Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  The aliens thought big. Their enclosure was far larger than it needed to be. Of course, the entire Bowl exceeded any imaginable idea of limits. Should that tell them anything about the psychology of those who built it?

  Tananareve noticed that Lau Pin was getting restless. He paced, climbed some of the thin, layered trees, got into arguments seemingly out of boredom. After several days of this, he announced that he was going to explore. He didn’t want company, either. Beth didn’t like that, but she had no real authority here. She wasn’t going to go herself, not with Tananareve injured and needing looking after.

  She was trying to convince Abduss to go with Lau Pin when abruptly he just hiked away, not waiting. Beth shrugged and said with lifted eyebrows to the others, “Guess he just doesn’t like us.” Still, Tananareve knew that Beth worried. That was her nature.

  Lau Pin was gone for well over a day. He returned (he admitted) when he started wondering if he could find the way back, even though he used slash marks on the large, barked trees to guide him. He reported finding nothing different, just endless vegetation. No hills taller than fifty meters, just enough to get streams to glide downhill. It was eerie, he said, watching a broad creek easing along over rocks, but not chuckling with the splashes it would have made on Earth. Low g did that, taking the zip out of life in odd little ways. He had never reached the turning back of their enclosure. Even in 0.1 g, the wall was too high to jump and its smooth lattice made climbing impossible. He guessed that the Serfs had dropped the tall, chicken-wire walls from some craft flying above. “It’s enormous, this cage they’ve stuck us in, at least tens of klicks across,” he said.

  “Maybe they want us not to get claustrophobic?” Abduss suggested. “Living in the Bowl, maybe they’ve evolved to like room.”

  “So we should, too?” Lau Pin rolled his eyes.

  “Come on, Astronomers are huge. They need room,” Mayra said. “Fred, what do you—?” Fred was glowering at one of the skyeyes hovering nearby. “Never mind.”

  Fred Ojama wasn’t taking imprisonment well. He was withdrawn, sullen. In some ways, he was worse off than Tananareve.

  Beth asked Lau Pin, “Were there more of those head-sized sensors floating around?”

  Lau Pin grimaced. “Two followed me the whole way.”

  Nobody liked the ever-watching spheres the size of a human head. They seemed to navigate by whispering jets. Lau Pin had studied them and found there was a strong magnetic field near them. Mag lift? Indeed, it was nearly a hundred times Earth’s surface magnetic field, running parallel to the ground here. Abduss guessed it might have to do with running the Bowl, perhaps helping stabilize it with magnetic pressure.

  Tananareve listened to all this behind the soft insulation her meds gave her. She was content to lie back and observe through cottony air. There were plenty of vines that in small gravs didn’t bow in graceful catenary curves, but shot straight out. These connected to plants that were crowded layers of great broad leaves. The leaves were as big as Tananareve and firmly attached to barnacled branches. Those long limbs were so large, she could not see where the gradually thickening, dark brown wood ended. Among the green and brown leaves scampered and leaped many small creatures. They capered among odd long, pearly white strands as thick as her arm. These connected like spokes across the open spaces—lanes that cut through the thick green stands of web-trees. She could not figure out what the pale fibers were part of, unless it was some plant of enormous size, its details lost among the distant growths that lay along the big tunnels that brought light and air.

  She suddenly saw that her whole mind-set was wrong here. This was not an Earthlike forest. The landscape is designed. Sculpted. But it looks like Earth’s nature preserves.

  Memor sent a small underling into that tangle. It was a ferretlike thing with a big head and darting eyes. It fell from one leaf to another, slid down to a third, and landed on a catlike creature—which squashed like a pillow. With a shudder the prey died, provoking in Tananareve a pang of guilt. The cat-thing had wings and sleek orange fur. Her heart ached at the beauty of it.

  Memor gruffed approval. With a few movements of its razor-claws, the ferret hunter skinned the cat and plucked off gobbets of meat and scampered to Tananareve with them. She bit her lip at the reek of the red gobbets, and pointed to the people tending their fire.

