Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [3]
Data had named the object after the twentieth-century scientist Freeman Dyson, who had anticipated that some civilization, somewhere, understanding that most of the power from its sun was being poured, wastefully, into the unfillable sink of space, might contrive to enclose the sun.
When he first considered the idea, Picard had suspected that such a vast construction would have to be a Dyson Cloud-millions of closely spaced habitats clustered around the star, and therefore much easier to construct; but the reality had proved to be a continuous sphere of what seemed to be solid material, imprisoning its sun with no visible breaks in the outer surface-a delightful feat of engineering, using an advanced materials technology.
The artifact, itself two hundred and four million kilometers in diameter, was located at the center of a cave two hundred light years across. The cave was a perfect sphere carved out of the galactic cloud of stars, gas, and debris. There was no doubt in the captain’s mind that the combined mass of thousands of solar systems had been gathered to open this hole in the galactic sea. Ahead, at the center of a stellar desert, was a vast oasis, watered by the energies of a once free star. Why then, as nearly as anyone had been able to ascertain, had the builders abandoned their creation?
With the wall of stars receding aft, the Enterprise began to cross the final hundred light years of desert toward the still invisible Sphere, and Picard could only wonder whether the presumed instability of the central sun was enough to explain why the builders had abandoned their home; he found it strange that they could not have stabilized the star before building so much around it. Was it possible that they had made the Sphere long before they suspected that their sun might develop problems? He found it difficult to accept that such a labor and resource intensive project could have been undertaken by beings lacking in foresight, even though he knew very well that the psychology of intelligent beings was everywhere flawed. Curiouser and curiouser … it fueled his appetite for the mysterious; and between the desert and the central sun of Dyson, mystery was his only certainty.
He glanced at Deanna Troi, who was seated at her station to his left. She met his gaze in silence for a moment, then said, “I can understand your frustration, Captain. How can we believe that after so much work they simply gave up?”
“Or can we believe that they simply died before they could leave?” Picard answered. “Is it possible that they are still somehow here?”
He stood up and looked around the bridge. His chief medical officer, Beverly Crusher, had ventured up from sickbay only a few moments ago. She stood near Geordi La Forge, who had cleared the neutrino telescope display from his screen and was scrolling through a vast collection of high-resolution scans made during the Enterprises first, hurried visit into the Sphere. Viewed from a distance of more than forty million kilometers, there was a small white island on the inner surface that later analysis by the more advanced Federation computer had clearly shown to be covered with Dalmatian-like patches of dark coloration. The patches probably represented forests and near-surface water tables interrupting what would otherwise have been smooth desert terrain. On Earth, Antarctica was considered large enough to be a continent. The desert “island” on Geordi’s screen was six times as large, yet here it barely qualified as a beach.
Offshore lay a scatter of microscopic sandbars, ranging down in size from the British Isles to Manhattan Island. There were too many of these “true islands” to be easily counted, much less named. Some were heavily forested, and ground-piercing radar sensors had revealed narrow lines and rectangular depressions that might have been roads and building foundations, unrepaired for millennia. Other islands, at the very limit of resolution, displayed structures that still appeared to be standing intact, as if inhabited