Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  They paused to drink water and Cliff stood looking at the big stonework. Slowly, about fifty meters up, an eye opened.

  He knew it was an eye though it was of the same burnished tan as the rest of the tower. It had a green center like an iris. Slowly the entire oval, several meters across, turned downward to look at them. One eye.

  “What…” Cliff could not take his eyes off the single enormous pupil at the thing’s center. It seemed to be looking straight at him. A pupil in rock? An eye with lens and retinas?

  “Stone mind,” Quert said simply. Then he turned quickly and peered into the distance.

  Cliff looked to his left and saw several of the stumpy humanoids flitting among the sculptures. There were a lot of them, moving with surprising speed. They huffed and squatted and made ready. Their brown clothes seemed to have endless pockets and they fished among those to bring out things, affixing them to the long tubes.

  “Chem guns,” Aybe said. “In all this high tech, the old stuff still makes sense.”

  “Or maybe they haven’t been allowed any more advanced tech?” Terry wondered.

  “We saw a humanoid like this, remember?” Irma said. “It opened a door leading down into some entrance, back there on an open plain. When it saw us, it just walked away.”

  Aybe said, “Yeah, maybe we should’ve looked into that entrance. We were getting pretty ragged, maybe it would’ve been good shelter.”

  Cliff knew this was a way of calling up an unspoken grudge. He had argued to push on and they had. “That means these humanoids are maybe maintenance workers,” he said mildly. “They’re working for the Folk, keeping the Bowl fit.”

  They broke off talk as the creatures moved. Without a word the entire party of Sil and humans turned and watched the humanoids go to each flank, surrounding them. Nobody spoke.

  “Kahalla,” Quert said. “They hold us for Folk. Send message.”

  Terry whispered, “How can we get away?”

  Before Quert could speak, a long droning note washed over the area. It seemed to come from everywhere and was more like a sensation in Cliff’s body than a sound. The tone shifted and a long rolling vowel played out, aaahhhhmmmm.

  Quert said, “Sit. Listen. The stone mind wakes.”

  Cliff sized up their situation. There were at least a few hundred of the humanoids around them. They didn’t look friendly. Many wore jackets and carried long tubes that looked like some sort of launch weapon. They were swarthy and their heads never turned away from watching the humans near the tower. They bristled with suppressed energy. Cliff wondered how he knew this and saw it was something about reading body postures. Maybe that was a universal, across species? Or else the whole primate suite of abilities converged—driven by the urgent need to communicate, no matter what world your abilities came from—on myriad subtle signs that told stories from a mere glance.

  Irma said quietly, “They’re dangerous. We can’t fight them. Are we waiting for this song to end or what?”

  “They hear the long voice,” Quert said.

  Aybe said, “So? How long does this last?”

  “The rock being speaks of its many deaths,” Quert said, its head dipping low and eye darting up and down, a gesture Cliff did not know.

  Tones now shifted higher, into shrees, kinnnes, awiiihs, and oooeeeiiinneees. The pressing power in it seemed to hammer the air around them. Cliff felt these as warring long-wavelength notes that made his muscles dance, his body arch and flex and stretch in resonance with the powerful sounds rolling through the dry air around them.

  “It’s … it’s playing us,” he managed to get out. “This sound…”

  “It tells of its great death,” Quert said. “Takes far time.”

  The Sil had formed a crescent facing outward against the solemn threatening silence of the humanoids. Together with Quert, the Sil flexed their arms, turning their inner elbows up to the sun. Cliff saw slender black fibers extend in the pits of their elbows. Their tips gleamed in the hard sunlight. He had never been able to tell males from females in the Sil, but it did not matter. They all had done some physiological magic and made these black lances poke out of their inner elbows. One of them abruptly jerked an arm down and the lance arced fast and sure out in a long parabola. The elegance of it struck Cliff as it watched it skewer a small wood emblem atop a hunkering stone sculpture of a big-chested humanoid. It hit the dry dark wood exactly in its center, and the black arrow flapped with energy not yet dissipated. As sure a challenge as he could imagine.

