Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  They all laughed hard, letting the tensions out.

  He helped Irma carry some gear from the sailer. She whispered, “Great attack! I knew you could do it.”

  “Well, that makes one of us.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  The hell of it was, Redwing thought, that SunSeeker’s magscoop seemed to act better as a brake than as an accelerator.

  The deck veered and flexed under his feet, seams groaned, a low rumble echoed. The magscoop expanded, breathing like a lung, and SunSeeker slowed. Contract, and the ship accelerated.

  Redwing hated the rumbles and surges, maybe because they echoed his own anxieties. To maintain flight control and keep their magnetic fields up and running, SunSeeker had to feed its engines with plasma. But the plasma density here was low and the ship had to keep flexing its magnetic screens to stay in burn equilibrium. So the whole ship followed a troubled orbit, skimming along above the Bowl and trying to pick up weak signals from their teams.

  “Jam, can’t we smooth this out?” he asked.

  The slender man stared intently at the control boards and just shook his head. “I am trying, sir. Ayaan’s array is slewing as we change velocity.”

  Ayaan herself called from a nearby control pod, “I can’t get coherence! My antennas cannot focus.”

  Redwing felt frustrated, out of his depth technically. A ramscoop of SunSeeker class was an intricate self-regulating system, and no one could master even a fraction of its labyrinthian technology. It was not so much a ship as a self-tech entity, with artificial intelligences embedded in every subsystem. It behaved less as a ship than as an electromagnetically structured metallic can run by a dispersed mind, itself electromagnetic.

  Beside it, an ancient automobile was an idiot savant, working because analog feedbacks and what the techs called “self-regulating networks” operated well enough, arrived at by incessant trials and some considerable deaths. Autos arose through a form of driven evolution. SunSeeker came from a two-century-long evolution of directed intelligences, none individually of great capability. Indeed, the subminds embedded in SunSeeker were no better than ordinary human intelligence, and some much lesser. But the sum of these subminds, as with whole human cultures, was greater than linear. Modern human civilization was surely of lesser station than its greatest intelligences, such as Gödel and Heinschlicht. So was SunSeeker an anthology of self-critical and disciplined minds. Each mind lived its life with a reward system and constraints, dwelling in a community of diverse talents. All that properly propelled SunSeeker into a social intelligence, one that ran beyond what the ship could entirely comprehend. In this it was much like human societies. While it nominally served Earthly society, the ship also had evolved over the centuries of its flight into its own, original society. Smart networks had to.

  It could innovate, too.

  “Cap’n! Our subsystems found a way to amp the coherence,” Ayaan called out. “I’ve never seen it do that before.”

  Redwing walked behind her acceleration couch and watched the screens display a dazzling graphic. It showed linked armories of smart systems, adjusting in milliseconds to the fits and snarls of SunSeeker’s trajectory. The hundreds of elements in Ayaan’s array glided to compensate, like a retina that caressed the light falling on it.

  The signal grid shifted, its colors cohering. Suddenly, a strong pulse came through. “It’s from Aybe’s phone,” Ayaan said, excited.

  “Send Beth’s bio data as soon as you can.”

  “Got it inserted already, right behind the carrier signature,” Ayaan said crisply.

  “What’s their situation?”

  “Here’s their text.”

  GOT FREE OF ALIENS. MAKING OUR WAY ACROSS THICKLY WOODED TERRAIN. HEADED OUT OF DESERT ZONE.

  “That’s it?”

  “I had to synthesize their signal three times to get even that.”

  “Can’t they send up some detail?”

  “I’ll ask them to use store and transmit. That lets them set the phone so when it acquires us, it sends a squirt at optimal rates.”

  “No audio?”

  “Too noisy for that. I squeezed this out of repeated text messages. Lucky it got through, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “How weak their signal is, how fast we’re moving, the whole problem of using a dispersed antenna—”

  “I get it,” Redwing said. “Outstanding work, Lieutenant.”

  She smiled and added, “I’ll send what text I get to your address.”

