Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “Some aliens we didn’t see down there?” Beth asked, her vision bleary, bones aching now. “Some kind of—”

  Redwing shrugged, as though he should have known all along. “Ice Minds move slowly because they’re cold. They keep the memories and experience, Tananareve said. They work with something called the Diaphanous, who manage the jet and the star.”

  “Plasma stuff?” Karl said. “Those were what made those sounds, that created those discharge arcs, that—”

  “Killed Clare,” Beth said. “Trying to stop us from kinking the jet.”

  “The cold works with the hot, then,” Karl said. “The Folk are just local managers.”

  “They sure don’t think so. They imagine they’re the whole show,” Beth said. “Funny, really.”

  “So why did the Ice Minds, or whatever, let us live at all?” Fred said. He had been silent the whole time but now seemed happy, smiling, eyes dancing.

  “They need help with Glory,” Redwing said. “We can get there first, going full blast. We can reconnoiter. And talk to the Glorians, who think we humans are running the Bowl. They got our radio and TV, and since they were along the same line of sight, thought the Bowl was ours.”

  Beth frowned. “We have to?”

  “Part of the deal.” Redwing smiled. “Tananareve said it’s pretty much take it or leave it.”

  Karl laughed. “No question, I’d say. We take it.”

  “They do want us to straighten out that standing kink. It’s rubbing against the Knothole and it’s gonna stay that way. But if we fly through it the right way, maybe we can bust it loose.”

  Karl said dryly, “There are better ways to put that, more precise. But I think with the fluences we have, and Beth as pilot, we can.”

  Beth laughed, a bit dry. “Beth the perfect pilot thinks she needs sleep. Lots of it. Then more coffee.”

  Redwing smiled and finally sat down in his deck chair, more relaxed than she had seen him in a long while. He looked at the walls showing their situation and said, “If we run down the jet, fix the Knothole plasma stall, then out—well, we can loop around and come back into simple orbit.”

  Beth scowled. “Back into the cold sleep vaults?”

  “Some stay here,” Redwing said. “The Ice Minds want some new species to give the Bowl some stability. The Folk couldn’t handle us, so they’re out of the policing business. We get that.”

  Beth nodded, knowing her piloting days were very nearly over.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Tananareve was tired when the incessant images and thoughts finally started to taper away. The Ice Minds had much to convey in their cool, gliding manner, but it was all so big and strange, she could not really think what to say. Mostly she just digested. Which was exhausting in itself. But one thing did puzzle her, and she asked about it.

  “Why was your jet open to attack? I mean, it and the star and the Bowl—it’s an unstable system, has to be adjusted all the time or it falls apart. Anybody wants to do you harm, the jet is an open target, the heart of the system.”

  Some confusion and delay. Soft pictures floated into her mind. The jet’s filmy twisting strands working out from the star. Sometimes it snarled a bit, but the plasma clots called the Diaphanous adjusted that. They made the jet smooth out and glide tight and sure through the Knothole. All was well. Nominally.

  “What’s the idea of letting it be so vulnerable? I mean, we just came alongside you and slipped in, rode up the jet. We could’ve damaged it then, even by accident. But other kinds, other aliens, they might want to bring you down.”

  Some did.

  “What was your strategy then?” She was tired, but what she learned could be useful. Redwing would want to know every damn detail.

  Imagine a simple army’s task, under imminent attack. They must find the part of their landscape best suited to strengthen their position when fighting in open battle. The answer is to fight on the edge of a sharp cliff. This gives their soldiers just two choices—to fight or retreat, and in retreating to go over the cliff and die. Their enemy has different options—to fight or flee. That option to flee makes the enemy’s attack less likely to persevere. Placing yourself in peril makes you appear fearless. It gives your opponent cause to consider breaking off the battle.

  She found this strange. “So you put your backs to the wall and that’s a defense?”

  We prefer to dissuade. We regret that the Folk, or rather one of them, used our final defense. Our Lambda Gun is immensely powerful. Luckily it was ineptly used. We have stopped its use and will punish those who erred so grievously.

