Shipstar

Twenty-seven

Cliff was tired of traveling. The immense distances of the Bowl took a steady toll that could not be erased by dozing in uncomfortable seats designed for another species, or indifferent food gotten from dispensers along the way, or headphones that tuned out the drones and rattles of endless long transport. The Bowl was built on the scale of solar systems, but humans were built to smaller perspectives.

Quert and the other Sils had brought Cliff’s team through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels, moving away from the hull where the Ice Minds dwelled. Then a mag-train. More tunnels. Occasional glimpses of odd landscapes seen through huge quartz sheets that glided by as they took barely curved speed ramps at planetary velocities.

He had felt the surges and high speeds, but after a while they did not register as distinct events, just a long symphony of lurches. At times he felt he knew where they were in an astronomical sense—alignments of star and jet and horizon, glimpsed through flickering windows. But those got confused as soon as he looked again, hours later, after being pummeled and spun.

Now they ventured out, on foot, into a terrain that reminded him of California deserts—low scrub brush, gullied tan terrain, hazy sky, occasional zigzag trees. Those seemed to grow everywhere on the Bowl. Gravity was different here, a lot less. He felt a slight tilt to his weight, too. They were closer to the Knothole, had to be.

Curious blocky buildings visible through some dust haze in the distance, maybe ten kilometers away, a tapered tower at its center. Cliff drew in hot dry air with a crisp, nose-tingling flavor and basked in the raw sunlight. It was good to be still and on your feet in sunlight. Always sunlight.

Quert beckoned the others out of the well-disguised hatch that led into the hull system. For many hours they had crawled through some conduits and once had to wade through a sewer to get onto a fast-moving slideway. Then a train. The Bowl’s constant daylight threw off their sleep cycles. He’d measured this, and found that the team had shifted to a thirty-hour waking cycle. The welcome dark of the night-side hull had helped fix that. But they were worn down.

“Think we’re okay here?” Irma asked Quert.

“Need go farther,” Quert said, looking around. “Not safe here.” The other Sil shifted uneasily and looked at the zigzag trees.

“What’s the danger? At least it’s warm.” Irma had not liked the cold and had hugged one or the other of the men in the night, seeking warmth. Nobody thought anything of it; they were all in a pile most of the time, dead to the world.

“The Kahalla. In shape they are more like you than we. An old kind of Adopted. Loyal to Folk.”

Irma frowned. “So what do we do?”

“Find…” Quert paused, as if translating from his language. “Tadfish. You would say. Maybe.”

“There’s shelter over there.” Terry pointed at the low hills to their left. He seemed more alert and energetic now, Cliff noted.

“We go past that,” Quert said, but the other Sil around him rustled with unease. This was the first sign Cliff had seen that they all could understand Anglish. Plainly they were worried, their legs shifting and heads jerking around as if looking for threats.

“So let’s do this fast,” Aybe said. He, too, looked refreshed. They all had skins worn from constant sun but not deeply tanned. There wasn’t a lot of UV in this star’s spectrum.

They set off at a long lope made graceful by the lower gravity. Cliff got into his stride easily, enjoying the sensation of hanging a second or two longer at the apex while his legs stretched out. As much as he had liked the dark of the hull labyrinth, the sunlit open was more his style.

“Kahalla!” one of the Sil cried. Quert stopped and turned and so did they all. Some fast shapes flitted through a distant stand of zigzags and heavy brush.

At first Cliff thought these were four-legged creatures, but as one of them sped across a gap in the rust-colored brush, he saw they had two legs. Their gait leaned forward and hinged oddly. Big angular heads.

“Here Kahalla live,” Quert said.

“What should we do? Deal with them?”

“Do not know.” Quert and the other Sil looked carefully at the Kahalla. There were many of them.

They all began to run again. Quert waved them away from the zigzag trees where the moving figures were and toward the buildings several kilometers away across a dusty plain. It seemed to Cliff they were needlessly exposed there but then Quert, who was in the lead, took them behind a rise and into a slight gully that was enough to shield them from direct fire. Dust from their running stung his nose. They were all running flat out. His team had their lasers and Quert their own weaponry, but they were vastly outnumbered. Until now he had not thought much about how lightly armed Bowl natives were. That seemed to imply little overt conflict despite the vast and horrible damage the Folk had dealt out to the Sil. There was an odd Zen-like grace to them in the face of horror.

As if sensing that something was up, big birds flapped suddenly from the surrounding brush and zigzags. They swarmed and turned together and made off with loud keening squawks. In the lower grav, the big wings could use the slight wind to escape. Obviously to these odd four-winged birds, the running figures meant trouble.

The dust swarmed up into his nostrils and stung. The acrid nip also snapped him into focus. He looked up at the big birds stroking themselves up into the air and he recalled his sense of relish when he saw his first Baltimore oriole. They were nearly extinct then. The Great Crash had passed but many birds were teetering on the edge, and the sight of the deep flaming orange against the rest of its black plumage thrilled him. He knew the Baltimore oriole’s name came from some ancient coat of arms royalty, but that mattered nothing compared with the small fragile beauty of it. These alien birds sweeping and cawing above had none of that, yet they still stirred him. So why had this structure, vast in size and time, kept so much rich wildlife when Earth had not? Humanity had overrun itself in vast sullen cities long ago. Its soiled vapors ruled the sky, still, despite earnest geoengineering.

That question swarmed up, awakened by this wealth of life flapping around him. Stinging sweat trickled into his eyes and he was glad of it.

He remembered the bleak gray landscapes he had seen across the American West following the Great Dry. The denuded skeleton forests of the High Sierras, where fires consumed the last needles of the demolished pine forests and layered the Owens Valley with black shrouds for weeks. The dead dry prospects of deserted suburban streets lined by abandoned cars already stripped of their paint by the hissing sands borne on constant hot winds.

