Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “They’re flying upstream, which costs them in momentum,” Karl said. “For us, it’s gain. We get more charged mass down the magscoop gullet. So—”

  “What do we do when we get to gunplay?” Redwing asked. “We got no guns aboard, Dr. Lebanon.”

  Beth said, “You’ve got the big gun, Cap’n—the torch.”

  Redwing nodded somberly. “You think it can make that much difference?”

  Karl said, “Whatever’s flying the flitters, Artilects or aliens, it has to be vulnerable to the jet. They have magnetic screens for sure. They must’ve been engineered to take care of problems in the jet.”

  Beth turned her back on Karl, irritated that he had jumped in when Redwing clearly addressed his question to her. “So—if we push them harder, give ’em some twist, maybe we can keep them at a distance, dodge them. Not like there’s not room to play out here in the jet.”

  Redwing scowled, his face more lined than she had ever seen. “It’s ten light-seconds across. Room to dodge, but—can we keep them far enough away?”

  “Depends on what their weaponry is.” Karl wore a dispassionate expression, staring into space. “Nuclear, sure, we can see hardware coming and hit it with our scoop-policing lasers. But if they have gamma ray lasers, like those big domes on the Bowl rim, we’re done.”

  Beth sat back and watched the flitters edge up from behind. She bit her lip, adjusted for a vortex plasma knot, felt it surge them to starboard, and said, even and controlled, “Cap’n, we don’t have much choice.”

  Redwing was silent, pacing, frowning. More silence. And suddenly Beth found herself on her feet, speaking in a flat, hard voice. “You ordered us into the jet, you wanted to press the Folk, Clare got killed right here, and you now have no idea what to do?”

  Redwing spun on his heel. “I have over a thousand souls aboard who signed on to go to Glory. I took an oath to deliver them. I didn’t agree to turn them over to aliens riding along in a big contraption.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Point is, your job is to not think beyond your rank!”

  “We all just saw Clare killed by something we don’t understand, that’s got us all terrified, and you—”

  “Quiet!” Jam said, rising to her height on the deck, her dark face severe. “The captain commands. We do not question, especially under combat conditions.”

  Beth stared at Jam, whom she recalled was a mere petty officer. But … she had to admit, Jam was right. “I…” Beth’s throat filled, choking off her words. “Clare…”

  “Enough,” Redwing said, addressing all the bridge crew. “We’re all jumpy. Forget this happened. We are committed and we shall engage.” He turned to Beth. “But you’re lead pilot. You are carrying this ship into a battle we cannot master without you. Do it.”

  So she did.

  FORTY

  We have need of your skills with your own kind, the cool voice said inside her mind. Tananareve felt around her, but no one had entered the narrow, warm envelope that had closed in on her as soon as the Folk sealed up this device. It smelled of dense, fleshy tissues, and indeed, the walls were softly springy, like the skyfish.

  “I am certainly willing,” Tananareve said, and waited. She could see nothing and heard no sounds. Yet the voice in her head seemed to be spoken.

  We desire you to be quiet of soul.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  We can see you churn with emotion. This is to be expected. But calm will come with concentration.

  “Uh, who are you?”

  The Folk term us Ice Minds. They see us, as shall you, as those of slow thoughts, as our barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times. We have of late examined your species and believe you can be of use to avert the gathering catastrophe that awaits in short time.

  “You know us? From Cliff’s team, I suppose?”

  Those who stand now outside this reading realm.

  “Reading? You’re inside my mind somehow.”

  From the Folk termed Memor, we inherited her inspections of your mind. From those primates outside, we learned, again with Memor’s excursions in your selfhood, to convey meaning in your Anglish. Now the Folk at our command immerse you in this fashion, so we can use you.

  She didn’t like the sound of this. “To do what?”

  To prevent damage to us all. Unite so that the destination we all share can be made coherent with the purposes of the Bowl. To let life call out to life in depths and ranges greater still.

  Tananareve had never liked sermons, and this sounded like one. Or maybe sanctimony varied with species. “Why are you Ice Minds? I mean, what do you look like?”