  Tananareve said nothing. She felt a rising, apprehensive note strike through her mind, and realized it was coming from the Ice Minds. They said, The Diaphanous now speak to those who caused this deep error. You should hear as well. A somber, rolling voice came then, not so much spoken as unfurled.

  Who is this that wrecks our province without knowledge?

  Do you know the sliding laws of blithe fluids?

  Were you here when the great curve of the Bowl shaped true?

  Can you raise your voice to the clouds of stars?

  Do fields unseen report to you?

  Can your bodies shape the fires of thrusting suns?

  Have you ever given orders to the passing stars or shown the dawn its place?

  Can you seize the Bowl by the edges to shake the wicked out of it?

  Have you journeyed to the springs of fusion or walked in the recesses of the brittle night?

  Have you entered the storehouses of the Ice Minds and found there tales of your long past?

  Can you father events in times beyond all seeing?

  Your answer to all these cannot justify your brute hands upon machines of black wonder.

  Nor shall you ever chance to be so able again, for you shall be no more.

  The space and time you sought to dissolve shall reckon without you hence.

  Tananareve knew somehow this came from the invisible ones who dwelled in the jet. She did not understand any of this. She just sighed and put such troubles away as she gratefully slipped into sleep.

  FORTY-NINE

  Memor watched the great floods sweep across lands that had held towns and forests and would now be swamps. Great constructions from far antiquity were undermined and slumped. Under great magnification, from this satellite view, she studied the rooftops of homes and city centers. There were no survivors awaiting rescue. A few boats bobbed here and there, but not many.

  “It is a tragedy, indeed,” Bemor said. He looked tired, surely from the work of keeping the Ice Minds in touch with the primates, funneled through the mind of the poor Tananareve. “But we are demanded at the leaving ceremony. Come.”

  “Who demands this? I do not wish to witness such.”

  “The Ice Minds command. Their attitude has changed substantially. I do not sense their goodwill toward us any longer.”

  Memor bristled and gave quick fan-signals of rebuke and mild anger. “The crisis faded away, yes? And we surely played a role.”

  “Of a kind.” Bemor gave a feathered signature of drab purple resignation, and wheezed a bit. “Come. And bring your primates. The Ice Minds wish them to see this.”

  “They have rested and eaten,” Memor said. “Perhaps they will profit from witnessing.”

  They entered the Citadel of the Dishonored to see Asenath’s end. She would be churned into the great matrix of dead plants and animals, so the dishonored could enhance topsoil. Memor and Bemor plodded into the high, arched atrium, where subtly hidden machinery murmured, managing the bacterial content, acidity, and trace elements of the slowly roiling mud-fluid below the Pit. First the Pit, then the Garden: the fate of all.

  “I disliked Asenath,” Memor whispered. “But she did have talent.”

  Bemor said, “Insults are best not remembered. She was sure of herself and had no thought of consequence.”

  Still, Memor needed to consult her Undermind to help her get through this. Calling the extincti
on of one she had worked with “a just recycling” did little good.

  The primates followed, and the Sil. Bemor remarked, “They show few signs of the early stages of Adoption. Perhaps we’d best be rid of them.”

  “I believe the Ice Minds will not allow any executions or harm to them,” Memor said. “Or the Sil, though we could build a case against them.”

  Bemor flashed vigorous objection. “The Ice Minds were behind the Sil actions. They wished the humans brought to them, without our knowing such intent.”

  “Ah, so the Sil are invulnerable, as are the primates. I dislike profoundly having our command of these creatures revoked for the sake of a passing problem—”

  “It is not passing. Asenath’s Lambda Gun pulse passed along the jet for a considerable distance. It intersected portions of several of the Diaphanous. One was killed, the others injured. These could self-repair, with help of others who could lend portions of their own anatomy. To damage the Diaphanous is to endanger the jet and thus the Bowl.” Bemor’s grave voice boomed. “An example must be made.”

