Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “How do you think, little one?” Bemor addressed the primate with his rumbling voice.

  Memor was shocked. Somehow in a mere few sleep-times, Bemor had mastered the Late Invader tongue, solely from Memor’s reports and recordings. His pronunciation was accurate, too, strong on the clunky primate vowels. She felt a wash of cold anxiety and not a little fear. My brother truly is quicker, sharper. Can it be because he links so much with the Ice Minds?

  “Clearly,” Tananareve said. “Quietly.”

  Bemor gave an amused rustle that no doubt the primate did not fathom. “Quite well put,” he said in Anglish. “Do you think your Captain will cooperate with us?”

  “If you let go of our people, he will.”

  “We will compromise on that. We might very well let many of you go on to Glory.”

  “Nope, we all go.”

  “That is unreasonable.”

  Bemor turned to Memor and in Folk said, “This is normal?”

  “They sail before the thousand breezes that blow through their opaque unconscious Underminds,” Memor said. She noted the primate was looking at them, but did not worry that this creature could fathom their speech. After all, Folk had layered grammars and conditional tenses the primates totally lacked.

  Bemor huffed skeptically. In formal Folkspeak he said, “Very pretty. What do we do?”

  “They do learn by experience,” Asenath said. “Memor herself says so. They are in a wholly strange place and may relapse into patterns from their past, fearing to face their future here.”

  “To face their fate,” Bemor said.

  Asenath said, “In them there is an undercurrent of strong neurological response to social life. In their neural patterns I read connecting elements, plainly honed by long natural selection. They evolved as hunter-gatherers within a socioeconomy where sharing and justice were critical to long-term survival. Yet these fail when extended to larger groups—a major problem of theirs, even now. Judging from the encased memories I read, even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.”

  Bemor said formally, “Our long voyages have revealed much poignant wisdom. I have often viewed from the hull observatories, the vibrant stars glaring in their perpetual dark. That star swarm marks not so much a mystery but a morgue, brimming with once glorious and now dead civilizations. This I learned from the Ice Minds.”

  Memor rustled at this. Here at last Bemor played his strong card, the slow intelligences of great antiquity. They dozed through the Bowl’s long voyages, else they might try too many experiments. In this way they were a reserve of long-term wisdom, not of mere passing expertise. They had been present at the Bowl’s construction, even participating in its design, or so legend had it. How such cold creatures could know mechanics was an ancient puzzle.

  Bemor used the rolling cadences of formal speech to stress his different status. Infuriating, but she could do nothing overt about it. And she was his sister twin, too. Asenath would falsely assume they worked together. Perhaps, Memor saw, she could use that in her own favor.

  “You believe they wish to play a role in this Glory matter already?” Asenath asked intently.

  Bemor fan-marked yellow agreement tones. “They must. The Glorians have technologies we need to ascend to a higher level of communications, with minds that have ignored us until now. The Ice Minds also surely wonder if these primates could ever fit in on the Bowl. They have implied such.”

  Asenath said, “The primates will have to.”

  Bemor said with casual superiority, “If they are able. We live among the long history of spaces and species. We encourage local groupings and discourage long travels across the Bowl. These adventurers may not fit in well. They seem obsessed with pushing beyond their horizons.”

  Asenath said, “Most of our Adopted give their names as ‘the people’—whom they of course assume to be blessed. Others are, well, not so blessed. Each likes to see itself as central and important even among the vast tracts of the Bowl. Many live within a history of faces—bosses and chiefs, matrons and managers on high. As they adapt, these Adopted, to the majesty that is the Bowl, their history becomes simple. It is about who wore their own species’ crown and then who wore it next.”

  Bemor fluttered agreeably. “Of course, as planned long ago. The Adopted do not any longer reflect upon great matters, beneath our eternal sun, untroubled by the universe around them. They dwell in comfort, without the horrors of unsteady sunlight, of seasons and slantwise sun. The Ice Minds see nothing but the entire universe, all around them. They are of the constant dark.”

