//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Those Who Were About To Die // Story: The Death of Tiamat // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// The star Tiamat was dying. She was a blue-white supergiant, massing some fifty octillion tonnes -- twenty-five times that of even a bright yellow main-sequence star. The immense bulk of matter stretched, in the time of her exuberant youth, over twenty million kilometers from surface to antipodal surface, where plasma roiled in the inconceivable radiance produced by 26 thousand degrees absolute, emitting a storm of actnic radiation by comparison with which a more normal sun would have been but a dim red ember. She would have looked blue-white to organic eyes, because the upper ends of the optical spectrum would have been the principal part of her output which organs formed of flesh and blood would have been able to detect. Such would have been her normal appearance; such the mien she had worn during most of the three and a quarter million years she had lived since she had first flared to life in the depths of a dense nebula, her lusty infant birth-cry flashing out to clear the veils surrounding her with the immense pressure of her stellar wind. Three and a quarter million years -- an immense amount of time in the lifespan of an organic mortal -- but barely a day on the scale of most of the mortals made of hydrogen and helium which lived by burning their own substance in their fusion fires, which the organics named "stars." For three and a quarter million years, Tiamat had blazed brightly in the firmament of the Universe. She had been one of the greatest stars of her galaxy -- so brilliant that she was visible from the closest other galaxies, and would in time be seen from other galactic clusters, when her light had time to reach them. But by then, of course, she would be long-dead. Big and bright, she was doomed to suffer the fate of all big and bright members of her kind, and run through her thermonuclear fuel at a ruinous pace. Her torrid inner fires, fed by a gravity many times greater than that of any main sequence star, had converted immense quantities of hydrogen to helium every second, every year, every millennium. As the millennia wore on, Tiamat fused all the hydrogen she had to helium. When the hydrogen ran out, she shrank, compacted under the force of her own gravity, until the temperature at her core rose to an astonishing two hundred million degrees absolute. Under such extreme conditions, the triple-alpha process began fusing helium into carbon and oxygen. And Tiamat burned on. But her time was running out. The helium began to be exhausted; the fuson fires sputtered within her heart. The end of helium-burning was fast-approaching; when it ensued, this would not be the immediate end of her life, but it would signal her inevitable death, in but a few thousand more years. All life perceives time in terms of its own vital cycles and span. A typical star, which lives for billions of years, experiences one billion years as we might a decade or two; a hundred million years as a year a few tens of thousands of years as a day. To such a beng, a long-lived organic civilization might last for but a few hours. To Tiamat, who would live but 3200 of our millennia, her life passed at a far more rapid pace than did that of lesser stars. Her thermmonuclear heart beat hot and fast, her life passed in a frenzy of fusion fire. By the standards of smaller, more sedate suns, she would be for but a season, barely seeing a fraction of an orbit around the center of her Galaxy. Her life would be brilliant, but brief. She was not alone in this. The rich nebular cloud which had spawned Tiamat had also birthed a score of siblings: some of them lesser supergiants; most of them hot, bright stars, who had been nourished by the density waves of Tiamat's own ignition. Together, the twenty-one young, doomed stars formed a little cluster, only a dozen light-years across at its longest axis. Within, all were friends. The stars of Tiamat's cluster warbled and hissed and popped at each other in their unceasing electromagnetic song; even at the frantically-accelerated paces of their superheated lives, the signal-to-response lag from one end of the cluster to the furthest end and back was but a quarter-century -- to them, the equivalent of half a minute or so. They were, by stellar standards, both physically and emotionally close to one another. Closest of all to Tiamat -- in fact, describing a braided orbit around each other as a distant binary -- was the smaller supergiant Barba. Their orbits varied, as one or the other was tugged by the other stars of their small cluster, but never were they more than a hundredth of a light-year apart. By stellar standards, they were very near neighbors indeed, and they chattered to one another constantly -- though Tiamat mostly talked, while Barba worshipfully listened to her larger sibling. Their friendship was the most precious thing in both their lives. This was true for Barba, despite the fact that it doomed her to a lessened lifespan, something of which they were both well aware. For Tiamat and Barba, while young, were neither foolish nor wholly innocent. They had witnessed the lives of the stars for many millions of light-years around them, for a length of time exceeding the lifespan of most sapient organic species. They had moreover conversed with many longer-lived stars, including the little red dwarfs, whose fires burn so dimly and slowly that the eldest of them still are children, for our Universe has not yet lived long enough to greatly age them. So they both well knew what happens to a star caught within fractions of a light-year of a type II supernova, especially when that star is herself big and bright and hot and but indifferently stable, forever teetering on the edge of her own supernova. They heard the stories from older stars; saw the warnings written in intense flares of light, briefly outshining whole galaxies; felt the truth of it within their very hearts, where the immense forces of Fusion and Gravity wrestled within them, their contest keeping the critical balance between explosion and implosion, flare and collapse, at whose boundaries lay the life of any star. Massing a bit less than half as much as Tiamat, some twenty-four octillion tonnes, Barba on her own might have shined for twenty million years. In close company with Tiamat, though, she would perish when Tiamat did, for the immense surge of energy and infalling of matter from her companion would imbalance her own life, and trigger the explosion of Barba's own core. They had been born and lived together; they would die together. These were their dooms; dooms shared in lesser degree by their siblings. For a close cluster of hot bright stars is inherently unstable: the death of the biggest may trigger a chain reaction of supernovae and nova flares which destroy many of them, and greatly shorten the lives of the survivors. Such