Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford

  One Sil came forward, took the fish, and did an astonishing thing. It cast the fish up and with a flashing knife blade caught the skin, tossed the fish up using the leverage, and spooled the skin off. It was a miraculous trick, skinning the fish — and then the Sil sectioned the fish, too, in slashing cuts as it turned in air. One of the Sil offered Cliff a hand-sized slice of sashimi.

  Cliff took a bite out of courtesy. It was near tasteless, something like tai.

  These creatures were quicker than the eye could see.

  Their lands were different, too: lush greenery, few rocky landscapes, odd trees and big-leafed plants rich in fruit. Plenty of scampering small game, too, which the Sil must relish hunting.

  He sat and thought about the Sil for a while and then of Beth. He wondered where she was, what she had learned. He recalled the soft brush of her hair on his chest when she hovered over him, sighing in low, sliding notes. He longed to see her, share the eerie wonder of this place with her. There might be trouble over Irma, but … but what?

  He had deliberately not thought about the problem. Irma had been a refuge from the increasing tensions that came from roving in hostile territory, yes.… But was there more to it? He didn’t know.

  Face problems as they come, he realized, had become his working rule. Irma sat down lazily beside him. “If you leave out these meaningful silences, I won’t fall asleep.”

  Cliff shrugged. “No meaning at all. I’m just feeling good.”

  She yawned. “My dad always said — ” She did a deep, boisterous male voice. “ — it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

  “I already had mine.”

  “Did you follow all that talk from Quert?”

  “About being an ‘Adopted’ species?”

  “Yeah, that whoever runs this place takes on board species from worlds they cruise by.”

  “They have the room for it.”

  “Not really a new idea, just bigger scale. I mean, we humans invented our own little niche evolution when we domesticated wolves.”

  “Sure, and when we turned bottle gourds into containers. But equally, that let dogs and gourds colonize the human niches — catch a ride on an opportunity.”

  “The Bowl is an opportunity passing by, with land to spare.”

  “This is a clue to why they built this thing. It’s impossibly big, sure, using materials so strong, they rival the subnuclear struts we have in SunSeeker. But they haven’t let the smart species here overrun the natural environment.”

  She sat up and watched a Sil try Cliff’s makeshift fishing rod. The Sil had their own, but were curious. It spun a line out a long distance with one liquid move. “You mean, they haven’t done what we did to Earth.”

  “Right. And got to go star-hopping while they do it.”

  “We evolved to take short-term predictions and make snap decisions using them. Long term isn’t our strong suit. Just look at the Age of Appetite — it ran more than two centuries!”

  “Must have been fun.”

  He applauded as the Sil caught a fish, uglier and even bigger than his. His noise made Sils nearby turn, startled, and give them long looks. Cliff recalled that if humans stared at each other for long, it meant they would either fight or make love. With the Sil, staring was clearly more complex. Their graceful faces used the eyes as much as humans used their mouths for signaling. Apparently right eye squinting and left wide open meant puzzlement.

  He contented himself with just waving. Their eyes widened in appreciation.

  “The 2100s were about digging out from the damage, getting the climate stable. Only way to do it was with a big presence in space, metals and rare earths from asteroids, a solar system economy. Then we got hungry for the stars.”

  “They must’ve, too.”

  “Then why not just send out ramscoops, like us?”

  “Maybe they did. Maybe came to Earth and left no trace.”

  “Haven’t we seen Earth species here?”

  He nodded. “I’ve seen plenty of things I recognized. It could be parallel evolution — function calls out form, the same shapes. Like that fish. It’s god-awful ugly, but so are some fish I saw in the Caribbean.”

  “Bet it tastes good, though.”

  His stomach growled. “I’ll start a fire. That’s a good point — the twist of molecules, the chemical hookups here. They’re close enough to ours so we don’t starve.”

  Quert appeared from the rich foliage, carrying a pack. “Swimmer! Good.” In one swift sweep, he took it from Cliff and said, “Cook we will.”

  Cliff sniffed the air. “Woodsmoke. They already knew I’d catch something.”

