Diamonds in the Sky (17 page)

* * *

Modani’s crest stayed rigidly poised between up and down as Daiffidi explained the danger from the tiny red disk in the sky that did not move. The telescope made it easier, but still, it was a stretch of comprehension. What he grasped was that stars could explode in big ways and small ways, and that the tiny white speck next to the disk that did not move could explode in either way. It was particularly hard to understand that that tiny point was heaver than the huge red egg.

But he had no basis for questioning his benefactors as Daiffidi told them how to build shelters that would protect them if the star exploded in the small way. They would need to live underground as a separate sun scorched the land for a few weeks.

“We should survive that,” Sani remarked, full of the confidence of restored health. “Especially if we take seed stock into the shelters with us.”

Modani touched her bill with his. “I think there is more. Daiffidi, there is no guarantee, is there, that such preparations will be sufficient? In the worst case, if the star explodes the large way, what will it be like?”

For one of the few times in the year Modani had known him, Daiffidi hesitated. “There will be burning,” he finally said. “The neutrinos themselves won’t quite kill you this far away, but some of the atoms throughout your world will become radioactive. A gravitational wave will flex the planet. The temperature of your planet’s mantle will increase a degree or so. Magma will start moving.

“A few days later, a blast will reach you. X-rays and Gamma rays will cascade into your upper atmosphere and it will appear to burn. A blast of photons will scorch your planet’s surface. But no one will be here. In the far reaches of your planetary system, we are preparing a fleet to take you to a new world before that happens. You’ll have a badly shocked culture, but better that then none at all.”

But Modani resisted that thought. “What would happen if we stay with our ancestors?”

Daiffidi showed discomfort. “Things will seem to back off for a bit, but silent invisible and lethal particles will sweep through as the star dims to merely the brightness of another sun in your sky. Within a week of that the star will become a visible hairy globe that will increase in brightness again until, for several weeks, it floods you with a million times your own sun’s brilliance. The deep sea shelters will last the longest, but we think the oceans may boil away, eventually. It will take years to dim; the planet’s surface will be cleansed of everything.”

So they would all become Daiffidi and Ellani’s foundlings, shorn of their world, their history rendered quaint and meaningless. A great emptiness came over Modani.

“Don’t give up hope yet,” Ellani said.

* * *

David and Ellen fell on the moon of a subgiant planet in a delicate resonance orbit that skirted the edge of the red hot vacuum disk around the two stars. They began immediately to devour the moon. In an hour, their two hundred kilograms of nanocells became four hundred. In three days, they became as massive as a small moon themselves. They spread themselves out in a great sheet of matter, balancing between gravity and photons, shielding the planet from the glare of the star, drinking in the wind from the disk and channeled it down to the planet, using the energy of its fall to the surface to run a vast refrigerator, pumping heat out the other side.

In a month, the planet had gained enough mass to affect its orbit. In two months, the resonance was broken and it was on a trajectory which would take it first through the outer layers of the red giant and then onward toward the white dwarf.

* * *

On a crisp clear night, Modani watched the star and tried to imagine what was happening. He felt a confusion of feelings. Yes, he felt pride in the telescopes he had built which had shown exploding stars and discredited the cult of Drua, but that had been Daiffidi and Ellani’s knowledge. And he felt pride in the shelters built in caves and in great tubes on the sea floor. But he and Sani were too healthy and active for their age, something which had began to attract notice as their friends passed on. Little by little, they had withdrawn and now kept to themselves and their small fields. Thus it was a surprise to have folk approach from out of the night. But caution turned to happiness when Daiffidi, Ellani, and Dosni identified themselves.

“The years treat you well, Gentleones,” he greeted them, touching beaks with all.

“Ah, years ignore us, but you have fought them well. And Sani?”

“Still in the race, thanks to you. But we both see the finish line.”

He brought them in, and helped Sani up off her blanket to let her touch beaks with neck unbent.

“We understand. That is what we’ve come to talk to you about. We think Dosni is well prepared to take over your duties. And we have a promise to keep.”

