Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford

  He mentioned this to Irma as the “day” was drawing to a close, and she said immediately, looking him in the eye, “Beth. Obviously.”

  This made him blink because it was obvious and he had not seen it. “I … suppose so.”

  “Just as I miss and want Herb.” Still the direct stare.

  “Of course.” That was his filler phrase while he tried to think, but Irma wasn’t having any.

  She shot back, “You don’t remember Herb, do you?”

  “Uh, engineer, right?”

  “No, he’s a systems man.”

  “Well, that sort of engin — ”

  “Redwing was going to revive him to work on the drive problem, but we got too busy.”

  “And you miss him.…” Cliff resorted to a leading phrase to get away from the Beth issue, but it didn’t work.

  She said, “We’re helping each other through the hard stuff, Cliff. I want you to know that’s all it is.”

  “Of course.” Pause. “Not that I don’t have, well, real feelings toward you.”

  She smiled. “I do, too, but they’re — how to say? — not deep.”

  “Sex does have what the psychers call a ‘utility function,’ yes.”

  “As long as we both know that. And speaking of it, I’m not really tired … yet.”

  This was clearly a lead-in, so he smiled and said, “I’ve got to take a stroll before settling down.”

  The team followed a set procedure when they slept. Find a secure place, often one that surveyed the land around them but was in shadow. Be sure nothing could approach silently by rigging lines that would rattle some gear if tripped. Post a guard if the situation looked risky. Have a spot where people could retreat for a toilet, perhaps even fresh water.

  Today — the term meant nothing more than their awake interval — they camped under a broad canopy of tall trees. Wildlife chattered and jeered above as they walked through dense vegetation. Cliff always kept aware of his flanks and regularly turned to look back, to recall the path. They kept silent, wary. What he called a smokebush bristled with its tiny branches, easing slowly toward them as it sensed their motion. It could snare only insects and small birds, but a moving plant still gave him the creeps.

  Irma checked above, head swiveling regularly, and they were a few hundred meters from camp when she abruptly turned and kissed him. He responded to her quick kisses and short, panting breath, and only when her clothes were mostly off did he notice that there was no comfortable place to lie down. “Maybe we should walk some more that — ”

  “There’s a slanted tree, see?”

  “Yeah, those zigzag trees. I think exploit the sun’s constant position. See, they stage tiers of upward-facing limbs and leaves, to cup the sunlight. Each layer is staggered to the side, so a single tree, seen from above, makes a broad emerald area, captures more sun.”

  “Faaaa-scinating.”

  Her dry tone made him turn and she kissed him hard and deep. Oh yeah, we came here to —

  She backed him onto the broad, slick-barked wood. He shucked his trousers down to his ankles, and she smiled when she saw he was ready.

  “There.” She settled on him. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Lots better.”

  “Stay still.”

  He wheezed with her weight as she moved. “Oh … kay.”

  “Hold me … here.”

  In the long moments he felt the breeze caress them with soft aromas and listened for any sound that might be a threat. Fidget birds that were always chattering and scattering chose this moment to go jumping through a nearby bush. He glanced to check, then focused on her eyes, which were drilling into him with concentration.

  You’re never off duty, he thought, and she whispered, “Slow. Don’t rush it. Slow. Keep doing that. Oh yes. God, Herb, yes, that’s it. Just like that.”

  He said nothing about the name, just concentrated. A small tremor came from branches above, then stopped. Wind whistled, wood creaked. “Lift up a little.”

  “That?” he gasped out.

  Then it got fast and intense and he lost all sense of place. When he came, it was hard and the scents of the woodland swarmed up into his nostrils.

  “Ah … Okay.” She exhaled a long, fluttery sigh and something fell on them.

  “Snake!” she cried, and rolled away. So did the snake. It was long and fat and slithered away.