  The humanoids did not respond. Their feet shuffled, their heads waggled a bit, but no sounds came. The big notes had fallen silent, and Cliff thought the song or whatever it was had come to an end. Dead silence. The Sil glowered at the humanoids and flexed their black arrows. He wondered how that had evolved. Gene tampering? An onboard defense, obviously. You didn’t have to carry anything, and the black rods with their gleaming pointed tips waited for the downward yank of the arm. Their hands could be free, so they could have other weapons there, too. But … the Sil held no other weapons in their hands. No pistols or guns of any sort. Unlike the humanoids, who now sent forth barking calls, high and shrill.

  A taunt? A rebuke? It was impossible to tell. The calls stopped and Cliff felt himself tensing, pulse fast and hard. The two bands of aliens glared at each other in what seemed another universal signal—narrowed eyes. Grunts and hisses and heavy panting. Feet stirred in the dust. Arms and chests bunched and flexed. A fevered bristly aroma came drifting on the still air, the heat of bodies exuding aromas that, he supposed, carried signals evolved long ago on planets far from this stark scene. Time stood crisp and still. Eyes darted and judged.

  But then came long drawing notes from the stone tower. Echoing tones of kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrrafff …

  He panted and watched the aliens move into position around them. Shuffling in the dust. Huffing with energy.

  “We haven’t got a chance, do we?” he said in a casual way.

  Irma said wryly, “Looks like.”

  Boonnnug wrappppennnu faaaaliiiooong …

  The humanoids lifted their heads. Their shuffling ceased. As the long solemn notes washed over them, they slowly buckled. Sat. Folded their armaments and their arms, down and low.

  The long, loud notes rolled on. Cliff did not know this speech. Neither did the Sil, he gathered. But the humanoids did and they wilted before the slow steady sway of the music that poured over them. The words became a soothing song that washed over the entire stonework, itself laid out some vast time long ago, an era beyond knowing.

  The warmth lulled Cliff as well. “Take a break,” he said to the others. “Sit. Wait them out.”

  He felt the flowing wall of sound as it called, yoouuiunggg kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg.… He felt his knees go weak.

  Quert was having none of this. It said, “Let them sit. You do not.”

  “Huh? Why?” Cliff straightened up.

  “The slow song will reach them. Resist it.”

  “Resist? I don’t—”

  Quert gave him an eye-goggle he could not read.

  “Let it go,” Irma said. “There’s more going on here than we know.”

  Terry and Aybe agreed, heads nodding, eyes drifting, going drowsy and vague. Greee habbbiiitaaa loohgeree …

  Strange fat pauses drifted by in the warm air. Hums and echoes. Like corpses on an ocean, Cliff thought, and jerked awake. What an odd repellent metaphor of the vaguely meaningful. His unconscious was seeping through as he got drowsy. Or was it something the words called forth? The low booming voice called … biiitha ablorgh quartehor biiilannaa …

  To keep himself awake and not weaken and sit down, Cliff asked Quert, “This is a sculpture? With a recording? Why is it so important?”

  Quert looked at him with an expression Cliff had learned to read as puzzlement. “It is alive. It awakes to speak.”

  Cliff glanced up at the huge eye, which was still staring down at them. Gradually Quert’s indirect w
ay of saying things unfurled the story of this place. What Cliff saw as a sculpture was actually a living thing. Alien to the Bowl, rugged and slow, it had come long ago from a world that died. “It lives to tell. It awakes when audience approaches.”

  Irma said, “This is a smart rock?”

  Quert said, “Sunlight powered. From world very hot.”

  “It can’t move, right?” Aybe asked. “How’d it get here?”

  Quert found all this unremarkable. “Bowl passing by. Explored that hot world. These Kahalla asked the Bowl to take one of them to keep themselves. To speak for them.”

  Terry asked, “To carry their culture?”

