Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  They had walked through Karl’s simulations and Ayaan Ali’s trajectory analysis. The Specialty Artilects had put their own stamp upon the general plan, though as always they did not make judgments beyond a probability analysis. Their deep problem, Redwing thought, was that they were so much like human reason with far better data—and yet so forever uncertain.

  The worst way of reviewing options was to let people make speeches. Questions shook them up, made them come forth.

  He looked at the entire assembled crew around the main deck table. “First question: What could we be missing?”

  Karl Lebanon answered. “Their defenses.”

  Fred Ojama said, “Ayaan Ali and I did a depth scan for those. Nothing obvious, like the gamma ray laser.”

  Beth Marble set her mouth at a skeptical slant. “They could launch craft against you from anywhere.”

  Petty Officer Jam scowled. “I’ve seen curiously few flights above their atmosphere envelope. They don’t seem to launch into space often.”

  Clare Conway said, “Speaking as copilot, the obvious way to launch is to just pop a craft out on the hull side. It’s moving at hundreds of klicks a second right away, so you zoom around the rim. Come at us from that angle.”

  Ayaan Ali nodded. She was wearing a metallic blue scarf over her hair and resisting the urge to toy with it, Redwing noticed. This crew was good at suppressing tension and not allowing it to change the group mood. That had been a high selection criterion. She spoke slowly. “We would have time to deal with that. I am able to turn the ship quickly now. We’ve learned how to use the magnetic torque technique to gain angular momentum from the fields above their atmosphere. And we may be difficult to spot, since we will be in the jet.”

  Karl nodded. Redwing saw they had now mentally stacked up the unknowns, which was a good moment to hit them with more. “Second big question: How will this not work?”

  Silence. Beth said quietly, “If they have something to prevent tipping the jet awry. Something we can’t guess at now.”

  “They’ve surprised us plenty before,” Ayaan Ali added.

  Karl added, “Right. They’ve had lots of time to think about this.”

  Clare said, “What maybe won’t work? Me. I may overestimate my ability to pilot through the jet. Beth, how bad was it?”

  “An endurance test, mostly. I was driving straight up the bore, staying near the middle. Had to stay on the helm every second of the way. The big problem was keeping SunSeeker stable in the plasma turbulence. The jet is far denser than anything this ship and its magscoop were designed for. I had to max everything we had.”

  Redwing wanted to add, And we nearly overheated, too, but he said instead, “Sounds hard. But we’re thinking of a fast flight through, yes?”

  “I think so,” Beth said, looking at Redwing, who nodded. “Put it this way—staying alive on the Bowl was hard, too, but lots more fun.”

  Their faces had grown more somber already. Most of them hadn’t been revived when SunSeeker flew up the jet and through the Knothole, but they had heard about the long hours of a creaking, groaning ship, and the dizzy swirls when they yawed and nearly tumbled. Their eyes turned introspective. He decided to loosen them up.

  “Y’know, way back when I was in nav school, I asked an instructor, ‘Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?’ At first the woman didn’t want to answer. But I nagged her and finally she said, ‘It saves them time.’”

  When their laughter died down—he could read their tensions by that measure, too—he said, “Point is, I’m a bug about details. Made me pretty damn obnoxious in nav school and ever since.” He gave them a smile. “I learned that in nav and tactics and all the rest. Space doesn’t forgive anybody. So we have to simulate all the troubles we can see coming.”

  Karl said, “And then?”

  “I’ll throw some unknowns you hadn’t thought of into the simulation, the training pod, all the rest. I want you to expect the unexpected.”

  They nodded and for half an hour they tossed around possible unknowns. Then he said, “Question three: Will you please shoot as many holes as possible into my thinking on this?”

  This led to more scattershot thinking, more debate. The jet was the big problem, and there were many ways to look at it. Redwing waved his hand in a programmed way, and the bridge wall lit up with a photo of the Bowl made when they were on the approach from the side. This was when Redwing and the small watch crew, plus Cliff and Beth, were just trying to grasp the concept of the Bowl. That now seemed so long ago, but it was less than a year.

