Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  Memor said kindly, in mellow tones, “Brother, I do not follow—”

  “The Bowl grows errant beliefs like mutant species. There were obscure faiths and ethical theories that held the body was some kind of holy vessel, whose owners had not yet departed. Or else such spirits would require the body, even though rendered into dust, to be made animate again. So they resisted return to the Great Soil, a true sin.”

  He looked around at nearby Folk, who regarded him with varying displays of doubt. “You flutter your fan-feathers with disbelief, yes—but I have seen this in historical records, and even in person. Sad sights I regret witnessing now.” Bemor sagged a bit as if borne down by history, his feathery jaws swaying. “Alas, my memory is long and I cannot erase those laid down with such feeling.”

  Crowds come to witness now shuffled out of the Vault. Other Folk dispersed until it was Asenath, Bemor, and Memor, plus of course the primate.

  Asenath said, “Your report is due, Memor. Your hunt for the bandit crew still loose among the Sil continues?”

  Memor duly reported finding the Late Invaders among the Sil. With a quick air display of images, she told of the attack upon the Sil city, the vast destruction.

  “Approved by upper echelons?” Asenath asked severely.

  “I ushered it through,” Bemor said mildly, eyeing Asenath but making no feather-display at all. Lack of fan-signal was a subtle sign of coolness, but Asenath missed this and rushed ahead, eager with a point to make.

  “And they are dead?”

  Memor suppressed her usual feather-rainbow to convey irked response and said, “No. I had surveillance auto-eyes study the Sil buildings. While they are rebuilding themselves, they involuntarily shape new messages in their forms. This is not a language but a gesture-speak. The influence of building style plainly shows a vagrant presence among the Sil, and I deduce that the humans survived the assault.”

  Asenath pressed forward with full fan-clatter. “So. You failed.”

  “I did not command the skyfish. Those who did not achieve their goals were demoted. But recently one fast-fly craft caught this.” Memor flicked an image into the air surrounding them. A down view showed a primate running between recently shaped buildings. A pain beam rippled over it, and the figure crumpled. The beam stayed on and the writhing thing kicked and thrashed and then lay still.

  “A single kill?” Asenath said with downcast tones.

  “We now know we can hurt them at will over distance. My primate here”—a gesture at Tananareve—“was our test subject. But I found also that the Sil have secured access to my own surveillance.”

  Bemor said, “So the Sil are watching you, too?”

  “I withdrew immediately, of course. In that interval the primates made their way toward a nearby mirror zone.”

  Asenath brushed this aside, pressing on. “Memor, we have not heard your report on this primate of yours. I take it she has been well fed and often exercised?”

  Memor puzzled at Asenath’s apparently friendly tone, suspecting something. “Of course. I brought her here to higher gravities, for her health. Her species was clearly not made for lightness—indeed, their bone and joint structures suggest a world of heavier gravitation than even the Great Plain.”

  Bemor asked, “You have read her mind structures enough? Your reports mentioned this odd character, inability to see her own Undermind.”

  “Yes, obviously an early evolutionary step. Imagine building a large, coherent society of individuals who could not know their own impulses, their inner thoughts! Touring her mind was instructive. I got most of what I need.”

  Asenath fluttered with appreciation. “I shall depend upon your ability to monitor this primate. We will need her cooperation to convey our response to their ship’s attempts at contact.”

  Memor hid her surprise. “Now?”

  Asenath said sternly, “We must deceive the Glorians about who commands the Bowl. Your primates can do this for us, if properly handled.”

  PART VII

  CRUNCHY INSECTS

  It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

  —JOHN STEINBECK

  TWENTY-TWO

  “These snakes are incredible,” Beth said to Karl. It was pleasant to have time to relax and just watch without feeling endlessly responsible. She had gotten used to that on the Bowl.

  “If you’d asked me before I saw them, I’d have said more like improbable.” Karl could not take his eyes from the screen. “Hard to see how evolution worked out skills like this.”

  They were watching some aft zone electronic repairs carried out in the narrow spaces near the magnetic drive modules. The snakes wriggled into spaces that would have taken her and Kurt hours to unsheath, disconnect, monitor, diagnose, and fix.

  Karl called to them, “Go left at the condenser bank. They’re cylindrical drums with oil valves on the upper side, colored yellow. Then spin open the double diode—they’re the blue plates.”

  The Maintenance Artilect took this from Karl’s mike and translated it into the sliding vowels and clipped sharp notes that made up the finger snake language. On the screen they both watched the snakes make the right moves. They each had a tool harness that they plucked small instruments from. With these they deftly inserted, turned, levered, and adjusted their way through one task after another, with speeds almost impossible to follow. The interior cameras were tiny light pipes and gave barely enough definition to make this work. All the while, the ship hummed on and occasional thumps and surges hampered the work. SunSeeker’s magscoop was operating close to its shutdown threshold already, and repairs while operating were the bane of all ships—but it had to be done.

  Beth was out of her depth here—hell, I’m a field biologist!—but regs said nobody worked alone on ship maintenance, ever. Flight deck officers were full up, conning SunSeeker as close in to the Bowl’s atmosphere levels as they could, while still grabbing enough plasma from the star as they could. Just maintaining flight trajectories while watching for bogies was burning up all their attention.

  Beyond tending to the hydroponics, certifying the air content, and helping turn algae into edible insects and porridge, Beth had nothing more to do. She helped a little with the preliminary “fault tree” analysis of this maintenance run, but that meant mostly giving instructions to the Artilect, which plainly knew far more than she did about what she was supposed to be doing. So she used a wise saying she’d learned from Cliff: Never pass up a chance to shut up.

  Which was harder to do than she had thought. “Uh, can I help?” she asked for maybe the eighteenth time.

  “No, I got it.” Kurt never took his eyes from the screens, and his headphones whispered constantly with updates from the Artilect. “Going well.”

  Man of few words, bless him. At least Karl didn’t ask her over and over about living on the Bowl, like the rest of the watch crew.

  The snakes wriggled some more, did scrub procedures on some parts, and with surprising speed got a discharge capacitor line back up to specs—part of the booster system that allowed them to amp their magscoop when needed. “Okay,” Kurt said, “come on back out. You guys need a break.”

  The snakes dutifully turned and started on their tortured way back out of the engine labyrinths. “Amazing what they can do,” Kurt said, nodding his head. “Makes me wonder how we got by without them.”

  “Barely,” Beth said.

  “You’re bio, how did smart snakes ever evolve? They sure didn’t Earthside.”

  “Something about their home world, one of them said. It had plate tectonics gone wild, crazy surface weather, storms that would take the paint off metal. So smart life stayed underground.”

  “How about earthquakes? Volcanoes?”

  “Their world had ‘bands of furious turmoil,’ they said—their language has considerable poetic power. Their landmasses butt against each other, kind of like Earth, with its baseball seam wrapping
around the globe. Stay away from those, and life underground is somewhat easier, they learned. Where are you from?”

  “Gross Deutschland. You?”

  “Everyplace, mostly away from California—after the Collapse, we had plenty of migrants from there.”

  “Okay, snakes got smart, but mein Gott they are wonders at handling mechanics.”

  Beth grinned. “Look, we don’t even know why we’re relatively hairless, compared with the other apes. Why we walk on two legs and can outrun anything over distance. Why we’re so damn good at mathematics, at music—you name it. So understanding where an alien species came from is hopeless.”

  The finger snakes came wriggling out of the narrow cap passage into the drive’s innards. Ordinarily she and Kurt would’ve used smart cables to get in there, running them with a control panel. To her astonishment, the snakes broke into a high, wailing song—chip chip, duooo, rang rang, chip, duoo duoo. Not entirely unpleasant, either. At least it did not last long. Then they formed a “wriggle dance” as Redwing called it, arcing over each other and forming intricate curves that included bobbing in and out of the circle, rolling over and doubling up to make O’s, then back into the throng—still singing, though less shrill. They finally ended up standing halfway erect on their muscular tails, their fingers wriggling at the dumbstruck humans in comradeship—or so whispered the Artilect in Karl’s ear.

  Then, with good-bye hails, they went off to eat in the algae pits, where a repast cooked up by Beth earlier awaited.

  Karl said, “They’re so coordinated. As if it was completely natural for them.”

  “You mean instead of how humans do it—drill, train, discipline, drill some more?”

  “Pretty much. The snakes—look at them, off to their home in the biospace. All together, chattering … Some species are better at collaboration than we are. How come?”

  “We’re pretty new at it. About two hundred fifty thousand years ago Earthside, group hunting became more successful than individual hunting. That started the logic of shared profits and risks. Penalties kept alpha males from dominating. There emerged a kind of inverted eugenics: elimination of the strong, if they abuse power. And the cooperators won out.”

  “Wow, you know this stuff. It’ll be fun seeing you work out all the aliens on the Bowl.”

  Beth opened her mouth to say something modest but … he’d brought up what she’d already missed. Back onboard, but dreaming at nights of the Bowl. “Uh, yes. Look, it’s time for that self-cook in the mess,” she said.

  * * *

  Fred was talking while he pounded a wad of bread dough. Physical work opened him as well as anyone could, so Beth tried to pay attention. “I kept wondering, y’know. The Bowl map shows Earth as of the Jurassic period, when all of the biggest dinosaurs emerged. Y’know, apatosaurs and so forth. I think I finally have the sequence right.”

  Beth nodded while she did her own kitchen work. He slammed the dough down and punched it for punctuation. “A variety of intelligent dinosaurs emerged first. Oof! They must have been carnivores. They invented herding. Uh! For millions of years they must have been breeding meat animals for size. Ahh!”

  He looked around and realized that nobody was listening except Beth. “You mean all those theories about dino evolution are wrong?” This was interesting to her but apparently not to the others. The crowded kitchen buzzed with low conversation as they worked on aspects of dinner. Fred’s jaw closed with a snap. She knew the pattern—if people didn’t listen, he didn’t talk.

  Karl handed Beth a handful of roasted crickets that reeked of garlic. “Try these. Crunchy.” He had pitched in with the cooking before she even got to the ship’s mess.

  “Yum,” she said. Next came a basket of aromatic wax worms ready to cook. She tossed aside black ones: that meant necrosis. “They go bad fast; hell, I harvested them two hours ago,” she apologized. “The rest are pupating—just right.” Deftly she peeled back their cocoons and tossed them into the electric wok.

  Captain Redwing came in and watched, standing straight and tall, smacking his lips slightly. “Wax moth larvae, a gourmet favorite.” The crew laughed, because he always pretended to like the food in the mess, no matter how implausible that was. Or else he ate alone in his cabin. After their last culinary disaster, a motley mashed-up dish everyone disliked and called Stew in Hell, he went on dry rations alone.

  Karl turned and swept brown roasted crickets up, salted them—salt was easy to extract from the recycler—and with head tilted back, trickled them into his mouth. “How come when you have less to eat, it tastes better?”

  “Less is more,” Redwing said. Everyone around him raised eyebrows. “Look, we’re in a tough spot, carrying forward maneuvers nobody trained for—” He nodded at Karl, Beth, Ayaan Ali. “—and exploring a big thing nobody even imagined. We’ve got to do with less until we see our way out of this.”

  Everyone nodded. Redwing finished with, “So on to Glory—and let’s eat.”

  The moth larvae weren’t all done. The crew watched the chubby white larvae sway and wriggle in delirious fits as the heat took them. Insect protein was simple to raise on algae and, if well cooked, had a zest that the rest of the menu lacked. Fresh from a skillet, they had a kind of fried fritter some called “pond scum patties” to go with them. The ship couldn’t afford the room or resources to raise muscle and sinew. Some crew came from the North American Republic and weren’t used to insect food, or else from experience regarded it as beneath their standards. A few weeks’ exposure to the stored rations usually fixed that. Some things, like the trays of gray longworms, few could bear to look at. Those Beth thought it best to grind into a paste for a fake pancake.

