Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

Cliff shrugged. “I think they’re processing it. Me, too. Whoosh! I can feel something I had on the Bowl.”

  “Aftershock?”

  Cliff smiled. “Nothing like not dying to bring the zest of feeling fully alive.”

  They looked deeply at each other and nodded.

  Ashley came over. “Want us to recon around this hill?”

  She shook her head. “This hill’s bigger than it looks. They know we’re here. Let them find us.”

  It was hard to judge vertical distance, she had learned from the odd perspectives of the Bowl landscapes. The human eye had a predilection to see all great heights as a few hundred meters, a foreshortening error that did not go away even when you knew about it. The Cobweb would bring strange perspectives, such as the sunset slowly creeping up, slower than Earth and somehow as though light were blades seeping through the eggshell blue sky. She knew the blue came because those wavelengths scattered more, so they dominated the side view of sky—but the tones here were more ivory, somehow.

  Ashley said, “Heard that term, backfire dragon. Kinda like it. Different. I like having heads at both ends. Senses around the back.”

  “A low-grav adaptation, I suppose,” Beth said to be saying something, while she kept eyes on the view.

  Ashley chuckled. “And not just because it’s sort of obscene. Mammals, we tend to guard our tails and work with our heads. But these must all have evolved from a limber thing that thought with both ends.”

  “Thing about aliens is, they’re alien,” she said, and waved him away. The man had no alien field experience, and not much of anything else, she knew. She wished the backfire dragon had taken Ashley and not the soldier.

  Cliff went away to help with the encampment. She started to check in with Redwing and heard nearby something that sounded like a two-stroke engine with bad coughing carburetor trouble. A big flapping thing came coasting over. Its quick small wings somehow whacked together to make a mechanical sound. Smackwing, she named it, just as the thing arrowed off into some twisted trees with razor leaves.

  She was taking a snap picture of it when it ran into a dangling semitransparent sheet. Moving, sticky material. The smackwing struggled in the moist folds as the sheet—which she named to herself, a snagger—drew it slowly upward. To the unwary smackwing came some gravely slow envelope, a weblike pale grasp that as she watched drew the unfortunate bird into a bulge on a tree. A carnivorous goiterlike swelling soon enfolded the smackwing. Here as always, nature red in tooth and claw, or maybe green.

  She had watched this, rapt. Natural strangeness always immersed her. She had become enfolded by it on the Bowl, so much she almost fought Redwing over leaving it. But now a new glorious Glory beckoned. She mused on this, and then a cough startled her.

  She turned to see Cliff and the whole team awaiting her. Pensive, faces drawn.

  “Graves’re dug,” Ashley said. He was dirty with the labor.

  She had utterly forgotten the funeral. Of course, she should bring it to order, say something.…

  Beth got through it, summoning up words she had spoken over graves on the Bowl. Memories of those came, and she thought, No one who has had “Taps” played for them has ever been able to hear it. She stared down into the face of Okala Ubanafore. Looked away. Blinked back tears. Vowed that her remaining team would not follow them.

  Ceremony done, she made her voice brisk. “Get your gear in order. We can catch some winks after sunset. Night’s only a couple hours long, so catch ’em as you can.”

  They would have to let their body rhythms reset for this place where the sun was nearly always in the sky. That would take time. Maybe best to use rotating watches, so people got into a schedule as soon as physiology allowed.

  Her own gear needed work. They had used carrier bots to lug nets of supplies over here, and it lay heaped around. The bots were recharging. Some she had sent back to their lander to regroup. Beth beckoned Cliff over to a copse where they could have some slight privacy.

  First, check the body. As she stripped down, her underwear informed her, You should not indulge in such acidic foods. Yes, she had pissed herself; she’d nearly forgotten. Ugh.

  Other discoveries were large bruises marring her thighs and shins. Nicks on arms, a pulsing strained calf muscle, souvenirs of learning this new grav, new world. As she massaged the calf, she remembered an earlier self nobody could recall now.

  Her fatty teenage self had struggled to get thin, saying angrily once, “Inside of me there’s a thin person just screaming to get out.” And her mom had smiled and said, “Just the one, dear?”—which provoked laughs, and now in memory nearly made her weep.