  Some of them must not have seen it before, because it brought gasps.

  “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is,” Beth said.

  Clare said wistfully, “Some of us have only seen it up close. We missed a lot.”

  Fred pointed. “Notice how it flares out from its star, then narrows down a lot. That’s the magnetic stresses working. Wish I knew how they do it.”

  Karl said, “I’ve fished around in the thousands of images SunSeeker’s Omni-survey Artilect made on our approach. That’s when we got far enough ahead, while we were making our long turn to rendezvous. By the way”—a nod to Beth—“that was brilliant navigation. Hitting a moving target on an interstellar scale.”

  “This was all-spectra?” Fred asked.

  “Exactly. Here is a view of the other side of their star. Away from the jet. It’s in spectral lines specified to bring out the magnetic structures visible in their solar corona.”

  Ayaan Ali said, “Star acne,” one of her rare jokes. She even blushed when everyone laughed.

  Beth said hesitantly, “Those are all … magnetic storms?”

  “Not storms, though on our sun, they would eventually blow open and make storms. Those loop structures are anchored in the star’s plasma. Think of the magnetic fields as rubber bands. The plasma holds them down, and when they get free they stretch away from their feet. They’re stable, at least for a while. Lots of magnetic field energy in those things. They move, just like the ones on our sun. But in the long run they move toward the edge we see and migrate. Over to the other side.”

  Before Karl could go on, Fred said, “To the jet.”

  Karl chuckled. “I should know somebody’d steal my thunder. Fred’s good at that.”

  “So the other side of their star, which we can’t see—”

  “Is a magnetic farm, sort of?” Clare said skeptically.

  Karl chuckled again. “You guys are too fast. Yep, Clare, that’s where the star builds big magnetic loops and swirls. Then they drift over to our side of the star. They gang up around the foot of the jet. Then they merge—don’t ask me how. That feeds magnetic energy into the jet—builds it, I guess.” He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue about how this gets done.”

  All but Karl had blank, big-eyed stares. Redwing watched them digest the scale of the whole thing for a long moment. Star engineering, he thought. Somehow we missed that in school.…

  “There’s a real problem here,” Ayaan Ali said. “These Folk aliens you talked to, Captain—did they seem like beings who could command a star?”

  Redwing pursed his lips. He liked to let things speak for themselves, and so had not kept the recording of his talk with Tananareve away from the crew. The more heads working these problems, the better. They had intuitions about the Folk, too, and now was the right time to let them come out. So he just nodded to Beth with raised eyebrows.

  Beth said, “You’ve all seen my pictures of the one who interrogated us, Memor. Plus all the assistants—so much smaller, they seem like another species entirely. Probably they are, but they work together in what looked to us like a steep hierarchy. Impressive, that Memor—especially in bulk. But a creature that could manage a star?” She arched a skeptical eyebrow and let her mouth turn down in a comic show of doubt.

  This brought smiles all round the table. “My point exactly,” Ayaan Ali said. “How would anything our size—hell, any size—made out of ordinary matter, contro
l solar magnetic loops?”

  “Good point,” Fred said. “There’s something else going on.”

  “But what?” Redwing said.

  No answers. They were all thinking, and he saw it was time to get back to work. He flicked another image on the view wall. “Here’s a later view as we came around in advance of their star.”

  This brought more quiet ooohs and aahhhs.

  “Here’s where we see the point about those magnetic loops,” Karl said. Fred was already nodding. “See how the jet seems to curl around? Those are—”

  “Magnetic helices,” Fred cut in. “The corkscrew threads are brighter, because the field strength is stronger there, and so is the plasma density. Classic stuff. Way back a century or two ago, we saw all that in the big jets that come out of disks around black holes. Astronomers know plenty about these.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  Redwing could tell Karl was getting irked with Fred’s butting in. But Karl was holding himself back with admirable restraint. And Fred’s point was well taken. Redwing said mildly, “So to get the idea for this, whoever built it had only to look into the night sky. At other galaxies, same as we did back in the—what, twenty-first century?”

