He turned on his wall screen and looked at the distant landscapes drifting past — low mountains crested in snow, vast forests, river valleys the size of Earthly continents. How did these creatures run their Bowl? It had to be far more complex than managing a mere planet.
Could the Bowl teach Earth something crucial about terraforming? That alone would be worth stopping for.
He made himself run through the rest of the tightbeam signals. There were some updates on performance modes of their onboard AIs, some hardware issues, suggested upgrades here and there. Most likely these came as feedback from other starships. SunSeeker, too, had tightbeamed back such reports. He was pretty sure the summaries he had sent about the Bowl were the most bizarre ever transmitted.
He captained a starship, but this enormous thing was a star that drove a ship, was the propulsion, a star that was the essence of the ship itself. It ran on fusion, too, like SunSeeker. It was a … shipstar.
So … who captained it?
END OF VOLUME ONE
• • •
VOLUME TWO:
SHIPSTAR
WILL FOLLOW SOON.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We conferred on scientific and literary matters with many helpful people. Erik Max Francis, Joe Miller, and Joan Slonczewski gave detailed comments on the manuscript. Don Davis, Mark Martin, and Joe Miller and James Benford were of great help in technical issues. And of course, Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson were first.
FOLK TERMS
TransLanguage
Long Records
Late Invaders
Undermind
Serf-Ones
the Builders
Third Variety (Astronomer variety)
Astronauts (Astronomer variety)
TOR BOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD
Jupiter Project
The Stars in Shroud
Shiva Descending
Artifact
In Alien Flesh
Far Futures
Beyond Human
TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN
N-Space
Destiny’s Road
Rainbow Mars
Scatterbrain
Ringworld’s Children
The Draco Tavern
Stars and Gods
Playgrounds of the Mind
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
LARRY NIVEN is the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf’s Children, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.
GREGORY BENFORD is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Irvine, California. Benford is the winner of the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his classic novel Timescape.
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Bowl of Heaven Page 35
