Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  Snaps, pops. Branches thrashed without a wind, off to the left. Lau Pin halted, motioned them back. Fred reached, not for a weapon but for his camera phone. They watched for long seconds. Then Tananareve aimed a low-level laser into the rustling branches.

  Branches fell, thrashing loudly on the long way down. Branches? “Tree octopus,” Lau Pin said. “I swear, that’s what it looks like.”

  “Couple of snakes, mating,” said Mayra.

  Beth said, “Seems more like a bunch.”

  Fred was replaying video in slow motion. “Snakes with two or three tails,” he said. “Very strange.” He showed them the phone. “See? Tails with … might be fingernails, or rattlesnake rattles. Look, they caught some lower branches.”

  They all paused to listen and heard rustlings below. Lau Pin suggested, “Go down for a better look?”

  Fred began working his way down, without waiting. Beth called, “Fred! We need to keep moving.”

  “I see something.”

  “They could be venomous!”

  Fred didn’t answer. Mayra videotaped him until he was out of sight.

  And here he came back moments later, waving something the size of a pillow, the shape of a sausage. “They dropped it,” he said as he reached them. “Look, it’s about as wide as they were, thirty centimeters around, snake-shaped. It’s got straps. And—”

  “Don’t tear it!” Lau Pin said.

  Rip. “Velcro.”

  Beth reached in, stirred the contents. A haunch of red meat wrapped in cloth. A knife with a peculiar handle. Tool with a button: Flashlight? Communicator? Both? Dared they try it?

  “Folks, we have to keep moving,” Tananareve said presently. Beth agreed. They resumed their flight, with the sausage pack tied at Fred’s hip.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “What if we have to leave the forest?” Lau Pin wondered. They rested on the broad leaves that were the size of the main deck on SunSeeker.

  Beth didn’t have an answer. Outside the forest, they would find a vertical landscape. There might be nothing to grab on to. But the greenery seemed to run as far as that row of dots, which was beginning to look like hemispheres of varied size and color. They had decided to move toward large buildings in the distance.

  Braid trees became scarce. Vegetation hugged low to the ground. The big canard birds were avoiding them now. That last meal might have cost us, Beth thought. Her stomach rumbled.

  They prowled through the low scrub bushes and used their binocs. At any movement they froze. Astronomer-sized Bird Folk were wandering among the buildings. And canard birds wheeled over the trees near the bubbles, cawing and diving.

  Their approach was slow, methodical. No shadows for cover, and the sky seemed hotter here. The first dome was a sphere as big as a ten-story building, standing up from the jungle on a single leg. Reeds and ferns surrounded it, of types the Bird Folk had used for food.

  Beth carefully watched the distant figures as they moved at their bobbing pace, their long necks weaving back and forth to keep their heads stationary as their long legs stroked forward with lazy grace. Walking out from the spaceport, Astronomers would reach this structure last, she saw. It would be the culmination of their path, a final lesson, with a vast garden of delights beyond.

  They crept forward warily. The air was fragrant and lush, and Beth listened for suspicious sounds, but there were none.

  So what was this bubble? She studied the designs on its outside. Brown abstracts, some with white traces, and each shape surrounded by a dark blue. Almost like—

  “It’s a globe,” Tananareve said in her ear. “A globe map.”

  “Damn, you’re right! This garden, it’s some sort of … gallery of planets?” She peered at the more distant globes—and, yes, they had the same color patterns, continents swimming in seas. But the spheres were comparatively tiny, not all the same size but no bigger than train cars or even the largest Bird Folk.

  Tananareve asked, “So this one—their home planet maybe?”

  “Or one they passed by, explored.”

  “They’re headed the same way we are, so maybe it’s Glory? At this range, their telescopes could pick out continent-sized features. And look, there’s another big one at the far end of the chain.”

  Beth saw it: barely more than a dot. “One is their home world, and the other’s maybe their ultimate target—yes, it could be. You’d think the home world would be treated specially.” The Astronomers might actually know the shapes of Glory’s continents, or this could be some planet they just mapped with big lenses as they passed by its system. If a world wasn’t interesting, they might not land on it at all.

