Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  The Sil chose habitats, he noticed, the way a seasoned soldier instinctively chooses cover. Here a wall gave an angled exposure to the star. Another wall stood oblique to that, to allow the jet’s glow to have its say with redder luminosities, so each shadow had different colors at play. One wall gave protection from the prevailing wind, with an apartment perched to take advantage of the cooler prospect, big open windows facing away from the field of bright, fine sands that bounded the Sil town. There was a lake nearby, not deep but enough to fetch a tranquil blue from the hovering sky. Sils lounged in shadows for delicious rest, on a spongy plane, their bodies prone on the soft jade green. Sil crowds gathered there, their trilling speech low and reflective. A moist breeze blew through the crowd, and streamers of fog danced among the zigzag trees.

  All eyes followed the humans. They had all agreed to affect a casual disregard of this. “Think of it as like being a movie star,” Irma had said.

  And it was. The Sil at least hid their sliding gaze by turning heads a bit away, but Cliff felt the pressure of their regard.

  “They wonder what to make of us,” Howard whispered.

  Aybe said, “We’re enough like them—two arms, two legs, one head. Maybe that’s an optimal smart alien design? Makes us sorta simpatico. Better than the Bird Folk, anyway.”

  “And the Sil know to keep a distance, give us some room to take them in, too,” Terry added. “It’s kinda fun. Here are real, smart aliens who aren’t chasing us.”

  “Or killing us,” Irma said sardonically. “Beth’s team wasn’t so lucky.”

  This memory sobered them as they passed by a truly ancient-looking stone edifice, erect on its bare site, the huge blocks sweating with every gush of mists from the lowlands. Cliff savored the moist breath. The winds here stirred with minds of their own, sinewy and musical as they hummed through the Sil streets. The homes somehow generated music from the wind, hollow woodwind notes in lilting harmonies that seemed to spill from the shifting air.

  The sky was clear, a flight of huge lenticular clouds sliding past like a parade of ivory spaceships. The sky creature had been of that size, moving with ponderous poise. Beautiful in its way, and lethal. These clouds poured rain onto distant hills, and the fragrant breeze brought the flavor to them.

  As they often did, the humans watched the strange landscapes around them and tried to figure out how it all worked. Aybe and Terry maintained that there had to be tubes moving water around the Bowl, since otherwise all fluids would end up in the low-grav regions near the poles. Irma pointed out that some photos of the Bowl, taken when SunSeeker was approaching, showed just what Aybe and Terry thought—huge pipes running along the outside of the Bowl. Cliff listened to all this and sorted through his photographs. He had nearly filled his comm-camera’s digital storage with photos of plants and animals and had to edit out some to free up space. Already he had decided to ignore algae, bacteria, Protoctista, fungi, and much else. He kept snaps of purple-skinned animals loping on stick legs across a sandy plain. He had captured flapping, flying carpets with big yellow eyes, massive ruddy blobs moving like boulders on tracks of slime, spindly trees that walked, birds like big-eyed blue fish. A library of alien life.

  Cliff knew he had missed a lot of creatures because they had quick and good camouflage to conceal themselves. They discovered this by stepping on what looked like limbs or lichen or dirt and turned out to be small animals that knew the arts of disguise. He sucked in the moist air and recalled that on Earth, desert plants defended against losing moisture by keeping their stomata closed in the day. They opened at night to take in carbon dioxide without evaporating too much water away. On the Bowl, though, without night, the air had to hold enough moisture to let plants respire, venting oxygen. That meant a lot of water. It explained the heavy rainstorms and thick, flavored air, the sprawling rivers they had to work around, the mists that shrouded even small depressions in the land.

  Yet some aspects here were like an Earth that had vanished long ago. Standing nearby was an enormous version of something he had seen Earthside, embedded in coal beds: horsetails. These resembled a first draft of bamboo—thick walled, segmented grass, tan and tall. The trunks popped as they swayed in the wind, eternally fighting for space and sun and soil just as did all the others. He had seen creatures that excreted through pores in their feet—surely not from Earth. Their speech sounded like whistling and farting at the same time. Both used flowing gases through a pinched exit, but …

  Quert broke off from a murmuring crowd. Moving with efficient grace, it came up to them, its big yellow eyes heavily lidded, and said, “Thank delivered in kind. We now speak, want.”