  Cliff stood and snatched up his pants, which were caught in his boots. Not smart, he thought just before the second snake appeared. It paused, rearing up to a meter height on a fidgeting stand of short tails. The beady eyes jerked around, studying them. It’s smart, he thought, and saw two more snakes come weaving out of the leafy background. They smelled like grease and ginger. Their eyes yawned wide in surprise.

  Then they all paused. Cliff could now see all four snakes, taking their time as they studied Irma. He plucked his laser from his belt and said, “Just stay still. Don’t look threatening.”

  “Me don’t look threatening?”

  This provoked some signals between the snakes, their slim heads jutting as they rasped out soft sounds. Do they recognize that we’re using a language? Their sibilants also seemed like words, modulated with clicks and head-juts. He noticed suddenly that two snakes had a belt tightened near their heads, and small slim things like tools tucked into loops.

  The moment hung in the soft air. The snakes eyed one another, heads jerked back to regard the humans, they rapped out a few more short bursts — and then darted away.

  Cliff started after them and Irma called, “Let them go!”

  He didn’t fear them somehow. They hadn’t bitten. Maybe this was just an accident.

  They were just strange enough to make him follow the wiggling shapes through the understory of thrashing green limbs, long stems with leaves, and flowering plants. After thirty meters he was going to give up, but the snakes, moving in parallel now and weaving in sequence like a wave, turned toward an out-jut of dirt. They went into a hole about twenty centimeters across, each taking a turn while the others turned to confront Cliff. The last one hissed something loudly, turned, and slipped quickly inside.

  Irma came up beside him. “What the — ?”

  “I want to know more about those.”

  “Hell, they made me wet myself.”

  “They’re tool users. I — ”

  “Snakes? Come on.”

  “And they’re smart.”

  “Snakes!”

  “They got away from us, didn’t they?”

  FORTY

  They came down the spire easily, cushioned on magnetic fluxes that Aybe treated like a rubbery ski slope.

  They got him to slow down, but he always took a slide when there was a catch basin below. Then he would fetch them up against the opposing slope, braking with the magnetic fields that were surprisingly strong within one meter of the rock.

  Most of the catch basins held deep blue water. The look of mountain lakes rimmed by trees reminded Cliff of hiking in the Sierras, which were much the same as centuries ago, judging from the Ansel Adams photos he had studied.

  After all, humans had restored the ancient world they destroyed in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the Great Rewilding. In Siberia, people had even carried out a Pleistocene rewilding, bringing back wolves, lynx, cougars, wolverines, grizzlies, and sea otters — top carnivores driven nearly to extinction. Once the human population fell back to two billion, there was room.

  Cliff had helped in that when a boy. Nothing biotech or major, just clearance of invasive species. He left near dawn in summers, wearing oiled pants to fend off chaparral scratches, carrying a big knife, a pick mattock, and binocs. Who meets the dawn owns the day, his father always said — and remembering this, he felt a pang that the father who had said good-bye to him with a firm handshake at their parting was now dead over a century.

  In those bright summer days, he had killed invasive pampas grass, flamboyant blond plumes that sucked nutrients from the
California soil and fed nothing. He cut and gouged down stands as big as his house. He was a bio-bigot supreme, angry at tough, foreign plants that took all and gave nothing. Far better than going after trout or deer, and better, rougher exercise. It felt good to yank pampas grass up. Then the chem death — spray the roots and dug-out ground with an herbicide sting.

  The memory made him think of how any mind could build this Bowl and make it work. It was millions of times larger in area than the whole Earth. How did they deal with species and change?

  Even California was hard to manage, demanding lots of gut labor. The golden hills where he grew up were in fact an outcome of invasive Spanish grasses. Those outcompeted the native bunchgrasses, whose deeper roots kept them green through the year. But the climate warming of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries favored the feisty, talented travelers people called weeds — which just meant a plant someone didn’t like — that were more robust compared to the local Spanish grasses. So change came again, and the Bowl would face such sweeping alterations, too.

  Moodily mulling this over, he hardly noticed when Terry nudged him. “Something big.”

