Shipstar

Fifty

Beth yawned and stretched and looked at the big foaming breakers curling onto a beach, splashing with a churning roar out to the edge of her wall. Relaxing lapping ocean sounds were a pleasant wake-up call. She had surfed there once a century or so ago and very nearly drowned. Her wrenched back had taken a while to stop complaining.

Now her muscles ached and spoke to her of her many hours in the lead pilot’s chair on the flight deck. They hadn’t enjoyed it, and neither had she. More fun to get worked over in a wave, she thought fuzzily. I wonder if there are surf-worthy waves somewhere on the Bowl? Maybe when a hurricane’s running somewhere, safely far away …

She got up and trooped down to the head and spent three days’ allotment of water on a hot shower. It helped ease her back muscles, and she could think again, too. About how to deal with Redwing and Cliff and all the open doors she was about to slam shut.

She slumped through the mess in her bathrobe, ignoring Fred, who was reading his tablet anyway, and scored a big coffee hit in her extra-size cup. Then back in bed and the wall now running a restful English village, with enough background sounds of breeze and birds to let her forget the ghastly silence aboard SunSeeker.

It wasn’t easy for SunSeeker’s chief pilot to ignore the quiet. SunSeeker was at rest, motors down, shields down. Only a pattern in the Bowl’s magnetic fields protected her from a flood of interstellar radiation. And an alien magnetic pattern, the Diaphanous, was shaping that.

The silence was eerie, after she had spent so long under its background working rumble. Now came a massive, heavy thump. A tanker, she thought. Tankers and cargo craft were a cloud around SunSeeker, and there were thumps and scraping as one or another mated to the ship and masses moved through air locks. Some robots dispatched by the Folk clumped and clanked across the hull on magnetic graspers.

She took a sip and shut out the fevered world.

E-mail first, to get up to speed after ten hours in the sack. She plunged in. The very first was a slab of homework from Tananareve. She had craftily recorded nearly all her interactions with the Ice Minds, at least those rendered in speech within the machine they had her trapped in. She had asked them to use audio rather than somehow making a voice resound in her mind. In the middle of the transcript, captured on her phone and patched up by a shipboard Artilect, was a nugget.

You must realize that Glory is not a true planet but rather a shell world. Many different species of intelligent Glorians live on concentric spheres, with considerable atmosphere spaces between them. Many pillars support this system, and powerful energy sources provide light and heat. Entirely different life-forms inhabit the differing spheres. The innermost shells support life without oxygen. These kinds come from deep within ordinary worlds, creatures of darkness and great heat. Some species have made their spheres into imitations of whatever their best-loved environments are. At the very top is a re-creation of a primitive oxygen world, flush with forests and seas. This outer shell your astronomers have studied. You conclude that Glory is a succulent target for a colony. That upper layer is deceiving, perhaps deliberately so—we do not know. Certainly Glory is not a simple prospect for your kind.

The Glorians who constructed this shell paradise of theirs also communicate on scales of the galaxy itself. They do not use simple electromagnetics, as you do. There are many worlds, many of them ruled by machine intelligences, who use electromagnetics over stellar scales. Emitting in these ways reveals an emergent society capable of beginner technologies. Most keep silent, their radiated power low, fearing unknown perils. We often found such silent planets. We were drawn to worlds we knew by distant examination were life-bearing, yet electromagnetically quiet.

The Glorians disdain such societies. They wish to speak, over many long eras, with greater minds—those who can blare forth using gravitational waves. Those waves are far harder to detect and stupendously more difficult to emit in coherent fashion, to carry messages. Here again, to radiate at all is a show of power.

These signals you primates have detected but cannot translate. That is unsurprising. So thus have many minds discovered, over many millions of your years. Some of these who hear but cannot understand gravitational waves, the Bowl encountered long ago. The gravitational message landscape is an intricate puzzle few solve.

We Ice Minds have unraveled the Glorian waves, with the help of the Diaphanous. It was a lengthy labor. They are strange, intriguing, and imply much more than they say. We now wish to know the Glorian Masters ourselves, to join in their company. That is why the Bowl now feels itself ready to approach. Before, we did not dare.

For you primates to dare is surely folly.

Beth took a deep breath and watched people from another century—when she grew up, of course—walk down the streets of the English village, the sea breeze sighing, birds all atwitter. So the Ice Minds were making their case for some of SunSeeker’s passengers to stay. Fair enough. The problem was going to be Redwing.

Next came data and text from Tananareve and ship Artilects, dissecting the events with the Diaphanous.

Karl and the Theory Artilect had worked out some ideas about what the hell the Diaphanous beings who had killed Clare could be. Self-organizing magnetic fields, smart bellies full of plasma, harvesting energy from the jet? And bigger than planets? Well, the jet was a puzzle, and managing it seemed beyond the Folk. She and the others had ignored that problem, now pretty obvious once you thought of it. Who mustered solar storms to the jet base? Who got the mag fields aligned so the jet was under steady control?

Something big. Beth tried to envision what would radiate waves kilometers long. That could induce enormous electric fields inside SunSeeker, and sound waves, too. To such creatures, humans might be as inconsequential as the lice that pestered the skin of a blue whale.

Without the Diaphanous, the whole Bowl system was impossible. Want someone to manage a star? Take the children born in stellar magnetic arches, evolved there. Hire the locals.

Enough. She left off the reading to get ready for her appointment with Redwing. Time to don the battle uniform, gal.

Fifty-one

The worst part about the free-bounding exercise he did in zero grav was the sweat. Sweat didn’t run. Redwing clung to a stanchion and mopped some from his eyes, but it was hard to get it all. Some covered his eyes in lenses. Blinking only made his image of the big craft bay wobble. Then his belt rang, reminding him of his appointments with Karl and then Beth.

Karl was waiting. Redwing hated showing up late for a crew appointment, but he had needed the exercise to clear his mind. As they went into his cabin, he saw his wall was running their real-time view. He was glad to see they had rounded the Bowl lip and so could see the Knothole region again. Radiation remained near zero as the Diaphanous sun dwellers’ mag shield followed their orbit. Redwing could not imagine magnetic stresses that could grasp and guide a starship of a thousand tons, but he was getting used to the apparently impossible.

Karl grinned. “It’s been a hell of ride. The way Beth drove us down into the cinch point of the Knothole, and then stood us here, blasting plasma out the back and pushing the standing kink over toward center, into a straight line—wow. Just, wow.”

Redwing nodded. “The finger snakes loved it, too. They’re bright, seemed to know a lot about how the jet works. I’ve seen piloting but never like that. We owe her one.”

“Maybe more than one,” Karl said, but Redwing let it pass.

Karl studied the hurricanes visible on long-range scopes. They were beyond spectacular, when you adjusted for scale. In the fractured zones near the knothole, the seas were giving up their moisture to the lowered atmospheric pressure. An enormous hurricane fed on the air pressure drop, a quickening drift toward the ruptured atmospheric envelope.

“Maybe we need a new term,” Karl said. He stood and pointed on the wall. “See, those eddies form in the big churning spiral, then spin off into hurricanes. It’s a fractal fluid turbulence.” He increased screen resolution. “So those too fling out smaller hurricanes, and so on down to some scale more like Earth’s puny varieties.”

“So more and more of them dance out their fury on the life below,” Redwing said, musing.

“They’ll take a while to patch the tears.” Karl turned away, shaking his head. “We really went too far.”

There was business to do, but he asked instead, “A celebration seems in order—the old eat, drink, and be merry. Plus we’re all tired. Let’s let the Artilects take over, say two hours from now, and muster the crew.”

Karl nodded, distracted. Redwing reflected that at tonight’s party, the entrée steak would not be meat, the wine would be water plus a grape extract and alcohol, and the water was fashioned from their collective piss. After all the deaths, maybe being merry was the hard part.

“Cap’n, this blizzard of info we’re getting from Tananareve and the Folk—it’s hard to digest. We’re getting their point of view, and I try to cock it around to our line of sight.”

“They’re old, we’re young. To be expected.”

Karl gave a wry smile. “Some of these messages, I sort of feel that they should have a space for ‘fill in name, address, and solar system’—it’s hard to grasp their assumptions.”

“And so, hard to know how to negotiate with them?”

“Damn right. Look, the Bowl is on a journey that takes it all over a chunk of the available galaxy. They should’ve settled most of the local arm by now. But these Bird Folk, they’re deeply conservative. They don’t seem to leave colonies.”

Redwing pursed his lips, sat back, and watched the super-hurricane grinding on. He tried not to think about what was happening below them. His work …

“Um. They say that’s because the Bowl is perfect, suited for the smart dinosaurs that built it. Warm, stable, predictable weather. They don’t want to leave it. So?”

“Then who’s doing the exploring? The Folk don’t want to advertise this, but it’s pretty clear. They tried colonies and failed. After millions of years in this nice, steady place—heaven, right?—they don’t work out well on planets.”

“But they say they keep track of every star they’ve visited. That’s how they knew what was going on, the Great Shame, all that.”

Karl leaned forward with a thin smile. “It’s the Ice Minds. They think slow, they live slow, but there’s still room for boredom. They’ve left some of themselves in the local Oort clouds, all over this galactic arm. Plus Earth’s. They like it, there’s no weather there. Stable, gives them lots of data, propagates the species, too.”

“And the Folk?”

“They’re the caretakers. They pick up some new species every million years or so, but mostly they just lord it over all the other species on the Bowl—the Adopted, they call them.”

“And we’re the new kids on the block?”

“Wait’ll you see this.” Karl clicked his tablet and flashed a picture on the opposite wall. A view of two spheres orbiting each other, black and white. A simulation, too clean to be real.

“The Ice Minds think the Glorians have a binary-charged black hole system, Tananareve says. It looks like this, they say. Since the black holes are basically very large charged particles, you could control their orbits with very large electromagnetic containment fields. That avoids collision of the black holes. But then they swerve them a little, so the near misses generate intense gravitational waves. That’s the Glorians’ communication link with other big-time civilizations in the galaxy.”

“And the Ice Minds want in on the conversation?” This was getting stranger than he liked.

“Social climbers, yes. They want to meet the adults, looks like.”

Redwing frowned. “But they can’t have black holes around the Bowl. Too dangerous.”

“Maybe so, but—these black holes are small, maybe a few meters across.”

“That small? It’s still massive.”

“Right, around a hundred times more massive than Earth. Oh, and—the Glorians made the holes, too.”

“What!”

“The Ice Minds want to find out how.”

“And we’re headed there.…” Redwing wanted to think this through, but a polite knock told him it was time for Beth.

Karl said, “I was talking to Fred just now and he made an interesting point. Remember when we all were approaching the Bowl? Flabbergasted, sure. But now, Fred says to him it’s been like a twisted encounter with the eventual human future.”

“That makes no sense.”

“In a tilted way—in Fred’s style of thinking, anyway—SunSeeker left an Earth already pretty well worked over by the human hand. Remember? Sunlight reflected by sulfur dioxide particles shimmering in its stratosphere, so at the right angle we could see it from space. Clouds of seawater mist billowing up from those small sail ships, to shield oceans from sunlight. Big carbon collector towers, stretching out across continents. Farm waste rounded up and consigned to the deep ocean, where it’ll keep for a thousand years. Throwing fine-ground chalk into those oceans every year, remember that?—in masses equal to the white cliffs of Dover.”

Redwing nodded, recalling the furiously working fretwork of corrections. “Right, to offset the acid from absorbed CO2. I was in deep space for decades, running hot nukes. Made no difference to us.”

“Me, too, mostly. Somebody else’s problem, and we had plenty of our own, running closed biospheres.” Karl gave a wry shrug.

“That was pretty much taking on an infinite career, endlessly shaping habitat. So I see Fred’s point—why didn’t he come with you to lay it out?”

Karl gave Redwing a skeptical arched eyebrow. “You don’t know he’s scared of you?”

“He does seem a bit quiet.”

“He’s not when you’re absent. His point is, someone or some thing faced those same problems long ago. They built the Bowl to be a better place. Got tired of planets, probably. Wanted to venture into the night sky, but in no hurry. So they took a big fraction of the species with them. Left behind the stay-at-homes.”

Redwing liked this. “You and Fred are saying they wanted managed landscapes that seemed natural. All nice and dinosaur-friendly warm, under a constant reddish sun. Plus its amigo, the jolly jet.”

Karl chuckled. “God knows what Earth looks like now, centuries into running its biosphere.”

“Is this a way of saying you and Fred want to stay on the Bowl?”

“Not at all!”

“Um. So what do I do with this new input?” He disliked asking advice from crew, but at least they were alone. “How does it affect going to Glory?”

“I thought you should hear what the crew thinks. Time’s up, I know.” Karl stood and saluted. “I want to go see the show at Glory, sir. Sail on.” He left.

When Beth came in, he could see her jaw set at a determined angle. She had looked that way through the long hard hours straightening the standing knot. When it was done, she had barely made it to her quarters.

“Captain, I formally request transfer to the colony on the Bowl.”

“Colony?” Things were moving too damn fast.

“The Folk—okay, they’re just speaking for the Ice Minds now—they say Cliff’s team all want to stay. I want to join them.”

“Look, I can’t have crew leaving. We need a sharp pilot—”

“Warm one up. I’m a biologist first, just a backup pilot, really.”

