Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “I’ve calculated how to tip in near the top—that’s our sign convention, right? Top is as high as we dare get, just below the deflection ability of the gamma ray lasers. We turn and plunge down, toward the Knothole. We sway back and forth across the jet while we drive down. Thrust hard in a helix winding path.”

  He had painted a red line in her simulation, standing for SunSeeker’s calculated path. Its helix widened as it got nearer the Knothole and the magnetic field lines—blue swirls embedded in the yellow and orange showing plasma—bulged outward in response. “See? We make the jet sway a little. A kink in the flow.”

  Redwing thought he followed this, but decided to play dumb. “Which are?”

  “I’m sure you went through the basic plasma-instabilities material, Cap’n. It was in your briefing run-up.”

  The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. He let it simmer a bit. “Karl, you will always answer a direct technical question and skip your idea of what I know. Assume I know nothing.”

  “Sorry, um, Cap’n. Of course. Certainly. I meant that…” His voice trailed off, uncertain of anything.

  Redwing bailed him out. “Like a fire hose?”

  “Right! Fast water going through a fire hose, if it swerves a little, the centrifugal force of it forces the hose even more to the side. It corkscrews, makes a kink.”

  “So it will lash the side of the Knothole? You’re sure?”

  Karl paused, nodded. “More of a brush, I’d say.”

  Redwing nodded. Ayaan Ali said, “I have some good news. We got a short signal from Cliff’s team—from Aybe.”

  Redwing brightened. “Where are they? What—?”

  “Here. They passed under the edge of the mirror zone and got out onto the hull. Found ice there. Then they had to take off. They got led to a place where there were something like, well, talking stones.”

  Redwing leaned forward. “And those said…?”

  A shrug. “We got cut off. See down there? They were in lands between that zone of hexagonal mirrors. The icelands, with some life in them, those are on the outer hull under the mirrors, which keep it cold. Then Cliff’s team and those Sil got to the drylands between the mirrors and this huge ocean.”

  Redwing stared at the view. Even when Ayaan Ali brought up a max resolution image, there was nothing to show more than occasional towns and roads. Again it struck him how much of this place was endless forests and seas and ranges of tan hills. Very few large cities and plenty of room for wildlife. Why? Hard to evaluate a thing as big as this Bowl. Earth alone had plenty of habitats that a few thousand years back were places where the crown of creation would be a tasty breakfast.

  Karl asked, “Those are—what, hurricanes on that ocean?”

  “Seems so.” Ayaan Ali pointed to a few. “The big winds have lots more room to play out, too. Huge storms. Cyclones the size of planets.”

  Redwing stood to end the meeting. “We’ll hit the jet in a few days, right? Keep doing your simulations and drills. Get some rest, too,” with a nod to Ayaan Ali.

  Now that the die was cast, he needed some alone time. SunSeeker’s steady rumble always told you that you were in a big metal tube, only meters away from other people. And meters away from both a furious fusion burn and, not far from that, high vacuum. First he quietly made his way through the biozones, sniffing and savoring air that came fresh from the oxy-making plants, and avoiding the finger snakes in their happy labors. They were fun, but he was not in a fun mood.

  Gecko slippers let him walk the far reaches of the ship, out of the centri-grav torus. They were like weak glue on your soles, following the sticky patches on the walls. The zero-grav plants were matted tangles of beans and peas, with carrots that grew like twisted orange baseballs and green bananas that made weird toroids. A finger snake tunnel ran underneath. The snakes weren’t showing.

  He went on into the hibernation modules, where what he thought of as the biostasis crew lay. Just sleeping, sort of, though hard to wake up. His footsteps rang as he walked the aluminum web corridor beside the solemn gray capsules. He didn’t want to call out of cold sleep enough people to crew a big landing expedition, not for the Bowl anyway. In the defrosting and training they would all have to triple up on a hot hammock, and shower once a week. As it was now, even the small present crew—nine plus Redwing plus three finger snakes—got two showers a week and didn’t like it.

