Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “Not for long, I bet. Sashimi still moving.”

  “Unpleasant … for me and for the fish.”

  “You all lost weight.”

  “Even after eating yummy dried worms, very ripe, like sticky Jell-O. Live antlike things, as big as dogs in the low-grav zone. Crunchy embryos in the shell, tasted good but I felt horrid after it, dunno why. A fried scorpion-like thing, two tails. The head was bitter but I ate it anyway.” She paused; it came back so easily.… “Trying to forget that one. Bizarre, memorable.”

  Redwing smiled fondly. “Hey, I ate haggis once in Edinburgh. So … uh, thanks.”

  She blinked. Thanks for what? Then she saw; the yucky food made him yearn to go down there a little less. And he had gotten her to unload some, too, get some of it behind her. A ship’s captain is always about moving on.

  “So I wondered—what kind of weaponry can they have down there? Gray goo bombs? Nerve flatteners? Old-style shaped charge with spinning flechettes?”

  “I didn’t really see weapons.”

  “Um. Cliff did—I’ll get to that in a moment.”

  Cliff! The crew had been evasive about him and his team, but they did say the “Cliff team” seemed healthy and still free—quite a tribute, they said, considering. She had thought to shooting back, Considering how we got snapped up right away?—but didn’t.

  “Point is, what can we expect from them?”

  “I think they want to control this, keep us around—preferably, in a nice, spacious prison like the low-grav one we were stuck in—while they figure out who we are, and if they can use us.”

  “Use us? For what?

  “Maybe make their big whirling machine work better? New tech?—though it’s hard to believe we could tell them anything. They built this—”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Well, they run it, anyway. It must be really old. Maybe somebody else built it? The big one who interrogated us, Memor, was evasive on that.”

  He frowned. “Hiding something they don’t want outsiders to know?”

  “Yes, it’s a puzzle. Or maybe a really ancient mystery. I wonder if even the Folk don’t know where the Bowl really comes from. They do know the terrain, though. There are life-forms that dazzle any biologist, some I couldn’t figure out at all. Cliff must be in heaven—he likes taxonomy. I filled up my digital photo files keeping track of the plants and weird animals. Some are bizarre, and others are kind of like Earthside, but changed. Larger, for one thing.”

  “Because the grav is less, point eight?”

  She nodded. “That, yes. Could also be the island effect.”

  “Which is?…”

  “We see it Earthside. Small islands have smaller animals. The last mammoths lived on Siberian islands, the smallest of their kind because the resource base is less.”

  “So … continents here are sure bigger. Some are larger than Earth. So are oceans—seas, I guess we should call them, they’re shallow. I’ve studied them in close-up scan while you were down there.” Redwing brightened. Here was something he knew and Beth didn’t. He flashed pictures on the wall and she realized he had cooked up a slide show. He went through it eagerly, describing how and where he had found the images. He and Karl had worked up a Bowl version of longitude and latitude. Numbers marked each slide.

  “So much open territory! Forests as big as North America, not a town anywhere. But cities the size of countries back home—hell, bigger than our continents. I’d sure as hell like to know who made it, and how.”

  Beth nodded. It had been an impressive show. “The Folk may have built it, or know who did. They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen—think of elephant-sized, two feet and a heavy tail, big eyes and mouths—and feathers they flutter around all the time, like it’s some kind of coded fan dance.”

  He grunted and frowned, which she took as encouragement. She knew she had to write a report, but telling it helped shape the story. Enthusiasm began to steal into her voice. “They examined Tananareve for long times in a big machine that seemed, she said, to read everything in her body. Plus her mind, somehow. She could feel tingling all over her, sensations like quiet little sparks, she said. There were plenty of other smart aliens around, most with handlike things that Earth never evolved—a sort of wriggly tentacle that split out into feelers, like you might see on an octopus that could make tools. They worked for the honcho—the big Folk creature in charge, named Memor. Terrifying thing, when it loomed over you, huffing hot smelly air in your face. Memor was in charge, all right. Once I saw it—her, whatever—eat something that was still alive, a kind of crunchy armadillo the size of a pony. It bellowed as she chewed it up. Disgusting! But sights like that were just getting started—”

  Redwing gave her a concerned look. “Um, if you could…”

  “Sorry, once I get started—okay. It’ll be in my report.”