His legs burned with fatigue. Cliff shook his head to throw the sweat aside. He checked that his team was staying together, and panted, and felt the ache slicing in his lungs, and ran on.

Sometimes he could abstract himself out of the moment with thoughts, memories, dreams, anything. Anything but the terrible fear that once again they were the prey. His team. Being run down again. His responsibility.

So … how did this enormous artifact preserve such diversity of life? It was like some goddamned Central Park in Old Manhattan, before the rising seas washed all that away. A natural place that life sought refuge in, yet it was an artifact, a managed simulacrum of the natural world. A jewel in a concrete setting.

But this place was not a dead park. It lived and maintained itself and went on. He had to concede that to the Folk who ran this place. They had evaded the excess that had nearly ruined Earth.

He ran on. The others panted and strained around him. The Sil took their long strides with easy grace and were always ahead. The humans labored in sweat and stink and gathering sour fatigue as the building complex loomed.

In the zigzag trees around them, Cliff felt the presence of the running humanoids though he could not see them. It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before. Here amid a fantastic construction they were reduced to—

Then he saw it. The Bowl, a huge facsimile of a real planet, kept itself running and stable by being larger than worlds could be. Giving life enough room to find its own way.

But how did they stop the myriad intelligent species here from expanding beyond their province? A puzzle.

And now there was no more time for idle thought. The distant buildings were close. And his legs were made of lead.

Quick is the word and sharp’s the action. Where had he heard that?

They came upon the towering great gray slabs through an outer maze of silvery metal sculptures. These depicted heavyset humanoids in various poses, mostly in combat with assorted knives, shields, lances, and the like. The nude bodies were squat and sturdy, big muscled chunks above short legs and fat feet. Their ribs seemed to wrap around the whole body and their arms turned both ways, double-jointed and elbowed. Some statues were of standing figures and in the air around these gleamed some unintelligible script that flashed brighter as Cliff looked at them. A smart system that registered his gaze and amped the label? They reached a large bladelike tower that seemed solid, standing at the center of a hexagonal open spot. Flagstones of intricate angular designs led toward this tower and up its flanks in elongated perspectives. There was a solemn air to the place as its design soared up the flat tower face, ornamented with bumps and knobs that tapered away into the sky.

They paused to drink water and Cliff stood looking at the big stonework. Slowly, about fifty meters up, an eye opened.

He knew it was an eye though it was of the same burnished tan as the rest of the tower. It had a green center like an iris. Slowly the entire oval, several meters across, turned downward to look at them. One eye.

“What…” Cliff could not take his eyes off the single enormous pupil at the thing’s center. It seemed to be looking straight at him. A pupil in rock? An eye with lens and retinas?

“Stone mind,” Quert said simply. Then he turned quickly and peered into the distance.

Cliff looked to his left and saw several of the stumpy humanoids flitting among the sculptures. There were a lot of them, moving with surprising speed. They huffed and squatted and made ready. Their brown clothes seemed to have endless pockets and they fished among those to bring out things, affixing them to the long tubes.

“Chem guns,” Aybe said. “In all this high tech, the old stuff still makes sense.”

“Or maybe they haven’t been allowed any more advanced tech?” Terry wondered.

“We saw a humanoid like this, remember?” Irma said. “It opened a door leading down into some entrance, back there on an open plain. When it saw us, it just walked away.”

Aybe said, “Yeah, maybe we should’ve looked into that entrance. We were getting pretty ragged, maybe it would’ve been good shelter.”

Cliff knew this was a way of calling up an unspoken grudge. He had argued to push on and they had. “That means these humanoids are maybe maintenance workers,” he said mildly. “They’re working for the Folk, keeping the Bowl fit.”

They broke off talk as the creatures moved. Without a word the entire party of Sil and humans turned and watched the humanoids go to each flank, surrounding them. Nobody spoke.

“Kahalla,” Quert said. “They hold us for Folk. Send message.”

Terry whispered, “How can we get away?”

Before Quert could speak, a long droning note washed over the area. It seemed to come from everywhere and was more like a sensation in Cliff’s body than a sound. The tone shifted and a long rolling vowel played out, aaahhhhmmmm.

Quert said, “Sit. Listen. The stone mind wakes.”

Cliff sized up their situation. There were at least a few hundred of the humanoids around them. They didn’t look friendly. Many wore jackets and carried long tubes that looked like some sort of launch weapon. They were swarthy and their heads never turned away from watching the humans near the tower. They bristled with suppressed energy. Cliff wondered how he knew this and saw it was something about reading body postures. Maybe that was a universal, across species? Or else the whole primate suite of abilities converged—driven by the urgent need to communicate, no matter what world your abilities came from—on myriad subtle signs that told stories from a mere glance.

Irma said quietly, “They’re dangerous. We can’t fight them. Are we waiting for this song to end or what?”

“They hear the long voice,” Quert said.

Aybe said, “So? How long does this last?”

“The rock being speaks of its many deaths,” Quert said, its head dipping low and eye darting up and down, a gesture Cliff did not know.

Tones now shifted higher, into shrees, kinnnes, awiiihs, and oooeeeiiinneees. The pressing power in it seemed to hammer the air around them. Cliff felt these as warring long-wavelength notes that made his muscles dance, his body arch and flex and stretch in resonance with the powerful sounds rolling through the dry air around them.

“It’s … it’s playing us,” he managed to get out. “This sound…”

“It tells of its great death,” Quert said. “Takes far time.”

