Across the Sea of Suns (48 page)

Just as the algae itself now stuck and crawled and slithered over the eyes and ears of the Watcher. Eating at the delicate sensors. Blinding them.

So that as the humans in their frail craft glided close, no bolt answered them.

Nikka sent,
I’d hate to have some of that ice-eating fuzz on me.

“All life’s an ally,” Nigel murmured. Not all life’s responses were inappropriate.

He was already readying himself for the battle.

The Watcher was a labyrinth. It wasn’t easy to get in, even with the external sensors covered by the thirsty algae. They had to burn it away from the hull to find a way in.

After they had forced an entrance at a bulky lock, the party of twelve found themselves floating through winding spaghetti corridors. Some necked down to scarcely a hand’s width. Others swelled until an elephant could have wallowed through.

A strange humming fled through the lacquered walls Skittering tones shot through the electromagnetic spectrum. Nigel followed Carlos down a tube that seemed to drop away into infinity. Red panels spattered random glows on bulk-heads and complex equipment. Nigel tried to see a pattern to the illumination, but most of it seemed to be wasted on bare, plain metal and stone.

The Watcher was half an asteroid, just as the ancient Icarus craft had been. Into the carbon and raw metal of a minor planet something had fitted elaborate technology. And whatever ran the Watcher lurked somewhere here. Nigel drew Nikka close and followed Carlos. The silence of the place hung like a warning.

They did not have to wait long.

Things long and snakelike scuttled from holes. Bigger machines, tubular and awkward, jetted down side corridors.

There were impossibly many of them. The humans fired at the approaching machines with a grim desperation. Laser bolts and e-beam cutters lanced forth.

They were almost surprised to see their shots fall sure and hard on the machines. Parts blew away. Electrical arcs flared blue-white, then died. The machines tumbled forward, out of control, and smashed into walls.

There are so many!
Carlos called. He had a laser projector in each hand and two power packs strapped to him.

Turn sideways, so you’ll be a smaller target,
Nikka answered.

Down this way,
Nigel called.

They fled the hordes. Nigel rebounded from three walls in quick succession and darted down a narrow tube. Weightlessness gave him back the deft reflexes he had too long missed. As soon as Carlos and Nikka had caught up to him he turned down a side passage. Two slender machines, glossy with glazed ceramic, came at him. He punctured each with a bolt of tightly bound electrons.

Carlos began,
What are
—

Nigel sent a signal back into the passage they had left. Crimson light burst upon them. A crackling of electromagnetic death ricocheted through their comm lines.

“Implosion devices I cooked up,” Nigel said. “Spits out electromagnetic noise. I’ve been dropping them every hundred meters.”

Nikka said,
I see. It will burn out these creatures?

“Hope so.”

It did. The swarms who staffed the Watcher had once been made to defend it against intrusion. But time works its way even with stolid machines. Those which wore out were replaced, but each time the basic instructions were engraved into fresh silicon or ferrite memory, a small probability existed of a mistake. The weight of these errors accumulated, like autumn leaves blown into a chance pocket of a backyard, making improbably dense piles.

So the minions of the Watcher had devolved. They were slow, sluggish, and dumb in just the deadly crafts of battle that life could never afford to neglect. Humanity’s penchant for warfare now paid off.

It took hours to work their way through the Watcher. Small machines launched themselves at any moving figure. Some exploded suicidally. Others jumped from ambush. Mines detonated, ripping at legs and lungs.

Nigel played cat and mouse down the dark corridors. He used stealth and tricks and, to his own vast surprise, stayed alive.

More men and women launched from the base on Pocks. They slipped aboard like pirates and joined battle.

In the end the machines retreated. Running, they were even less able. They were blown apart or fried with microwave bursts. Every machine fought to the very end. It was obvious that whatever had designed the Watcher had not thought deeply about the chance that it would be boarded. After all, the vast ship was intended to bombard planets, perhaps even kindle suns to a quickening fire. Hand-to-hand fighting was not its style.

Still, over half of the humanity that entered the Watcher left as corpses. Many more groaned and sweated with deep wounds. Others bit their lips at the pain and swore with ragged, angry pride. The last machines they found, cowering now in dim hiding holes, they smashed with great relish into small, twisted fragments.