  Tananareve watched as Memor’s minions snatched at tubular insects and crunched them with relish into a hash. They especially enjoyed ripping big fronds to shreds, picking out packets of ripe red seeds. Tananareve videotaped them at it, watched and learned.

  One of the ferret-things brought her crimson bulbs that grew profusely in grapelike bunches. Memor reassured her with feather-fans of certainty that these were humanly digestible. She reached for some, and the bulbs hissed angrily as she plucked one loose. All bluster—the plant did nothing more as she bit in. She liked the rich, grainy taste. Far better than ship food, for sure.

  The taste rode atop the bland dryness of the sedative she had taken. Here she was, in the most fascinating and terrifying moment of her life—and she was injured, dulled. Tananareve stopped herself from rubbing at her cracked ribs and her upper right arm, which throbbed from a nasty break. Nothing to be done about broken ribs except not move around, as Beth said, and risk jabbing a rib through a lung. Beth had splinted her arm quite deftly. Their emergency med kit gave her some pain relief, but that didn’t stop her restless mind.

  She knew she wouldn’t be much use for a while, even with the quick heal salve Abduss applied to her aching arm. She hung relaxed in a secured bower of vines and plants and wondered how all this profuse life had evolved in near-zero gravity. Time to sit back, watch, and learn—which turned out to be, fathom what the alien called TransLanguage.

  At university she had been good at the language game, learning French and Russian. Her secondary expedition job was to be alien translation. So now she had the job of dealing with the giant who identified itself as Memor—the name itself an approximation she had worked out to a sound like a bass humming, deep in its throat. She had imagined that, if they met aliens, there would be some orderly exchange of texts and recordings and, well, a method. Something like SETI messages, maybe, across a proper desk. Not here.

  The other people were distracted, finding and choosing edibles, building a shelter, classifying Bird Folk varieties—which kept appearing to do work nearby, openly gawk, and flare their brilliant feather displays, rainbows of vibrant color. Squawking, too, in a language Memor dismissed with a gravelly grunt: unimportant.

  Beth came to watch with her and change the dressings on her broken arm. “That bush over there smells like cooked meat,” Beth said. “Strange…”

  They watched it uneasily. A ratlike thing as big as a dog but sporting an enlarged head came foraging by. Humans bothered it not at all. Beth pointed out that the animals here had no fear of humans because they had no experience. The rat-thing caught the meaty smell and slowed, tantalized. It lingered—and the bush popped. Spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away.

  “A victory for the plants,” Beth said. “That rat will carry the seed, I’ll bet, until it dies.”

  Tananareve said, “So then a fresh bush grows from the rat’s body. Smart.”

  Memor approached, huffing and rumbling, and they both tried not to shrink from its size. It spoke and Tananareve translated to, “I, like you, have a meat tooth.”

  Beth said, “Uh, charmed, I’m sure.”

  “We try for you to find the eatables,” Tananareve translated again. She thanked Memor, and the mountain of flesh and rippling feathers seemed to bow at a sideways angle, lowering its arms and head.

  Memor took them for a stroll in the awkward low g, explaining, gesturing with head and hands. It felt good to walk. All this helped improve Tananareve’s translating abilities. They passed by colonies of plants that clearly had a social life, communicating through pollen-sprays their needs and distresses.

  Tananareve
bit her lip and summoned up the courage to ask, “How do you … manage all this? Your … world-ship?”

  Memor stopped and regarded them with big, solemn eyes. She spoke in long, rolling cadences and Tananareve struggled to translate. Her voice came in bursts as she got the meaning. “Fast learns, slow remembers. The quick and small instruct the slow and big by bringing change. The big and slow urges—dammit—call it constraint and constancy. Fast gets attention; slow has power. A robust system needs twice—I mean both. There is one great commandment: Stability is all.”

  The sound of her voice was like stones rattling in a jug. Very large stones, boulders, in an immense jug.

  Beth asked, “How old is this … world?”

  After translations, Tananareve shrugged. “We don’t have the same time measures, but it’s old. I get the feeling Memor doesn’t want to say.”