The Sil had formed a crescent facing outward against the solemn threatening silence of the humanoids. Together with Quert, the Sil flexed their arms, turning their inner elbows up to the sun. Cliff saw slender black fibers extend in the pits of their elbows. Their tips gleamed in the hard sunlight. He had never been able to tell males from females in the Sil, but it did not matter. They all had done some physiological magic and made these black lances poke out of their inner elbows. One of them abruptly jerked an arm down and the lance arced fast and sure out in a long parabola. The elegance of it struck Cliff as it watched it skewer a small wood emblem atop a hunkering stone sculpture of a big-chested humanoid. It hit the dry dark wood exactly in its center, and the black arrow flapped with energy not yet dissipated. As sure a challenge as he could imagine.

The humanoids did not respond. Their feet shuffled, their heads waggled a bit, but no sounds came. The big notes had fallen silent, and Cliff thought the song or whatever it was had come to an end. Dead silence. The Sil glowered at the humanoids and flexed their black arrows. He wondered how that had evolved. Gene tampering? An onboard defense, obviously. You didn’t have to carry anything, and the black rods with their gleaming pointed tips waited for the downward yank of the arm. Their hands could be free, so they could have other weapons there, too. But … the Sil held no other weapons in their hands. No pistols or guns of any sort. Unlike the humanoids, who now sent forth barking calls, high and shrill.

A taunt? A rebuke? It was impossible to tell. The calls stopped and Cliff felt himself tensing, pulse fast and hard. The two bands of aliens glared at each other in what seemed another universal signal—narrowed eyes. Grunts and hisses and heavy panting. Feet stirred in the dust. Arms and chests bunched and flexed. A fevered bristly aroma came drifting on the still air, the heat of bodies exuding aromas that, he supposed, carried signals evolved long ago on planets far from this stark scene. Time stood crisp and still. Eyes darted and judged.

But then came long drawing notes from the stone tower. Echoing tones of kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrrafff …

He panted and watched the aliens move into position around them. Shuffling in the dust. Huffing with energy.

“We haven’t got a chance, do we?” he said in a casual way.

Irma said wryly, “Looks like.”

Boonnnug wrappppennnu faaaaliiiooong …

The humanoids lifted their heads. Their shuffling ceased. As the long solemn notes washed over them, they slowly buckled. Sat. Folded their armaments and their arms, down and low.

The long, loud notes rolled on. Cliff did not know this speech. Neither did the Sil, he gathered. But the humanoids did and they wilted before the slow steady sway of the music that poured over them. The words became a soothing song that washed over the entire stonework, itself laid out some vast time long ago, an era beyond knowing.

The warmth lulled Cliff as well. “Take a break,” he said to the others. “Sit. Wait them out.”

He felt the flowing wall of sound as it called, yoouuiunggg kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg.… He felt his knees go weak.

Quert was having none of this. It said, “Let them sit. You do not.”

“Huh? Why?” Cliff straightened up.

“The slow song will reach them. Resist it.”

“Resist? I don’t—”

Quert gave him an eye-goggle he could not read.

“Let it go,” Irma said. “There’s more going on here than we know.”

Terry and Aybe agreed, heads nodding, eyes drifting, going drowsy and vague. Greee habbbiiitaaa loohgeree …

Strange fat pauses drifted by in the warm air. Hums and echoes. Like corpses on an ocean, Cliff thought, and jerked awake. What an odd repellent metaphor of the vaguely meaningful. His unconscious was seeping through as he got drowsy. Or was it something the words called forth? The low booming voice called … biiitha ablorgh quartehor biiilannaa …

To keep himself awake and not weaken and sit down, Cliff asked Quert, “This is a sculpture? With a recording? Why is it so important?”

Quert looked at him with an expression Cliff had learned to read as puzzlement. “It is alive. It awakes to speak.”

Cliff glanced up at the huge eye, which was still staring down at them. Gradually Quert’s indirect way of saying things unfurled the story of this place. What Cliff saw as a sculpture was actually a living thing. Alien to the Bowl, rugged and slow, it had come long ago from a world that died. “It lives to tell. It awakes when audience approaches.”

Irma said, “This is a smart rock?”

Quert said, “Sunlight powered. From world very hot.”

“It can’t move, right?” Aybe asked. “How’d it get here?”

Quert found all this unremarkable. “Bowl passing by. Explored that hot world. These Kahalla asked the Bowl to take one of them to keep themselves. To speak for them.”

Terry asked, “To carry their culture?”

Quert turned to them and made a gesture they now knew meant “stay steady” among the Sil. “It sings. The Kahalla decide to send one of them. Their sun swelled. They would soon melt.”

Terry said, “I thought those humanoids—” He gestured at the ring surrounding them. “—were the Kahalla.”

“They take name of living stone.” Quert seemed to find this completely natural.

“We triggered the monument? The Kahalla stone?” Aybe asked, his eyes wandering over the landscape.

Cliff understood; it was so ordinary in a dry fashion, but there were plenty of ways to get everything wrong here. Stones and primitives, all beneath a luminous sky, elements of ancient human history and still so easy to see as simple, a tailoring of Earth history. It was nothing like that. The strange kept trying not to be strange.

Quert’s eyes meant “yes.” “I-us took here. Knew song was only way.” The alien’s eyes told more than its words, but then words were tight little symbol lines. They could easily deceive the mind.

Only way? To not get caught? Cliff studied the stern stonework that soared over a hundred meters above them. A single creature, something he would have bet plenty could never evolve: smart rock. On a hot dry world, there must have been some sort of competition. Among rocks? He could not grasp how they contended. Against weathering? To gain mass and so defend themselves against abrasive winds and tides? How could information flow in a stone? How could it gain intelligence, to control its fate?

This went beyond biology into geology—and yet evolution had to explain such a thing. He recalled how dumbfounded he had been when he first saw the Bowl from SunSeeker. This made him feel the same way.