  Its language ability came in simple stutters of words. Cliff could usually guess the content. Quert moved with rippling muscles. Like brilliant gazelles, Cliff thought. The Sil were limber, dexterous creatures that worked on the Bowl’s understructure. They lived in small towns, mostly, so this now-ruined city was unusual. Quert said Sil were peppered through the immense lands of the Bowl. They seldom met other Sil groups larger than the few thousand here, since distance isolated them. They received instructions from the Folk and carried out their labors. Otherwise, they governed themselves. Populations were stable, by social conventions handed down for countless generations. This was a standard Folk method, apparently. Divide and rule, Cliff thought.

  Throngs of Sil followed their mourning with festival. The humans stood aside as the lithe forms began to move, sway, sing. All around them spontaneous movement broke out. The warm sun and lancing jet stung their skins and they danced until a kind of glow spread on their skins. “Maybe the exercise changes their surface circulation?” Irma wondered as the pumping music swelled, bodies glided and kicked, and the golden richness of Sil skins seemed to give off its own moist radiance.

  Quert led them to a low building, its walls slanted sheets of ivory rock. Beneath their feet was blond gravel that as they entered a small room turned green, each pebble wrapped in a translucent skin of slime. Quert bent and carefully unhinged from some sculpted seats small blobs that seemed to be slugs that had adhered. They sat and the seats adjusted to their bodies with a slithery grace.

  There was a long wait, but as protocol required, the alien spoke first. “We need know goal Astronomers.”

  “They want to catch us,” Terry said. “Or kill us.”

  “Whichever is easier,” Aybe added.

  “Capture best for them. Folk want know what you know.” Quert said this flatly.

  “About what?” Irma asked.

  “Ship you ride, plants you carry, bodies you have, songs. Possible is.” The swift slippery slide of Quert’s words belied a calm the feline alien wore like a mantle. Plainly Quert was a leader.

  The talk went on, speculating on why the Folk had fired into a Sil crowd. Yes, humans were among them, but why did that matter? Cliff watched the alien and reflected on what could come next. In his experience people centered their lives around money or status or community or service to some cause, but the Sil seemed to live learning-centered lives. Here little bits of practical knowledge were the daily currency—Howard had given them a Möbius strip to amuse the children—and their main vocation was to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen. As one Sil had told him, it was quicker to list the jobs he didn’t hold than the ones he did.

  There were teams completing a pit to turn manure into electricity, plans to build a micro-hydroelectric generator in a local stream. They devised and built their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard wood of the big trees that ringed their sprawling village. The Sil seemed shaped by what Cliff saw as a frontierlike culture. Here they drilled into trees to make body lotion or designed cement hives for swarming insects, as if to foil a creature that sounded to Cliff like honey badgers. They’re isolated, Cliff thought, no other Sil for great distances, or other intelligent species … out here in the bush, lost in their experiments.

  His attention had wandered. Aybe had been p
eppering Quert with questions, and nobody understood its answers. Then the alien leaned back, yawned to show big teeth, and held up its hands. “Not right thing, you speak for. Folk want all Adopted to obey. I-we, you—” A liquid pointing gesture. “—not made in Bowl. Danger badness comes from us, say Folk.”

  This came out as hard, clipped words, not the sliding sibilants Quert usually used. It was tricky inferring emotions from alien facial signatures, Cliff’s judgment warned him, but the narrowing eyes and tensed lips made a constricted face that oozed resentment. Cliff said, “You came before us.”

  A quick blinking, which seemed to convey agreement among the Sil. “Not Adopted over long time. We move, live, work. Folk give us things. We do their commands.”

  Irma said, “You said earlier that you move often?”

  Quert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. “Our kind rove.”

  “But you have buildings.”