  “What’s it—okay, she—doing now?”

  Tananareve looked up as Memor tilted her head back and went into the long trancelike state she had seen before. “I don’t know. She says it’s like talking to another part of her mind—that is, if I’m really getting the gist of her meaning.”

  Memor wandered away, still in a daze.

  Beth smiled and sat back into a conical bower of fleshy plants. “I’m amazed, just like all of us, at how fast you’ve learned.”

  She gave Beth a quick, flinty look. Tananareve knew that her honey-toned Mississippi vowels made most crew members discount her. Talk that way, and people will knock twenty points off your apparent IQ, her mother had said. But she liked the soft, supple play of her accent, the stretched vowels and rounded consonants. “I’m even more so. Who would’ve thought that an alien language would have sentences at all? Much less, relating in a linear configuration with structures, a system?”

  “And they’re not even mammals,” Beth mused. “I think.”

  “I suppose, but we don’t really know. Kinda a hard subject to just bring up.” Tananareve frowned. “It was so easy to learn from Memor, just from pointing and acting out. Maybe the underlying chemistry and stuff doesn’t matter so much. I guess there are essentials in language after all. Not just in vocabulary and grammatical rules, but in their semantic swamps. Gad!”

  “But you did it,” Beth said simply.

  Tananareve shrugged. “Memor says she’s using ‘artful intelligences’ to help her. I suppose that means she’s computer linked.”

  “Well, we don’t have that,” Beth said. “Maybe that’s necessary, to run a thing like this huge thing.”

  “Could even our most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number-crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta stone? I doubt it.”

  “Maybe they’ve met other aliens, learned something of how the whole galaxy talks.”

  Sobering indeed, Tananareve thought.

  “Still, it means we’re dealing with beings who have unseen resources,” Beth said.

  “Hey, just the visible resources are incredible! Yeah, that may explain why Memor can teach me so well. She’s flexible. Nearly all human languages use either subject-object-verb order, or else subject-verb-object. Memor says she uses both, plus object-verb-subject, so she can adapt to us easily.”

  Beth sat up quickly. “Something’s happening.”

  Animals came fast, yelping, flitting through the nearby foliage. An insectlike thing fluttered by them. It was like a dragonfly whose wing sets moved at right angles to each other. A long-limbed jumping rat streaked by, using Beth’s head as a touchpoint, then gone. She flinched but managed not to cry out.

  Then they both heard a long bass note sound through the bowers. Nearby, some of the long, thick white strands trembled. Something was tugging on them, sending low frequency waves ahead.

  “Get down, cover up,” Tananareve whispered.

  The deep note was louder. Or maybe it just sounded that way since everything else got suddenly quiet.

  She looked down the long strands. They laced through the foliage with a clear path around them, almost like a tunnel in the air. Every hundred meters or so, they had an anchor on one of the thick, rough trunks.

  A big hairy thing came into view from the distance. Fast. Spherical and ruddy, with six long legs or arms that moved with liquid grace. It flowed as if it were swimming, flicking long, thin legs out to pluck momentum from the white cables. Soundless. Tananareve judged it was ten meters across at least. A flying house.

  She and Beth wrapped themselves away, but Tananareve left a slit open to watch the enormous creature pull and fly, pull and fly—zooming on by them with quick, nimble movements of the legs. It swept by, leaving a slight breeze with a prickly, acid aroma.

  Then another. It looked the same, maybe slightly smaller, but even faster. Its legs sang with humming as they plucked, all a blur.

  It followed the first around a far curve maybe a kilometer away. The sharp odor lingered.

  The area around them was dead silent. Nothing moved. Slowly, slowly small rustlings started. The forest went back to business throughout the three-dimensional volume.

  Beth whispered, “What was that?”

  “A spider designed by an art deco mind.”

  “I thought Memor was the top predator of this biosphere.”

  “Me, too. But even we have bears and sharks.”

  “What’ll we do?”

  Tananareve thought to herself, Send not therefore asking for whom the bells toll. And if it starts ringing, start moving. “We’d better be getting on.”