  Quert turned to them and made a gesture they now knew meant “stay steady” among the Sil. “It sings. The Kahalla decide to send one of them. Their sun swelled. They would soon melt.”

  Terry said, “I thought those humanoids—” He gestured at the ring surrounding them. “—were the Kahalla.”

  “They take name of living stone.” Quert seemed to find this completely natural.

  “We triggered the monument? The Kahalla stone?” Aybe asked, his eyes wandering over the landscape.

  Cliff understood; it was so ordinary in a dry fashion, but there were plenty of ways to get everything wrong here. Stones and primitives, all beneath a luminous sky, elements of ancient human history and still so easy to see as simple, a tailoring of Earth history. It was nothing like that. The strange kept trying not to be strange.

  Quert’s eyes meant “yes.” “I-us took here. Knew song was only way.” The alien’s eyes told more than its words, but then words were tight little symbol lines. They could easily deceive the mind.

  Only way? To not get caught? Cliff studied the stern stonework that soared over a hundred meters above them. A single creature, something he would have bet plenty could never evolve: smart rock. On a hot dry world, there must have been some sort of competition. Among rocks? He could not grasp how they contended. Against weathering? To gain mass and so defend themselves against abrasive winds and tides? How could information flow in a stone? How could it gain intelligence, to control its fate?

  This went beyond biology into geology—and yet evolution had to explain such a thing. He recalled how dumbfounded he had been when he first saw the Bowl from SunSeeker. This made him feel the same way.

  It was harder to remain standing, but Quert insisted. The resonant voice boomed on and the Sil listened intently. Long droning notes rode the hot dry air.

  “Each time, different information,” Quert said.

  Long song pealing on. In the next hour, Quert gave Cliff, in halting detail, some of the Kahalla’s slow evolution. Planets that condensed out early near their stars necessarily must seethe and surge. Liquid metals and decaying radioactives spit energy into crystalline lattices. Order came from oblique condensations. The essentials geological were much like essentials biological: Life began from metabolism wedded with reproduction.

  The first sentient Kahallans used their world’s temperature and metallic difference between the core and the upper mantle as their thermodynamic driver. Along slithering seams of flowing lava, moving with aching slowness, they learned to track the shifting heat patterns. Predicting these was even better. Among the metal ions in their crystalline rhomboids, variations made their own order. Slow, slow and strange, reproduction of patterns followed. Some worked and so persisted. When shifting crystalline lattices held the basic data of early sentience, evolution’s hammer could find its anvil—much like bits encoded in silicon by humans’ computing chips, fresh intelligences arose without benefit of the bio world.

  Size conferred advantages in energy harvesting, so the Kahalla grew ever larger, over working agonies of billions of years. They learned to communicate through acoustic waves amid the strata. Social evolution drove the geological, just as they had driven the biological.

  Time stretched on. There was plenty of it.

  As their world’s core cooled, the Kahalla migrated from near the core and toward the surface, for their planet was slowly spiraling toward its sun, its barren rocky surface cracking with the warming—a new source of nourishment. Geological energy was like the biological—diffuse, persistent. Driven by gradients, not logic. Yet it sifted through patterns and choices.

  Ages passed. Finally the early Kahalla extruded themselves onto the plains festering with swarming heat, simmering beneath a glowering orange sky that was mostly now the skin of their star. Bio life had never arisen here, but now persistently the Kahalla colonized the stark black fields graced by rivers of smoldering lava. Great strange sagas of conquest and failure played out across smoldering landscapes. Songs worthy of immortality sang across blistered lands and blighted great monuments.

  Civilizations faded as tidal forces forced the planet nearer its star, ever nearer beneath a flowering culture—and soon the Kahalla saw their fatal trap.

  With their gravid slow slides of silicate, they could not migrate away from the surface fast enough to evade the heat. It lanced down from a star that swept the Kahalla with furious particle storms and bristling plasma. They retreated. Not fast enough. And ahead, their silicate minds knew, lay a great brutal force. They would soon enough reach the limit where tidal stretching could wrench and wrest apart their entire world.

