Bowl of Heaven

ONE

Life persists.

He recalled those words, his nervous mantra recited as the soft sleep came closing its grip with chilly fingers —

— and so he knew he was alive. Awake again. Up from the chill-sleep of many decades.

He was cold. His memory was blurred, but it told him he was on an odyssey no biologist had ever ventured on before, a grand epic. He was going to the stars, yes, and they had given him the stinky sulfur gas, yes, the first creeping chill … and that was … it.

But beyond that flash of memory, all he could think of was the incredible, muscle-shaking chill that spread like a sharp ache through him. He was too numb to shiver. Somewhere a loud rumble rolled up through his body, not heard but felt. The cold … He thought hard and with effort opened his sticky eyes.

Trouble. His gummy eyelids slammed closed against a crisp actinic glare. He must be in the revival clinic. Slowly he pried them open, still numb with cold. He focused with effort, looking for the joyous faces of his fellow colonists.

Not there. Nor was Beth.

Instead, the worried frowns of Mayra and Abduss Wickramsingh made him groggily anxious as they worked over him. Their faces swam away, came back, drifting above like clouds as the cold began to recede. He was tired. His bones ached with it. After decades of sleep …

Hands massaged his rubbery legs. Lungs wheezed. His heart labored, thumping in his ears. His throat rasped with a sour wind. He was finally starting to shiver. Sluggish sleep fell away like a mummy’s moldy shroud.

Think. The Wickramsinghs were paired by ability, he recalled in a gray fog, self-sufficient and solely responsible for the three years of their watch. Mayra piloted, and Abduss was the engineer. They were fairly far down the queue, maybe twenty-seven watches.… How far along were they? It hurt to figure.

They turned him on his side to work on his stiff muscles. The massaging sent lancing pain, and he let out a muffled scream. They ignored that. At least he could see better. Against the hard ceramic glare, he could see that no others of SunSeeker’s 436 passengers in cold sleep were being revived. A capsule was running its program, though, so someone was coming out behind him. The bay was empty. Carboceramic tiles were clean, looking like new.

As a scientist, he was not slated to come out until the infrastructure staff was up and running at Scorpii 3, the balmy world that everybody called Glory, that no eye had ever seen.

So they were maybe eighty years into the voyage. Not enough to be near Glory. Something was wrong.

Mayra’s lips moved, glistening in the hard light, but he heard nothing. They worked on his neural connections and — pop! — he could hear. The dull rumble hammered at him. Interstellar surf.

“Okay? Okay?” Mayra said anxiously, mouth tight, her eyes intent. “What’s your name?”

He coughed, hacked. Once his throat was clear of milky fluid, his first words were, “Cliff … Kammash. But … Why me? I’m bio. Is Beth still cold?”

They didn’t answer at once, but each looked at the other.

“Don’t talk,” Mayra said softly, a smile flickering.

Definitely trouble. He had known the Wickramsinghs slightly in training, remembered them as reserved and disciplined, just what a cryo passenger would wish in a caretaker watch team.

And they were good. They got his creaky body up off the slab, kind hands helping, his muscles screaming. Then into a gown, detaching the IVs. Up, creaking onto his feet. He swayed, the room reeled, he sat down. Try again. Better … a step. First in eighty years, feet like bricks. They helped him shuffle to a table. He sat. Minutes crawled by as he felt air swoosh in and out of his lungs. He studied this phenomenon carefully, as though it were a miracle. As perhaps it was.

Food appeared. Coffee: caffeine, yes, lovely caffeine. Nobody spoke. Next course, soup. It tasted like nectar, the essence of life. Then they told him, as he eagerly slurped down a big bowl of fragrant veggie mix grown aboard. Halfway through his third bowl, he became vaguely aware that they were talking about an astrophysical observation that required his interpretation.

“What? Mayra, Astro is you,” he shot back. “Every pilot has to be.”

“We need a different viewpoint,” Mayra said, her dark eyes wary. “We do not want to bias your views by explaining more now.”

“We are reviving the captain, too,” Abduss said.

He blinked, startled. “Redwing?”

“It’s that important.” Abduss was unreadable. “He will awaken in another day, his capsule says.”

Cliff felt a chill that was not thermal. Stores of food, water, oxygen couldn’t be recycled forever. That was the point in riding semi-frozen: They would reach Glory with enough stores to survive until they could replace what was lost.

“Four of us. Waking too many people would run us short,” he said. “What’s up?”

Again, the Wickramsinghs looked at each other and did not answer.

As soon as he could walk steadily, they showed him the viewing screens, and for a long moment he could not speak.

The spectacle was striking, both for what was familiar and what was not. SunSeeker was forty light-years from Earth, and yet he could identify many of the constellations he had known as a child in Brazil. Their familiar faces swam among a bright swarm of lesser lights, twisted here and there. On the scale of the galaxy, light-years did not count for much.

He immediately looked for their destination. A star not much different from Sol, Glory’s primary should be a white point dead ahead. It was there, reassuringly bright, though still five light-years away. Perhaps its brilliance was enhanced by SunSeeker’s velocity? No, that was a small effect. More probably, brightened by his own longing to see, to breathe, to touch an Earthlike world, named Glory out of pure hope before any human eye had seen it. Pixels and spectra didn’t do the job.

Other stars brimmed in the rosy night lit by SunSeeker’s bow shock. The ramscoop’s plowing through the interstellar gas and ionized hydrogen was an unending rainbow light show, filmy incandescent streamers curving around them as they plunged into the infinite night. Beyond that prow wash lay the spectrally shifted universe. Some of the glimmering stars were intriguing, constellations rearranged — but nothing compared to the nearby red sun.

“That’s the problem?” Cliff asked.

Abduss nodded. “It is a problem, but there is another, larger. We have been wrestling with this more difficult issue, but that can wait for the captain.”

Can’t these people ever say anything straight? He made himself say deliberately, “Okay, tell me what’s the big deal about this star?”

“We are overtaking it. When we came on watch, the star was not visible. There was a mild recombination source nearby, rather odd.” Switching to another channel, Abduss pointed out a diffuse ivory plume behind the dark patch.

Cliff frowned. “How long is it?”

Abduss said, “About three astronomical units. This is a signature of hydrogen recombining, after it has been ionized. This linear feature seems to be a jet, cooling off and then turning back into atoms. That’s the emission I made this map from, you see?”

“Um.” Cliff wrinkled his nose, trying to think like an Astro type. “A jet from a star. It didn’t jump out at you?”

Abduss tightened his mouth but otherwise did not move. “At first we did not even see the star.”

Uh-oh…, Cliff thought. Best to shut up, yes.

“We had much to measure. The jet did not attract much attention, as it seemed unimportant. Yet now we can see it to be related to the star — which suddenly appeared.”

Cliff nodded, smiled, tried to defuse the man’s irritation. “Perfectly understandable. Our problems are inside the ship, not outside. So … the star popped into view because it came around the rim of this … thing.”

Mayra murmured, “We became alarmed.”

“Nobody noticed the star before? Earlier watches?”

Abduss blinked slowly. “We could not see it.”

Cliff shrugged. In moderate close-up, the dwarf showed as a disk: it must be close. It was perched at the lip of a much larger arc of light. An ordinary star, little and reddish. He raised an eyebrow at Mayra.

“The spectral class is F9,” Mayra added helpfully. “Most likely the plasma plume means that this star must have been recently active. Early stars often display this.” Under magnification, the expelled matter looked to Cliff like a thin nebula, dim and old.

“But we don’t know it’s a young star,” he said.

“No, stars of this class have very long lifetimes.”

Cliff had never been much concerned with the fate of failed stars as they erupted and faltered. Spectacular, sure, easy to sell to contract monitors — but biology demands a stable abode. Still, he immediately guessed that this veil was a remnant of an earlier era in the star’s life, when it was blowing off shells of hot gas. A good guess, anyway — but of course, not his field. These details of stellar evolution had never interested him very much, since they had little to do with his specialty, the evolution of higher life-forms on worlds similar to Earth. A largely abstract pursuit until the Alpha Centauri discoveries of a simple but strange ecology there. That was what drew him to Glory; Beth was an accidental benefit.

So he shrugged. “Gas from a small star. Why wake me up?”

“You are the highest-ranked Scientific,” Abduss said.

Marya added, “And your specialty may be quite relevant.”

That remark just perplexed him. He felt hungry and tired and disappointed. And miffed, yes, with a raspy sore throat. He sucked in a deep breath. “I’m supposed to assess Glory’s biology, not be awakened to answer questions from the watch crew!”

They blinked, startled. He wondered if he was betraying more than the typical awakened-sleeper irritation they all had been warned about. Chill-sleep was reasonably safe, but coming out of it was not. Every crew member under its enforced hibernation cycle ran a 2 percent risk of subtle neurological damage from a revival, an irreducible price of seeking the stars. By waking him, they had forced him to double that risk. He’d be going back into the chill when he’d done what they wanted. He had rather blithely accepted the risk of several revivals when he became a senior science officer, he recalled, when it was entirely theoretical.

As well, no sleeper could be immediately returned to the vaults after revival. The medical risks were too great. So he was stuck for at least a month in the narrow rumbling quarters of the starship, eating the pallid food generated from ponics tanks. There was no way to avoid the perpetual growl of the fusion ramscoop. Filters could not erase the ever-shifting tones of turbulence as the ship surged through clumps of denser gas, riding waves of ionization — a moving electrical discharge, lighting up its neighborhood.

He had not been slated for revival on the passage at all, so his sensitivity to noise had not been an issue. And indeed, the shifting, grating clangor already irked him a bit. There was no way to damp it, so he would have to use noise-suppressing headphones. Certainly he would not have made the cut for active, awake crew.

The Wickramsinghs glanced at each other yet again, as if to say, Humor him — he’s a senior officer. Both inhaled deeply. Abduss said, “Please tolerate our unveiling this anomaly so that you may experience it as we did.”

“Um, yes.” He still felt irked, but ordered himself to behave as an officer should.

Mayra said, “Notice that the luminous gas, as you put it, is very straight.”

Cliff zoomed the image — and blinked. He had expected a ragged cloud of expelled debris, the star’s outer layers blown off. The plume seemed to point at the star ahead. “Pretty, at least. Why so sharp?”

Abduss said carefully, “We wondered, too. None of the astronomical analysis systems had an explanation. But it did alert us to the infrared spectrum.”

“Of this plume? Why — ?”

Mayra switched to the middle infrared bands, and his mouth fell open. An orange circle stretched across the sky. The plume was an arrow stuck in the exact center of some target.