  “I wish we had more people to analyze this,” Redwing said suddenly, feeling his isolation.

  Again, Ayaan smiled kindly. “Our experts are on the ground, gathering information.”

  He nodded, then lifted his head a bit. He shouldn’t let the crew see his uncertainty. An old rule: If people can see up your nostrils, you’re keeping your chin at the appropriate alpha angle.

  “Has Aybe got the food stuff?”

  “Just did. Sent back an acknowledgment—whoops, there goes the connection. Damn.”

  Redwing paced and turned back to her. “Y’know, just before they went down, Cliff was afraid they wouldn’t be able to digest any of the food down there. Kind of funny. Now we’re sending him menus.”

  Ayaan chuckled. “It’s a major discovery, I should think.”

  “Really? Still seems like common sense to me. Food is food.”

  “Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed, while our amino acids are left-handed. It could easily have been the other way round.”

  Redwing blinked. He kept forgetting that crew were multiskilled, so the loss of one specialist couldn’t crimp them a lot.

  “Well, turns out otherwise,” he said. “Beth’s team said they had some dysentery at first, but some of their med supplies put them right. Prob’ly Cliff’s did, too.”

  “Beth’s text messages said she got most of her lore from the aliens.”

  Redwing nodded once more. “They knew the poisons, and maybe those are pretty near universal? Interesting idea.”

  Ayaan was observing him closely, he noted. “Sir, I understood Cliff’s point, and indeed, I agreed with it. Particularly his suggestion that they do thorough sampling of the alien air, to see if it would be dangerous to us.”

  “Which they did. And it wasn’t.”

  “Beth reported some flulike symptoms, dysentery, too—but, yes, nothing fatal.”

  “They caught a break, maybe.”

  She shook her head. “What interests me is that these ideas of Cliff’s, and mine, they were quite plausible. Yet you ignored them.”

  “Not exactly. I said be careful but keep going. We had to go down there, had to take our chances.”

  “Yes, and that is what I find admirable. You made the decision, despite our worries.”

  He wondered briefly if she was just sucking up to him. But no—she wasn’t that kind of woman, a brownnose climber. “That’s my job.”

  She beamed. “And I am glad it is not mine.”

  “You’re going to have to make decisions, too, as this whole thing plays out. Here’s a tip: The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.”

  They both laughed together and it felt good.

  * * *

  That evening he lay in his bunk thinking about the day and what Ayaan had said.

  All the media back Earthside had played the whole ocean/space analogy to the hilt, making Redwing’s job sound like that of Captain Cook or Magellan. But those sailors had plenty of experience, had worked their way up the naval ladder by sailing to nearby ports, learning command, getting navigation right, and gradually making longer voyages. The first generation starship commanders had to make a huge leap, from piloting craft around the solar system, then the Kuiper belt and fringes of the Oort cloud, then to interstellar distances. That was a giant jump of 100,000—like sailing around the world after a trial jaunt of about three football fields.

  He had piloted a ramscoop o
n one of the first runs into the Oort cloud, and done well. But in all the trials, SunSeeker hadn’t topped a tenth of light speed more than once, and they had run at that for only a week. Five ships had gone out before SunSeeker. In the first decade, none reported ramscoop troubles like theirs. That didn’t mean much now, though. Communications from Earth had stopped more than a century back, for reasons unexplained. Silence says nothing.

  They were sailing uncharted waters here, Redwing thought, to use a nautical phrase. Magellan, he now recalled, had gone ashore and gotten tangled up in conflicts in the Philippine Islands, and died in a battle he chose to start. He had been convinced that the angel of Virgin Mary was on his side, so he couldn’t lose, even though he was outnumbered by a thousand to thirty. Later generations named a small galaxy after him, but he had made plenty of dumb decisions, especially that fatal one, out of emotion.

  So maybe analogies could be useful, after all.

