A dawn like a gray colloid. The dwarf ’s ruddy glow stirred the air like a thick fluid, sending blue streamers through the clotted air, bringing soon enough sharp shafts to bear on black forests below. They already knew, from SETI messages and innumerable probes, both human and alien, some sad truths. A million worlds had brimmed with life but like a puzzle with a sole dreary solution, the show ended soon. Ice or fire snuffed out life’s promise.
But on living worlds, there was a plentitude of wonders. There was even oxygen—the slow fuse to the explosion of animal life. On Earth around 635 megayears ago, enough oxygen supported tiny sponges. After 580 million years more, strange creatures as thin as blue crêpes lived on a lightly oxygenated seafloor. Fifty million years later, vertebrate ancestors glided through warm, oxygen-rich seawater much as she had done as a girl.
So dwarf stars with oxygen-rich children had billions of years of advantage over latecomer Earth.
They used their eons, she saw. Probes dropped into the atmospheres of these planets heard distant calls like screechy toots on a rusty trombone, gut-bucket growls, sighing cries—from creatures that looked as dull and gray as sluggish rutabagas. Then—goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Odd beings who burst into flame at mating season, apparently after passing on their genes—and leaving the stage in hasty crimson blisters.
Her heart jumped like a mullet, quick and hard, just as she recalled seeing them in the salty warm Gulf bay air where she grew up. Angels we Have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er The plain, she thought, as she played back the sounds of distant animals she would never see, beyond mere pixels.
Then the entire vibrant world was gone in a sharp instant.
She staggered a bit, going away from the yawning mouth of the pod. Looking back, it seemed indeed like a giant grin that had swallowed her, and now spat her out, altered. The experience had turned her inside-out, like a pocket no good for holding much anymore.
Somehow the sensorium had been fuller, more invasive this time. Smell carried memory, carried history. She bore now an after-memory of the shimmering redlands she had seen, somehow transmorphed into smells, sounds, and textures in her recollected sum of all she had experienced. The pod made that transition across senses, embedding the past into the sensual present. The pod was an Artilect and so learned her, too, and each new world had held greater impact, from that.
She had seen shattered worlds, those at one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. Those who could pour no more into the golden vessel of great song, sent across the eons and light years. Their Messages might once have sung of alien Euclids who had looked on beauty bare, and so stitched it into Messages of filmy photons, sent oblivious into the great galaxy’s night …
Such fools we mortals be . . .
She stopped for a glass of wine and some snack centipedes, delaying the inevitable. A passing friend gazed into her eyes and asked, “Hey, what’s biting your bum today?”
Rachel opened her mouth, closed it, and the whole idea she had been seeking came together in that second.
“Shut up,” she explained. And went to see the Prefect.
“I’m aware that I’m not the fastest fox in the forest here,” she began, after seating. “But I have an idea.”
The Prefect brightened. “Ah. Fastest fox—I do appreciate bio analogies, since we live on a dead world.” He steepled his hands on the desk and took up an expectant face, eyebrows arched.
She took a deep breath, nostrils flared at the antiseptic air of the Nought’s shadowy preserve. “The older dwarf stars with rich biospheres—they’re lying low.”
“From our probes?”
“Yes—that’s why they shot down our observing craft.”
“Aha.” A salamander stare.
So he wants me to spell it out. “I estimate the rejecting biospheres are several billion years old. They let us approach, even drop balloons, then—wham.”
“Indeed. You have done the required statistics?”
“Yes.” She let her inboard systems coalesce a shimmering curtain in the air, using the Prefect’s office system. The correlation functions appeared in 3D. The Prefect flicked a finger and the minamax hummocks rotated, showing the parameter space—a landscape covering billions of years, thousands of stars.
“Perhaps significant.” A frown formed above his one cocked eyebrow. She recalled that the Prefect was the sort who would look out a window at a cloudburst and say, It seems to be raining, on the off-chance that somebody was pouring water off the roof.
“They’re probably the longest-lived societies in the galaxy, since they’re around red stars that hold stable. If they can’t do cold-sleep, either—and so can’t go interstellar voyaging, like us—they’re stuck in their systems. And they’re still afraid.”
The Prefect nodded. “Correct, yes—the cause of the dwarf-star worlds’ insularity lies in the far past. An antiquity beyond our knowing, from eras before fish crawled from our seas.”
“Whatever could have made them fear for so long?”
“We do not know. It is a history …” Mixed emotions flitted across his face, as if memory was dancing within view. “… for which adjectives are temporarily unavailable.”
“We have to be alert!” She got up and paced the office. “These aliens hunkering down around their red and brown stars, they have lasted by being cautious.”
A shrug. “That seems obvious.”
She had hoped for help, not a blasé, blunt assessment. “So we need to find out more,” she said, realizing it was lame.
He leveled a stare. “Intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case, to consider it as one of many. A child becomes humanly intelligent
