Diamonds in the Sky (15 page)

Sani moaned in a high pitch airy whistle and Modani rushed back to the screened-off alcove in the mud brick hut after showing a comforting fluff of featherfur to the children. That was the way Sani wanted it; the young ones would have to deal with her final crisis soon enough.

“Apologies, my love,” Sani whispered. “For a moment the pain was too much, and I lost control.”

Modani made no sound, but with a fluff and a lay showed his deep concern. Softly, with all three fingers of the left hand, he groomed his dying mate, a gesture that at one time might have led to ovulation, but now only recalled fond memories. Though she had become thin, Sani looked no worse for the immobilizing cancer. The small lump on her neck was hardly noticeable, but their local crest-pruner said it went down into her spine, and to cut it out would likely kill her immediately.

“I will get more painkiller from the chemist, my love.” Modani whistled and they touched beaks in a gentle reminder of their mating dance so many years ago.

* * *

A hundred thousand years before Sani’s cancer took hold, the great blue disk and ultraviolet arms of the majestic Whirlpool galaxy filled David Martin’s field of view. He scanned for polarizations by strong, extensive, magnetic fields. There! An evolved neutron star … not a lopsided pulsar with a bumpy field whipping around, but a near-classic dipole with an ion wind streaming out of its poles. The field should, he determined, be well organized, with hundreds of Tesla out to megameters from the relatively tiny thirty-kilometer sphere at its center; a featherbed entry.

Orienting the superconducting loops in every nanocell of his body, he tacked against the faint plasma breeze of the galaxy’s central black hole, gradually bending his path toward his chosen decelerator.

His pattern recognition codes latched onto a memory of air pillow diving with Ellen from a hundred million years ago, and he reexperienced the undiminished thrill of defying his youthful fear of heights. Ten thousand light-years out from the star he woke his wife, and suggested a reprise.

She gleefully concurred, so they willed their nanocells to take human form again, for the first time in ten million years. Trillions of submicroscopic hexagonal toroids arranged themselves to emulate skin, hair, flesh and bone; optical data links carefully arranged themselves to simulate nerves and glands. Most of a billion years of experience was set carefully aside from conscious thought so that they could enjoy real-universe sensation again.

Ellen laughed joyfully, surrounding him with legs and arms, devouring him with kisses as they tumbled through the void, delighting to join one another as if they had not been one undifferentiated physical being just a few moments before.

* * *

For Modani, the trip to the village would not be the simple thing it had been as a youngster. There were too many angry people out there, would-be tribal leaders whose superstitions and egos had been bypassed by the new, Ixoran-style civil service. The desperate and the lazy had been known to waylay travelers.
I should not go alone
, he thought.
If anything happens to me, it will be a far worse tragedy for the children than Sani’s pain.

He stuck his head out of the door, smelled the freshly mown reeds he kept around the border of his land and listened. They lay on top of older dry reeds because this allowed air circulation which hastened drying. But this also let the unwary think they could place a silent foot on the soft new reeds — and then the snap when the dry, brittle, reeds below broke would betray their approach.

He thought he heard such a snap, then silence.

The silence continued. An animal?

He almost turned back, but then thought of his poor mate’s agony. Convincing himself that he would probably get away with it, he donned a leather greatcape and bid his oldest to care for Sani. He resolved to buy as much medicine as he could to reduce the number of such trips alone. Half their family’s savings were in his purse; he would have taken it all except for the threat of robbery.

Then Modani headed across his fields toward Omphan Village at several body lengths in a heartbeat, his four sleek thin legs still whipcord strong, galloping at the pace of urgency. He felt guilty about his own good health.

* * *

The neutron star lay in a medium-age open cluster, still brilliant with new blue-white stars and set off by a garnet-tinted supergiant here and there, but already penetrated by the older stars of the arm and of the halo. David and Ellen hit its magnetic pillow holding hands in a flat spin like a pair of skydivers, and bounced away at half of lightspeed, having raised the general temperature of the plasma around their impact point a femtokelvin or so. They tingled as their nanocells repaired radiation damage as fast as it happened.

