Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  He did not notice nearby cars or anyone following until abruptly one drew up alongside them. It deftly came in and blocked them from the other human car. The two Sil inside did not look at him, but they matched exactly his velocity. Then the magcar started coming in closer. He thought nothing of it until they were only a car-length away. He slowed. They slowed. He sped up. So did they. Another magcar came in from his left, moving fast. Its driver also didn’t even seem to notice the three cars moving now together. They all peered straight ahead. Maybe they’re a guard party? he wondered.

  Closer, closer … Cliff had time to say, “Quert—Quert?” interrupting the alien’s concentration, its eyes slowly coming fully open, as if it had been in a trance. “I think something’s—”

  A third car came over fast from the left, slightly ahead. It slewed hard and set itself up exactly in front of their car.

  Irma said, “Are these—?”

  The lead car slowed, its big tail signal sliding in ruby red pulses across the back. Cliff had to step on the mag brakes, and the car hummed loudly. He tried to maneuver to the left, then right, but there was no room now, and then the car ahead braked harder.

  Cliff slammed on the brakes. The three that had boxed him in hit theirs a few seconds later. The brake howl was a high skkkrrreeeee, all of them losing speed as fast as they could. The cars were identical, so they hardly separated at all as the howling deceleration threw Cliff forward. They all wore odd net belts that stopped Cliff from being heaved onto the windshield. His few seconds’ lead in decelerating meant he was now about ten meters behind them all as they slid to a stop, throwing gray dust and the humming loud and shrill.

  Irma was saying something and Quert, too, but Cliff focused on the six Sil who jumped out of the magcars. They called short crisp orders to each other and reached into their workbelts. Going for weapons, Cliff thought. Not guards.

  The Sil ran around their cars and formed an orderly bunch, intent on Cliff’s car, shouting now. Quert gave its gravel growl and took off its web-belt. Irma gave an alarmed cry.

  The only weapon we have, we’re inside.

  Cliff saw what he must do. He slammed on the acceleration and shot forward. The car shook as he hit the Sil. Impact scattered them across the blunt shiny hood. Bodies struck their windshield and rolled up it, tumbling over the roof—dull thumps—and Cliff kept his foot on the accelerator until just before they hit the forward car.

  They slammed in hard and the magnetic bumper pushed them back, lessening the impact. Their magcar’s hood crumpled. Alarms blared an odd hooting call in Cliff’s ears. Quert cried out in surprise and Irma went silent.

  “Okay?” Cliff said, surprised at how mildly he said it. “Irma? Quert?”

  “O-okay,” Irma said. Coughed, gasped. Aybe said, “What the—?”

  Quert caught Cliff’s eye and gave the assent signal. Its mouth sagged open.

  He had scooped up all the Sil. Some had rolled off to the side and others over the cabin. They had all absorbed the full hard impact of the car, giving off sharp, surprised cries. He watched where they had hit the plain. None bounced back up.

  They wanted to grab us, maybe kill us. No negotiation. Went for their weapons.

  Some of them had gotten their odd little guns free and lay stretched out, guns in hand but arms not moving.

  Cliff backed out, turning to his left so the car glided over the bodies on that side. They crunched beneath the magcar. He got ten meters behind the bodies and shifted. He moved forward very deliberately and ran over the ones sprawled on the right. Moving fast, he slewed to ride over the two in front. Each body nudged the car up, no more, but that brought the full pressure of the magcar down on them.

  He knew the bumps meant smashed bones, organs, spurting gouts of fluids lost into the soil. Agony, screams, the light fading behind terrified eyes.

  None of them moved as Cliff then backed all the way out and drove around the whole mess. No point in checking to see if anyone survived.

  Irma said, “The other car’s gotten free, too. Looks like they have a Sil driving.”

  “My mate,” Quert said quietly. “She fine. Drive hard.” Cliff glanced at the alien, who seemed as quiet and calm as ever.

  Terry was in the other car and waved at them, holding thumbs-up. “They must’ve done something similar,” Aybe said quietly. “Wasn’t watching…”

  Cliff amped the acceleration and had them up to max speed by the time the cars and bodies were just a dot in his side rearview screen. He was surprised that he did not need to think much at all about what had happened. The three-car team had tried to grab those he cared about and were willing to use force to do it. That meant they had crossed a line.

  Cliff had spent endless days stacking and processing bodies, and now knew he was not the same man. He had done what he had to and had not taken any time to think it through. Before he came down to the Bowl, he had been another sort of man entirely. This place had taught him a lot, and most of it he could not say but perhaps comprehended it better that way. It was in his nervous system now, experience digested and made part of himself.

  Maybe that was what Quert had. Indeed, maybe the Sil had it without having to learn. In the silence of the magcar he felt himself relax. The mountains ahead loomed large now beneath their mantle of anvil clouds, bellies ripe with purple richness, ready to rain as they climbed the slopes. Already he looked forward to that. He would get out of the car and let the falling big drops hammer him with their wealth and feel each moment for what it was, for the joy of it entire.

  “Those wanted capture,” Quert said.

  “I figured that,” Irma said. “Killing us is easier.”

  “Our chances would be not good in their tender care,” Cliff said.

  “Give us to the Folk, show loyalty.” Quert made a head-shrug.

  “So … you killed them,” Irma said.

  Cliff nodded. “Probably so.”

  Irma let that ride and then said, “They would have gotten in their cars and come after us.”

  Cliff thought that was obvious and kept his attention on their rearviews and the mountains ahead. No visible pursuit. He reminded himself that attack could easily come from above. A skyfish could be hovering a kilometer up and—he glanced out the window—not obvious until it was too late. Worrying isn’t thinking, he thought, using a saying he had honed in the long, unending days of pursuit when they were first on the run across the Bowl. Perpetual alert could degenerate into a floating anxiety that robbed the mind of concentration, sent it skittering into pointless knots. Not returning to the same damn subject was a learned skill, he saw.

  “Where do we go now?” he said directly to Quert.

  “Into cold.”

  EIGHTEEN

  They went under the mountains, not up them.

  Before entering the underground maze, Cliff looked down through a short pass at the lands beyond the lofty mountains. Beyond lay the first mirror zone he had ever seen. Big hexagonal patterns gave some sparkling side-scatter of sunlight. They filled a valley and dotted the hills above. Lush vegetation filled the spaces between, but clearly most of the sunlight reflected back at the star. This was how the Bowl fueled the jet that boiled up from the hot arc light inferno at the center of the stellar disk. Expanses of mirrors, incomprehensible in scale, focused on the central fury. Somehow, the SunSeeker engineers said, magnetic fields got drawn into the perpetual hellhole. These fed outward with the jet as it escaped the focal point. The brilliant plasma billowed out at its base, and then the magnetic fields gripping it in rubbery embrace disciplined the flow, narrowing it. By the time the luminous jet reached the Bowl’s Knothole, it passed through easily without brushing the heavily armored walls.

  As he watched the enormous sheets of reflecting metal in the distance, Cliff mused that this was how the star provided its own thrust, from sunlight that first bounced off the hexagonal mirrors, returned to its parent source, and propelled the jet. Riding on light, he thought, and held his phone u
p to the star itself, letting the device consider it. In a moment, the back panel said

  K2 STAR. SIMILAR TO EPSILON ERIDANI (K2 V). INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE BETWEEN RED M-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS AND YELLOW G-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS.

  Yet he recalled the watch officer who revived him had said it was an F star. It had turned out later that the spectrograph was saturated by the hot spot glare, and got its signatures wrong. Classic field error.

  And indeed the star seen through the phone’s polarizer was a troubled disk, speckled by dark blots that circled the base where the jet blossomed. The whole star rotated around the jet base, which meant the builders had started their mammoth final touch there, perching the Bowl as a cup high above the original star’s pole. Fascinating to consider—

  “Come!” Cliff noticed Quert glance back at him with irritation, eyes jouncing in the Sil way. He rushed to catch up with the others.

  Their party neared the underground labyrinth and found they were not alone. There were zigzag trees in dense blue green forests near the entrance. Sil moved under the canopy, bands trotting with deft speed. They kept to well-defined bunches, entering the weaving corridors under the stony flanks. The corridor’s external locks yawned. Even in the rock hallways, yellow orange plants hung, emitting light to guide the constant line of Sils and humans. The Sil barely glanced at the humans. Quert and mate moved together in the swift shuffle Sil used, like loping in light gravity, as easy as swimming in air. All in silence.

  Cliff saw as they fled that many Sils had small, betraying injuries. Parts missing—splayed knobby fingers with one gone, just a blank space of gnarled red skin. A conical Sil ear half sheared away. Marvelous purple-irised eyes clouded by some past collision with life. Mottled skin; scars adorning slim legs, feet, inflamed two-step joints that served as elbows in their arms; faces sporting red scars that wrapped around as though some enemy had used a curved blade. Cliff felt oddly embarrassed at the humans’ smooth clear skins, unmarked by a life of labor and hardship, or battle and disaster. Without even thinking about it, the humans paraded around with skins and sturdy limbs that spoke of city comforts, the easy life away from fear and pain, a softness not earned.

  The unseen Sil damage was perhaps more lasting.

  He watched Irma as they sped down internal corridors of the Bowl, following Quert and its team along the gradual downward slope. She was changed, subdued and reflective. Her eyes peered ahead but were focused on some internal scene. He recognized the symptoms because he had known them, back there amid the wholesale slaughter of the Sil. She had announced his own blunted responses to him, using her jargon—diminished affect, emotional isolation, a thousand-meter stare, a general emotional numbness, stress disorder.

  Now it visited her. Maybe Howard’s death had done it, tipped her over the edge. Or the fast way Cliff had crushed the Sil who wanted to grab them.

  He thought of this as they kept their steady pace, moving away from the big thick doors of what seemed to be the occasional air lock. Since he and Irma started having sex—neither of them called it lovemaking, and in a fundamental way, it wasn’t—they had drawn closer. The other team members had seen that, and aside from a few wry references, nobody said much about it, or seemed to let it irk them. They were a field team, not a social circle. Howard’s death had made that clear enough.

  He watched Irma’s concentrated expression, ever alert to what lay ahead, but clearly introspective. He cared about her now and had to understand what she was going through. They had lost Howard in a way nobody saw coming, and for Cliff there were no afterthoughts, because he knew he could have done nothing different. In the sudden deadly moments, everyone was truly on their own.

  Maybe Irma didn’t see that yet. Something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against some hammering event that changed how she saw the world. If she had stayed Earthside, she might have gone into late old age before it happened. The ones with no give, the ones with the carefully guarded, clear-skinned little porcelain selves, shatter in the end. Some chips and splinters get lost, so that when mended, little fracture lines show. Nobody gets through life immune to the hard collisions. The blackness always follows a step or two behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. That tap, when it comes, shakes you and hastens your step. When the indifferent world breaks your illusions, that shattering takes something out of your own inner cosmos. Something dies within. Irma will never fit together quite so well again. Neither will I, of course.

  They came through another of the bulky air locks, and when the intermediate chamber closed, Cliff saw that their escort Sil were the only ones left with the four humans. The fleeing Sil had gone elsewhere.

  At the other side, the cool, clammy corridor sloped steeper still, and now they passed into a different kind of passageway. The flooring became transparent and then the walls. The orange glow of luminous plants dimmed because there were few of them on the ceiling. Through the floor he could see nothing but black and then abruptly, as they passed a ribbed steel seam—stars. Wheeling slowly across their view through walls and floor, red and blue and yellow.

  “Ah!” Aybe said. Irma sighed. Quert made the gesture of approval and eye-bulge.

  “We’re on the outside of the Bowl,” Cliff said needlessly, hearing the joy in his voice at the same moment he noticed the air before him fog with his breath.

  The wheeling sky lit a twilight world.

  They all stood and took it in. The whispering drone of the airflow masked any sounds that might come from the outside world. They stood on a pathway looking up at the Bowl skin, visible in starlight through cylindrical walls transparent in all directions. Their passage stretched into the distance, below a flat plane above them that even looked cold, a land showing silver ice and black ribbed lines that marched away like longitudes and latitudes.

  “Ice and iron,” Irma said.

  Between the black support struts was a rumpled terrain of dirty ice. The stars moved in lazy arcs above. A few craters pocked the ice, broken by strands of black rock and—

  Glimmers on the plain. Cliff turned and looked behind them, where the long shadows of a quick dawn stretched. And sharp diamonds sparkled white and hard.

  “Reading 152 K in starlight from that surface,” Aybe said, peering at his all-purpose detector/phone/computer.

  “Nearly as cold as the Oort cloud,” Terry said. “But why is there a tube to take people—well, Sil—up above the Bowl skin?”

  Quert said nothing.

  Irma pointed to bright points of light winking on and, after a few seconds, off. “It’s always dark here, just starlight. Maybe that’s mica reflecting from rock?”

  “Too bright,” Terry said.

  A flash came from nearby. They turned and looked at a pinnacle that forked up from the silvery plain below. “A … flower,” Terry whispered.

  Fronds spread up from a gnarled base, which itself sat firmly on the icy crust. Light green leaves speared up, tilted toward them. “A paraboloid plant,” Aybe said.

  The thing was at least five meters long and curved upward to shape a graceful cup made of glossy, polished segments. The plant turned steadily as they watched, and as the direct focus of it swept over them, the reflected beam was like a blue-tinged spotlight.

  Irma looked over her shoulder and said, “It’s tracking that big blue star.”

  The plant turned steadily away and Aybe said, “Look down at the focus point.” Where the glassy frond skins narrowed down, they became translucent, tight, and stretched. The starlight collected all along the parabolic curve, about a meter on a side.

  Cliff close-upped it in his binocs and made out an intricate tan-colored pattern of lacy veins. “Chloroplasts working in this cold? Impossible.”

  “It’s not so cold at the focus, I bet. That’s the point of concentrating starlight,” Irma said. She gestured at the horizon, which seemed sharp even though it must have been thousands of kilometers away. “A whole damn biosphere in vacuum.”

>   “Running on just starshine?” Terry asked. “Not much energy there.”

  “So this plant evolved to work like an antenna,” Aybe said. “They live here, hanging upside down on the outer edge of the Bowl.”

  “Where did a star flower evolve?” Irma asked wistfully. They saw now the thick dark stalk that supported and held the flower, swiveling it as the Bowl’s fast rotation swept stars across the sky. “To track starlight and digest it.”

  Aybe snorted. “Life evolving in vacuum?”

  Cliff noticed that Quert was letting them work through this.

  “Doing its chemistry by … starlight?” Disbelief made Aybe grimace. “How’s that happen?”

  “Folk bring,” Quert said.

  “From were?” Terry asked. “Why?”

  Quert paused and struggled with the language problem, eyes jittery and trying to convey nuances, Cliff thought, that were simply beyond human capacities. “Light life we term them. Here when we came. Learned to get out … live from ice … find star.”

  Irma said, “Maybe they started in a warm core of an asteroid? Or iceteriod? Got to the surface and used sunlight? Far out from its star, maybe no star at all nearby. Survived. Made leaves to be sunlight concentrators. So then parabola flowers just evolved, out in the dark.”

  “Long time,” Quert said.

  Irma shrugged. “Maybe a long way from a star, too. So the Bowl comes by, grabs some? But … why?”

  Cliff watched across the flat plain and, yes, glimmers came from everywhere as—he glanced back—stars rose and the light-seeking flowers tracked them. Or one of them. The slow steady sway of the focusing plants swept the sky, selected the brightest, fixed on it. The big flowers locked on a bright blue-white star. Light vampires, Cliff thought.