  Memor thought this a bit much, attaching Ice Mind majesty to his own agenda. But she said nothing. She thought, though, upon her own past roles in this. Species grew in number until the Folk had to shepherd them to their equilibrium value. Belligerence and slaughter ran their bloody course. Borders brought a fretwork of scars, a long scrawl of history made legible on ground. With borders of sand or forest or water, Astronomer Folk shaped place to match species. Boundaries defined. When warring muddles arose, they examined yet again why territory caused them. Often this came from inept borders drawn by yawning bureaucrats far in the past.

  So Memor and others thrust themselves into the ground truth of locales, letting time brew wisdom from raw rubs and strife. Such lands were often the equivalent of cluttered attics, stuffed by history with soiled rags, dented cans, and old, oily wood: a single spark could ignite them. Such running sores where species war raged unchecked, the Folk could only cleanse with great diebacks. Quite commonly, the packing fraction of religious passions in too little space was the deep cause, and had to be corrected. Folk molded the Adopted so none sprawled in an unending tide. Conversations and genetics shaped better and longer than mountains and monsoons could. Tribal beliefs in a tyrannical God figure running an imaginary, celestial dictatorship were often easier to manage. They understood hierarchy.

  Such was the aged truth the Folk learned either from the Cold Minds or from hard experience. Memor had climbed up with a chilly indifference to necessity, and so now had merited the honor of dealing with the Late Invaders. I hope I can capture the renegades and win approval, Memor thought, suppressing her Undermind’s qualms. Or else there will come … execution. She felt a shudder from her Undermind—something she could not see, a secret of great implication … it slipped away.

  Her reverie done, Memor snapped back to attention. Asenath ventured, “So … we should not consider these primates good Adoption candidates?”

  Bemor gestured at the primate, who narrowed her eyes and looked intently at him. “No, I believe they can be broken to the rule of reason, in time. But their Adoption should not be assumed to be an important value to us. We need them to help negotiate with the Glory system, true. But we can then cast them aside like a sucked carcass, if we wish, at little loss.”

  “What habitat would suit these creatures, then?” Asenath asked.

  Memor said, “I have plumbed the mind of this primate, Tananareve. I gather they want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean. They prefer to live in those environments in which their species evolved over millions of years. Instinctively, they gravitate toward parklands and transitional forest, looking out safely over a distance toward reliable sources of food and water. They can flee predators from land to water, or back, or to forest, where their kind once lived in trees.”

  “What a primitive mode!” Asenath seemed repulsed.

  “Is this opinion, that the primates are mostly useful for dealing with Glory, the sole wisdom the Ice Minds wish to convey to us at this point?” Memor asked, turning to Bemor.

  “I think that is quite enough indeed,” Bemor said—rather haughtily, Memor thought. “But…” Bemor moved uneasily, feathers rustling. “The Ice Minds do not always reveal their thinking. They seem unusually interested in these primates. Still, they wish us to secure th
e help of these Late Invaders.”

  Asenath rushed to send an assent-flutter toward Bemor and turned a subtle angle toward him, and so away from Memor. “So, Contriver, I propose that we give the primate ship a reminder of their true position.”

  “Um,” Bemor said with a skeptical eye-cant. “How?”

  “They are inspecting the magnetic configurations around their ship, probably to better guide their own craft. But it could be they will use it to disturb our magnetic mechanics, as well. Their technique is to spread a wide array of sensors.”

  “Adeptly so?” Bemor said.

  “These are craftily done, hundreds of disks the size of my toenail. I suggest we wipe our skies free of them.”

  “Destroy them?” Memor asked.

  “It will serve as a calling card,” Aseneth said with a smirk-flutter.

  “I’m sure it will,” Bemor said, sending an assent corona of yellow and blue. He leaned forward eagerly. “We will at least learn something from their response.”