  Their society, ponderous and unimaginative, began to disintegrate. Their muted culture was largely a society of songs—purling out through the stacked geological layers, soaring operas of driven love and inevitable death. Like all life in its long run, it strove to understand itself and so perhaps its universe.

  Yet some had fashioned instruments to survey their lands, their swarming sultry skies—and caught a glimmer of the Bowl in a momentarily clear sky. The Bowl had ventured in without fear of disrupting life-bearing worlds, for there were none—it thought. It coasted clear and sure in a long hyperbolic orbit. The Bowl was a sudden beckoning promise to those slow and solid and doomed.

  Somehow the Kahalla sent a signal to the Bowl. It was of long wavelength and thus carried low meaning, A slow song. Yet over time their signal persisted, and was heard.

  An expedition of robots answered—the spawn of a crafter species that stubbornly managed the near-Bowl transport and mass harvesting. Much conversation came and went and came again. It became with gravid grace a slow sliding talk across barriers of time and mind and much else.

  Yet still. These robots retrieved the essence of the Kahalla intelligence—slabs of silicate, laced with evolved strands of impurities, all serving as a computational matrix.

  So the robots brought the Kahalla mind to the Bowl in crystalline crucibles. It was a great act of graceful tribute, ordered by the least likely magistrates of all—the Ice Minds. So did the very cold save the very hot from utter extinction.

  “And this is the only one?” Cliff asked Quert. The droning long chant was still pealing on. And on. Bass thuds and hollow tones spoke wruuunggg laddduuutt eeeillooonnnggghh.

  “It alone stands for all the Kahalla now.”

  Cliff could sense the majesty of it as he watched the great vibrating rock, framed against cottony clouds that rushed across the sky. “How does it live?”

  “The sun lights those”—an eye-shrug toward the hills—“and tech condenses the heat, feeds the Kahalla crystals.”

  “So it’s like an enormous, living museum exhibit,” Irma said.

  “Bowl preserves. Without, life-forms die.”

  “All life-forms?” she asked.

  “Must be.”

  Cliff turned to watch the humanoids who had taken the name of this mournful singing stone and saw that the Kahalla’s long hours of chant had done its work. The humanoids lay sprawled in deep slumber.

  “Song goes to their souls,” Quert said.

  “You knew it would?” Aybe whispered.

  “Heard it did. Only chance.” Quert turned and gave them a comical eye-shrug. Then Quert bowed and gestured to them all. “Silent go.”

  The long aaahhhhmmmm loohgeree o
ojahhaaa habbbiiitaaa pealed on. It was great and strange and still impossible to fathom.

  They left quietly. They were tired, but the long notes drove them forward. Somehow the place now smelled ancient and timeworn without question. The very scented air told them this without instruction.

  Cliff and Irma and Aybe and Terry—they were all that was left now, and they had to move. The constant sun slanted pale yellow through high sheets as they trundled on with the Sil forming a crescent escort around them. He saw rainbow clouds hovering in the vapor over their laboring heads. Their crescents spoke bold colors shimmering through the sky’s firm radiance.

  His team was shambling on now, sweaty and confused, truly tired in the way he had learned to recognize. Heads sagged, feet dragged, words slurred. The alien song droning on from far behind them would never end, he saw, down through however many corridors of ruin and turbulence that song needed. They were beautiful stretched songs telling of sad histories that no one would ever quite know. There would be scholars of it somehow in the long run, but they would carve off only a sheet of it and not know it entire. Cliff looked back once as they neared a stand of zigzag trees, a whole sweeping forest waving in the moment’s breeze, and saw that the round eye was still watching them.

  It never blinked. They went on.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Captain Redwing started crisp and sharp, fresh from coffee, with the same questions he always used when taking staff through the planning stages of a new, untried operation. Standard questions, but always able to surprise.