Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford

  “And that’s nearly our ship velocity. Sure seems high for a star.”

  Abduss nodded. “A bit less than ours, so we overtook it. But yes, unusual for a star.”

  They glanced at each other and Beth wondered why the Wickramsinghs liked unveiling mysteries one step at a time. A cultural thing? Maybe they just hadn’t wanted to shock her too much, so soon after revival? She had to admit, her head was still feeling a bit woozy — and not from the cold or the drugs. Conceptual overload. If she hadn’t seen the thing on the screens with her own eyes …

  Try to think straight. Beth asked, “Could … could the flares we see at the center of the star be responsible?”

  Mayra shook her head. “How? Surely they are caught by the cap.”

  Beth drew herself a sketch with an unsteady hand. “The flares point toward the cap, and the star is accelerating away from the cap? And there’s a hole in it.”

  Abduss said, “I wondered about that. The cap keeps away, even though the star’s gravity attracts it.”

  She thought of such colossal masses in flight, the balance of forces necessary to keep them from colliding. How? “What’s moving all this?”

  “The jet escapes, driving the entire configuration forward,” Abduss said. The Wickramsinghs shook their heads, apparently still amazed at the immense contraption. She could see why they had awakened Cliff first, rather than Redwing. Cliff’s specialty lay in dealing with the oddities of life that Glory might hold, at being flexible. A biologist, true, not an astrophysics type. Yet he had devised the idea of flying up the jet, and they hadn’t.

  A long still silence … and an idea came, lifted an eyebrow at her. She recalled suddenly that old phrase for understanding: to see the light.

  “The missing element, it’s — the light,” she said. “The whole setup has to be using the starlight from Wickramsingh’s Star.”

  “How?” Redwing asked skeptically.

  “Let’s get as many spectral views of this thing as we can on the approach,” Beth said.

  She had her add-ins working so sent a question and got back

  SPECTRAL SYNTHESIS-BASED ABUNDANCE MEASUREMENTS OF FE AND THE ALPHA ELEMENTS MG, SI, CA, AND TI —

  — so she realized she would just have to rely on ship’s diagnostics visually presented. This was going to be the perfect collision of shipboard smart systems and the unknown — with her in the middle. At hallucinogenic speeds.

  She had a big fat intuition and nothing more. Everyone had a right to their own intuitions, but no one had a right to their own facts. Best to let the facts speak.

  * * *

  Now came Beth’s moment. Piloting is not a committee event. Even Redwing could only watch and make decisions, while the artistry of magnetic steering lay in Beth’s hands.

  “Wish me luck,” she said with strained bravado as the ship drifted into the pearly plume of the jet.

  Cliff hugged her and kissed her cheek, but she was already riveted on the lively screens curving before her acceleration couch. He whispered, “Good luck, yes,” and retreated to his own couch, within watching distance.

  Wickramsingh’s Star was a smoldering beacon seen through the knothole that let the jet escape. “What’ll we call it?” Beth asked from the board.

  “Knothole, then,” Redwing said tensely.

  Near the star’s hot spot, at the foot of the blossoming jet, coronal magnetic arches twisted in endless fury. Storms jostled one another all over the star, brimming with X-ray violence. It almost seemed as if the red dwarf had a skin disease.

  They swept in behind, lining up. The speed of overtaking was now visible from hour to hour as the bowl swelled. Beth went with little sleep, aided by mild performance drugs that she carefully monitored. Abduss and Mayra spelled her when she started to nod off. She stayed with the board, trying to remain steady through her jittery anxiety — but aren’t pilots supposed to be rock-steady, girl? — and couldn’t help but speculate. The bowl’s outside, seen in infrared, was crusted and simmering in the eternal starnight. Colossal structural beams coiled around it in a dark longitude–latitude grid. It hung there, spinning, dutifully following behind its parent star. Its cool nightside scarcely reflected any of the bright stars.

  “The spectra look to be some metal–carbon composite,” Mayra observed. “Not like our alloys at all.”