“The plasma apparently comes from the center of that massive infrared region. It is mostly of hydrogen, and its ions eventually find electrons and they unite,” Abduss said, as if he were talking to a student. “That is the hydrogen line we see, the plume cooling off.”

Mayra added, “But it did lead our attention to the huge region of soft infrared emission.”

“Hey, I’m a biologist — ”

“We awoke you because the infrared signature is clear. The circle we see is solid, not a gas.”

His irritation vanished. Even a biologist knew enough to be startled by the implication. All he could manage to say was, “That’s impossible.”

Mayra said mildly, “When I first saw it, I, too, assumed it to be gas. The spectral lines prove otherwise.”

He studied it, trying to allow for perspective. “A disk?… It’s huge.”

“Indeed,” Mayra said.

“But it can’t be a planet. It would be bigger than any star.”

Abduss nodded. “We are approaching from behind it, and at present speed will come directly alongside within weeks. The … thing … is about three hundred AU away from us.” He smiled quickly, as if embarrassed. “Allowing for that, look closer.”

“This is why we awakened you,” Mayra said.

He blinked. “It’s … artificial?”

“Apparently,” Mayra said.

“What? How — ?”

“We have just come into view of this object, by coming alongside. It drew our attention because its star suddenly appeared — presto! We could not see it before because the … the cap, whatever it is … blocked the starlight as we overtook it.”

Abduss added helpfully, “Infrared study shows that it is not a disk. It’s rounded. We witness it from behind, with the plasma plume coming through a hole at the exact rear center. The cap radiates at the temperature of lukewarm water.”

“A … sphere?” He saw it then, the image snapping into perspective. He was looking at a ball with a hole in its bottom. Through that hole, the star glowed. His imagination scrambled after an old idea. “Maybe it’s a, what was the name — ?”

“A Dyson sphere,” Mayra provided. “We thought so at first, too.”

“So this is a shell?”

She nodded. “A hemisphere, perhaps — a sphere halfway under construction. Perhaps. Only — the old texts reveal quite clearly that Dyson did not dream of a rigid sphere at all. Rather, he imagined a spherical zone filled with orbiting habitats, enough of them to capture all of the radiant energy of a star.”

Abduss thumbed up a reference to these ideas on a side screen. Good — they had done the homework before awakening him. But if not a Dyson sphere, what — ?

Mayra said, “We have watched and run the Doppler programs carefully. The hemispherical cap is spinning about the same axis formed by the plume.”

Abduss said helpfully, “Only by rotating such a shell could one support it against the star’s gravity.”

“Like this ship.” He nodded, trying to guess Abduss’s point. “Centrifugal gravity. But a complete, rigid sphere … spinning … that would be impossible, right? Gravity would pull it in at the poles.”

They both nodded. Abduss said, “Still, the configuration is not stable.”

They both looked at him, so he went on, thinking aloud. “The shell should fall into the star — it’s not orbiting. There’s some sort of force balance at play here. Odd construction, indeed. Just spinning isn’t enough, either — the stresses would vary with curvature. You’d need internal supports.”

Mayra said, “Quite right, I believe. My first degree was in astrophysics and I have some ideas about this object, but — ” She bowed her head and shrugged.

As matters developed, there was a great deal behind Mayra’s modesty. In the next day, eating five meals to build himself up, he learned as much about the Wickramsinghs’ subtleties as he did of the strange object they had discovered. They were deferential toward him, unveiling their ideas slowly, allowing him to come to his own conclusions. This helped greatly as the magnitude of implication grew.

He didn’t even ask about Scorpii 3 until hours later, when Abduss and Mayra were using the control room facilities to lecture him. The planet, their destined home, was a long way off still, and deserved the nickname Glory. Scorpii 3 was the second nearest habitable-seeming world ever found, after the Alpha Centauri base. A fast-burn probe had verified the bio-signatures found by deep space telescopes two generations before SunSeeker’s launch. A wonder, with strong ozone lines, a lot of water, and tantalizing hints of green chlorophyll in the spectrum. A dream world. No sign of any artificial electromagnetic emissions, after big dishes had cupped their ears toward it for decades. Plus the mysterious grav waves that made no sense, considering that there were no big masses in the system to send out such quadrupole emissions.

He looked at it in the high amplification forward scope, but it was just a flickering blur through their bow shock. Scorpii 3 was barely visible because it hung near the edge of the structure ahead, though it was many light-years away. He looked at the screens, trying to get his head around what that vast bulk could mean. But emotion overwhelmed him. Pure wonder.

Unimaginable, yes. Bigger than the orbit of Mercury, huge beyond comprehension, the hemisphere was an artifact, a built thing, the first evidence of another intelligence in the galaxy. Not a trickle of radio waves, but a giant … riddle.

He took a long breath, relaxed into the observer’s chair and headpiece, and let the slow, long wavelength rumble of the starship run through his bones. And thought.

The Wickramsinghs felt it was a matter of biology. Wake the biologist!

Cliff wrinkled his nose. He had been irked, sure, but the Wickramsinghs were right: You see trouble, you call for help. But he wasn’t prepared for this. But as well he saw that none of that now mattered.

Science had speculated about intelligence for centuries, as probes spread out through a desert of dead worlds. The Big Eye telescopes in the twenty-first century had found warm, rocky worlds resembling Earth, and some had the ozone spectral lines that promised oxygen atmospheres. There the promise had ended. Here and there flourished slime molds in deep caverns, or simple ocean life, maybe — cellular colonies still unable to shape themselves into complex forms, as Earth’s life had more than a billion years ago. Sure, there was life, the consensus said … boring life.

To find an artifact of such immensity … it made his mind reel.

Then Abduss said, almost casually, “There is something more. Why we realized the protocols demanded that you be awakened. We have detected narrow-band microwave traffic from near the star.”

Cliff realized that he should have seen this coming. “Coded?”

“Yes. It may be broadcasting from near the hole in the center — the angle is right — and we’re getting some scattered, reflected signals.”

“Are they hailing us?”

“There’s nothing obvious that we can figure out, no,” Mayra said. “There are many transmissions, not a long string. It looks like a conversation, perhaps.”

“So they don’t know we’re here, maybe.”

“We could hear the traffic once we were within view of the hole, I believe. Perhaps it comes from within the hemisphere, and leaks through. It is not broadcast for others to pick up — or so we think. And unintelligible, at least to us.”

Cliff eyed them both and said carefully, “I agree that the protocols call for my revival. But this is more than anybody ever visualized, when those protocols were invented.…” He was still dazed after a day awake. And cold; he rubbed his arms to get blood moving. “I wonder if you didn’t wake me too early, though. We’re not looking at plants and animals yet. If we wake too many of us…”

“Yes,” Abduss said.

“We’d run short.”

“We’re short now,” Mayra said. “That is the other problem. It is high time someone woke the captain, we felt.”

“So you did, right after me? Me, because my secondary specialty is in rations and ship biology. Mostly, though, I’m a field biologist. But sure, call me up. Then the cap’n, to take over all the other implications. Right.”

“And now we are happy to turn both problems over to you.” Abduss gave him a broad smile without any trace of irony. Mayra beamed, too. They had faced all this together, and the weight of it showed in their evident relief.

It didn’t take long to see why they were handing off to him and the captain.

The opportunity: an artifact bigger than planets.

The problem: SunSeeker was not performing to specs. The ramscoop drive was running at 0.081 of light speed, instead of the 0.095 engineering had promised.

Not a big difference, but in starflight it was crucial. At 0.081, their trip would take 550 years. They had stocks for a bit over 500 years.

Early space travel had been like this, with tiny margins of safety. Reaching the Moon six out of seven tries had been a miracle. They’d run aging X-planes for a quarter of a century, losing two shuttles before they built something better. Interplanetary travel still cut close to the bone, and interstellar was a crapshoot. And still there were always those who would take the gamble.

Of course, SunSeeker recycled everything — and, of course, the accounting never quite came out even. The flight plan had them arriving at Glory with time to find what they needed. Glory had a world with oceans and free oxygen, all carefully checked in the ozone spectral line seen from Earth orbit. And in the infrared, they had seen a broad disk of asteroids, too, comfortably farther out and with traces of iceteroids among them. The world or the rocks would give them the elements they needed: water, oxygen, dust to be turned to soil.

But this slower speed was eating their safety window.

He checked the log. Five watch cycles had worked on the problem in their ramscoop drive without really spotting a cause. None of them had wakened the captain. It was an engineering problem, not a command structure one. And they were on a centuries-long voyage.

The big magnetic fields at SunSeeker’s bow drove shock waves into the hydrogen ahead, ionizing it to prickly energies, then scooping it up and mixing it with fusion catalysis, burning as hot as suns — but somehow, the nuclear brew didn’t give quite the thrust it had during field trials out in the Oort cloud. Considering how new relativistic engineering was, maybe this was not truly surprising.

Still, it had huge consequences. “We won’t get to Glory in time,” Cliff said.

The Wickramsinghs nodded together. Mayra said, “So…” She did not want to draw the conclusion.

“We have cut our rations to a minimum, all five watches, yes,” Abduss rushed in, eyes large. “It was a major decision we made, you see — to revive you and the captain.”

Cliff slurped down more coffee. It tasted incredibly good — another symptom of revival. “You’ve done the calculation. Can we make it?”

“Marginal at best,” Mayra said precisely. “The last five watches have run at the minimum crew number: two. Plus we are pushing the hydroponics to the maximum. We fear it is not enough.”

“Damn!” Cliff grimaced. Starve to death between the stars. “That’s also why nobody woke the captain. One more gut, one more pair of lungs. Until … yeah.” Until they saw the strange thing up ahead.

He knew the deeper reason, too. What could the captain do, after all? If the engineers could not find a solution, mere managerial ability would not help. So the engineers had followed the protocols that had been drilled into them: Follow mandates and hope for the best. Especially since an error could kill them all with relativistic speed.

They gazed at him, calm and orderly and patient, the perfect types for a watch crew. Which he was not. Too restless and a touch excitable, the psych guys had said. That was fine with Cliff; he wanted to see Glory, not black interstellar space. All crew were calm, steady types, or they wouldn’t have made the first cut in the long selection filters.

The Wickramsinghs were waiting. He was in charge until the captain woke up. That he did not understand the situation did not matter; he was a superior officer, so he had to make the decisions.

First, he had to rest. About that, the revival procedures were as hard-nosed as the mission protocols. At least that would give him a little time to think.

They found him twelve hours later, in the kitchen.

The first thing he ordered was a thorough study of the star they were approaching. The Wickramsinghs called up screens of data and vibrant images. This gave him a jumpy image of a star massing about nine-tenths of Sol’s mass. There were plenty of those in the galaxy, but this one was not behaving like a serene, longer-lived orange dwarf. Fiery tendrils forked and seethed at the center of the apparent disk. “There is blurring in the image,” Abduss remarked, “by the plasma plume.”

