“And there was no apparent effect from inside?” Bill asked. “I was up front, so the change never got to me.”
“Not that anyone could tell, sir,” Captain Zanella said. “Until we got the transmission from Colonel Che-chee, we had no idea there had been a change.”
“That’s not all, sir,” Figueredo said. The astronomy tech had been sent along to assist in investigations. While the exploration of the interior of the Tree had been uninteresting, the readings that he got from the Cheerick suits… “Admittedly, they were shielded by the Tree. But there was a sharp change in stellar emissions. They actually dropped.”
“Run that one by me again,” Bill said. “Define.”
“Local heat output dropped by ten percent,” the astronomy tech replied. “Solar wind dropped by thirty percent. Cosmic ray scatter dropped by nine. Those are near orders, sir, but probably close to accurate. Whatever this thing was doing, it was affecting the star, sir.”
“Okay,” Bill said, looking at the Cheerick. “Colonel, I want you to refuel your dragonflies then move out to at least two AU and observe the effects. But not all of them. Send two males.”
“You think there may be hazard?” the colonel asked.
“I have no grapping clue, Colonel,” Bill admitted. “But I’d rather not lose the flight commander.”
“Freebird?” Weaver muttered to himself. “Too slow. “Smoke on the Water?” Too bass. “Jungle Love?” Too campy… Ah!”
He hummed to himself for a moment, then started slamming the guitar strings, his eyes closed and grooving to the music. When he finished the intro, he just had to open his mouth. The hell with these crystals and not liking his singing…
“When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town,” he screamed over the guitar, “Down around San Antone, And the folks are risin’ for another day… round about their homes…”
“Sir!” Eric shouted. “Sir! Open your eyes!”
Weaver looked up and the guitar twanged a loud, flat C chord as it slid to a stop. Because he could see what he was doing.
He couldn’t see what was happening to the Tree, but he could see the effects. The walls of the room had become transparent and all four of the Jovians were in view. Something was causing the massive planets to fluoresce in different colors. The only thing that would do that, Weaver knew, was massive energy input. Offhand, the amount of joules just wouldn’t register. Actually, for a moment they did, then his brain locked up trying to count the zeros. Pretty close to the total output of Earth’s sun was the best he could figure. For each Jovian. The energetic gas was flashing in all the colors of the rainbow and as the Jovians moved it streamed out behind.
“Don’t stop!” Eric shouted again. “It’s just started!”
Weaver caught up the melody again, grooving on the music and playing for all he was worth. But this time he kept his eyes open. This show was just too good to miss.
“Well, the secret of the Tum-Tum Tree is finally explained,” Captain Zanella said, shaking his head.
“It’s a concert venue,” Weaver finished, grinning. “It’s a grapping interstellar concert venue.”
While Weaver was playing in the control compartment, the wall of the compartment the camp had been moved to became transparent as well. As the Tree spun on its axis, the Jovians could be seen fluorescing while the music was transmitted to the entire crew. After a few minutes of playing, the “beams” that the Tree was shooting out began collecting the gases, drawing them towards the Tree and fluorescing them along their entire length. The whole solar system was lit up with cascading waves of lambent color, reds, blues, greens, purples, every color of the rainbow as the gases reacted to the massive power of the Tum-Tum Tree and formed a huge spiral of shining, rippling light.
“Apparently an open one, too,” Miriam said. “The caves are now explained. Besides being sort of stellar sky-boxes, they’re rooms for bands getting ready to play to warm up. And they have automatic visual feedback if you’re not up to par. No offense, Captain.”
“None taken,” Bill said dryly. “I think the main venue must have filtered out the vocal component.”
“It is even more remarkable from space,” Colonel Che-chee said. “But we nearly lost a dragonfly. Cha-shah came close to one of the beams and reported that if it had not been for his shield he would now be dead. And he was not even in the beam itself, more than a hundred meters away.”
The video shots from the dragonflies showed that the tree opened up into a hemisphere, stretching somehow to engulf the upper tenth of the star then entirely wrapping it in some sort of absorption field. The incredibly hot, bright, star faded to insignificance, becoming almost black, keeping the light from the star from overwelming the show and feeding the masses of raw power into the beams that created it.
If anything, the most spectacular sight was the Tum-Tum Tree, which must have been using a good quarter of the star’s energy itself. It blazed along with the music, visible only from space. But from the right place it would be magnificent.
“Time to full warm up was right at nine minutes,” Figueredo said. “At that point, stellar output was less than three percent of normal and the power of the beams was blasting the Jovians so hard they’ve probably lost a good ten percent of their mass.”
“Yeah, but it’s gas,” Weaver pointed out. “Most of it remained in the orbits. They’ll collect it back over time. When this thing was in full use, though, I wonder how they kept them supplied?”
“With these guys, sir, who knows, sir?” Figueredo said. “They could have teleported it through gates from other Jovians. Especially if they could expand the size of the gates.”
“Planet-sized gates?” Bill mused. “Heck, just set up a gate to move a smaller Jovian. Put one gate in the way of the incoming Jovian and the other by the one you’re refueling.”
“That is scary,” Miriam said. “That’s… too big.”
“These guys used the full output of a blue-white star, twenty thousand times the power of Sol, as a laser-light show,” Bill pointed out. “Throwing around Jovians would be comparatively trivial.”
“The males did report something that troubles me,” Colonel Che-chee said, her nose twitching. “They say that they could hear the music. Not over the radio, mind you. They could hear it as if they were present. They, in fact, complained about how loud it was.”
“Impossible, Colonel,” Captain Zanella said. “Noise does not propagate through vacuum, no matter how loud it is.”
“I told them this,” the colonel said. “They still insist that they heard the music.”
“Was it in time with the pulsing of the planets?” Bill asked.
“I believe they said it was,” the colonel replied.
“There’s a way that you could do it,” Weaver said musingly. “If you knew the make-up of the receiving ship, or suit in this case, you could tune a gravitational beam to cause harmonics in the receiving ship. But, my God, the computational requirements! You’d have to figure for light-speed lag, the materials you were encountering, location of the target referential to the Jovians and the Tree…” He shook his head in wonder. “And all this for an entertainment device?!”
“You know, in about eight years this star’s going to start blinking from the standpoint of the nearest G class star,” Bill said, watching as Red moved out of place and Gants stepped up. The Tree would hold in “playing” position for up to fifteen minutes, apparently to let bands change places. And it reacted to any music, even badly sung or played. It was best with better quality and reacted the most effectively to pure sonic mass, the more decibels the more the planets fluoresced. But it would even cause some reaction from a badly sung nursery tune, as Captain Zanella had demonstrated to everyone’s dismay.