Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  Somehow the bipeds’ methods worked, even at the chemical maintenance level. Their minds worked largely out of view of their “running-selves,” the surface mind that thought it was in charge, simply because it could not see its own minions below. Indeed, she now recalled that this female had used an expression, once: “I just had an idea.”

  That must mean that notions simply appeared in their Overminds. They had no concept of where the ideas came from. Worse, they could not go and find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds were barred to them.

  Astounding! Yet it worked.

  Still, the danger of this strategy was their lack of true awareness. These creatures were strangers to themselves. So they decided issues without knowing the true elements behind the decision. Perhaps they did not even know why they chose mates!

  This implied a further thought.

  Did they have more mental freedom than the Folk … or less? To mask the Undermind from view—could that convey some benefit? Even though it was clearly a fearsomely destabilizing element, as the ancient history of her species had shown? The Undermind could unleash vast passions that swept whole societies. Unless, of course, their deep natures could be seen and regulated.

  She had never thought this of another intelligence—that there could be any advantage to concealing the Undermind. The question struck at the boundaries of the Folk, their superiority—even their freedom.

  She knew that one must believe in free will, despite the ability to analyze the mind to great detail. This rule applied even to these aliens. Its logic was simple: If free will was then a reality, one had made the right choice. But if free will did not exist, one had still made no incorrect choice. One had made no choice at all, not having free will to do so.

  In this, the Folk and the Invaders were equals.

  These tiny creatures had a rich mental life, but it was actually deeper than they knew. They had no overlook, from which they could view the vast continents of the adaptive unconscious below. They did not see the sobering landscape of the mind in all its fervent glory.

  In their curious vessel, they voyaged amid a ship environment surely unlike their natural world. Perhaps they had not considered building a Ship Star for proper exploration of the galaxy. Or more likely, they could not attempt it, and so set forth in simple machines. They were young and raw, willing to suffer.

  Their situation was then tragic. They had launched forth into the stars with brains evolved to deal with a world that bore only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in their present, awkward mind-machinery.

  Perhaps, then, their deaths would be a proper release from such unnatural tortures.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The message from Redwing had given them a lift. But the mood faded before a clear, quick question: So what?

  Lau Pin’s beamer couldn’t rouse SunSeeker. It was a long shot, of course—Redwing could focus a megawatt of 14.4-gigahertz power on them, but Lau Pin’s beamer, even fully charged, delivered only a watt or two of unfocused signal.

  So they were stuck. Beth watched them react to this. Then Abduss produced his own miracle, after a desultory day of chores.

  “I have a bit of joy here!” he called to them all. In his hand was one of the useful flasks the Serfs had given them for their own housekeeping. Now that they had established their chore routines of getting and preparing food, the usual details of a stationary life, they had time to amuse themselves as they wanted. So they assembled, not expecting much. Abduss passed around the little cups the Serfs had made for them, ladling into them a murky fluid. “Toast!” he said loudly.

  They drank. “Moonshine!” Fred called.

  Abduss looked hurt. “Wine. It is a wine I made from the esters of the fruit they give us.”

  Lau Pin and Mayra both said, “Rotgut!” Mayra even hugged her belly in comic relief.

  But they liked it anyway. Beth waved away her second cup and watched the others. They grimaced when they drank but that didn’t stop them, or their increasingly high-pitched laughter, the rude stories, obvious lies, raucous laughter, bright eyes. They needed release, after all that had happened. Alcohol was the easy road to all of that. Let this pass, she thought. She watched Fred Ojama, but he only grew more torpid. Presently he said, “I shouldn’t,” and set the cup aside.

  The next morning most of them were hungover, griping and shaking their heads. They got their housekeeping jobs done and sat around and then the lumbering, smooth-feathered Serfs brought in cylindrical canisters, laying them at the feet of Mayra. She opened them carefully. Sniffed. “It’s—it smells like alcohol.”