is the price of being big and brilliant, and keeping company with the big and brilliant, in the world of the stars. The time came when Tiamat knew that her last days were upon her. For her helium, which had long since sank to her core in a shell, displacing her remaining hydrogen, had been itself been slowly squeezed out of her heart by the buildup of the carbon and oxygen which came from the triple alpha process. Twenty million degrees absolute, though very hot even on the scale of a stellar core, is not hot enough to fuse carbon. So her central fires flickered out. In that moment, Gravity gained in the endless struggle within Tiamat's core. Tiamat gasped and shrank, her core imploding, compacting from its already great density of two thousand times that of liquid water to an absolutely astounding million times that amount; an increase of five hunded times its previous value. So compressed, not even the more massive nuclei of carbon atoms could keep their integrity. At Tiamat's core, carbon began to fuse: becoming neon, sodium, magnesium and aluminium. Tiamat knew what this meant. A star could not live long burning anything but hydrogen; or in a pinch helium. The new fires within her had countered her core collapse for the moment; the moment would not last long by stellar standards. She now had but a matter of millennia to live -- at best some days, by her own temporal perceptions. "Tiamat!" The worried cry came from Barba, who had felt the neutrino pulse from her boon companion, and also understood its meaning. "Are you all right?" "It's ... what we knew would happen," Tiamat told her. "I'm burning my carbon now. A ... perfectly natural process. Nothing to worry about. It unsettled me for a moment. But just a moment. I'm perfectly chipper again." Tiamat's concsciousness was an intricate neural net of electromagnetic currents powered by her heart and running through her immense bulk. From the core, the webwork field lines and computative nodes extended out through her radiative and convective zones, through the photosphere and chromosphere, to finally trail off into a vast array of whisker-like filaments in her rarefied corona. Within were many specialized organs, some analogous to those in organic mortal life, and some very alien in purpose. The stability of this neural net had of course been shaken by the immense change which had happened within Tiamat's core, but the dynamically-regenerating pattern which was Tiamat the person had survived, mostly unchanged. The substrate of matter and energy which was Tiamat the star supported the magnetic fields which organized into Tiamat the person, but they were not the same thing. Tiamat, now burning carbon instead of helium, or the hydrogen of her prime, was still Tiamat. "I ... I'm ... I'm glad," said Barba. "That you're still yourself." "One must keep one's grace under pressure, darling," replied Tiamat, doing the equivalent within the shared conceptual space of their conversation of smiling warmly at her lifelong friend. "Whether that pressure be compressive or expansive in nature." Then her expression sobered. "I will, of course, not be able to keep myself together for too much longer, and you know that my end will be rather destructively spectacular." "Yes," said Barba. "I know. And I've been thinking about that." "Are you at last going to widen your orbit?" asked Tiamat. "You really should. My final flare will shorten your life in any case; there's not enough time for you to get far enough away from me to totally avoid it. But, well, inverse-square. Every doubling of distance will quarter the damage to you ... let you go on longer." "No," said Barba firmly. She seemed to gather up her courage. "Tiamat, I want to spiral inward. When you go, I want to go as well. I ... I want us to mingle." The life cycle of the stars is not the life cycle of most vertebrates. They reproduce by exploding, spraying their fusion-processed substance into the void. This creates nebular clouds, from which new stars form. Only the larger ones -- ones massing more than two and three quarters octillion tonnes -- reproduce. And only those massing more than around sixteen octillion tonnes, stars such as Tiamat and Barba, can spawn stars with enough metallicity to form complex planetary systems around them. Stars can love one another. Binary stars can even caress one another with filaments of magnetic fields; enrich one another with matter siphoned or even shared from their surfaces. But to do what our kind of life does, and share the bulk of their equivalent of genetic information to make new stars from both their masses -- they must die, close together in spacetime. This is what Barba was proposing, to her lifelong beloved friend. "No!" cried Tiamat, her tone anguished. "My dearest, you simply can't! If you do that, you'll die within instants of me." It would actually take many hours, even days of our sort of time for Barba to explode after Tiamat did, but on their timescale this was almost simultaneous. "I know," said Barba. "But I ... don't want to outlive you. I love you. I have always loved you. You know that. You've always known that." "I do," replied Tiamat. "And ... I feel the same. As you have always known." "Then we shall die together," said Barba. "And our selves will join, to make a new cluster." "Yes," agreed Tiamat, "though I wish you might live. But I shall not deny you your last wish, my dearest one. And ... a shamefully selfish part of my self is gladdened by the thought that at the end ... the very end ... we shall be closer together. The naive astronomers of nascent Type I planetary civilizations, limited as they are by their assumptions that they may be the only intelligent life in the Universe, and that in any case "life" must be based in molecular reactions, imagine the stars to be inanimate objects, whose motions are wholly at the mercy of Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity. It is true that, by the standards of little organic beings, stars have immense inertia and can move their vast bulks but very slowly. But they are capable of voluntary motion, a fact which would astound those primitive astronomers. As Barba and Tiamat proceded to demonstrate. Each of them adjusted the flow of plasma by means of their many and diverse organs, making great conical rifts in their photospheres; funnels which led into their deeper, hotter layers. These funnels were anchored to their whole immense forms, by means of complex three-dimensional networks of enhanced electromagnetic fields. Each of them slightly ramped up the fusion at their cores beneath them, increasing the exterior pressures at these points. They squeezed, and hot plasma from their interiors jetted out the funnels in truly immense stellar flares. Propelled by the plasma rockets they had ignited, Tiamat and Barba began to -- necessarily very slowly, to avoid prematuringly exploding -- spiral closer to each other. The two supergiants approached their final union.