Pala, despite all her training, couldn’t help but feel a deep empathy for him. ‘We’re here to save you,’ she insisted, longing to be reassuring. It didn’t seem to work.
They were all relieved when Sool stood. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You should see the heart of our community, the Lake of Light.’
The Lake was another car journey away. The vehicle was small and crowded, and Dano, uncomplaining, sat with one Virtual arm embedded in the substance of the wall.
They travelled perhaps thirty kilometres inwards from the port area to the centre of the lens-shaped colony. Pala peered out at villages and farms. Mirror-masts towered over the buildings. It was as if they were driving through a forest of skeletal trees, impossibly tall, crowned by light.
‘You see we are comfortable,’ Sool said anxiously. ‘Stable. We are at peace here, growing what we need, raising our children. This is how humans are meant to live. And there is room here, room for billions more.’ That was true; Pala knew that the sphere’s surface would have accommodated ten thousand Earths, more. Sool smiled at them. ‘Isn’t that a reason for studying us, visiting us, understanding us – for letting us be?’
‘But you are static,’ Dano said coolly. ‘You have achieved nothing. You’ve sat here in the dome built by your forefathers five thousand years ago. And so have your neighbours, in the other colonies strung out along this star’s equator.’
‘We haven’t needed any more than this,’ Sool said. ‘Must one expand?’ But his smile was weak.
Bicansa, sitting before Pala, said nothing throughout the journey. Her neck was narrow, elegant, her hair finely brushed. Pala wished she could talk to this woman alone, but that was of course impossible.
As they approached the Lake there was a brighter glow directly ahead, like a sun rising through trees. They broke through the last line of mirror towers.
The car stopped, and they walked. Under their feet, as they neared the Lake itself, the compacted comet dirt thinned and scattered. At last Pala found herself standing on a cool, steel-grey surface – the substance of the sphere itself, the shell that enclosed a sun. It was utterly lifeless, disturbingly blank.
Dano, more practical, kneeled down and thrust his Virtual hand through the surface. Images flickered before his face, sensor readings rapidly interpreted.
‘Come,’ Sool said to Pala, smiling. ‘You haven’t seen it yet.’
Pala walked forward to the Lake of Light itself.
The universal floor was a thin skin here, and a white glow poured out of the ground to drench the dusty air. Scattered clouds shone in the light from the ground, bright against a dark sky.
As far ahead as she could see the Lake stretched away, shining. It was an extraordinary, unsettling sight, a flood of light rising up from the ground, baffling for a human sensorium evolved for landscape and sun, as if the world had been inverted. But the light was being harvested, scattered from one great mirrored dish to another, so that its life-giving glow was spread across the colony.
Sool walked forward, onto the glowing surface. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Pala. ‘It’s hot, but not so bad here at the edge; the real heat is towards the Lake’s centre. But even that is only a fraction of the star’s output, of course. The sphere keeps the rest.’ He held out his arms and smiled. It was as if he was floating in the light, and he cast a shadow upwards into the misty air. ‘Look down.’
She saw a vast roiling ocean, almost too bright to look at directly, where huge vacuoles surfaced and burst. It was the photosphere of a star, just a thousand kilometres below her.
‘Stars give all humans life,’ Sool said. ‘We are their children. Perhaps this is the purest way to live, to huddle close to the star-mother, to use all her energy…’
‘Quite a pitch,’ Dano murmured in her ear. ‘But he’s targeting you. Don’t let him take you in.’
Pala felt extraordinarily excited. ‘But Dano – here are people living, breathing, even growing crops, a thousand kilometres above the surface of a sun! Is it possible this is the true purpose of the sphere – to terraform a star?’
Dano snorted his contempt. ‘You always were a romantic, Missionary. What nonsense. Stick to your duties. For instance, have you noticed that the girl has gone?’
When she looked around, she realised that it was true; Bicansa had disappeared.
Dano said, ‘I’ve run some tests. You know what this stuff is? Xeelee construction material. Your first intuition was right. This cute old man and his farm animals and grandchildren are living on a Xeelee artefact. And it’s just ten centimetres thick.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she admitted.
‘All this is a smokescreen. We have to go after her,’ Dano said. ‘Bicansa. Go to her “community in the north”, wherever it is. I have a feeling that’s where we’ll learn the truth of this place.’
While Dano murmured this sinister stuff in her ear, Sool was still trying to get her attention. His face was underlit by sunlight, she saw, reminding her of the portrait in his home. ‘You see how wonderful this is? We live on a platform, suspended over an ocean of light, and all our art, our poetry is shaped by our experience of this bounteous light. How can you even think of removing this from the spectrum of human experience?’
Pala felt hopelessly confused. ‘Your culture will be preserved,’ she said hopefully, still wanting to reassure him. ‘In a museum.’
Sool laughed tiredly, and he walked around in the welling light.
Pala accepted they should pursue the mysterious girl, Bicansa. But she impulsively decided she had had enough of being remote from the world she had come to assess.
‘Bicansa is right. We can’t just swoop down out of the sky. We don’t know what we’re throwing away if we don’t take the time to look.’
‘But there is no time,’ Dano said wearily. ‘The Expansion front is encountering thousands of new star systems every day. Why do you think you’re here alone?’
‘Alone save for you, my Virtual conscience.’
‘Don’t get cocky.’
‘Well, whether you like it or not, I am here, on the ground, and I’m the one making the decisions.’
And so, she decided, she wasn’t going to use her flitter. She would pursue Bicansa as the native girl had travelled herself – by car, over the vacuum road laid out over the star sphere.
‘You’re a fool,’ snapped Dano. ‘We don’t even know how far north her community is.’
He was right, of course. Pala was shocked to find out how sparse the scouts’ information on this star-world was. There were light lakes scattered across the sphere from pole to pole, but away from the equator the compensating effects of centrifugal force would diminish. In their haste the scouts had assumed that no human communities would have established themselves away from the standard-gravity equatorial belt, and hadn’t mapped the sphere that far out.
She would be heading into the unknown, then. She felt a shiver of excitement at the prospect. But Dano admonished her for being distracted from her purpose.
He insisted that she shouldn’t use one of the locals’ cars, as she had planned, but a Coalition design shipped down from the Navy ferry. And, he said, she would have to wear a cumbersome hard-carapace skinsuit the whole way. She gave in to these conditions with bad grace. It took a couple of days for the preparations to be completed, days she spent alone in the flitter at Dano’s order, lest she be seduced by the bucolic comfort of Home.
At last everything was ready, and Pala took her place in the car.
She set off. The road ahead was a track of comet-core metal, laid down by human engineering across the immense face of the star sphere. To either side were scattered hillocks of ice, purple-streaked in the starlight. They were the wrecks of comets that had splashed against the unflinching floor of the sphere.