Much of the Watcher labyrinth they would never understand. It was a forest of glazed surfaces, nested cables, inexplicable tangles of technology alien to all humanity’s avenues of thought.

But they did understand the small ship they found.

It was buried near the center of the vast complex. It had a curious blue-white sheen, as if the metal were fired in some unimaginably hot furnace. Yet it opened easily at a touch of a control panel.

Carlos said, “It’s not the same design as the rest of this Watcher. Looks finer, I’d say. The Watcher is solid but crude. This thing …”

Nigel nodded, The craft was a hundred meters long, but still seemed tiny and precious compared with the monstrous Watcher. And its arabesqued surfaces, its feeling of lightness and swift grace, conveyed its function.

“It’s a fast ship,” Nikka observed, passing a hand over circuits that leapt into amber life.

“I agree,” Nigel said. “The Watcher’s a blunderbuss. This is a stiletto. Or maybe an arrow.”

Carlos touched the hard, dimly alabaster-lit surfaces of it. They stood in what had to be a control room. Screens blossomed into unintelligible displays when they approached. “Robots flew it, I guess,” Carlos said. “Must’ve built the Watcher around this.”

“Perhaps.” Nigel calculated. They had already found evidence that the Watcher was very old, perhaps as much as a billion years. Radioactive isotope dating techniques were fairly accurate, even for such long durations. If this ship was older, it implied a machine civilization of vast age.

“I wonder if we could use it? Figure out the controls?” Nigel wondered.

Carlos brightened. “Sail it to Earth? My God! Yes!”

“Earth?” Nigel hadn’t thought of that.

They were all intensely aware that they were like fishermen swallowed by a whale.

Somewhere in the huge Watcher was the guiding intelligence. Its minions destroyed, it had withdrawn. But it would not give up.

Eventually it would find a way to strike back at the vermin which had invaded it. The Watcher had time. It could move subtly, deliberately.

The corridors took on a brooding, watchful cast.

No one went anywhere alone.

It took three days to find the core.

A crewman led Nigel to the small, compact room near the geometric center of the Watcher’s huge mass.

“Looks like an art gallery, I’d wager,” Nigel said after a long moment of surveying the curved walls.

It was a wilderness of tangled curves. Nothing sat flush with the walls. Small, ornate surfaces butted against each other, each rippling with embedded detail. Patterns swam, merged, oozed. A giddy sense of flight swept over Nigel as he watched the endless slide of structure move through the room.

“This is where it thinks?” he asked.

A crewman said at his elbow. “Maybe. Functions seem to lead into here.”

“What’s that?” A hole gaped, showing raw splintered struts.

“Defense mechanism. Killed Roselyn when she came in. I got it with a scrambler.”

Nigel noticed that some of the panels were spattered with drying brown flecks. The Watcher was exacting a price for each of its secrets.

He sighed and pointed. “And that?”

The crewman shrugged.

A pattern came and went, as though it was a huge ocean wreck seen deep beneath the shifting waves.

It was first a line, then an ellipse, and now a circle. Its surface piped and worked with tenuous detail. Somehow the walls seemed to contain it as an embedded image, persistent against the passing shower of lesser facts. Nigel frowned. An unsettling, alien way to display information. If that’s what it was.

Again came the sequence. Line, oval, circle, oval, line. Then it struck him. “It’s the galaxy.”

“What?” Nikka had just arrived. “What
is
all this?”

“Watch.” He pointed. “See the broad line of tiny lights? That’s the galaxy as it looks from the side. That’s the way we see it from Earth, a plane seen edge-on. Now watch.” His lined hands carved the air.

The line thickened, winking with a cascade of lights. It swelled into an oval as other data sped across the image, like clouds rushing over the face of a slumbering continent. Fires lit in the oval. Traceries shot through it. It grew into a circle. Strands within it flexed and spilled with light.

Nigel said, “Catch the spiral arms? There. Faint out-lines against those bright points.”

“Well …” she looked doubtful. “Maybe.”

“See those blue points?” Dabs of blue light stood out against the other tiny glows. Evidently they were all stars. But … “I wonder what those stand for?”

“Other Watchers?” Nikka asked.