  “Everything you recall. Anything could be vital; we just don’t know enough.”

  Beth nodded. It had all come rushing out, the pent-up emotions and thoughts of months on the ground, every day tense and wearing.… She took a deep breath. “Anyway. This Memor seemed to read Tananareve and ask questions about how her mind worked, what she thought of, how it felt to think—odd stuff.”

  Redwing pursed his lips and looked down at the vast clouds coasting by far below. His wall screen amped the image to the max, so they both watched huge purple cloud-anvils towering over a seemingly endless sea. There were sand bars the size of the Rockies lounging in the sea’s green shallows, like tan punctuation marks. Vegetation dotted them, and one dot she judged to be the size of Texas.

  She had learned to let him have his silences, as he let her experience settle in with all the rest of what he knew. Beth sucked in the dry ship air and tried to recall the cloying thick, aromatic atmosphere they had wondered about, alien air they called it because of the syrupy way it filled your lungs with a heavy, cloying sweetness unlike any flower she had ever known. The smell was still on some of her carry-gear. Up here, in dry antiseptic rooms, she sniffed it and liked the aroma and body. Breathing it in, she felt something like nostalgia.

  Redwing nodded as if making a decision. “You can review Cliff’s messages—some text, some voice. Short, to the point. Don’t be alarmed by them. He had not much time to report in. Reception is bad, we should have sent you down with more robust comm.”

  “Our good comm gear was in the landers.”

  “Of course. That’s how the Folk found out our operating frequencies, broadband patterns, encryption. For the landers and for the hand comms, too, damn it. So he and you could get through only a short while, then the Folk autoscreens went up and it was all fuzz.”

  “Look, Cap’n, we had no way of knowing—”

  “I should’ve been more cautious.” He shook his head abruptly, face pinched. “I used the landing protocols we rehearsed Earthside—simple stuff for an uninhabited planet. No defensive measures. I went by rote, when I should have been wary of anything like this—an impossible machine churning through space, managing its own star to—”

  He broke off, she saw, knowing he shouldn’t vent his inner doubts to officers or crew. Yet it helped him, she was sure, and he needed it. A man like Redwing had spent his life wanting authority, getting some, then some more, all the time finding out how to make it work, how to move up a ladder everybody wanted to climb. Nobody had a captaincy forced on them. Nobody told them it meant keeping yourself to yourself for long years and decades and, for starships, the rest of your life.

  He swiveled his chair away from the constant landscape sliding by and looked at her with an expression made rigid by force of will. “Cliff described a mass slaughter. He was hurt—not too bad, but he took days to even be able to call in. Wounds, fever, the cruds.”

  “We had the cruds a lot of the time,” she said to be saying something, keep him from lapsing into a monologue again. This captain needs help. But then we all do.

  “I got reports just this watch. From Cliff, pretty noi
sy. The Folk killed a whole damn city. Some kind of living blimp—he sent two pictures, hard to believe even then. And Howard … died.”

  “Oh no. He was—”

  “Always thought he was a little too inquisitive, couldn’t move fast—I down-wrote him in an operations report during crew training, but Command ignored me. He didn’t come into a shelter fast enough, Cliff said. Got burned with a weapon tuned to our nervous system. Heats up the skin some, overloads the neurological system—fries it, really. Pain like he’d never felt before, Cliff said.”

  It was Beth’s turn to look away. “We had it easy.”

  “But these ‘ally aliens’ as Cliff calls them, the Sil—they had scavenged around in the blimp thing. Got some Folk comm gear they’d never seen before. Those Sil are smart. They got it running, broke the encryption barriers on the Folk message center, pried out all sorts of stuff they can use—and something bigger than that. Lots bigger, that we can use. The Folk had a message, just came in recently, the tags said—” Redwing leaned across the desk, laced his hands together on it, spoke directly at her. “—from Glory.”

  Beth had been in sympathetic mode, trying not to think about Cliff’s wounds, Howard being fried, and all the rest—but this made her snap out of it. “Earthside never picked up a peep from Glory. No leakage, no ordinary surface EM traffic—”

  “I know. This is plainly different, directed at Earth.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Here.” He thumped his desk, and the wall turned from sliding perspectives of a tan grassland swept by waves the size of continents—and became … a cartoon.

  Line drawings, vibrant color. Purple background. Traceries of yellow on the edges, twisting like snakes. A strange red-skinned asymmetric being with what looked like three arms stood alone, facing the viewer. It began a rhythmic move, arms rotating in their sockets in big, broad sweeps—except the third, which somehow lashed up and down, then made a wide circular arc with a sharp snap at the end. Athletics? Beth thought. Or some diplomatic pose? Ritual? Kabuki theater among the stars?

  The thing wore tight blue green sheath-clothes that showed muscles everywhere, bulging and pulsing. The covering seemed sprayed on, showing a big cluster of tubular—genitalia? If so, male—not between the legs but above them, where a human’s belly button would be. They, too, bulged as she watched.

  The skintight covering ran all over the body, including the wide gripping feet. But the arms and its head were exposed; the head was triangular and oddly ribbed. Two large black eyes. No discernible nose, but three big holes in the middle of the face, echoing the face’s triangle, with big hairy black coronas around each hole like a weird round mustache. A large mouth with two rows of evenly spaced gray teeth.

  For a moment the viewpoint closed in on the head, which looked like an Egyptian pyramid upside down—ferocious, with mouth twisting, thin lips rippling with intricate fine muscles around the gray teeth, which kept clashing together. The front three teeth in both rows were pointed—evil-looking things—and the mouth had puffed-out lips to accommodate them.

  “So far, just an introductory picture, looks like,” Redwing said. “No sound. But then we get action.”

  Beth was still blinking in pure astonishment. Her father had centuries ago called this a whatthehell moment.… She had met uncountable aliens, fled from some, killed some, eaten many—but this …

  The viewing angle expanded, and walking in from the right was a … human. Beth gasped.

  The man wore a blue skintight suit with a red cape, big head, black hair—clearly a man, yes. Muscled, striding forward proudly—and the alien third arm struck out, caught the human in the face. A nasty slap. The man staggered back. The alien made a half turn and thrashed the man, slamming him away and then grabbing him by his right shoulder, twisting him into full view. There was a large red S on the man’s deep blue chest.

  “Superman!” Beth did not know whether to laugh or just gape. She did both.

  The alien leaped, twisting in air, kicking Superman in the gut. He went down hard on the rocky ground. The graphics were good—Beth could see Superman’s shock, surprise, pain. Dust puffed up where he fell. Vigorously the alien leaped high, paused while it made more mouth-gestures directly toward the viewer—and came down hard on top of Superman with obvious relish, slamming down with both big feet. Superman’s mouth opened in shock and surprise, eyes bulging, showing white. The alien fanned its two arms, whipped the third one that seemed slim and sharp—and brought it down on Superman’s head. The lash brought blood streaming from Superman’s left ear and—incredibly, splashed big red gobbets on an imaginary window between the scene and the viewer. The blood ran down in rivulets while the alien raised all three arms into the air, head back.

  The effect made Beth rock back, as if the blood had flown in her face. She gasped.

  Prancing, whip arm twirling, the alien proceeded to dance on Superman. It sent more kicks to the head and gut as the opportunity arose. The alien looked full at the viewer as it pranced, eyes even bigger. Its image swelled to fill the screen, and the eyes glowered at the viewer.

  Stop.

  A long silence.