  “Young must learn by doing. This I-we know. Costs to know. Must pay. No such thing as free education. And buildings, cities used to talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Adopted can see our work from everywhere in the Bowl. We shape our cities to make messages. Small messages. Big shapes for streets, parks, buildings. When we know, they know, too. What Folk want from you.”

  The Sil had a way of leading you toward what they meant, then letting you go the rest of the way. Maddening, at times. Asking them again, or in a different way, got nowhere, banging on a door that wouldn’t open.

  The Sil preferred to show them. Quert took them to a site where the ground seethed with a tan, stretching substance. It came out of the Bowl when the Sil triggered it, Quert said. Then they tuned it somehow. Cliff inspected one of their handheld devices but could make nothing of the ribbed and fissured face of it. The Sil apparently took in information and gave instructions by feel, not visually. This seemed odd for ones who had so many eye-moves to express themselves. Cliff was still wondering at this when the slick tan surface began to ease upward. It became grainy as it rose, wedges emerging from the big bubble that blossomed above them. It firmed up into walls and crossbeams as windows opened like sleepy eyes along the edge. A thick cloying scent like drying cement filled the air and Cliff stepped back with the others, not able to follow the complex moves the “constructors,” as Quert termed them, made to shape the thing, through signals he could not fathom.

  After an hour or two, a fresh building stood two stories tall. The floors were rough and there was no clue how the inhabitants could get water or electricity, but the oval curves of its walls and sloping floors of the interior were elegantly simple. The roof sported an odd array of sculptures that imitated Sil body shapes and cups pointed at the horizon.

  In the entire growth of the home, Cliff felt a tension between order, as seen in the room gridiron pattern, and a spontaneous, discontinuous rhythm to the wrinkled walls and oblong windows. It had just enough strangeness to be expressive, though he did not know what the Sil made of it. They seemed to think it played a role in reconciling them to their lost friends and shattered city.

  Nomadic, Cliff guessed. Each generation set up shop in a new area, hunted and gathered, devised their own kind of town. A species with a wandering curiosity, alighting on interesting parts of their environment. The Bowl was big enough to accommodate that style. But buildings as messages? “Do the Bird Folk read your building messages?”

  “Think not.” Quert made a rustling sound in its big chest and said quietly, “I-we lost many. Sil like you, many parts, all lost.”

  There was a sadness in the long, sliding words. The self-forming building seemed to play a role in their reconciling what had happened. Yet none cast glares or stares at the humans. He could imagine no reason why the Sil should forgive the humans for bringing all this upon them. But then he was yet again seeing them as thinking like humans, and they did not.

  The talk continued for a while as Cliff listened intently, trying to judge how Quert saw the world. Having an alien who had already learned Anglish was an immense advantage, but Quert’s short, punchy sentences gave only a surface view of the mind beneath.

  “If I were a lizard, I’d be a belt by now,” Irma said at one point, and for the first time they saw Quert laugh. Or something like it—barks that could just as well have been a summons, but accompanied by eye-blinks and sideways jerks of the head. As Quert did this, the eyes watched the humans, and there came a moment of—Cliff grasped for the right word—yes, communion. A meeting of minds. This cheered him up a great deal.

  Then Quert said there were meetings to go to, clearly meaning to end on a high, light note. They broke up and returned to the cavelike place the Sil had given over to the humans. It was a rude warren built of rocks rolled together to form corridors and rooms. A thick tentlike sheet drawn over the top of the whole sprawl of rock made a roof. At certain places detachable patches let in sun for the rooms, and were easily pegged back in place for sleep. Utilitarian and, Cliff realized, quite portable—just roll up the sheet and find another field of boulders. The Sil apparently used whole gangs to move the rocks, a communal effort.

  The whole team was tired and somehow the Sil dirge had quieted them. They went to their rooms. Cliff took a side corridor to his own small cubbyhole; Irma gave him a smile he could feel in his hip pocket.

  Cliff had never fancied himself much of a lover, but since they had been taken under the protection of the Sil, they were at it every sleep period. This was no exception. They slept awhile then, and when he woke up she was looking at him. With a lazy smile she said, “When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.”