  Cliff had no important role in all this. He made the meals and washed up while the crew worked their bridge stations with unrelenting devotion. Every plot change they checked and rechecked. Beth could tell that Cliff was impressed by their close teamwork, once the goal was clear. They could focus on technical details at last, and were obviously happier to do so.

  Cliff made himself fade into the background. He had little role here, but he didn’t sleep much either. Beth could read his unspoken thought: If he was going to die, at least he wanted to be awake.

  In the unending din of the scoop engines, it was a struggle not to let feelings overly influence her thinking. Irritation mounted as she tried to do precise calculations and maneuvers. She projected all kinds of fantasies upon the growing mote as they screeched around, the ramscoop fields readjusting to a turning maneuver they had never been designed for. Artfully, Abduss and Beth used the star’s gravity to swing Seeker into the exact vector that the dwarf sun was patiently following.

  Beth got edgy with their eyes on her — or was that the fatigue talking? Redwing sensed this, so he and Cliff spent their time writing the report for Earthside, with full data and visuals. They were on the bridge, sending it out through the laser link at their stern, when it struck her. What were the odds that SunSeeker would come upon Wickramsingh’s Star when their velocities were aligned?

  Redwing looked startled when she pointed this out. “We’re both headed toward Glory. Damn.”

  “They want to colonize Glory, too?” Mayra asked.

  “Can’t be,” Abduss countered when he came onto the comm deck. “What would be the point? That bowl has tens of millions of times the area of a planet.”

  This seemed an obvious killer argument. Still … their velocities were aligned. Bound for Glory. With Sol dead aft.

  “Maybe they just wander from star to star?” the captain asked. “Interstellar tourists?”

  Nobody answered.

  Redwing said cautiously, “You were briefed on the gravitational waves?” and looked around.

  They all nodded. “Can’t keep secrets from the tech types, boss,” Beth said without moving her eyes from the shifting displays.

  Abduss said, “You suggest perhaps this construction, this bowl, is seeking the source?”

  “Makes sense, I’d think. A puzzle, isn’t it?” Redwing looked around again.

  Mayra said, “It is noise, or so scientists thought when we departed.”

  “Any chance this bowl thing could be the source of the grav waves?” Redwing gestured. “Maybe this jet?”

  “There are no masses of size that could make such waves,” Cliff said. “I read up on it while Beth was waking.”

  Abduss said, “The Glory system has no obvious enormous masses either.”

  Redwing thought. “Maybe they’re going to Glory for its grav wave generator?”

  Cliff shrugged. None of their ideas sounded right.

  “Not that intuition is a reliable guide here,” Beth said wryly, over her shoulder. She never took her eyes from the panels. Soon enough they got back to work, plotting and piloting. The intense work was a relief to them, a respite from the uncertainties of their lot. Beth saw Cliff come onto the bridge; he clearly envied them. At least their days were full.

  They vectored in on the center of Wickramsingh’s Star’s bowl, keeping a respectful distance. Beth trimmed their velocity by cutting back the engines. “Maybe letting them rest a bit will make them run better later,” she said, but she didn’t believe it. The jet plasma running through the Knothole had plenty of fast ions in its plume, and these pushed steadily against their ramscoop fields. Shudders ran the length of
the long ship. The deck hummed with long, slow tremors. For the first time in her life, Beth felt like an old sea captain, riding out a hurricane.

  Now the jet was visible to the unaided eye as they neared it. They could see it as a pearly churn lit with darting flashes of blue and yellow — recombination of the plasma, Abduss said, atoms condensing out of the torrent and sputtering out their characteristic spectra. The control deck lights were ruby for visibility, stepped far down. A direct view through a window would have burned out their eyes and set the room aflame.

  As it flowed away from the bowl, the long jet was oddly tight. Beth close-upped the views. “Looks like the jet narrows down at the Knothole, then flares out. Look, some regularly spaced bright spots in the outflow.”

  “An instability, I would gather,” Abduss said. He was fidgeting but he kept his voice calm. “The jet must have been magnetically squeezed as it passed through the Knothole.”

  Corkscrew filaments crawled along it, Beth saw, like one of those old barber poles. They could now see longer along the luminous lance of the jet as it speared through the opening, an exact circle far bigger than the span between Earth and its moon. Mayra trained all their scopes on the rim of the circle. The microwave spectrum crackled with bursts of noise from the spaced bright spots: pinched-in electrons singing their protests.

