Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - Science Fiction, Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Space colonies, Fiction, Short stories
ISBN: 9780061059049
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2001-03-15T04:51:50.916000+00:00

The yacht tacked into the laser breeze, slowed, halted before one tetrahedral plane. Two men pushed through an air-curtain into space, bulbous and clumsy in cold-suits.

The faintest spurt of low-velocity helium pushed at Kapur's back, propelling him towards the Snowflake. The fat, padded suit was snug and warm around him, like a blanket; he felt oddly safe, remote from the immensities around him. At the center of his visor Mace sailed ahead, arms and legs protruding comically from the bulk of his cold-suit.

They stopped a few thousand miles from the iron plane. The face swept to infinity all around Kapur like a vast geometrical diagram; the horizon was razor-sharp against the intergalactic darkness, the three vertices too distant to perceive as corners. His Eyes, set to human wavelengths, made out some detail in the 'Flake; it was like a gigantic engraving, glowing dully in the smoky light of the Galaxy.

Kapur felt small and helpless. He had four days left.

Mace's commentary came to him along a laser path, helmet to helmet. "All right," Mace said. "Here we are in our patent cold-suits; inside, as snug as bugs; outside, radiating heat at barely a fraction more than the background three K."

As Kapur stared the Snowflake seemed to open out like a flower; he saw layer on layer of recursive detail, sketches of nested tetrahedra dwindling into the soft brown heart of the artifact. "It's wonderful, Mace."

"Yeah. And as delicate as wishes. Hey, Kapur. Give me your Eyes. I'll show you the data."

Kapur hesitated, gathering his resolve.

He hated using the implants. Each time he Opened his Eyes he felt a little more of his humanity leach away.

Now he breathed deeply. The air inside the cold-suit was warm and scented, oddly, of cut grass. With an odd, semi-hypnotic relinquishing of will, he deferred to Mace.

His Eyes Opened wide.

The Snowflake changed, kaleidoscopically.

"You're seeing a construct from our passive probes," Mace whispered. "False-color graphics of the data streams."

Terabits of ancient wisdom hissed on whiskers of iron, sparking like neurons in some splayed-out brain. It was beautiful, Kapur thought; beautiful and monstrous, like the mind of the antique gods of mankind.

His soul recoiled. He sought refuge in detail, the comparatively mundane.

Kapur knew that the mission profile had been designed with caution in mind. The Spline ship had parked over an AU away; he and Mace had approached in a yacht riding a tight laser beam, eschewing chemical flame. "Mace, what would happen if we let stray heat get at the 'Flake? Would we disrupt the structure?"

"You mean the physical structure? Maybe, but that's not the point, Kapur. It's the data that's the treasure here."

"And would a little heat be so harmful?"

"It's to do with thermodynamics. There's a lower bound on how much energy it takes to store a bit. The limit is set by the three K background temperature of the Universe."

"So the lower that global temperature is, the less energy a bit would take."

"Right. And so if we raised the 'Flake's temperature, even locally, we would risk wiping out terabits.

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