Now there was only the mighty red sun, filling the sky from side to side. He was so close that its surface was no longer frozen into immobility by sheer scale. There were luminous nodules moving back and forth, cyclones of ascending and descending gas, prominences slowly rocketing toward the heavens. Slowly? Why, they must be rising at a million miles per hour for their movement to be visible to his human eyes!512Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡa8L6sjMlVB
He didn't even try to grasp the scale of the hell toward which he was descending. The immensities of Saturn and Jupiter had defeated him, during Pesquisador's flyby in that solar system now some untold gigamiles away. But everything he saw here was 100 times larger still; there was nothing he could do but accept the images that were flooding into his mind, without attempting to interpret them.
As that sea of fire expanded beneath him, Dhala should have been afraid--but, curiously enough, he now felt only a mild apprehension. It was not that his mind was benumbed with wonders; logic told him that he must surely be under the protection of some controlling and almost omnipotent intelligence. He was now so close to the red sun that he would have been burned up in one moment if its radiation had not been held at bay by some invisible screen. And during his voyage he had been subjected to accelerations that should have crushed him instantly---yet he had felt nothing. If so much trouble had been taken to preserve him, there was still cause for hope.
The bola was now moving along a shallow arc almost parallel to the surface of the star, but slowly descending toward it. And now, for the first time, Dhala became aware of sounds. There was a faint, continuous roar, broken from time to time by crackles like tearing paper, or distant lightning. This could only be the feeblest echo of an unimaginable cacophony; the atmosphere surrounding him must be racked by concussions that could tear any material thing to atoms. Yet he was protected from this shattering tumult as effectively as from the heat.
Though ridges of flame thousands of miles high were rising and slowly falling around him, he was totally insulated from all this violence. The energies of the star raved past him, as if in another universe; the pod moved sedately through their midst, unbuffeted and unscorched.
Dhala's eyes, no longer hopelessly confused by the oddness and grandeur of the scene, began to pick out details which must have been there before, but which he had not yet perceived. The surface of this star was not a formless chaos; there was a pattern here, as in everything else in nature.
He noticed first the little whirlpools of gas--likely no bigger than Asia or Africa---that wandered over the star's surface. Sometimes he could look straight down into one of them, to see darker and cooler regions far below. Strangely enough, there seems to be no sunspots; maybe they were an affliction peculiar to Sol, the star that shone on Earth.
There were occasional clouds, like wisps of smoke blown before a storm. Or they might indeed be smoke, as this sun was so cold that real fire could exist here. Chemical compounds could be born, live for a few seconds, and then be ripped apart again by the fiercer nuclear violence surrounding them.
The horizon was now growing brighter, its color changing from a gloomy red to a sunny yellow to a cold blue to blistering snobbish violet.
The White Dwarf was rising over the horizon, dragging a tidal wave of cosmic gases behind it.
Dhala shielded his eyes from the unbearable glare of the tiny sun, and focused on the troubled starscape which its gravitational field was now sucking skyward. Once he'd seen a waterspout moving across the face of the South Atlantic; this tower of flame had almost the same shape.
Only the scale was slightly different, for at its base, the column was likely wider than the whole planet Earth.
Just then, immediately below him, Dhala noticed something which was surely new, as he could not have overlooked it if it had been there before. Moving across the sea of glowing gas were myriads of bright beads shining with a pearly light that waxed and waned in only a few seconds. They were all moving the same direction, just like salmon moving upstream; sometimes weaving to and fro so that their paths intertwined, but never touching.512Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtpi2zrDUiP
There were thousands of them, and the longer Dhala stared, the more convinced he was that their motion had a purpose. They were too far away for him to make out any details of their structure; that he could see them at all in this gargantuan panorama meant that they must be scores---maybe hundreds---of miles across. If they were organized entities, they were leviathans indeed, built to match the scale of the world they inhabited.
On the other hand, they might only be clouds of plasma, given temporary stability by some odd combination of natural forces--like the short-lived spheres of ball-lightning that still puzzled terrestrial scientists. That was an easy, maybe soothing, explanation; but as Dhala looked down upon that star-wide streaming, he could not really believe it. Those glittering nodes of light knew where they were going; they were deliberately converging upon the pillar of fire raised by the White Dwarf as it orbited above.512Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDHwjDzOasF
Dhala stared once again at that ascending column, now marching along the horizon underneath the tiny, massive star that ruled it. Was it pure imagination - or were there patches of brighter luminosity creeping up that mammoth geyser of gas, as if myriads of shining sparks had coalesced into whole continents of phosphorescence?512Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1i4CZoRuJD
The idea was almost beyond fantasy, but maybe he was watching nothing less than a stellar migration across a bridge of fire. Whether it was a movement of mindless, cosmic beasts driven across space by some lemming-like urge, or a vast concourse of intelligent beings, he would likely never know.512Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkdL8VY1Pu9
He was now moving through a new order of creation, of which few mortals had ever dreamed possible. Beyond the realms of sea, land, sky and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been allowed to glimpse. Was it too much to expect him to understand?512Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXycUaFWgTc
