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This book is for John Varley, Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Shaw, Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Robert Reed, and others of the Big Object Society. On to larger things!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We conferred on scientific and literary matters with many helpful people. Erik Max Francis, Joe Miller, and David Hartwell gave detailed comments on the manuscript. And of course Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson were first.
CAST OF CHARACTERS, COMMON TERMS
SUNSEEKER CREW AND TERMS
Captain Redwing
Cliff Kammash—biologist
Mayra Wickramsingh—pilot, with Beth team
Abduss Wickramsingh—engineer, with Beth team
Glory—the planet of destination
SunSeeker—the ramship
Beth Marble—biologist
Eros—the first drop ship
Fred Ojama—geologist, with Beth team
Aybe—general engineer officer, with Cliff team
Howard Blaire—systems engineer, with Cliff team
Terrence Gould—with Cliff team
Irma Michaelson—plant biologist, with Cliff team
Tananareve Bailey—with Beth team
Lau Pin—engineer, with Beth team
Jampudvipa (shortened to Jam)—an Indian petty officer
Ayaan Ali—Arab woman navigator/pilot
Clare Conway—copilot
Karl Lebanon—general technology officer
ASTRONOMER FOLK
Memor—Attendant Astute Astronomer
Bemor—Contriver and Intimate Emissary to the Ice Minds
Asenath—Chief of Wisdom
Ikahaja—Ecosystem Savant
Omanah—Ecosystem Packmistress
Ramanuji—Biology Savant
Kanamatha—Biology Packmistress
Thaji—Judge Savant
Unajiuhanah—Senior Mistress, Keeper of the Vault Library
OTHER PHYLA
finger snakes—Thisther, male; Phoshtha, female; Shtirk, female
Ice Minds—cold life of great antiquity
the Adopted—those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl
the Diaphanous
FOLK TERMS
Analyticals—artificial minds that monitor Bowl data on local scales
TransLanguage
Long Records
Late Invaders
Undermind
Serf-Ones
the Builders—the mix of species that built the Bowl
Third Variety—Astronomer variety
Astronauts—Astronomer variety
Quicklands
Kahalla
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters, Common Terms
Part I: Essential Error
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Illustration 1
Part II: Sunny Slaughterhouse
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part III: Status Opera
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part IV: Sending Superman
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part V: Mirror Flowers
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part VI: The Deep
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part VII: Crunchy Insects
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part VIII: Counterthreat
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part IX: On the Run
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Illustration 2
Illustration 3
Illustration 4
Chapter 29
Part X: Stone Mind
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Illustration 5
Chapter 32
Part XI: Double-Edged Sword, No Handle
Chapter 33
Illustration 6
Illustration 7
Illustration 8
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part XII: The Word of Cambronne
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Part XIII: The Diaphanous
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Illustration 9
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Part XIV: Memory’s Flickering Light
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Afterword: Big Smart Objects
I. How We Built the Books
II. Fun with High Tech
III. Bowl Design
Books by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
About the Authors
Copyright
PART I
ESSENTIAL ERROR
It is better to be wrong than to be vague. In trial and error, the error is the true essential.
—FREEMAN DYSON
ONE
Memor glimpsed the fleeing primates, a narrow view seen through the camera on one of the little mobile probes. Simian shapes cavorted and capered among the understory of the Mirror Zone, making their way to—what? Apparently, to the local express station of mag-rail. Very well. She had them now, then. Memor clashed her teeth in celebration, and tossed a squirming small creature into her mouth, crunching it with relish.
These somewhat comic Late Invaders were scrambling about, anxious. They seemed dreadfully confused, too. One would have expected more of ones who had arrived via a starship, with an interstellar ram of intriguing design. But as well, they had escaped in their scampering swift way. And, alas, the other gang of them had somehow evaded Memor’s attempt to kill them, when they made contact with a servant species, the Sil. So they had a certain small cleverness, true.
Enough of these irritants! She would have to concentrate and act quickly to bring them to heel. “Vector to intercept,” Memor ordered her pilot. Their ship surged with a thrumming roar. Memor sat back and gave a brief clacking flurry of fan-signals expressing relief.
Memor called up a situation graphic to see if anything had changed elsewhere. Apparently not. The Late Invader ramship was still maneuvering near the Bowl, keeping beneath the defensive weapons along the rim. From their electromagnetic emissions, clearly they monitored their two small groups of Late Invaders that were running about the Bowl. But their ship made no move to directly assist them. Good. They were wisely cautious. It would be interesting to take their ship apart, in good time, and see how the primates had engineered its adroit aspects.