  Memor saw Asenath being led to the Pit and recalled when she herself had faced the prospect of oblivion. Asenath had been disappointed at Memor’s being spared, and had allowed a pitch of reluctance into her later comments. Now Asenath faced the yawning black Pit at the center of the Vault. The sentence was read and Asenath gave no reply, or any mournful yips and drones. Her feathers were a muted gray and hung lifeless. Her fate spread before her in the green slime before the final descent. Deep long chords sounded.

  Various religious figures were there, clad in ancient Folk grandcloth. They urged Asenath to convert to their faiths, here in her last moments. Memor recalled that through its history the Bowl had passed by worlds where creatures shaped like ribbons or pancakes held sway. These the ancients had termed Philosophers, for they had little tool-using ability. Such fauna were deeply social and spun great theories of their world, verging into the theological. To Memor philosophy was like a blind being searching a dark room for an unknown, black beast. When philosophy verged into theology, it was like that same predicament, but the black beast did not even exist, yet the search went on. Asenath waved the religious Folk away, giving a fan-flutter of rejection.

  Asenath declined a final statement; then her feather-crown altered to deep gray. She raised her head and said, “We die containing a richness of lovers, and characters we have climbed into, as if trees. I have marked these on my body for my death. Then I go into the Great Soil.”

  Memor wondered at this. No one would see such inscriptions. Perhaps it was a declaration Asenath hoped would somehow make its way into Folk-lore?

  Head held high, with a resigned shrug, she simply stepped off the edge and slid down into the disposal hole. She had never looked at the crowd of witnesses.

  Memor could smell a fear among the primates; she had nearly forgotten them. She reassured them that this was to educate them in the ways of the Bowl and the Great Soil to which all must return.

  A primate vomited at the sight and smell of the execution, spattering vile acid. Memor saw it was Tananareve, who she recalled had learned some of Folk speech. These creatures were smarter than she had supposed, as recent events revealed.

  There was a long silence after the ceremony. Bemor said to the primates, “We have strict justice for all here.”

  Tananareve said, “It looks like you’re ruled by those Ice Minds. They can order executions?”

  Bemor said, “The Bowl would fail if there were not an authority who could override the passing opinions of individuals. Or of species. Your own ship has a Captain.”

  “I never thought it would be a pleasure to see Redwing again,” Tananareve said. “But life is full of surprises.”

  They all—Cliff, Irma, Terry, Aybe—laughed hard and long at this. Memor saw that this eruption came from great internal pressures, now released.

  “We shall have to be careful with these primates,” Bemor whispered in Folk speech. “They are few and we are merely many trillions.”

  He and Memor laughed with deep, rolling tones of relieving tensions. In not too long a time, they would remember Bemor’s joke with little humor.

  PART XIV

  MEMORY’S FLICKERING LIGHT

  The natural world does not optimize, it merely exists.

  —KEN CALDEIRA

  FIFTY

  Beth yawned and stretched and looked at the big foaming breakers curling onto a beach, splashing with a churning roar out to the edge of her wall. Relaxing lapping ocean sounds were a pleasant wake-up call. She had surfed there once a century or so ago and very nearly drowned. Her wrenched back had taken a while to stop complaining.

  Now her muscles ached and spoke to her of her many hours in the lead pilot’s chair on the flight deck. They hadn’t enjoyed it, and neither had she. More fun to get worked over in a wave, she thought fuzzily. I wonder if there are surf-worthy waves somewhere on the Bowl? Maybe when a hurricane’s running somewhere, safely far away …

  She got up and trooped down to the head and spent three days’ allotment of water on a hot shower. It helped ease her back muscles, and she could think again, too. About how to deal with Redwing and Cliff and all the open doors she was about to slam shut.

  She slumped through the mess in her bathrobe, ignoring Fred, who was reading his tablet anyway, and scored a big coffee hit in her extra-size cup. Then back in bed and the wall now running a restful English village, with enough background sounds of breeze and birds to let her forget the ghastly silence aboard SunSeeker.