  “They’re smart. I wonder why they took such losses just to pluck us off that train.”

  “They want out from under the boss who runs this.”

  “Well, we sure can’t help them.”

  “Probably not. We’re damned lucky to be alive.”

  “Did you think we’d last this long?”

  “Not really.” Cliff took a deep breath and plunged on, feeling awkward. “I … didn’t think we’d become lovers, either.”

  She blinked and looked hard at the river flowing past, clear and cool. Avoiding his eyes. “We’re not, really. At least, I don’t love you.”

  “Me either. ‘Utility sex,’ wasn’t that what you called it?”

  She giggled nervously. “I did say that.”

  “You and your guy were going to have a standard contract marriage?” he said to be saying something.

  “Yup, when we got settled at Glory. Then I’d bring out my stored eggs and have a family. We figured a twenty-five-year contract would do that nicely.”

  “Beth and me, we hadn’t gotten that specific. In all the training, there wasn’t time to…”

  “To really think it through? Actually, it’s feeling it through that does the trick.”

  “Um. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ I suppose.”

  “What? Oh, Shakespeare. Well, this is alteration” — she waved a hand at the Bowl, which hung like a shimmering haze across the sky — “beyond anything I imagined.”

  “So…” He savored finally getting some use from his high school English, then sobered. He wanted to get something settled but didn’t know how. “We keep up with the … utility?”

  She shrugged. “It helps.” Then she gave him a wicked grin. “That’s my story for now.”

  “Might be trouble when we meet our mates.”

  “Face that when it comes.”

  He stood, stretching. He watched in the distance dust devils climb toward the roof of the sky, in an atmosphere so deep, he could see huge dark clouds that hung like mountains in the high, fuzzy distance. How were they ever going to figure out this place?

  Aybe, Howard, and Terry arrived, carrying some plants they had harvested with the Sil. “Shoulda had you along, Cliff, so’s you’d know what these things are, if we can eat ’em. Howard spotted a lot of this.”

  “My God, Terry, you’re drunk!” Cliff took the plants and checked them; they looked reasonable. But he couldn’t take his eyes from Terry and — yes, Aybe also had a bleary look.

  “They gave us a drink, said it was refreshin’,” Terry said.

  Howard said, “Tastes a little like pineapple wine. Bland. I was not tricked, boss.” He thumped his chest. “Alcohol.”

  “I’ll say. The chemistry here really is similar.” Cliff waved them to the riverside. Might as well relieve the pressure when they can.…

  Was ethanol a universal? It appeared in low densities in star and planetary system forming regions: simple organic chemistry. It was just sugars turning bad, so they formed a hydroxyl with carbon. Chimpanzees used it, too. Maybe all higher intelligences sometimes needed to escape from the prison of reason?

  “So,” Aybe plopped down and said with the owlish manner of a drunk trying to pretend he’s sober, “where do we go from here?”

  “There’s a price on our heads, boys,” Irma said
. “I say stay here, rest up, learn from these Sil.”

  “We can eat,” Howard said. “Nev-ever a given.”

  “We need a plan,” Aybe said.

  “A goal without a plan is just a wish,” Irma said. “But what’s our goal?”

  “There’s enough room here,” Terry said with leaden profundity, “for everybody cold sleepin’ on SunSeeker to live.”

  “But this isn’t a planet, it’s a park!” Irma shot back.

  “Seems big enough for a million planets. Strange aliens. Room to make somethin’ new.” Terry nodded to himself.

  Irma’s eyes and nostrils flared. “We didn’t cast off everybody we knew to come to this place!”

  “Well, we’re here anyway,” Aybe said solemnly. “We don’t even know if we can get SunSeeker started up right again.”

  “There’s damn plenty we don’t know, right,” Terry agreed.

  Cliff eyed them and saw this was an idea brewing for some time among them. Carefully he said, “Look, we’re in a crazy place. But don’t let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination. We’re bound for Glory.”

  In their pealing laughter he heard joy.

