Chapter Twelve: Perinucleon
Mission Time: +10,646.38 Earth-years
It was a sunny day in Durban. Mbali sat on the park bench and laughed as she watched the children play on the grass. Beyond the grove of trees, the sparkling mega-towers shimmered in the heat. Then a shadow passed over her, and she shivered. The continual clicking of the gossiping women behind her stopped. Mbali turned and saw no one was there. Something dark emerged from the trees: something large, something long, something serpentine.
"No!" Mbali screamed and rushed towards the Pelagoid exosuit, fists held as if they were deadly weapons. But the ground beneath her feet broke into hexagonal fragments, each shrinking away to reveal a backdrop of monochromatic pink noise; the ophidian form dwindled into a glowing line. The line vibrated and became music, a deep hum which propagated through and vanquished the noise. Mbali was caught in the humming waves and flailed her limbs. She was in an ocean of light. But the ocean blinked. Blinked? It disappeared, then came back in an instant. The Cosmos was light, flashing on and off and on.
She did not hear the words, but saw them in the pulses of darkness. Her limbs were moving in circles, over the edges of a table. She was weightless as restraints retracted and saw she was on a perforated slab suspended above an open cryostat chamber. The oddly curving room was composed of metal hexagons. A Pelagoid stood attached to the deck nearby, and Tai was floating next to it.
"Doctor Tai?" Mbali said. "What is that flashing light? Turn it off!"
Tai pointed to the broad monitor screen covering one wall. The light emanated from a point in space. "It's a pulsar with a quarter-second rotation rate. Just wait a moment ..." The flashing stopped, and the room was dark except a soft glow from gaps amongst the hexagons. "There. We passed out of the pulsar's beam."
Mbali pushed off the table towards the screen. "A pulsar? Aren't those dangerous? How far away are we?" The faint wisps of a planetary nebula filled the view.
"We just passed the farthest point in our orbit--the apastron--although, since a neutron star isn't really a star anymore, and it's composed of nucleonic matter, I suppose I should say 'apnucleon.' We're far enough out to escape gravitational tides and dangerous magnetic effects. This is an optical pulsar, and there isn't enough x-ray or gamma-ray output to cause tissue damage. Standing Wave, can you zoom in on it?"
Standing Wave did not appear to do anything, but the image on screen zoomed to fill the field of view with the neutron star. The surface was a smooth mirror, reflecting the swath of the Milky Way. But the starlight beyond its edge, as well as its reflection on the surface, was warped by both gravitational and magnetic lensing.
"There are things here perhaps even more interesting," Tai said. He nodded to the Pelagoid, and the view zoomed out again. Tai pointed to dark silhouettes against the nebula.
"Asteroids?" Mbali squinted. The dark spots were sharp and regular, often cubic or rectangular solids. The more she looked, the more she saw; they filled the sky. "What the ..."
The tiles on one wall reconfigured themselves to form an opening, and Ryder and another Pelagoid, Interference Pattern, floated through. "We found Unbounded," he said. "It's orbiting the pulsar, near one of the mandelboxes."
"I'm sorry--'mandelboxes'?" Mbali asked.
"Yes," Tai said. "The megastructures appear to be large space stations orbiting about the pulsar. The Pelagoids refer to them as Topology Temples, and this particular type is a 'Holomorphic Cathedral.' They all have approximate fractal geometry, mainly slices of mandelboxes, which are maps of continuous Julia sets."
Mbali blinked hard. "What can you tell about Unbounded's condition?"
"We're over 900 light-years from Proxima Octantis. So, not good. We'll know more once we get closer," Ryder said.
"We need to board it and deactivate Fai-tsiri's servers," Mbali said. "Isn't there anything here on the shuriken we could use to couple with one of our airlocks?"
"Actually, we just observed a Tui skiff landing inside a Holomorphic Cathedral co-orbiting with Unbounded," Tai said.
"Can we land in there too?" Mbali asked.
Ryder nodded. "Wave Collector is taking us there now."
"Good. Then we'll take the skiff by force and bring it back to Unbounded."
"That may be difficult. The Pelagoids' personal weapons are basically lasers, meant to damage biological tissue. If we use them on one of Fai-tsiri's gynoids, the metal parts could reflect the laser back to us."