Squinting, at first he did not understand the implication of the roiling spikes that leaped from a single hot spot, a blue white furnace. “Ah — that spot is directly under the center of the artificial bowl, the cap.”

Abduss nodded. “Something is disturbing the star, making it throw out great flaming tongues. Very dangerous, I would think.”

They were coming up on this system pretty fast. Cliff thumbed in the whole data field. The obviously artificial disk — okay, call it the cap, because he could sense from the image that it was curved away from their point of view — the cap was not at all far away, maybe a few hundred astronomical units, where an A.U. was the distance from Earth to Sol. You got used to such enormous distance measures, in the relentless training all crew had to undergo.

He tried to remember when that was … centuries ago. Yet it seemed like just a few weeks.

He looked at the image and let his eyes see it as a curved hemisphere cupped around this side of the star.

They zoomed the optics in on the disk’s flares, having to go through several settings that blanked out the blue white hot spot on the star’s surface. The glare of the hot spot was fierce, actinic, bristling with angry storms, a tiny white sun attached to the bigger pink star like an angry leech.

Above the white spot raged the filigree spikes of streaming plasma. They whirled around one another like fighting snakes, burning as they rushed up from the hot spot. It looked like they should bathe the hemispheric bowl in licking flames. But before they reached the curve of the bowl, they dovetailed into a slender jet. Among the streamers, Cliff could see little blobs and bright flecks moving out from the star, swarming up along the jet, toward the neatly circular hole in the bowl and out into the sky.

Cliff wrestled with the images. “Let’s see the earlier pictures, from the last watch.”

Automatically, the ship kept records of the local sky. Its software was spectrally sophisticated and framed its own, limited hypotheses about the class and type of every luminous object it saw. They checked the records. The muted minds that murmured among themselves, struggling to understand the bowl, had spun endlessly in parameter-space confusions.

In the infrared, there was a glow where the “bottom” of the bowl would be. None of the instruments showed any image of the bowl during the years while the ship was approaching from behind. He thumbed through uninteresting pictures. The bowl blotted out a small dot on the sky, but nobody had noticed such a minor thing from light-years away.

The bowl’s infrared radiation showed a temperature around 20 degrees centigrade. Room temperature.

“Ah, balmy,” Abduss said. Across that vast curve, tropical conditions prevailed. The back face was cool and appeared stony. But the warmed side was at 20 degrees C. The star was less luminous than Sol — but, of course, the bowl was in continuous sunlight, so it would get pretty warm. No night.

Cliff had a mind’s eye picture of the bowl as a colossal construction, even though his common sense was screaming. When something appeared impossible, it seemed best to simply study it until understanding emerged. And wait for the captain to wake up, yes.

The first shock came from simple geometry. Mayra gave him distances and angles and he quickly found that the area of the inward-facing cap was two hundred million times that of Earth. Hovering over its star, the rim of the bowl would provide a vast, livable surface. (The biologist would wait for the captain’s take, but … Air. Water. Stores to replenish a failing ship. The Wickramsinghs nodded and smiled when he spoke of this.…)

On that area, peering through the small hole they could see, Abduss picked up reflecting optical emission … and found the spectral signatures of water. Then, with a bit more effort to see through the rippling plasma that shrouded SunSeeker, he found oxygen.

So it was an immense area designed for living … by what?

Cliff checked their distance from the bowl: 320 AU — about a hundredth of a light-year. So close! And coming up fast.

But they were still looking at the back of the cap, in the dark. He looked at the waiting faces of the Wickramsinghs and thought. They were left with some brute astronomical facts — velocities, times, food supplies.…

At their review meeting, the Wickramsinghs eyed him expectantly.

“It’s beyond me,” he said — and watched their faces, despite their best efforts, show disappointment.

“Surely we can learn more?” Mayra suggested hesitantly.

“Not at this distance,” Abduss said. “And I doubt the captain will authorize a trajectory change to get closer.”

Cliff looked at them and thought unkind thoughts. Five crews didn’t wake the captain, because there wasn’t an answer. They had been trained to keep the ship running. Schooled to stay steady. But here was something the Earthside planners had never imagined.

“I think we have two problems,” Cliff said with what he hoped was a diplomatic tone. “Supplies, yes. And this strange … object. Too much here for us to deal with.”

Abduss said carefully, “We had thought somewhat the same.”

“Look,” Mayra said directly, “it’s nearly time to take the captain up to his conscious stage — ”

“I want Beth Marble brought up, too.”

Both of them blinked. “But she is — ”

“Capable, right.” He could see a lot of trouble coming, and he didn’t want to be alone. Who did?

“But there is no protocol requiring — ”

Cliff held up his hand and looked across the table steadily, letting them think about it. “Let’s just do it.”

“She is … not your wife.”

“No, but she has ship skills and can pilot.”

“Not until we can ask the captain,” Abduss said. His face was firm.

TWO

They told the captain when he came out of cold sleep, bleary-eyed, stiff, still lying on a slab — and then his eyes began blinking with startling speed, alert.

Abduss said, “You aren’t going to believe this.”

Captain Redwing’s skeptical grin crinkled the leathery skin around his eyes as he said, “Try me.”

So they told him, while they gingerly massaged his stiff, cold muscles and applied the necessary chemistries. Cliff hung back and bided his time while the Wickramsinghs took Redwing through the whole story.

Redwing sat up and shook his black mane, his bronzed skin blue-veined at the wrists, and said, “You’re sure?”

So they told him some more. Showed the screens, the time log, and finally the close-ups of the back of the bowl. The captain stared at the bowl image, and Cliff could see him mentally put it aside to concentrate on the supplies issue.

“The drive not running to specs. Five crew changes! You couldn’t do anything?” He jabbed a finger at the Wickramsinghs.

“We did not know what to do,” Mayra said reasonably. “There were — ”

“We’ve run this way for — what? — decades!”

Abduss bristled in her defense, face stiff. “This was not in the protocols.”

“Protocols be damned. I — ”

“The leptonic drive is one issue, Captain,” Cliff said, “and this thing ahead is quite another — ”

“You’re Science.” Redwing cut him off with a chopping hand signal. “This is crew.”

Cliff sat back and nursed his coffee and remembered all the rumors before launch. How Redwing was from one of the families that had made a bundle out of the Indian casinos. How he’d breezed through MIT with great grades and a wake of surly enemies. Made his rep in the Mars exploration and exploitation. Been a real sonofabitch, sure, but he had gotten things goddamn well done. Maybe not the worst recommendation, considering. Cliff was going to have to follow orders.

“We cannot go on like this,” Mayra said, ever the diplomat. “Our external diagnostics are working well, so we are sure there is not some property of the interstellar gas that is the root of our drive problem. We rely on the microwave view to diagnose the ramscoop fields — ”

“We’ll review it all,” Redwing said crisply. He bit his lip. “And the earlier crews — Jacobs, Chen, Ambertson, Abar, Kalaish — all top people…”

Redwing went through an extensive engineering review with them. Systems, flows, balances, malfunction indices. After hours of work, he was just as stumped as the ship diagnostic systems, which were better engineers than any of them. Nothing seemed wrong, but the ship could do no better. Seeker had performed perfectly in the first few decades, achieving their terminal velocity when the pressure of incoming matter on its ram fields equaled the thrust it got out of hydrogen fusion. They had been losing velocity through tens of light-years — slightly at first, then more.

Crews had tested the obvious explanations. Maybe the interstellar gas was getting too thin, so they weren’t taking in enough hydrogen to drive the fusion zone at max. That idea didn’t pencil out in the detailed numbers. The fusion drive was a souped-up version of magnetic cylinders, each a rotating torus that contained fusing plasma. Boron–proton reactions were the burning meat and potatoes, the protons shoveled in fresh from the ramscoop. The rotating magnetic equilibria held fusing plasma in their bottles, releasing the alpha particles into the nozzle that drove them forward. It had worked steadily now for centuries. It looked fine.

The next crew thought there was too much dust ahead, so perhaps the fusion burn was tamped down. They found an ingenious way to pluck dust samples from their bow shock and measure it carefully. Nothing wrong there, either.

There were more ideas and trials, and now it was getting serious. They had started with plenty of spare supplies, but now it wasn’t going to be enough.

“Our big fat margin of error got … eaten,” Redwing told them.

Seeker would arrive nearly a century late. They might barely squeeze through, if the expected level of leaks and losses did not happen … but nobody wanted to calculate the odds of that. Because they all knew the odds were bad.

They all slept on their problems, and the next ship-day Cliff was first up. Another revival symptom — insomnia sometimes lasted weeks. Along with that, and no surprise: irritability. The damn noise wasn’t helping. The best solution was to say as little as possible. Meanwhile, his mind churned away at the deeper puzzle of the bowl that hung like a riddle on their optical viewing screens. The image rippled from plasma refraction, but Cliff could make out tantalizing, momentary patches of detail in it.

The world as a bowl, he thought, trying to think of a better term. Flamboyantly artificial. What would choose to live in such a place?

They held a meeting, and then another, without anything new turning up. At the end of another frustrating conversation, Cliff said quietly, “I want Beth revived. We need more minds on this problem, and we’re stalled.”

Redwing pursed his lips briefly and shook his head. “We’d better keep lean.”

“Only if we’re going to just forge on and hope things improve without our doing anything.” Cliff said it in a rush, finally getting out what he and Abduss had agreed upon.

Before Redwing could respond, Abduss chimed in, “I found another slight decrease in our velocity this morning. Nearly a full kilometer per second.”

A long silence, Redwing carefully letting nothing show in his face. The signs of strain in the man had been mounting. Little gestures of frustration, a broken cup, time off by himself, little social talk. The psychers back Earthside had a high opinion of Redwing’s leadership style, but to Cliff the man had seemed to be best at bureaucratic infighting. No managers to game around out here, though.

“So whatever’s wrong, it’s getting worse,” Redwing said.

Nobody answered.

Cliff said carefully, “Beth has piloting and engineering skills, pretty broad.”

Only when the words were out did he recognize the pun. Mayra smiled but said nothing. A pretty broad. And of course, Cliff’s longtime “associate,” as the polite social term had it.

Redwing let a wry smile play on his face for a few seconds. “Okay, let’s warm her up.”

They started Beth’s revival. The protocols were straightforward, but every case had variations. While the slow processes worked in her, they spent another two days looking at the slowdown problem, getting nowhere. The ship was flying hard, hitting molecular cloudlets and, increasingly, vagrant wisps of plasma. “That’s the plume from the jet we see,” Abduss said. “We’re starting to hit the wake.”