  FORTY-NINE

  The inhabited section of the Bowl, its vast ring-shaped rim, was what Redwing had come to call the Great Plain. Now SunSeeker crossed softly over the rim of the Bowl, and the Great Plain fell behind. Far below, the cellophane sky dropped to touch a rise in the Bowl’s understructure, bulging outward by a few kilometers, as they crossed the Bowl rim. “Stay well clear,” Redwing told Jam again. “We don’t want to burn holes in their sky with our magnetics.”

  Jam grinned as if at a joke. “Yes, sir. Do your enemy no small injury.” He added, “Machiavelli.”

  So the great ship floated past the rim with 100,000 kilometers to spare. Redwing watched, mesmerized, until Ayaan whacked his back with her fist. “Captain! I’ve got Fred Oyama!”

  “Hot damn! Patch me through. Fred, need update on your condition.”

  Ayaan said, “Talk past him. You’re twenty-three minutes apart at lightspeed, and all they can send us is text. Talk and I’ll text-connect it.”

  “Yah. Fred, we’re cruising around back of the Bowl to see what we can see. Our last contact with Beth’s team had her in a cluster of caves. She’s worried about what low gravity is doing to their bones and such. Otherwise they’re safe. She should have at least a couple of months, but then they’ll all need SunSeeker’s hospital section.

  “We’ve solved the problem with SunSeeker’s motors,” he said, and decided not to give details. The ship had been delayed by the Bowl’s head wind, just enough to matter. Maybe SunSeeker could have veered around the Bowl’s wake and kept on to Glory, stretching their supplies to the max. But the Bowl was a bigger game, really, he decided. An unimaginable jackpot — if they survived it. Glory could wait.

  Redwing watched Ayaan working their antenna system to keep him on target. Their technology was at its very limits, communicating over such vast, constantly moving ranges.

  “We’ve fiddled some with the menu, including some biochem information, so I’ll beam you an update, now.” Ayaan nodded and pressed a key to send the prepared squirt.

  “I’d like to pick you all up. We should at least plan to meet. It would be great if we could find a meet place. The trouble as I see it is that any site big enough to see from here would be like arranging to meet in Australia.” Redwing laughed, then remembered that he wouldn’t hear a response. “Too big. But if we could find something like a radio station, we could find each other there. We’ll look for antennas of any kind while we’re here.”

  He paced the deck, trying to wedge in every thought before they lost the connection. “Of course, there’s no docking or refueling arrangements for us that we understand on the outer skin. Of course, we’ve lost one of our landers. Never mind, we still have the Hawking and Chang and Dyson. Your team has been without medical treatment for four months now. We need to debrief you.”

  Not the best time, a link just when they were coasting out over the rim. “I’m looking at the back of the Bowl, seeing quite a lot of structure. Blems, bubbles, angular structures, crisscrossed lines … I’m zooming on an intersection … those are tubes networking … maybe a transport system. Looks like spiderwebbing.

  “Bigger, shorter tubes right at the rim. Knobby gray structures big as … well, little moons. Like Ceres. Several of ’em. I can see the nearest one in motion. Really big. Too big to be a weapon. Helical lines running round the inside — ”

  Redwing’s internal alarm bells went off. “Karl, what do you think?”

  Karl was standing alert, almost crouching. He said crisply, “Looks like they’re encased in magnetic field coils. Maybe some sort of offensive weapon.”

  “Or telescope,” Clare said.

  Karl shook his head. “Astronomy? Nah. No need for that long cylinder. Could be a laser of a kind we don’t know? Huge, in any case.”

  “Looks like old-style cannon,” Redwing said. “Except bigger than makes any sense.”

  Clare Conway said, “Maybe they fight planets. Big cannon. Captain, we’ll be looking right into that tube in maybe twenty minutes.”

  Karl said, “The nearest of them is swiveling to engage us, sir.”

  Redwing frowned. “Okay. Jam, start us turning. Stay away from the focus of that thing. Ayaan, do you still have Fred? Fred, give me some good news, will you?”

  Jam said quickly, “With your permission, Captain, I’ll bring us back above the Great Plain.”