  Kurt nodded. “As Fred said, yes. My point is, the jet gets all that magnetic field strength from the loop structures. So those magnetic fields migrate around to the jet base and get sucked up into it somehow.”

  Fred said, “Ah! Then those fields do the crucial job of confining the jet, straightening it out into the lance that spears through the Knothole.”

  “Right. Because the star spins, its magnetic field gets twisted and wrinkled, kind of like a ballerina’s skirt. That gets swept into the base of the jet, hangs up in it. The intense pressures at the base throw the jet out. It swells at first. Then the magnetic fields sort themselves out. Because field lines have to eat their tail—they can’t break—they weave themselves. We’ve known a long while that you can twist a magnetic field so it crosses itself—but then it just springs back as two loops, almost like reproduction. So the field self-organizes in the flow and takes the jet through the Knothole.” Karl finished with a flourish, getting the picture of the Bowl to make the threads in the jet fluoresce like neon signs.

  Beth caught on to this. “I get it—hell, I experienced it. Waves of hard turbulence, coming at us at speeds SunSeeker was never designed for.”

  Karl smiled, happy to see his theory confirmed by raw experience. “You came in on the jet at first in the exhaust, right? Backwash. That’s where the folds of the skirt bunch up—”

  Karl went on with some more technical stuff, but Redwing didn’t listen. He watched them all to see how they took it in. Teams had to feel they had some understanding of what they were about to get into. If you were lucky, you even got a dividend, a fresh idea or two.

  “It’s self-organizing,” Ayaan Ali said, gazing at the intricate luminous lines that laced through the jet. “That’s why it all works.”

  Plainly this surprised everyone. Ayaan Ali’s crew slot was navigator/pilot, not astrophysics.

  She paid no attention to their puzzled expressions and went on, “Our fusion drive is the same. It confines plasma long enough to fuse it for energy, heats the incoming plasma that way. Then we blow it out the back. It’s a hot plasma shaped by magnetic fields all along the way. That jet that makes the Bowl work—it’s just like our exhaust jet.”

  A few jaws dropped. Redwing had always enjoyed moments like this. Get a smart crew together and let them Ping-Pong ideas back and forth. Add new information. Stir. Turn up the heat a notch. Simmer. Amazing, how often good fresh notions came out.

  A rustle of astonishment. “Good point,” Karl said. “The same basic idea in our ship and … theirs.”

  “Their shipstar,” Redwing said.

  The melody of the conversation had shifted. The immensity of what they faced simmered below everything they said, and their faces showed this. Tight mouths, chins stiff, eyes dancing or else narrowed. Time to get them back into focus.

  “Even if it’s technically sound,” Redwing said, leaning forward with hands clamped together on the table. “There’s the big question—is this maneuver understandable enough for the ship Artilects to operate, to troubleshoot, and to extend what they’ve learned?”

  Beth said, “Our flight in, up the jet—the Nav Artilect group certainly learned from that.”

  Ayaan Ali’s face became veiled, remembering. “You’re right. When I came on duty, I was amazed at how much they could do. Remember when we had trouble with the scoop getting enough mass to fuse it in our core chamber? They adjusted the field structure before I could even grasp what was wrong. They’d never done that in our field trials out in the Oort cloud.”

  The talk got technical. They all ran with it. The deep silent secret of SunSeeker was the collaboration between mere mortal humans and the crystal Artilects who knew much that the vagrant human mind could not hold in ready use. The Artilects managed innumerable details at a speed and accuracy far beyond the blunt comprehension of their fragile cargo. They were integrated artificial minds, merged into a collective intellect. A society of minds, furiously engaged. Redwing always thought of them as crew who rarely talked back. They kept track of innumerable daily problems and never complained. The Insys Artilect, especially; he spoke with it several times every watch. On the other hand, they never had really original ideas.

