Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 28 June 2012.
The 5th Jump
A new system coalescing. Sun not yet
compressed enough for thermonuclear reactions but energised by
contraction. Asteroids plentiful, heating planets to incandescence and
increasing their mass by falling onto them. In five million years, a
planet will be like Earth - unless it is Earth?
6th
In an old globular cluster with little free
gas or dust. Stars, mostly ruby, others orange and golden, block out
blackness. There is a planet overrun by life where human beings would be
able to survive but only on the uppermost plateaus. Elsewhere, the
atmosphere is too concentrated.
7th
Near the dust clouds of the galactic core, a black hole with an orbiting observatory. Chinook does not stay because the forces, energies and shape of space are too strange.
8th
Inside the clouds near the galactic centre
in the far future. Radiation background moderate. In one direction
stellar density increases into "...a ruby globe..." (1) While Chinook
is here, a nearly massless force field ship transits in 37 seconds.
Joelle speculates that an intelligent being can send a recording of his
personality to be activated in an artificial body, then to be returned
as a pattern for transcription into the original. Thus, the ship in
transit need have carried only a molecular recording.
The T machine is twice as big as any previous, for transport across bigger distances.
9th
Maybe a billion years futureward and 50,000
light years out in intergalactic space. The entire galaxy is visible.
Another big T machine.
10th
The biggest T machine yet. Back in the
galaxy but between 70 and 100 billion years futureward. Only the dimmest
stars survive and they are dying while the galaxy disintegrates. The
universe is four or five times bigger and the Virgo cluster of galaxies
is no longer visible.
One planet has life because the Others have
transformed its moon into an artificial sun, a nuclear reactor with
almost total conversion of mass to energy, possibly by forced
inter-quark interaction in a hollow space protected by fields at the
centre of the moon.
11th
The Chinook is enclosed by a vast
globe of moving colours containing the T machine, a white-hot sphere
with lesser shapes moving around it and a curved ellipsoid extruding a
delicate webwork like those seen at the neutron star and black hole
observatories. A point of light moves from the ellipsoid to the Chinook. Something stirs in crew member Caitlin Mulryan... Another craft comes from the T machine to the Chinook. Two of the Others enter in the forms of Aengus mac Og and Brigit. Caitlin is an avatar.
Delicately balanced forces artificially
maintain the place where they have met "...here at the end and the
beginning of a universe...." (2) So the "...white-hot sphere..." must be
a monobloc before its big bang?
A hyperdimensional ocean brings forth
universes. Our expanding, dying universe intersects another. Their union
will bring forth a new universe with different laws and constants of
physics that the Others aim to understand.
(1) Anderson, Poul, The Avatar, London, 1985, p. 347.
(2) ibid., p. 379.
Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation,
28 June 2012.
1st Jump
The spaceship Chinook has jumped at
random through a T machine field and is in an unknown planetary system.
The bearings of other galaxies show this system to be about 500 light
years from Sol towards Hercules. This makes Deneb and the Orion Nebula
identifiable.
The new sun is a red dwarf with five planets, none like Earth. The Chinook
crew detect artificial radio signals from a gas giant which they name
Danu. The ship's boat investigates and finds inhabitants like flying
whales with whom they exchange music. The Danaans have instruments made of
metal which could not have been mined on a planet whose surface is hot
liquid hydrogen so must have been donated by the Others who constructed
the T machines.
2nd
10 to 20 billion years ago. Dark empty
space with no stellar background. Gas clouds collapsing into galaxies.
One supergiant star, 50,000 times as luminous as Sol, has been big
enough to form this early but with just a single companion, not as part
of a cluster.
The Others must have originated even
earlier when an unusual concentration of elements in a nebula generated a
star with life-bearing planets.
3rd
Bearings of other galaxies and shape of home galaxy indicate thousands of light years from Earth, same era. Chinook
has emerged near a star temporarily green because leaving the main
sequence and shortly to expand into a red giant, about ten billion years
old but containing enough heavy elements to indicate that it might have
formed near a supernova.
The crew detect repetitive radio signals
from an old, dying planet they name Pandora. A force field protects
uninhabited buildings with an empty spacecraft base and the radio
transmitter. A landing party find ruins and three-eyed animals but is
attacked by savages and leaves. Theory: the old race has left but
sometimes returns to guide the savages who have evolved during the
planet's decline.
4th
Millions of years futureward, in the same
spiral arm, thousands of light years closer to galactic centre. A
"...whirling sword of light..." is a pulsar/neutron star with a
quasi-solid quaking surface under a six millimeter atmosphere. (1) A
curved shell around the T machine shields emerging spacecraft from the
destructive pulsar ray. Near the T machine is a station for visitors of
different species. Chinook's holothete, Joelle, a human being
linked to a computer, communicates in binary code with the station which
informs her that, on the pulsar's surface, interactions between raw
nuclei generate self-replicating, thus living, structures lasting for
mere seconds but so energetic that they experience the equivalent of
more than a century so that to them human beings would be as inert as
stones.
The station guides the holothete to contact with the Oracle, a self-aware Others' artifact on the pulsar, which:
is as intelligent as a human being in holothesis;
counsels pulsar life ("...the star dwellers..." (2)) to whom it is a gigantic shrine;
records and plays back pulsar history;
mediates between pulsar life and visitors to the station;
possibly modulates strong nuclear forces to communicate quasi-telepathically with the star dwellers;
communicates, possibly by quark beams, with the station which relays by radio etc;
slows or speeds communications as appropriate for receivers.
The star dwellers:
had no idea of a sky in the pulsar's radiation haze;
exploring through a billion generations, found the Fire Fountains;
to
explore the Fountains, climbed thirteen millimeter high mountains,
which last as long as a terrestrial year, through many generations and
civilizations;
reaching the top of the atmosphere, tunneled up through a mountain;
a million lifetimes later, saw the stars through a transparent dome.
With knowledge from the Oracle, Joelle plans a route between T machines to take Chinook to the frontier where the Others still construct new T machines.
(1) Anderson, Poul, The Avatar, London, 1985, p. 319.
(2) ibid., p. 330.