  Lau Pin whispered, “What’s up?” so they shared the idea. Beth stared at the nearer sphere, then began circling anticlockwise. The rest came with her, moving in irregular jumps, staying hidden.

  It mapped a planet, all right. There were no ice caps; where were the poles? The thing wasn’t rotating fast enough to tell. It might not be rotating at all, though it stood on a single axial pole. Oceans were a mottled blue; land was red and brown. The land masses were all clumped, and white streaks showed chains of snowcapped mountains. It was somewhat stylized, the continent and islands colored more like gems than landscapes, and the blue oceans—three-fourths of the globe’s surface—were translucent, the deep sea floors showing through, subduction zones and midocean ridges clearly defined. Look hard enough, and you saw shadows moving in there. Life-forms the size of mountains? By now they knew that it was indeed rotating, but very slowly.

  Tananareve whispered, “Somebody coming.”

  Fred sprang up on a strut and surveyed. “Yep.” A handful of bird shapes were moving toward them. Lau Pin said, “We need to hide.”

  Fred jerked his head again—“Inside.”

  “The only way in is that post holding up the sphere,” Lau Pin said. He loped away.

  Beth said uneasily, “I saw motion in there. We don’t want to have to fight anyone.”

  “I looked,” Mayra said. “Holograms. Something’s making pictures.”

  “Audience?”

  “Nothing I could see.”

  Lau Pin waved an arm, and they followed silently, swiftly.

  The spindly metal pillar that held the ten-story globe would have collapsed in normal gravity. The interior was a spiral stair, steps narrow near the axis, several feet wide near the walls. Lots of room. Accommodation for various species, maybe not just Bird Folk.

  They were hidden as soon as they entered the giant stairwell. Tananareve suggested staying in the stairwell, but even she wasn’t pushing it. Wonders waited above.

  They entered armed, as best they could.

  The inside was even roomier, with a ceiling ten meters high above a single gigantic space. It looked like a museum: items standing free or floating on thin wires Beth couldn’t quite see, all squashed into whatever space would fit. A vast ceramic green ramp ran round the spherical wall.

  “Watch for anything moving,” Lau Pin said. “Fred, Mayra, Tananareve, you in the middle. I’ll take point. Beth?”

  “Rear guard.”

  Here on the floor was a shifting mound, almost flat but with ridges and pools. Patches of ocher and pale green writhed and then spread out. After a minute, it repeated. It made no sense at all until Tananareve said, “Continental drift.”

  Beth said, “We still don’t know—”

  “Which planet. True.”

  They walked among what must be model spaceships, and with a flicker were suddenly in a three-dimensional movie. As they crossed some unseen threshold, it rose abruptly all around them, a starscape riddled with swarming dark dots.

  Beth stepped back quickly. The dots vanished. That much furious motion, anything could be hidden … but there wasn’t anything alive here except her own people, visible as long as she wasn’t in the hologram. They had spread out a little, looking for enemies—barring Fred, who stood stock-still, caught by the dancing dots.

  She stepped back in. Chaos danced
in flickering light around her. Anything could sneak up on them under these conditions, but she couldn’t look away. Fred sighed beside her, mesmerized.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The sensaround opened in deep space.

  A tiny knot of yellow white sat at the exact center of the display. The field of view was a hemisphere so big, she could not grasp it without turning her head. Stars sprinkled the sky, but she could recognize no constellations.

  Slowly the point of view rotated. Maybe that was the nearest star? But, no—a ruddy yellow disk swam into view at her far left. The disk fumed with small storms, and she could see magnetic arches soaring above the brimming bright churn. Clearly this star was smaller and redder than Sol and pocked with dense black spots. The vision slid farther, the star moved right, and tiny ships came in view. They had blue bubbles midship, probably fuel blisters. They tugged huge hexagonal containers, hundreds of ships all heading toward …

  A vast pale crescent swam into view. She watched the framework of long, spiky girders that curved around complex guts. Between these were long loops like wedding bands, glowing. The thing was so large, it cast deep shadows over a bee swarm of ships, all tending to the large structure like worker insects.

