The Man Who Talked to Suns Read online

Inside, the building was a beauty of comfort. The darkwood was smooth like polished metal, and in places bio luminescent sap rose to the surface to create amber light glowing like coals. Floor, walls and ceiling flowed into each other with no discernible edge. Everything was smooth, organic and alive. The light sensitive windows were cultured from a natural parasite of the host plant, genes spliced so they wanted to be flat colonies of perfectly transparent photo-sensitive panes. The lodging did not intrude on the environment, it was the environment.

  He had enjoyed this place, allowing himself the luxury of relaxing his body, and to some extent his mind. He had spent hours seated in a dark nook by the door, propped on cushions and casually tracing a story patch. He watched his fellow travellers, partly out of curiosity and partly out of self-protection. All but a few of the poorer natives entered wearing respirators designed to filter and concentrate the air. All wore clothes that either drew heat from the sun’s rays or perfectly preserved the body heat of the beings inside. Some were clearly fashionable, others were clearly not, and many had a sense of dress developed in places where the fashion was a concept beyond his ken. All here were human — the temperature, atmosphere and humidity of the interior were optimised for people. Other races would have found their own lodgings better suited to their tastes and needs. That his potential pursuers and perhaps assassins shared his genetic origin was an irony not lost on him. Nature had a way of camouflaging hunters as well as hunted.

  Now on the path down, he looked back up, taking one last glance at his former refuge. At this moment there was the path, and later there would be the ship. He was moving again. Around him a steady flow of others were also walking down, and a few vehicles navigated the road. More would come later. Those in vehicles travelled faster than those on foot — no need to rise early for their passengers. He turned a sharp bend and moved from shade into sunlight and his view expanded. There below was his destination — the ship. The distance made it hazy, but its bulk and shape were unmistakable. From this distance it looked as if it had landed. It had not of course; it merely waited close to the ground. This one was rounded and asymmetrical, mimicking the style of other things here. There was something of the streamlined bulk of a giant sea creature about it, and something of the dead-build harshness of metals and polymers and nano. Ships had been described by artists but there was really only one way to feel the essence of one; first see it, then enter it, and finally to surrender to its course.

  He continued down for hours, the steady exertion building up a prickle of sweat under his clothes, and his breathing taking on a deeper pattern. Each outward breath left a small cloud of warm moist air condensing in the cold as it vented from his respirator. The sun was higher and his suit had stopped warming him, body heat alone would do that now. When he set out, the bottom of the road — where it levelled to meet the valley floor — was hidden from view. It was a known but unseen destination. Now he could make it out, and he could see the reception centre — the gateway to the plateau and then the ship.

  As he walked, he’d listened, not to the natural sounds around him, but to the random collection of music he had accumulated over the years. It played the sounds he had heard in bars or watched musicians perform, or songs and tunes he’d added to his collection after searching for new aural experiences. There was a soundtrack to his life. Music had been his refuge after his flight. It had helped to sustain him. As his strength returned and he had returned himself to life, the sounds had changed. Now each note and chord seemed to play in his ears and in his mind too. The sound patterns recalled events and memories, some as vivid now as they had been when they occurred. Each had a place and time. Each had a special meaning, and now each was being reshaped by this new purpose and the emotions that accompanied it. Would there be a song, a movement, a concerto or verse that one day would sound like victory? Yes, he believed there would.

  Before setting off this morning he had checked the guide and found a rest spot on route. Now it was before him — a small open area overlooking the plateau. There were seats for beings and places for vehicles. A scattering of each was occupied. He crossed the road, sat, and hefted the travel pack onto a table. In a small pocket he found the food prepared by the lodging the night before, and in a larger padded pouch, his magnifier. He switched on the telescopic device while he ate — lifting the respirator occasionally to take a bite or a sip — and heard the faint high pitched whine of it powering up. A small blue tell-tale lit and he placed the device over his eyes, seating it carefully so the receptors channelled light directly on to his retina and the controls could read the movement of his eyes and the intention of his mind.

  After taking a moment to orient and prepare himself, helooked at the ship. It appeared to rush at him as he focused. The hazy outline vanished and detail and definition sprang forward. A small look down and his vision hurtled down the hull side, stopping where a series of openings at ground level already welcomed a steady march of life and machinery boarding the vessel. He let his gaze trace the paths and low buildings that fringed them. There was nothing to see but the expected. He had anticipated no more, knew there would be no visual signs of threat so obvious and readable from so far. And yet he had looked anyway. It was a breach of self-discipline, a giving in to fear. And he knew, the fear and danger would grow as he advanced. This ship, the one that would lift him one step closer to home, must surely know him for what he was; one who had once commanded a vessel like this, one who had bonded heart and mind with a ship and persuaded it to surrender to the power of suns, and be moved in time and space to a place of his choosing. It would see the very thing he sought to hide, the very thing he had buried deep when he had fled. He was a pilot of ships once, and now — if the plan was good and luck was his better — he would be once again.

  Chapter 2.