Then the ramscoop would need to navigate, and there would be no data to let it know how to work. The artificial intelligences that tirelessly regulated the scoop fields were smarter than mere humans, adjusting the magnetic scoops and reaction rates — but they were also obsessively narrow. The AIs worked as well as they could, making estimates based on many decades of in-flight experience, guessing at causes — but they could not think outside their conceptual box. “Savants of the engine,” Mayra called them. Cliff wondered if she was being ironic.

“Look, we need to make a decision,” Abduss insisted. “Yes?”

“I do, you mean,” Redwing said. He made a cage of his fingers and peered into it. He was pale and drawn, and not all of that came from his recovery from the long sleep. Nobody had slept much.

Cliff said, “Maybe this is a godsend.”

Redwing shot him a questioning glance. “You always had an odd sense of humor.”

They had not gotten along particularly well in staff and crew meetings. Redwing had held out for making all Scientific Personnel de facto crew members, rigidly set in the chain of command. Cliff and others had blocked him. Scientific Personnel had their own, looser command structure that dealt with Redwing only near the top of the pyramid. Cliff was the highest-ranking Scientific Personnel officer awake. Of course, all that procedural detail was decades ago — no, centuries, he reminded himself — but in personal memory, it still loomed as recent.

He tried a warm, reasonable tone. “If we hadn’t been slowed down, we’d be blazing right by this weird thing. No way we could even swing around that star — say, let’s call it Wickramsingh’s Star, eh? With joint discovery rights for all.”

Thin smiles all around. They needed a little levity. Nobody aboard would ever make a buck from interstellar enterprises.… “But now, going slower, maybe we can make a small correction with a pretty fair delta-V, get a closer look at the thing.”

Redwing looked blank. So did the Wickramsinghs.

Cliff said carefully, “It’s artificial. Maybe we can — ”

“Get help?” Redwing’s mouth twisted skeptically. “I admit, that’s a bizarre object, but it’s not our goal to explore passing phenomena along the way. We’re headed for Glory, and that’s it.”

Cliff had thought about this moment for two days. He spread his hands as if making a deal, splitting the difference. “Maybe we can do both.”

Redwing’s face had already settled into the firm-but-confident expression that served him so well back Earthside. Then he paused, puzzled, and almost against his will asked, “How’s that?”

“Say we use the plasma plume from the star. We’re running up into the fringes already. It’s rich in hydrogen, right?” A nod to Abduss and Mayra. “And a lot more ionized than the ordinary interstellar gas we’ve been riding through, scooping up with the magnetic funnels and blowing out the back, all these decades. For a ramscoop motor, this is high-quality input. Let’s use it to pick up some speed.”

A heartbeat went by, two. Cliff thought, Keep it simple, and said, “That jet’s spurting straight out the back of the thing. Let’s fly up it.”

Redwing asked, “Abduss, isn’t that plume moving at relativistic speeds? In the wrong direction? It’d slow us down.”

Was Redwing right? Mayra was nodding. Recklessly, Cliff said, “That could work, too.”

“You make my head hurt,” Redwing said. “What are you on about now?”

“With what we’ve got for consumables, we’re going to arrive dead at Glory. If we can’t speed up, we’ll have to stop for supplies. Here, now. Make orbit around Wickramsingh’s Star. Deal with the natives.”

They stared at him.

Cliff played his next card. “We’re overtaking the star. Every hour makes a velocity change tougher.”

Mayra’s eyes widened, startled — but surely she had thought of this? — and then she nodded.

Redwing wasn’t a man to leap at a suggestion. But he screwed his mouth around, eyes seeking the low, mottled carbon-fiber ceiling, and said, “Let’s do the calculation.”

That took another day.

While the others checked their screens and fretted, Cliff watched Beth come up out of the long dark cold and into his arms. He claimed the right to massage her sore self, rub her skin with the lotions and soothe away the panic that raced across her face, coming up out of decades’-long sleep. He watched her pretty face fill with color, rosy with freckles, her red hair still a vibrant halo. She had been uneasy about the whole prospect, kept it from him and failed, and now here was her fear again, in fluttering eyelids, vagrant jitters that flickered in her face — until her cloudy eyes focused, squinted, and she saw him hovering against the ceramic sky and a flush brightened in her, surprise racing, and she smiled.

“I … what … cold…”

“Don’t talk. Just breathe. Everything’s fine,” he lied.

“If you’re here, it’s gotta be.” She reached for him anyway, grimacing at the effort. It was like a new sun coming up.

THREE

Beth Marble felt life coming back into her like a muddy, warm flow. Seeing Cliff first made her last thoughts — those fears of decades ago, as the sedative swarmed up in her — trickle away. He’s here! Looking the same. It worked! We’re at Glory, then.

A few minutes ago in relative time, she had felt the old clammy panic. This could be the last sight I see.… And the adrenaline surge of dread still pounded through her. And I thought I was so ready, so sure.…

She smiled at this memory of her former self and carefully put that past aside. What was that mantra in high school? Be here now.

Cliff spoke, his words warm and steady. “Everything’s fine.”

She answered with a croaking, “If you’re here, it’s gotta be.”

His hands on her felt wonderful and she followed his whispered orders. Lie back, just take it, enjoy. Smell the cool metallic air. The spreading glow of tissues swelling, blood flowing at speeds her cells had not known for years, tingling, surges of pleasure as her senses revived … Hey, I could get to like this.

Then she heard the growl of the ship.

The vast majority of the crew had gone into sleep before SunSeeker even started, but as pilot she had stayed up for over a year as Seeker gathered speed. It felt good, to be at the helm of a starship, she recalled — even if the yoke helm was nearly superfluous, since electronics really steered the magnetics and lepton-catalytic fusion burn.

So she knew the thrumming long bass notes that told her the ship was running full bore. She didn’t need to hear that; she could feel it.

And the subtle tenor in the background, when Seeker was in reversed configuration, and so decelerating — it wasn’t there.

She listened hard as Cliff’s hands welcomed her back into the world, and no, they weren’t at Glory. Something was wrong.

Redwing’s well-managed face was a study in guarded reluctance.

He did not like any of the alternatives on the table. Nobody did. But Cliff could see in the doubting downturn of his mouth that he did not want to forge ahead into long, lean years, hoping the drive would improve.

Abduss scribbled on a work slate. By this time, Cliff could read his expression pretty well. The man was steady and reliable, risk averse, with an automatic distrust of radical new ideas — just right for crewing the long years out here. Yet despite himself, Abduss was trying out the idea, and liking it. Now he had a share in a great discovery, and it was dawning that he wanted more. So did Cliff, for that matter.

But mostly, Cliff wanted to live. With Beth. They could marry, after the longest courtship in history.

Cliff knew enough to let the silence in their wardroom lengthen. Beth sensed the score now, and her careful look took in the tension: Redwing’s folded hands, Abduss and Mayra keeping their eyes on their slates. The background rumble of the ramscoop fusion engines was like a persistent reminder; Newton’s laws don’t wait. Redwing stared into space. In the end, Abduss looked up. “We could make such a maneuver, yes. But very vigilantly.”

“What do you make of it, Beth?” Redwing asked softly.

“I’m pretty sure the ship can be helmed in that accurately,” she said. “It’s within specs, the delta-V and aiming. I can tune the comm deck AIs to smooth it a bit. It’ll be a ten-day maneuver. But I do wish I knew why the engines aren’t working to design.”

“Don’t we all,” Redwing said ruefully, unfolding his hands. “But we play the hand we’re dealt.”

It was as though fresh air had come into the room. Four faces awaited the captain’s word.

They had awakened him to make this decision, and so far he had shied away from it. Now Cliff had a slender moment to wonder at his own ideas, if he’d followed them far enough. Life’s a gamble. He had a gathering, foreboding sense — and a heart-pounding curiosity that would not give him rest. Life persists.

Redwing’s mouth firmed up. “Let’s do it.”

Beth had the flight plan Alfvén numbers tuned just about right. She found it gratifying to see the ship respond to her helm, even though it was a bit spongy. It took eleven days to make the swerve. There were dark days when it was not clear whether Seeker was responding correctly to the maneuver. The magnetic scoops rippled with stresses but performed to code. With Abduss checking her every move, she brought them through, though not without some polite arguments.

Cliff and Beth spent a lot of time in their room together. The warm comforts of bed helped.

She preferred taking ginger snaps from her recovery allotment of “indulgences.” These she had selected for just this, a crisp bite floating on sugar, to the richness of chocolate chip, which she also had because Cliff liked them. Though with either she always had a cup of cocoa, the warm brown mama she needed, Cliff had carried none but stern Kona coffee in his wakeup stash. No cookies at all.

“What do you remember about going into the chill-sleep?” she asked while they licked crumbs off each other.

He smiled dreamily. “They said I would feel a small prick in my left hand and I thought that was funny but couldn’t laugh. Could barely crack a smile. Then — waking up.”

Beth grinned and finished her cocoa. “I thought of the same dumb joke. Not that, in your case, I know what a small one feels like.”

The remark got more laughter than it deserved, but that was just fine, too.

Beth said with a thin voice, “Y’know, looking at that round thing from this angle, first thing I thought was, it seems like a giant wok with a hole at its base.”

“You’re thinking about food again. Time to eat.”

Her old fear subsided while she worked, and to keep it at bay she indulged herself with Cliff. He was the sun of her solar system, had been since the first week they met during the crew selections trials. Her parents had both died the year before in a car crash, and that cast a shadow over her application, in the eyes of the review board. They wanted crew with a long history of steady performance, no emotional unsettled issues that might boil over years later.

Losing the two central figures of her life had eclipsed her joy, made her withdraw. She had not thought of the affair with Cliff as an antidote to her grief, but its magic had played out that way. He brought out the sun again, eclipse over, and it showed up in everything she did. Especially in her psych exams and, more tellingly, in the return of her social skills. Later, in training, she had learned that about the time she met Cliff, she was slated to be cut in the next winnowing. As she put it later, “Then Cliffy happened to me.” The visible changes in her had saved her slot. Then her performance at electromagnetic piloting, a still-evolving new discipline, had excelled.

She was here because of him. She let him know that, in long, passionate bouts of lovemaking. Sex was the flip side of death, she had always thought — the urge to leave something behind, ordained by evolution way back in the unconscious. Their sweaty hours “in the sack” (not a phrase she liked, but it sure fit here, because Cliff used a hammock) certainly seemed to confirm the idea, as never before in her admittedly rather scant love life. At meals, she was afraid that it showed in her face, which now reddened at the slightest recollection of how different she was now, wanton and happy and well out of the eclipse shadow.

