As she spoke, the figure behind Lissa came forward. Max saw a sandy-haired man with pale blue eyes, slightly taller than Lissa. He seemed stocky in his jumpsuit.

  “This is Captain Alek Calder,” Lissa said, showing no surprise at what Linda had just told her.

  Captain Calder nodded in greeting. “I want you all to know that we’ve detected no danger in the docking procedure by which your habitat and our ship were drawn into this station.”

  “And where is this station?” Linda demanded.

  “Inside the Sun itself,” Lissa replied.

  “The Sun?” Jake asked.

  “All of this,” Lissa continued, “may be described as a suncore station, designed to sit inside a star and draw power from the star. Obviously, the station could not be placed directly inside a sun’s fusion furnace without vaporizing, so this station exists in what may be described as otherspace, outside our space but congruent with it. This station sits in that space, where there is no sun as we know it, but which shares its location with our Sun’s interior. Somewhere in this station is a device whose core blinks back and forth from normal to otherspace, and uses that infinitesimal interval of time to draw power from the Sun’s fusion process. At least that’s what we think happens, even if the details are very different. In effect, two kinds of space are superimposed on each other, making it possible to harness the energy of a star. To put it in very quaint terms, this station is a kind of waterwheel, turned by the controlled amounts of energy released from the Sun, much in the same way a stream or waterfall would turn a generator wheel or millstone.”

  “How do you know any of this?” Jake demanded.

  “After your habitat disappeared during its approach to Titan,” Lissa continued, “we went out to the point in space where you were last seen. We found no evidence along your course that you had disintegrated. I felt that there was something at the point in space where you vanished. We passed through the same window you did and arrived here, although for a few moments it seemed as if we were being pulled into the Sun. There may be two windows, one in the outer Solar System near Saturn’s orbit, where you entered, and one nearer the Sun. The second one may be there to orient incoming vessels, or just as a spare. When you entered the distant window and came out closer to the Sun, you had in effect stitched through space like a needle through a folded fabric. You probably saw that the Sun was closer. You were being given a clue, terrifying as it was.”

  “Are you sure of this?” Jake asked.

  “I’ve been working at uncovering something like this all my life,” Lissa said. “We’ve been suspicious of the Sun ever since the discovery of tachyon transmissions from the stars twenty years ago. At that time we learned that our Sun is a tachyon crossroads, a focus of some kind—probably quite routine—for faster-than-light communications. The existence of this station fits in with that early observation. I’m certain that what you have to tell me will confirm and extend what I’ve described.”

  Linda asked, “What can Earth do to free us?”

  “Very little, at the moment.” Lissa smiled. “I suspect that someone wanted you to stay a while.”

  “Who are they?” Jake asked.

  “We don’t know anything about them,” Lissa replied, “except that they exist. I suspect my ship is not under restraint, and that they wanted us to find you. I think that if we activate our g-pusher drive, it will trigger this stations’s departure systems, and we will be ejected through one of the existing windows.”

  “Are you sure?” Linda asked.

  “I’m guessing that this suncore station,” Lissa continued, “is part of a communications and travel net, a component of a grid for powering interstellar vessels. It probably contains repair facilities, judging by its size. Stations of this kind may be common throughout our Galaxy.”

  Max saw his chance. “Better than that,” he said. “Over in that direction there is a column with twelve portals. There’s a tunnel in each that leads to another star system. Lucinda and I, and Emil, explored a number of them. One passage took us back to Centauri. Emil’s there now, in the habitat’s hospital.”

  “He’s recovering from an alien poison,” Lucinda said in a shaking voice.

  “We saw living things on the worlds we visited,” Max continued. “I saw what might have been intelligent beings inside one of the passages, when I was looking through a barrier that went up there.”

  Lissa nodded. “So the system is even more advanced than I thought. Direct interstellar passage rather than starships. But why did you enter the portals in the first place?”

