Belladonna Nights and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds

Belladonna Nights and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


* * *

I believe that I have a capacity for independent research. I do not need constant supervision or direction to guide my activities. In fact, I work better alone than in a crowd.

* * *

I look forward to the day when I can call myself “doctor”. I will enjoy the prestige that comes from the title.

You felt that the solar heliospheric oscillations would be a fruitful area to explore?

No, an inward voice answers sarcastically. I thought that it would be an excellent way to waste three years. But she straightens in her chair and tries to make her hands stop wrestling with each other. It’s sweaty and close in this too-small office. The blinds are drawn, but not perfectly, and sunlight is fighting its way through the gaps. Bars of light illuminate dust in the air, dead flies on the window sill, the spines of textbooks on the wall behind the main desk.

“Before I left Mumbai I’d spent a summer working with Sun Dragon, a graphics house working on really tough rendering problems. Light-tracing, real physics, for shoot ’em up games and superhero movies. I took one look at what those guys were already doing, compared it to the models everyone else was using to simulate the solar oscillations, and realised that the graphics stuff was way ahead. So that’s where I knew I had an edge, because I’d soaked up all that knowledge and no one in astrophysics had a clue how far behind they were. That gave me a huge head start. I still had to build my simulation, of course, and gather the data, and it was a whole year before I was even close to testing the simulation against observations. Then there was a lot of fine-tuning, debugging…”

They look at graphs and tables, chewing over numbers and interpretation. The coloured images of the solar models are very beautiful, with their oddly geometric oscillation modes, like carpets or tapestries wrapped around the Sun.

“P-mode oscillations are the dominant terms,” she says, meaning the pressure waves. “G-mode oscillations show up in the models, but they’re not nearly as significant.”

P for pressure.

G for gravity.

The road to Prometheus Station was arduous. Few of us have direct memories of those early days. But the prolongation has given you an unusual, not to say unique perspective. Do you remember the difficulties?

Difficulty was all we knew. We breathed it like air. Every step was monumental. New materials, new cooling methods, each increment bringing us closer and closer to the photosphere. Our probes skimmed and hovered, dancing closer to that blazing edge. They endured for hours, minutes. Sometimes seconds. But we pushed closer. Decades of constant endeavour. A century gone, then another. Finally the first fixed bridgehead, the first physical outpost on the surface of the Sun. Prometheus Station. A continent-sized raft of black water-lilies, floating on a breath of plasma, riding the surge and plunge of cellular convection patterns. Not even a speck on the face of the Sun, but a start, a promise.



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