  Beth grimaced. The aliens had caught on that fast. To keep the prisoners quiet, give them the ancient chemical that consoles without illuminating. Smart, in a worrisome way.

  Lau Pin, to his credit in Beth’s view, said, “I don’t like that they watch us. This proves they’re trying to…” He didn’t complete the thought.

  Beth said, “What? Keep us sedated?”

  Mayra objected, waving her arms. “They’re just catering to us!”

  Lau Pin twisted his mouth into a sardonic curve. “Worse. They’ve got organic chemists, sure. But we’re lab animals here, not guests. The alcohol is an experiment to see how we react.”

  Beth agreed. They broke up, since it was time nearly for lunch—according to their suit clocks, not of course to the unending sunlight here. Lau Pin drew the job of expanding and deepening the latrine, while the others cooked the fish and vegetables they had learned to harvest from the ample surroundings. Even simple jobs here demanded some learning, since working in 0.1 g changed everything ingrained in them. They managed, though without spirit.

  Beth worried. No new word from Redwing, and they were settling into a routine now. Jobs assigned, a routine set up.

  Lau Pin shouted. He came running from where they’d dug the latrine. “Come see! This topsoil is only a meter deep.”

  So it was—which made complete sense. The Bowl was a thin layer built to face the central star, capturing sunlight. But it couldn’t be very thick without imposing huge stresses on the tension that held the Bowl together, just from mass loading. Here they saw that the entire ecology was rooted in soil only as deep as needed. Lau Pin had uncovered metal sheets and pipes, the underpinning of this odd building bigger than any world.

  At lunch they mused aloud at the possibilities. “How about tunneling through?” Mayra asked. “How could we use that?”

  Fred smiled derisively. “And let the vacuum suck us away? These aliens have some way to patch really fast, I’d guess—but not before we die.”

  They all nodded. Beth looked around at their faces going slack and thought, We need to have a goal. Otherwise, we’ll turn into passive prisoners. She had learned what to do from her training. Get them focused. Do the next right thing. Now.

  She knew it was true. In a tough situation, don’t avoid acting just because it’s easier or comfortable. Don’t lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

  Abduss mentioned something in passing that cut off Beth’s reflections. “I found these strands of spidow web, must’ve been tossed aside when a Spidow repaired the network. They spin this stuff out, just as Beth said they must. I saw one doing it. Creepy! Anyway, I got the strands to fuse—”

  “Fuse how?” Beth pressed him.

  “With a laser. Just warm the ends, stick them together.” Abduss smiled, obviously happy to have something to do. He produced from a sack he carried two meter-long pieces of the filmy white stuff that made the spidow web. “See? They can be retied, with heat. I suppose these pieces got cut off in some way—”

  “Then they can be made into long ropes,” Lau Pin said, eyes on Beth. “So we can use them.”

  Beth smiled. “To get out of here.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Never before had Tananareve wished so fervently for blessed night.

  They had all slowly adjusted to sleeping in the incessant daylight, wrapped away in
the long, moist, flexible leaves of the giant bowers. With pieces of the stuff, Mayra made them masks that helped them all get some shut-eye. Still, sleep was always troubled, her alarm senses waking her often to the occasional scamper, rattle, or caw. So when they agreed to arise and move, she was thick-eyed and muzzy.

  Now they had to sneak away without the Serfs catching on. That was hard. Lau Pin led them stealthily away along routes he had explored. Tananareve had insisted she go, too, even though she had trouble getting through the root-rich terrain. Thin soil meant that trees spread their roots along the surface, making for tricky footing.

  Abduss had risked his life for the long, ropy strands they carried in teams. He had walked kilometers away along the flat, forested terrace that confined them, to separate his acts from the others. A simple precaution, in case the spidows discovered him at work. Then he cut long segments of the spidow fibers and carried them away from the thread-corridor before a spidow came to repair it. This meant only minutes. Slicing through a thread sent a signal along the webs, and the huge things raced to make repairs. They looked and moved like a nightmare on a caffeine high.