  Cliff helped her with their thin tent. Nobody spoke. They were all on edge, defensive, processing events they did not understand. She recalled her first girly outdoorsy phase. She had started it to lose weight, putting distance between her and any possible chocolate. She became one of the woodsy types who slept in her clothes and a piece of canvas for the rain. Ate fish she caught and rice she brought, carried a fishing line (sticks were easy to find for a rod). Carried a jackknife, coffee can soon emptied and used for a carry, matches, extra dry socks, and done. She had thought of the comfy hikers as Slaves of Their Stuff. Now her First Team showed itself as they made camp. Some stripped to tighty-whities and others were plainly going commando, ready for action, to take a leak or dump quick and with less rustle of clothing. Bemor Prime had assembled a little backpack from what was aboard that great carry cage. It seemed to be weaving a web-bed for this micrograv. Tastes varied.

  Then, with no warning, there it was.

  Or he. Or she. No way to tell. Alien, yes.

  The thing was tall, walking on two legs. The feet were broad, and as Beth watched it approach with a casual gait, she saw the legs were double-jointed. Big sticky feet. That gave it a swaying rhythm, making the large head weave.

  Think like a biologist, she reminded herself. Make no sudden moves. Of course, she looked for the tail, and saw eyes and tympana surrounded by four little limbs. There were more limbs above the big legs, all the way along the limber three-meter body.

  It was slender, roughly human mass. As she had come to expect from the Bowl, like all Earth land animals, it had an elongated, bilaterally symmetric body. A neck, but with two deep recesses that might be eyes—at the bottom of the head. Not near the top, as nearly everything she knew did. This alien had a head like an artist’s first impression, broad planes and notches chiseled from something like translucent yellow horn. What did yellow skin imply? For the rest of its body was dark, maybe tanned.

  As she watched it, the head rotated—completely around. So, she thought, a head adapted for quick scanning and action. It looked spooky, alarming. Nothing on the Bowl had that. At most, like Earth owls, Bowl life could swivel a head about 280 degrees.

  Somehow this thing could spin its head, triangular with a beaky snout, without breaking blood vessels or tearing tendons. She recalled that a praying mantis could spin its head, because it had an open circulation system. This thing swept in a view of the whole human campground as it slowly came forward, taking its time.

  It said nothing. She could not read its eyes or face.

  She had seen smart aliens on the Bowl who mixed poorly with humans, because they spoke through smell, quick face moves, and pheromone chemicals they squirted. Humans relying on sound and sight in very restricted frequency bands were, she had learned, a rather isolated evolutionary group. But those scent-talking aliens faced a roadblock on the path to high intelligence. They made up for it somewhat with expressive faces or sign language. But their limitations had never led them to high technology. The Bird Folk had domesticated them long ago, making them into slave species.

  This thing did not look like a slave. It sauntered, rotating head taking in the humans. Silently.

  A thin little mouth, too. Animals with heavy mandibles and massive grinding teeth were typically vegetarians that ate coarse low-energy vegetation. Animals with fangs and horns used th
em for defense against predators and for competition among males. None such here. Then this alien probably progressed by cooperation and strategy rather than brute strength and combat. Only a broad high-energy meat and vegetable diet could sustain the relatively large populations needed for later stages in the development of intelligence. Hence, moderate jaws, no fangs or horns.

  But it had something new to her: plenty of arms. The lower ones, it walked on. Easy in low grav. The uppers swung to help its gait. Still, the arms fit what she had learned from the many Bowl aliens. The slender arms, eight along each side, maybe had bones or cartilage, levered for maximum strength. The big hinge joints were bigger than human elbows and knees. Some showed digits with pulpy tips, probably for sensitive touch and grasping.

  She stood still. Whispered to her team to do the same. Treat it like a viper; you never know.