  Beth spread the larvae into a frying pan, where they fell into a fragrant, fatty goo Ayaan Ali had made. They squirmed as they sizzled and then went still. She stirred them, thinking Amazing what you’ll eat when you have to … and then recalled things she had gratefully ingested when she had to on the Bowl. Sometimes, admittedly, while deliberately not looking at them …

  A zesty aroma rose from the crusty larvae and as soon as she set them out, crew descended on them.

  Redwing had saved a morsel for this moment, and now trotted out from his personal stock a bowl of—“Honey!”

  That made the dish work. Everyone dug in. “As insect vomit goes,” Karl said, “not at all bad.”

  Ayaan Ali asked Karl, “Done with that flight analysis?”

  Karl barely slowed his eating to say, “Realigned the simulation, yes. Fitted it to isotope data from the scoop over the last century.”

  Beth asked, “Meaning?”

  Ayaan Ali said, “We’re still trying to understand why the scoop underperformed. It might help us fly it now in this low-plasma-density regime.”

  Redwing said casually, “How’s the detector mote net working?”

  Beth knew this was one way Redwing liked to turn social occasions into a loose staff report meeting. Certainly his approach made hearing tech stuff flung about a tad more appetizing.

  Ayaan Ali gave herself an extra helping of sauce—much needed, since to Beth the woman seemed rail thin and low energy—and crunched up some more insect delicacies before saying softly to the others, “Karl and I deployed, on the captain’s direction, the diagnostic fliers we’d planned to use when we came into the Glory system. They would give us a good three-D map of the mag fields and solar wind when we came in.”

  Redwing said, “So I decided we could send them out on a short leash. They can tell us details about the plasma turbulence, density ridges, things that we can’t get a good reading on inside SunSeeker’s mag cocoon.”

  This, too, was a Redwing method—let the crew know there was logic behind his orders, but do so ex post facto. Playing along, Beth asked, “Short leash?”

  Karl said, “I’m pretty sure we can reel them back in. They’re marvels, really, size of a coin but able to propel themselves by using tiny electric fields that let them sail on magnetic energy, to sen
se plasma and measure waves, and report back in gigahertz band. We’ve got them spread over a big fraction of an astronomical unit, sniffing out ion masses and densities, picking up plasma waves, the whole lot.”

  Beth was impressed with SunSeeker’s abilities and kept quiet while the others kicked around their lingo. They loved their gadgets the way ordinary people cherish their pets. The thousands of “smart coins” sending back data were working well. That they could be fetched back, told to return home for reuse—amazing stuff. Plus they had useful results right now.

  Ayaan Ali waved one of her augmented fingers, and a 3-D vision snapped into view, sharp and clear above their table. Hanging in air, it showed schematics of the Bowl in green, with SunSeeker a tiny orange dot swimming above it. The ship had to stay below the rim of the Bowl to avoid the defensive weapons there. But it also had to skate above the upper membrane that held in the Bowl’s atmosphere. That left a narrow disk of vacuum for SunSeeker to navigate, riding the plasma winds that came direct from the star. But more important, they got plasma spurts from the traceries and streamers that purled off the yellow-colored jet. The churning jet was big in the 3-D view, a slowly twisting nest of luminous threads that drove forward. As the crew watched the display, it shifted smoothly, since the Bridge Artilect tracked human eye movements to display what interested people. They witnessed the jet narrowing further as it flowed out, then piercing the Bowl cleanly at the back, through the Knothole and out into interstellar space.

  Deftly Ayaan Ali pointed to the safety zone disk where SunSeeker flew and the 3-D dutifully expanded until they could see bright blue dots swimming in a grid formation all across the huge expanse. They were sprinkled over a distance of about an astronomical unit and when Ayaan Ali waved her hand, they answered with momentary violet flares, a ripple slowly expanding away from the ship’s position.