It was harder to remain standing, but Quert insisted. The resonant voice boomed on and the Sil listened intently. Long droning notes rode the hot dry air.

“Each time, different information,” Quert said.

Long song pealing on. In the next hour, Quert gave Cliff, in halting detail, some of the Kahalla’s slow evolution. Planets that condensed out early near their stars necessarily must seethe and surge. Liquid metals and decaying radioactives spit energy into crystalline lattices. Order came from oblique condensations. The essentials geological were much like essentials biological: Life began from metabolism wedded with reproduction.

The first sentient Kahallans used their world’s temperature and metallic difference between the core and the upper mantle as their thermodynamic driver. Along slithering seams of flowing lava, moving with aching slowness, they learned to track the shifting heat patterns. Predicting these was even better. Among the metal ions in their crystalline rhomboids, variations made their own order. Slow, slow and strange, reproduction of patterns followed. Some worked and so persisted. When shifting crystalline lattices held the basic data of early sentience, evolution’s hammer could find its anvil—much like bits encoded in silicon by humans’ computing chips, fresh intelligences arose without benefit of the bio world.

Size conferred advantages in energy harvesting, so the Kahalla grew ever larger, over working agonies of billions of years. They learned to communicate through acoustic waves amid the strata. Social evolution drove the geological, just as they had driven the biological.

Time stretched on. There was plenty of it.

As their world’s core cooled, the Kahalla migrated from near the core and toward the surface, for their planet was slowly spiraling toward its sun, its barren rocky surface cracking with the warming—a new source of nourishment. Geological energy was like the biological—diffuse, persistent. Driven by gradients, not logic. Yet it sifted through patterns and choices.

Ages passed. Finally the early Kahalla extruded themselves onto the plains festering with swarming heat, simmering beneath a glowering orange sky that was mostly now the skin of their star. Bio life had never arisen here, but now persistently the Kahalla colonized the stark black fields graced by rivers of smoldering lava. Great strange sagas of conquest and failure played out across smoldering landscapes. Songs worthy of immortality sang across blistered lands and blighted great monuments.

Civilizations faded as tidal forces forced the planet nearer its star, ever nearer beneath a flowering culture—and soon the Kahalla saw their fatal trap.

With their gravid slow slides of silicate, they could not migrate away from the surface fast enough to evade the heat. It lanced down from a star that swept the Kahalla with furious particle storms and bristling plasma. They retreated. Not fast enough. And ahead, their silicate minds knew, lay a great brutal force. They would soon enough reach the limit where tidal stretching could wrench and wrest apart their entire world.

Their society, ponderous and unimaginative, began to disintegrate. Their muted culture was largely a society of songs—purling out through the stacked geological layers, soaring operas of driven love and inevitable death. Like all life in its long run, it strove to understand itself and so perhaps its universe.

Yet some had fashioned instruments to survey their lands, their swarming sultry skies—and caught a glimmer of the Bowl in a momentarily clear sky. The Bowl had ventured in without fear of disrupting life-bearing worlds, for there were none—it thought. It coasted clear and sure in a long hyperbolic orbit. The Bowl was a sudden beckoning promise to those slow and solid and doomed.

Somehow the Kahalla sent a signal to the Bowl. It was of long wavelength and thus carried low meaning, A slow song. Yet over time their signal persisted, and was heard.

An expedition of robots answered—the spawn of a crafter species that stubbornly managed the near-Bowl transport and mass harvesting. Much conversation came and went and came again. It became with gravid grace a slow sliding talk across barriers of time and mind and much else.

Yet still. These robots retrieved the essence of the Kahalla intelligence—slabs of silicate, laced with evolved strands of impurities, all serving as a computational matrix.

So the robots brought the Kahalla mind to the Bowl in crystalline crucibles. It was a great act of graceful tribute, ordered by the least likely magistrates of all—the Ice Minds. So did the very cold save the very hot from utter extinction.

“And this is the only one?” Cliff asked Quert. The droning long chant was still pealing on. And on. Bass thuds and hollow tones spoke wruuunggg laddduuutt eeeillooonnnggghh.

“It alone stands for all the Kahalla now.”

Cliff could sense the majesty of it as he watched the great vibrating rock, framed against cottony clouds that rushed across the sky. “How does it live?”

“The sun lights those”—an eye-shrug toward the hills—“and tech condenses the heat, feeds the Kahalla crystals.”

“So it’s like an enormous, living museum exhibit,” Irma said.

“Bowl preserves. Without, life-forms die.”

“All life-forms?” she asked.

“Must be.”

Cliff turned to watch the humanoids who had taken the name of this mournful singing stone and saw that the Kahalla’s long hours of chant had done its work. The humanoids lay sprawled in deep slumber.

“Song goes to their souls,” Quert said.

“You knew it would?” Aybe whispered.

“Heard it did. Only chance.” Quert turned and gave them a comical eye-shrug. Then Quert bowed and gestured to them all. “Silent go.”

The long aaahhhhmmmm loohgeree oojahhaaa habbbiiitaaa pealed on. It was great and strange and still impossible to fathom.

They left quietly. They were tired, but the long notes drove them forward. Somehow the place now smelled ancient and timeworn without question. The very scented air told them this without instruction.

Cliff and Irma and Aybe and Terry—they were all that was left now, and they had to move. The constant sun slanted pale yellow through high sheets as they trundled on with the Sil forming a crescent escort around them. He saw rainbow clouds hovering in the vapor over their laboring heads. Their crescents spoke bold colors shimmering through the sky’s firm radiance.

