Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  Abduss said helpfully, “Only by rotating such a shell could one support it against the star’s gravity.”

  “Like this ship.” He nodded, trying to guess Abduss’s point. “Centrifugal gravity. But a complete, rigid sphere … spinning … that would be impossible, right? Gravity would pull it in at the poles.”

  They both nodded. Abduss said, “Still, the configuration is not stable.”

  They both looked at him, so he went on, thinking aloud. “The shell should fall into the star—it’s not orbiting. There’s some sort of force balance at play here. Odd construction, indeed. Just spinning isn’t enough, either—the stresses would vary with curvature. You’d need internal supports.”

  Mayra said, “Quite right, I believe. My first degree was in astrophysics and I have some ideas about this object, but—” She bowed her head and shrugged.

  As matters developed, there was a great deal behind Mayra’s modesty. In the next day, eating five meals to build himself up, he learned as much about the Wickramsinghs’ subtleties as he did of the strange object they had discovered. They were deferential toward him, unveiling their ideas slowly, allowing him to come to his own conclusions. This helped greatly as the magnitude of implication grew.

  He didn’t even ask about Scorpii 3 until hours later, when Abduss and Mayra were using the control room facilities to lecture him. The planet, their destined home, was a long way off still, and deserved the nickname Glory. Scorpii 3 was the second nearest habitable-seeming world ever found, after the Alpha Centauri base. A fast-burn probe had verified the bio-signatures found by deep space telescopes two generations before SunSeeker’s launch. A wonder, with strong ozone lines, a lot of water, and tantalizing hints of green chlorophyll in the spectrum. A dream world. No sign of any artificial electromagnetic emissions, after big dishes had cupped their ears toward it for decades. Plus the mysterious grav waves that made no sense, considering that there were no big masses in the system to send out such quadrupole emissions.

  He looked at it in the high amplification forward scope, but it was just a flickering blur through their bow shock. Scorpii 3 was barely visible because it hung near the edge of the structure ahead, though it was many light-years away. He looked at the screens, trying to get his head around what that vast bulk could mean. But emotion overwhelmed him. Pure wonder.

  Unimaginable, yes. Bigger than the orbit of Mercury, huge beyond comprehension, the hemisphere was an artifact, a built thing, the first evidence of another intelligence in the galaxy. Not a trickle of radio waves, but a giant … riddle.

  He took a long breath, relaxed into the observer’s chair and headpiece, and let the slow, long wavelength rumble of the starship run through his bones. And thought.

  The Wickramsinghs felt it was a matter of biology. Wake the biologist!

  Cliff wrinkled his nose. He had been irked, sure, but the Wickramsinghs were right: You see trouble, you call for help. But he wasn’t prepared for this. But as well he saw that none of that now mattered.

  Science had speculated about intelligence for centuries, as probes spread out through a desert of dead worlds. The Big Eye telescopes in the twenty-first century had found warm, rocky worlds resembling Earth, and some had the ozone spectral lines that promised oxygen atmospheres. There the promise had ended. Here and there flourished slime molds in deep caverns, or simple ocean life, maybe—cellular colonies still unable to shape themselves into complex forms, as Earth’s life had more than a billion years ago. Sure, there was life, the consensus said … boring life.

  To find an artifact of such immensity … it made his mind reel.

  Then Abduss said, almost casually, “There is something more. Why we realized the protocols demanded that you be awakened. We have detected narrow-band microwave traffic from near the star.”

  Cliff realized that he should have seen this coming. “Coded?”

  “Yes. It may be broadcasting from near the hole in the center—the angle is right—and we’re getting some scattered, reflected signals.”

  “Are they hailing us?”

  “There’s nothing obvious that we can figure out, no,” Mayra said. “There are many transmissions, not a long string. It looks like a conversation, perhaps.”

  “So they don’t know we’re here, maybe.”

  “We could hear the traffic once we were within view of the hole, I believe. Perhaps it comes from within the hemisphere, and leaks through. It is not broadcast for others to pick up—or so we think. And unintelligible, at least to us.”