  Farther away orbited tumbling rocks, mostly tinged with white. Flames shot along their faces, and fumes billowed out in spheres. Those must be immense smelting systems laboring in the high vacuum. Big clouds of white and amber gas rose from them, expanding until they dimmed to transparency and faded. The view crossed a smaller star, glare white, brighter than the rest of the sky.

  Still smaller ships flitted among the mining operations. Some hauled massive girders through cylindrical arrays. Out the far end emerged long struts with a glaze on them, shimmering in the orange red starlight. Some kind of hardening process?

  Dirty gray blobs hovered in the distance. Beth realized these were iceteroids, like those humanity exploited in the Oort cloud of Earth—condensed out when the sun was born, rich in volatiles. Beside them flitting ships shepherded enormous orange balloons. These filled with gas that was born in the tiny orange fires at their base. Mass and elements for the construction, she guessed.

  Then the milling swarm of mote-sized ships became a blur. Time speeded up. The huge thing they were building took shape. Girders aligned and layered. Scaffolds unfolded and crossbars buttressed those. Joists and brackets the size of planets formed in the haze of buzzing motion. An enormous geometry emerged. It was the Bowl.

  Flitting shapes, too small to see clearly, wove a tapestry of black lace around the budding hemisphere. This array glowed suddenly, a flash of white light. Gas blew away from the structure like a fading fog.

  This is a history lesson, Beth thought. The natives here must want to keep aware of how they came to be … and so leave places like this so the message is not lost, a tradition sent down through deep time.

  The camera eye view closed in. Beth could see intricate maneuvers of silvery ships as they worked their way across the surface of the Bowl in the making. They laid down layers and pillars that lapped around the hemisphere, and the camera eye followed them, sliding over the lip of the Bowl into … a thick flock of ships, all ferrying volatile bags, the orange balloons she had seen before. Flashes like lightning arced through the bags of gas. Above the bottom of the Bowl, these came free. They slipped through holes in a nearly invisible upper layer, gliding downward toward the floor of the Bowl.

  The field of view closed in on the shimmering layer. It was the atmosphere’s boundary shield. This billowed out as it held in the pressure of gases emptying forth. On the Bowl floor, gushing geysers spouted thick ivory clouds. Other ships skimmed along the ribbed understory of the floor, spewing masses of brown and black—the topsoil, falling into place.

  This was an Origin Story. Somewhere, the small red sun had spawned the creatures who built the Bowl. Why didn’t it open on a planet where the builders began? There were none in the black sky. If the red star had planets, they were small. So maybe the creatures’ world was far away, orbiting the first bright spot she had seen. Maybe the builders came from near a distant companion of this small sun.

  Now the measureless basin turned. The bee swarm of working ships was an earnestly working fog as they spun up this world in the making. The soil settled and blue haze spread throughout the skin of atmosphere. Darting flashes lit the troubled high clouds. Monsoons swept the ragged continents, and seas sloshed.

  The system evolved. Storms lashed immense, windswept lands. A joist on the backside popped free and the bee swarm surrounded it as gouts of dirt and gas became a volcano into a vacuum. Patched, the system ground on, spinning up. The shimmering sheet holding in the atmosphere flexed and rippled as angular momentum warped it.

  Time ran faster. She was not sure how she knew this, but surely it would have taken a very long time to form a working biosphere. Yet now she saw the air clear and gray clouds form in high stacks like pancakes. Green lands spread like a bacterium overwhelming a curved petri dish.

  Beth could see the Knothole now through the clearing atmosphere. In an arc around it, mirrors blossomed in lines, like yarn wrapping around the floor of the Bowl. The dark patch of the Knothole bristled with large gray shapes that she supposed must be large magnet cores being built. Slowly the center resolved and she could see stars winking in it.

  The winding up of the mirror fields slowed as the last strands of it popped into being. Now the mirror fields jittered and flashed as they came alive. Her view tilted and swam toward the edge of the Bowl, where knuckles of burnished metal grew. Quickly the mirror field gained a slick metallic sheen. Fitful sprays of blazing colors worked in it.

