Read Beyond the Rift for Free Online

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-sized now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.
    “A thousand lightsecs,” I command.
    “There,” Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the tank, dark, clear, pristine. 428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded cast-offs from companion stars whose convulsions 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 AUs across. And for the fact that this 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 350 lightsecs from its primary and then just stop s, 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 335, 500 and 800 nanometers.”
    The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.
    “It’s beautiful ,” whispers my awestruck son.
    “It’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.
    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.
    “So 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 .”
    “Yes,” the chimp says.
    “But that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”
    “No more than two millimeters. Probably less.”
    “How so?”
    “If 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.”
    “That’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”
    “The 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...
    “Okay, 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?”
    “1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.
    “That’s, uh...”
    “Half the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.
    I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”
    “I don’t know yet.”
    “It’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking . It’s intelligent.”
    “Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”
    I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”
    He frowns. “Chimp says—”
    “ Assume . Use your imagination.”
    I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.
    He looks like that a lot, I realize.
    “ If someone were signaling you,” I say, “ then what would you do?”
    “Signal...” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “...back?”
    My son is an idiot.
    “And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in