His team was shambling on now, sweaty and confused, truly tired in the way he had learned to recognize. Heads sagged, feet dragged, words slurred. The alien song droning on from far behind them would never end, he saw, down through however many corridors of ruin and turbulence that song needed. They were beautiful stretched songs telling of sad histories that no one would ever quite know. There would be scholars of it somehow in the long run, but they would carve off only a sheet of it and not know it entire. Cliff looked back once as they neared a stand of zigzag trees, a whole sweeping forest waving in the moment’s breeze, and saw that the round eye was still watching them.

It never blinked. They went on.

Twenty-eight

Captain Redwing started crisp and sharp, fresh from coffee, with the same questions he always used when taking staff through the planning stages of a new, untried operation. Standard questions, but always able to surprise.

They had walked through Karl’s simulations and Ayaan Ali’s trajectory analysis. The Specialty Artilects had put their own stamp upon the general plan, though as always they did not make judgments beyond a probability analysis. Their deep problem, Redwing thought, was that they were so much like human reason with far better data—and yet so forever uncertain.

The worst way of reviewing options was to let people make speeches. Questions shook them up, made them come forth.

He looked at the entire assembled crew around the main deck table. “First question: What could we be missing?”

Karl Lebanon answered. “Their defenses.”

Fred Ojama said, “Ayaan Ali and I did a depth scan for those. Nothing obvious, like the gamma ray laser.”

Beth Marble set her mouth at a skeptical slant. “They could launch craft against you from anywhere.”

Petty Officer Jam scowled. “I’ve seen curiously few flights above their atmosphere envelope. They don’t seem to launch into space often.”

Clare Conway said, “Speaking as copilot, the obvious way to launch is to just pop a craft out on the hull side. It’s moving at hundreds of klicks a second right away, so you zoom around the rim. Come at us from that angle.”

Ayaan Ali nodded. She was wearing a metallic blue scarf over her hair and resisting the urge to toy with it, Redwing noticed. This crew was good at suppressing tension and not allowing it to change the group mood. That had been a high selection criterion. She spoke slowly. “We would have time to deal with that. I am able to turn the ship quickly now. We’ve learned how to use the magnetic torque technique to gain angular momentum from the fields above their atmosphere. And we may be difficult to spot, since we will be in the jet.”

Karl nodded. Redwing saw they had now mentally stacked up the unknowns, which was a good moment to hit them with more. “Second big question: How will this not work?”

Silence. Beth said quietly, “If they have something to prevent tipping the jet awry. Something we can’t guess at now.”

“They’ve surprised us plenty before,” Ayaan Ali added.

Karl added, “Right. They’ve had lots of time to think about this.”

Clare said, “What maybe won’t work? Me. I may overestimate my ability to pilot through the jet. Beth, how bad was it?”

“An endurance test, mostly. I was driving straight up the bore, staying near the middle. Had to stay on the helm every second of the way. The big problem was keeping SunSeeker stable in the plasma turbulence. The jet is far denser than anything this ship and its magscoop were designed for. I had to max everything we had.”

Redwing wanted to add, And we nearly overheated, too, but he said instead, “Sounds hard. But we’re thinking of a fast flight through, yes?”

“I think so,” Beth said, looking at Redwing, who nodded. “Put it this way—staying alive on the Bowl was hard, too, but lots more fun.”

Their faces had grown more somber already. Most of them hadn’t been revived when SunSeeker flew up the jet and through the Knothole, but they had heard about the long hours of a creaking, groaning ship, and the dizzy swirls when they yawed and nearly tumbled. Their eyes turned introspective. He decided to loosen them up.

“Y’know, way back when I was in nav school, I asked an instructor, ‘Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?’ At first the woman didn’t want to answer. But I nagged her and finally she said, ‘It saves them time.’”

When their laughter died down—he could read their tensions by that measure, too—he said, “Point is, I’m a bug about details. Made me pretty damn obnoxious in nav school and ever since.” He gave them a smile. “I learned that in nav and tactics and all the rest. Space doesn’t forgive anybody. So we have to simulate all the troubles we can see coming.”

Karl said, “And then?”

“I’ll throw some unknowns you hadn’t thought of into the simulation, the training pod, all the rest. I want you to expect the unexpected.”

They nodded and for half an hour they tossed around possible unknowns. Then he said, “Question three: Will you please shoot as many holes as possible into my thinking on this?”

This led to more scattershot thinking, more debate. The jet was the big problem, and there were many ways to look at it. Redwing waved his hand in a programmed way, and the bridge wall lit up with a photo of the Bowl made when they were on the approach from the side. This was when Redwing and the small watch crew, plus Cliff and Beth, were just trying to grasp the concept of the Bowl. That now seemed so long ago, but it was less than a year.

Some of them must not have seen it before, because it brought gasps.

“I’d forgotten how beautiful it is,” Beth said.

Clare said wistfully, “Some of us have only seen it up close. We missed a lot.”

Fred pointed. “Notice how it flares out from its star, then narrows down a lot. That’s the magnetic stresses working. Wish I knew how they do it.”

Karl said, “I’ve fished around in the thousands of images SunSeeker’s Omni-survey Artilect made on our approach. That’s when we got far enough ahead, while we were making our long turn to rendezvous. By the way”—a nod to Beth—“that was brilliant navigation. Hitting a moving target on an interstellar scale.”

“This was all-spectra?” Fred asked.

“Exactly. Here is a view of the other side of their star. Away from the jet. It’s in spectral lines specified to bring out the magnetic structures visible in their solar corona.”

Ayaan Ali said, “Star acne,” one of her rare jokes. She even blushed when everyone laughed.

Beth said hesitantly, “Those are all … magnetic storms?”

“Not storms, though on our sun, they would eventually blow open and make storms. Those loop structures are anchored in the star’s plasma. Think of the magnetic fields as rubber bands. The plasma holds them down, and when they get free they stretch away from their feet. They’re stable, at least for a while. Lots of magnetic field energy in those things. They move, just like the ones on our sun. But in the long run they move toward the edge we see and migrate. Over to the other side.”