One evening, after she had set them in a long, curving arc toward the bowl, the captain allowed spirits to be broken out. They held a sort of impromptu group brainstorming session, with Mayra presiding as de facto referee. Ideas flew back and forth. What would they find up ahead? What the hell could the bowl be? Squeezebulbs were lifted, and lifted again. Beth got them all laughing. There was singing, predictably awful, which made more laughter. The captain drank more than the rest of them put together and she began to understand the pressures the man was under.

The maneuver they were planning was astonishing. The jet was far denser than any plasma Seeker had been designed to fly into. But Seeker’s specs were broad enough to include collisions with molecular clouds. You never knew what you would run into in interstellar space, Beth thought. Never the bowl, not that, but SunSeeker had been made robust.

Stars buried in a cloud could ionize spherical shells around them. SunSeeker might have to brave a cloud, and so the plasma spheres. Its prow sprouted lasers that could identify solid obstacles up to the size of houses, and vaporize them with a single gigawatt pulse. The lasers were tough, hanging out in the plasma hurricane near SunSeeker’s bow shock. They were going to need that.

Wickramsingh’s Star was moving counter to the galaxy’s rotation. That was somewhat unusual, though not rare. They were headed the same way, because Glory’s system lay behind Sol, in the sense of the rotation most stars share in the immense beehive pinwheel that is a spiral galaxy. That was why they had not noticed the star’s oddity before — the bowl cupped around the star, so they could not see it from SunSeeker or from Earth. As Seeker overtook the system, moving directly behind, the star had suddenly seemed to pop into existence from behind its shawl. And it was quite nearby.

“Mmmmmm. It’s moving how quickly?” Beth asked in the next meeting. Five of them just fit five monitor chairs in the control room.

“More than ten thousand kilometers per second,” Mayra said.

“Look, that’s damn fast.”

Mayra beamed. “Yes. I was keeping this precise fact for the right moment.”

“And that’s nearly our ship velocity. Sure seems high for a star.”

Abduss nodded. “A bit less than ours, so we overtook it. But yes, unusual for a star.”

They glanced at each other and Beth wondered why the Wickramsinghs liked unveiling mysteries one step at a time. A cultural thing? Maybe they just hadn’t wanted to shock her too much, so soon after revival? She had to admit, her head was still feeling a bit woozy — and not from the cold or the drugs. Conceptual overload. If she hadn’t seen the thing on the screens with her own eyes …

Try to think straight. Beth asked, “Could … could the flares we see at the center of the star be responsible?”

Mayra shook her head. “How? Surely they are caught by the cap.”

Beth drew herself a sketch with an unsteady hand. “The flares point toward the cap, and the star is accelerating away from the cap? And there’s a hole in it.”

Abduss said, “I wondered about that. The cap keeps away, even though the star’s gravity attracts it.”

She thought of such colossal masses in flight, the balance of forces necessary to keep them from colliding. How? “What’s moving all this?”

“The jet escapes, driving the entire configuration forward,” Abduss said. The Wickramsinghs shook their heads, apparently still amazed at the immense contraption. She could see why they had awakened Cliff first, rather than Redwing. Cliff’s specialty lay in dealing with the oddities of life that Glory might hold, at being flexible. A biologist, true, not an astrophysics type. Yet he had devised the idea of flying up the jet, and they hadn’t.

A long still silence … and an idea came, lifted an eyebrow at her. She recalled suddenly that old phrase for understanding: to see the light.

“The missing element, it’s — the light,” she said. “The whole setup has to be using the starlight from Wickramsingh’s Star.”

“How?” Redwing asked skeptically.

“Let’s get as many spectral views of this thing as we can on the approach,” Beth said.

She had her add-ins working so sent a question and got back

SPECTRAL SYNTHESIS-BASED ABUNDANCE MEASUREMENTS OF FE AND THE ALPHA ELEMENTS MG, SI, CA, AND TI —

— so she realized she would just have to rely on ship’s diagnostics visually presented. This was going to be the perfect collision of shipboard smart systems and the unknown — with her in the middle. At hallucinogenic speeds.

She had a big fat intuition and nothing more. Everyone had a right to their own intuitions, but no one had a right to their own facts. Best to let the facts speak.

Now came Beth’s moment. Piloting is not a committee event. Even Redwing could only watch and make decisions, while the artistry of magnetic steering lay in Beth’s hands.

“Wish me luck,” she said with strained bravado as the ship drifted into the pearly plume of the jet.

Cliff hugged her and kissed her cheek, but she was already riveted on the lively screens curving before her acceleration couch. He whispered, “Good luck, yes,” and retreated to his own couch, within watching distance.

Wickramsingh’s Star was a smoldering beacon seen through the knothole that let the jet escape. “What’ll we call it?” Beth asked from the board.

“Knothole, then,” Redwing said tensely.

Near the star’s hot spot, at the foot of the blossoming jet, coronal magnetic arches twisted in endless fury. Storms jostled one another all over the star, brimming with X-ray violence. It almost seemed as if the red dwarf had a skin disease.

They swept in behind, lining up. The speed of overtaking was now visible from hour to hour as the bowl swelled. Beth went with little sleep, aided by mild performance drugs that she carefully monitored. Abduss and Mayra spelled her when she started to nod off. She stayed with the board, trying to remain steady through her jittery anxiety — but aren’t pilots supposed to be rock-steady, girl? — and couldn’t help but speculate. The bowl’s outside, seen in infrared, was crusted and simmering in the eternal starnight. Colossal structural beams coiled around it in a dark longitude–latitude grid. It hung there, spinning, dutifully following behind its parent star. Its cool nightside scarcely reflected any of the bright stars.

“The spectra look to be some metal–carbon composite,” Mayra observed. “Not like our alloys at all.”

Cliff had no important role in all this. He made the meals and washed up while the crew worked their bridge stations with unrelenting devotion. Every plot change they checked and rechecked. Beth could tell that Cliff was impressed by their close teamwork, once the goal was clear. They could focus on technical details at last, and were obviously happier to do so.

Cliff made himself fade into the background. He had little role here, but he didn’t sleep much either. Beth could read his unspoken thought: If he was going to die, at least he wanted to be awake.

In the unending din of the scoop engines, it was a struggle not to let feelings overly influence her thinking. Irritation mounted as she tried to do precise calculations and maneuvers. She projected all kinds of fantasies upon the growing mote as they screeched around, the ramscoop fields readjusting to a turning maneuver they had never been designed for. Artfully, Abduss and Beth used the star’s gravity to swing Seeker into the exact vector that the dwarf sun was patiently following.

Beth got edgy with their eyes on her — or was that the fatigue talking? Redwing sensed this, so he and Cliff spent their time writing the report for Earthside, with full data and visuals. They were on the bridge, sending it out through the laser link at their stern, when it struck her. What were the odds that SunSeeker would come upon Wickramsingh’s Star when their velocities were aligned?

Redwing looked startled when she pointed this out. “We’re both headed toward Glory. Damn.”

“They want to colonize Glory, too?” Mayra asked.

“Can’t be,” Abduss countered when he came onto the comm deck. “What would be the point? That bowl has tens of millions of times the area of a planet.”

This seemed an obvious killer argument. Still … their velocities were aligned. Bound for Glory. With Sol dead aft.

“Maybe they just wander from star to star?” the captain asked. “Interstellar tourists?”

Nobody answered.

Redwing said cautiously, “You were briefed on the gravitational waves?” and looked around.

They all nodded. “Can’t keep secrets from the tech types, boss,” Beth said without moving her eyes from the shifting displays.

Abduss said, “You suggest perhaps this construction, this bowl, is seeking the source?”

“Makes sense, I’d think. A puzzle, isn’t it?” Redwing looked around again.

Mayra said, “It is noise, or so scientists thought when we departed.”

“Any chance this bowl thing could be the source of the grav waves?” Redwing gestured. “Maybe this jet?”

“There are no masses of size that could make such waves,” Cliff said. “I read up on it while Beth was waking.”

Abduss said, “The Glory system has no obvious enormous masses either.”

Redwing thought. “Maybe they’re going to Glory for its grav wave generator?”

Cliff shrugged. None of their ideas sounded right.

“Not that intuition is a reliable guide here,” Beth said wryly, over her shoulder. She never took her eyes from the panels. Soon enough they got back to work, plotting and piloting. The intense work was a relief to them, a respite from the uncertainties of their lot. Beth saw Cliff come onto the bridge; he clearly envied them. At least their days were full.

They vectored in on the center of Wickramsingh’s Star’s bowl, keeping a respectful distance. Beth trimmed their velocity by cutting back the engines. “Maybe letting them rest a bit will make them run better later,” she said, but she didn’t believe it. The jet plasma running through the Knothole had plenty of fast ions in its plume, and these pushed steadily against their ramscoop fields. Shudders ran the length of the long ship. The deck hummed with long, slow tremors. For the first time in her life, Beth felt like an old sea captain, riding out a hurricane.

Now the jet was visible to the unaided eye as they neared it. They could see it as a pearly churn lit with darting flashes of blue and yellow — recombination of the plasma, Abduss said, atoms condensing out of the torrent and sputtering out their characteristic spectra. The control deck lights were ruby for visibility, stepped far down. A direct view through a window would have burned out their eyes and set the room aflame.

As it flowed away from the bowl, the long jet was oddly tight. Beth close-upped the views. “Looks like the jet narrows down at the Knothole, then flares out. Look, some regularly spaced bright spots in the outflow.”

“An instability, I would gather,” Abduss said. He was fidgeting but he kept his voice calm. “The jet must have been magnetically squeezed as it passed through the Knothole.”

Corkscrew filaments crawled along it, Beth saw, like one of those old barber poles. They could now see longer along the luminous lance of the jet as it speared through the opening, an exact circle far bigger than the span between Earth and its moon. Mayra trained all their scopes on the rim of the circle. The microwave spectrum crackled with bursts of noise from the spaced bright spots: pinched-in electrons singing their protests.

Abduss close-upped the bowl at a good angle and Cliff felt his heart leap as the resolution grew.

In the side-scatter of the star’s somber rays, they saw what looked like enormous coils, bathed in lukewarm beauty. “Those are bigger than mountain ranges,” Abduss said in a whisper.

Without thinking it through, Cliff had expected that whatever built the bowl had long since died out. Decay, collapse, extinction — these were the fates of whole species hammered on the anvil of time, not merely of civilizations. This thing had to be old. But it still worked. The star’s solar wind got funneled stably into the jet, pushing the whole vast construct to high velocity. What could have thought of this, never mind actually build it?

Beth began getting stronger signals in the microwave spectra — a rising buzz of electromagnetic signals as Seeker neared the cap. Mayra began to detect a haze of watery nitrogen at the innermost edge of the circle, farther in than the coils.