  Aybe saw it, too, and angled them over into shelter below a ledge. A long blue green tube was drifting high up across the sky. It was partway through a turn, coming around so the nose pointed their way.

  “It’s seen us,” Terry said. “And coming down. Speeding up.”

  Aybe said, “Same old deal — you trade altitude for velocity.”

  “So they’ve got blimps,” Terry said. “Makes sense, with this deep an atmosphere.”

  “Yeah,” Aybe said. “Got no fossil fuels, hard to run a plane without ’em. Might as well float.”

  Irma pointed. “Not a blimp. Fins moving. Rowing in the sky? Look — ” She close-upped with her binocs. “ — it’s got eyes.”

  “A living blimp,” Cliff said. “That’s one adaptation I didn’t think of.”

  Through his binocs he close-upped the warty hide of the thing. Bumps and gouges expanded into turrets and sealed locks. Yet the thing had big eyes and ample fins like the sails of a fat ship. They canted to catch the wind and he saw other eyes toward the stern of it.

  How could such a thing evolve? He had seen floating birdlike things with big, orange throats they could expand. But he’d guessed that was just a sexual display, not a navigational trick. There were odd slits in its side. At extreme magnification he saw things moving along there and abruptly knew he was seeing through a transparent window. The tiny shapes visible there looked like the Bird Folk. “Living, sure. With passengers.”

  Irma said, “I can see the tail as it comes around. Big! It’s sure hard to judge distance here. From the detail, I can see it’s a long way off, ten klicks at least.”

  Terry said, “So it’s really large.…”

  “We’d better run,” Aybe said, and took the magcar whooshing down the slope. He popped up the field screen to deflect the wind.

  Terry said, “Circle round, block their view so they can’t see us as they approach.”

  “Right,” Cliff said, thinking. “Run into those canyons and stay low. We’ll be hidden then.”

  They continued down, Aybe deftly buffeting them against the magnetic fields. This took them frighteningly close to the sheets of rock that made up the spire. “Stay near the trees, at least!” shouted Terry. “If we smack those rocks at these speeds — ”

  “Don’t bother me!” Aybe shouted, and narrowed his eyes, gripping the yoke tightly. Sweat ran down his brow and dripped off his chin.

  They got into a narrow canyon just as something came arcing through the sky. It was a slim airplane with visible pilots. “Should’ve known they’d send something faster. Think they saw us?”

  “We were visible only a few seconds — ”

  The canyon wall exploded. Shards and chunks of rock rained down. The windshield proved to be better than that. Cliff jerked his head up at the wham of impact and saw a rock larger than his head fall, tumbling, then sag into the field shield and bounce off.

  Aybe threw the yoke forward and they accelerated, a meter above the rough ground. The car jittered as the magnetics dealt with the onrushing shelves of rock in the canyon floor.

  Carl heard somebody’s breath rasping in and out. He had heard it before. It was his. The others were hanging on as Aybe made a hard left into a narrow side cut. What if this is a box canyon? Cliff thought but decided not to say. It was too late. They rounded the sharp curve and another wham behind them threw rocks and gravel against the magcar. Cliff looked up but could not see the plane. Aybe took a hard right into a passage that angled steeply up so only a sliver of sky showed.

  Irma said, “If we get trapped in here — ”

  “We’re not running, we’re hiding,” Aybe said flatly. “I don’t think they can see us this far down in a crevice.”

  Terry said, “You decided that without a word?”

  “There wasn’t time. They threw missiles at us so fast, I could barely stay out of their view. They’d catch us eventually.”

  Irma said, “You’re right. Or anyway, we have to stick with this now.”

  Terry hunched down and twisted his mouth skeptically. “What if they just use bigger warheads?”

  “I doubt they can. Punching away at the understructure of this Bowl is risky,” Cliff said. “I’d bet they don’t use heavy ordnance.”

  “Let’s hope,” Terry said.

  So they sat. They kept the screen up, which in turn muffled outside sounds. They sat so they could watch in all four directions, including up at the crooked line of blue sky. That soon went white from clouds scudding in. They could hear no sounds of the plane or the colossal balloon creature, and neither crossed the crack of sky.