  The mirror fields showed sparkling oranges and reds. They threw images of the small star into view, flickering and finding their patterns, settling in. Abruptly a thin line of boiling plasma arced in and played in the spaces above the Bowl. The plume steadied, stuttered—and lanced through the Knothole.

  Thin at first, the luminous Jet thickened. Snarls worked along it. Dark spots. A filament broke free and lashed across the envelope that held in the atmosphere. The Jet snapped off. But the damage was done: the atmosphere’s skin darkened and massive plumes of air shot out. A blur of worker ships stopped that.

  The view turned toward the reddish star. Its corona boiled with hoops of magnetic force, making giant high bridges around a white-hot point. That was the mirror focus spot, and more ships tended to it with anxious energy.

  With a jerk the Jet lanced out again. It speared exactly through the Knothole. The repaired skin of the atmosphere reflected a pale image of the Jet.

  Now this Bowl of the past resembled the vibrantly alive presence of today. The point of view backed away from it, and the constantly flickering swarm of worker ships faded.

  Imperceptibly, the system of star, Jet, and Bowl began to move. It swam across the blackness, the Jet’s raging brilliance drowning out the icy stars. The vast contrivance glided with aching slowness away from the distant yellow white star.

  Leaving the system, she guessed. It could not make a pass near that star without risking disruption of whatever planets might orbit there. The Bowl became a vessel bound for the distant pale lights, the firmament of beckoning stars.

  Only the starscape remained.

  Lau Pin, Fred, Tananareve, and Mayra looked around themselves. It was, Beth thought, a little like being on LSD. A trip into a distant, wondrous time.

  In the dark she could see through the globe’s smoky glass. Gigantic Bird Folk were walking underneath.

  Fred said, “I think I see.”

  Mayra said, “We all saw, Fred.”

  Tananareve said, “I think I see why primitives died out when they ran across advanced civilizations.”

  Lau Pin said, “It strikes me that if there’s only one way into here, there’s only one way out.”

  Beth: “We can’t leave now. We’re surrounded.”

  “If any of them come in—”

  “We’re dead. Let�
��s keep looking. All the secrets are here. By the way, Beth, this has to be the map of the origin world.”

  “Oh … almost.”

  * * *

  Over the next hour, two dozen Bird Folk passed them by. The human folk spent their time examining hundreds of spacegoing tools. Most were too cryptic even to be described. Mayra took pictures.

  They gathered at one point to share dried canard bird meat. It was all they had left, save for a bar of chocolate Tananareve shared out.

  “I think the Bird Folk are gone,” Beth said. “Do we feel lucky?”

  “We feel hungry,” Tananareve said. “Somewhere around us, there must be something to eat.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Six little world-globes ran in a row, three or four meters in diameter, half a kilometer apart. Worlds—big enough to show as spheres—but not all Earthlike. One was featureless blue, bigger than the rest. One was stark ice white, cracked around the equator. None of them had windows or openings.

  The final bubble, an hour away, was another glassy sphere marked with land masses in a great blue sea. They moved carefully now, slipping from clumps of immense ferns to the shelter of occasional tree stands. Bird Folk of a variety Beth didn’t recognize were streaming into a great arch. Beth’s troupe moved carefully, but the Bird Folk were paying no attention at all. They murmured and whooped with odd, high singsongs.

  Tananareve crept close against the glass, around the curve from the entrance. “Dancing,” she said. “It’s a dance hall.”

  Lau Pin was beside her now. He stared awhile, then said, “Mating ritual.”

  Beth said, “There’s a difference?”

  The chuckles that followed this weak joke told her how tense they were.

  Beth was up against the glass now. Slow, thumping music with skittering undertones. A simple song, cascading chords ornamented by lots of percussion. Lurching bodies, heads turned upward to the ceiling.

  With sun and flare behind her, she and Tananareve might look like ferns, if they held still. There were platforms throughout the interior, on narrow pedestals, some topped with … sofas … nests? Thousands of Bird Folk, including a few gigantic Astronomers, were paying no attention to anything but one another. Some were dancing, some fighting, some … head to tail … that must be mating. But the Astronomers weren’t doing any of that. Were they there to supervise? Or as voyeurs?