  Now that they were headed for a battle, of sorts, he realized how far from its expected role this expedition had come. This was not a craft built for war and neither were the crew. They had been carefully tuned for exploration and centuries of confinement. They were living in a constantly running machine where opening a hatch without proper precautions could kill you dead in seconds flat.

  With that happy thought, he turned back. You’re worrying, not thinking. He could use some time with the finger snakes.

  * * *

  Rich garden smells slapped him in the face. He looked around him, seeing miniature sheep and full-sized pigs and chickens, clucking and grunting—and no finger snakes. Their tunnel was big enough, he could peer into it … but he went to the screens. If they weren’t in the tunnel, he’d still find them easily enough.

  Now, what had the finger snakes left on-screen? They’d been watching the Bowl slide past, even as he had. No, they hadn’t: this view was following a cityscape as it rolled below SunSeeker. If Redwing understood rightly, that was a Sil city, newly rebuilt after an attack from the Folk. It looked quite strange. Streets and peaks like hieroglyphs, or wispy Arab writing.

  He jumped when a flat head poked his elbow. “This they did hide,” said—Shtirk? Marked near the tail with a bent black hourglass. “Hide no more. A great shame.”

  “Wait. Is this writing? So big?”

  Its voice had a sliding, flat tone, faint. “Can see such writing from everywhere on the Bowl. This says the Bird Folk stamped their own world flat. A mistake in steering ended their bloodline. This was in a message … a message from the stars. Captain, yes please, how does a star send a message?”

  Redwing dithered for a moment about how much to reveal; but he wanted to know what Shtirk knew. “You know what a star is? It’s like your sun, that sun, but much farther away. Stars have worlds, not Bowls but spinning balls. We have a message from one of those, from Glory. We haven’t been able to read it all, and it’s still coming in.”

  “The Sil read,” Shtirk said. “Your bandits learn find the message from you, the Sil from them, then the Sil read. Now they tell us. Thisther goes to tell you all in command deck. Is it true? Bird Folk did smash their own world?”

  Redwing laughed. “And they think they’re the Lords of Creation! Yeah, I believe it. I’ll put it to the others, and we’ll look through the message from Glory. But I believe it.”

  * * *

  Fred Ojama and a giant snake were hard at work at the control screens when Redwing found them. Thisther’s head and the fingernails on its tiny quick tail were close up against the controls, typing. Fred was saying, “Yup, yup, yup…”

  “Fred?”

  “Sir.” Fred didn’t turn. “If you’ll look past me … see the starscape? And the blue dot? The dot is the Bowl. The stars move, too. I’ve run this twice already. The Bowl left Sol system in Jurassic times, then tootled around to several other stars—not moving as fast as it does now. Then they came back between the Cretaceous and Tertiary. If the times hold, then the mass of the Bowl ruined some comet orbits that second time, and that was it.”

  “It?”

  “The timeline checks. They caused the Dinosaur Killer impact.”

  Thisther said, “Great shame. They hid this for lifetimes of worlds.”

  “My God,” Redwing said.

  Thisther said in his quiet way, “But no more. All will know. They killed their own genetic line. Sil will tell all.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Tananareve realized she should agree with the big, ponderous beast th
at was Memor. She had come to think of the alien as a kind of smart elephant, with a sense of humor equally heavy. “Yes, that was a clever saying,” Tananareve made herself say.

  “I am happy you have discovered the nuances of our nature,” Memor said. Apparently sarcasm is unknown here, never mind irony, Tananareve thought. She knew Memor thought what she’d said was amusing, from the way her body shook, but it went right by human ears.

  “The wonder of all this is what impresses me most,” Tananareve said to move on to better things. Memor and Bemor were huge and strange, but they liked her to play the awed-primate role. The hard case was Asenath, who mostly ignored Tananareve except for the occasional glower. Plus deliberately aimed stale exhaled breaths and well-timed, acid farts.

  They stood among a crowd of hundreds of squat, humanoid creatures who formed neat, obedient circles around the Folk party. She watched these, the first human-shaped aliens she had seen, trying to understand the blank expressions on their hairy faces, to figure out what was going on. Beyond the crowd was a tall pinnacle with a single round thing in it that she had just now realized was an eye or camera, watching all this.