  It had taken thousands of years to unlock the language of the universe, and grow the ships that traverse it. Early attempts at understanding came with quaint names like physics, cosmology or astronomy. They were doomed to failure from the start. In fact all terrestrial life was doomed to fail the test of scale and scope required to understand the cosmos. Two simple and irreversible factors stood in the way of true insight, terrestrial life did not live long enough to read the signs, and it did not possess the senses required to feel how the universe worked. Evolving on a world of rock, gas and liquid did not equip any of the sentient races with the basic sensory suite required to comprehend life galactic.

  In retrospect it was laughable to think that evolutionary pressure would create conditions in which people, or any other planet bound sentients, would need to feel the galaxy at work. To survive on a benign world no more required adapting to the universe than an ant needs to adapt to deep sea pressures. Sentients on worlds separated by light years measured in millennia evolved to survive on their worlds, not beyond. That which they called intelligence was limited by the senses that fed it, and those senses could not detect, or even begin to imagine the forces that shaped the spaces which kept them apart. And yet, the incomprehensible had now become the everyday; races travelled between worlds. The map of planets was a tapestry of political, social and racial zones, often inter-mixed and overlapping in complex exchanges of resources and influence. Those in turn reflected the universal pursuit of safety, pleasure and longevity. The impossible had been made real.

  The key that had finally freed races from planetary solitary confinement was not understanding the dynamics of the universe, it was discovering the language of those that did. Like many great discoveries this one had been made by accident, and there was a dispute over who made it. The discoverers had been looking for other things. They had been seeking the elusive insights that would explain gravity and infinity and more mundanely, the life cycles of the species on their own planet. And like many great insights, once revealed, the incredible seemed obvious. ‘Of course’, people said, ‘it makes so much sense. Those who brought life to planets, those who warmed the cold surfaces, and lived and died on the s
cale of the galaxy, of course they are sentient, of course they must know and understand the galaxy to survive. Of course, it is the suns that bathe us in life, that are themselves alive.’

  The discovery of solar-sentience happened through a meeting of minds. Those studying the life cycle of suns had observed the ebb and flow of sun spots and corona. They had measured temperature, mass and density. They had kept data and accumulated the data over years, then decades, then centuries. They had asked machine minds to guard it and collate it, and in time to explain it. And one day, a machine mind had posed a question to its human counterpart.

  “Why,” it had ventured, “do you never ask me about the language of suns?”

  The human was intrigued, at first by the machine’s own use of language, because she knew that suns did not speak, then as she conversed with the machine more, she was intrigued by the patterns it had seen. There was repetition, startling exact repetition across centuries and most likely millennia (although the data was very limited that far back). She had explored with her machine counterpart — looked at records of the sun, looked for flaws in the data, questioned it on its choice of language and eventually agreed that there were indeed definite repeating patterns — an alphabet as the machine put it, of sunspots, solar flares coronal variances and even density. They were combined into words and sentences over centuries. The sun spoke in a time frame that no single human could ever comprehend; it spoke at the speed of its life, not of ours.

  The human was still sceptical, as her training had taught her to be. She respected the machine mind, but it was fallible, like her own.

  So, she challenged, “Who does the sun speak to? A conversation requires two participants, doesn’t it?”

  The machine had replied, “Yes. Would you like to meet the suns ours is talking to?”

  She had sat still and silent for a moment, almost afraid to demand the evidence. She had convinced herself that the talking sun was a whimsy of the machine; the wrong conclusion drawn from the right data. But this — an offer of compelling evidence — was a challenge. Should it not have been her who had made these connections? It was, she felt, a failure by her that the machine had prompted her to examine these patterns, this ‘language’. Professional pride and calculations of advancement and wealth had started to influence her. The evidence — if such it was — would be a revelation. It would change life forever, and, she wondered, what would be the rewards for the one whose name was associated with the discovery?

  She paused and toyed with questions of secrecy and attribution. She knew that as soon as the machine showed her the evidence, it should by scientific convention, be attributed to the machine and made available to other minds to support or challenge, assuming of course it was real evidence. She struggled with the dilemma. She could not, would not, fail to ask her machine-mind partner to reveal more, but how to do so and keep the discovery as hers? It was an appalling dilemma.

  So she said, “When you show me the evidence, can it be re-framed? I’m not convinced that this is language. I don't want you to refer to it that way until I have understood what you see. Please refer to it as patterns in data. Is that acceptable?”

  “Yes,” said the machine, “but language is more accurate.”

  It will be data for now she had asserted. “I will decide if it is language.”

  “That is curious, as the evidence of language is compelling, but I can accept these parameters for our discussion for now, even though it will limit what I can describe to you. You will have to interpret what I tell you.”

  Yes, she thought that will be ideal! It will now be my mind that describes this discovery as language not yours.

  “Show me”.

  The words fell from her lips with a tremble. The familiar hue and tone of the Earth’s sun was replaced on the screen by a darker ball, a star light years away. The tones were different, the detail was less clear, but the patterns that flicked across the screen — helpfully juxtaposed with those from Earth’s sun by the machine mind — were exactly the same. The scientists jaw slackened and she found she had to remind herself to breath. When she managed to think she thought of the vast light years between those two entities.