“Air?” Beth asked aloud. No one answered. Cliff thought about the inner surface of the bowl, a land holding millions of times Earth’s area.

And more: Close-upped through the churning refractions of SunSeeker’s plasma shroud, the shell clearly rotated as a single piece. “Of course,” Mayra said. “Centrifugal gravity.”

They merged their measurements and built up an image on the main screen. The bright plasma jet pierced the bowl’s hemisphere through a ribbed hole. “Kind of like a weird teacup,” Redwing said. “Cupworld.”

For long moments no one spoke. Then Redwing said with elaborate casualness, “Abduss, check if there’s any new tightbeam traffic from Earth.”

“There has been none for — ”

“Now,” Redwing said firmly. Beth understood: Abduss needed something to do.

The deck took up a long, deep vibration none of them had ever heard before, an ominous bass note they felt rather than heard. “We’re entering the edges of the jet,” Beth said tersely. “Picking up — well, plasma surf, I guess you’d call it.”

Redwing frowned. “Full brake. Cycle the magnetics.”

“Roger.” Beth worked the large board, eyes never still.

The bowl seemed to swell quickly. “We’re locked in on the jet.” The deep bass note swelled. “And — slowing. We’re flying straight up the jet.”

SunSeeker made its agonizing turn. To pivot the ship on its plasma plume demanded the skill of an ice skater, combined with an acrobat, spinning in three dimensions under thrust. In interstellar space, where most hydrogen is a gas and not broken into ions and electrons, Seeker ionized the gas ahead with a shock wave driven by its own oscillating magnetic snowplow. The pressure waves plunged ahead, grabbing the electrons available and smacking them into the hydrogen gas molecules. Properly adjusted — which took Beth only moments to tune — there was enough time for the hydrogen to break up into protons and electrons. The gas fried into a torch of fizzing ions. That left a plasma column just ahead of the ship, ready to be netted and swallowed by their magnetic dipole scoop, then fed down into the fusion reaction chambers. The trick was to torque the ship while riding atop this angry, spitting column.

Seeker curved sideways by a mere few degrees, letting the target star gain a little on them. Then they curled behind it. Lacy filaments played before them as the jet grew near. They swerved fully into the jet with a hard, wrenching turn that slammed them all against the left arms of their couches for … forever.

Starships do not easily change directions. Sweat popped out on Beth’s brow; a swipe of her hand on a touchpoint started a cool breeze. Throughout SunSeeker, joints strummed, echoing in the long corridors. Auxiliary craft shifted and strained on their mountings. Beth wondered if the ship could take it, and then if she could.

Finally they straightened and felt the push of the sun’s jet against their magnetic collector fields. Beth surged forward from the deceleration, straps cutting into her. In the wraparound omniview screen, set to all parts of the spectrum, plumes of incandescent plasma skated and veered around their prow. Their total speed was higher than the star’s, but as they came around under the great bowl and into the furious jet, another force came into play. She felt it, became alarmed, then understood. SunSeeker began to twist, corkscrewing steadily around in the rushing plasma torrent. They all felt the grinding force of it, a giant’s slow twirl.

“Y’know, I was kinda wondering what held this jet so straight and tight,” Beth said in a conversational tone, her hands moving quick and sure over the many induction controls. “Magnetic fields do the job, generated by a current in the jet itself.”

“Uh, so?” Redwing said. He was not a technical type, she recalled.

“Somebody’s designed this to use the star’s own fields, sucking them into a jet. They form those helical filaments we saw on our approach.”

“Currents?” Mayra was alarmed. “We are mostly metal, a conductor — ”

“So the currents are running around us, but not into us. Conveys angular momentum. Same as airliners flying through lightning on Earth. But — what a ride! Feel the twist!”

Beth turned to grin at them all and saw startled dismay. Okay, not everybody likes surfing. An acquired taste.

“Hey, I’ve got us under control. No sweat. It’s a big magnetic helix.” Put forward the best news, worry about the rest later. “And that means we’ll follow a longer path, take more time — so we’ll get more deceleration out of the jet.”

No change of expression. Passengers! No fun in them …

They ran hard and hot for hours and then hours more. Beth felt the strain, but somehow didn’t mind. Riding the plasma knots without battering the ship was … well, fun. Her heart was pounding away joyfully. Excitement did that for her as nothing else could. She had been a skydiver and surfer and skier, savoring the sensation of dealing with artful speed. Zest!

But whenever she grinned, Redwing frowned. After a while, claiming that she needed the stretch, she got out of her harness and couch and stood while she worked the board. The AIs were laboring hard, carrying out a lot of the minor adjustments. For a while there, the ship gained a lot of charge on seams and edges, and Beth was afraid something would start shorting out. Too many electrons jockeying on the skin. But then she blew the charge off with a proton-rich plasma pulse — pure inspiration, plus freshman physics — and they got right with Mister Coulomb again.

She stayed standing. This was like surfing the longest wave in the universe, buffeted and sprayed and rough — but it thrilled her to her soul, every zooming kilometer of the way.

And here came the Knothole. She got back into her couch. Fun’s over … maybe.

Somebody was talking behind her and she let it go. Pilots don’t listen to passengers, not if they’re smart.

Beth lunged painfully forward into her shoulder straps. The bowl ahead yawned like a flat plane — with a bull’s-eye target. She could see intricate ribbing around its polar opening, a ridge around the Knothole. Engineered current-carrying circuits, bigger than continents? Something had to make the magnetic fields that shaped plasma from the sun, fields that were also pushing against their ship now with a fierce, blinding gale. Something huge.

“No trouble decelerating now,” she said matter-of-factly, to calm the others. She need not turn to look at them; she could smell their fear. They swam upstream against the jet. Now the magnetic braking was worse than anything Seeker had ever been designed for. The ship popped and groaned. The bowl came rushing at them. Deep bass notes rang through the ship, vibrating Beth’s couch, rattling everything.…

Focus. She flew through the bowl’s exhaust Knothole, hugging the edge to avoid cremation. A noose of magnetic fields at the Knothole boundary tightened the jet like water in a constriction. Flow velocity rose against the ship. Running creases crossed the shock waves they rode. She saw the bowl was thicker at the Knothole than elsewhere — to carry bigger stresses? And eerie lightning played along the Knothole rim.

She dispatched an AI to map the Knothole magnetic geometry and in seconds a color-coded 3-D map unfurled on a screen. “The noose we’re going through is bounded by dipolar fields,” she said abstractly. “And the dipoles are kept in line with another field, perpendicular to the dipoles — so the magnetic stresses can’t reconnect and die. Neat.”

Murmurs from behind her egged her on. Analysis, tension-relieving talk, cheers — all just a chorus she ignored.

“Plus, ladies and gentlemen, it’s radioactive as hell around here,” Beth said, adding brightly, “but an interstellar surfboard — that’s us — is designed for that.”

They slammed ahead, losing speed. She surged forward in her harness, adjusted, and surged again. Surfing the big one. Ride of a lifetime. If you survive …

The prow tried to fight sideways but she jockeyed it back. Again. And again. Each time she got the feel of it better. Offhand she noticed she was drenched in sweat. No wonder I can’t smell their fear anymore.…

She caught a glimmer refracted through the streaming plasma ahead, a small sphere wobbling toward them — Wickramsingh’s Star. The bowl flattened, became the sidewise horizon. The ship howled with its labors.

For Beth, time ceased to mean anything. She countered every veer and vortex, kept them straight, swore, blinked back sweat — and they were through.

The sky opened. Abruptly they were rising above a silvery plain. The jet hammered at them still. “Wonderful!” Cliff choked out, still hanging forward in his harness. Hollow cheers, ragged. They were rising above a vast white plain, but slower, slower — and then they turned again.

“Getting out of the jet,” Beth said, as if passing the butter. If they stayed in the jet, they’d be slowed further, back through the Knothole and out again.

“We’re taking a lot of ohmic heating in the skin,” Abduss said, voice tight with worry.

“I can barely hold the vector,” Mayra said calmly. Cliff knew by now the subtle tones of tension in her voice.

The white-hot jet plume thinned, then seemed to veer aside. Rough turbulence struck, slamming them around in their couches, bringing fresh metal shrieks from the ship.

“Out!” Mayra shouted. “We’re out.”

“I’d say we’re in,” Redwing said.

They cheered and all eyes were on the screens. Now they could see the inside of the bowl … and it was a vast sheeted plain brimming with light. They rose swiftly, peeling off from the jet to the side, plasma falling behind, vistas clearing. Again there curved away over the misty distance great longitude and latitude grids in sleek, silvered sections the size of worlds. The sections had boundaries, thin dark lines, demarking different curvatures of a greater mirror — and from that their eyes told them that these were all focused far away.

Silence. In a whisper Abduss said, “Mirrors … reflecting the sunlight back, inward, onto the star. That’s what causes the hot spot.”

Beth nodded, awed. Yes — otherwise the huge curved mirrors would have blinded them instantly.

They slewed to the side, turning, the screens taking in, across the immense celestial curvature, hazy tinctures of … green. She zoomed the scopes pointing inward along the great spherical cap. The lower latitudes of the inner bowl teemed with intensely green territories and washes of blue water. Lakes — no, oceans. The eye could not quite grasp what it saw. They were cruising along near the jet axis, and before them unfurled a landscape of arcing grandeur.

Beth calculated angles and distances. Any of the grid sections had a larger surface than the entire Earth. Each boasted intricate detail, webs strung among green brown continents and spacious seas, framing immense areas.

And her vision was all getting foggy with fatigue. Aches seeped through her.

“I’ve had enough,” Beth said. “Climbing up that jet burned away our velocity enough. The bowl and star system were moving pretty fast, and now we’re in their rest frame. We’re marginally trapped in the potential well of that star.”

Captain Redwing said, “You what?”

“Captain — ”

“No, it’s okay, I get it,” he said suddenly. “The scale of this thing, it’s just mind-scrambling, Beth. The bowl is the size of a little solar system, right, and you can just leave the ship circling the sun, right? Are we too close? Will we heat up too much?”

“We’ll be okay.” She visibly straightened, her pale lips firming. One last effort. “I’ll leave the ramscoop idling, keeping the fields high, so we won’t be sprayed with radiation. It runs rough that way, but we have no choice. We’ve matched velocities with the system, so it’ll be months before we could be in trouble. We’ll be in an eccentric orbit, right, Abduss? I’ll be back at the controls before anything can happen, but somebody stay on trajectory watch, please.”

Redwing looked puzzled.

Beth gave him a weak smile. “I’m going to sleep.”