  Asenath was holding forth to the rapt assembly in a booming voice that had made Tananareve flinch when she first heard it. Study of the Folk conversations had given her some hints of meaning, but the long phrases Asenath used seemed more like chanting. Tananareve asked Memor, “Is this some kind of ritual?”

  “Quite observant of you. She is reassuring the Kahalla that the Sil and humans who escaped their capture will be taken in hand soon. No damage shall follow from this Kahalla failure.”

  “What’s that about their … children?”

  “Nothing important. The Kahalla are losing many eggs to the appetites of scavengers. They seek us to somehow ward off their predators.”

  “Will you?”

  “We do not intervene in natural matters. Nature runs itself well.”

  “You told me earlier that you Folk ran Nature.”

  Memor gave a fan-flutter of amber and blue, which seemed to mean pleasant amusement. “And so we do. At a remove, of course. Long ago the Folk set up this dynamic equilibrium, a predator–prey oscillation that will not go too far.”

  “So these … Kahalla?… won’t get wiped out?”

  “No, they are sufficiently intelligent and wary to deal with their predators—a nasty little vermin species. Both predator and prey have a low mental level and can adapt to changes in the other species, as they occur over long times. Evolution is thus contained. Populations do not sprawl out, consuming natural lands. There are several such interlacing balances in this zone.”

  Tananareve pondered this as Asenath’s long bellow went on.

  Then a new droning cry came—shree, kinnne, warrickk, awiiiha …

  Memor said, “Ah, they have awakened the memory box.”

  Asenath paused, then went on, trying to boom over these new deep tones with their extended cadences. Tananareve saw that the laboring sounds came from the tower with the eye. “What is it?”

  “A form of consciousness prison. From a hotworld it came and we are its stewards. Or rather these Kahalla are its attendants.”

  “A … rock mind?”

  “We have several strewn about the Bowl. They are slow but sure and alert us to long-term trends that otherwise might elude our quick eyes. You are, for example, a somewhat old-fashioned individual intelligence, organic. This is an inorganic one, and the Kahalla are a sort of hybrid mind who attend the stone lattice mind. They are nothing like the vast collective intelligences—but never mind, we have had enough of this slow-thought place. And our escape approaches.”

  awrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrraff kinnne yuuf …

  Tananareve had not noticed the huge wall of scaly flesh settling down from the sky, beyond the talking tower. Across its rough brown skin silvery fins fanned as the bulk waltzed lazily into place. It spread slender tentacles grasping for ground. They played across the land. Kahalla ran to secure these to boulders, looking in perspective like ants bringing down a sea fish. The tentacles wrapped around catch points and pulled the great thing snug to ground.

  Asenath finished and the Kahalla bowed deeply, on their knees with a low, sonorous moan that grew in volume until it washed over Tananareve. Asenath returned the bow, gave a vibrant trill salute and a four-color fan-flurry of farewell. Memor scooped up Tananareve and made short work of the journey to the immense thing—a bag inflated to fly, she guessed. But alive.

  By now she knew that Memor enjoyed the open land, and spoke, too, of “the serene voyaging our living craft affords.” They entered by a flap that opened like a mouth. A huge tongue unfurled and Memor walked up it, carrying the primate on her shoulder. It felt to Tananareve unpleasantly like being eaten. Memor said in her booming Anglish, “The mucus of this great beast had been engineered to carry a delicate fragrance unlike anything else. Its scent is a luxury and settles the mind, a necessary aid in air travel. Chaos may come to rage all about us, but we shall be mild.”

  Tananareve sucked in a lingering taste. Like flowers, though with an oily undertaste. Bemor, too, sighed, though he said, “We must make haste,” and bellowed an order to small scampering things that had come to greet them.

  They were in a wet cavern. This “skyfish” as Memor called it was like a cave of moist membranes lit by phosphorescent swirls embedded behind translucent tissues. They reminded Tananareve of illuminated art back Earthside.

