Nigel smiled and laughed and filed it all away for future pondering. The chasm vibrated with clashing holo-audio fantasies, competing gaudy beams of light, raw scents in the breeze. Nikka and Carlotta mingled with the increasing crowd. Bob Millard came by, an unaltered face Nigel was glad to see. Whatever he might think of Bob’s handling of the Isis exploration, the man’s easy hospitality was welcome. They both made passing jokes about the fads around them and then Bob put in casually, “Been lookin’ over your medmon specs jess t’day. Pretty good.”
“Um. They spruced up my detoxifying mix, cleaned out the ol’ bloodstream. Seems to’ve helped the muscles and ligaments and so on.” Nigel kept his voice light, airy.
“Your motor response is back up. Surprisin’. You lookin’ to do manual work again?”
A suitable pause. “Would like to, yes.”
“Got a job down the drive throat. Scrapin’ off the accumulated crud, freein’ up the fluxlife.” He raised an eyebrow.
Nigel nodded. “I’m on.” This still moment passed, and the party swept on around them.
Later, Nigel said pensively, “Must say, I hadn’t expected that.”
“A manual job?” Carlotta nodded. “I told Ted you wanted to get your hands dirty again. There’s plenty of scutwork to go around. Older this ship gets, more it takes. Ted must’ve put it through the Work Council.”
“Without my asking, even?”
“Look, it’s been years since you two were picking at each other. Ted’s bighearted.”
Nigel nodded to himself, trying to come to terms with the erased years. Time had blurred and softened everything. He had to remember that these were different people and he could not carry over the old emotions. “Anachronistic thinking,” he muttered.
“Yeah. Fresh start, Nigel. You did real well in the Slots—you look great.”
“I hope I can handle the work.”
“Sure, you can. Bob wouldn’t sign you on if the med reports weren’t okay.”
Nigel nodded again. Fresh start. He felt a vivid surge of joy. “So bring me up to date. What else is new?”
Three
Procyon was a gleaming white F5 star with an insignificant dull binary companion. The flyby ship tallied the planets and tasted the stellar wind, before plunging close to the only interesting Earth-size world. It was mottled and cloud-speckled. An ocean wrapped the planet from pole to pole, there was no land. The vast sea showed odd chemical emission lines. The probe checked and rechecked and, in a cybernetic storm of confusion, relayed the answer: This world was awash in oil. Had the reserves in the rock been pressed out onto the surface? Or did organic chemicals in the air condense this way? It was low-quality crude, brackish and high in sulfur. It ran in tides and twisted into funnels beneath furious storms. Evaporation of water ran the weather cycle, but oil was the important surface fluid.
Nothing lived in that sea.
No stony sphere orbited the world.
But battered, worn craft circled it. The probe raced by one and glimpsed a tin-colored, boxy thing. It had solar sails, partly unfurled. None of the grimy ships gave the slightest sign that they had noticed the passing intruder.
There were thousands of them in orbit. A few descended to the surface as the probe watched. A few fought up from launch pads floating on the sea. When these finished their arc up, they deployed immense, tear-shaped bags. They assumed long-lived orbits and their engines’ orange plumes ebbed into nothing.
Parking orbits. From the rate of launch it was simple to estimate how long the thousands of craft had been accumulating: several centuries. Their cargo was clearly oil; the probe resolved spidery pumping stations afloat below.
The convoy was waiting, perhaps until each ship was filled. But where would they go? There was nothing else in the Procyon system except gas giant planets and dead moons. How long would it take them to reach any further destination?
Nigel lies mute and blind and pinned in his couch and for a moment feels nothing but the numb silence. It collects in him, blotting out the dim rub of the snouts which cling like lampreys to his nerves and muscles, amplifying every movement, a pressing embrace, and—
—spang—
—he slips free of the mooring cables, a rush of sight-sound-taste-touch washes over him, so strong and sudden a welter of senses that he jerks with the impact. He is servo’d to a thing like an eel that swims and flips and dives into a howling dance of protons. His body lies three hundred meters away, safely behind slabs of rock. But the eel is his, the eel is him. It shudders and jerks and twists, skating across sleek strands of magnetic plains. To Nigel, it is like swimming.
The torrent gusts around him and he feels its pinprick breath—autumn leaves that burn. In a blinding orange glare Nigel swoops, feeling his power over the servo’d robot grow as he gets the feel of it. The shiny craft is wrapped in a cocoon of looping magnetic fields that turn the protons away, sending them gyrating in a mad gavotte, so the heavy particles cannot crunch and flare against the slick baked skin.
Nigel flexes the skin, supple and strong, and slips through the magnetic turbulence ahead. He feels the magnetic lines of force stretch like rubber bands. He banks and accelerates.
Streams of protons play upon him. They make glancing collisions with each other but do not react. The repulsion between them is too great, and so this plasma cannot make them burn, cannot thrust them together with enough violence. Slapping together mere nude protons is like trying to burn wet wood. Something more is needed or else the ship’s throat will fail to harvest the simple hydrogen atoms, fail to kindle it into energy.
There—In the howling storm Nigel sees the blue dots that are the keys, the catalyst: carbon nuclei, hovering like sea gulls in an updraft.
Split-image phosphors gleam, marking his way. He swims in the streaming blue-white glow, through a murky storm of fusing ions. He watches plumes of carbon nuclei striking the swarms of protons, wedding them to form the heavier nitrogen nuclei. The torrent swirls and screams at Nigel’s skin and in his sensors he sees and feels and tastes the lumpy, sluggish nitrogen as it finds a fresh incoming proton and with the fleshy smack of fusion the two stick, they hold, they wobble like raindrops—falling together—merging—ballooning into a new nucleus, heavier still: oxygen.
But the green pinpoints of oxygen are unstable. These fragile forms split instantly. Jets of new particles spew through the surrounding glow—neutrinos, ruddy photons of light, and slower, darker, there come the heavy daughters of the marriage: a swollen, burnt-gold cloud. A wobbling, heavier isotope of nitrogen.
Onward the process flies. Each nucleus collides millions of times with the others in a fleck-shot swirl like glowing snowflakes. All in the space of a heartbeat. Flakes ride the magnetic field lines. Gamma rays flare and sputter among the blundering motes like fitful fire-flies. Nuclear fire lights the long roaring corridor that is the ship’s main drive.
Nigel swims, the white-hot sparks breaking over him like foam. Ahead he sees the violet points of nitrogen and hears them crack into carbon plus an alpha particle. So in the end the long cascade gives forth the carbon that catalyzed it, carbon that will begin again its life in the whistling blizzard of protons coming in from the forward maw of the ship.
With the help of the carbon, an interstellar hydrogen atom has built itself up from mere proton to, finally, an alpha particle—a stable clump of two neutrons and two protons. The alpha particle is the point of it all. It flees from the blurring storm, carrying the energy that fusion affords. The ruby-rich interstellar gas is now wedded, proton to proton, with carbon as the matchmaker.