  “I’m more of a biology type.”

  “That, too. Y’know, you’ve learned how to keep this pack of people together, too. I watch you do it. You’ve learned how to pull their strings.”

  “Um—yours, too?”

  “Not so much. Learning to pull men’s strings is one of a woman’s major skills, of course. I can see you do it in your own guy way.” She softened this, though, with a grin.

  He felt uneasy thinking about being manipulative, but— “I learned on the job.”

  “You let everybody have their say, then let them do the calculation. Who’s with them, who’s not. Most of the time that solves the problem.”

  “Well, they think I have your vote already.”

  She laughed. “Touché! But not because of fun in the sack.”

  They were indeed in a sack, of sorts. The open, braced hammock fiber somehow stayed flat though it hung from straps, a smart carbon sheet. He didn’t like discussing how to manage their little team, though. He now trusted his intuition and was relieved not to think about it. He leaned over, kissed her. “What do you think we should do next?”

  “If you keep caressing my leg, I’ll tell you.”

  Cliff laughed and kept up a smooth, steady stroking of her tawny leg. He hadn’t noticed he was doing it. “I don’t see how we can find Beth or stay away from the Folk, much less figure out this place.”

  Irma shrugged. “I don’t either. Yet.”

  “What makes you think we can?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s us. And we have smarts.”

  “Smarter than what built this contraption?”

  “Well, there’s street smarts on Earth—remember that phrase? Means you can get around on your own. Maybe here we have planet smarts.”

  “Which means?” A pretty obvious way not to give away what he thought, but people didn’t seem to notice it.

  “This place seems to be deeply conservative. You have to be, to keep a contrivance like this running. Hell, even at first glance, I knew it wasn’t stable. If the Bowl gets closer to the star, the biosphere heats up and starts to fall toward the star. To correct that, I’d guess the locals have to fire up the jet stronger, propel the star away, and get back to the right distance for heating. Then there’s the problem of what to do if I stamp my foot and th
e Bowl starts to wobble. It must be they have correction mechanisms in place. On a planet, inertia alone, and Newton’s laws, keep you going if you do nothing. Not here.”

  “Ah, the spirit of an engineer. You didn’t answer my question.”

  She chuckled. “You noticed! I’d say stay here, try to get back in touch with SunSeeker. Let Redwing figure a way to help us.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have a clue. Unless you’re down here, it’s hard to get a grip on the quiet, odd ways this place is so different from a planet.”

  “Such as?”

  “It’s impossibly big, but it’s mostly vacant. Why?”

  “It suits the Folk mentality, must be. Lots of natural landscape—okay, not natural, but it’s shaped to feel natural. It’s a park, really. The Sil fit in here, too.”

  “Nomad habits of mind, right. And the Bowl is a nomad, too. Wanderers living on a wandering artifact. A big, smart object.”

  She pursed her lips. “Smart? Because it has to be managed all the time, kept from falling into its star?”

  “It moves forward in a dangerous way, just like us. Any two-legged creature has to fall forward and catch itself. Aside from birds, there aren’t many Earthside animals that do that. The most common two-legged one is us.”

  She considered this. “The Bird Folk are two-legged, in a way. Though I saw them move on all fours, too, since the forearms can help them for stability. Maybe they’re concerned about not falling, because they’re massive.”

  “So they have the same gut instinct—move forward, even if it’s tricky. I—”

  Shouting in the distance. Irma got up and pulled on her rather tattered uniform, stuck a head out through the curtain of her chamber. “Quert? What’s—?”

  The alien came into the room in the quick, sliding way the Sil made look so liquidly graceful.

  “Come … they.”

  Cliff hauled out of the hammock, feeling his joints ache and eyes sticky. His fingers fumbled as he got dressed. Irma went with Quert. By the time he got to the entrance, they were all staring up at something humming in the sky. Not the balloon creature that had fired on them all, something smaller, faster. It skimmed low, wings purring. A slim, winged thing of feathers and a big crusty head that scanned the land below systematically. Its big glittering eyes saw the Sil settlement and turned toward them.