharpened their hunting skills, forming groups that drove their solitary natures toward social skills. That in turn improved their ground locomotion and evolved claws into hands, though they never lost their sharp hooked nails. So the Ythri had evolved extreme territoriality and individualism, with social cohesion when needed. This had consequences in their governments, mores, arts, faiths, and philosophies. All that came from their extreme carnivore appetites.

So, she guessed, Fraq and his other Ythri expressed in their beautiful golden-brown feathers the itchy tensions that came to them while in close association. Even a kilometers-wide Void was too tight for them. Their feathers riffled with jittering waves. Zooming through the wormhole, confronting humans in confined spaces—these were fresh challenges, driving uneasy stresses.

She had to admit, Fraq was an admirable male, proud and aloof. And those eyes . . .

For this event the Library had leased the Verdant Void exclusively and filled its dense forests with animals, many brought especially from Earth. (Thriftily, the Library also discreetly posted micro cameras throughout, and had already sold the media rights for more than the Void lease cost.) The translators, who studied Ythri culture as rendered in conversations and a few grudgingly given texts, all advised not to make it easy for the Ythri. This was the central “sport” of the Ythri life, as well as their food source. They rose to civilization not through agriculture but through managing vast populations of animals, kept in the enormous forests and hunted daily. All their culture focused on pursuit, stalking, attack, and feasting—the intense code of “bloodpride.” If they inferred that the prey here was being staked for easy plucking, or was tame, the aliens might well take grave offense.