  Cliff eyed them both and said carefully, “I agree that the protocols call for my revival. But this is more than anybody ever visualized, when those protocols were invented.…” He was still dazed after a day awake. And cold; he rubbed his arms to get blood moving. “I wonder if you didn’t wake me too early, though. We’re not looking at plants and animals yet. If we wake too many of us…”

  “Yes,” Abduss said.

  “We’d run short.”

  “We’re short now,” Mayra said. “That is the other problem. It is high time someone woke the captain, we felt.”

  “So you did, right after me? Me, because my secondary specialty is in rations and ship biology. Mostly, though, I’m a field biologist. But sure, call me up. Then the cap’n, to take over all the other implications. Right.”

  “And now we are happy to turn both problems over to you.” Abduss gave him a broad smile without any trace of irony. Mayra beamed, too. They had faced all this together, and the weight of it showed in their evident relief.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to see why they were handing off to him and the captain.

  The opportunity: an artifact bigger than planets.

  The problem: SunSeeker was not performing to specs. The ramscoop drive was running at 0.081 of light speed, instead of the 0.095 engineering had promised.

  Not a big difference, but in starflight it was crucial. At 0.081, their trip would take 550 years. They had stocks for a bit over 500 years.

  Early space travel had been like this, with tiny margins of safety. Reaching the Moon six out of seven tries had been a miracle. They’d run aging X-planes for a quarter of a century, losing two shuttles before they built something better. Interplanetary travel still cut close to the bone, and interstellar was a crapshoot. And still there were always those who would take the gamble.

  Of course, SunSeeker recycled everything—and, of course, the accounting never quite came out even. The flight plan had them arriving at Glory with time to find what they needed. Glory had a world with oceans and free oxygen, all carefully checked in the ozone spectral line seen from Earth orbit. And in the infrared, they had seen a broad disk of asteroids, too, comfortably farther out and with traces of iceteroids among them. The world or the rocks would give them the elements they needed: water, oxygen, dust to be turned to soil.

  But this slower speed was eating their safety window.

  He checked the log. Five watch cycles had worked on the problem in their ramscoop drive without really spotting a cause. None of them had wakened the captain. It was an engineering problem, not a command structure one. And they were on a centuries-long voyage.

  The big magnetic fields at SunSeeker’s bow drove shock waves into the hydrogen ahead, ionizing it to prickly energies, then scooping it up and mixing it with fusion catalysis, burning as hot as suns—but somehow, the nuclear brew didn’t give quite the thrust it had during field trials out in the Oort cloud. Considering how new relativistic engineering was, maybe this was not truly surprising.

  Still, it had huge consequences. “We won’t get to Glory in time,” Cliff said.

  The Wickramsinghs nodded together. Mayra said, “So…” She did not want to draw the conclusion.

  “We have cut our rations to a minimum, all five watches, yes,” Abduss rushed in, eyes large. “It was a major decision we made, you see—to revive you and the captain.”

  Cliff slurped down more coffee. It tasted incredibly good—another sym
ptom of revival. “You’ve done the calculation. Can we make it?”

  “Marginal at best,” Mayra said precisely. “The last five watches have run at the minimum crew number: two. Plus we are pushing the hydroponics to the maximum. We fear it is not enough.”

  “Damn!” Cliff grimaced. Starve to death between the stars. “That’s also why nobody woke the captain. One more gut, one more pair of lungs. Until … yeah.” Until they saw the strange thing up ahead.

  * * *

  He knew the deeper reason, too. What could the captain do, after all? If the engineers could not find a solution, mere managerial ability would not help. So the engineers had followed the protocols that had been drilled into them: Follow mandates and hope for the best. Especially since an error could kill them all with relativistic speed.

  They gazed at him, calm and orderly and patient, the perfect types for a watch crew. Which he was not. Too restless and a touch excitable, the psych guys had said. That was fine with Cliff; he wanted to see Glory, not black interstellar space. All crew were calm, steady types, or they wouldn’t have made the first cut in the long selection filters.