Memor counted herself fortunate that the seeking probe had now foun
d this one group, running through the interstices behind the mirror section. She watched vague orange blobs that seemed to be several simians and something more, as well: tentacular shapes, just barely glimpsed. These shapes must be some variety of underspecies, wiry and quick. Snakes?
The ship vibrated under her as Memor felt a summoning signal—Asenath called, her irritating chime sounding in Memor’s mind. She had to take the call, since the Wisdom Chief was Memor’s superior. Never a friend, regrettably. Something about Asenath kept it that way.
Asenath was life-sized on the viewing wall, giving a brilliant display of multicolored feathers set in purple urgency and florid, rainbow rage. “Memor! Have you caught the Late Invaders?”
“Almost.” Memor kept her own feather-display submissive, though with a fringe of fluttering orange jubilance. “Very nearly. I can see them now. The primate named ‘Beth’ has a group, including the one I’ve trained to talk. I’m closing on them. They have somehow mustered some allies, but I am well armed.”
Asenath made a rebuke display, slow and sardonic. “This group you let escape, yes?”
“Well, yes, they made off while I was attending to—”
“So they are the escaped, I take it. I cannot attend to every detail, but this was a plain failure, Attendant Astute Astronomer. They eluded you.”
Memor suppressed her irritation. Asenath always used full titles to intimidate and assert superiority—usually, as now, with a fan-rattle. “Only for a short while, Wisdom Chief. I had also to contend with the other escaped primates, you may recall, Your Justness.”
“Give up everything else and get us that primate who can talk! We need it. Don’t fire on them. If they die, you die.”
Memor had to control her visible reaction. No feather-display, head motionless. “Wisdom Chief? What has changed?”
No answer. Asenath’s feather-display flickered with a reflexive blush of fear, just before she faded.
She was hiding something … but what? Memor would have to learn, but not now. She glanced at the detection screen, ignoring her pilot. Beth’s group had disappeared into a maze of machinery. There were heat traces in several spots, leading … toward the docks. Yes! Toward another escape.
There had been six of these Late Invaders when they escaped. Now the heat traces found only five, plus some slithering profiles of another species. Had one died or gone astray? These were a social species, on the diffuse hierarchy model, so it was unlikely they had simply abandoned one of their kind.
“Veest Blad,” she said to the pilot, “make for the docks. We’ll intercept them there. Fast.”
TWO
Tananareve Bailey looked back, face lined, sweat dripping from her nose. Nobody behind her now. She was the last, almost keeping up. Her injuries had healed moderately well and she no longer limped, but gnawing fatigue had set in. She was slowing. Her breath rasped and her throat burned and she was nearly out of water.
It had been a wearing, sweaty trip through the maze she thought of as “backstage.” The labyrinth that formed the back of the Bowl’s mirror shell was intricate and plainly never intended for anybody but workers to move through. No comforts such as passageways. Poor lighting. Twisty lanes a human could barely crawl through. This layer underpinning the Bowl was the bigger part of the whole vast structure, nearly an astronomical unit across—but only a few meters thick. It was all machinery, stanchions, and cables. Control of the mirrors on the surface above demanded layers of intricate wiring and mechanical buffers. Plus, the route twisted in three dimensions.
Tananareve was sweating and her arms ached. She couldn’t match the jumping style of her companions in 18 percent gravity without a painful clicking in her hip and ribs. Her pace was a gliding run, sometimes bounding off an obstructing wall, sometimes taking it on her butt—all assisted by her hands. It demanded a kind of slithering grace she lacked.
Beth, Lau Pin, Mayra, and Fred were ahead of her. She paused, clinging to a buttress shaft. She needed rest, time, but there was none of that here. For a moment she let the whole world slide away and just relaxed, as well as she could. These moments came seldom but she longed for them. She sighed and … let go.…
Earth came to her then … the quiet leafy air of her childhood, in evergreen forests where she hiked with her mother and father, her careless laughter sinking into the vastness of the lofty trees. Her heart was still back there in the rich loam of deep forests, fragrant and solemn in the cathedral redwoods and spruce. Even in recalling it all, she knew it had vanished on the tides of time. Her parents were dead for centuries now, surely, despite the longevity treatments. But the memories swarmed up into her as she relaxed for just a long, lingering moment.
Her moment of peace drained away. She had to get back to running.
In the dim light, she could barely make out the finger snakes flickering ahead of the long-striding humans. They had an amazingly quick wriggle. Probably they’d been adapted through evolution to do repairs in the Bowl’s understory. Beth had gotten fragments of their history out of the snakes, but the translation was shaky. They’d been here on the Bowl so long, their own origins were legends about a strange, mythical place where a round white sun could set to reveal black night.
