Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “That’s it,” Aybe said, “these corridors are below the mirror zone. We’re at the edge of a big mirror area, too. This whole section of the Bowl must be chilly.”

  It seemed so. So the land beyond was extremely cold, dotted with rock that formed roofs over areas of gray ice steeped in dark. Following Quert’s advice, Irma played her laser beam, set on dispersed mode, into those dark spaces. In this flashlight mode, they were surprised to see odd, ivory-colored things moving with agonizing slowness.

  Aybe asked what these were. “On our way here we saw bizarre life-forms feeding on ice, but those—”

  Irma said, “Those slow creatures with mandibles and eyestalks, yes—like lobsters, but living in high vacuum and low temperatures.”

  Terry eyed the moving gray things. “These shapes are amorphous. More like moving fluids.”

  “Ice life,” Quert said. “Kin to ice minds.”

  Irma said, “So, ah … You brought us here to…”

  Quert let the silence lengthen, then said, “Sil want speak.”

  “To…?”

  “Ice minds.”

  “What can we do?” Irma asked.

  “Ice minds speak to you.” Quert made eye-moves that might imply hope or expectation; it was still hard to tell.

  “Won’t they speak to you?” Terry asked.

  “Not speak Adopted.”

  Irma said, “You mean, species brought onboard the Bowl? Why not?”

  “Ice minds old. Want only new.”

  “Y’know, those blobs in the shadows are moving, together. Toward us,” Aybe said.

  “Watchers,” Quert said. “Allied with ice minds.”

  Cliff said, “So you were ignored before—,” and saw that now the vacuum flowers were opening and turning. “Why … why are those doing—?”

  Quert gestured at the vacuum flowers that abandoned their slow sweep of the sky, dutifully tracking nearby stars for their starlight. They rotated on their pivot roots toward this transparent wall.

  The company fell silent as the flowers began to open fully, from their tight paraboloid shapes that focused sunlight on their inner chemistry. Slowly they nosed toward the wall where humans and Sil watched. As they did so, they blossomed into broad white expanses, each several meters across.

  “They’re really large,” Irma said. “Still hard to imagine, plants that can live in vacuum, and bring in starlight from over a large area. To feed … Quert, did you mean these flowers provide energy for the whole biosphere living out there, on the hull?

  Quert simply gave eye-signals, apparently a “yes.” Then the Sil said, “Commanded by cold minds,” and would say no more.

  The thin glow of the jet brimmed above the horizon here, and some flowers seemed focused permanently on that. It seemed an unlikely source of much energy, for the plasma was recombining and emitting soft tones in blue and red. On the other hand, that was steady though weak and some flowers had perhaps evolved to harvest even such dim energies.

  They were all transfixed as the radiators spread open and completed their pivot toward the humans. There was silence broken only by the faint sound of air circulating, as the field of flowers—Cliff swung his head around to count over a hundred within view—then began to pulse with a gray glow. Behind the flower field the stars still wheeled, cutting arcs in the black. The humans stood mutely watching, their heads tilted up to see the spreading flowers, who in turn clung to the rotating hull. The gray glow built slowly, the whole flower display assuming a shape like a giant circle flecked with light, staring at them. Cliff felt a chill wash over his skin that was not from the temperature. This is truly alien.…

  A pattern began to emerge. In the dim light their eyes had adjusted, and so the brighter flower circles made blotchy spots while the darker flowers accented a contrast … and the entire array began to form a speckled image.…

  A picture came into view. Irma gasped. “It’s Beth’s face—again!”

  The picture was crude because there were fewer pixels to be had from the flowers, but still Cliff found it unsettling. He gazed at the cartoon of Beth Marble while others talked on. Finally he said, “Reasonably close, too. Whoever commands these vacuum flowers knows the method they used with the mirror zones. They’re using this to get our attention.”

  Quert gave a rustle of agreement. “Ice minds.”

  “At least her lips aren’t moving,” Terry said. “That gave me the creeps.”

  “So … no message,” Aybe said. “Just a calling card.”

  Quert looked around and pointed to the wall behind them. The snake team was still working, this time with some armatures like waldoes. They had somehow extruded a flat tank from the wall, and snakelike machine arms were completing it. This was not repair but construction. They worked by coaxing features from a substrate that simmered with flashes of orange light. The whole working team was laboring with new members. A big lizardlike thing of crusted hide had four tentacles, each of which alone was larger than a finger snake, fissioning into more small ones that snakes did not have. Cliff watched one use fingernails, too, that deformed into helical screwdrivers, snub pliers, a small hammer. It was trimming away and adjusting features freshly drawn from the wall. Cliff glanced back at the Beth portrait, still frozen in a smile. When he turned, the work team was slithering away across the wall, as the central oval they left brimmed with orange glows.

  Letters and then words seemed to drift to the surface of the wall, as if bubbling up from deep ocean water.

  “It’s Anglish,” Terry said. “How do they know?”

  “Ice minds,” Quert said. Across the Sil’s face—and across those of the other Sil with them, who had been quiet all along—the skin stretched and warped, framing the eyes. Did this mean joy? Fear? Impossible to tell. But there were no other signs of concern in the body, which remained still.

  The script ran slowly.

  We have ranged the Deep and kept history near.

  We are not of you carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and light.

  We ride here to preserve the greatness you have found now.

  Long ago we shaped this traveling structure, when the warm folk came to us from deep within the whirlpools that girdled our suns. The warm folk gave us tools to build large. Some of us stayed among the comets, but we here have clung to the Bowl. We live through eons of time, and so have seen the many thousands of faces intelligence can assume. We dealt with them in turn. We are the Bowl memory.

  Irma said, “This looks like a prepared lecture.”

  Aybe nodded. “Must be. They’ve used it before. I guess if there are thousands of years between passes nearby other stars, you work up an all-purpose greeting.”

  Terry smiled. “Boilerplate, huh? This doesn’t look like a greeting, though. More of an announcement, I’d say.”

  “Intended to awe, yep,” Cliff said.

  “As if this place didn’t impress us enough? Their Anglish is good,” Irma said. “They must have access to the Folk’s experience. But are we missing a point? These—Ice Minds—claim they built the Bowl.”

  “Shaped it. Designed it, maybe,” Terry corrected her. “After intelligent warm life found them. After they ranged through the solar system and then the planets of this other little companion sun, after they worked their way into … would you say a mutual Oort cloud? And found these forests of supercold life. And the Ice Minds used them for engineering.”

  “Or they could be bragging,” Cliff said. Nobody laughed.

  They watched as the words faded and a long series of still pictures followed. Each came in at an easy pace, as though there were all the time in the world to show images of planets—crisp and dry, cloudy and cool, cratered yet with shimmering blue atmospheres—and stars, sometimes in crowded clusters, at times seen close-up and going nova in bright, virulent streamers, or in tight orbits around unseen companions that might be neutron stars or black holes. Wonders the Bowl had seen while driven forward by its jet. Portraits of the early Bowl years, Cliff g
athered—the jet flaring and trembling in tangled knots of ruby and sharp yellow as the vast cup got under way.

  For these ones that Quert termed Ice Minds there was indeed all the time in the world. The screen visions streamed on and the humans sat with backs against the rough walls to watch them. Strange landscapes loomed.

  “They call us warmlife,” Quert added as the screen showed an iceworld. Against a black sky odd lumps moved, in a lake lit by a smoldering red light. There were dune fields, ponds, channels. The lake sat in a convoluted region of hills cut by valleys and chasms.

  Aybe said, “I’d say that looks kind of like Titan, Saturn’s moon.”

  “There was small life there,” Irma said. “Microbial, some pond scum, nothing more.”

  “There’re moving forms on that screen,” Terry said. For this view the screen showed sequential shots. The lumps seemed like knots of fluid, assisted by sticks that crossed through the globular bodies. Blobs that somehow used tools like rods? These coherent colloids moved across bleak fluid that might be hydrocarbons like ethane. On the beach the lumps moved ashore with viscous grace, pulling themselves forward with extruded feelers that managed the sticks. “They’re clustering around that domed thing that looks like a termite mound,” Irma said. “Even blobs can build.”

  “Those forms we saw in the shadows out there—” Terry gestured to the ice plains beyond. “—might have some connection to these. Except these are on a planet.”

  “Life adapts,” Irma said. “A big leap, from a Titan-like cold around a hundred degrees Kelvin, with high atmospheric pressure, to those vacuum flowers and the rest of it, all holding on to the outside hull.”

  “A big jump,” Terry said. “But there must have been incremental steps, and they had billions of years to do it.”

  By this time the image had faded, replaced by a view of a dense jungle. This one, though, had spiral trees, whipped by high winds against a purple sky of shredded clouds. The stilled storm had a big beast in the foreground, something like a dirty brown groundhog, its head tucked in against the wind.

  The show went on and then on some more. After a while even exotic alien landscapes became repetitious: blue green mountain ranges scoured by deep gray rivers, placid oceans brimming with green scum, arid tan desert worlds ground down under heavy brooding brown atmospheres—

  “All planets,” Terry said. “They’re not showing us comets. Not showing us themselves.”

  —iceworlds aplenty beneath starry skies, grasslands with four-footed herds roaming as volcanoes belched red streamers in the distance, oceans with huge beasts wallowing in enormous crashing waves, places hard to identify in the swirling pink mists. Life adapts, indeed.

  After a while, the slide show was over and more Anglish words appeared.

  You warmlife now learn to journey from star to star.

  We have seen your kind before.

  You expand outward at great cost to you, for fleeting quicklife reasons.

  Most warmlife comes in small ships, as do you.

  The dream of this Bowl enticed us with its capacity. Its slow progress fits our minds, our style. Over eons we have seen little need to change its design.

  Through voyages we gain passengers warm and cold. This is only part of us. Other ice minds live elsewhere in the Bowl’s shadow.

  We deeplife are one in fluidity.

  We address you now because this is an unusual time. This Bowl approaches a fresh world. As do you.

  We have no reason to intervene in warmlife affairs. We act when the Bowl faces threats to its stability and endurance.

  You will help us.

  “We will?” Aybe said.

  “They’re probably listening in some way, y’know,” Cliff said sternly.

  Aybe blinked and said loudly, “Ah, yes, we will. If we know how.”

  Irma stood and gazed out at the dim icelands where the vacuum flowers still held Beth’s image. She fanned her laser and said, “Those blobs, they’re moving, all right.”

  “Maybe these Cold Minds keep those forms around because they’re related by mutual evolution?” Terry asked. “Hard to know. If these Cold Minds are as old as they say, there’s not much that can be new to them.”

  Cliff said, “And even less that’s interesting.”

  Liquid life-forms? he thought. Trying to think on huge time scales was hard. Maybe warmlife is just a buzzing, frantic irritant to them. And there is something in their manner, dealing with us warmlife, that suggests immense distance. These things had probably evolved in the outer fringes of solar systems. They could travel on comets, maybe, bouncing from star to star. So maybe they freely roamed the galaxy while the most advanced warmlife consisted of single-celled pond scum.

  None of this was reassuring.

  “What did you have in mind?” Irma addressed the screen.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Memor watched Tananareve carefully as their party entered the chamber for the Justice Rendering. The primate studied the walls and ornamental traces with a quick and ready eye, as though cataloging all she saw. Quite natural for an explorer, who expected to report back to her superiors. That might well not happen, but no need to give the primate a hint of that.