  “Something lured us out through the manual lock,” Lucinda said, “a kind of mental compulsion we couldn’t resist, and we found the column.”

  Max sensed that same compulsion again, but-it faded quickly, leaving him with the feeling that he had accomplished his task. He glanced at Lucinda, and saw by her relieved expression that she had also felt something.

  Lissa said, “The link with our colony at Centauri would be invaluable, if we could use it.”

  Captain Calder whispered something to her. She nodded to him, and he went back toward the ship, becoming again a dark shape in the brightness.

  “We should go inside,” Linda said. “I’ll call a general meeting. Everyone should hear what you’ve told us.”

  Lissa nodded. “There’s a lot we have to consider.”

  They all started toward the open lock. Muhammad smiled as Max passed him and said, “Welcome back, Max.” They went through the lighted passage and came out one by one below the sunplate.

  “I’m sure you’ve noticed,” Lissa said, when they had all emerged, “that even though the asteroid is not spinning, you have your usual gravity, which means that the station’s systems are maintaining given conditions.”

  “We couldn’t know that until we came outside,” Joe said. “It gave us quite a start.”

  It was afternoon in the hollow. Max looked out across the sunny inner landscape and remembered what he would usually be doing at this time of day. Only a week separated him from that time, but it felt as if years had passed, and it seemed possible now that the habitat would not be dismantled. There was no way to get it out of its cradle in the Sun, at least not very soon, unless the station cooperated. Unintentionally, perhaps, the alien system had saved his home. He looked at Lucinda. She smiled sadly and took his hand as they followed their parents across the grass.

  19

  As the habitat’s assembly came to order, the navigator introduced the woman from Earth, then sat down in the first row with her daughter, Jake, Max and his parents.

  The spherical chamber was silent as Lissa stood up and repeated what she had told the group outside, including what she had learned from Max and Lucinda. “Now I want to tell you what we believe may be true,” she continued, “about the civilization, or civilizations, out in the Galaxy. Many of us at the Interstellar Institute believe that the attitude of galactic civilizations toward us may be divided into two factions—nurturers and weeders. We think they’ve been debating about us, in a general way, for maybe a million years, or from just before humanoid life appeared on Earth. The actions flowing from this debate explain, I believe, why the habitat is here in the suncore station, and what happened to Max Sorby and Lucinda ten Eyck.”

  And to Emil, Max thought sadly.

  “Our previous discovery of their tachyon communications, together with what you’ve learned here, may give us a clue to what the attitude toward us might be, or is about to become.”

  Max felt a rush of excitement tainted with fear, as if he was waiting for his grades, or was about to be judged in a school project. What right did an alien species have to make decisions about humankind? They were not humanity’s parents or teachers.

  “We’ve thought about this in several ways at the Institute,” Lissa continued. “To some of us it seemed that if life were plentiful in the universe, then even a single technical civilization might overrun our Galaxy in less than thirty million years. That’s a very short time in the life of a galaxy. It would mean that younger cultures, when they attained the means to leave their sunspaces, would encounter the galactic culture and stop developing. They would adopt the dominant culture’s ideas and technologies, and lose the unique road they might have taken in ignorance of the galactic culture’s existence. Some of us have argued that the first culture to sweep the galaxy might have learned this when it found itself surrounded by echoes of itself, in the form of cultures it had influenced earlier. Not wishing to have this happen again, it began to nurture worlds where life might still develop, but it also set up limits to prevent developing civilizations from bursting the bounds of their solar systems too easily and losing their individuality. They could have done this by slowing down evolutionary processes with periodic catastrophes. One example would be an inward rain of asteroids from the cometary shells that surround most solar systems. Ice ages caused by such collisions would slow intelligent life’s emergence but not stop it, thus saving the galaxy from being choked with intelligent life. Cultures would emerge spaced across great stretches of time, much in the same way as parents often space their children. Individual cultures would have a chance to shine, to be themselves before meeting others. Their emergence onto the galactic stage of history would be slow, based on careful prior exchanges of technical and ecological information, of the kind that would help species control their more rampant, darker natures. Cultures engaged in purely informational exchange would be stimulated by each other’s unique outlooks and experiences of nature without being swamped.”