  Clare said sternly, “Their attention reservoirs can take only so much—”

  “Let’s leave that to experience,” Redwing cut in. “Officer Conway,” with a nod to Clare, “consult the Artilects themselves. Give them your simulations; ask them to appraise their own capabilities. Regard them as crew members who couldn’t make it to this meeting, if you will.” And since the interior systems no doubt can hear us in their acoustic monitors, they actually are here. Not that the Insys Artilect would ever bring it up; strategy was not its province. But he suppressed that thought, for now.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and sipped her coffee. Always the caffeinated, he recalled—she used it to drive herself harder. Several others around the table did the same, an amusing social echo.

  “Then we are resolved on this course?” Redwing said with a light and conversational air.

  Only Beth failed to get the message. Probably, he thought, because she had been down on the Bowl so long and had forgotten shipboard’s unspoken signals. She said, “I don’t know if we’ve resolved anything, Cap’n.”

  “We’re going to give the Folk a nudge,” Redwing said. “Their reply was quite clear—they killed our coin array. They don’t want us knowing the local conditions well, to navigate by. If we were Earthside, that would be an act of war.”

  Beth wouldn’t stand down. “A ‘nudge’? Despite all these problems? Unknowns? Risks?”

  He leaned forward, extending his clasped hands. “There are always problems. My orders are to get us to Glory and see if we can colonize it. Extracting us from this strange … place … this shipstar … I see as my duty. To do so, I must impress on these aliens that we will not join the—what was their term? The one Beth reported?”

  Redwing looked down the table at Beth, whose open O of a mouth told him she had not expected this. Maybe the ground truth of the Bowl had told her something he did not know? “Beth?”

  “The … the Adopted.”

  “Right. We’re not a damn bunch of orphans from Earth. We’re not going to get Adopted.”

  Beth said, “In their eyes…,” and stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve been gone from Earth so long, all our relatives dead, who knows what has happened…” She looked forlorn for a moment, grasping for words, head down. “We might as well be orphans.”

  He had not expected this. What had the Bowl done to her? “We’re officers of a ship, Science Officer Beth Marble. Humanity’s farthest excursion. We have a goal and we shall reach it. This Bowl interlude, however amazing, will be useful, but we shall go on. Is that u
nderstood?”

  Long silence. Karl started to say something, his lips half-forming a word, but thought better of it. Fred was quite obviously biting his tongue, eyes studying the table as if it were a brilliant new discovery. Their faces closed up into pale masks with eyes looking everywhere but not at Beth or at him. Very well. “This was an exploratory discussion, folks. I appreciate a free airing of views, as always.”

  Fred said, “Outcome pretty obvious. When we came in.”

  Redwing let nothing show in his face. “I’m sorry, Officer Ojama? Your special area is geology, as I recall. And ship systems. You said…?”

  “It was pretty obvious you had decided to fly into the jet. You wanted to get us used to it.” Only after saying this did Fred’s eyes jerk away from the table’s smooth obsidian finish and dart a look at Redwing.

  Redwing did not let his feelings show, much less his surprise at Fred’s suddenly becoming a talker on something other than tech details. Always remember that these people are damned smart. And odd. Not predictable. “Quite so. It’s useful to hear how hard this is going to be. Also to know the purpose.”

  “Which is?” Beth was still softly defiant. Her eyes glowed.

  “Getting to Glory. Those are our mission orders. We’re carrying humanity to the stars. Beginning a process that ensures our species immortality.” They had all heard these terms, but maybe they needed to be reminded.

  “We haven’t discussed other options,” Fred said, his eyes still holding firm on Redwing.

  “I haven’t heard any proposed,” Redwing said, deliberately settling his cheek on his right palm, as if settling in to listen.

  “We could—should—continue our conversation with the Folk. Edge them toward our point of view.” Beth said this stiffly, eyes on Redwing. “They have Tananareve and Cliff’s team, yes. But we have so many sleeping souls with us—”

  “We have given them days already,” Clare Conway said. “And they attacked our coins. In a few more days, what else might they do?”