  They sat in high rows above the steeply inclined vault. Above them hovered ancient tapestries of gold and ivory, while the funnel at the vault’s floor was an ominous jet black. Bemor sat higher than Asenath, Memor, and the primate, as fitted his rank. He spoke with the Highers, even the Ice Minds. Memor knew—and envied, of course. Though Bemor was her twin genetically, but for those genes that expressed sex, he had been reared to deal with long-term thinking and abstractions at a level Memor had not. Perhaps that explained, Memor thought, the tenor of irritation that crept into his sentences when discussions flagged or failed to reach a sharp point of usefulness. Male traits indeed, she recalled.

  A clarion call sounded deep and long in the vault. It comprised some high trills, playing against long strumming bass notes that Memor knew were resonant with the body size of Folk, and so would be felt rather than heard. Such musics instilled an uneasy impression of immensity and whole-body involvement, a tool persuasive yet hard to recognize. It instilled an apprehensive awe.

  Tananareve watched and listened, saying nothing. Her eyes darted with quick intelligence. Only her tight pale lips told of some inner tension.

  Resonant chords came from the music walls. At a signal, a team of brawny Folk strode from the witnesses gathered on the lower level. With prods, these forced each of the Maxer Cult members forward … closer to the edge … their legs slipping in the slime … then at the teetering brink … as a deep voice extolled their violations of the Great Pact. At a second hooting call, the Folk thrust the Maxers into the pit. Some flailed in resistance. Others turned with resigned shrugs and jumped. Cries, shouts, shrieks.

  “This is a most useful spectacle,” Asenath said mildly. “Well done, too.”

  The music rose to a triumphant chorus, high notes rejoicing. Barely audible beneath the sound was a chanting—

  “Live in this moment. Give in this moment.”

  “Ritual reprocessing is too good for those who undermine stability,” Asenath said, spitting out the words. “They endanger us all.”

  “So may we,” Memor said, and at once regretted it.

  Asenath shot back, “Not if we exterminate the humans as we have these!”

  They had apparently forgotten that the primate sat among them, Memor saw. Tananareve’s head jerked up for a moment; then she bowed it … which meant, Memor knew, that the primate had learned some of their speech. Had understood Asenath’s remark. These creatures were smarter than she knew.

  There was a long silence after the ceremony, hanging in the heavy air.

  Bemor said softly, “We Folk must conquer our own festering anxieties, as well. These reprocessings are necessary for stability and for life itself. We Folk in our own wide variety, along with the multitudes of Adopted, should accept the hard, simple fact that we oursel
ves and all we encounter are transitory, ephemeral, beings of the moment. We matter little. We should embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world, knowing it will cease for us, inevitably. We are not the Ice Minds. Such is the Order of Life.”

  Memor added her agreeing fan-display to that of Asenath and other Folk within range of Bemor’s deep bass voice. For her it was a satisfying moment. Bemor could make these matters far more resonant and inspiring than she; just another sign of his ability range. When they were both young, cared for by their long dead Principal Mother, he had early on shown his ability to handle higher-level abstractions and find the nugget of wisdom in passing moments. She admired him.

  But Asenath would not let it be. She said, “These primates do not see such wisdom. They are an expansionist species, such as has been seldom seen in the Bowl for great ages. Their ship has maneuvered below range of our defense gamma ray lasers. Their parties afoot elude us. It is time to marshal efforts to eliminate them.” A pause and vigorous fan-rattle. “Obviously.”

  Bemor gave an agreeable rainbow flourish with mingled eye-frets, but then said soberly, “There have been, down through the vast generations, uncounted acts to restore stability. All these carried a penumbra of drownings, starvation, sad sickness, massacre, looting, ethnic scourges, laser conflagrations, air-cutting slaughters, assisted group suicides, expulsions into vacuum—the list trudges on.”

  “You seem saddened by this,” Memor said—a bit presumptively, but after all, she was his identical.

  Bemor yielded on this with an embarrassed flutter. “I recall when young—you were spared this, my twin—assisting the more militant among us. We walked on corpses, sat on wrecked bodies to rest, stacked them as they stiffened to provide us a momentary table to eat upon. The delay in recycling them into the Great Soil meant they had to be assembled and even defended, against predators both feral and intelligent. But it had to be done.”