“You’re our best! The way you flew us—”

“Then it’s payback time, Captain. You made the deal with the Folk, right?”

“Not the Folk, no. The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous, actually, seems like.”

“You have to leave some of us on the Bowl, then. So leave enough to reproduce without inbreeding.”

“The genetic stores—”

“Need enough founding population to reduce risk, even with the genetic augmentations from the database. That’s at least a hundred people, no, several hundred. Defrost them while we’re resupplying.”

“You want a—”

“Colony. That’s what we were sent for.”

Redwing told himself to stay steady, calm, but his heart thumped harder. “I’ll have to do that anyway, Beth. The finger snakes want to ride with us. Just the three, a male and two females; they don’t seem to have an inbreeding problem. But fifty Sil have already been picked. There are other species who might want to board. The Artilects say they can rework the freezer capsules, but some of our passengers will have to stay awake longer than optimal.”

“You’ve got room for a bigger live crew, don’t you? You’re launching fully provisioned, yes? We’re already near relativistic speed.”

“Faster than that. We’ll fly up the Jet and get a boost from rounding the sun. Sure you want to miss that?”

“I’m sure. I’m the one who wants to stay, Captain. Cliff is going along with that.”

Redwing sighed. “Then there’s no room for Bird Folk, of course, except as fertilized eggs and an artificial womb—but they want that, and it’s a big volume.”

Beth’s mouth twisted. “After all they did to us?”

“It’s part of our deal. Those Folk don’t run the Bowl, they’re more like the cop on the beat—”

“Corrupt cops. They kill other species to keep some equilibrium of theirs running. It’s a murderous regime. They chased us, imprisoned us—”

“We’ll be carrying them because we could hardly carry Ice Minds. Though we will have a Diaphanous—more on that later, when it’s worked out.”

“But your charge Earthside wasn’t to pick up aliens and carry them—”

“You have to adjust your initial launch orders to the situation. Beth, I’ll have to download nearly half our passengers, and how do I pick them? It isn’t as if I could thaw them and let them choose. They get no more vote than the unborn.”

Beth said, “Pick mated couples. Pick the ones who wanted to colonize rather than explore. We were tested for attitudes.”

“We were all picked for adaptability. Even so…”

She leaned forward, smiling. He sat back, a little mouth twitch telling her he found that a bit strange. “Look at our larger aim—to get humanity out into the galaxy. Play the big game. This way we have two colonies.”

“Glory’s a bigger game,” he said. She hadn’t heard Karl go on about the black hole radiator theory, but no doubt she would in the mess, later, when the reconstituted booze started flowing.

“Glory’s not our kind of game, I’d guess. Not yet.” She shrugged ruefully. “It’s maybe a league up from what we can handle. The Bowl was tough enough.”

Redwing knew enough to wait. Her voice became soft, almost sympathetic. “But we’ll get there. The Bowl will get our first human colony to Glory. Long after I’m dead, sure—and I’m hoping to reach two hundred. Hell, more! But we humans, we’ll get there. And be waiting to meet up with you.”

Redwing frowned. “I have orders.”

“And crew. You’ll have nearly a thousand left in cold sleep. Plus, y’know, not all our people on the ground down there want to stay. Tananareve doesn’t! She’s had enough of the Folk, thank you.”

“Okay, I heard that. You want to reunite with Cliff, too. So you’ll join this Bowl colony you want.”

“Right. But not because of Cliff, especially. He’s important to me, sure, but—oh, that’s right. You probably know from the field reports—somebody must’ve blabbed, though it’s obvious— He’s been screwing Irma.”

“Well, I’m not prepared to reveal—”

“You don’t have to. Put people under dire threat for many months, and the prospect of death makes them set about being sure there’s going to be a replacement. Plus it feels good when the world threatens you. Hey, I’m a biologist.”

“I know. And Irma’s coming with us. So is her husband. You don’t—?”

“I don’t mind. Irma, Cliff—that was a ‘field event,’ as we used to call it. Whatever works in a pinch, I say. And … isn’t that party you talked about earlier about to start?”

A big sunny smile. And she gave him, unmistakably, a wink.

Fifty-two

He got back to his cabin only a bit squiffed. Odd term, squiffed. He had inherited it from his grandfather, who had never given a definition. It was pretty clear, though. Pleasantly inebriated but in control. As a captain should be.

Redwing also recalled a parting remark from his commanding officer, just before he took the shuttle out to SunSeeker for his last transfer. Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery. You had to give them room.