  It wasn’t easy for SunSeeker’s chief pilot to ignore the quiet. SunSeeker was at rest, motors down, shields down. Only a pattern in the Bowl’s magnetic fields protected her from a flood of interstellar radiation. And an alien magnetic pattern, the Diaphanous, was shaping that.

  The silence was eerie, after she had spent so long under its background working rumble. Now came a massive, heavy thump. A tanker, she thought. Tankers and cargo craft were a cloud around SunSeeker, and there were thumps and scraping as one or another mated to the ship and masses moved through air locks. Some robots dispatched by the Folk clumped and clanked across the hull on magnetic graspers.

  She took a sip and shut out the fevered world.

  E-mail first, to get up to speed after ten hours in the sack. She plunged in. The very first was a slab of homework from Tananareve. She had craftily recorded nearly all her interactions with the Ice Minds, at least those rendered in speech within the machine they had her trapped in. She had asked them to use audio rather than somehow making a voice resound in her mind. In the middle of the transcript, captured on her phone and patched up by a shipboard Artilect, was a nugget.

  You must realize that Glory is not a true planet but rather a shell world. Many different species of intelligent Glorians live on concentric spheres, with considerable atmosphere spaces between them. Many pillars support this system, and powerful energy sources provide light and heat. Entirely different life-forms inhabit the differing spheres. The innermost shells support life without oxygen. These kinds come from deep within ordinary worlds, creatures of darkness and great heat. Some species have made their spheres into imitations of whatever their best-loved environments are. At the very top is a re-creation of a primitive oxygen world, flush with forests and seas. This outer shell your astronomers have studied. You conclude that Glory is a succulent target for a colony. That upper layer is deceiving, perhaps deliberately so—we do not know. Certainly Glory is not a simple prospect for your kind.

  The Glorians who constructed this shell paradise of theirs also communicate on scales of the galaxy itself. They do not use simple electromagnetics, as you do. There are many worlds, many of them ruled by machine intelligences, who use electromagnetics over stellar scales. Emitting in these ways reveals an emergent society capable of beginner technologies. Most keep silent, their radiated power low, fearing unknown perils. We often found such silent planets. We were drawn to worlds we knew by distant examinati
on were life-bearing, yet electromagnetically quiet.

  The Glorians disdain such societies. They wish to speak, over many long eras, with greater minds—those who can blare forth using gravitational waves. Those waves are far harder to detect and stupendously more difficult to emit in coherent fashion, to carry messages. Here again, to radiate at all is a show of power.

  These signals you primates have detected but cannot translate. That is unsurprising. So thus have many minds discovered, over many millions of your years. Some of these who hear but cannot understand gravitational waves, the Bowl encountered long ago. The gravitational message landscape is an intricate puzzle few solve.

  We Ice Minds have unraveled the Glorian waves, with the help of the Diaphanous. It was a lengthy labor. They are strange, intriguing, and imply much more than they say. We now wish to know the Glorian Masters ourselves, to join in their company. That is why the Bowl now feels itself ready to approach. Before, we did not dare.

  For you primates to dare is surely folly.

  Beth took a deep breath and watched people from another century—when she grew up, of course—walk down the streets of the English village, the sea breeze sighing, birds all atwitter. So the Ice Minds were making their case for some of SunSeeker’s passengers to stay. Fair enough. The problem was going to be Redwing.

  Next came data and text from Tananareve and ship Artilects, dissecting the events with the Diaphanous.

  Karl and the Theory Artilect had worked out some ideas about what the hell the Diaphanous beings who had killed Clare could be. Self-organizing magnetic fields, smart bellies full of plasma, harvesting energy from the jet? And bigger than planets? Well, the jet was a puzzle, and managing it seemed beyond the Folk. She and the others had ignored that problem, now pretty obvious once you thought of it. Who mustered solar storms to the jet base? Who got the mag fields aligned so the jet was under steady control?