  The Wickramsinghs were waiting. He was in charge until the captain woke up. That he did not understand the situation did not matter; he was a superior officer, so he had to make the decisions.

  First, he had to rest. About that, the revival procedures were as hard-nosed as the mission protocols. At least that would give him a little time to think.

  * * *

  They found him twelve hours later, in the kitchen.

  The first thing he ordered was a thorough study of the star they were approaching. The Wickramsinghs called up screens of data and vibrant images. This gave him a jumpy image of a star massing about nine-tenths of Sol’s mass. There were plenty of those in the galaxy, but this one was not behaving like a serene, longer-lived orange dwarf. Fiery tendrils forked and seethed at the center of the apparent disk. “There is blurring in the image,” Abduss remarked, “by the plasma plume.”

  Squinting, at first he did not understand the implication of the roiling spikes that leaped from a single hot spot, a blue white furnace. “Ah—that spot is directly under the center of the artificial bowl, the cap.”

  Abduss nodded. “Something is disturbing the star, making it throw out great flaming tongues. Very dangerous, I would think.”

  They were coming up on this system pretty fast. Cliff thumbed in the whole data field. The obviously artificial disk—okay, call it the cap, because he could sense from the image that it was curved away from their point of view—the cap was not at all far away, maybe a few hundred astronomical units, where an A.U. was the distance from Earth to Sol. You got used to such enormous distance measures, in the relentless training all crew had to undergo.

  He tried to remember when that was … centuries ago. Yet it seemed like just a few weeks.

  He looked at the image and let his eyes see it as a curved hemisphere cupped around this side of the star.

  They zoomed the optics in on the disk’s flares, having to go through several settings that blanked out the blue white hot spot on the star’s surface. The glare of the hot spot was fierce, actinic, bristling with angry storms, a tiny white sun attached to the bigger pink star like an angry leech.

  Above the white spot raged the filigree spikes of streaming plasma. They whirled around one another like fighting snakes, burning as they rushed up from the hot spot. It looked like they should bathe the hemispheric bowl in licking flames. But before they reached the curve of the bowl, they dovetailed into a slender jet. Among the streamers, Cliff could see little blobs and bright flecks moving out from the star, swarming up along the jet, toward the neatly circular hole in the bowl and out into the sky.

  Cliff wrestled with the images. “Let’s see the earlier pictures, from the last watch.”

  Automatically, the ship kept records of the local sky. Its software was spectrally sophisticated and framed its own, limited hypotheses about the class and type of every luminous object it saw. They checked the records. The muted minds that murmured among themselves, struggling to understand the bowl, had spun endlessly in parameter-space confusions.

  In the infrared, there was a glow where the “bottom” of the bowl would be. None of the instruments showed any image of the bowl during the years while the ship was approaching from behind. He thumbed through uninteresting pictures. The bowl blotted out a small dot on the sky, but nobody had noticed such a minor thing from light-years away.

  The bowl’s infrared radiation showed a temperature around 20 degrees centigrade. Room temperature.

  “Ah, balmy,” Abduss said. Across that vast curve, tropical conditions prevailed. The back face was cool and appeared stony. But the warmed side was at 20 degrees C. The star was less luminous than Sol—but, of course, the bowl was in continuous sunlight, so it would get pretty warm. No night.

  Cliff had a mind’s eye picture of the bowl as a colossal construction, even though his common sense was screaming. When something appeared impossible, it seemed best to simply study it until understanding emerged. And wait for the captain to wake up, yes.

  The first shock came from simple geometry. Mayra gave him distances and angles and he quickly found that the area of the inward-facing cap was two hundred million times that of Earth. Hovering over its star, the rim of the bowl would provide a vast, livable surface. (The biologist would wait for the captain’s take, but … Air. Water. Stores to replenish a failing ship. The Wickramsinghs nodded and smiled when he spoke of this.…)

  On that area, peering through the small hole they could see, Abduss picked up reflecting optical emission … and found the spectral signatures of water. Then, with a bit more effort to see through the rippling plasma that shrouded SunSeeker, he found oxygen.

