Incandescence

"To do what, exactly?" Rakesh hadn't realized quite how tense he was until he heard it in his own voice. He didn't want the fate of a civilization resting on his shoulders, but nor could he simply turn and walk away. Any people who'd survived their world being dragged from star to star and then torn apart deserved sanctuary. What he did not want to do, though, was blunder in and destroy their paradise, if they had already found it right here.

Parantham said, "Whether the Aloof are pulling our strings, or whether they really don't give a damn what we do, in the end we only have our own judgment. All we can do is tread carefully. I say we wait a few weeks to see if anyone answers our message. If they don't, we go in as unobtrusively as possible and take a look around."

Standing on the surface of the Ark at the point closest to the neutron star, Rakesh could feel the plasma wind and the tidal gravity trying to peel him off and fling him away into the accretion disk. It was like hanging upside down in a stiff breeze, albeit in low gravity and very low pressure. The adhesive pads on his jelly-baby feet could easily resist his avatar's minuscule weight, but the insistent tug was still disconcerting. It was no wonder that in all of their time watching the Ark they had seen no locals foolish enough to venture outside.

Parantham said, "Come on, it's this way." He followed her across the gray plain; the surface felt rough to his clinging feet, but it was flat to the eye and bore no visible cratering. The plasma around them was extremely hot, but also very thin; its temperature in Kelvin made it sound like it would fry anything instantly, but if you calculated its energy density it suddenly seemed a whole lot tamer. The inner edge of the disk and the plasma falling on to the surface of the neutron star were emitting hard radiation that would not have been too healthy for an organic body, but it was nothing to their avatars, and the Arkrock would block it once they were inside.

The crack they'd found was even narrower than the last one, and they'd had to shrink their avatars accordingly. Parantham entered first and Rakesh followed, reaching up by bending sharply at the waist to get a handhold before unsticking his footpads. They could have used their ion thrusters and let the autopilots navigate them through the crack without even touching the sides, but to Rakesh that would have ruined the whole sense of presence; he might as well have sent in a surveyor probe and merely watched the feed from its cameras. Whatever the Arkdwellers might think, he felt far more comfortable making an uninvited entrance in this form than he would have about sending in an autonomous spying device; this way seemed respectful, rather than sneaky. No doubt that reflected his own cultural bias, but until he had something better to go on it was as good a basis for choosing his actions as any.

As soon as they reached a point sheltered from the direct force of the wind, fungus began appearing on the Arkrock. Rakesh took some samples and sequenced them; they were recognizable cousins of the species on the other Ark, though there were significant genetic differences relating to the different environments. As they clambered up the walls, the winding of the crack soon blocked out the starlight, but this time as well as the thermal radiation of the walls themselves they had another kind of light to see by: the Arkrock was translucent to a band of terahertz radiation being produced by electrons spiraling around the magnetic field lines of the plasma. This window appeared to have been tuned to the predominant frequency in the plasma surrounding the Ark's natural orbit, so it was almost certainly a deliberate part of the design. The Arkmakers had not built a dark world of subterranean tunnels and caverns; they had made a world of glass and set it swimming in a sea of light.

Combining the visual processing techniques they'd used in the previous Ark with sensitivity to this new illumination was remarkably effective; although the kind of information they were receiving was very different from that yielded by the usual scattering of light from surfaces, making use of the right cues still generated a rich, detailed sensorium. Rakesh found that he could distinguish most of the species of fungus by sight, and even spot one kind buried beneath another. It was a shock at first to realize that almost nothing was completely opaque across this new spectrum, but once you accepted that fact the potential confusion abated. It was still possible to determine which of two things in your line of sight was the closest; it was just a matter of abandoning the old expectation that the nearer would obscure the farther as a matter of course.