Sunborn Read Online Free PDF

lives, and his/her memory was at times a patchwork of ancient quarx-memory and recent history.
        /// I may have...once.
        This is bringing back echoes. ///
        Bandicut felt the universe shifting beneath him again. Echoes of stars as living, thinking beings?
        “This—” said Li-Jared with a bonging sound “—is not so surprising.” He gazed at the others, his eyes vertical gold slivers, with bright bands of electric-blue across the middle. He appeared energized by the subject.
        “It is, hrrm, to me, ” said Ik.
        “Why is it not surprising to you?” Antares asked Li-Jared.
        “Because—” bong “—stars are such layered and energetic creations,” the Karellian said. “They are defined by exceedingly complex and turbulent electromagnetic fields, and contain long-lived internal structure. It would almost be surprising if intelligence did not  evolve there. Plus—” he waggled his hands in traceries through the air “—the highly energetic sky of my own world has shown possible signs of awareness, and it is less complex than a star.”
        Good Lord, Bandicut thought. He turned back to Jeaves. “So you’re saying the star we just watched going supernova was a sentient star ?”
        “Indeed,” said Jeaves. “And there could be more coming. My friends, the severity of that last quake has me worried. We may have less time than I’d thought. Would you mind if I brought in some friends to augment the learning process? It could make all of this go much faster.”
        Bandicut closed his eyes and thought wistfully of the respite he had been hoping for.
        “I am willing,” he heard Antares say. He sighed, opened his eyes, and along with Ik and Li-Jared said, “Okay.”
        The desert surroundings faded into the background, and two intersecting arcs of smooth stone wall became highlighted by hidden light sources, creating a focused space around them. “Prepare yourselves for contact,” Jeaves said. “This will require the help of your translator-stones.”
        Antares’s hand went to her throat, Ik’s to his temples, Li-Jared’s to his chest.
        Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
        The alarm sound came from overhead. Three rings of golden light soared into view, skating across the sky. They grew to meter-wide haloes, then descended, orbiting one another, making a sound like wind chimes. One halo turned ruby, one pale emerald, and the third shimmering aquamarine. After a few moments, the blue one glided to the center and floated directly over their heads, making a sound like a steel hoop whirling around a pole.
        /Charlie? Char?/
        /// I’m not sure...
        they’re alive, I know that. ///
        *Establishing contact. Translating now,*  muttered the stones in his wrists.
        The hoop sound dropped away, and Bandicut felt himself blinking as he slipped helplessly into a dream-state. He seemed to fall through emptiness as the voices of the haloes, like soft-spoken angels, told him about the life and death of stars in a nebula called Starmaker...
    *
        The story was almost incomprehensibly old, in human terms. Yet in other ways it was familiar: birth and life, life and death. But in this story, the players were different; the story spoke of the birth of stars, the life and death of stars. Some were wise, some foolish, some noble, some dull, some none of those things.
        In the beginning, in the deepness of time, there were no players; only cold gas and dust, and coiling magnetic fields, and clenching gravity wells. No one spoke; none were alive. For a long time, there was only endless rotation of gases in the cold, and slow contraction. But as the matter condensed, compressed, and heated, there came a dull reddish glow. It was not yet life, but it was the crucible from which life would emerge.
        Even so, true life might never have appeared in most of the clumps of gas, were it not for a few