  “I shall see it is done,” Asenath said happily. “I believe these Late Invaders will be put in their proper place, and soon realize it.”

  Memor wondered if she had been outmaneuvered here. Caution would have been her policy, but Bemor seemed bemused by the idea of overt action. “I hope you enjoy it as well, Asenath,” Memor said with what she hoped was just the right tone of sardonic agreement. It was always difficult to get these things right.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Blessed night, Cliff thought. The soothing qualities of pure deep darkness washed over them all. After months of relentless sun, they had all they wished of sweet shadow. It fell like a club upon their minds, sucking them into sleep.

  He swam up to blurred consciousness after another long sleep, wrapped in a fuzzy warm blanket the Sil had found for them all. His team lay around like sacks of sand, feasting on the festival of dark that released their need, after so long in the field, for rest.

  He was still groggy. Something had sent a twinge, awakened him. He got up, pulled on pants and boots, and left their little room carved from brown rock. His boots were getting worn down and he wondered how he could get something serviceable. As usual, the right answer was, ask the Sil.

  Small soft sounds were coming from where they viewed the Ice Minds messages. He came in carefully, watching the two Sil speaking in their curious way. There was more eye and head movement than there was talk. And as usual, the most active one was Quert—who noticed Cliff and beckoned him over with an eye-shrug.

  “Ask for wisdom of past,” Quert said. “This got now.”

  On the screen were phrases that might have been answers to Sil questions.

  Over long times there is no lack of energy or materials, only of imagination.

  Not having resources makes species resourceful.

  Anger dwells long only in the bosom of fools.

  “Thanks for having them do this in Anglish.”

  “Did not ask. They spoke first to us. Now to you.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “Want to deal with Folk. You can help. Ice Minds care not for us. Care for you.”

  “Why?”

  “New Invaders know new things.”

  “So they brush you off with ‘Anger dwells long only in the bosom of fools.’ And you are supposed to forget how the Folk killed so many of you?”

  Quert gave only a tightening around the eyes, and his words were in a cool whisper. “Ice Minds say we are unquiet in soul.”

  “You’re handling those deaths better than I have done with my friend Howard.”

  “There is more worry to come.”

  Quert beckoned him toward the large portal that gave a view of the sprawling icefields. To the side the stars wheeled and on the dim icy outer crust of the Bowl the vacuum flowers slowly tracked the brightest stars in the moving sky. This was for Cliff still a magical vision. He watched it with Quert, who after a moment made a simple hand gesture and the portal flickered. The view jerked and though the stars still swept across the jet-black sky, now there was a bright object moving counter to the Bowl’s rotation, skating across the blackness. When it was nearly overhead, a sudden beam flashed into view and Cliff realized the craft was using a spotlight. A powerful green laser beam fanned out to a ten-meter circle, sweeping. The beam flared briefly as it shone directly into the portal and then moved on. The bright point of the surveying ship tracked on, away and over the horizon. The stars wheeled on.

  “That was a recording?”

  An assent-rachet of Quert’s eyes. “They not see your kind. Saw us.”

  “Some Sil? If they were looking for us, then we’re safe—”

  “Folk say Sil not come here.”

  “I thought—” He stopped, realizing that he had not thought at all whether the Sil were trespassing here. Apparently they were. Once the thought occurred, it seemed reasonable. You don’t want riffraff intruding into the provinces of beings who dwell in deep cold. Their mere body heat could cause damage.

  “No one is to come talk to the Ice Minds?”

  “Not allowed by Folk.”

  “So they’ll come after you?”

  “Soon. We move.”

  Cliff realized he had thought of this cool dark refuge in rock as a resting place. They were all tired of moving across strange landscapes. But now they would lose that, too.

  “Where to?”

