The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online Page B

density?”
    â€œEstimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter.”
    Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. “Why so heavy?” Surely we’d have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood.
    â€œI don’t know,” the chimp says.
    I get the queasy feeling that I might. “Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared.”
    Space grows ominously murky in the Tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-size now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.
    â€œA thousand lightsecs,” I command.
    â€œThere,” Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the Tank, dark, clear, pristine. DHF428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded castoffs from companion stars whoseconvulsions spew gas and rads across lightyears. But 428 is no nova remnant. It’s a red dwarf , placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable.
    Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AU’s across. And for the fact that that bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about three hundred and fifty lightsecs from its primary and then just stops , its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be.
    For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.
    Numbers come back. “Chimp. I want false-color peaks at three hundred thirty-five, five hundred, and eight hundred nanometers.”
    The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.
    â€œIt’s beautiful, ” whispers my awestruck son.
    â€œIt’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.
    Â 
    Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore : branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell’s effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens , dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.
    â€œSo there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star .”
    â€œYes,” the chimp says.
    â€œBut that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”
    â€œNo more than two millimeters. Probably less.”
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œIf it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.”
    â€œThat’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”
    â€œThe pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.”
    It can’t be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze…
    â€œOkay, let’s be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?”
    â€œ1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.
    â€œThat’s, uh…”
    â€œHalf the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.
    I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”
    â€œI don’t know yet.”
    â€œIt’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking .