Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  But … no curiosity? No desire to embrace the strange, the alien, the obviously huge technology the Bowl implied? What kind of aliens were these Glorians, anyway?

  Beth had said shakily, “I need to think about this,” and departed.

  A sharp rap startled Redwing. He glanced at his desk, which pulsed with a reminder color.

  Karl had knocked smartly on the door, right on time. Redwing got up and met him, shaking hands as he did sometimes with crew to show this conversation was more than ordinary. After all, the close quarters and endless waiting led, in classic fashion, to rumors, imaginary problems, and endless speculation.

  “I carried forward those points you brought up,” Karl began.

  “You’re done integrating the new crew?”

  “Nearly. They’re slow, dazed. Some sleep pods didn’t work just right, it seems.”

  “Anything serious medically?”

  “No, just slow recovery rates.” Karl looked tired.

  Redwing knew that rumor-mongering went double for the newbies. Some of the freshly revived had the checked-my-actual-personality-at-the-door look of people absorbing and not able to react. It was a surprise, yes. Not Glory on the viewscreens, but an immense, whirling landscape. Redwing had decided to let them get into the work cycle, then get to know them, see what teams he could shape from them. Dealing with the Bowl to get what Redwing wanted was going to be a complex game.

  They needed supplies of volatiles and fusion fuel catalysts, just to depart and head for Glory. That was only the beginning, though.

  Best to get things back on firm ground. He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desk. “You and I need to have a clear understanding of how the dynamics of this Bowl and star system work. It may be the only leverage we have over the Folk.”

  “They’ve been running this place for a very long time,” Karl said. “I doubt it has any vulnerabilities.”

  “Start with that jet. You’d think they’d have reached cruising speed and been able to shut off the plasma jet by now, but never mind that—”

  “They can’t!”

  Redwing looked skeptical. He liked playing this role, letting crew “educate him” and tumble out their ideas. While a lower-rank officer dealing with the myriad specialists a ship needed, he had learned that you could get to the point much faster this way. These were tech types first and crew members a distant second. “Ummm … Maybe they can’t.”

  Karl rose to the bait. “Look, a grad student can show that the Bowl isn’t statically stable. I know, I checked with a shipmind nonlinear analysis, and I’m just an engineer.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Bowl’s not in orbit around the star. Turn off the jet, the star draws it in by gravity. It hits the star.”

  “So the jet has to stay on.”

  “This whole thing is dynamically stable, not static—same as we are when we walk. We take a step, fall forward, catch ourselves—only way to get anywhere.”

  “So what makes the whole star-and-Bowl scheme work?” Redwing had a hunch, but he liked to check it against somebody who really knew. It helped the intuition. Karl was just the type he needed.

  “The jet comes off that glaring hot spot. The Bowl reflects a lot of the star’s own sunlight on that spot, making the corona far hotter than you ever see on the surface of a star. Somehow—here’s the real magic trick—the star’s own magnetic field gets wound up in that spot. Notice the star’s spinning—so it generates magnetic fields deep in its core, a dynamo. That leaks out, forms the whole region dominated by the fields—the magnetosphere—and that hot spot draws field lines in, wraps them around the jet as it forms. Then the field takes off with the incredibly hot plasma, trapping that pressure in a wraparound like rubber bands—and it all escapes the star. The magnetic field lines wrap around the plasma like tight invisible fingers, squeeze it, make it spurt out. The jet carries forward, slim as you like, straight for the Knothole—and passes through. The jet thrust makes the whole damned thing move forward, star and Bowl and all.”

  “So?” Redwing knew he could appear incisive by just asking the obvious next question, interrupting the headlong spinning out of a whole complex story.

  It worked. Karl blinked, seemed to come out of his techno-daze. “So … the magnetic fields hit the Bowl’s fields—”

  “What fields?”

  “The Bowl’s a huge conductor, spinning fast, with electrical currents running in it. It makes its own magnetic fields. I checked the lander data from when the teams went down. Strong fields, even at the top of that deep atmosphere. Keeps cosmic rays away, sure, but its real reason is—”

  Karl blinked again and sensed he was going into lecture mode. Redwing just nodded. Keep ’em anxious but focused, his old cycle-ship commander had said. They never really notice you’re leading them.

  Karl slowed. “The Bowl mag fields, they catch the fields from the jet. I’ve got plenty of mag-depth photos of this. The Bowl shapes the jet and binds to it, both. That links the Bowl to the star. Of course, gravity’s making the Bowl want to fall toward the star—after all, it’s not in orbit or anything, just spinning around. But it can’t fall into the star—there’s a sort of dance between them. The star’s running away, thanks to the steady push it gets from the jet. So the Bowl is chasing it. To make the ride less bumpy, the system has those nice magnetic fields, acting like rubber bands you can’t break. See, magnetic fields always form closed loops.”

  “Why?” Even Redwing knew this, but it was best to throw the occasional bone.

  “Old Doc Maxwell. It’s the law.”

  “So—”

  Karl jumped right in, as Redwing had known he would. “The fields massage the Bowl, cushion minor excursions, smooth out the ride.”

  “So the Folk can’t turn it off. Ever.”

  “Do that, the Bowl crashes. I estimate it’ll take about a year to fall into the star. I’d love to see it—gotta be spectacular.”

  “But it can’t happen. Because of the jet. So—how do we screw around with it?”

  Karl blinked yet again, twice. “But … why…”

  “We have people down there. Must be billions of smart aliens on the Bowl, too. We have to make a deal to get our people back. To get on to Glory.”

  Karl looked at the Bowl view sliding by on the wall—forestland now, dotted with twinkling small seas, whitecaps outlining some where a strong wind blew down from somber gray mountains. “They’ve been safe for millions of years. Longer.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. But to make something like this—you have to have some large-scale ambition in mind.”

  Redwing looked skeptical. “Touring the galaxy?”

  “While you get a permanent suntan, yes.” Karl grinned. “And never get cold.”

  Redwing nodded. “Never get cold—maybe a motive? Not just a small thing like going interstellar, but never leaving your home?”

  Karl thought awhile and Redwing let him. When Karl spoke, it was a whisper. “Taking a whole culture, a world, so many species … on a ride that could last forever. Not just colonizing some planet. An eternal voyage. That’s got to be it.”

  Redwing shrugged. “Over millions of years, your own species has got to change—maybe go extinct.”

  “The whole thing will go unstable if you don’t have somebody to do the tweaks, keep watch, fix accidents.”

  “For sure. Then there’s cultural change. But you can’t let the society decide the whole Bowl experiment is a bad idea. Then you die!”

  Karl hadn’t thought this way. Engineers don’t, he mused, and then recalled that his three degrees were in electrical, mechanical, and astroengineering. Okay, usually. “Look, Karl. A few hundred years ago, we called people savages because they pierced their ears, ballooned their lips, wore trinkets in their nose, cut their hair so it looked wild or had no hair at all. They did weird stuff, had strange noisy dances and rites, and tattooed their bodies. Then, when I was growing up, everybody called that stuff
hip and fashionable.”

  “Uh, so?”

  The lands below were back to mountains and seas—beautiful expanses, larger than the whole Earth–Moon system. Redwing never tired of it all.… “We can take cultural change, even stuff that comes back from our ancestors and looks odd. But we’re expanding, moving out into the stars.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “And so are the Folk. I guess they can take tattoos. It’s fashion, which means it’s over by the time people like us even hear about it. But I doubt they can take big new religions or political mobs that want to, say, take over piloting this contraption. They can’t allow that.”

  Karl got it. He nodded eagerly. “And we thought we knew what conservative meant.”

  “They can’t risk the wrong kind of change. And that’s exactly what we new-kid-on-the-block humans represent.”

  PART V

  MIRROR FLOWERS

  A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

  —MARK TWAIN

  SEVENTEEN

  Cliff and his party followed Quert at an easy, loping pace. The lower gravity made long strides easy, but the humans could not match the ease of the Sil’s fluid grace. There was no ground transport except the Sil city subway, but that had been damaged, too. Quert said it was intermittent and unreliable, “Smoke go in there. And … some say … be worse things.”

  They made their way beyond the ruined Sil city and broke into open woodlands. It was a relief to suck in soft, moist air and just move, escape. No one looked back.

  They paused on a short hill and Cliff could not resist a last perspective on the blasted landscape. Its once-proud ramparts and arches, its residential precincts, its lofty spires of what might have been elegant churches—all burned or hammered down to rubble. The Folk had no mercy. Yet he could see rising from rubble the tan buildings they had watched self-forming with a quiet, eternal energy. Seen at a distance, the fresh shoots of new life moved like stop-motion videos, eager plants rising to begin anew a city that surely, in the immense history of the Bowl, had been rebuilt myriad times. Cliff sighed and clasped Irma to his side. “It’s coming back. Slow but steady.”

  “This place was made to replace itself. A technology that counts on having to regenerate. I wonder what it runs on.”

  “Solar energy, reprocessed waste—did you see that molecular printer Quert used to make us your new carry-pack?”

  She nodded and shrugged the new pack, easing the straps. “Great, some kind of light composite stuff. Made a molecule at a time, Quert said. It’s built exactly like the old busted one. Minus the broken frame, from when I fell down.”

  Cliff shrugged. “If you hadn’t been down, that flame beam would’ve burned you.”

  “Yeah, lucky break.” She puffed her overhanging hair back from her eyes, a classic gesture of bemused frustration. “Dumb luck. Poor old Howard ran out of luck.”

  “Damn shame. He was always getting hurt, breaking something, even getting lost to go pee.”

  “Some people are like that. Crew selection was by Fleet merits, y’know—not backpack experience. Résumés don’t account for plain old bad luck that keeps coming back.”

  “Sure ’nuff—a big mistake. Next starship I’m on, I’ll remember that.”

  She laughed and punched him in the arm, which drew sidelong glances from Terry and Aybe. Even Quert noticed. Well, let ’em, Cliff thought. Not like it’s been a lot of fun lately.

  Then they pressed on, turning their backs on the burgeoning city that would live again.

  Quert led the way, with other Sil flanking them. They all carried weapons, long slim tube launchers. Their faces were grim, focused, and they did not seem to tire.

  Relentless sunlight streamed down through the symphonic play of ivory clouds. Tall and cottony, they were so vast that parts of them were laced through with blue tinges of moist anvils. Clouds as anthologies: the anvils hanging in the soft mist of larger puffballs, lightning sheeting across denser, purple knots, all of it like separate cities of the sky, tapering away into the far heights. Here and there clots condensed out, their understories fading into rainfalls—sheets of pale blue falling great distances, then absorbed back into the air before ever striking the Bowl.

  Cliff said to Irma and Aybe, “Relax into tourist mode,” and they all chuckled, not because it was funny but because everyone needed an excuse to smile. They came into a flash of green, almost pornographically abundant in the smoky, almost rotting aroma of turned black earth, rains sweating down from passing squalls, air thickened with rich purpose. A vehicle purred past and from its big tailpipe a lush pale blue cloud gushed. Irma drew in a breath of it and said, “You can almost smell dinosaurs in that. It smells like a fossil fuel.”

  Aybe sniffed. “Probably ethanol, but it sure smells rich.”

  None of them had actually ever smelled the exhaust of a true oil burner, on an Earthside that was scrupulous about emissions. Only jet airplanes using turbines rated fossil fuel use, back when SunSeeker left the solar system. Cliff wondered if by now Earthside biotech had engineered anything like the skyfish here, living beasts that could float and fight.

  He doubted it. What biological substrate could they start with to develop such bizarre forms? That made him consider how the Folk had ever engineered their skyfish. From some airborne floaters, found on some planet where thick air and light gravity made that an optimal path? Big, slow, made invulnerable by its size, like elephants or whales or a brontosaurus? This place is like a museum of other life-forms, he thought, but one that keeps evolving. Maybe that was part of the point of building the Bowl itself? An ongoing, moving experiment with more room than a million planets?

  They entered a broad plain of short grass, and there was a trampled, much-traveled track stretching into the hazy distance. Straight up in the air, though, momentary openings between the towering clouds gave a dim vision of the Bowl hanging in a pale eggshell blue sky. Cliff watched the watery vision of huge lands shimmer, a vision from all the way across this solar system. Only it’s not any solar system we ever envisioned, he thought. More like a huge contraption made of a system’s parts. Back on SunSeeker before they came down, Fred the engineer type had estimated the Bowl’s mass, and got more than Jupiter, more probably than there was in the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. Somebody had scavenged an entire expanse of space, maybe all the worlds that circled Wickramsingh’s Star, to make this thing.

  Along the trampled path, occasional Sil held out strings of fish, stringy rootlike vegetables, a gauzy plant like a haze of wire. He realized these were for sale, but of course, the humans had nothing like Sil cash. Passing these hawkers, making poor imitations of the Sil no no no eye-gestures, they went by. Here and there a Sil stepped forward, lowered its head, and held goods up, waving them toward the humans—an offering. This struck Irma as an eye-widening surprise. Cliff knew enough to take some food, with eye-moves of thanks, and then wondered how to cook the food that began accumulating. All this occurred silently, for the Sil seemed to relish a gentle, still presence. It was usually hard to get them to talk at all, and when they did, they were terse.

  Across the plain came small, darting vehicles sheathed in shiny silver metal. Some moved toward the humans, though most went their own way. A knot of about a dozen Sil cars eased up in the purring machines and shut them down. With proper greetings they got out to address Quert. They had a conversation taking at least twenty minutes.

  That was long enough for the humans to sit near the cars and find out which of the gift foods they could eat raw. “Hand meal” the Sil called this. Sil talked while they ate. When Irma asked about that, Quert had consulted an electronic aid he sometimes used to translate, and said, “Sportive verse.” This apparently meant creating poetry, a ritual perhaps parallel to humans drinking alcohol and singing together.

  They were hungry. There was a pleasant nutty spiral fruit that left a peppery taste. They ate it all and had moved on to a nearly rhomboid-shape
d bittersweet fruit. Quert and three other Sil came over to the humans, doing the head-moves and eye-signals that always came before an important discussion. Cliff reflected on how much they had learned about Sil culture by simply watching their social cadences. Humans talked all the time, Quert had noted with genuine wonder, as though that were uncommon on the Bowl.

  Quert said, “They gift movers to us.”

  “We are gift happy,” Irma said, smiling and nodding. She was better at ferreting out the meanings of the clipped Sil sentences and echoing their manner. She kept track of the myriad eye- and head-gestures and tried to imitate them, though not always with much success. There had been some amusing errors, such as when she had inadvertently asked Quert if sex was part of their diet, or where the beds were to be, and then walked into the rather primitive male toilets. She could not then tell male from female Sil and had to be told, with furious elbow signals.

  The small, squat vehicles were actually simple to drive. They used hands and feet, just as Earthside cars did, and ran on an auto-gear system with adjustable constraints, mostly apparently magnetic. Indeed, its propulsion seemed magnetic, but it never rose more than a meter above the broad plain. Everything here, even the homes, seemed powered by electromagnetic induction, through the Bowl’s substructure. There were solar collectors everywhere, befitting a land where the sun always shone, and the self-shaping buildings were driven that way, too. Cliff could tell by the occasional tingling of electrical discharge that ran over his skin when he stood near the walls, as they surged up and formed elegant cusps and arches.

  Quert showed Cliff how to drive the magcar, seeming to insist it was a guest’s privilege. That let him take the little thing out onto the broad plain, Quert in the copilot seat, and Irma and Aybe in the rather cramped rear seats. Their backpacks and gear went in racks on the roof, secured by a curious self-wrapping lattice that figured out its own way to secure the arrangement, tripped by a tiny tapping from Quert.

  They headed on toward distant mountains, cloud-shrouded and mysterious. Quert then went into comm mode, using the inbuilt dash system to get in touch with other Sil, using a system Quert said the Folk could not intercept. Quert apparently had embedded acoustic receivers, for it peered ahead intently and subvocalized, face giving nothing away. Irma sat in the back, and the others were in another car, following close on the right side. Cliff took the odd magcar up to its highest speed as other car traffic thinned out. They were moving away from the Sil concentrations, but Cliff had no idea of their destination.