  “Time to light out for the territories!” Tananareve said gladly, when they had it all assembled. She saw Fred’s grin; nobody else got the reference to Huck Finn. They were tense, ready.

  Time to go, then. But the pace wore her down.

  Tananareve struggled to keep up with Fred and Lau Pin as they hauled the coils along on their shoulders, with leaves to separate the fat threads so they did not stick together. Her arm was mostly healed, but it hurt now and sweat popped out on her brow, trickling into her eyes in big fat drops, and stinging. Sweaty work, silently done, as they crept away from their campground. Serfs did not all sleep at once, apparently, and Tananareve had monitored them to find the time when a minimum of them were awake. The Serf sleep cycle took about three Earth days, by her reckoning.

  They quietly stole away, leaving behind dummies of wood wrapped in the leaves, looking somewhat like sleeping humans. No Serfs raised an alarm.

  Moving silently took concentration. The air seemed to coil up into her nose, filling her lungs with thick musk. They reached the barrier just as Tananareve was starting to feel woozy. Her arm ached. Lau Pin thought the tall, slick wall was slightly lower here, due to some sagging. A huge tree had fallen into it from the other side, pulling it down somewhat. It was uncomfortably close to a spidow corridor, too.

  Quickly they deployed their loops of spidow string. Lau Pin and Abduss began linking the coils, fusing them together with quick bursts of laser light, raising a stench like burnt milk. They had practiced this craft and now could seal the ends within seconds, playing the beams along the ends until they bubbled.

  Tananareve took her position along the barrier, as they had drilled. The wall was transparent and slick, probably to keep animals from climbing it. Easily a hundred meters high, too. She looked through the wall at the jungle beyond. The wall was like ancient glass, with whorls and ripples that toyed with the view. She realized that that must be exactly what it was—glass so old, it had warped through its slow slide downward, for glass was a fluid. These must be some sort of standard wall, used for keeping animals within their range. But not, apparently, smart animals.

  Working quickly, Lau Pin and Abduss fused the end of the coiled filaments to a chunk of wood. Lau Pin had cut and sized these days before. He had proved handy at woodcraft and more. The ropy, rubbery vines nearby he had built into a curious kind of slingshot—taut vines, a cantilevered flinging pouch, artfully angled struts. He and the others cocked his array back, grunting. The men had practiced this and seemed confident it would work. A tanned and stretched leaf held the wood block payload, the ropes straining at it. They all took their positions as Lau Pin counted down.

  Tananareve had to admire how Lau Pin had made this with Abduss. The entire taut machine was like something from the Middle Ages—and they had built it from scratch.

  “Fire!” Lau Pin couldn’t resist whispering.

  The energy stored in the stretched vines sent Abduss’s payload shooting upward, arcing high. It cleared the barrier lip and started down on the other side. In 0.1 g, a slingshot had ten times the range it would have on Earth. That simple physics had led to many comic miscalculations as they learned to walk and work here on the terrace, but now the difference paid off. The soaring block pulled the spidow thread smoothly out of the coils. The block struck the ground with a thump she could barely hear.

  “Over!” Lau Pin called.

  Beth scrambled up the threads, hand over hand. The pale fibrous stuff was strong and slightly sticky, just enough to get a hold. She went up fast in the low g.

  But something moved behind them.

  Tananareve turned and saw two spidows moving off the threads about a hundred meters away, in the channel of their threads. How did they know? she had enough time to think. Vibrations? The stench?

  Then the spidows came at them.

  Abduss turned and fired his laser at both the approaching shapes. The spidows kept coming. He hit one in the four eyestalks and it bucked back, showing a mouth of converging black teeth like pincers. They made not a sound, but the wounded one reared up, as if to frighten them with its size. At that moment, Tananareve fired her laser into its belly. The thing came down with a crash. It didn’t move.