  “Warm and hot.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Redwing woke from a blurred dream of swimming in a warm ocean, lazily drifting … to a melodious call from the bridge. He hated buzzers in his cabin, and so the strains of Beethoven’s Fifth drew him up with their four hammering notes. If he didn’t answer within ten seconds, it would double in volume. He got to it in nine. “Um, yeah.”

  “Captain, the smart coins aren’t reporting in,” Ayaan Ali said in a tight, clipped voice. In task rotation, this was her week on the skeleton watch. It was 4:07 ship time.

  “How many?” He was still groggy.

  “All of them. Their hail marks just winked out. I had them up on the big board along with full stereo visuals in optical. Their hails started disappearing at angle two eighty-seven, and a wave of them swept across the real space coordinate representation. It took, let’s see, one hundred forty-nine seconds to sweep over all of them. I can’t get a response hail from a single one.”

  “Sounds like an in-system malf.”

  “I checked that. The Insys Artilect says nothing wrong.”

  “You called on the other two?”

  “I brought them up into partial mode to save time. With just their diagnostic subset running, I got them to review whole-system stats for the last hour. They say there’s nothing wrong.”

  “The full Artilect is right, then.” His mind scrambled over the problem, got nothing. “Run it again. And direct for an all-spectrum search. Plus look at all the particle count indexes. Everything we’ve got.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I call—?”

  “Right, Karl. And Fred.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be there pronto.”

  He made it in under two minutes. His onboard coverall slipped on easily—he had been losing weight lately, working the weights and doing pace running—and he used Velcro shoes. Ayaan Ali’s brow was creased with lines he had never seen before. Worry, not fatigue.

  “Nothing unusual in the all-spectrum,” she said, voice high and tight. “Particle fluxes normal. The magnetosonic and ion cyclotron spectrum is as usual, pretty much. But the Alfvén wave spectrum power is up nearly an order of magnitude.”

  The Insys Artilect visualized this spectrum, cast over the schematic of their near-space environment. It presented as a green front of waves rolling over the zone of the smart coins, silencing each as it swamped them. With an on-screen slider bar, Ayaan Ali moved this map backwards and forward in time. “I wonder how these magnetic waves could turn off our coins.”

  “Tumbling them, I would think,” Karl said. He had come i
n quietly with Fred just behind. “Alfvén waves can nonlinearly decay into waves short enough to be of the same size as the coins. That tumbles them and can kill their navigation.”

  “And maybe turn them off, too,” Fred added.

  Karl pointed to the wave sequences. “They spread out from the jet, notice. An example of what my language has a single word for—Vernichtungswille: the desire to annihilate.”

  “So this is the Folk reply to our first negotiation?” Ayaan Ali asked.

  “Looks like,” Fred said. “Say, what’s that?” The back-time display ran into earlier hours, and Fred reached over to freeze it, march it forward. As he did, a blue wave rushed across the entire display space. He backtracked it, shifting out to larger frames. “Look, it traces back to the jet. What’s blue mean?”

  “High-energy ions.” Ayaan Ali thumbed the resolution until they could make out a snarl in the jet itself. It was a knot of magnetic stresses that tightened, fed by smaller curls of magnetic flux that rushed outward along the jet.

  “Look,” Fred said. “Kinks came purling along the jet, moving fast. They converged in that knot, and—here comes the blue.”

  Karl nodded. “From that we get the Alfvén waves. Very neat, really. They can control the magnetic fields in their jet, focus them.”

  “To kill our coins.” Redwing looked around at them. “To show us what they can do.”

  A silence as they looked at him, as if to say, What do we do?

  “Officers of the bridge, I want you to fly a small satellite over the rim of the Bowl. We haven’t got any recon of the outside of this thing, and Ayaan Ali reports that we got a stray signal from Cliff’s team just hours ago. It was text only, said they were under the mirror zone. If we can put a relay sat within range of them, on the outside, maybe we can make a stable link.”

  Fred looked at Redwing for a long moment. “You want to risk a satellite?”