  Lissa paused and looked around the gathering. “But some cultures would perish,” she continued. “If the weeders exist, then they’ve seen many tragedies. But imagine how terrible it would be to use up a whole galaxy for resources and have only one culture to show for it. That would be the greater tragedy. Imagine how such a dominant culture might feel when it looked back and understood what it had done. However rich it would be in knowledge and spirit, it would know that an infinity of riches had also been lost, never to be regained.”

  Max glanced at Lucinda’s parents and saw their unease. They knew this was important, but their immediate worry had to be about Emil.

  “Everything we know about the growth of science and technology,” Lissa continued with great emphasis, “suggests massive exponential growth that leads to explosive cultural transformations and expansion beyond a single planet. Many worlds probably destroy themselves before they can look beyond their solar systems, but it takes only one success to spread through a galaxy. If that happens at the right time, that one civilization would not even have to destroy any existing cultures, only worlds where life might one day develop.”

  Lissa smiled. “Some of you might quite naturally resent the idea of being judged by alien others, or having them make decisions about our lives. But they wouldn’t see it that way at all. No life can think only of itself for long. The weeders and nurturers would have seen countless forms of sunlife coming up, growing into self-awareness and tragedy at the same time. Many would weed themselves, with no one lifting a finger to destroy them. Meanwhile, the nurturers would strive to help civilizations grow up in less cruel ways. Contacting them directly would not be the way to do it, since that would alter the very individuality that is developing—which is all that any civilization really prizes in any other. So, by slowing the emergence of cultures, the nurturers would preserve a galaxy’s resources, and by isolating a culture preserve its individuality. Yes, some cultures would die.”

  Max felt both challenged and awed by her words.

  “But who could these weeders and nurturers be?” Jake asked.

  “They are probably a very old culture,” Lissa replied. “Having achieved everything that younger species strive for, this is probably the only interesting thing left for them to do. Of course, we can’t be certain yet that all this is true, or that the weeders and nurturers even exist.” She was silent for a few moments, then began to pace back and forth before the assembly. She was graceful, Max noticed, her steps sure. She was, he realized, the most intriguing person he had ever met.

  “But consider,” she continued, facing the gathering, “what it means for you to be here inside the Sun. There are many ways to put together the clues and evidence we’ve gathered, but we must also include the possibility that clues have been given to us, and that we were meant to be having this very kind of discussion, in which we try to think about how galactic cultures might regard us. It may be that our Galaxy has always been safe from being overrun, because most cultures perish through nuclear wars and technological disasters, rather than from outright weeding. Perhaps ours is a young galaxy, in which the weeder-nurturers seek to prevent what has happened in older ones. As you know, in the years when your habitat was returning from Centauri, we received what seemed to be a radio warning from the Cometary Halo, or the Oort Cloud, as it is better known. I was part of the expedition that found the transmitter, which might have been placed there by the nurturers, or by another civilization seeking to warn us about the dangers of cometary infall. Later that same year we detected a whole network of tachyon communications crossing the galaxy, with some of them passing through our sun. That was what first made me suspicious. The existence of this station makes sense of that observation. I think we’ll find that stars are used to channel and amplify tachyon links, and that they also power physical bridges.” She gazed out at the gathering. “They’re talking to each other out there!” she said, gesturing with both arms.

  A chill went through Max as he wondered what terrible things the aliens might be saying about humanity, especially if the aliens were like the whale-thing that had menaced Lucinda and him on the terrace world.

