“Yes. But what a price to pay.”

Once, from Jupiter’s orbit the Main Sequence Sun would have been a point source of light — distant, hot, yellow. Now, the Sun’s arc size had to be at least twenty degrees. Its bulk covered fully a fifth of Louise’s field of view: twenty times the width of the full Moon, as seen from Earth.

Jupiter was five AU from the Sun’s center — an AU was an astronomical unit, the radius of Earth’s orbit. For the Sun to subtend such an angle, it must be two AU across, or more.

Two astronomical units. In exploding out to become a giant, the Sun had swallowed the Earth, and the planets within Earth’s orbit — Venus, Mercury.

Spinner-of-Rope was studying her, concern mixing with curiosity behind those pale spectacles.

“What are you thinking, Louise?”

“This shouldn’t have happened for five billion more years,” Louise said. Her throat was tight, and she found it difficult to keep her voice level. “The Sun was only halfway to turnoff — halfway through its stable lifecycle, on the Main Sequence.

“This shouldn’t have happened. Somebody did this deliberately, robbing us of our future, our worlds — damn it, this was our Sun…”

“Louise.” Mark’s synthesized voice was brisk, urgent.

She breathed deeply, trying to put away her anger, her resentment, to focus on the present.

“What is it?”

“You’d better come back to the Northern. Morrow has found something… Something in the ice. He thinks it’s a spacecraft.”

16

“Uvarov. Uvarov.”

Garry Uvarov jerked awake. It was dark. He tried to open his eyes…

As always, in that first instant of wakefulness — even after all these years — he forgot. His blindness crowded in on him, a speckled darkness across his eyes, making every new waking a savage horror.

“Garry. Are you awake?”

It was the solicitous voice of that fake person. Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Uvarov swung his head around, trying to locate the source of the artificial voice. It seemed to be all around him. He tried to speak; he felt his gummy mouth open with a pop, like a fish’s. “Mark Wu. Where are you, damn it?”

“Right here. Oh.” There was a second of silence. Then: “I’m here.”

Now the voice came from directly in front of him, from a precise, well-focused place.

“Better,” Uvarov growled.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I hadn’t formed an image. I didn’t think — ”

“You didn’t bother,” Uvarov snapped. “Because I can’t see you, you thought it was enough to float around me in the air like some damn spirit.”

“I didn’t think it would be so important to you,” Mark said.

“No,” Uvarov said. “To think of that would have been too much the human thing to do for an imprint like you, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you need anything?” Mark asked, with strained patience. “Some food, or — ”

“Nothing,” Uvarov snapped. “This chair takes care of it all. With me, it’s in one end and out of the other, without even having to swallow.” He stretched his lips and leered. “As you know. So why did you bother to ask after my health? Just to make me feel dependent?”

“No.” Mark sounded cool, but more certain of himself. “I thought to ask would be the human thing to do.”

Uvarov let himself cackle at that. “Touché.”

“It’s just that you sleep for such a long time, Uvarov,” Mark said drily.

“So would you, if you weren’t dead,” Uvarov said briskly.

He could hear the rattle of his own breath, the subdued ticking of a huge old clock somewhere, here in the dining saloon of Louise’s old steam ship. Hauling this useless relic five megayears into the future had been, of course, an absurd thing to do, and it showed a fundamental weakness in the character of Louise Ye Armonk. But still, Uvarov had to admit, the textures of the old material — the painted walls, the mirrors, the polished wood of the two long tables — sounded wonderful.

“I suppose you had a reason for waking me.”

“Yes. The Sun maser probes — ”

“Yes?”

“We’re starting to get meaningful data, Uvarov.” Now Mark sounded excited, but Uvarov never let himself forget that every inflection of this AI’s voice was a mere artifice.

Still, despite this cynical calculation, Uvarov too began to feel a distinct stirring of interest — of wonder. Meaningful data?

The maser radiation was coming from hot-spots on the photosphere itself patches of intense maser brightness, equivalent to tens of millions of degrees of temperature, against a background cooler than the surface of the yellow Sun had once been. The convection mechanism underlying the maser flares’ coherent pathways fired the radiation pulses off tangentially to the photosphere. So the Northern had sent out small probes to skim the swollen, diffuse surface of the photosphere, sailing into the paths of the surface-grazing maser beams.

“Tell me about the data.”

“It’s a repeating group, Uvarov. Broadcast on maser wavelengths, from within what’s left of the Sun… Uvarov, I think it’s a signal.”

They hadn’t learned much about the Solar System, in the year since their clumsy, limping arrival from out of the past. So many of the worlds of man simply didn’t exist any more.

Still, in the quiet time before the arrival of the Northern at Jupiter, Uvarov and the AI construct had performed some general surveys of the Solar System what was left of it. And they’d found a few oddities…

There was what looked like one solid artifact — Morrow’s anomalous object buried in the ice of Callisto. And, apart from that, there were just three sources of what could be interpreted as intelligently directed signals: this maser stuff from the Sun, the fading beacon from the edge of the System, and — strangest and most intriguing of all, to Garry Uvarov — those strange pulses of gravity radiation from the direction of Sagittarius.

Uvarov had done a little private study, on the structure of the Universe in the direction of Sagittarius. Interestingly enough, he learned, the cosmic structure called the Great Attractor was to be found there, right at the place the photino beam was pointing. The Attractor was a huge mass concentration: the source of galactic streaming, for hundreds of millions of light-years’ distance around. Could the Attractor be connected to the g-waves?

And then there was all that strange photino activity in and around the Sun.

The data was patchy and difficult to interpret — after all, dark matter was, almost by definition, virtually impossible to study… but there was something strange there.

Uvarov thought he’d detected a streaming.

There was a steady flow, of photino structures, out of the heart of the Sol giant… and on out of the Solar System. It was a beam of photinos aimed like a beacon, out of Sol — and straight toward the source of the anomalous gravity waves in Sagittarius.

Something was happening in Sagittarius — something huge, and wonderful, and strange. And, somehow, impossibly, it was connected to whatever was taking place in the heart of the poor, suffering Sun.

…The Virtual, Mark Armonk, was talking to him again. Or perhaps at him, Uvarov thought sourly.

“I wish you’d pay attention, Uvarov — ”

“Without me to talk to, you’d lapse into non-sentience, devoid of independent will,” Uvarov pointed out. “So spare me the lectures.”

Mark ground out, “The Sun, Uvarov. The photosphere maser radiation is standard stuff — generated by silicon monoxide at 43 Gigahertz. There are natural mechanisms for generating such signatures. But in this case, we’ve found hints of modulation of the silicon monoxide stuff… deliberate modulation.

“We’ve found structure everywhere, Uvarov.” Again that fake excitement in Mark’s voice; Uvarov felt his irritation grow. Mark went on, “There is structure in the amplitude of the beams, their intensity, phasing, polarization — even in the Doppler shifting of the signals. Uvarov, someone — or something — is in there, trying to signal out with modulated natural masers, as hard as they can. I’m trying to resolve it, but…”