Before Karl could go on, Fred said, “To the jet.”

Karl chuckled. “I should know somebody’d steal my thunder. Fred’s good at that.”

“So the other side of their star, which we can’t see—”

“Is a magnetic farm, sort of?” Clare said skeptically.

Karl chuckled again. “You guys are too fast. Yep, Clare, that’s where the star builds big magnetic loops and swirls. Then they drift over to our side of the star. They gang up around the foot of the jet. Then they merge—don’t ask me how. That feeds magnetic energy into the jet—builds it, I guess.” He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue about how this gets done.”

All but Karl had blank, big-eyed stares. Redwing watched them digest the scale of the whole thing for a long moment. Star engineering, he thought. Somehow we missed that in school.…

“There’s a real problem here,” Ayaan Ali said. “These Folk aliens you talked to, Captain—did they seem like beings who could command a star?”

Redwing pursed his lips. He liked to let things speak for themselves, and so had not kept the recording of his talk with Tananareve away from the crew. The more heads working these problems, the better. They had intuitions about the Folk, too, and now was the right time to let them come out. So he just nodded to Beth with raised eyebrows.

Beth said, “You’ve all seen my pictures of the one who interrogated us, Memor. Plus all the assistants—so much smaller, they seem like another species entirely. Probably they are, but they work together in what looked to us like a steep hierarchy. Impressive, that Memor—especially in bulk. But a creature that could manage a star?” She arched a skeptical eyebrow and let her mouth turn down in a comic show of doubt.

This brought smiles all round the table. “My point exactly,” Ayaan Ali said. “How would anything our size—hell, any size—made out of ordinary matter, control solar magnetic loops?”

“Good point,” Fred said. “There’s something else going on.”

“But what?” Redwing said.

No answers. They were all thinking, and he saw it was time to get back to work. He flicked another image on the view wall. “Here’s a later view as we came around in advance of their star.”

This brought more quiet ooohs and aahhhs.

“Here’s where we see the point about those magnetic loops,” Karl said. Fred was already nodding. “See how the jet seems to curl around? Those are—”

“Magnetic helices,” Fred cut in. “The corkscrew threads are brighter, because the field strength is stronger there, and so is the plasma density. Classic stuff. Way back a century or two ago, we saw all that in the big jets that come out of disks around black holes. Astronomers know plenty about these.”

“Uh, thanks.”

Redwing could tell Karl was getting irked with Fred’s butting in. But Karl was holding himself back with admirable restraint. And Fred’s point was well taken. Redwing said mildly, “So to get the idea for this, whoever built it had only to look into the night sky. At other galaxies, same as we did back in the—what, twenty-first century?”

Kurt nodded. “As Fred said, yes. My point is, the jet gets all that magnetic field strength from the loop structures. So those magnetic fields migrate around to the jet base and get sucked up into it somehow.”

Fred said, “Ah! Then those fields do the crucial job of confining the jet, straightening it out into the lance that spears through the Knothole.”

“Right. Because the star spins, its magnetic field gets twisted and wrinkled, kind of like a ballerina’s skirt. That gets swept into the base of the jet, hangs up in it. The intense pressures at the base throw the jet out. It swells at first. Then the magnetic fields sort themselves out. Because field lines have to eat their tail—they can’t break—they weave themselves. We’ve known a long while that you can twist a magnetic field so it crosses itself—but then it just springs back as two loops, almost like reproduction. So the field self-organizes in the flow and takes the jet through the Knothole.” Karl finished with a flourish, getting the picture of the Bowl to make the threads in the jet fluoresce like neon signs.

Beth caught on to this. “I get it—hell, I experienced it. Waves of hard turbulence, coming at us at speeds SunSeeker was never designed for.”

Karl smiled, happy to see his theory confirmed by raw experience. “You came in on the jet at first in the exhaust, right? Backwash. That’s where the folds of the skirt bunch up—”

Karl went on with some more technical stuff, but Redwing didn’t listen. He watched them all to see how they took it in. Teams had to feel they had some understanding of what they were about to get into. If you were lucky, you even got a dividend, a fresh idea or two.

“It’s self-organizing,” Ayaan Ali said, gazing at the intricate luminous lines that laced through the jet. “That’s why it all works.”

Plainly this surprised everyone. Ayaan Ali’s crew slot was navigator/pilot, not astrophysics.

She paid no attention to their puzzled expressions and went on, “Our fusion drive is the same. It confines plasma long enough to fuse it for energy, heats the incoming plasma that way. Then we blow it out the back. It’s a hot plasma shaped by magnetic fields all along the way. That jet that makes the Bowl work—it’s just like our exhaust jet.”

A few jaws dropped. Redwing had always enjoyed moments like this. Get a smart crew together and let them Ping-Pong ideas back and forth. Add new information. Stir. Turn up the heat a notch. Simmer. Amazing, how often good fresh notions came out.

A rustle of astonishment. “Good point,” Karl said. “The same basic idea in our ship and … theirs.”

“Their shipstar,” Redwing said.

The melody of the conversation had shifted. The immensity of what they faced simmered below everything they said, and their faces showed this. Tight mouths, chins stiff, eyes dancing or else narrowed. Time to get them back into focus.

“Even if it’s technically sound,” Redwing said, leaning forward with hands clamped together on the table. “There’s the big question—is this maneuver understandable enough for the ship Artilects to operate, to troubleshoot, and to extend what they’ve learned?”

Beth said, “Our flight in, up the jet—the Nav Artilect group certainly learned from that.”

Ayaan Ali’s face became veiled, remembering. “You’re right. When I came on duty, I was amazed at how much they could do. Remember when we had trouble with the scoop getting enough mass to fuse it in our core chamber? They adjusted the field structure before I could even grasp what was wrong. They’d never done that in our field trials out in the Oort cloud.”