She staggered out. Behind her she heard Redwing’s, “How can anyone leave this?”

And then Cliff was with her, guiding her, but lurching a little himself.

FOUR

Beth thrashed and jerked awake. The hammock shuddered. Her legs and arms were cramping from armpit to fingertips, hip to toes.

The dream faded. The controls weren’t under her hands; the ship wasn’t roaring through a plume of star-hot plasma. She hugged herself and tried to sleep. Cliff wasn’t there. How long had she been sleeping?

Presently she gave up and went to the bridge, her boots thumping, bringing her fully awake. Her hands were trembling, though. Not what you want in a pilot …

“Hi,” Cliff said, grinning. “Redwing left me on watch. Abduss is computing an orbit for us, unless he flaked out, too.”

Beth was famished. She got out bread and fruit and ate as she watched the displays. She was just a little jealous of the others, who must have been watching for hours. And it was glorious.

Structures fanned out from the Knothole. She was now watching from the other side, gazing down at a vast sprawl. Her eyes kept tricking her, making her think this was all nearby, like looking down on Earth … but she was gazing over interplanetary distances. The tubing around the Knothole must be tremendous, the size of continents.

Far below the ship stretched away the wok-shaped mirrored shell, faring into a ring of green-tinged ocher. Between SunSeeker and those lands was a shimmering layer — atmosphere, she guessed. Held in … how? She squinted and thought she could catch a sheen, the star reflecting from some transparent barrier. A membrane? She squinted at what seemed like millions of square kilometers of clear plastic sandwich wrap. The diffuse layer stretched away toward the distance, where she saw the lands of the belt — the great cylindrical section that formed the thick rim of … Cupworld? She didn’t like Redwing’s term but couldn’t think of a better one. No mirrors there. Continents, yes, cloud-shrouded and green. Deserts as well, sandy and bright under the unending glare of a star that never set. Indeed, never set on all this colossal construction. And what lives here?

Her hands were trembling even more.

This immensity was impossible, too much; Beth looked away.

“They’ve made a world … a habitat out of the bowl,” Mayra said wonderingly. “A vast green thing.”

Beth took a long breath. For safety — pilots must be focused — she took her hands off the command boards.

Cliff thumbed up a display board. “We worked up a sketch to get the essentials of this thing in one view. Have a look.”

She studied the line drawing, feeling woozy. “Yes, right. You’ve labeled the regions out from the axis with the equivalent gravs…”

“Yup, and the clumps in the edge plain are supposed to be topological features. Only my splotches are bigger than whole planets, a lot bigger.” He waved his hands helplessly, grinning. But he frowned, too, worried at her fatigue.

“Right, hard to grasp the scale — this is inconceivable, but a sketch helps. You caught how the jet bulges out near the star.”

More hand waving. “Looks to me like the magnetic fields in it are getting control, slimming it down into a slowly expanding straw…”

“A wok with a neon jet shooting out the back … and living room on the inside, more territory than you could get on the planets of a thousand solar systems. Pinned to it with centrifugal grav…”

“They don’t live on the whole bowl. Just the rim. Most of it is just mirrors. Even so, it’s more than a habitat,” said Cliff. “It’s accelerating. That jet! This whole thing is going somewhere. A ship that is a star. A ship star. We humans only built a star ship.”

There wasn’t much redundancy among SunSeeker’s auxiliary boats. Designs were modular: tanks or skeletal cargo carriers could substitute for passenger shells.

There were two fliers, Hawking and Dyson, twin lifting body designs. “We can’t use reentry vehicles,” Redwing decided. “We’d tear holes in whatever’s holding the air in.”

Abduss said, “Captain, these are the tankers.”

“Ceres and Eros are tankers, too, for mining asteroids. We just add the tank,” Redwing said.

Mayra said, “There aren’t any asteroids or comets. The locals must have cleaned out everything that might have threatened their habitats, or even used it all to build the bowl.”

“Really?”

“We haven’t found anything at all,” Mayra said.

“What, in four days? Four days to do a thousand years’ worth of astronomy in a brand-new solar system?”

The Wickramsinghs were silent before Redwing’s sarcasm. Indeed, the autoinventory had found no asteroids. “It’s been vacuumed clean.”

“Um,” Redwing said. “So nothing hits the bowl.”

Cliff listened with half his attention; this wasn’t his business yet. The automatic search cameras were smart, quick. Probably Mayra was right: The whole solar system had been scoured long ago. But he didn’t want to cross Redwing over a minor point; best to husband his credit with the irascible captain. The man had gone without much sleep, too. Cliff had found him pacing the corridors, checking and rechecking ship status, when he was supposed to be asleep.

He wished he had someone else to talk to about this, but the Wickramsinghs kept their own counsel. And Beth was sleeping. She’d done a lot of that, still recovering from cold sleep and the grueling flight through the Knothole.

Redwing chopped air with his hand. “Okay, for the moment we’ll take that as given. No asteroids, no comets. We’ll put a tank on Eros. It can carry water, mine it out of a comet, even — and it can land. Landing legs and a high-thrust fusion motor. We thought there’d be moons.”

Mayra asked blandly, “Where are you planning to land, Captain?”

“Down there.” Redwing waved toward Cupworld’s green-tinged rim.

“Yes, I thought so. If you land near the Knothole, you’ll be millions of klicks from any water source, and right on top of the systems that shape the electromagnetic fields. We could be perceived as a threat.”

Redwing blinked. “You think so?”

Mayra kept her face blank, apparently her way of being diplomatic. “We have no idea how the builders of this thing feel about visitors.”

Cliff couldn’t resist saying, “At least they didn’t shoot at us.”

Redwing grimaced; he had not been chosen for fighting skills. “They haven’t tried to talk to us. I don’t like that.”

Cliff put in, “But, Captain, the rim is where all the water and farmland is. They must live there.”

Mayra added, “It’s spinning around at thirty-four klicks per second, too.”

Redwing nodded. “Higher than our orbital speed, right? Do we have onboard fuel to catch up with that spin?”

Abduss said, “It will take a significant fraction of our onboard reserves, principally water for the nuclear rocket.”

Redwing snorted. “All our onboard ships are fusion powered. We can fly wherever we like if we can get water from Cupworld. We’ll need the same trick to use any of them. Okay, say we see a lake. We’ll put SunSeeker in a nearer orbit and drop the lander from there. Beth will know how to do that. Cliff!”

Cliff jumped.

“Where shall we land?”

They were asking him as the biologist. “It all looks like farmland and meadows and forests,” he said. “Different habitats, probably — see those ice fields? I don’t know how they create those, but our telescopes can’t make out individual trees. All I’ve got is a light spectrum, but clearly from spectral reflections, the plants are using chlorophyll, Captain. Land anywhere near water on the rim, I’d say, and refuel the tanks first thing.”

Mayra asked, “Do we land on the inside of the bowl? Or the outside?”

Redwing frowned. “Inside, of course. That’s where they live.”

Mayra pursed her lips and said evenly, “They surely launch their own spacecraft from the outer surface. They could simply put their ships in elevators, lower them through an outer air lock, and let them go. Immediately the ships would have a thirty-four-kilometer-per-second velocity. All with no need to fly through an atmosphere, or out through the film that covers their atmosphere.”

Cliff grinned. Mayra had been thinking as he did, asking how the hell this enormous contraption worked. “You think we could go in through their outer air locks? From underneath? Maybe to reenter, they have magnetic clamps or something to catch incoming craft. Maybe we could use those.”

Mayra shrugged. “Suppose we do. How do we knock on the door?”

Redwing mused, “They must have safeguards.…”

“Even if we get in the door, they control the locks,” Cliff added. “We’d be caught.”

Redwing liked that. He sat back and gave them all a glassy grin. “Makes it easy to choose, doesn’t it? We must retain our freedom of maneuver until we know what — whom — we’re dealing with. We go down through the atmosphere, then.”

“We’ll have to bust through that film they have,” Cliff observed.

Abduss added, “They might see that as aggressive. I would.”

Redwing nodded. “But it’s the only way not to be cornered from the start.”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Cliff said casually. “They must have seen us. How come they haven’t come out to pay a call?”

Abduss said, “Good, yes. I have received no electromagnetic transmissions, either.”

“Funny,” Redwing said. “You’d expect at least broadcast radio.”

“Perhaps they use point-to-point comm, laser links,” Mayra said. “Just as we do.”

Redwing sat up straight, switching to his command voice. “Abduss, would we have time to hover? Pick a landing spot?”

“Not much.”

“We’ll take Eros,” Captain Redwing decided. “Get it ready as quick as we can. Now, do we need to thaw anyone else?”

Maybe this was Redwing’s way of “building consensus,” as the leadership classes taught. Cliff said the obvious: “We’ll need twenty minimum to do anything on the ground.”

“Let’s get started, then.”

FIVE

They kept wary eyes and instruments on Cupworld while they tended to the auxiliary ships. Beth brought SunSeeker into a useful orbit for making the Eros drop. They maneuvered carefully, but though they could see landscapes far below, the distances were vast. Even orbital rendezvous took weeks. This was not a planet.

That gave them time to revive a selection they would need — engineers, maintenance people, “groundpounder” types who expected to wake up on a planetary surface. Redwing kept the numbers revived as low as plausible for the exploring party. They needed replacements for the current crew, who were all going down to the bowl, since the revived wouldn’t be physically able in time.

Unsurprisingly, those woken up were quite surprised.

Just looking at the external feeds could cause these newbies to freak out. Redwing quickly learned that it was best to have the recently revived brief the next batch. Cliff got tired of explaining their incredible situation.

He spent his days surveying the lakes, rivers, and oceans of Cupworld — or as some called it, the Bowl; Cliff had tried to think of something descriptive yet high-minded, and failed. The dotted blue expanses had been well planned, apparently — no huge deserts or wastelands, good circulation of air currents and moisture.

They awoke Fred Ojama first, so Cliff could work with a geologist while making the survey. “This isn’t geology,” Fred pointed out immediately. “It’s a, well, a building.”

“A building the size of the inner solar system, yep,” Cliff answered. “But somebody thought it through. Look at how the lakes, rivers, and seas follow a fractal distribution.”

Fred thought that through. “Best way to distribute water. Avoids deserts, maybe … but that patch looks like desert. And that patch of forest might be … No, never mind.”

“Like symbols,” Cliff agreed. “Looks like writing. A super landscaper leaving messages. Like in Hitchhiker’s Guide, the guy who designed the fjords.”

Fred looked blank.