“Ah, elders,” Dosni said, “To speak of promises reminds me of my mate at home. But before I go, I have a request. You have told us you were once flesh and blood, like us. What did you look like?” Dosni’s eyes reflected the sunset from the hut’s single window, and so seemed to glow with curiosity. Modani flicked his crest in amusement at his son’s insatiable thirst for the new.

“Do you promise not to be afraid?” Ellani replied — part in jest, Modani thought.

The young one’s featherfur ruffled down in embarrassed assent.

“You too, Modani?’ Ellani asked. He nodded.
What had he to fear?

But, before his eyes, their perfect Li bodies melted into a hairless, fleshy lipped, biped half again his size, with a bulging skull and odd flesh protuberances. He was prepared, intellectually, for the difference, the alienness. But he had been thoroughly imprinted with the old fears of devils, monsters and jealous gods as a young Li, and his featherfur fluffed out involuntarily, embarrassing him. In spite of himself, he backed away.

Dosni’s crest was relaxed, however, and his eyes were bright and curious. He asked Daiffidi and Ellani many questions, which they answered without embarrassment, which Modani had always been too deferential to pose. But Modani made no effort to stay his son. His own reluctance to ask personal questions was the imprint of a more cautious time and a more stern upbringing.

“Father, I need to go back to my own house, now,” Dosni said at last, long toward midnight. Modani nodded in assent. Dosni lived with his young mate a short trot down the trail, not a dangerous journey even in these times, and there was work to be done tomorrow.

So, to Modani’s relief, Daiffidi and Ellani resumed their Li form and they all made farewells to Dosni. Afterwards, the four remaining friends went into Modani’s house and settled down and pushed sucking needles through the skins of fermented tholfruit.

“What promise did you mean,” Modani finally asked, slightly less inhibited and still unclear as to what Daiffidi’s greeting statement had meant.

“We promised to save Sani’s life,” he answered, simply.

“But you did!” Sani chirped.

“For the tissue-thin slice of a world line. We can do much better than that, but there is a cost to an indefinite life span which is very hard to explain. You must imagine yourselves going on without end, and ask yourselves if that is what you really want.”

“I think I understand,” Sani chirped in low, thoughtful tones, “that to live in such a manner is both its own blessing and its own curse. I know the blessing, but what is the curse?”

“There is,” Ellen added softly, “some wisdom in your myth of a musician who wished for wings, and, having her wish granted, loved flying so much that she never used her hands again…”

“…and so became the mother of all flying things,” Modani added. “I think I understand the dilemma. In fact, by just making the offer you have put us in it, have you not? For if we refuse now, our end becomes not simply an inevitability, but a form of suicide.”

“My mate!” Sani interjected. “That’s not fair to our friends. Daiffidi, we have suspected for some time that you could do this for us,” her crest made an ironic half rise and settled, “or to us. And we have not asked. Someone could call that a form of suicide — being too polite to ask for our lives. Well, I am curious and want to know more than I have life in which to learn. How is it with you? What is the problem?”

“We all exist,” Daiffidi said, “as patterns of data and logic, systems of input and output which can include biological parts or not. It doesn’t matter as long as the same sensory input leads to the same conscious image. We can exist in any calculating machine that is large enough, and for Ellani and me, these assemblages of nanocells give us the greatest independent physical capability.

“We worry about why we keep going, whether our existence serves any significant purpose. Can anything in an infinite cosmos claim to be significant? We accumulate knowledge, but it all falls within known bounds — it is like numbering all the points on a line. But however pointless existence is, there never seems sufficient reason to
stop
existing.” He flipped his crest in a yes-and-no gesture. “So we go on.”

“It’s a logical trap, really, but I doubt it is possible to appreciate the full complexity of it without having the logical resources we have.”

“We shouldn’t be too discouraging,” Ellani added. “We don’t worry when we don’t want to worry, we don’t feel sad if it isn’t convenient, and we’ve had an awful lot of fun. This living forever isn’t bad at all, but it is a decision you need to make, and, in our experience, it’s a decision that doesn’t get unmade.”