  So it was an immense area designed for living … by what?

  Cliff checked their distance from the bowl: 320 AU—about a hundredth of a light-year. So close! And coming up fast.

  But they were still looking at the back of the cap, in the dark. He looked at the waiting faces of the Wickramsinghs and thought. They were left with some brute astronomical facts—velocities, times, food supplies.…

  At their review meeting, the Wickramsinghs eyed him expectantly.

  “It’s beyond me,” he said—and watched their faces, despite their best efforts, show disappointment.

  “Surely we can learn more?” Mayra suggested hesitantly.

  “Not at this distance,” Abduss said. “And I doubt the captain will authorize a trajectory change to get closer.”

  Cliff looked at them and thought unkind thoughts. Five crews didn’t wake the captain, because there wasn’t an answer. They had been trained to keep the ship running. Schooled to stay steady. But here was something the Earthside planners had never imagined.

  “I think we have two problems,” Cliff said with what he hoped was a diplomatic tone. “Supplies, yes. And this strange … object. Too much here for us to deal with.”

  Abduss said carefully, “We had thought somewhat the same.”

  “Look,” Mayra said directly, “it’s nearly time to take the captain up to his conscious stage—”

  “I want Beth Marble brought up, too.”

  Both of them blinked. “But she is—”

  “Capable, right.” He could see a lot of trouble coming, and he didn’t want to be alone. Who did?

  “But there is no protocol requiring—”

  Cliff held up his hand and looked across the table steadily, letting them think about it. “Let’s just do it.”

  “She is … not your wife.”

  “No, but she has ship skills and can pilot.”

  “Not until we can ask the captain,” Abduss said. His face was firm.

  TWO

  They told the captain when he came out of cold sleep, bleary-eyed, stiff, still lying on a slab—and then his eyes began blinking with startling speed, alert.

  Abduss said, “You aren’t going to believe this.”


  Captain Redwing’s skeptical grin crinkled the leathery skin around his eyes as he said, “Try me.”

  So they told him, while they gingerly massaged his stiff, cold muscles and applied the necessary chemistries. Cliff hung back and bided his time while the Wickramsinghs took Redwing through the whole story.

  Redwing sat up and shook his black mane, his bronzed skin blue-veined at the wrists, and said, “You’re sure?”

  So they told him some more. Showed the screens, the time log, and finally the close-ups of the back of the bowl. The captain stared at the bowl image, and Cliff could see him mentally put it aside to concentrate on the supplies issue.

  “The drive not running to specs. Five crew changes! You couldn’t do anything?” He jabbed a finger at the Wickramsinghs.

  “We did not know what to do,” Mayra said reasonably. “There were—”

  “We’ve run this way for—what?—decades!”

  Abduss bristled in her defense, face stiff. “This was not in the protocols.”

  “Protocols be damned. I—”

  “The leptonic drive is one issue, Captain,” Cliff said, “and this thing ahead is quite another—”

  “You’re Science.” Redwing cut him off with a chopping hand signal. “This is crew.”

  Cliff sat back and nursed his coffee and remembered all the rumors before launch. How Redwing was from one of the families that had made a bundle out of the Indian casinos. How he’d breezed through MIT with great grades and a wake of surly enemies. Made his rep in the Mars exploration and exploitation. Been a real sonofabitch, sure, but he had gotten things goddamn well done. Maybe not the worst recommendation, considering. Cliff was going to have to follow orders.

  “We cannot go on like this,” Mayra said, ever the diplomat. “Our external diagnostics are working well, so we are sure there is not some property of the interstellar gas that is the root of our drive problem. We rely on the microwave view to diagnose the ramscoop fields—”

  “We’ll review it all,” Redwing said crisply. He bit his lip. “And the earlier crews—Jacobs, Chen, Ambertson, Abar, Kalaish—all top people…”