  * * *

  Abduss close-upped the bowl at a good angle and Cliff felt his heart leap as the resolution grew.

  In the side-scatter of the star’s somber rays, they saw what looked like enormous coils, bathed in lukewarm beauty. “Those are bigger than mountain ranges,” Abduss said in a whisper.

  Without thinking it through, Cliff had expected that whatever built the bowl had long since died out. Decay, collapse, extinction — these were the fates of whole species hammered on the anvil of time, not merely of civilizations. This thing had to be old. But it still worked. The star’s solar wind got funneled stably into the jet, pushing the whole vast construct to high velocity. What could have thought of this, never mind actually build it?

  Beth began getting stronger signals in the microwave spectra — a rising buzz of electromagnetic signals as Seeker neared the cap. Mayra began to detect a haze of watery nitrogen at the innermost edge of the circle, farther in than the coils.

  “Air?” Beth asked aloud. No one answered. Cliff thought about the inner surface of the bowl, a land holding millions of times Earth’s area.

  And more: Close-upped through the churning refractions of SunSeeker’s plasma shroud, the shell clearly rotated as a single piece. “Of course,” Mayra said. “Centrifugal gravity.”

  They merged their measurements and built up an image on the main screen. The bright plasma jet pierced the bowl’s hemisphere through a ribbed hole. “Kind of like a weird teacup,” Redwing said. “Cupworld.”

  For long moments no one spoke. Then Redwing said with elaborate casualness, “Abduss, check if there’s any new tightbeam traffic from Earth.”

  “There has been none for — ”

  “Now,” Redwing said firmly. Beth understood: Abduss needed something to do.

  The deck took up a long, deep vibration none of them had ever heard before, an ominous bass note they felt rather than heard. “We’re entering the edges of the jet,” Beth said tersely. “Picking up — well, plasma surf, I guess you’d call it.”

  Redwing frowned. “Full brake. Cycle the magnetics.”

  “Roger.” Beth worked the large board, eyes never still.

  The bowl seemed to swell quickly. “We’re locked in on the jet.” The deep bass note swelled. “And — slowing. We’re flying straight up the jet.”

  SunSeeker made its agonizing turn. To pivot the ship on its plasma plume demanded the skill of an ice skater, combined with an acrobat, spinning in three dimensions under thrust. In interstellar space, where most hydrogen is a gas and not broken into ions and electrons, Seeker ionized the gas ahead with a shock wave driven by its own oscillating magnetic snowplow. The pressure waves plunged ahead, grabbing the electrons available and smacking them into the hydrogen gas molecules. Properly adjusted — which took Beth only moments to tune — there was enough time for the hydrogen to break up into protons and electrons. The gas fried into a torch of fizzing ions. That left a plasma column just ahead of the ship, ready to be netted and swallowed by their magnetic dipole scoop, then fed down into the fusion reaction chambers. The trick was to torque the ship while riding atop this angry, spitting column.

  Seeker curved sideways by a mere few degrees, letting the target star gain a little on them. Then they curled behind it. Lacy filaments played before them as the jet grew near. They swerved fully into the jet with a hard, wrenching turn that slammed them all against the left arms of their couches for … forever.

  * * *

  Starships do not easily change directions. Sweat popped out on Beth’s brow; a swipe of her hand on a touchpoint started a cool breeze. Throughout SunSeeker, joints strummed, echoing in the long corridors. Auxiliary craft shifted and strained on their mountings. Beth wondered if the ship could take it, and then if she could.

  Finally they straightened and felt the push of the sun’s jet against their magnetic collector fields. Beth surged forward from the deceleration, straps cutting into her. In the wraparound omniview screen, set to all parts of the spectrum, plumes of incandescent plasma skated and veered around their prow. Their total speed was higher than the star’s, but as they came around under the great bowl and into the furious jet, another force came into play. She felt it, became alarmed, then understood. SunSeeker began to twist, corkscrewing steadily around in the rushing plasma torrent. They all felt the grinding force of it, a giant’s slow twirl.