Sani closed her eyes completely, then opened them again. “I’m not sure.”

Modani’s featherfur bristled again with memories of village stories about immortal ghouls that sucked life fluids from the living like juice from a tholfruit. “Gentleones,” he said, “I am overcome. Forgive me if I absent myself a moment for nature and to find the rightful place for my featherfur.”

Everyone nodded at him and he left the group to be alone in his garden for a few moments, fertilizing this and that. He told himself over and over that this strange offer was from his dearest friends. Sani and he could live forever. But at a price — a price that would clearly mean giving up much of what he thought he knew about life. Could he do that? Could he embrace such a strange future?

The larger moon hung low in the east, a bright crescent the size of a child’s kicking ball held at arm’s length; they had stayed up late and the sun would soon rise. Modani had no trouble in seeing the craters and mountains on the back side, nor the minuscule disks of the nearer wanderers; it was as if there was more light. His hindquarters shifted involuntarily and his crest rose.

Slowly he looked up. The tiny red disk which did not move was now a brilliant beacon, a searing point of light in the west that cast its own shadow.

Keeping himself as calm as he could, he turned toward the house and called out.

“Sani. Gentleones, it has started…”

* * *

A white dwarf is a small target. Tides stretched the planet one way and squeezed in another. Great magnetic fields formed and whipped up an uncontrollable magnetic storm. Radiation from both sides lanced through David and Ellen faster than they could repair themselves. Still they fought to keep it on course.

The dwarf flared and the planet broke, disrupted as billions of atmospheres of pressure blasted through its ends. All became plasma, trapped in fields beyond any control. There would be no escape. To preserve themselves for a few more moments, they contracted to an essential core and used the mass and energy of their dying outer layers to cool the inner layers.

Have we succeeded, David?

I think so, but it all depends on how advanced the dwarf’s core is, and how much matter we will blow away from it
. Thoughts were harder now, as cells struggled to contain damage and redundant pathways were lost.

We are evaporating
, Ellen observed.
It seems strange. I wish we could send this experience to the other David and Ellen.

If we could, we would send ourselves. Since we can’t, the logic is that we accept what must happen, and enjoy it. I think they will understand and be happy for us. Since we are them, we would understand in their place. That is all they need to know; that it can be done. They will know that… that last logical barrier to will can be broken.

David, I’m losing memories. I’ll hold onto you until the last.

And I will hold onto you. So, after a hundred million years, to end. I am at peace. And free. Free… Farewell.

Farewell.

* * *

Photons ran rampant inside the white dwarf, chipping off pieces of nuclei here and there, which were gobbled up by larger, more stable nuclei. Here, a neon nucleus collided with a helium nucleus head on, and before they could disentangle themselves, a neutron stole away with their excess energy, and a magnesium nucleus was born.

An iron core started to form, the harbinger of catastrophe imminent. Iron had no excess energy to give in support of the hungry masses pressing upon it. The star began to shrink, compress, and burn hotter. Soon the remaining nuclear fuel would detonate. Immediately. Devastatingly.

But on the surface, triggered by the disintegrating planet with far more hydrogen and helium than the white dwarf could digest in its usual incremental manner, another explosion was already in progress, throwing matter out and away. A glowing cloud, bright as a million suns, fled out from the white dwarf. The influx stopped. The star stopped growing poised on the brink of disaster.

On Tha-Li, four beings watched the sky.

* * *

“You should go to the shelters,” Daiffidi said.

Modani’s beak dipped to him in negation. “We have agreed to leave the space for younger Tha-Li. I feel, one way or another, we are done with this world. Now, tell me. The travels we have made with you, the gardens we have grown together, the troubles we have taken to fend off robbers without killing them,” Sani asked. “If we became like you, would we remember all of this?”

“Yes, you will,” said Ellen, “and more, much more.”

They were silent for a long time, watching the new sun burn. Then Sani’s crest raised slowly in a coy humor. “Will I be able to mate again with my Modani?”