  Maybe this thing was adapted for the range of gravs on the Cobweb. On Earth, the four-leggedness of big land vertebrates came because fishes with four lobed fins, instead of six, colonized the land. Insects had six legs, spiders eight, but they were never large. So she figured few legs and arms were good for evolutionary success on land. Fingers, though, were rare Earthside. Only chimps and humans invented tool artifacts, using their fingers with soft sensitive tips. So if that held true, on the Cobweb, anything with beaks, talons, scrapers, or claws was an animal. Like the backfire dragons.

  The alien got within five meters of her and stopped. Its arms stilled and the narrow mouth opened. It spoke in what seemed Anglish. The language seemed gouged from the mouth and heaped with rolling vowels, tongue sprung. “Thees lin’ar moodes—sen’ces youu caall theem—sufferrer frommm illusionee thaat caan parallele, thoouught.”

  “Useful it is,” Beth said. Keep this simple. Clip the vowels, maybe the alien would, too. It had probably learned from intercepted transmissions, then the many texts Redwing sent. Getting an interesting sentence out on this first try was impressive.

  The alien said, “Go with mee noow to moveh plaace.” With two arms that articulated backwards, it gestured toward the way it had come. “All come.”

  Decision time. Beth waved to Viviane and Cliff. “What do you think?”

  “Let’s go,” Viviane said. “After those backfire dragons, I don’t like the idea of this place in the dark.”

  She sent a whisper to the team. “Pack to travel. No sudden moves.”

  She sent similar messages to the ship and Redwing. “We’ll be beyond comm, I think. Send a flock of relay drones along the Cobweb, parallel to wherever we’re going.”

  Redwing’s assent came by text. She felt fluttery, a mix of anticipation and anxiety.

  They assembled their gear and got away within five minutes, following the alien in good order. Only a few hundred meters around the hill, through some more helical trees, they came upon a startling vision: a lake. It stood on a flat wedge angling out from the hill, plainly artificial. Clouds hung thick but they dissolved quickly, and the lake glimmered in the steeply slanted sunglow.

  Sunset climbed down the Cobweb, a wall of hungry fire. First came a delicate pink, followed by rosy reds, then crimson hot and angry, until the stalks farther out burned with hard white light. Sunlight swept away from them slowly, and a booming chorus of chips and howls and caws sounded in waves.

  Now they could see something loom forth from the thinning ivory clouds. A tube, turning in an arch, across the lake. Light seeped away, so the vision faded to gray and blacks.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  The alien’s odd head turned nearly around to address her. “We taakee you to our smaller world.”

  It was getting better at Anglish in quick order. “What should we call you?” Viviane asked.

  The reply had more vowels than Beth could count, so she said, “Let’s call you Twisty, yes?”

  “I will render forth to that. Why is.”

  “Because of how you turn your head. And arms. Limber.”

  “Yes. See. You are narrow of motion.” With that, it led them to the lakeshore, lining them up with multiple arms waving. Then it stepped straight into the water. And walked. A platform came up in support and extended out as Beth and then Cliff and Viviane stepped carefully on it. They marched toward the tube arch as darkness fell.

  Beth glanced up into the gathering gloom and saw two zingoes. They glowed with an infernal red like brimstone, standing out in the dark. So they were not creatures at all. But what could make that color hang in the sky … as though watching them?

  Then they merged into one. Even more puzzling.

  Overhead, one by one, the stars were coming out.

  SIXTEEN

  GAS AND GRAV

  Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that has never been.

  —THEODORE VON KÁRMÁN

  “This is a continuous elevator?!” Ashley asked in disbelief. “And we just…”

  “Step on,” Twisty mouthed.

  The grainy platform moved smoothly by. Beth eyed it dubiously.

  “Is secure,” Twisty said—and took an adroit leap onto the steely ledge.

  “Go!” Beth shouted. The team obeyed. They landed easily on the broad metal. She landed with careful grace and turned to Twisty. “Now what?”

  Twisty made three quick gestures with his double-jointed arms and legs. She saw that the appendages were adaptable, with filmy skin layers that could harden in seconds into a kind of ridge.

  In response, the room surged. As it carried them away from their entry point, it began to flex. Walls popped. Tremors shook the floor. Support structures rose from the seeming metal, like shiny, flowing mercury.