The talk got technical. They all ran with it. The deep silent secret of SunSeeker was the collaboration between mere mortal humans and the crystal Artilects who knew much that the vagrant human mind could not hold in ready use. The Artilects managed innumerable details at a speed and accuracy far beyond the blunt comprehension of their fragile cargo. They were integrated artificial minds, merged into a collective intellect. A society of minds, furiously engaged. Redwing always thought of them as crew who rarely talked back. They kept track of innumerable daily problems and never complained. The Insys Artilect, especially; he spoke with it several times every watch. On the other hand, they never had really original ideas.

Clare said sternly, “Their attention reservoirs can take only so much—”

“Let’s leave that to experience,” Redwing cut in. “Officer Conway,” with a nod to Clare, “consult the Artilects themselves. Give them your simulations; ask them to appraise their own capabilities. Regard them as crew members who couldn’t make it to this meeting, if you will.” And since the interior systems no doubt can hear us in their acoustic monitors, they actually are here. Not that the Insys Artilect would ever bring it up; strategy was not its province. But he suppressed that thought, for now.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and sipped her coffee. Always the caffeinated, he recalled—she used it to drive herself harder. Several others around the table did the same, an amusing social echo.

“Then we are resolved on this course?” Redwing said with a light and conversational air.

Only Beth failed to get the message. Probably, he thought, because she had been down on the Bowl so long and had forgotten shipboard’s unspoken signals. She said, “I don’t know if we’ve resolved anything, Cap’n.”

“We’re going to give the Folk a nudge,” Redwing said. “Their reply was quite clear—they killed our coin array. They don’t want us knowing the local conditions well, to navigate by. If we were Earthside, that would be an act of war.”

Beth wouldn’t stand down. “A ‘nudge’? Despite all these problems? Unknowns? Risks?”

He leaned forward, extending his clasped hands. “There are always problems. My orders are to get us to Glory and see if we can colonize it. Extracting us from this strange … place … this shipstar … I see as my duty. To do so, I must impress on these aliens that we will not join the—what was their term? The one Beth reported?”

Redwing looked down the table at Beth, whose open O of a mouth told him she had not expected this. Maybe the ground truth of the Bowl had told her something he did not know? “Beth?”

“The … the Adopted.”

“Right. We’re not a damn bunch of orphans from Earth. We’re not going to get Adopted.”

Beth said, “In their eyes…,” and stopped.

“Yes?”

“We’ve been gone from Earth so long, all our relatives dead, who knows what has happened…” She looked forlorn for a moment, grasping for words, head down. “We might as well be orphans.”

He had not expected this. What had the Bowl done to her? “We’re officers of a ship, Science Officer Beth Marble. Humanity’s farthest excursion. We have a goal and we shall reach it. This Bowl interlude, however amazing, will be useful, but we shall go on. Is that understood?”

Long silence. Karl started to say something, his lips half-forming a word, but thought better of it. Fred was quite obviously biting his tongue, eyes studying the table as if it were a brilliant new discovery. Their faces closed up into pale masks with eyes looking everywhere but not at Beth or at him. Very well. “This was an exploratory discussion, folks. I appreciate a free airing of views, as always.”

Fred said, “Outcome pretty obvious. When we came in.”

Redwing let nothing show in his face. “I’m sorry, Officer Ojama? Your special area is geology, as I recall. And ship systems. You said…?”

“It was pretty obvious you had decided to fly into the jet. You wanted to get us used to it.” Only after saying this did Fred’s eyes jerk away from the table’s smooth obsidian finish and dart a look at Redwing.

Redwing did not let his feelings show, much less his surprise at Fred’s suddenly becoming a talker on something other than tech details. Always remember that these people are damned smart. And odd. Not predictable. “Quite so. It’s useful to hear how hard this is going to be. Also to know the purpose.”

“Which is?” Beth was still softly defiant. Her eyes glowed.

“Getting to Glory. Those are our mission orders. We’re carrying humanity to the stars. Beginning a process that ensures our species immortality.” They had all heard these terms, but maybe they needed to be reminded.

“We haven’t discussed other options,” Fred said, his eyes still holding firm on Redwing.

“I haven’t heard any proposed,” Redwing said, deliberately settling his cheek on his right palm, as if settling in to listen.

“We could—should—continue our conversation with the Folk. Edge them toward our point of view.” Beth said this stiffly, eyes on Redwing. “They have Tananareve and Cliff’s team, yes. But we have so many sleeping souls with us—”

“We have given them days already,” Clare Conway said. “And they attacked our coins. In a few more days, what else might they do?”

Redwing was happy with this support and decided to let them talk awhile, let the idea sink in.

Fred said, “Think about us as orphans. This thing, the Bowl, is so old—they must be used to expeditions from some nearby star coming out to look. So whatever alien species arrived, they were on a one-way trip. Just like us. That’s the Folk history. So they think of us the same way.”

“Makes sense,” Karl said. “They think the Bowl is so wonderful, of course smart species want to come and see it. Tourists who came and stayed.”

Fred grinned, a rare event. “Not like us, passersby.”

Redwing did not like the way this was going. He kept his tone measured and precise. “In the end, a ship is not a democracy. It’s a ship and there’s only one captain. I’m it. I have to decide.” This came out of him as a formula, but he had to say it.

“The Bowl teaches us a lot, Captain.” Beth spoke quietly, slowly, but firm and steady. “We should study it awhile before we just go on. Before we leave it behind. There’s so much to learn!”

