The Sunborn (28 page)

S
HANNA GAZED
at the pale crescent of Pluto falling behind. Its moon, Charon, looked outsize, fat. It was, at about half Pluto’s diameter. Thirty years ago, the astronomers said, it was just an iceball. Now it brimmed with a filigree of warming nitrogen and water, as Pluto did. Pale gas rimmed both crescents.

The source of the energy that drove this lay farther out from Pluto. And Uziki, the shy physics type, had found out how. After Ferrari’s death, the remaining five had reshuffled duties to cover the tasks. Her original crew position was in engineering and computers, but she had a Ph.D. in plasmas. She had found that the energy came in subtly, as electrical currents in a thin plasma column, pointing straight in toward the sun.

The nuclear drive rumbled hard at her back, rattling the decks.
Proserpina
was now riding along that column’s outer sheath. The plasma physicists Earthside thought they could learn a lot about how the whole mechanism worked by looking at the conditions at its boundaries, for some reason.

Not her field of expertise, but it made sense—something was confining the current flow, shaping it neatly toward Pluto. What lay at the other end of this mechanism nobody had even guessed, so far. Something big and strange, for sure.

“Picking up a lot of turbulence,” Jordin said from the side couch.

“Plasma waves?”

“Yeah, a lot like the stuff coming from the bow shock zone up ahead, I’d say.”

“Low frequency? Like
Voyager
picked up?” About plasma physics she knew at least enough to ask questions, but not much more.

“Sure is. Pressure waves, running down this sheath, keeping the currents nicely aligned.”

“A kind of…plasma pipe?”

“Yep. Energy flow pipe, with Pluto-Charon at the far end of the circuit.” Jordin was intrigued, fingers working in his command gloves. He waved in the space before him, and pretty colored displays outlined the flow patterns. Currents arcing in, nose-diving, finally captured by the crusts of the two worlds. The heating effect flared visibly as a dull orange glow in the icy crusts. Filigrees ran under the blue ice sheets, melting the thinnest layers into gossamer vapors. Clouds fumed into the gathering atmospheres.

“Damned odd,” was all Shanna could think to say.

“Not an accident, no way,” Jordin whispered, eyes intent on the constant play of pattern.

“What kind of thing can set up magnetic pipes bigger than planets?”

Jordin shrugged. “I dunno. Earthside is still talking about all this as a whole new kind of biosphere, driven from outside by currents—”

“I’ll say!”

“—but natural. The astrophysicists are playing games with the bow shock region, tying its moving into all this commotion on Pluto.”

She snorted. “That just moves the problem back a step. What made the bow shock boundary move in from 100 AU?”

“You don’t get the game.” Jordin grinned. “Moving the cause into their ballpark means they get to make the pitches. Get the hurry-up funding. Make headlines.”

“So young and already so cynical.”

“You expect scientists to be loftily above it all?”

She nodded grudgingly. “Okay, now you’re starting to sound reasonable. Time to up my medication.”

It took six days for
Proserpina
to overtake
High Flyer.
Its exhaust burned diamond-hard against the black. Escape velocity from Pluto was 1.1 km/sec, only a tenth of what it took to escape Earth’s grasp. Orbital speeds were low out here, too. Pluto moved at a paltry 500 m/sec, not a whole lot faster than a jet plane. Out there in the Oort cloud, speeds got even slower. Shanna had a momentary comic picture of herself running to catch up with a planet…

And there it was, a bright dot rushing into the far dark.

High Flyer
was a huge thing, like a skyscraper with a big bright rocket flare stuck on one end. Most of it was gray bottles of water blocking the hind drive from the living quarters.

In space geometry is the only guide to size, and even geometry needs a measuring stick. Here the only guide to her eyes was the air lock, the bulky structure a mere small cap near the top third of the craft.

This was a
big
nuke. And the first fusion rocket of major scale, built for both speed and distance. No mere pod sitting atop a big fuel tank, which in turn fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way, no matter how ornate the subsections got, because the water in the tank shielded the crew up front from the reactor and the plasma plume in the magnetic nozzle.

To even see the plume,
High Flyer
had a rearview mirror hung amid-ship, out ten meters to the side. The whole stack was in zero g, except the top thick disk, which the crew seldom left. Forty meters in diameter, looking like a dirty angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the outside. There the walls were meter-thick and filled with water for radiation shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with forward viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through electronic feeds.

The whole ship was well over a hundred meters long. Built like a barrel, it rode a blue-white flare that stretched back ten kilometers before fraying into steamy streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out the actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern, so that at the right angle the whole scene was an exclamation point, with the sun as the dot.
Proserpina
hauled up within a kilometer, and the two ships fretted over the details of making the transfer.

In the end Shanna won out.
Proserpina
was cramped and showing wear; and she wanted to see inside the bigger ship. She, Jordin, and two other crew would come across in the shuttle. Part of her wanted to play status games and make them come to her, but her own curiosity won out. She wanted to see what this monster of a ship looked like, and it would indeed be good to get out of the house for a while.