Redwing had hesitated to wake Fred Ojama. Fred’s bio listed him as borderline autistic. He’d barely made the height requirement. Nobody actually knew him very well. Not all the crew were social mavens, for psycher reasons. Redwing remarked that a cocktail party with no listeners was a noise fest, and there was an analogy there about teamwork. The list claimed Fred was a near genius, too, with a history of original ideas, and Cliff had wanted that.

Cliff pointed to the boundary where the cylindrical part curved smoothly into the vast mirror dome. “I’m trying to figure out how it would be to live on the surface, when it starts to slant. The whole thing is rotating together, so as soon as the slope changes, centrifugal grav will be at an angle to the ground.”

Fred zoomed on that area. “The rivers go away there. Just vanish into the sands.” He snapped his fingers. “I got it. The centrifugal grav works against the inward-sloping curve of the high Bowl. So water can’t flow up into the mirror area. That means the gravity alone can keep that big zone clear of life, I guess. Maybe even air.”

Fred was smart. There weren’t dumb people on Seeker, just people with other tales or people you disagreed with. An important point to remember in arguments. “Sounds right. The mirrors are important. The builders don’t want them growing lichen or anything.”

“So the whole structure has a clean division. The cylinder’s for living, the mirror for propulsion.” Fred shook his head. “What an idea.”

“What kind of mind would even think of it?”

“Something with a long time horizon. This whole construct accelerates very slowly.” Fred looked at the jet in the distance, a brilliant ivory pillar of ever-shifting tendrils. “That plasma’s pushing a star.”

“Odd minds, gotta be. But engineering’s a universal. Things work or you change them.”

“You want to reverse engineer this place?” Fred grinned, nodding his bald head so it caught the gleam of the lights. “Good. Good.”

Cliff had close-upped the region where sunlight reflected off the atmosphere membrane. He and Fred kept up their banter while he tried to see deeper. The shiny surface was probably some tough but thin layer to keep their air in — 19 percent oxygen, 72 percent nitrogen, and traces of carbon dioxide and noble gases. Then he saw it. A patch that didn’t reflect.

They used the maximum magnification of the scopes and then called Redwing. “I think we’ve found an area sealed off from the membrane,” Cliff said, showing him the barren circle. “It’s about a hundred kilometers across.”

“How can they tolerate it? Won’t their air leak out?”

Fred said, “Maybe they opened it for us, just recently. A thing this big can take a little loss.”

Redwing looked at every view, across the spectrum, before finally saying, “Open areas, yeah. Makes sense. Apparently for landings from space?”

“That’s what we figured,” Fred said.

“Solves our landing problem, then,” Redwing said with a thin smile of satisfaction. “Let’s go in.”

SIX

If your heart is large, Memor thought, and contains volume enough to envelop your adversaries, then wisdom can come into play. One can then see their transparency, and so then diffuse or avoid their attacks. And once you envelop them, you will be able to guide them along the path indicated to you by your own hard-won wisdoms.

He shook himself. This insight came from some new part of him … the restless part of his mind that would soon be her mind. For Memor was now amid the fevered straits of the Change.

Not the optimum time to confront a crisis unlike any within the last eight-squared of generations. Lifeshaping should be done in peace, but that was not to be Memor’s destiny. He would be female within a few short cycles, but he had not yet lost the male’s sense of reach and joy, the Dancing. He could even smell the seethe of fructifying change within him. Hormones raged; molecules fought for dominance in his bloodstream. Fevers came in like chemical reports from a raging battlefield. These changes had been designed by the Founders and their following generations, now well sanctified by endless eras. Memor knew his shifting moods and jitters paid the cost of acquiring greater wisdom. But the cost was high and hard to endure amid a crisis.

“Order descends,” the Prefect called in ancient tones for the assembly of Astronomers.

“Order prevails,” came the answering chorus as they took their places of rest beneath the great dome.

Memor let the details of unfurling discussion play over him. He kept his body still while his inner mind fretted at the vagrant impulses within his changing self. Even his Undermind, normally serene, showed a surface wrinkled by fretful winds. Waves of knotted concern broke across its steady currents.

The technical summary was as he had heard. A starship of boldly simple design approached from aft. Diagnostics astern had seen it turn and approach, as though their flight had not been directly for the Bowl. Perhaps they were bound for the star ahead, where the gravitational waves emerged?

The audience of Astronomers murmured. Speculation fueled their excited chatter. Monitoring the approaching ship’s transmissions picked up several bursts directed back along the ship’s path. Trailing satellites had picked up these, yet intensive study by the linguist minds gave little more than a simple sense of their grammar and contextual constructions. Their habits of mind as revealed in language did not seem remarkable. Linear logics, few layers of meaning. Indeed, they seemed like their ship — primitive, yes, but ambitious to undertake full starflight in such a flimsy craft. The consultant engineers — small creatures, timid in the presence of full-sized Astronomers — pointed out odd features in the magnetic configuration, and announced that they would like to inspect the long, slim craft. Much sharp discussion followed.

Memor felt distracted by the marinating changes within him. He sat out the usual time-honored dispute, Watchers — pejoratively called Sitters — versus Dancers. The Prefect called up ancient records and even voices from the far past.

Past lore supported the Dancers, Memor thought. Unsurprising — stories of change are always more interesting than stories of stasis. Change is the essence of story, built into the mind by evolution’s strict dictates.

Astronomers of ancient times had fired upon many ships, usually with the Gamma Lance. They had passed by many planets, explored and then ignored. These cases did not have many stories. The Watchers kept referring back to them.

Memor stretched and tried to look alert. Watchers were boring, ponderous. But then, Memor was still male, and like Dancers favored variety, engagement. Wisdom came later. The Watchers were nearly all female.

So Memor was in the middle here. He could sense the change to come, but he hadn’t lost the male’s sense of reach yet.

The assembly took a long, deliberate time to glide through the vast library of the past. Memor coasted through the old records as if they were his own adventures. Zesty, colorful, shot through with ancient exploits. They enthralled him.

The Bowl of Heaven never came too near a sun. It was too ponderous for that, and with its mass could perturb the orbits of life-bearing worlds. They did send ships, of course. But the Astronomers’ telescopes had always been superb; they knew the nature of a world or moon before an exploring ship ever set forth, fired into a solar system from the rim of the Bowl. Voyages to interesting planets always took hundreds of long cycles, aboard one or more great cruisers usually equipped with landers, sometimes with orbital tethers.

Memor sat up, snorted, and focused on what had been mere droning history. Here, in one thrilling tale, the Bowl had come near a heavy world, too massive to support any adventurer. The mother ship hovered in the quasi-stable point beneath the largest moon. Ships angular and strange rose like sparks from the heavy world’s surface, rocket propelled. There was no orbital tether. Simple technologies. This was how the finger snakes had reached them — an artful species indeed.

There followed hundreds of long cycles of negotiation, of studying one another. The little finger snakes had gained from this dialogue some trivial enhancement in their technology, nothing that could threaten the Bowl. The Bowl had learned little from them, of course.

Then 256 finger snakes had returned to the Bowl aboard the mother ship. The small colony had needed little in the way of integration. They were more dexterous than most Bird Folk, good tool-users, and crafty repair artisans. You rarely saw them now; they lived underground. Memor was impressed that such small beings had ever attained spacefaring skills, considering how they loved their buried warrens.

Lessons of ages unwound. The past scrolled on within Memor’s mind. Around him, other Astronomers huffed and grunted as they, too, experienced the deep realms. An elder snored. Out of respect, all let her sleep.

Here, a bandit species had attacked approaching Astronomers’ exploring ships. The Astronomers had retreated. The Bowl’s defenses proved adequate, and so they had continued on, out of their range. A few scores of invaders had landed, been captured, been bred for docility. Four-limbed bipeds, they were, and they made good farmers.

These named Sil had come as plunderers; they’d seen the Bowl as a high-tech civilization and wanted its secrets. Their early days after capture proved turbulent. Training worked its slow magic. The Sil were limber, dexterous creatures, invaluable today. Space suits allowed them to work on the Bowl’s understructure. Their docility was not quite dependable, even now, after twelve million long cycles.

Memor moved on through the stories. Images filled the air around him, long dead voices spoke in somber tones of musty triumphs.

Here, a gas giant planet was home to living dirigibles. Probes managed to scoop up enough infant balloons to make a stable population. They bred in air, seldom touching down. The Bowl’s deep atmosphere gave them free, safe range. The bioengineers deftly tuned their genes for docility and strength. A million long cycles later, they were an indispensable part of the Bowl’s civilization. To take to air without expending fuel was a great pleasure, available to all the master Folk.

Memor moved on through the annals of history, all the while fighting his trembles, fits, fevers. Is it worth all this to become female? Judgment is never wise while in restless agonies. He focused, lifting mind above body. His unmasked Undermind dealt with the aches and fevers, beneath his burrowing consciousness.

Here, alien visitors had failed to accommodate to their new station in life. Genetic trickery had failed them, too … but a life-form derived from that world had become the skreekors, a valuable and tasty prey animal that could be eaten raw for the relishing. Memor hungered for one now, stomach squeezing, just from viewing the savory pursuit-and-devour sense concerts.

Tales of successful change rolled by, all leading to today’s ideal ecological and political balance. The Bowl was a living thing, not a static tool. This incoming visitor was the first in many a million long cycles. Flaming them with the flare would be easy, though not trivial: it demanded managing huge energies with a deft touch. They’d done it before.

“The Gamma Lance is primed,” a senior female said. She gestured at the star bowl. The starship plainly intended to fly into their jet. Foolish! The senior female said.

Memor rose on unsteady legs to dispute. But what would we all lose? An interstellar ramjet of unusual design and audacity, at the very least. New modes of thought. Strangeness. Adventure! Memor sat, and others sang their vying songs. Discussion rolled on.

Memor tried to follow the discourse, while giving no sign that he wrestled with his inner self. Strange emotions flitted through his mind, mingling with the ancient records in strange symphonies of thought. The best stories were never of maintaining stasis. Change meant action meant zest. Watchers held the balance of the Bowl, but Dancers had all the best songs. Of course, there had been times when a visiting alien was simply destroyed, but where was the entertainment in that?

It might be that Memor, and Memor’s peers, would give too much weight to tales of change and advancement.

Time would tell. But for now, Memor was a Dancer. He had to be.

His inner struggles and outer sweats so preoccupied him that he very nearly failed to note that the Dancers carried the argument. Only when a friend pounded him with hearty congratulation did Memor discover that he had been made Master of the Task — and would have to deal with the approaching aliens, if they should dare land.

“Why?” he asked a friend Watcher.

“Because you are inventive. Also, you have enemies.”

“My enemies would — ?”

“Hope you fail, yes.”

Memor paused, but decided to go with the tide. He strutted a bit and bellowed hearty masculine thanks to all. Let them come!