Across the Sea of Suns Read Free Page B

of the dome, illuminating the fields on the opposite side, powering the ecology of
Lancer.
Wraparound lighting. The fusion burn in
Lancer’s
throat gave ample electricity for the phosphor panels, but to Nigel it still seemed like a wasteful squandering of photons.
    Nikka interrupted his thoughts with, “What do you think is our best tactic?”
    “Um?”
    “We have to keep down criticism of us. Of our …”
    “Decaying physical abilities.”
    “Yes.”
    “Right, then—we should work in modest jobs. Low profile.”
    “Until we reach Isis.”
    “Then—well, we maneuver ourselves into interesting work.”
    “Don’t let them argue us into a desk job.”
    “Right. Maybe we’ll have to be content with merely controlling robots or something, but—”
    “No paper pushing.”
    “Just so. Meanwhile—”
    “Stave off the bastards.”
    She smiled and repeated with some relish, “Stave off the bastards.”
    Months before,
Lancer
had dropped a self-constructing radio net, letting it tumble away in the wake. Riding inside a cocoon of shock-ionized plasma, they could not make high-resolution radio maps.
    The net uncurled and deployed. Alex controlled the servo’d antennas by remote, painstakingly assembling aperture synthesis maps of the Ra system. The star itself flared violently, sending tongues high into its corona. Detailed mapping of their target, Isis, took much longer.
    Nikka prodded Nigel awake when their apartment Sec chimed. “Let me be,” he growled.
    “Stop doing your croc-in-the-sun impersonation. It’s the Assembly review of the first Isis map. You wanted to see it.”
    “Ah. I’d fancy that.”
    Nikka tapped her wrist and the wall screen clicked on. She silenced Alex’s voice-over explanations and enlarged the map. Nigel peered at the round image. The Isis disk was a spaghetti scramble of contour lines.
    “Planetary acne,” he said.
    Nikka said, “Looks like a river valley system, there.”
    “Couldn’t be. Trick of the eye, probably. This isn’t radar, remember. They’re picking up the Isis transmissions.”
    “How can it come from all over the planet’?”
    He squinted. “It
can’t.
The simple, efficient way to send across interstellar distances is with one fixed antenna.”
    “Yes …” She combed back her sleek black hair with her fingers. “Or so we think.”
    “Electromagnetic waves are culture-independent. Makes no sense to use lots of antennas.”
    He tapped into the interactive-mode discussion, still lying in bed. No interesting ideas surfaced. “Wait’ll we’re closer,” he said.
    Nikka dialed the map to max scale. “I
still
say it looks like a river valley.”

THREE
    Isis was a red world.
Mars-tinged,
Nigel thought, staring down at it. But rich with air, cloud-choked.
    One warm face forever pinned toward Ra, the other staring blank and frozen into the eternal cold: tide-locked. In the immemorial night the land groaned beneath vast blue glaciers. Half a planet, capped in ice.
    Winds from the twilight fed the great, slumbering, white-crusted mountains, bringing breaths of fresh moisture. At the eternal dawn line where dim pink light licked, icebergs calved into a red ocean. The sea circled Isis, pole to pole, separating ice and land. It was pink and glinting, scratched by winds, dotted with orange-yellow clouds.
    More sunward still, broad fans of waves battered at the base of steep, flinty chasms. The sea clawed at the rising ramparts of the one vast stained brown continent.
    Fingers of water thrust inland, toward Ra. River valleys carved the gray granite, as if clutching the world’s face, to force it toward the fire. Fingers: poking at the Eye.
    Channel #11: “Yeah, that pattern, what’d I say, fits the theory. Perfect stress pattern there, you can see the normal faulting and graben at the poles—”
    Channel #20: “Jess a sec, theh ah no poles at all, an’. if unnerstan your calc, your equilibrium is wrong from step one—”
    Channel #5: “—Jeezus, check