Incandescence

"A few secrets?" Rakesh laughed. "We mapped their gamma ray data routes. They get to read our minds, down to the last byte. And you're the one who told me that the gamma ray network was probably just a honey pot."

"I'm not saying that the relationship is symmetrical," Parantham conceded. "They've certainly out-somethinged us. "

"Outwitted?" Rakesh suggested. "Outsmarted? Outmanoeuvred?"

"Out-sphinxed us," she replied. "We stared into the bulge for a million years, trying to get a reaction, and they just stared back out at us, stony-faced. We did much more than blink; we gave up the game completely. I don't believe it's harmed us, though. I don't believe it's a loss on our part, or a victory on theirs. It's just a difference in our natures. We never wanted to keep our nature and our history secret. It's a game we never wanted to win."

Rakesh was woken by the next wave of results. He watched the data and images spinning in his skull as he walked down the corridor to the control cabin, where Parantham was already seated.

"It's alive!" she crowed. "DNA-based, multi-cellular, engineered. but then drifting genetically, running wild for tens of millions of years."

The probes had found a scum of fungus-like growth clinging to parts of some of the asteroids. These were not just colonies of microbes; the cells showed specialization, and were organized into distinct clusters. Though the anatomy of the clusters included a protective skin, all of the cells were individually tough enough to retain internal liquid water while exposed to vacuum, over a considerable temperature range, with antifreeze compounds and vapor-reducing soluble polymers augmenting the sheer strength of the cell walls. Their genome showed clear evidence of sophisticated engineering, and although they shared a common ancestor with the dead microbes, most of the traits that ensured their survival in their present harsh environment appeared to have been artificially introduced.

The creation of the species couldn't be dated exactly until mutation rates and generation times had been measured, but on general biochemical grounds it seemed likely that this fungus had been deliberately constructed at about the time the Steelmakers' world was torn apart.

Rakesh immersed himself in a diagram of metabolic pathways. "It lives on the stellar wind," he marveled. "That's its energy source. For raw materials, it's coping on the asteroids, but there are vestigial enzymes that suggest it might have thrived with a slightly different substrate. So it spread to the asteroids from somewhere else, and adapted to them over time, but the original species was happier in a different environment."

Parantham said, "You look up into the sky, and a neutron star is coming. There is no transport network to whisk you away to safety, and you can forget about deflecting this planet-killer. What do you do?"

"Build a spaceship."

"To go where? There are plenty of stars around, but they're all devoid of companions. A hundred million years ago your ancestors visited another planet, but the space program has grown a little rusty since then."

Rakesh grimaced. "So I give up on the idea of running, and make a fungus that will outlive me? I know I've been spoiled by high-tech immortality, but that doesn't sound like much consolation to me."

Parantham said, "Perhaps it's just the bottom of the food chain. Make a fungus that will outlive you, then a few species that can eat it, and so on. Then give birth to a child that can live on them."

"Maybe." Rakesh ran his fingers through his hair. "Live on them where, though? Those old genes I mentioned were for enzymes that relied on elements that most of the asteroids don't have. If you know that your world is going to be torn apart, and there are no other planets in sight, where exactly do you expect to live, if not on the scrap heap that's left behind?"

A few hours later they had the answer, from their telescopes rather than from the probes. Near the edge of the belt, an object some six hundred meters across with a highly atypical spectrum had been found orbiting among the rocks. The telescope's image showed a gray ellipsoid, pitted and corroded, but clearly too regular to be an asteroid itself. Spectroscopy revealed that its surface contained molecular filaments, carbon nanotubes with elaborate chemical modifications that both strengthened them and protected them against the stellar wind. A variety of the vacuum-hardened fungus they'd detected in the asteroids could be seen in the indentations of small impact craters, where the wind couldn't reach in to scour it off.

"The material is advanced beyond the Steelmakers' technology," Rakesh mused, "but it's not one hundred million years ahead. They must have gone through a long Dark Age before they finally rose up again." Only to be cut down once more? That wasn't clear. Their home world was in ruins, but this artefact was in one piece.