[ASH] Coherent Super Stories #39 - Dead Stars

[Dave Van Domelen]

     [Interior of an observatory, an astronomer points dramatically
      at the night sky and proclaims to the reader, "THE STARS ARE 
      DYING!"]

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 .|, COHERENT                                            An ASHistory Series
--+-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 '|` SUPER STORIES                        #39 - Dead Stars
        Featuring the Great Work          copyright 2020 by Dave Van Domelen
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     During the black and white boom of the 1970s, Coherent Comics' publisher
decided to get into the SF/F magazine business, and even bought up a number
of "orphaned" works from a defunct 1950s publisher in preparation.  But then
the bust hit, and expansion plans got scrapped.  But Coherent still owned the
rights to these stories, and would publish them as text backups in some of
their comics for several years, giving them just enough of a distinction to
help ride out the lean years until the Direct Market got started.  In the
mid-80s, they published a collection of these works, with comic-style covers
at the start of each one.

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     The mood in the observatory was somber, and more than a little anxious
as well.  
     "Is it confirmed?" the head astronomer asked.
     His assistant nodded, holding up a photographic plate.  "The star is
still there, after a fashion.  Took an extra-long exposure to pick it up,
it's as if it's a cinder.  A black dwarf, when last week it was a healthy
main sequence G-class star.  Still waiting on the spectrography to come in,
but I expect it will tell the same tale."
     "Blackbody radiation consistent with temperatures that would fit a
planet, not a star," the head astronomer nodded.  "Now, the theorists might
still claim some wiggle room in their stellar lifecycle models, but I'm
pretty sure a main sequence star doesn't just turn off on its own."
     "Five stars isn't much to build a theory on," the assistant pondered,
"but it the fact that they were all much like our own star does suggest that
the mechanism has a preferred type."
     The head astronomer sighed and sat down.  "This one is particularly bad,
though.  It's the first naked eye star, and the first in the northern
hemisphere.  The other four that've been noticed in the last two years, the
astronomical community could keep a lid on, but someone is bound to notice
this one going away.  And they're going to want answers...even if there's
nothing we can do about it."  A lengthy pause, filled only by the slow
ticking of the observatory turning to track the skies.  "Get everyone on that
spectrograph, and I'll call our southern hemisphere partners to get their
data.  We need to find out if these stars were only 'kind of' like ours, or
dangerously like it.  Best case, we can find some telling differences and use
that to reassure the public."

	       *	      *		     *		    *

     A few weeks later, at a meeting of observatory directors and prominent
astrophysicists, the mood was grim.
     "It turns out that the first star we noticed vanishing was not the first
one for which we have records," one director noted.  "I had my people going
back over older plates with a blink comparator, and there's been even more
distant and dim stars winking out for years at least, possibly decades.  A
total of betweeen thirty-four and fifty-two stars, depending on how reliable
some of the older plates are...I expect some of the missing stars from those
were just bad grain errors in the plates and never stars in the first place."
     "The good news, if there's any to be had," a theoretician pointed out,
"is that we can do some meaningful statistics on the dying stars now.
They're not all G-type stars, but most are.  None in the later stages of
life, no red giants or blue supergiants, though.  And there seems to be a
pattern in what data I was able to get over telex...if I could have the
lights out so I could present my slides?"
     After a brief discussion, it was agreed to suspend the agenda and look
at the data.
     "The oldest, ah, events are mostly farthest away.  This slide shows only
the ones from more than fifty years ago.  As you can see, the trend is vague,
because of the uncertainty of the data.  They're scattered about, with a
couple of clumps.  The next slide is also fifty years ago, but excluding any
plates we're not very sure of.  Only a few stars left, but..."
     "They're all in the same direction," one of the people in the darkened
room said.
     "Precisely.  Only about a ten percent chance for that particular
clustering if they were truly random.  Now this next slide overlays the rest
of the 'historical' vanished stars, most of which you're still trying to find
with your telescopes to see if they also left visible cinders.  A bit
scattered, but again, mostly on one side of our celestial sphere.  Finally,
the seven that have been observed since the phenomenon was noticed, including
two whose news was slow to reach us from remote observatories...."
     The room let out a collective gasp.
     "It's definitely coming this way, whatever it is," someone remarked.
     "The 'it' may be a natural phenomenon, such as the 'carbon currents'
model proposed by one of my colleagues.  Or it may be an expanding
interstellar civilization that has learned to drain stars of their energy to
fuel its expansion.  I'm not entirely sure which is worse, and we're not even
remotely equipped to deal with either possibility...."

	       *	      *		     *		    *

     Generations passed, and the Great Work slowly took shape.  Few stars
died for a time, but whenever it seemed like humanity could relax, another
star or two in the night sky went dark.  And it was almost always a closer
star than the ones before.
     It had been agreed that without more information, humanity could not
hope to face whatever was devouring stars, but the key to any solution would
be energy.  Resources.  There was a time of some chaos as people thought
divine judgement was upon them, or decided to go out in a blaze of glory, but
eventually humanity settled its internecine differences and began to work on
saving their home.
     Mighty rockets spread to the corners of the system, colonizing other
worlds with an eye towards harvesting them for resources.  
     Other rockets carried scouts to the nearest of the dead stars, in hopes
of gathering more information, even if they would not return for centuries.
     Desperate "sleeper ship" expeditions were sent out to keep some portion
of humanity alive, to arrive centuries later on worlds that might have some
life to them, circling stars that would hopefully not be devoured before the
sleepers arrived.
     More generations passed.  The lightspeed barrier remained stubbornly in
place, and only tiny bits of extra information could be teased out from
telescopic observations of the dead stars.  Even the vast Interplanetary
Array had its limits.  Humanity could only watch from afar, much as it itched
to leap across the void and know NOW.
     Jupiter was dismantled for fuel and other resources, followed by Saturn.
The Great Work continued while stars continued to wink out, even as the night
sky was filled with the flares of rockets moving materials to a near orbit
around the Sun.

