Chinook had come far through the galaxy, in the same spiral arm but thousands of light-years closer to its cloud-veiled core. She had traveled futureward also by some millions of years; where S Doradus had been, in the larger Magellanic Cloud, there was a glowing nebula. The body here had exploded, itself a supernova, but long before she left home – back when dinosaurs walked on Earth, if that statement had any physical meaning.
Rather, a giant sun had burst, strewing most of its substance into space was a remnant, two-thirds the mass of Sol. Gravity had collapsed it until the diameter was a bare twenty kilometers. Few atoms existed within it. Instead was an ocean of elementary particles, as close together as quantum mechanics allowed, mercurially interchanging natures with each other, at densities which men could measure but never conceive.
A little of the star’s material, caught up in the monstrous magnetic field which its spin generated, was cast outward through a pair of spirals until the speed approached that of light. Thereupon this matter gave off synchrotron radiation, in thin beams with small dispersion, whose ardor equalled that of an entire Sol. Most was at radio frequencies; the visible light was a tiny fraction of it. Astronomers with suitably tuned and sensitive receivers, on distant planets which happened to lie in the path of the ray, would mark a pulsar blinking.
The Others had built their engine to orbit in a plane normal to those energy torrents, at a distance of about seventy-five million kilometers. Closer, conditions would have been lethal, where infalling gas from space and the star’s own chained violence created a maelstrom of hard radiation. Joelle wondered why the radius vector was not longer, much longer. As was, throughout its 157-day
“year” the construct must repeatedly be smitten by a fury that ought to be ruinous to it, that would surely vaporize any ship which chanced to emerge just then.
No. A great round thing circled it. Joelle determined the period to be such that the object was always between T machine and star during a transit.
Side 152
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The This was not a stable situation; but no doubt the device had robotic engines which readjusted its path as necessary. It was a shield.
Another, bulkier thing likewise played satellite to the machine, in a way which, given occasional compensation, likewise put it behind the shield when protection was needed.
“And what the hell might that be?” Brodersen asked the heavens.
He, Dozsa, Weisenberg, and Granville took Williwaw forth on exploration.
By telemetry and audiovisual transmission, Joelle followed along. The data flow to her would have been maddeningly slow and incomplete were a holothete not above impatience. (Between inputs she had everything else to consider, to dwell in.) Nonetheless she was with them immensely more than Rueda, Leino, von Moltke, or Mulryan, straining eyes and ears before the screens, could surmise.
Understanding better what the investigators found than they did themselves, Joelle was presently telling them what to search for, and how, and what their discoveries meant.
The shield was a curved shell. Its mean density was about the same as that of the cylinder; no doubt the same kind of force bound it together. It was about five kilometers across, ample to intercept a firebeam a fifth as wide, adamant enough to reflect that energy without being damaged. The shape maximized diffusion of the image, thereby minimizing impact upon the star. Attachments around the circumference, some ponderous, some skeletal, probably generated fields to divert charged particles that might otherwise come storming past it and swing inward. A different apparatus at the center of the concave side was surely the motor that corrected the orbit. Joelle could see all those shapes in a way that nobody else was able to – for they were not readily describable in manspeech – and could appreciate their exquisiteness.
What Brodersen and company saw was impressive aplenty, the shimmering white shell athwart a black, many-glittered sky, the searing line of brilliance that whirled beyond it. Weightless though they drifted, they seemed to feel enormous powers at work; silent though the gulf about them was, hiss and crackle out of radio receivers brought them the noise of a cosmos in travail.