"That may be a risk we have to take," Mbali said. "What is our time to intercept?"
"About ten minutes," Ryder said.
Mbali looked back at the screen and saw one of the complicated structures growing larger in the center of the view. Unbounded spun beside it. She saw the alien architecture was not one piece, but discrete modules maintained at constant distances from each other.
"How is that thing being held together?" Mbali asked. Her arm-calc chimed, and she looked down at the Pelagoid's speech translation.
"So each one of those pieces generates its own field? Or are they using the pulsar's field somehow?" Ryder asked.
"Wait, what do you mean there's only one magnetic field?" Ryder responded.
"So the Shape Dreamers are masters of magnetism?" Mbali asked.
The three humans lined up on the wall near Mbali's cryostat pod, which was now retracting into the deck. Straps sprouted from the hexagons and encased the humans' limbs. The Pelagoids rooted themselves to the surface which formerly had been a ceiling. There was a twisting motion, and the image in the view screen changed orientation.
Interference Pattern reported.
"Show me!" Mbali said. The image on the screen changed to display the aft section of the spinship, and the rest slowly scrolled by. "It looks okay--no obvious external damage." The forward section of the ship passed out of sight, and the view switched back to show the mandelbox structure.
They were now near enough to see that what had seemed like solid modules of the space structure were in fact composed of even smaller modules held closely together. There were cubes of cubes arrayed in space, curving solids forming nested arches, and complex holes which receded in repeating patterns deep into the structure. The humans and Pelagoids were pulled in various directions as the ship maneuvered inwards.
>
"Maybe we should just cut our losses and leave the system," Ryder said. "We could go back to Earth."
"Would Earth and humanity even be recognizable to us after twenty kiloyears?" Tai asked.
"Uh, Mbali," Ryder pointed to the console next to her. "What's that?"
"It's the Pelagoid vessel--it's emerging from the temple. I'm sorry, Standing Wave. If Interference Pattern takes your ship, it looks like you may be stuck with us for a while."
"That's good to hear," Mbali said. "It would be great to have you with us. I'm sure you could fit into one of our cryostat pods, since the Speakers clearly used--"
"Mbali! The shuriken is accelerating towards us!" Tai said.
Mbali looked at a graph of the two ships' vectors. "It's going too fast. That's not a rendezvous vector; it's a collision vector."
"Can you use reaction control thrusters to maneuver out of the way?" Ryder asked.
"Not in time," Mbali said. "Even if we could, the shuriken is more maneuverable. It's not going to miss us."
"Send out a skiff to ram it off course!" Tai said.
"That would shred both vessels, and the debris cloud would still hit us," Mbali said. "We have no time. Thirty seconds to impact."
"We have to do something!" Tai shouted. The humans looked at the Pelagoid, who remained silent.
Ryder began typing on the console. They lurched backwards and steadied themselves.
"What are you doing? Are you crazy? You'll make the damage worse!"
"We're dead anyway if this doesn't work. By accelerating towards the Cathedral, we put the Shape Dreamers in danger. They should be smart enough to realize if they get the shuriken out of the way, we'll back down," Ryder said and put on
a VR visor. "Impact in ten seconds."
"That's a lot of ifs! You have no idea how--" Mbali almost lost her footing and had to hold onto the console. Tai and the Pelagoid went sliding back towards the aft bulkhead, weapons tumbling with them. Mbali closed her VR membranes and looked at the scene with a vector overlay. "So this is how it ends."
"It's working!" Ryder shouted. The shuriken was jerked to one side, losing attitude control, flipping wildly towards the pulsar. "I'm firing thrusters!" They were pushed to the side as Unbounded changed course. "Ring thrusters firing to maintain spin-rate. We're out of the Cathedral's path."
"Are we sure?" Mbali asked. But even as she said this, the spinship passed within one hundred meters of the mandelbox, flying by at 800 kilometers per hour.
"You really did it?!" Tai said. Ryder handed him a visor, and he put it on.
Mbali found the damaged shuriken spinning away from them. "The Shape Dreamers knocked it into a low orbit around the pulsar. It's going to reach its perinucleon in a few seconds--what happens when it gets that close?"
"You'll see." They stared at the zoomed image of the Pelagoid vessel firing thrusters rapidly near the mirror-smooth sphere of the neutron star. The ship stretched. The six arms broke off, and then these separated further into smaller pieces. There was a flash of light in the central hub, and then it scattered in a line of tumbling fragments.