     At last, the Great Work was completed, and ready for activation.

	       *	      *		     *		    *

     The Project Director may not have officially been the leader of all
humanity, but his authority was so great that he might as well have been.  He
spoke now to every human living, save for those on the great sleeper ships
and the few volunteers willing to ride the deep space probes.  The speed of
light meant many would not hear his words for hours, but they would hear him
before they saw the Great Work put into effect, and that was sufficient.  The
hundreds gathered in the amphitheatre before him were the most important and
influential people involved in the Great Work, at least those whose presence
wasn't required on-station in the Great Work.
     "People of humanity!  We have completed the Great Work that our distant
forefathers put into motion!"
     He paused for the cheers of those in the amphitheatre with him.  
     "Despite our best efforts, we still do not know the nature of the doom
of the stars, but we have plans in place to deal with every possibility that
has come to the mind of scientists and dreamers.  If it is a deadly current
in space, the Great Work will deflect it.  If it is a hostile or indifferent
alien species, the Great Work disguises our Sun from their acquisitive eyes
and will provide the energy to destroy any invader who is not fooled!  
     "And energy is what the Great Work has been about.  When I activate the
collectors mounted on the orbiting fragments that were once the cores of
Jupiter and Saturn, a field will be generated that covers our Sun, save for a
small window controlled by a dozen of our most powerful analog computers, a
window to make sure that our world does not fall into eternal twilight.  But
all the remaining energy of our Sun will be collected and stored.  Already,
merely testing single elements of the Great Work has granted us the power to
free us from all other energy sources.  We stand on the brink of an age of
plenty, after generations of sacrifice!"
     The cheers returned, louder and longer, but they eventually subsided.
     "But this is merely the first step!  We will have erected a wall and
armed ourselves, but our greatest foe remains...ignorance.  Even under the
most optimistic projections, nearly a century remains before our probes will
report back more information about the dead stars, and that assumes that
whatever snuffed out the heavenly lights doesn't treat our brave explorers as
a light snack.  But humanity will endure!  If we cannot go to the starkiller,
it will no doubt draw near...even with our star disguised by the Great Work,
there are other stars nearby that will attract its hunger, be it a mindless
cloud or an uncaring evil."
     The Director paused, sparing a furtive glance at a blinking countdown
light in the control booth at the back of the amphitheatre.  The true signal
had been sent to the Great Work several minutes ago, but its effects would
soon be visible on Earth.  The Director had always felt a certain amount of
drama must accompany the completion of this task.
     The overhead dome faded from opacity to clarity, showing the Sun shining
overhead in a clear sky.  He pressed a large (and symbolic) switch on his
podium, and proclaimed, "Behold the GREAT WORK!"
     At that moment, the Sun shrank down to a tiny dot in the sky.  Still as
warm and bright, but somehow muted, as 99.99% of the star's output was
redirected by the Great Work and stored in mighty continent-sized batteries
orbiting the Sun.

	       *	      *		     *		    *

     203 lightyears away and 203 years later, alien astronomers huddled
nervously over the display from their telescope.
     "Another star has been snuffed out," one said.
     "Third one since we noticed the phenomenon," another added.
     "And this one bright enough for the amateur sky-watchers to notice," the
first noted, dismay in his voice.  "We need to figure out what to tell the
public...." 

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Author's Notes:

     If you haven't read many installments of Coherent Super Stories before,
one of the recurring conceits of this series is that in some universe the
various ASH-universe stories were published at roughly the time they were
set.  So the Second Heroic Age heroes like Dragonfly had comics published in
the 60s and 70s, with the end of the age coinciding with the Black & White
Implosion, for instance.  (I don't worry too much about the continuity of
this side universe, I expect I sometimes contradict myself with the events
taking place there, but that's not too big of a worry of mine.)
     I'd established in previous issues that the fictional publisher of
Coherent Comics liked to buy up or license obscure properties that he felt
were undervalued (like the White Hat cowboy movies), and when I had an idea
for a 50s-style SF vignette, I decided that I could fit it into CSS via the
premise in the framing bit at the start.
     The style is deliberately a mixture of dry and lurid that a lot of the
50s SF short stories I read as a kid tended towards, with the Clever Idea
taking precedence over things like character development.  I put in a
deliberate Asimov reference...while later on I'd find that he was a pretty
horrible person beneath his carefully crafted avuncular image, I can't deny
the influence his writing had on me in general, and on this story in
specific.  ("The Currents of Space" hung on a since-abandoned theory about
currents of carbon and other elements drifting through space.  Spoiler
warning for a really old story, I guess?  But the spoiler's also kinda in the
title.)
     This is not ASH continuity, since obviously FTL has been a thing in that
setting for quite a long time.  But in the universe where Coherent Comics
publishes stories, who's to say if any of these stories really happened?

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