  “It was fortunate that we were contacted by radio,” Lissa continued, “since it’s a means we knew before our discovery of tachyons. Someone wanted to make sure that we would receive and understand the warning about cometary bombardment, and perhaps wanted to do so anonymously, using a backward technology. The signals were a display diagram, showing us where the transmitter was located. You can’t get simpler than that. They thought we were worth warning, too far along to let perish, as they might have let happen with Earth’s dinosaurs. Or perhaps the transmitter was just a routine buoy, of the kind used to mark ocean reefs to warn ships. But one thing is inescapable—any kind of message received by one culture from another has a shaping effect on the recipient culture, even if nothing in the message is understood, even if it’s only a nonsense message proving that the other culture exists, or once existed. The sending culture had to know that we would never look outward in the same way again.”

  “But is there any danger from cometary infall?” Linda ten Eyck asked.

  “Not that we could find,” Lissa replied. “After we found the radio buoy, we took our ship-habitat out into the Oort Cloud for a two-year survey. We charted the velocities of thousands of bodies whenever we could, and found nothing large enough to slow up bodies in their orbits to fall sunward. Of course, the Halo is large, and can be disturbed anywhere in the vast sphere it forms around the solar system. It takes only a small change in a body’s orbital velocity to send it into the inner solar system. Our survey is still incomplete. The danger may well exist.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “Or they’re just taking a break, until the nurturers figure out what to do with us. I don’t like this idea that some other culture knows what’s best for us, or that it feels justified in deciding we shouldn’t exist at all!”

  Max realized that he felt the same way, and was glad that Jake had spoken up.

  “You’re right,” Lissa answered, “but that may be just the way things are. And it may be that they do know what’s best for us in some things.”

  “So where do we stand right now?” Jake demanded. “You’re not even sure if any of this is true.”

  “Good question. Let’s see if we can tie it all together. Everything that’s happened since we discovered the signals from the stars seems to me to have been a way of getting us to think about our place in the Galaxy, and how we will survive the weeding process, whether it’s intended or natural. We’re past the era when we might have destroyed ourselves in a war or through ecological disaster, so it’s possible that we’re only being nurtured now. I don’t think any civilization out there is longing to meet us, but they don’t mind us overhearing what they’re saying to each other, even though we don’t understand them. We’ll have to work at that, and I think they want us to. I’m certain we were meant to find this station, and to discover the link with Centauri, but I also suspect that we’re supposed to have large doubts about what may be going on. Doubts protect us from being overly influenced by the weeders or nurturers. Our future remains an open possibility.” Lissa looked at Max and Lucinda. “The passages you discovered and explored may be a learning maze, a labyrinth that is already teaching us to look beyond the more strenuous forms of interstellar travel. We’ve done it the hard way, by accelerating a habitat to relativistic speeds with enormous expenditures of energy—but now we know for sure that better ways exist, and that will spur our technical development. And one day we’ll meet the Others, in the maze perhaps.”

  “I might have already seen them,” Max said, “just for a moment, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Did you see signs of intelligent life on the worlds you visited?” Lissa asked.

  “No,” Max said, “but there was life.”

  Jake asked, “What else are we supposed to learn about this station?”

  “Perhaps they want us to learn to operate some of the systems here,” Lissa answered. “Max and Lucinda did that when they explored the portal connections. There may be other things we can learn to do.”

  Max’s curiosity raced, and he tried to imagine what else might be possible. For a moment Lissa seemed to look at him with keen interest, as if he might not be aware of how much he knew.

  “It seems to me,” she continued, “that the weeders and nurturers could not depend on the timing of natural disasters in the galaxy. For example, the nurturers might have to protect a promising species from natural disasters once in a while. A suncore station has enough energy to do a number of things. It could easily power a destructive beam to prevent comets and asteroids from striking planets, but such a beam could also sterilize planets to slow down the emergence of intelligent life. It could stop an intelligent species that turned out to be psychotic. One other thing. Stars aren’t always stable. A station like this could adjust a star’s energy output if something went wrong and a species was about to be destroyed. Or it could increase or decrease solar output and wipe out life.”