  “Pretty clear message, I’d say,” Redwing clasped hands across his belt and leaned back in his flex chair.

  Beth could not take her eyes from the alien head, its threatening expression frozen. “They eavesdropped on something, TV I guess, or…”

  “And chose to send a message a child could understand: Stay away.”

  SIXTEEN

  Cliff had handed him a problem from hell. How to stop the Folk from killing a lot more of an alien species, to intervene with big things Redwing had never seen, minds unknown … or else do nothing. “Nothing” looked like the right answer, but he didn’t have to like it.

  He had the shipmind call up readings on this from the ancients available on the ship’s database of all human cultures. These long-dead voices had never confronted any remotely similar problem, but came as close as humans could: Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Churchill, Lao Tzu, Kant, Aristotle, Niebuhr, Gandhi, King, Singh. Interesting, thick reading—but it made him think about his life in perspective. Maybe he could use that if he survived this whole huge thing. But for now, alas … No help there.

  The best solution was to get Cliff’s team out of that place. Then the Folk would stop trying to capture or kill them. Bargaining could begin.

  The brief comm burst Cliff had managed to get through to SunSeeker, fighting through the electromagnetic haze-screen the Folk had put up, gave the cartoon files and some optical spectral data that fit Glory exactly. No question where it came from.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Glorians were sending the Bowl a threat. But it used imagery of Superman, of all things—an antique “superhero” (he had to look the term up) from the expansionist phase of the Anglo-Saxon era. Technically, of course, that era was not over. It had merged with the larger economic unification of Earthside. English was the obvious unifying language—larger, richer, with simple introductory grammar. Irregular verbs galore, of course, but by the time the interplanetary phase of economic expansion was well under way, there was no competition. Mandarin, Cantonese—they came from a productive society, as did Hindi—but nobody could write them well, and they didn’t work simply with digital culture anyway. Plus the Chinese culture didn’t have the flexibility of the Anglo structure. The other Asian cultures did a bit better, but English was as set into the world culture as the qwerty keyboard. History ruled.

  So a comic book figure like Superman, his Pedia base said, fit with the modern social structure, too. Other archetypes like Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein had clear roles, but fit uncomfortably with the world culture. The other superheroes of the twencen were modeled on men like animals—bats, spiders, apes. Superman, tellingly, was an alien. Yet he fit into human society seamlessly.

  Superman’s key assumption was that his disguise was just to put on glasses and business clothes and be an everyman. Then nobody,
even Lois Lane—a character that reminded Redwing of his ex-wife—could spot him. Every man a Superman. What could be more obvious? Do your job, toe the line, the daily grind—but all the time you are free to imagine yourself leaping over buildings, flying through the air, flattening the baddies. Maybe even getting a date with Lois.

  Redwing shook his head. Cultures could best be understood in the rearview mirror. Superman might work among the multitudes of Earthside, but such guiding archetypes were not what you needed in deep space. The interplanetary culture spawned Smoke, Ellipso, Whitethighs, and others. Such larger-than-life figures helped cultures understand themselves, turn their lives into stories.

  So … Here among the worlds and stars, this was a frontier. Earthside hadn’t had one in centuries.

  But the aliens spoke in that antique visual language. They must have used big antennas to pick up all sorts of popular media, broadcast over hundreds of years. Then, apparently, they finally saw the Bowl headed toward them. So they sent a brush-off message, using the cartoons that swerved around language and slammed home the point. Aliens stomping on Superman, beating him up, kicks to his head and gut, the finishing glower straight into the viewer’s face—classic, in its way. Any chimpanzee would get that right away. Even a smart one with a starship.

  There were intelligent, technological Glorians who knew something about images with power—and they didn’t want the Bowl to appear in their skies.

  Well, who would? It had immense mass and its own star in tow. It couldn’t approach a planetary system without scrambling up planetary orbits. Coming to call meant the bull comes into your china shop and is in no hurry to leave.

  A warning was understandable. Threats, comic book or not, might work.