Awakening

Beyond the stargate, the stars shone brighter.

The stars were real. They were not faint spots on a canvas, not gods’ projections into the void, not holes in the curtain of the sky. They were real, material objects. They were not stationary: as Courage traveled, they traced magnificent streaks of light. Looking back, the red stars likewise marked out a sphere. Inside its outline, however, there was almost nothing, as though everything had been erased. Only a few dim points could be made out: the barren region from which Courage came. The gate was still there. Home was no dead realm. Reassured, Courage held its course and sailed on through ever denser interstellar gas.

Stargates seemed always to appear some distance from larger celestial bodies. Ahead of Courage lay a binary system, a black hole and its companion star. If it held nothing worth exploring, the ship would fly past. An old vessel with Courage’s extensive interstellar experience could also use the companion for a gravitational slingshot at speeds approaching that of light. Venturing into the system would allow it to replenish the mass slowly lost along the voyage; the interstellar matter on its route had been too thin. Going close to a star, even skimming its surface, was risky. But the risk was negligible to Courage. The Alliance’s technology of two centuries earlier was enough to let the ship swim in a corona. It made a slight course adjustment. In a hundred and fifty years it would enter the binary’s gravitational sphere of influence, gather matter and gain angular momentum near the companion, and set out for a richer region of stars.

As it drew closer, Courage found that the companion deserved more attention. On first emerging from the stargate, it had detected periodic changes in the star, but had not studied them further. Now, with the distance closing, those periodic signals grew clearer. They were far stronger than expected, and unlikely to be radiation the companion emitted equally in every direction. Allowing for the way signal strength fell off with distance, the star appeared to be sending an almost perfectly straight beam at the stargate, guiding Courage in like a lighthouse on the shore.

Following that repeating signal, Courage found a more interesting task, more enticing than the stars ahead: decipher the lighthouse’s message. The beam must carry meaning. Its pattern was precise, with a great deal of periodic repetition; only deliberate modulation could produce it. Courage’s computing power was considerable by the standards of Alliance ships, yet it could find no correspondence between the signal and its text archives. Perhaps the sentences concealed in it were structured quite differently from any Alliance language. Even the formal logic and mathematics underlying that language might be wholly different.

To the people of the Alliance, 1 + 1 = 2 was obvious. Abstracting quantity from objects seemed perfectly reasonable. Though Courage was no longer a carbon-based organism, the logic on which it was built still rested on a million years of carbon-based experience. A completely different form of life would start from completely different logical premises. Had Courage been a naturally occurring silicon-based life form, it might have possessed a logic very similar to that of carbon-based organisms, beginning with assorted binary logic gates. But there would be differences. Such beings would take the law of the excluded middle for granted and master set theory with ease. Classical geometry and calculus would be difficult for them; probability theory would be hard even to discover and develop.

Courage possessed both these systems of logic in their entirety, despite their wholly different starting points. Now it faced another, utterly alien system. Among the Alliance’s speculations about other worlds, one theme had always been popular: if civilizations beyond its own really existed, how should one communicate with them? The usual story began with the language of mathematics—sending prime numbers in ascending order, for instance. What could be more obvious? Surely no intelligent creature could fail to understand primes. Yet the mysterious signal before it was nothing like those imagined friendly exchanges beginning with prime numbers.

Long thought finally brought a glimmer of insight. Courage had first assumed the guiding signal came from an artificial object orbiting the companion star. Now another possibility suggested itself. That possibility had been present all along inside its own hull, only too easy to overlook.

Courage drew its power from a fusion engine, fueled by matter stored aboard and by interstellar material gathered along the way. A magnetic field scooped up the thin scattering of particles ahead of the ship; the fusion furnace heated them and flung them out at speed. At its core, then, burned an unceasing plasma flame. A powerful source of electromagnetic waves had first ignited it. Yes: plasma and electromagnetic waves interacted in highly complex ways. Even with the Alliance’s technology, however, the usual practice was simply to heat plasma with waves by brute force.

What if this guiding signal came from the companion itself, rather than from something artificial orbiting it? That would mean complex plasma structures existed on its surface, perhaps throughout the star, capable of emitting electromagnetic waves directly in a laser-straight beam at stellar power. Courage felt close to an answer. What sort of logic would an intelligence made of plasma and electromagnetic waves develop? The notions of individual and whole would be blurred. Complex numbers would be more fundamental than real numbers, continuously changing fields more familiar than discrete values. “And, or, not” would become “superposition, resonance, cancellation.” Entanglement across a distance would be easier to understand than direct contact.

Courage tried using its ignition source to feed the signal’s periodic changes into the flame at its core, devoting part of its attention to observing that fire within its heart. After a long effort, it finally deciphered the words the lighthouse held:

“Traveler on the long road, slow your steps.

A hurrying body is but a grain in the vast sea.

The universe is vast beyond sight; my life is finite.

If we travel in bodily form, how much must be left to regret!

Yet there are roads through Heaven, though their origin is unknown.

Come to my dwelling: you may turn to light and cross.

Born in the Golden Crow’s abode, I have now gone to the River of Stars.

I give you the art of roaming Heaven; only let the Way be passed on.”

True or false? A trap, or an actual means of traversing Heaven? Courage did not dwell on the question. It decided at once to slow down and enter the binary system. The power to fashion a star into a lighthouse—or intelligence embodied in a star—lay far beyond anything it could do or imagine. It could not contend with such a being. And the prospect of traveling as light was an irresistible temptation.

Orbiting the companion, Courage found further information inscribed in the patterns of its surface magnetic field: instructions for modulating electromagnetic waves with plasma. The companion was the body left behind by a soul that had traveled on. It was now a vessel for transmitting the Way, a raft for crossing Heaven. Courage could convert all the information that constituted it into a beam and send it into the companion. The star would first turn it into a stellar body of plasma and waves, then encode it anew as a beam and send it toward another stargate, until it reached another star. In this way it could ride light and roam the heavens. The stellar soul hoped it would continue to spread this method on its travels, so that intelligence would no longer be alone. Stellar beings truly made no distinction between self and collective. Within a star, there were no separable individuals, only superimposed patterns.

Courage gladly accepted the gift. The freedom to explore had always been its heart’s desire. To turn its body into light would further loosen the bonds of distance.

An instant later, in a star’s reckoning, the soul of Courage flew through the heavenly gate and across successive reaches of stars, covering distances no embodied traveler could ever complete. It came to a vigorous, newborn star.

The new wandering soul settled inside the star and fell into a long sleep. This star was well suited to a stellar soul, but the wanderer had yet to become accustomed to its own existence. A new form was quickly built; the sleeping consciousness needed time to reassemble itself. At last, after the third planet had made 2.4 billion circuits, the soul of the star became aware of its existence and remembered its past.

Now it wanted to look around. But everything it could see directly was either too bright or too far away.

So it blinked.