  But its partner did not slow. It brushed aside big trees as if they were saplings, ripping some out by their roots. Abduss held his ground and Tananareve saw the others were going up the thread, hand over hand. She fired again but the second spidow seemed invulnerable. It took the bolts without a pause. She heard from it a high, thin shrill.

  “Go!” Abduss called to her. “Up!”

  She fired one last time at the spidow. It was moving slower but was only twenty meters away. Tananareve tucked her laser into her belt and leaped for the thread. Her arm gave a sharp spike of pain. She favored that arm and went up, hand over hand, kicking off against the wall to try to get more momentum.

  The spidows could climb the thread, of course. She had not thought of that before. They had worried about the Serfs and Memor, but the spidows were the present threat.

  She was halfway up when she heard a scream. She could not help looking down.

  Abduss was under the spidow, and with a gurgle the screaming stopped. But the spidow did not linger. It tilted up and with its arms it grabbed at the thread. The arms were long and sinewy and moving so fast, they were a blur.

  It launched itself upward. Behind it, Abduss looked like a tissue someone had crumpled up after a nosebleed.

  It was coming for her. The thin, cutting shrill was loud now.

  She pulled furiously at the thread, kicked with her toes. She could hear the huge thing sucking air in and out now with long, windy breaths.

  The thread jerked with the weight behind her. She looked up and there was Lau Pin, aiming down from the top of the wall. A crisp sizzle raked the air near her head. Dazzles flashed in her eyes, evaporated away. Another sizzle. Her breath rasped and she ignored the snap in her shoulder.

  Lau Pin held out a hand and when she took it he lifted her bodily free of the thread. With one hand he brought her to the lip and she angled herself over, rolling to stay out of his way.

  He said, “No way I—” Another sharp sizzle near her hand. The thread went limp in her hand.

  She canted over the lip, gasping. Her hands grabbed it and she tumbled over, facing the wall. The brown and gray spidow mass was just below her. She thumped against the wall, mashing her nose. Blood drooled down her face.

  She looked around. Lau Pin was falling away below her. He had laser-cut the thread and—the spidow was falling. It went straight down, getting smaller in slow motion. No sound now.

  She hung there, holding on, watching it thud below. And flatten down, graceful and quick as a cat. Scrabbling legs, a long low mournful sound. It got larger then. It had absorbed the fall in its legs and now—it leaped for her.

  Missed. Fe
ll back. Would try again.

  She let go with one hand, the weak arm, and turned her back to the wall, clunking into it.

  Below were faces. The thread had fallen into coils below her and the others looked up at her. A long fall, over a hundred meters. They waved their arms and their mouths moved, but with the pulse pounding in her ears she could not make out what they said.

  The spidow was coming. Maybe it had a way of clinging to the wall. She did not wait to find out.

  A treetop beckoned about fifty meters below. It looked leafy and thick, with few branches showing. In this low g—no, not the time to do a calculation.

  She gathered her feet and pushed off—toward the treetop.

  She tumbled and tried to come down on her boots. When she hit, the leaves lashed at her. Branches snapped against her boots, arms; one caught her smack in the face. She hit a large limb, pain lancing into her ribs. It hurt badly as she tumbled headfirst through—into clear air—and managed to get her boots under her.

  She hit hard. Collapsed. Rolled away, trying to get a look up at the spidow.

  It came through the tree after her. Slamming through, snapping even the big branches, showering leaves and limbs down. It had punched its way through and crashed to the ground right beside her.

  Beth shot it through the enormous, many-eyed head. It jerked, gave a high, thin wail—and went still.

  When Tananareve looked through the wall, she could see Abduss, as still as the spidow.

  PART V

  Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

  —THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Citadel of Remembrance loomed larger than Memor recalled from her young days, so long ago. The high ramparts loomed like mountain cliffs over the gathering assembly. Fog trailed strands of pale luminance that frayed into brilliant amber fingers, like a twisting dome over them all. She admired the new additions to the Citadel, feeling the immense powers lodged here. That august force seemed more like a state of nature than a power, but such was the point.