  PART VI

  Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

  —MARK TWAIN

  THIRTY-TWO

  Even Tananareve was keeping up, moving steadily with grim, sweaty determination, but Mayra wasn’t. She hadn’t been making good time since their last sleep. Her forehead wrinkled with grave, deep lines and her lips moved in an interior dialogue. Beth could feel what it was doing to her, the loss of her husband eating into her morale.

  That was how she had to think of it, Beth realized. Morale. Keep the unit together and deal with what happened. Leadership, they had called it in crew training. Every crew member had to be able to assume leadership if the circumstances demanded it. Which meant if the actual leader got killed or disabled or broke down in the face of things nobody had imagined before. Leadership.

  She slowed her own pace, then watched as Lau Pin burrowed into the thick, leafy undergrowth and was gone in seconds.

  Beth bit her lip. She would not yell after him. They were fugitives, best to stay quiet. She followed the torn foliage, thinking how easily a Serf-One tracker could do the same, or just follow his nose. The smell of smashed vegetation was rank.

  But Mayra wailed and threw herself down among the springy leaves.

  Beth glanced after Lau Pin, then touched her shoulder. “Mayra—”

  “He’s dead, and what’s it for? We’re just running. We’re all dying of bone loss anyway in this low g!” She spat the words out, pressure released.

  “Oh, Mayra, I’m so sorry.” Best to just let this run for the moment, get the words out and be done with it. The emotion was the point here, not the health issue. There was plenty of experience in low gravs, and this region seemed to be about 0.3 g. Maybe not too bad—if they didn’t spend months in it.

  “And, and—where are we going that it was worth so much?”

  Beth said softly, “We had to get out. We all agreed. He was a fine man, and he dealt with that spidow brilliantly. Bravely.” Beth patted her arm, feeling useless in the face of such sorrow.

  Mayra nodded, tears running down her face unnoticed. “He was just so, so—”

  “I know.” That was all there was to say, really. Sympathy seemed useless, but it was essential all the same. If the bereaved felt isolated, they got even worse. “I’m so sorry.”

  In a flash, she recalled her own feelings, looking at Abduss. A thick smell rose up from the body like fumes, stinging the nose. The spidow had flattened Abduss, and the bladder and bowels had let go. Already blood had crusted into reddish brown rivers and the face was squashed beyond even parody of the man who had once enjoyed sharp, symmetric features.

  She had worked up spit and swallowed, taking deep breaths, and managed not to vomit. Then she walked away, expelling her lungs and getting rid of the dregs of the smell. Every encounter with death stayed with her, but this one would go to the head of the line.

  Even the memory made Beth wonder if Cliff had survived in this strange place. She made herself stop thinking about it and sat beside Mayra, putting an arm around the woman who was sobbing softly.

  Fred spoke, slow and even. “So am I, Mayra.” A pause. His head jerked toward the horizon. “Either way we decide to go, we should stick to the ridge.”

  This startled Beth; Fred could go for a day without talking. The other women blinked, glanced at one another, and decided to let the moment move on. They tended to look around when Fred spoke. He did it so seldom, so gravely.

  Lau Pin was back in time to catch it. “Fred? We can’t. It’ll make us conspicuous.”

  “Not on the ridge,” Fred said witheringly. “Keep it in reach. It orients us. Look—” His hands sketched a tented line. “When they brought us here, do you remember passing that line of bubble buildings? Then the ridge just went on, dead straight for thirty or forty klicks, under the wall and into the Garden. Under the dirt and rock, it’s a, a structural member, don’t you see it? How shallow the dirt is? If you’re building here, you anchor the important stuff to the load-bearing…” He trailed off, hands waving.

  Beth was nodding, hoping this would move them away from Mayra’s grief. There was no solution for that but time. “Along the ridge, right. Stay off to one side and don’t go near the spidows. Keep close watch, and we can see the spidow corridors.”

  Fred nodded, too, so she went on. “We already know some of what we can eat. Cook it with the guns so they can’t follow the smoke. There’s no dry wood here, so it’ll smoke for sure. Folks, we need to think about not getting caught. No more ripping through undergrowth. We move along the tops of the trees. Tricky, but we can do it.”