As they left the region, they reformed themselves into a thousand telescopes, which they spread into a globular constellation a hundred million kilometers across; a giant’s eye to examine their surroundings in detail, sending everything to the small remaining central coordinating sphere. Their conscious time sense slowed; thoughts that used to take microseconds now took hours as their data links stretched over light minutes, but to them it was as if the galaxy around them had contracted and accelerated its motion.

The view exhilarated them; indeed, David reflected, by their self-chosen logical structure, it was one of those fuzzy patterns that
defined
exhilaration; the feeling of speed.

There! A white and a yellow giant were distended into nearly touching eggs of light, spinning madly around each other, almost ready to coalesce.

There! Orbiting a brand new white dwarf, they found a brown dwarf with glowing bands under a magnificent multihued ring system, all still encased in the nebula of the white dwarf’s final mass expulsion. A secondary planetary system was forming.

There! An old ruddy, overinflated windbag of a star circled a white dwarf grown heavy from the giant’s effluvia. If it grew heavy enough, it would collapse and explode as a supernova. Though such things were always hard to predict, they might be in time for the show.

And there! Not a thousand astronomical units from the red and white pair was an older interloper, its spectrum tinged with orange. Its passage was distant and gentle enough that its planetary system was undisturbed — and this planetary system included a rare, tiny blue and white marble not so different from far away Earth.

Ellen turned all their thousand eyes in that direction. It was her initiative, but there was no conflict — such design problems had been well worked out even before they had moved out of the Mind of Mars to seek adventure in the real cosmos with nanocell bodies. This blue green world they saw was teaming with life by virtue of the oxygen in its spectrum, but had it evolved intelligence?

Close enough to the orange star for heavy tides, it had a large moon locked in synchronous orbit of about a day and a half. The star’s gravity tried to stretch the system, adding orbital energy which the tides in the planet’s ocean tried to take away, pounding on its continents — neither, David thought, would win their argument in the lifetime of the orange-tinted star.

Remarkable, Ellen, to chance upon such a world so soon in our exploration of the Whirlpool.

But, David, what a dangerous place indeed for it to be!

David agreed. That incipient supernova should soon reset any biological evolutionary clocks in the area. The white dwarf had already grown to an almost unstable 1.44 solar masses, and the giant’s atmosphere continued to slosh out of its Roche lobe, adding more and more mass.

Collapse was inevitable, but when? The model was too sensitive to a myriad of conditions and the supernova might have already happened, or it might not happen for another hundred thousand years.

* * *

In one of her earliest memories, the ones you never throw away or store elsewhere, Ellen had been a ranger at Mt. Hood and rescued an orphaned bear cub. Despite geological warnings that an eruption was about to occur, she had been told to return it to its environment. After the eruption, she found its charred body with the beacon still operating. What choice would it have made if it could have understood? “Let nature take its course” was the rule then and wisdom now; but sadness still held her.

David, not snooping, but aware of her as always, prodded her to reduce the output multiplier of her emotive subroutines.
Silly
, she thought, she had left it on high from the lovemaking. She imagined a strong cup of coffee, and that chased the blues away. Contentment returned.

Long ago, unable to resolve the problem logically, they had simply decided that their place in things was to let the universe unfold
its
will and watch. But since it was their rule, and they were a hundred million years away from any human critics, they could make exceptions.

Curious, David and Ellen reconfigured themselves into a great conducting loop and soared in the plasma currents of the cluster, gently bending their path in an arc many billions of kilometers in radius toward the golden sun of the little blue world.

The data they gathered confirmed early hopes and fears; the world was inhabited. A race of gracile, vaguely avian centauroids lived in a metastable system of low-technology tribal cultures which, from the ruins they could see, had lasted for thousands of years. Cycles of conquest, decay, and rebirth would allow little progress toward the technology those beings would need to survive.