There was plenty more to being a captain than bulldog stubbornness. Beth was good at giving him a different angle on events. It had been fun seeing her play with the finger snakes tonight. Who knew that they liked alcohol, too? There had been a lot of laughter, the pure long gasps that meant pressures were easing somewhere deep inside.

Beth was good, quite so. But she hadn’t seen that the Ice Minds wanted Tananareve to go forward to Glory on SunSeeker, as part of their exploratory advance party. Tananareve would be able to report back to the Folk—or maybe directly to the Ice Minds?—in an intuitive way. Better than the rest of the rude invader primates, since now they knew how her mind worked.

He still hadn’t told Beth all of it.

The ship would run up the jet, gulping plasma, boosting hard, and as it flew past the sun, SunSeeker would gain one more passenger. A Diaphanous would ride the motor. The Diaphanous thought that was a fresh opportunity, helping shape the magnetic geometry and exhaust parameters, while clinging to the ship and its scoop geometry. They’d never tried such a lark before. And maybe they wanted to meet up with the Diaphanous species on yet another star? Redwing suspected he would never truly know their motives.

SunSeeker’s Artilects had already been brought up to speed on that. Would a magnetic pattern obey a ship’s captain?

That problem could wait. He shrugged off his uniform and decided to shower in the morning. He brushed his teeth and dropped the plastic glass as he tried to dump the waste rinse water into the tiny bowl his cabin alone had. Was he losing his ability to process alcohol? Well, so be it. After all, he was somewhere in his eighties.

He stared into the Bowl. They had called this huge artifact Wokworld when they first found it, but names were just pigeonholes. The feeling he had gotten, at first glance, seeing the vast spinning machine at a distance, was of some parasite grasping a star, sucking life from it. And charging forward, too, using that raw energy to move, forever restless, onward into the great night.

Beth had been a quick, sharp slap in the face today. She had made him see the bigger view of what they were here for. He owed her for that. And he would miss her, he just now realized.

Should he just stay here, dock SunSeeker somehow, and join the happy guys down on the Bowl? No. He had a clear duty and he would carry it out, even if all those who had ordered him were dead.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one, he had heard somewhere in his Fleet training. Somehow in this evening, with Beth’s help, he had made a lot of them.

On his wall he called up the real-time view of the landscape passing below them. They were headed for a good place to rendezvous with the lander they had sent down. The Folk would put Tananareve on board—and Aybe, who had just changed his mind; tech types often did. The Folk would send up supplies, and it shouldn’t take long to mate their comm gear with SunSeeker’s, so they could stay in close touch with the Bowl, and get going again. Bound for Glory.

Yes—squiffed he was. Indeed, sir. Onward.

This Bowl was not so strange, after all. Maybe it meant that really advanced societies overshot their agenda, gliding for a while in the enameled perfection of their way of life, following habits deep-grained and evolved long before. So they correct and modify and engineer and correct again. Build big and think big and think again. The Bowl was the first big strange idea humanity had really met—terrifying and intriguing. And among many yet to come. Of that he was sure. Terrors can be mirrors, too.

Details. The tortured landscapes below passed before his eyes like an unending scroll. He thought of how the decisions that seem momentous in the moment, or even over a lifetime, were flickering instants in the life of the Bowl. These matters were too small to be observed by the Ice Minds, just single passing lives.

The Bowl had made them look back across a gulf of not mere centuries or millennia, but on the grand scale of evolution itself. Maybe that was the true deep purpose of coming out here among the stars. To see times that glowed and shimmered in memory’s flickering light.

He had a thought. Was there more than one Bowl, coasting around the galaxy? Maybe such things were a technological niche that others thought of and inhabited—very-long-view things, hard to quite grasp for humans. Maybe if alien species had the right precursor society—that of those smart dinosaurs, who loved warmth and sun and stillness—then their love of a forever summer would make them build such contraptions. If so, the blunt hammer of evolution gave another strategy to gain the stars, one different from smart, talky primates.

Whatever waited at Glory, in its stacked levels, there was a biosphere on top, a place to love beneath a star that had a sunset every day. Beings who lived in layers would be strange indeed, and humanity would have to adapt. Redwing smiled. If the Bowl had taught him anything, it was about human versatility. He would be alert when he reached Glory after a long sleep, and he liked his odds.

It couldn’t be stupid to voyage out in small vessels, to distant worlds where beauty and happiness would get redefined again and again. Even if Earth became a distant and perhaps wistful memory—as all his crew and himself would inevitably be, for sure—the expansion of human horizons was an ultimate good. Whatever built the Bowl had believed that, too. There was something comforting in that thought alone.

Time for bed.