  Lau Pin frowned. “Dangerous, and that’ll slow us down.”

  “Safer, though,” Mayra said, coming out of her mood. “How much spidow rope have we got? Lau Pin—?”

  “I took Abduss’s share of the rope,” Lau Pin said, pointing to the loops of it around his waist. Beth realized that the way to keep Mayra involved was to present decisions to be made. Draw her into the group.

  Tananareve said adamantly, “I think Beth’s right. And it’s only for a short distance. So, which way, Fred?”

  Lau Pin said, “That was a spaceport, that line of bubbles. I never saw them clearly, I was too dizzy. But, but it has to be a spaceport, doesn’t it? And warehouses and so forth.”

  “Could be,” Mayra said, blinking some more and visibly bracing herself, getting back into emotional stability. “But that’s just where they’ll look for us.”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” said Fred. “But if we follow the ridge the other way, we’ll find something important.”

  Tananareve asked, “Like what?”

  “Say, something that wants a solid anchor.”

  “Okay. Which way is the ridge?”

  They looked at one another. Beth took a big breath, thinking, and said, “We need to climb.”

  * * *

  From the top of a braid tree the ridge was obvious, a couple of kilometers away. They were on its long, gentle flank. Moving along in the treetops was more like swimming than climbing. The low grav helped a lot, giving their movements a slow-motion grace as they swung among the long, rubbery limbs of the tall trees.

  Beth could see immense distances: the landscape was concave, unlike Earth’s. Distant things rose up and got noticed. The ridge was conspicuous, a bony scrabble of boulders at the crest, four or five kilometers away. Beyond was a frenetic sky, the bright pink sun, and the glaring, restless white flare. The Jet cooled into rolling reds and strands of amber as it neared the Bowl. She watched a filament weave around another, each making a helical dance, like snakes dancing to slow music.

  They stopped short of the ridge to talk it through.

  “Spaceport,” Beth said. “We need to find a way back to gravity. How’s our dead reckoning working today? Fred, which way is that row of bubbles?”

  Fred’s eyes danced anxiously and he nodded toward his left.

  “Should be that way. Left,” Lau Pin gestured.

  Tananareve used her binocs and said, “Folks, can’t you see it? Like a black frot
h, that way. Left, like you said, Lau Pin.”

  “You’ve got good eyes. Anything to the right?”

  They looked. The ridge dwindled, dwindled … nothing, nothing …

  “Spaceport,” Beth commanded, keeping her voice firm. “I wish I knew how to be less conspicuous. We’re not hidden.” She ducked suddenly. A big black bird with bright yellow canard fins just back of its head cruised above them, inspecting, unafraid. It swooped and dived away, honking.

  “Ah, lunch,” Fred said.

  Lau Pin laughed. “Those will help. The Astronomers won’t find us by our heat signature, not while the sky is full of big birds. If we can catch a few for dinner, we might use their feathers for camouflage.”

  * * *

  Marching away from the spaceport, they would have left behind them vehicles that could take them back to gravity. Lau Pin was right: the spaceport was their obvious target.

  Too obvious.

  Canard bird flesh tasted like meat-eater, dark and rangy, a little like lion, Beth thought. She’d eaten lion at a theme restaurant, centuries ago now. She pushed away the thought that of all those she had ever known—parents, friends, lovers—only the SunSeeker crew were still alive.

  She smacked her lips and focused on the meat. They conscientiously ate all of any game they got—fat, gristle, crack the bones and suck out the marrow. You never knew where your next meal was coming from here. They’d caught only four of the turkey-sized black canard birds before the rest caught on. Now they had to dip down into the forest to get anything to eat. Water they found pooled in leaves. Shooting from the trees was easy, though; the midsized animals didn’t seem to regard the sky as a threat, and just ambled along.

  They’d used the black feathers to decorate themselves, smiling as if at a masquerade. Now they crossed the forest tops in low leaps, like flying squirrels. They’d tied spidow line in loops, to catch themselves in case of a fall. All their Earthside training in fieldwork paid off.