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There is a very faint, but detectable line in the solar system that emits infrared light at the 25.984 micron wavelength. It seems to be solely that wavelength with no variance.
You will see on the model that the line is a lopsided arc that rises straight up from the sun’s North Pole for 37 million kilometers. From there, it angles sharply down and away from the sun, toward Venus. After the arc’s apex, the cloud widens like a funnel. At Venus, the arc’s cross-section is as wide as the planet itself.
I think in imperial units. That’s a clue. I’m probably an American. Or English. Or maybe Canadian. Canadians use feet and inches for short distances. I ask myself: How far is it from L.A. to New York? My gut answer: 3,000 miles. A Canadian would have used kilometers. So I’m English or American. Or I’m from Liberia.
They say hunger is the greatest seasoning. When you’re starving, your brain rewards you handsomely for finally eating. Good job, it says, we get to not die for a while!
I didn’t have an abdominal tube when I woke up, so it was probably feeding me with an NG tube running down my esophagus. It’s the least-intrusive way to feed a patient who can’t eat but has no digestion issues. Plus, it keeps the digestive system active and healthy. And it explains why the tube wasn’t around when I woke up. If possible, you should remove an NG tube while the patient is still unconscious. Why do I know that? Am I a doctor?
Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward—the period—won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That period ends up being driven by two things, and two things only: the length of the pendulum and gravity.
whiskey. “Have you heard of Amaterasu? It’s a Japanese solar probe.” “Sure,” I said. “JAXA has been getting some great data from it. It’s really neat, actually. It’s in a solar orbit, about halfway between Mercury and Venus. It has twenty different instruments aboard that—” “Yeah, I know. Whatever,” she said. “According to their data, the sun’s output is decreasing.”
“JAXA took a good long look at the Petrova line and they say it’s getting brighter at the same rate that the sun is getting dimmer. Somehow or another, whatever it is, the Petrova line is stealing energy from the sun.”
“The sun’s output will drop a full percent over the next nine years. In twenty years that figure will be five percent. This is bad. It’s really bad.” I stared at the graph. “That would mean an ice age. Like…right away. Instant ice age.” “Yeah, at the very least. And crop failures, mass starvation…I don’t even know what else.” I shook my head. “How can there be a sudden change in the sun? It’s a star, for cripes’ sake. Things just don’t happen this fast for stars. Changes take millions of years, not dozens. Come on, you know that.”
There’s no special technology at play here. I think we were in medically induced comas. Feeding tubes, IVs, constant medical care. Everything a body needs. Those arms probably changed sheets, kept us rotated to prevent bedsores, and did all the other things ICU nurses would normally do.
All life needs is a chemical reaction that results in copies of the original catalyst. And you don’t need water for that!”
But for what it’s worth, you’ll be able to show everyone you were right. You don’t need water for life. Surely that must be something you want.”
“I put a few dots under a vacuum and ran a spectrograph. Just a simple test to see if they emit light. And they do, of course. They give off infrared light at the 25.984 micron wavelength. That’s the Petrova frequency—the light that makes the Petrova line. I expected that.
This star I’m looking at…it’s not the sun. I’m in a different solar system.
“Astrophage is an alien microbe. What if it can infect humans? What if it’s deadly? What if hazmat suits and neoprene gloves aren’t enough protection?”
“So…basically, you know how there’s algae in the ocean, right? Well, there’s sort of a space algae growing in the sun.”
Thing is, Astrophage is starting to absorb a lot of the sun’s energy. Well, not a lot. Just a tiny percentage. But that means Earth gets a tiny bit less sunlight. And that can cause real problems.”
Besides, if I had a nickel for every time I wanted to smack a kid’s parents for not teaching them even the most basic things…well…I’d have enough nickels to put in a sock and smack those parents with
Point is: The inside of an Astrophage wasn’t much different from the inside of any single-celled organism you’d find on Earth. It used ATP, RNA transcription, and a whole host of other extremely familiar things. Some researchers speculated that it originated on Earth.
Single-celled organisms don’t just store buttloads of energy and fly through space for no reason. There had to be something Astrophage needed from Venus or it would just stay on the sun. And it needed something from the sun, too, or it would stay on Venus. The sun part was pretty easy: It was there for the energy. Same reason plants grew leaves. Got to get that sweet, sweet energy if you’re going to be a life-form. Makes perfect sense. So what about Venus?