  “Y’know, I was kinda wondering what held this jet so straight and tight,” Beth said in a conversational tone, her hands moving quick and sure over the many induction controls. “Magnetic fields do the job, generated by a current in the jet itself.”

  “Uh, so?” Redwing said. He was not a technical type, she recalled.

  “Somebody’s designed this to use the star’s own fields, sucking them into a jet. They form those helical filaments we saw on our approach.”

  “Currents?” Mayra was alarmed. “We are mostly metal, a conductor — ”

  “So the currents are running around us, but not into us. Conveys angular momentum. Same as airliners flying through lightning on Earth. But — what a ride! Feel the twist!”

  Beth turned to grin at them all and saw startled dismay. Okay, not everybody likes surfing. An acquired taste.

  “Hey, I’ve got us under control. No sweat. It’s a big magnetic helix.” Put forward the best news, worry about the rest later. “And that means we’ll follow a longer path, take more time — so we’ll get more deceleration out of the jet.”

  No change of expression. Passengers! No fun in them …

  * * *

  They ran hard and hot for hours and then hours more. Beth felt the strain, but somehow didn’t mind. Riding the plasma knots without battering the ship was … well, fun. Her heart was pounding away joyfully. Excitement did that for her as nothing else could. She had been a skydiver and surfer and skier, savoring the sensation of dealing with artful speed. Zest!

  But whenever she grinned, Redwing frowned. After a while, claiming that she needed the stretch, she got out of her harness and couch and stood while she worked the board. The AIs were laboring hard, carrying out a lot of the minor adjustments. For a while there, the ship gained a lot of charge on seams and edges, and Beth was afraid something would start shorting out. Too many electrons jockeying on the skin. But then she blew the charge off with a proton-rich plasma pulse — pure inspiration, plus freshman physics — and they got right with Mister Coulomb again.

  She stayed standing. This was like surfing the longest wave in the universe, buffeted and sprayed and rough — but it thrilled her to her soul, every zooming kilometer of the way.

  And here came the Knothole. She got back into her couch. Fu
n’s over … maybe.

  Somebody was talking behind her and she let it go. Pilots don’t listen to passengers, not if they’re smart.

  Beth lunged painfully forward into her shoulder straps. The bowl ahead yawned like a flat plane — with a bull’s-eye target. She could see intricate ribbing around its polar opening, a ridge around the Knothole. Engineered current-carrying circuits, bigger than continents? Something had to make the magnetic fields that shaped plasma from the sun, fields that were also pushing against their ship now with a fierce, blinding gale. Something huge.

  “No trouble decelerating now,” she said matter-of-factly, to calm the others. She need not turn to look at them; she could smell their fear. They swam upstream against the jet. Now the magnetic braking was worse than anything Seeker had ever been designed for. The ship popped and groaned. The bowl came rushing at them. Deep bass notes rang through the ship, vibrating Beth’s couch, rattling everything.…

  Focus. She flew through the bowl’s exhaust Knothole, hugging the edge to avoid cremation. A noose of magnetic fields at the Knothole boundary tightened the jet like water in a constriction. Flow velocity rose against the ship. Running creases crossed the shock waves they rode. She saw the bowl was thicker at the Knothole than elsewhere — to carry bigger stresses? And eerie lightning played along the Knothole rim.

  She dispatched an AI to map the Knothole magnetic geometry and in seconds a color-coded 3-D map unfurled on a screen. “The noose we’re going through is bounded by dipolar fields,” she said abstractly. “And the dipoles are kept in line with another field, perpendicular to the dipoles — so the magnetic stresses can’t reconnect and die. Neat.”

  Murmurs from behind her egged her on. Analysis, tension-relieving talk, cheers — all just a chorus she ignored.

  “Plus, ladies and gentlemen, it’s radioactive as hell around here,” Beth said, adding brightly, “but an interstellar surfboard — that’s us — is designed for that.”

  They slammed ahead, losing speed. She surged forward in her harness, adjusted, and surged again. Surfing the big one. Ride of a lifetime. If you survive …