Reaching the star, they parachuted through its ionic wind, slowed to a planetary pace, and drank in the light of the star, giving trillions of trillions of tiny flywheels their fill. They felt powerful.

Then they sailed to a chance comet and devoured it as it bulled its way through the starwind back to its cryogenic lair. A year later, the comet was a shining sphere, composed almost entirely of their nanocell dopplegangers, and went off to convert some of its fellow comets to their purposes.

Thus, they built a great telescope system at the edge of the planetary system, to observe everything from gamma rays to quasistatic currents. Soon, the vast storehouse of memory which had followed them as photons would be collected again, augmented by news of home and beyond. And thirty million years from now, the great eyes and ears of the Milky Way would learn of their adventures and spread the word to the minds of a hundred billion worlds.

But that would have to wait. The nuclear weather inside the nearby massive star was as chaotic and unpredictable as rainy days in the Minnesota Augusts of David’s childhood. If there was to be any data from the blue green world, they’d best get it with what they had while it was still alive.

With a fountain of ions, their machine pushed them toward the golden sun, and they curved through its solar wind to reach the life-world.

* * *

Modani saw the ruffians before they saw him, and had a bolt on his bow in the flick of a crest. Nonetheless, they continued to shadow him, racing along in the brush parallel to the road.
They could not keep that up and remain quiet
, he thought, and he broke into a light trot.

An arrow whistled by him, with the black and red feather’s of Drua’s cult. Superstitious mystics! Fear tugged at him. That group preached the strong should rule the weak, and resented the increasing influence of technicians. Which meant they would resent Modani, if they knew him.

No
, he thought,
it was not so romantic when one who ground glass well stood equal with powerful warriors
. But most people were not warriors, and bit by bit, through the central council, the guilds had a crest-standing strength of their own.

Another arrow brought him back to reality; no guild help today! Enough of philosophy; more likely these hoodlums merely thought they had a right to his purse if they could take it. He’d been a racer in his youth and had kept up with it after a fashion on the odd rest day. The young ruffians would be surprised to see an oldster pick up the pace so!

As he did, they broke cover and scrambled after him. Indeed, they were mottle-crested young — but heavy with the indulgence of the undisciplined strong. He increased his distance, gauging his own endurance carefully. He could not, nor would he run forever, so he looked for opportunities.

After a bend in the road, he spotted a large Athota plant circle — one of the trunks was down, making a door, and there were gaps between the trunks for shooting arrows. Excited by danger and angry with the degenerates, he dove into this natural blind before they rounded the bend and plotted his ambush.

They galloped along in clouds of dust, puffing with fatigue. They wheeled and reared, confused at his absence. Then they saw the Athota circle, but too late. He put a bolt into the flank of one of them and the neck of the other.
Maybe they would respect that!
he thought. At least they fled squawking, in pain.

Still nervous, but urgent in his errand, Modani left the Athota plant circle and continued down the road for Omphan in the fastest cursorial trot that he could sustain.

* * *

“Look,” Ellen exclaimed. In the form of a flock of local avian life, their eyes turned to a fertile valley just north of the south polar glaciers, between two dramatic mountain ranges, one folded, the other volcanic, and they wheeled in the sky as one, descending to spy on its villages and farms. They drank in the smells and sights, the culture and language, the sounds and music. David dipped into his memory and relived the wonder of one who had seen thousands of crystal blue lakes ringed by great white pines trees in his youth, and could spend hours in contemplation of yet another.

While their conscious minds wondered, their myriads of subroutines were busy with the data coming in. Flying insects gave them the key to the biology of the land below, and samples of the blood of its dominant vertebrates. They saw a great stone temple with handwritten scrolls, and learned the world was called Li and the people, Tha-Li. They perched for days in the marketplace and the temple to learn its brand of wisdom. Then the flock that was David and Ellen flew out along an uncrowded path to the countryside, took the form of the visitors from a different part of Li and began walking back to the village.