I wanted to see a bright-yellow flash. That would be the Petrova frequency that Astrophage spit out to move around. If any of my Astrophages moved even the tiniest amount, I’d see a very obvious yellow flash.
Light. Whatever their navigation system was, it was based on light. I suspected that would be the case. What else could you use in space? There’s no sound. No smell.
To be fair, it wasn’t likely to work. If you were at the sun, looking away from it for the brightest splotch of light you could see, you’d probably zero in on Mercury, not Venus. Mercury is smaller than Venus, but it’s a lot closer so you’d see more light. “Why Venus?” I mused. But then I thought of a better question. “How do you guys identify Venus?”
The key had to be frequencies of light. My boys didn’t wiggle at all in darkness. But it wasn’t just about the sheer volume of light, or they would have gone for the LED. It had to be something about the frequency of the light.
First off, two of the Astrophage whipped over to the filter. They saw the light and went right for it. But how? It should be impossible for Astrophage to interact with a wavelength that big. I mean…literally impossible! Light is a funny thing. Its wavelength defines what it can and can’t interact with. Anything smaller than the wavelength is functionally nonexistent to that photon. That’s why there’s a mesh over the window of a microwave. The holes in the mesh are too small for microwaves to pass through. But visible light, with a much shorter wavelength, can go through freely. So you get to
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Astrophage hang out on the surface of the sun gathering energy via heat. They store it internally in some way no one understands. Then, when they have enough, they migrate to Venus to breed, using that stored energy to fly through space using infrared light as a propellant. Lots of species migrate to breed. Why would Astrophage be any different?
Venus, it goes straight to it. The path it takes—straight away from the solar pole, then sharply turning toward Venus—that’s the Petrova line. Our heroic Astrophage reaches the upper atmosphere of Venus, collects the CO2 it needs, and can finally reproduce. After that, both parent and child return to the sun and the cycle begins anew. It’s simple, really. Get energy, get resources, and make copies. It’s the same thing all life on Earth does.
Tau Ceti is very much inside the cluster of infected stars. In fact, it is near the center.” “Okay,” I said. “I’m sensing there’s something special about it?” “It is not infected,” Xi said. “Every star around it is. There are two very infected stars well within eight light-years of Tau Ceti, yet it remains unaffected.”
reactor for a year comes from a single kilogram of mass. Astrophage can, apparently, do this in either direction. It takes heat energy and somehow turns it into mass. Then when it wants the energy back, it turns that mass back into energy—in the form of Petrova-frequency light. And it uses that to propel itself along in space. So not only is it a perfect energy-storage medium, it’s a perfect spaceship engine.
Tau Ceti, I assume. It makes sense that I’d mistake it for the sun. Tau Ceti is very similar to the sun as stars go. Same spectral type, color, and so on.
flipped through the paper and skimmed to the findings. “Gene markers?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “They found a collection of genes that give a human ‘coma resistance.’ That’s what they’re calling it. The sequences are in what scientists used to think was junk DNA. But apparently it’s something we evolved a long time ago for some unknown reason and still lurks in some people’s genetic code.”
I search the image desperately. Nothing at first, but then I see it. A beautiful dark-red arch coming out of the bottom-left portion of Tau Ceti. I clap my hands. “Yes!” The shape is unmistakable. It’s a Petrova line! Tau Ceti has a Petrova line!
I should see where the line leads, for starters. One of the planets, obviously, but which one and what’s interesting about it? And I should get a sample of local Astrophage to see if it’s the same as what we have back on Earth.
challenge. I pan back to look at the Petrova line. Something’s wrong now. Half of it is just…gone. It’s coming out of Tau Ceti, just like it was a few minutes ago, but then it stops abruptly at a seemingly arbitrary point in space. “What is going on?” Did I mess up their migration pattern, maybe? If it’s that easy, wouldn’t we have worked that out when the Hail Mary was wandering around our own solar system? I zoom in on the cutoff point. It’s just a straight line. Like someone took an X-Acto knife to the whole Petrova line and threw away the scrap.
I catch a glint of the cylinder. Every now and then the flat ends of the gently tumbling cylinder reflect Taulight. I’ve decided “Taulight” is a word, by the way. Light from Tau Ceti. It’s not “sunlight.” Tau Ceti isn’t the sun. So…Taulight.