Not that she looked forward to a tech-talk fest. Whenever ship crews got together, there was a lot of talking shop, but out here she could use some simple human contact. Being captain always kept you at a distance from your crew. And the hyperlink to Earth was no substitute for real talk, either. Last week she got a memo that said, “Cascade this to your people and see what the push-back is.” It put her off reading her e-mail for days.

They wedded to the air lock gingerly. The lock was big and bulky, like everything here, with fancy safety bells and whistles.
Mass
to spare,
she thought sourly.

They cycled through, in formation. For Earthside audiences
High Flyer
was recording every greeting, handshake, joke, and guffaw. They got through it, agreed to turn the cameras off, and Shanna had a moment to assess this Julia Barth, senior woman among astronauts, legendary for a crusty exterior that concealed a sharp intelligence. She stood straight, shoulders back, smaller than Shanna had expected; the great should be larger, to match the reputation. Julia was compact as all astronauts were, maybe a tad stringy. Her face was lined, mouth cocked at an assessing angle, eyes quick. Suntanned, too, from working in the Martian domes. Already, Shanna was sizing her up.

Her husband, Viktor, was quiet and gruff, big and muscular among the slim astronauts, eyes flicking from one face to another as the conversation moved. Equally famous, just as at ease. They both seemed energetic but calm. Maybe the Mars Effect was real. Shanna wondered how they were in bed together…

Everybody knew each other’s profile, had read their books (some ghost-authored, some even eloquent), and they passed through the usual compliments. Shanna knew she would take an industrial-strength makeover to be presentable, but the
High Flyer
men all told her how great she looked. One, Hiroshi Okada, had gleaming eyes and a mirthful grin. She liked him at once, and not just because his compliments didn’t seem forced.

In cultural profile
High Flyer’s
crew was like hers. By no accident, most spacers were from North America or Asia. Those were the cultures, mid-twenty-first century, where young people still asked,
When can I do X?
The Europeans usually said, with dread,
How do we stop
people
from doing
X? And X could be just about anything technological. Genetically modified food, screening for future disease risk, opening up the asteroids for mining of scarce metals, living longer through genetic tailoring, beaming microwave power from space, living half-time in virtual villages, sending a beacon signal to the stars.

ISA was mostly backed by Asians and Americans. Euros didn’t go into space—You could die! It would cost a lot!—and were busy shoring up their aging societies with plentiful taxes and fearful politics, eyeing the ever-growing population of Muslims in their midst… Shanna was quite glad to be out here, away from the swamp of Earthside.

They sat around the ship’s pedestal mess table, a polycarbon white circle. An awkward moment. Everybody beamed, glad to see fresh faces, but nobody spoke. An
epic moment far from Earth. All sorts of firsts here. How to start?
Then Viktor produced, improbably, two bottles of champagne to mark the moment. That loosened everybody even before lips touched liquid.

Sure enough, the first socializing was about the latest Earthside news, most of it just the usual wrangling and angling that passed for politics. That done, like dogs sniffing noses, they relaxed.

Shanna let the chatter run for about half an hour. They all had the zand interpretations, the spotty information on the Pluto biosphere. So they concentrated on reviewing the data, dancing around hypotheses. Viktor reported on his idea that the wavelengths received from farther out meant that the radiators were tens of meters in size, at least. Maybe that’s just their antenna size, Chow-Lin said. Franklin agreed. After all, our antennas are pretty big, too.

But, Viktor countered, the signals are from places where there are no worlds at all. Certainly nothing remotely as large as Pluto. They got into a technical discussion, and momentum flagged. Tit for tat, counters, hedges. Shanna let it run as long as she could bear before saying, abruptly, “What do you make of our…hosts?”

Viktor’s face was veiled as he said, “You think big things make the small Pluto things?”

Wow, he knows how to cut to the chase.
“Somebody did,” Shanna said. “We’re not looking at natural evolution here, for sure.”

“Julia thinks so, too,” said Viktor. “She is pretty good biologist. Has intuition.”

Shanna felt a stab of jealousy.
Damn, she’s good. How did she come up with it so fast?

Jordin sent her a look she could not decipher. “We haven’t actually discussed all this yet.”

Good
old Jordin, undercutting my claim to first discovery,
Shanna fumed.

“The antenna-size argument,” Chow-Lin pointed out, “just sets a lower bound. The creatures could be far larger. We’re lots bigger than our eyes.”

Viktor said, “All assuming that the antennas
are
eyes—I mean, not a technology. Because we see no technology out there, just empty space.”

Julia’s mouth tilted skeptically. “I rather think these zand of yours are not naturally evolved, but how can something bigger than a mountain—maybe the size of continents—make them?”

“Not a clue,” Shanna said. “But they didn’t evolve on Pluto. That’s not a biosphere back there, not a truly integrated system. It’s a base camp, getting by on energy rations.”

“And run by electrical power that comes from way beyond,” Jordin added.

Julia’s wary gaze did not alter. “No chance Pluto’s been running that way for a long time?”