  “Chairs?” Cliff looked dubious as the liquid flows neared him. The pod around them began accelerating. It wrenched around, as if going through the top of the arched loop they had seen as they approached. “It’s taking off—”

  The shiny stuff formed into a couch, almost as though it were beckoning to him. He carefully sat. It grasped him lightly. “Not bad.” He stretched out and looked surprised at how quickly the mercury bed shaped itself to him. Tings, hums, shudders. There were ridged cushions for the finger snakes, a couch for Bemor Prime.

  Beth called, “Okay, make your acquaintance with it. Go easy.”

  The team complied, though with frowns. She gingerly sat, and it shaped for her. Twisty sat, too, nearby, in what appeared to be a steel hammock lined with grips. She framed a question and stopped when a gauzy film began to seethe through the air.

  “Hey, what’s this?” she asked the alien.

  “To hoold and breeathe,” Twisty said. “For us alll.”

  The stuff seemed to envelop them in a light, spongy foam. Yet air flowed easily. She did not feel trapped or confined. The stuff was like a soap bubble without smell. She touched it and the film gave a bit, resisted a bit.

  Acceleration built. The return of weight was welcome; she had felt inept in a tenth grav. With a sense of mass, of clear ups and downs, she felt more at ease. Her silvery couch seemed to clutch her more, though with a slippery touch. Odd stuff. The wispy, airy foam added to a feeling of security and yet strangeness. Now it began to give off an odd scent, like lilac. Alien safety measures, she guessed.

  “Getting faster,” Viviane said from several couches away.

  “Need to goo,” Twisty said.

  Viviane frowned. “How far?”

  “To our smallness world.”

  “We call it Honor.”

  “We say—” It made a sound like a buzz saw hitting rock.

  Beth’s ears popped. She realized the walls of their pod were now transparent. She sat up. They were rushing along in a slanted twilight. The shadow cast by the Glory world, eclipsing the Cobweb, was waning. Cliff had calculated the nighttime as about two hours. Now, as they rushed between slabs of living planes, the sky glowed in faint orange. Shadowy clouds flitted by. In dim light a landmass rose toward them and she saw a rough sea below, whitecaps and storm clouds. Maybe ten kilometers up�
��but closing fast. They were falling. She could not restrain her automatic reflex.

  “We’re going to hit—!”

  “No, through,” Twisty said.

  The others in her team were rustling uneasily, too. Dancing eyes, hands clutching the couches. Acceleration gripped them harder. They flew through shrouded gray cloud banks. Lightning flashes. Purple vapor wedges the size of mountains. More puffy cotton clouds, churning. Then into the open—

  “Fire!” Viviane cried, pointing.

  “Skyee flame, it is, yes,” Twisty said with what Beth supposed was a calm voice. Certainly not strained and thin, like the human mutterings she heard around her.

  She could see sheets of yellow seethe and smoke and snarl in the dark sky. Some life-form? It fractured into pieces the size of hills, roiling. Parts seemed to roll and gather up other dancing fires. Not lightning, not simple fireballs, then what? Before she could think about it, the flames fell behind their long tube. She could see down now to the lands below. They rushed forward, still accelerating, a heavy weight.

  “Feels like two gravs,” Cliff said in a reedy voice. They were all slammed into their couches as the plains below swept toward them.

  Some of the team gave involuntary yelps. Cries of alarm. Beth held hers in. Time compressed as she felt her adrenaline kick in.

  Even then, in the twilight she could see a huge balloon thing coming up from below, not far off. Pearly sails flounced lazily from its eggshell blue sides. An animated Christmas tree ornament. Its colors blended with the sky glow, she saw—camouflage. So it had predators, yes. There seemed to be a lot here, based on her experience—less than a day in, one dead.

  From above, though, the tube had orange vents and stood out against the browns and greens below. A rocket-effect creature cruising the skies?

  She shook her head against the acceleration that drove them straight down along the slender, transparent tube they were in. She shot a look at Twisty, who was lounging back on his couch. The transparent webby stuff held her tight now. “Why are we—?”