"It was shredded by the pulsar's tides," Mbali said. Very close to the pulsar now, the fragments were pulled into another direction, vaporizing into glowing dust which got trapped in a portion of the magnetic field spinning four times a second. The dust became a glowing cloud, encircling the pulsar in a diffuse ring.
Tai took off his visor, smiling. "You did it. I can't believe that worked!"
Ryder took off his visor and saw Tai's face contort.
"Mbali!" Tai shouted and jumped in front of her. Then he burst into a cloud of ash, his blackened skeleton clattering to the deck.
Ryder dove down and rolled, then brought up his laser. He fired through the ash cloud, and a strobing line of red light sliced down the length of Standing Wave's body. The Pelagoid dropped its weapon, and its two halves curled away, yellow and purple organs bubbling through the smoothly seared cut-plane.
Ryder lowered his laser and hung his head. He stayed there for a few seconds--or perhaps it was a few minutes. Then strong hands and arms pulled him to his feet. Mbali looked into his eyes. Pale ash settled onto their faces.
"Standing Wave was the traitor," Ryder said. "We should have ... should have--"
"Ryder Kask," Mbali said. "It's over. But our work still is not done. We have over sixty people in stasis. They're depending on us."
Ryder nodded.
Mbali turned to the navigation console. "Where do we go from here?"
Ryder put on his visor and looked away from the pulsar nebula, out at the stars. "Earth?" he asked.
"It's so far away," Mbali said. "I don't know if we--if Unbounded--can survive such a long journey. But there is a type-G star fewer than seven light-years from here."
"We don't even know if it has planets," Ryder said, staring at the cold light of the abyss.
"True. But we can hope."
* * *
Author's Note
Fiction is easy; truth is difficult.
With the Unbounded series, my intention is to write fiction that respects our current understanding in science. Certainly, I wrote of improbable technologies, but nothing intentionally violates known physics. There is speculative biology in the story, but it does not contradict what we already know. I do not invent any fictional theories, so that if something in the story is incorrect, it was a research error or a misunderstanding on my part. I believe the best possible science-fiction is scientific fiction, not fictional science (for that would make it fantasy--a perfectly respectable genre, but not the one in which I intend to write).
From the human perspective, the real Cosmos is more wonderfully bizarre and spectacular than what we can imagine. Here I provide a list of non-fiction readings for anyone who desires to delve into the actual science that underlies my fiction. Interstellar distances are based on the HIPPARCOS Catalogue data, and habitable zone distances are based on the model provided in StarGen by Jim Burrows.
Ander Nesser
August 2016
Auckland, New Zealand
Selected Bibliography
Brin, Glen David. "The 'Great Silence:' the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life." California Space Institute, UC San Diego, Sep. 1982.
Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. Basic Books, 1995.
Duncan, Robert C. "Physics in Ultra-strong Magnetic Fields." Dept. of Astronomy and McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin, Feb. 2000.
Frank, A. and W.T. Sullivan III. "A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe." Astrobiology, 2016, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 359-362.
Gillett, Stephen L. World-Building. Writer's Digest Books, 1996.
Heller, Rene, and John Armstrong. "Superhabitable Worlds". Astrobiology, 2014, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 50-66.
Kiang, N. Y. "The Color of Plants on Other Worlds." Scientific American, 2008, vol. 298, no. 4, pp. 48-55.
Kouveliotou, Chryssa, et al. "Magnetars." Scientific American, 2003, vol. 288, no. 2, pp. 34-41.
Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe. Knopf, 2006.
Loeb, Abraham. "On the Habitability of Our Universe." Astronomy Department, Harvard University, Jun. 2016.
Meltzer, Michael. When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA's Planetary Protection Programs. NASA SP-2011-4234, 2011.
Meyers, Walter E. Aliens and Linguists. University of Georgia Press, 1980.
Schmidt, Stanley. Aliens and Alien Societies. Writer's Digest Books, 1995.
Ward, Peter, and Joe Kirschvink. A New History of Life. Bloomsbury Press, 2015.
Wilczek, Frank. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Basic Books, 2008.
About the Author
https://andernesser.wordpress.com/about/
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