  “How long?” she whispered. “How long between each… flow of data?”

  The machine mind replied. “The patterns reflect each other exactly, and allowing for the time it has taken for the light from the second sun to reach us, they are taking place simultaneously, that is the patterns match and change at the exact same moments.”

  Her face had tightened into a grimace of disbelief. “That cannot be” she breathed. “The light would take decades to go back and forth. If, and I remain sceptical, but if, these two suns are mirroring each other through some kind of contact, the one receiving the message would have to wait decades for the light carrying the message to reach it. It can’t be that they are synchronised.”

  “Yes, it challenges our thinking, but I have checked and re-checked the data. There is no mistake, and there is only one conclusion; the suns can exchange data instantly. Perhaps what we see is not the message itself but some form of residue or leakage. The message itself is likely transmitted in some other way. However it is done, it is done instantly across light years. It implies, of course, that the scientific laws we understand describe only part of the dynamics of the universe. There are other forces that neither your mind nor mine can comprehend. I suggest we initiate a conversation with the sun”.

  She laughed, tension and excitement all escaping in a guffaw that turned into deep, repeating sobs of laughter. She half spat and half stuttered out the words.

  “How on earth will we ever get its attention?”

  Answering that question launched a project that united nations and polarised societies. It took nearly two centuries, vast resources, and the building of the largest and most complex machine that humans had ever constructed. It united billions behind a cause that was for the first time in history, larger than humanity itself — contact with new life forms and the uncovering of their knowledge. There was political and religious turmoil, as humanity struggled with the fundamental moral and emotional questions raised. Sometimes the technical challenges seemed dwarfed by the social. Despite the challenges and set-backs and sheer inhuman scale of the undertaking, the new machine was finished. No one who had seen it started, lived to see it finished. The scientist and machine mind both died before the project was even half finished.

  So the machine was finally completed; a vast apparatus floating in space. It took more centuries to broadcast a greeting, and decades later the first predicted shifts in sun-spots, corona and density were observed. The solar mind had noticed and focused its attention. It sensed life in a place that it had never for one moment of its long life imagined that other life could be. Those tiny puddles of rock and gas that were the waste products of its birth harboured sentient life? Sun was astonished and for a moment considered cleansing those spheres of the infections they had acquired. But other sentience? It was a possibility its kind had dismissed long-ago. But now it appeared that they were not alone. Other life existed — even if it was not as they knew it. That was profound enough for it to pause, consider, and experiment with a reply. When, sure enough, a simple and oddly phrased message was received in return, Sun sent a message to its kin, and the great minds of the universe adjusted their perceptions.

  The newly discovered planetary life had questions. How can we travel faster than light? How can we travel to new worlds, and new stars? Is there planetary life elsewhere? Open the secrets of inter-stellar travel they implored, and release us from imprisonment on our worlds to so that we can explore the galaxy. The interpreters seemed desperate for suns to move them in the void.

  The first replies had been crushingly simple “You cannot travel to other worlds. You will die.”

  But, as time went by understanding grew. Sun understood that these terribly fragile and short lived planetary sentients believed they could be transported inside something calle
d a ship. They wished to be lifted from their world and moved to another, and they could make things to sustain them in the void. Those ships could move far enough from the clutter of rock and gas they inhabited for Sun to identify the vessel and persuade the ship to stop existing there and exist elsewhere. The ship would protect and nurture them in the void. As it moved so the tiny sentients inside it moved too. The ship would also carry the equipment needed for human minds to talk to solar minds.

  “This”, Sun had communicated, “is possible. Where do you wish to go?”

  Chapter 3.

  He replaced the magnifier, finished the odd meal he had been given, and continued his decent. The sun was high in the sky (‘high’ being a human concept that the sun still found puzzling), and the warmth of the day and lower altitude made the rest of the descent pleasant. After a few more hours of walking, he could dispense with the respirator completely and unfasten the neck of his suit. There was a brisk flow of traffic now and the frost forest had thinned to be replaced with flora of a more conventional kind, flora that was native to this world. He checked the guide patch, and sensing his question, it set a path to the reception centre. The path was almost straight, having levelled out with the gradient. He was no longer traversing the zig-zag track of a mountain side. He was now strolling through the gentle foothills that joined the plateau to its mountain guardians. He was approaching the ship.

  The reception centre was made of dead-build. Centuries ago it had been shaped from some liquid or soft material. It was moulded and poured into the shapes needed to organise the transit of life and goods from outside ships to inside ships. The surface texture was like polished bone. It had been built at a time of great hope and prosperity; a time when humankind had been discovering, not just new worlds, but new life forms. The centre was originally designed to be convenient for people and those other life forms, but now only people used it. The others had long ago built facilities more suited to their own needs. Even so, as he looked around he saw a smattering of other races traversing the manicured gardens that formed the promenade route inside. Foremost among those were the Praveen.