  There flashed before her images that somehow blended with knowing at the same instant—vision and insight coupled, so that in a few shifting seconds she felt herself understand in a way that simple explanations did not convey. It was less a sense of learning something than of understanding it, gaining an intuitive ground in the flicker of a moment, without apparent effort.

  A rumpled night terrain under steady dim stars. Dirty gray ice pocked with a few craters, black teeth of black rock, grainy tan sandbars … and fluids moving in gliding grace across this.

  “You’re the ivory stuff sliding on the rocks and ice?”

  And you are death to us. We remain a mystery to you myriad warmlife races. To you bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and searing light. We are of the Deep and knew, shortly after the stars formed, of the beauty stark and subtle, and old to you beyond measure. Our kind came before you, in dark geometries beneath the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices. Metabolism brims in the thin fog breath of flowing helium, sliding in intricate, coded motion, far from the ravages of any sun.

  “And you live here?” Still too much like a sermon, but it had an odd feeling of being true.

  The Bowl rushed at her, sharp and clear, the rotating great bright wok beneath the hard little red star, its orange jet—and then the point of view swept around, to the hull. It plunged along the metalware—humps and rhomboids and spindly stretching tubes of the outer skin—until it swept still closer and she saw endless fields of parabolic plants, all swaying with the Bowl’s rotation, focused up at the passing stars … while among them flowed that pearly fluid, lapping against odd hemispheres that might—she knew, without thinking about it—be dwellings, of a sort.

  “Never thought of that. Shielded from the star, it’s kind of like being on the far outside of our solar system, in what we call the cometary sphere.”

  We exploit the heat engine of leaked warmth from the Bowl’s sunswept side to our realm, so we bask in beautiful cold-dark while harvesting waste energy from below. Our minds organize as complex interactive eddies of superconductive liquids.

  The view skated across huge curved fields of icy hummocks and hills, with sliding strange rivers of ivory glowing beneath the dim stars. There came to her a creeping sensation of a vast crowd on this stretching plain, a landscape of minds that lived by flowing into each other, and somehow teasing out meaning, thought … more.

  “Why do you care about us? We—”

  Warmlife, you are. In our primordial form, we traded knowledge collected over vast eras, useful for chemicals, coldworld facilities, or astronomy. We were shrewd traders and negotiators, having lived through eons, and having dealt with the many faces intelligence can assume. Our cold realm has existed relatively unchanged since the galaxy was freshly forged in the fires of the strong nuclear force.

  Tananareve was startled by the linguistic sophistication of their speech, resounding in her head exactly like real sounds, in a flat accent—no, wait, they were speaking to her with her accent. Even more impressive. Not many could ape her honey-toned Mississippi vowels.

  “Against all that, why bother with me?” Maybe not a smart question, but she was wondering, and here were the minds that seemed to rule this place.

  To us little is new. Even less is interesting. We have watched great clouds
of dust and simple molecules as they were pruned away, collapsing into suns, and so left the interstellar reaches thinner, easier for our kind to negotiate, and for the ion churn of plasmas to form and self-organize. But these were slow shifts. We are as near to eternal as warmlife can imagine. But you are quite the opposite. You are swift and new.

  Into her mind came an image of their bulblike bodies and weaving tentacles, all gracefully flowing, a sliding ivory cryogenic liquid. Something like an upturned cat-o’-nine-tails whip appearance.

  We stand at an immense distance from such as you, yet at times arouse when the Bowl, our transport, is under threat. As it is now—from you.

  “Look, I don’t know what Redwing is doing—”

  Yet you are also vital to the Bowl’s survival when we arrive at the target star, one you term Glory. So you are both friend and foe.

  “Why me? I—”

  Memor integrated your neural levels to enough detail that we can access them. So we choose you to speak for us to your nominal leader, the Redwing, and to the Diaphanous.

  “I don’t know what’s going on!”

  Our long views are essential to the Bowl’s longevity. At this moment some 123,675 of us are engaged in this collective conversation with you. The number shifted even while the Ice Minds spoke.