  Beth nodded, eyes big, face pale, and lips drawn. Tananareve was startled to see that Beth, who had always seemed to have rock-hard confidence, was scared.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The moist heat here felt like it could be cut into cubes and used to build a wall. Beth was glad to feel it. It wouldn’t be long before their clothes would get worn. At least there was a nearby stream running through so they could bathe and drink. Plus, the Astronomers let them make fire. She had wondered if Memor would intervene when they used the tools they wore around their waists, too, but apparently the immense aliens thought puny humans could do no real damage.

  Damage, no. But maybe they could escape.

  It had been several days since the huge spiderlike things came zooming through. Beth hadn’t been able to sleep well after that. Others remarked that the huge beasts—Abduss called them spidows—had ignored the humans. Maybe they weren’t predators at all, just large herbivores. But Beth had seen their bristly palps moving in a blur as they clutched the thick strands. It called up a fearful image of spiders that still made her shake.

  Tananareve was healing quickly from the speed-heal salve Abduss had in his med store pack. But they were all getting restless, now that they had food and the basics. Mayra deftly climbed to the top of a particularly tall frond tree, lashing herself in with ply ropes when she got above a hundred meters’ height. She found feathered lizards that sported gorgeous fan plumage and could fly among trees, apparently evolved toward a monkey lifestyle. One variety she called mammoth monkeys. Like many things here, they were huge but not gorilla-like. They were shy, with attenuated, long arms and long torso, just built big and limber as a snake. They liked to swing on vines, apparently for amusement.

  She could see farther from there, she reported, above most of the tree canopy.

  Lau Pin and Mayra spent their time with heads together, inventing one scheme after another to escape. They even got Fred involved. His notions were crazier than theirs, but nothing stood up under examination.

  Find if there’s some key to their enclosure, steal it. Only there didn’t seem to be anything obvious the serf breeds used to seal and unseal the boundary.

  Find a way to fly away; in low gravity that should be pretty easy. But that wouldn’t get them out of their warm prison. It just meant they would be on their own, without the serf breeds to help them find food.

  Surrender. Somehow. Already they were talking, sort of.

  Lau Pin hotly objected to this view.
“Should we sit here, as prisoners? We can explore a whole huge world out there!”

  Tananareve said mildly, “How about those spidows?”

  That sobered them all. Beth let their discussion run; it kept them busy and they might find a good idea. She got up to get some water from the daisy-cup cistern Lau Pin had made. Far up among the bowers, orange flashes arced and snapped from treetops into the gray, clouded sky. Only moments before, those clouds had been cheery, popcorn-white puffballs. Now they slid aside to reveal angry purple towers that tapered to infinity. Her hair stood up on her neck, and a warm wind tickled her hair, sure sign of air freighted with electricity. She turned to say something—

  —and got knocked off her feet by percussive force. It felt like getting hit with a baseball bat and blinded by a virulent yellow flash. The others were sitting in the giant leaves and nearly got walloped by a felled tree that crashed through nearby. The air reeked of ozone. Small creatures lay around, some twisting and the others clearly dead.

  None of Beth’s people was hurt, but they were certainly shaken. There had been no warning except the instant when she felt her neck hairs rising. She had always thought lightning struck golfers out on fairways swinging 4 irons to the sky, or farmers sitting on tractors in flat fields. Earthly lightning descended on anything taller than the rest of the landscape, like a sailboat on open water. But here she had been among trees and massive foliage.

  Abduss said, “You were the only one of us standing.”

  Beth frowned. “So?”

  “Lau Pin measured a strong magnetic field here. We are on a spinning conductor that carries a strong field.”

  Lau Pin snapped his fingers. “The same as a generator—a rotating magnetic field drives current. Charges move around on Earth because of that, so it’s the same for the Bowl.”

  Abduss grinned. He always seemed happiest, Beth knew, when he was solving a puzzle. “Lightning is the celestial housekeeper, balancing out the overcharged land with the ionized top layer of the atmosphere.”