Across the Sea of Suns Read Online Free PDF Page B

been drawn by its
whooshing
crash. But the image was clear: a huge thing, leathery, unclothed. Three thin arms rode above the tangle of stiff legs. An awesome head.
    It carried nothing. No tools. No radio transmitter.
    It had no eyes.
    Instead, there was a chunky, rectangular slot in the huge head, a meter across. It turned toward the probe, just as the boosters fired to fling the black cylinder skyward. The probe radio registered a burst of noise, a crisp sputter. Then the landscape dwindled below and the thick pink clouds of Isis consumed the EM creature.
    But the spiky rattle in the radio spectrum had come from the creature itself. That much was sure.

FIVE
    Preliminary exploration inched on. Nigel tried to hasten matters, but he had long ago learned the uselessness of trying to put body English on the universe.
    Instead, he worked in the fields and tanks, making the fat vegetables swell under ultraviolet phosphors. Rubbery plants stretched tall, driven not by nature’s cruel competition but by well-runed DNA, stepchild of laboratories. Amid these cathedral trees of 99 percent usable, man-centered life, he walked with a slow shuffle, hoarding his energy. The other men and women on the agri team did their work with a quick, efficient energy, but they flagged at the end of the shift, more from boredom than fatigue. Nigel did it slowly because he liked the musk and raw damp of the soil, the click of the hoe, the lofting high into the air of a bundle of rattling dry stalks.
    The aliens had given him that. The ability, the oddly tilted sensitivity, had been in him—was in everybody—and the blinding moments in direct contact with the
Mare Marginis
computer, in the splintered alien ship, had set it loose. In the first years afterward, the stink of enlightenment had followed him everywhere. Before, the dripping of water from a thick-lipped stonework urn had been a restful, pretty sight, nothing more. Then, after the
Mare Marginis
ship, the same dripping had become a wonderful thing, packed with meaning. Now, at last, it was a dripping into a thick-lipped urn again.
    He had talked about that, occasionally, and the words had been distorted and ramified and defined into oblivion. He knew, but others didn’t, that he really could not speak for anyone else, could not penetrate to the experience so that others felt it. Things happened to you and you learned from them, but the pretense of a common interior landscape which one could cart—nonsense. Nothing captured it. He had seen the usual menu of savants, with their crystallized formulas, but they seemed no different. He listened to those Tao and Buddha and Zen phrases, like great blue-white blocks of luminous granite through which pale blades of light seeped, cool and from a distant place, eternally true and forever, immutable and as useful as alabaster statues in a town square.
    So he had been grateful when others finally left him alone. He had worked and he did the Slotsleep job, submitting himself to the trial runs with the calm of a domesticated animal. But the alphabet jumble of organizations—ISA, then UNDSA, then ANDP—they were machines, not people. And machines have no need to forget. So to them he was an odd bird with a certain fame and fading glory. He had been in the space program since his early twenties. He had taken part in the series of discoveries that led to the bleak
Mare Marginis
plain and to the encounter with the alien computer. That made his name useful to the ISA.
    It also meant they had to let him go on
Lancer
. He had put in years of developing Slotsleep, trimming seventeen years from his span. He had done it for the value of research, yes, to bring the stars within range of the extended human life-span. But he had also spent the years floating in the milky rich fluids to keep his own effective age down, so the alphabet agencies could not use age alone as a weapon against him.
    The flaw in the logic, he saw, was that after launch, the
Lancer
crew could