  We are individually slow, but together we can think far quicker than you. We are eternal and you are like the flickerings of a candle flame—that which combusts dies, as must all warmlife. When we evolved, the most advanced warmlife creatures on hotlife worlds were single-celled pond scum.

  “Why are you on the Bowl at all, then?” She was getting irked with all this bragging. But trapped in a smelly box, probed by who-knows-what kinds of technologies, it seemed best not to be obnoxious. And she would hate to meet whatever these things needed help with. If these Ice Minds just wanted her to talk to Redwing, fine. But somehow she knew it couldn’t just be that.

  We bring a wisdom of long memory. We alone speak with and for the Diaphanous. We wish to explore and to meet the Superiors who seem to be at Glory.

  Then she felt a surge, as though the entire machine containing her was moving. It lurched a bit and she poked an elbow against a soft wall. Hoarse calls came from outside. What now?

  FORTY-ONE

  Cliff looked down at what the Folk called their mooring mountain. They said it held a shelter for this skyfish, but it was far beneath them, barely visible through stacked gray cumulus clouds.

  The ship crew had leaped into action after the big long boom pressed through the skyfish. They had all rushed to the big transparent wall, mouths gaping, not heeding the shouted orders of Bemor. The male Folk stamped his feet in an accelerating rhythm, big hard thuds. That snapped the crew out of their funk and they followed his barking orders.

  The humans and Sil did not know what was going on, so they moved to the wall, now deserted, to look out. Cliff saw far overhead an upside-down tornado. In profile, it looked like a funnel. Within it, huge clouds churned in an ever-tightening upward spiral, turning somber purple as moisture condensed within them. The lower levels of the air were clear, so Cliff knew he was seeing far up into the atmosphere. The conical cloud was fat and white at the bottom and tapered upward into a narrow purple-dark neck. Even at this great distance, Cliff could see flashes of blue and orange lightning between immense clouds. Across the sky, other high decks of stratocumulus were edging toward the inverted hurricane. He was looking at a puncture in the high envelope.

  “They’re trying to ground the skyfish in this storm,” Irma said.

  The skyfish dove deeper and shuddered with the racking winds. Irma and the others watched the high vortex churn as if it could change, but Cliff knew with a wry sinking feeling that it could only worsen. A huge deep atmosphere would take a long time to empty out into space, but the pressure drop would drive weather hard. He wondered if the Folk could patch a big rip in the high shimmering envelope from the way Bemor was lumbering around and barking at the crew, he doubted it. He looked down and saw they were headed for the nearest clear ground they could find within quick reach, the mooring mountain.

  Aybe pointed. “The crew—they’re taking that machine away, with Tananareve in it. Damn! We get her back, and then right away she’s goddamn gone.”

  “We’re all gone, really,” Terry said. “No chance of getting out of this living blimp that I can see.”

  Irma was talking to Quert and reported back. “That’s a kind of Folk redoubt we’re approaching. They can shelter there.”

  Quert came over. “Wind hard. Anchor skyfish, it hard.”

  As if to demonstrate, the skyfish lurched and they all fell to the deck. Cliff tucked in and rolled, coming up to look out the transparent wall just in time to see a brilliant yellow lightning strike descend from a high cloud. Unlike on Earth, this one snaked down, shooting side bolts as it kept going. The distance was so much, Cliff could see the entire brilliant streamer, the vibrant, bristling conducting path for electrons seeking the ground. Like a lazy snake, it slid sideways in a long twist. Then it hit the mountain below and snapped off, just vanished in an instant. The thunderclap shook the entire skyfish, and Terry, who had already gotten back up, came crashing down again.

  Something rumbled in the pink walls nearby. The skyfish went into a steep descent. “It fears,” Quert said.

  “Me, too,” Irma added. Everybody stayed down, hugging the deck that reeked with some slimy fluid. The skyfish tilted and turned violently. More lightning scratched across a lead sky.

  The skyfish hit like a fat balloon. It squashed and flexed, the walls of their big chamber collapsing down, then wheezing with the effort to rebound. The walls thumped with the slow, massive heartbeat of the skyfish. Cliff heard bones snap and the soft rip of tissues deep in the walls. Blood ran across the deck.