  A deep bass note rang, ending in a whoosh that made it seem like an immense sigh. Grav momentarily rose, and Tananareve knew they had lifted off. Ruddy wall membranes fluttered. Warm air eased by them as they entered a large bowl-shaped area. Sunshine lanced through membranes so clear, Tananareve thought at first they were open to the air. But the sweet breeze swept first one way, then reversed, and she realized that it was the breathing of this great beast. The tower that had seemed so tall outside now dwindled away and the skyfish turned, so the sweep of a plain came into view. Clouds stacked like fat blue plates loomed on the shimmering distance. She could see the long arc of Bowl curving up into a pale sky; she was looking across a distance the size of planetary orbits. The eggshell blue of seas dominated the somewhat washed-out greens and browns of landmasses, and made pale the sheet grays of mirror zones. Across that flapped big-winged angular birds with long snouts and crests atop their bony heads.

  Memor met the captain of this gasbag being. The whole idea of a captain was odd until Tananareve realized they were like people riding a larger animal, as she had ridden horses. Memor spoke quickly, with booming comments from Bemor, all too fast for her to fathom.

  The captain listened for a while, big eyes watery and anxious. This creature was somewhat like some of the Folk—a big thing, four-legged and solemn and slow, mouth wide and salmon-pink and lipless. Bursts of words rattled from the mouth. Its narrow nostrils were veined pink, with fleshy flaps beneath. Large round black eyes watched them, yellow irises flashing in the slanting sunlight. From the top of the captain’s head sprouted a vibrant blue crest, serrated and trimmed with yellow fat, reminding Tananareve of a cock’s comb.

  The captain took them on a walk through the ramparts, view balconies, and residential segments of the great living volume. A narrow hissing hydrogen arc heated its eating levels and lit the translucent furniture in blue light, where workers of four and six and even eight legs labored to bring forth live dishes for Folk delight. Pressed, Tananareve cracked a carapace and slurped out the warm white flesh of some sea creature. The next dish was a kicking big insect basted in creamy sauce. Memor said something about how keeping it alive through the cooking added savor to the proteins, but Tananareve decided that it was best to know less about Folk gustatory tastes. She tried to break the thick legs with her hands and snap off the tasty eyestalks. Crunchy but with a peppery flavor that stung her lips and sent a scent like stale meat into her sinuses. A green pudding turned out to be a slime mold that thrust probes out into her mouth as she tried to che
w it. The flavor wasn’t nearly worth it.

  Still, it was useful food. Folk ate meats and veggies she found mostly dull or repulsive, with little in between. She sat in the steady warm breeze of the skyfish’s sweet internal breath—were they essentially sitting in its trachea?—and listened as Memor rattled on to other Folk sitting nearby about matters political and somehow always urgent. Or so her limited translation abilities told her. Finally Memor turned and said to her—whom she described to the other Folk as “the small Invader primate”—“You must surely admire our craft. We took the early forms of this creature from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant world, long ago. Their ancestors found our deep atmosphere a similar paradise, to cruise on soft moist winds, and mate in their battering fashion, and wallow in our air, to turn falling water into their life fluid, hydrogen.”

  “I doubt the primate can follow your description,” Asenath said, coming into view.

  Tananareve warily backed away from the lumbering thing. She could smell the malice oozing from Asenath. “Still, she could be of some use in capturing the renegades of her kind, whom we shall soon intersect.”

  Asenath ushered them all over to the broad window in the skyfish’s side. Elaborate orange-colored fins flexed near the back of the beast. They flared out, capturing winds like a sail, driving the bag forward. Tananareve felt a lurch and a dull thump. She had the sense of rumbling movement under her feet and in the living walls. Memor explained that the bag was “trimming” in flight by shifting weight inside itself. Asenath said, “Our admirable skyfish can torque about its center of mass, and thus navigate.” Tananareve watched the flexible yet controlled fan-fins spread out, at least a hundred meters long. Its gravid majesty seemed somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking above the lush forest below.

  Asenath said, “We are precisely on course to intersect the renegades. They are sailing on this same gathering wind.”