“Beth,” Tananareve sent over short-range comm, “I’m kinda … I … need a rest.”
“We all do,” came the crisp reply. Beth turned up ahead and looked back at her, too far away to read an expression. “Next break is five minutes.”
“Here I come.” She clamped down her jaw and took a ragged breath.
Their target was an automated cargo drone. The snakes had told of these, and now the bulkheads and struts they passed were pitched forward, suggested they were getting close. Up ahead, as she labored on, she could see it emerge, one in a line of identical flat-bellied cylinders. Tananareve could see the outline of a great oyster-colored curved hatch in its side, and—was that? Yes!—stars beyond a window wall. She felt elation slice through her fatigue. But now the hip injury had slowed her to a limping walk.
Without the finger snakes, this plan would have been impossible.
She limped up to the rest of them, her mouth already puckering at the imagined taste of water. The three snakes were decorated in camouflage colors, browns and mottled blacks, the patterns almost the same, but Tananareve had learned to tell them apart. They massed a bit more than any of the humans, and looked like snakes whose tails had split into four arms, each tipped with a claw. Meaty things, muscular, slick-skinned. They wore long cloth tubes as backpacks, anchored on their ridged hides.
Beth’s team had first seen finger snakes while escaping from the garden of their imprisonment. Tananareve surprised a nest of them and they fled down into deep jungle, carrying some cargo in a sling. The snakes were a passing oddity, apparently intelligent to a degree. Her photos of them were intriguing.
Now it was clear the finger snakes must have tracked and observed their party ever since. When Fred led the humans to an alien computer facility, they were not in evidence. Fred had found a way to make the computer teach them the Bird Folk language. Among his many talents, Fred was a language speed-learner. He got the quasilinear logic and syntax down in less than a day. Once he had built a vocabulary, his learning rate increased. A few more days and he was fluent. The whole team carried sleep-learning, so they used a slip-transfer from Fred’s. By then he had been somehow practicing by himself, so it was best that he got to talk to the snakes first.
They just showed up, no diplomacy or signposting. Typical snake character—do, don’t retreat into symbols or talk. When the finger snakes crawled through the door, somehow defeating Lau Pin’s lock, Fred said hello and no more. He wasn’t exactly talkative either—except, as he often rejoined, when he actually had something important to say.
So after his hello, and a spurt of Snake in reply, Tananareve was able to yell at them. “Give you honor! We are lost!”
Five snakes formed a hoop, which turned out to be a sign of “fruitful endeavor co
mmencing.” Tananareve made a hand-gesture she had somehow gotten from the slip-transfer. This provoked another symbol, plus talk. Formal snake protocol moved from gestures and signs into the denser thicket of language. Luckily, the highest form of Snakespeech was a modified Bird Folk structure that stressed lean and of sinew as virtues, so their knotted phrases did convey meaning in transparent, staccato rhythms.
The finger snakes were rebels or something like it, as nearly as Tananareve could untangle from the cross-associations that slithered through Snakespeech. Curious, also. Humans were obviously new to their world, and therefore they began tracking the human band in an orderly, quiet way shaped by tradition. The snakes worked for others, but retained a fierce independence. Knowledge was their strong suit—plus the ability to use tools of adroit shape and use. They went everywhere in the Bowl, they said, on engineering jobs. Especially they maintained the meters-thick layers between the lifezone and the hard hull. In a sense, they maintained the boundary that separated the uncountable living billions from the killing vacuum that waited a short distance away.
The snakes wanted to know everything they could not discover by their intricate tracking and watching. They knew the basic primate architecture, for their tapering “arms” used a cantilevered frame that bore a warped resemblance to the human shoulder. This, plus a million more matters, flew through their darting conversations. Snakes thought oddly. Culture, biology, singing, and food all seemed bound up in a big ball of context hard to unravel. But when something important struck them, they acted while humans were still talking.
When it was clear that humans would die if they stayed at low gravity for too long, the finger snakes led them here: to a garage for magnetically driven space vehicles. Snake teams did the repairs here.
* * *
One of the finger snakes—Thisther, she thought—clicked open a recessed panel in the drone, so the ceramic cowling eased down. Thisther set to work, curling head to tail so his eyes could watch his nail-tipped fingers work. The wiry body flexed like cable. Phoshtha turned away from him, on guard.
Tananareve was still guessing at genders, but there were behavior cues. The male always seemed to have a tool in hand, and the females were wary in new surroundings. Thisther was male; Phoshtha and Shtirk were female.
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