  “Let us go fast, my friends,” Quert said. They fled.

  As Cliff followed the Sil down fleshy corridors that reeked of fluids he did not want to think about, sloshing boot-deep through it, he recalled something his army uncle had said once. Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.

  FORTY-TWO

  With her fellows, Memor watched a high view of their Zone, sent from a craft dispatched to survey.

  Something had hit the great sea at the center of the Zone, not far from where their skyfish labored. An enormous tsunami rushed across the dappled gray surface. The sea was shallow, so the wave was already at great height and as they watched, it broke, white foam curling forward. This towering monster broke across the land. Forests and towns disappeared.

  The skyfish rolled to port and then back, with an alarming twist running down the great beast’s spine as well. Their compartment twisted as the skyfish fought to right itself. In this very low gravity zone, the air density fell off slowly and there was less acceleration to gain from venting hydrogen. The floor tilted as they accelerated downward at a steep angle. Memor staggered, then abruptly sat. The capsule where Tananareve was in immersion with someone—could it be Bemor was right, and she spoke now with the Ice Minds? Surely that was impossible. The mismatch of mind states was surely too much for that. Memor herself had encountered difficulties with the primate. The Ice Minds were scarcely reachable without considerable training, such as Bemor had endured.

  The deck heaved sickeningly, but Memor forced herself to her feet. Bemor was gone on a task he said came from the Ice Minds, and Asenath lay whimpering in a slung rack. It was one of the water-clasping type, so she now floated in a sleeve, only her head visible. Her eyes wandered, and Memor judged Asenath would be paying no attention to Memor. Good.

  Each step she took came freighted with fear. The deck rolled with flesh waves. The body around them groaned and sloshed. The hydrogen exhaust was roaring and she felt its dull tone through her legs. Memor had made herself put away the terrifying—and, she now realized, quite embarrassing—storm within her. Suppressed truths had overwhelmed her. She realized that her Undermind had sheltered much of the Bowl’s l
ong history from her and she had never suspected. The Undermind somehow knew she could not bear facts that clashed with her deepest beliefs in the role, status, and glory of the Folk.

  Then, in shocking moments that she never wanted to relive, all the tensions and layered lies of her entire lifetime came welling up. Spewing as from a volcano, it burst through her.

  Now she made herself put all that aside. She sealed layers over her Undermind. She confronted a problem demanding all her ability now. Put a foot forward. Brace against the rumbling, twisted flooring. Take another step. Each demanded labor and focus, and it seemed to take a long while to reach the external panel of the capsule.

  The harness fit her head, and the connections self-aligned. She sank into the inner discourse, but only as an observer. She could affect nothing inside.

  She felt Tananareve’s mind as a skittering, quick bright thing. Few images, but thoughts of the Ice Minds played through the strata of the primate mind. They seemed to fragment and go into separate channels, streams fracturing as they flowed.

  Memor struggled to make sense of the hot-eyed fervor of these flows. Revelation dawned along axes of the primate Undermind. New data flowed into Memor and she could flick back and forth between her own mental understory and the primate’s. These laced with the shadowy strangeness of linear minds. Hereditary neural equipment governed these divided minds—straight down the middle, a clear cleft. Such was common in the Bowl’s explored region of the galaxy.

  She saw Tananareve’s mind taking in the Ice Minds’ conversation and hammering that on the twin forges of reason and intuition, with great speed. So the Ice Minds wished to enlist her! Astounding, but perhaps it was only to speak to that Captain Redwing. Still, Bemor was the proper pathway for such diplomacy.

  The deck lurched. Memor barely kept her purchase. Shouts and cries echoed.

  The conversations and images seemed to condense in Memor’s mind like a vapor forming a shape. The precise words shifted and changed as the translations moved restlessly. Memor had to cling to nuance, not precision. Something about Redwing the Captain and the jet, yes, and how much humans could help in dealing with the Glorians. A need to intervene between Redwing and—