  “Do that. Fred, we’ll be out of touch in a few minutes. We have a message from Earth. I’ll squirt it now.”

  * * *

  They lost the Fred link. What Clare had called a cannon continued to follow them. Jam and Clare rolled the ship to escape. The magscoop flexed and fought as it reconfigured, seizing on whatever ionized solar wind it could grasp. They dropped down below the Bowl rim.

  “No telescope could be that big,” Clare said. “Right? Captain?”

  “Jam, is she right?”

  “I’m going lower,” Jam said, concentrating on their trajectory. Long rolling waves hummed through the ship. “Scopes don’t need to be long, just wide to capture light. But to emit light…”

  They were over the Great Plain now, decelerating a little to bring them past the rim. Clare said, “That does it. That long tube isn’t following us anymore.”

  “Doesn’t want to fire on the Great Plain.” Redwing made it a straight assertion based on his intuition. That hid some of his relief.

  Jam said, “Maybe they can’t. If it’s a cannon, and if it could swivel down to fire on inhabited turf … a civil war could get really nasty, couldn’t it?”

  Redwing didn’t know, so he didn’t answer.

  Ayaan said, “My lucky day. I’ve got fresh text from Cliff’s team. Spotty and noisy, but the software cleaned it pretty well. Want to see it?”

  She put the long message on all their screens. Cliff’s team had discovered a tram system and learned to use it; had met aliens and fought a war with them as allies; those aliens had led them into the Bowl’s structural undergrowth. There were low-res pictures. They were eating well enough, and grateful for Beth’s menu instructions.

  “Mostly they’re staying alive and moving,” Redwing said. There were smiles all around. “Great news.”

  “But even if they’re not captured, they’re getting nowhere,” Ayaan added.

  Redwing was getting near the end of his watch so handed off to Karl and went to his cramped quarters. They had snagged a cluster of messages from Sol system while beyond the Bowl’s lip, and the AI had them crisply decoded on his private computer. He told it to speak the messages as he ate dinner alone — Sri Lankan rice and chicken in a deep tangy sauce. One of the biggest threats to stability in a spacecraft was sensory deprivation of a subtle sort, and tasty food helped a lot. So would sex, but that was a dead end for a captain. There was a certain lady he’d like to revive, but the circum
stances had to call for it — probably, when he needed large ground teams. There was nothing official between them, no contract, no conditional agreement. And big ground teams didn’t seem to be a good bet here anyway. He sighed, watched the great construct roll on below, and turned to the tightbeam communications.

  There were some tech updates on the grav waves. He set them aside for Karl after a glance and read the executive summary. After centuries of study, Earthside didn’t know a whole lot more. The wavelengths and wave packets still implied huge masses waltzing around each other in complex patterns. Yet large aperture studies of the Glory system showed no such masses at all. Maybe grav theory was wrong, one message said. Or they were watching a source accidentally in the same spot of the sky and much farther away.

  He read that “… final merger of two black holes in a binary system releases more power than the combined light from all the stars in the visible Universe. This vast energy comes in the form of gravitational waves, bearing the waveform signature of the merger.” Far too much power to be the Glory signature, but the waveforms were like those from the merger theory.

  Or else, the summary said, “… the effect is fictional, made up somehow to deceive us.” Fictional? Maybe the language had changed. Facts never had to be plausible; fiction did. He snorted.

  The last century or so of messages had taken on an odd flavor of exhortations to the same refrain — the glories of their mission and urging them on. Sometimes these carried overt religious tones, but this one was an eco-sermon. He told his software to mine it for real information.

  Most of the real news was on biosphere management: Earthside, the carbon sequestration that had worked well was having side effects. The warmed, expanded oceans were building up their carbonates, a product from the deployed farm waste carbon dropped into them. Now some was coming back out. Seeding the ocean to capture CO2 by sweetening the ocean dead zones had also capped out, and the climate engineers couldn’t stuff more in. Alarm bells …

  All the things put off for a few centuries were now biting back. The only thing Earthside had truly planned for on a centuries-long timescale was the starships.…