“Could be. But think. This is a map of the whole damn galaxy.” He said it quietly but it had an effect on the others now crowding into the cramped room. “Seen from every angle. Which means somebody—some-
thing
—has done that. Sailed far up above the whole disk and looked down on it. Charted the inlets of gas and dust and old dead suns. Seen it all.”

In the silence of the strange room they watched the galaxy spin. It moved with stately slowness. Grave and ghostly movements changed it. Sparks came and vanished. Dim gray presences passed across its face. Lingered. Were gone.

Then a specialist Nigel knew slightly, a wiry astronomer, said, “I think I recognize some of the pattern.”

“Where?” Nigel asked.

“See that quadrant? I think it’s ours.”

A segment of the galaxy did seem to Nigel, now that the astronomer pointed it out, slightly more crowded and luminous that the rest. He frowned as thin mists seemed to spill liquidly through the pie-slice segment. “You recognize stars?”

“In a way,” the astronomer said with a certain prim precision. “Not optical stars, no. Pulsars.”

“Where?”

“See the deep blue ones?”

“Yes, I was wondering—”

“They’re where pulsars should be.”

Nigel remembered vaguely that rapidly spinning neutron stars accounted for the pulsar phenomenon. As the compacted cores of these dense stars spun, they released streams of plasma. These luminous swarms flapped like flags as they left the star. They emitted gouts of radio noise. As a star spun, it directed these beams of radio emission outward, like a lighthouse sweeping its lamp across a distant ship. When the beam chanced to intersect the Earth, astronomers saw it, measured its frequency of sweep.

The astronomer went on, “They’re so prominent in this map. Far more luminous than they are in reality.”

“Perhaps they are important?” Nikka asked.

“Umm.” The astronomer frowned. His face was lined with fatigue but the fascination of this place washed away the past. Even amid tragedy, curiosity was an itch that needed scratching. “Could be. As navigation beacons, maybe?”

Nigel thought of his lighthouse analogy. Beeping signals across the blind abyss?

But there were easier ways to find your way among the stars. He pointed again. “Why is there that big blue patch at the center, then?”

The astronomer looked more puzzled. “There aren’t any pulsars at the galactic center.”

Nikka asked, “What is there? Just stars?”

“Well, it’s got a lot of gas, turbulent motions, maybe a black hole. It’s the most active region of the whole galaxy, sure, but …”

Nikka asked, “Could it be that the galactic center and pulsars have something in common?”

The astronomer pursed his lips, as if he disliked making such leaps. “Well … there’s a lot of plasma.”

Nigel asked slowly, “What kind?”

“All kinds,” the astronomer said with a touch of condescension. “Hot gas made still hotter. Until the electrons separate from the ions and the whole system becomes electrically active.”

Nigel shook his head, not knowing himself where he was headed. You just skated, and went where the ice took you. “Not around pulsars. I remember that much.”

The astronomer blinked. In his concentration the weight of the last few days slipped from him and his face smoothed. “Oh. Oh, you’re right. Pulsars put out
really
relativistic plasma. The stuff comes whipping off the neutron star surface close to the speed of light.”

Nigel wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. Still, something tugged at him. “What kind of plasma?”

“There aren’t any heavy ions, no protons to speak of. It’s all electrons and their antiparticles.”

“Positrons,” Nigel said.

“Right, positrons. The electrons interact with the positrons in some fashion and make the radio emission. We—”

“And at galactic center?” Nigel persisted.

The astronomer blinked. “Well, yeah … There was report a while back. … A detection of positrons at the galactic center.” His voice caught and then a wondering enthusiasm crept into it. Nigel watched the man’s face fill with a wan yet growing delight. “Positrons. If they slow down, meet electrons, the two annihilate. Give off gamma rays. A gamma-ray telescope Earthside, Jacobson’s group I think it was, saw the annihilation line.”

Nigel felt a slow, gathering certainty. “Those blue dots …”

Nikka said softly, “The Watcher keeps track of where positrons appeared naturally in the galaxy.”

The fact sank into them. The Watcher’s main job was to stamp out organic life, that was clear. But something had told the ancient craft to notice pulsars and the positron plasmas they spewed out into the galaxy. A phenomenon that occurred also at galactic center—but on a hugely larger scale, apparently, judging by the large blue zone at the very hub of the rotating swirl.