  Purple clouds slid across the narrow slit above. For a moment they drew down the windscreen and listened. A breeze stirred the sand nearby but they could hear no odd sounds. “We’d better just stay here, lie still, draw no fire,” Aybe said.

  So they waited a long hour. Then another.

  Terry got impatient. They dropped the screen again, and everyone got out to pee. Cliff squatted in a side passage and had just finished up using the paper tree bark to clean himself when suddenly big raindrops smacked his head. More spattered down as he ran back, getting soaked. By the time he got there, torrents were hammering on the magcar and bringing a prickly tinge of ozone as lightning forked and crackled. He was last and they all got more wet when Aybe dropped the screen to let Cliff in.

  They sat and watched noisy water splash down the rock walls. Streams rushed by, gathering force and lapping at the car.

  “We’d better get the hell out of here,” Terry said.

  Aybe scowled skeptically at the rushing water. “Okay. I’d rather get caught than drown.”

  “If water gets drawn up into our undercarriage — ” Cliff stopped. “Never mind, we don’t really know how this thing works anyway.”

  This had been bothering him, but it did no good to say so now. You learn more with your mouth shut, he thought. Amazing, how often that’s the right way to go. No one said anything as streams slid down the screen, blurring the view.

  “Somebody could come up on us here and we’d never know,” Terry mused. “But movement draws attention,” Terry added.

  Cliff recalled his father saying, The early bird may get the worm, sure, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

  “We can’t just sit here,” Aybe said adamantly. “That living balloon will come looking, use a search grid.”

  Irma nodded, her hair bedraggled. Aybe tried the controls and got a comforting hum from the floor. He lifted them above the muddy, frothing waters. Gingerly he found a side channel and went up it. After cautiously following that for minutes, Aybe paused to see if any danger lurked. A broad canyon yawned ahead, ghostlike in the sleeting rain that blew by in gusts. “This is a real break,” he said, looking back at the others, who were still wringing water out of their clothes. “Looks like a long valley. I think I’
ll make time up that canyon so that air whale can’t find us.”

  “Unless they can look through rain in nonvisible wavelengths,” Terry said. “Then we’ll be a nice fat moving target.”

  Irma said, “And we are a target. Aybe, don’t worry — you won’t get caught. They’re shooting to kill.”

  Silence as this sank in.

  “Um,” Aybe said. “I’ll hug the walls, then.”

  “Might help,” Terry said, “but — ” He glanced up at an angle, saw nothing through the hammering downpour. “ — we don’t know where that sky whale is.”

  “And we won’t know,” Cliff said. “That’s our problem.”

  Aybe grinned. “Indecision may or may not be my problem.…” They all laughed, breaking the tension.

  Out they went. The canyon snaked a lot and through the screen looked like dim blobs. Without saying anything, Aybe turned up the speed, elevating another meter for safety. At a speed Cliff judged to be at least sixty klicks an hour, the driving rain seemed to miraculously go away. Water swept around the sides and Cliff realized this was from the speed, clearing the view far better than wipers could.

  They sat and pretended not to worry, which only lengthened the silences between them. Cliff realized that while they had been running from aliens for long weeks now, the odds had changed. The birdlike aliens were trying to kill them now. If cornered, what should he do?

  He knew he wouldn’t beg. That would be an insult to all humanity. He felt this immediately, without thinking.

  The others were probably thinking about this, too. He could see the strain in their averted eyes, the sagging lines of fatigue in Irma, who was still futilely trying to wring out her hair. How much longer could they take of this?

  Aybe concentrated, flying them past rock walls, which zoomed by like ghosts that slid out of the storm, flashed by, and then fell away into mist. Cliff realized that rain was the only cover they or any living thing had here. No creature could take advantage of darkness, ever. He saw some animals running nearby and wondered if they, too, were repositioning themselves. Or using the rain as cover to mate?