Pa'an

Virti grew out of her childbearing phase not long ago. She still has the fairthers (hair-like feathers) on her head and handarms, but her mating orifice and feeding tubes are nearly gone. She had just adopted her new biped body phase. Biped is convenient in space, but having four of her six limbs on the ground was definitely better on heavy planets like Gara’un. She wonders what it really felt like to live during the hard millennia of the Changes before the Pa’an had biologic technology to allow body phase changes. It certainly must have been difficult, according to all the historical documentaries.

Virti is a slender, wiry biped with dark tan fairthers on her handarms, footarms and feet, and delicate featherlike scales on her head fading to beige. She has a deep red streak across her eyes, a very attractive highlight in the reddish glow of L’ley. Her eyes are large and owlish, not at all alien in appearance to humans. A tough but flexible pebbled carapace covers her back and the upper part of her limbs, an evolutionary protection from the rigors of Gara’un. A ruff of stiff hairs at the back of her head serves as her electric sense organ. Her oval head surmounts a flexible neck that can extend and contract for polite gestures. Each handarm and footarm terminates in four dexterous fingers. Her ambulation is a shuffle, rather than a stride, in her native heavy gravity. Like humans, Pa’an are versatile and adaptive forms, not overly specialized as predators or plant eaters. Biochemically and internally, Virti is quite alien compared to any Earth form.

Presently, Virti is much more concerned with her new role as one of the last plasma pushers on the Pa’A’Pavalan, maintaining the Gate. Her offspring are just now emerging from ploids into childbearing phase themselves, and will soon be too busy for her. Her male-phase mates have long since moved on through the Project Gate. Her few remaining colleagues only swap small talk and gossip with her now. Their individual disciplines are too deep and specialized, Virti is just ocro’act, and the Project is demanding. Keeping the cosmic construct tuned properly while the mass of the Pa’an civilization uses it is critical. Virti is in a lonely phase.

It was over two thousand cycles since the three suns had been moved into their triangular configuration and force fed until they collapsed into precisely charged black holes. She remembers the shock of the three ensuing gravity waves as if it were yesterday. She was braced for it, as were all Pa’an everywhere in the galaxy, but it was both an experience and a thrill. She remembers how her home ship bucked and gyrated, how she had to extrude all four of her handarm hooks and footarm hooks to hold on to her roost. All Pa’an celebrated that cycle and still celebrated every 80 cycles since then. Now all that was left was the critical but tedious part of the construction – precisely maintaining the fine tuning of the mass, charge and spin of the black holes.

Her control station was one of many cubbies tucked into the inner wall of the immense hollow cigar that was the Pa’A’Pavalan. The lighting was set to the ruddy orange of L’Ley, a small comfort out in distant space. Her jumpsuit was a soothing tan, and there was a drink and a snack in her chair pod. She tried to make herself as comfortable as possible, but she was nervous about doing her job. Around her she could feel the concentration of the other plasma pushers, measurers, calcs and supervisors on this shift. She could also sense that they were very aware of her and the role she filled on the team.

Her immediate job was balancing mass flow and charge feeding the black hole humans would classify as a Kerr 3A. A stream of ionized gasses flowed through the magnetic aperture that occupied the core of her ship. She could see the faint bluish glow, but that didn’t tell her much. Imposed on that view were a series of numbers and indicators. She had to keep each of her indicator pointers on a colored dot. The blue dot was mass flow, the yellow dot was charge, and red dot was temperature. A computer monitored the overall condition of the nearby black hole through a network of sensors and computed the positions of the moving dots.

Ionized plasma is a stubborn, tricky thing and the one thing it does best is escape. Virti’s task was to keep the indicators on the dancing dots. As she delicately slid the charge control forward, the charge increased, but then the mass indicator started to drop. So she increased the push on the plasma, but that increased the temperature. She added more neutral mass flow, but that required more charge, and it went on and on. There were many times she questioned the wisdom of having a sentient being perform such a fussy but tedious task, but then, after many such sessions, she had developed a sixth sense about an incipient kink or a vortex that made her invaluable. Pa’an had evolved a special sense about plasma in the course of their long evolution under their unpredictable star L’ley. As she pushed plasma to tune up the black hole to its critical mass, charge and spin, she could feel the flow of approval from her pan’vact. Virti felt like this part of the project was in good handarms, and she flowed panor to her supervisor. Kerr 3A was at 99.999% of spin, mass and charge and only needed a little more tuning, perhaps no more than another 80 Gara’un cycles would see it done. If the other two black holes were in equally good shape, the Gate would remain open, on time, and within the predicted resources, not an unusual thing for Pa’an projects, even for construction on a cosmic scale.

Virti, watching and fine tuning this captive plasma stream, remembered the hypersonic plasma storm in Copper Canyon. Maybe the Pa’an had a fated link with plasma.

Suddenly there was a curl, then a twist developed, and the wayward plasma sucked charge and heat from the hot, stable flow. Her ionization detection organ was twitching, even through the shielded hull plating. Virti’s handarms flew over the controls, but the kink was too fast. Inexorably, the blue glow developed a hot white spot. She winced, but she knew the hard x-rays from that spot could not get through the hull plating. The hot spot flowed down the ship’s central tube, growing into a dangerous pinch. The warning clicker registered neutron emissions from the hot spot and, for an instant, Virti thought it might go thermonuclear. Just then the next plasma pusher upstream reversed the magnetic field on his portion of the coil, cutting off the mass flow to the black hole before the pinch could grow. Downstream of her, another safety monitor shut off the central tube, preventing the kink from escaping down the stream. The hot spot faded to pink and quickly died. Virti flowed panor and gratitude to that rello. After a calming moment she restarted the mass flow and set up the next stream. There was still some time to the end of her shift, and she was anxious to make up for her incident. Her fairthers were ragged and stuck out at unflattering angles. She smoothed them down and reached out graceful handarms to the controls. It was only a few eightcycles since she was in this biped form. She needed more practice with fine movements of her handarms. She needed to focus on her delicate task.

After a while, she became so engrossed in the flow of plasma and panor that she forgot she was lonely. She seemed to have developed a feel for the way the plasma would twist and curl before it did. She could feel her kar engage the immense power of the streaming plasma and control all the possibilities. Of course, it helped to have the technology and the instantaneous cooperation of her fellow plasma pushers.

Virti eventually reached her cabin and randomly called up a program on her personal viewer. She was hoping a diversion would relieve some of her stress.