Spectrometers, DNA sequencers, microscopes, chemistry lab glassware—” “I’m aware of the list,” Stratt said. “I was the one who signed off on it.” Lokken dropped the papers on the table. “Most of this stuff won’t work in zero g.”
But no matter how you look at it, the end result is the same: The doohickey is a map of the local stars.
That’s the message. “We’re from the 40 Eridani system. And now we’re here at Tau Ceti.” But there’s even more to it than that. They’re also saying “40 Eridani has a Petrova line, just like Tau Ceti.”
Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.
“Get a square of metal foil. Pretty much any metal will do. Anodize it until it’s black. Don’t paint it—anodize it. Put clear glass over it and leave a one-centimeter gap between the glass and the foil. Seal the edges with brick, foam, or some other good insulator. Then set it out in the sun.”
“The black foil will absorb sunlight and get hot. The glass will insulate it from outside air—any heat loss has to pass through the glass, and that’s slow. It’ll reach an equilibrium temperature well over one hundred degrees Celsius.” I nod. “And at that temperature you can enrich Astrophage.” “Yes.”
“How do the Astrophage breed in this scenario? Your blackpanels will enrich them, sure, and they’ll be breed-ready. But there are a bunch of steps they need to go through when they breed.” “Oh, I know.” He smirked. “We’ll have a static magnet in there to give them a magnetic field to follow—they need that to kick off their migration response. Then we’ll have a small IR filter on one part of the glass. It’ll only let the CO2 IR spectral signature wavelengths through. The Astrophage will go there to breed. Then, after dividing, they’ll head toward the glass because that’s the direction of the
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“Rocky. I am here because Astrophage makes Sol sick but doesn’t make Tau Ceti sick. Are you here for the same reason?”
“Cell,” he says. “My crew have problem with cells. Many many cells die. Not infection. Not injury. No reason. But not me. Never me. Why, question? I not know.” Each individual cell in the affected Eridians died? That sounds horrible. It also sounds like radiation sickness. How am I going to describe that? I shouldn’t have to. If they’re a spacefaring people, they should already understand radiation.
That was the answer to the long-asked question: Why is Astrophage’s critical temperature what it is? Why not hotter? Why not colder? Astrophage makes neutrinos in pairs by slamming protons together. For the reaction to work, the protons need to collide with a higher kinetic energy than the mass energy of two neutrinos.
“Nineteen years isn’t enough time. It’ll take thirteen years for the Hail Mary to get to Tau Ceti, and another thirteen for any results or data to come back. We need at least twenty-six years. Twenty-seven would be better.”
“A nice blanket of greenhouse gases would buy us some time, right? It would insulate Earth like a parka and make the energy we are getting last longer. Am I wrong?” “Wha—” he stammered. “You aren’t wrong, but the scale…and the morality of deliberately causing greenhouse-gas emissions…”
The Eridian homeworld is the first planet in the 40 Eridani system. Humans actually spotted it a while ago, obviously not knowing there was a whole civilization there. The catalog name for it is “40 Eridani A b.” That’s a mouthful. The planet’s actual name, from the Eridians, is a collection of chords like any other Eridian word. So I’ll just call it “Erid.” Erid is extremely close to its star—about one-fifth as far as Earth is from our sun. Their “year” is a little over forty-two Earth days long. It’s what we call a “super-Earth,” weighing in at eight and a half times Earth’s mass. It’s about
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Planets get magnetic fields if the conditions are right. You have to have a molten-iron core, you have to be in the magnetic field of a star, and you have to be spinning. If all three of these things are true, you get a magnetic field. Earth has one—that’s why compasses work. Erid has all of those features on steroids. They are larger than Earth, with a larger iron core. They are close to their star, so they have a much stronger magnetic field powering their own field, and they spin extremely fast. All told, Erid’s magnetic field is at least twenty-five times as strong as Earth’s. Plus, their
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For Erid, it’s 100 percent. Radiation just doesn’t get to the ground. Light doesn’t even get to the ground—that’s why they never evolved eyes. The surface is pitch-dark. How does a biosphere exist in total darkness? I haven’t asked Rocky how that works yet, but there is plenty of life deep in Earth’s oceans where the sun doesn’t shine. So it’s definitely doable. Eridians are extremely susceptible to radiation, and they never even knew it existed. The next conversation took another hour and added a few dozen more words to the vocabulary.