“They could be just waiting us out,” Clare said. “They know our general flight plan. It demands that we have only a few crew up and consuming food while we’re on full-bore flight. Here, we’re in a solar system, of sorts. We’re catching their solar wind, what there is of it, and barely maintaining good sailing conditions. They know us. We don’t know them.”

Fred said, “They must have seen our magscoop flexing, struggling, trying out new patterns.” He nodded to Clare. “And we kept running, but barely.”

“It’s pretty obvious, now that I think about it, from their point of view,” Karl said. “They know this system intimately—hell, we don’t even know how they manage to run it!”

“So it’s likely they want to wait us out. Run low on supplies.” Clare looked around at the whole table. “Gives them more time to hunt down Cliff’s team, too.”

Redwing was glad to get some support without saying a word. “Y’know,” he said casually, “Magellan lost most of his crew when he sailed around the world.”

“Magellan didn’t make it home either,” Fred said. “And we have over a thousand souls sleeping aboard who count on us.”

Well, that backfired. “They’re always in my calculations, Fred,” he said as warmly as he could.

“I still think—,” Beth began.

“That’s not a crew officer issue,” Redwing said firmly. “Not at all.”

Silence as it sank in. To his surprise, Karl said with a deliberate mild voice, “We do not know what we face.”

Redwing felt the tension rising in the room. At least the Artilects don’t argue.… “The human race has never known what it faced. We came out of Africa not knowing that deserts and glaciers lay ahead. Same here. If we have no respect from these Folk, we will be captives. Humanity will become zoo animals.”

This shocked them. Their eyes widened, blinked, mouths opened and closed with a snap. Maybe they’ll remember their obligations. Where they came from.

They all looked at him long and hard. But Beth looked away—and in that moment he knew that he had them.

Twenty-nine

Tananareve was a useful test subject. Memor enjoyed experimenting with the primate.

Memor listened to the rumble of the fast train and ignored Bemor, who was working on his portable communicator. The primate was irked, eyes narrowed, after she heard some of Memor’s remarks about the difficulty of negotiating with their Captain. Tananareve did not know she carried embedded sensors that reported regularly to Memor’s diagnostic systems. When she got angry, her heart rate, arterial tension, and testosterone production increased. Quite interestingly, her stress hormones decreased.

Memor turned out of the line of sight and flourished a flat display of the primate response.

“Bemor, note this, please.”

Bemor idly cast a distracted glance. Memor sent the data set to him and he glanced at the curves on his comm. “How odd, that anger relieves stress in these primates.”

He sniffed. “With bad social effects, I would wager.”

“Why? It must have evolved in the wild—”

“Exactly. They feel the stress-lowering as a kind of pleasure. So to relieve anxieties, they fight. This is not good for a peaceful society. It may explain why they are out here, far from home, exploring.”

Memor paused. She differed with her brother over this area, which was, after all, her own realm of research. But … “You could be right. It seems an unlikely feature in a species we would make docile.”

“I note her left brain hemisphere becomes more stimulated as well. This may confer some aggressive abilities.”

Memor let this ride. The strumming metallic rhythms of the fast train were comforting, considering that they were moving with truly astronomical speeds down magnetically pulsing tubes, over elegant curve trajectories, arcing across and within the Bowl’s long slopes. They had voyaged now for several slumbers. The fast tubes were cramped, and their outer metal skins at times heated to smarting temperatures through inductive losses. Tight, unamusing quarters even for Folk. Uninspired edibles, with little live game at all. Memor passed the last wriggling forkfish to Bemor; it flapped weakly and gave a soft cry of despair. He took it with relish and crunched happily, snapping the bones. The heady, acid flavor of the forkfish filled the cabin. Tananareve made a clenched face and covered her mouth and nose with a cloth.

All this travel to rendezvous with the proximate locus the autoprobes had found—among the icefields of the hull, in ready range of the Ice Minds—for the vagrant primates.

The renegade primates had tripped detectors among the renegade Sil first. Now this. Memor’s attempts to keep a distant trace on the primates was well enough, Bemor thought, but “Given to excess,” he had remarked, “when not well policed.”

Several ready examples had happened a short while ago.

First came the incident in which Sil hirelings had patrolled the precincts outside the recently bombed Sil city. There were minor traces of the primates in the area, but the bombardment had eliminated most of the sites where identification would have been simple. Instead there were vague sightings and some detector probables. Bemor had disliked Memor’s delegation of patrolling to a band of Sil unloyal to the central Sil hierarchy. They attempted a poorly thought-through maneuver to block the primates’ movements across a plain. The Sil accompanying the Late Invaders managed to kill and badly injure several of their blockers. There was one report that a car of Late Invaders had taken part in the action. Since Memor knew this same party had killed a local party in a magcar before, and taken part in an insurrection from which Memor herself narrowly escaped, this latest incident was no surprise.

The second incident was more troubling. The same Sil and Late Invaders party had been glimpsed by a routine patrol skirting the hull territories. Only one clear identification, but enough. Yet by the time automatic patrols had arrived, the party was gone.

Now a third report, in a region housing old intelligences. The portal near the Kahalla shrine had triggered an abnormality alert. This signal came to the attention of resident monitors for the Zone. Since Memor had a tag on such genetic identifiers, she heard of this just a short while ago, when already in the long magnetic train tube network with Bemor.

“They move in crafty fashion,” Bemor had observed. “Doubtless this is not a signature of Late Invader cleverness. They do not know our territories. They must be guided by the Sil.”

Memor sent a fan-array in a flutter of subtle, doubting yellows. “I doubt the Sil have such abilities either. We have contained them in their urge to expand for a great long time now. Many generations have passed since Sil could roam in exploring parties.”

Bemor considered this. “They are also a rambunctious species, still. Some longlives ago, they sought access to the strictly nonsentient Zones.”

“I do recall.” Memor quickly accessed her Undermind, and the memory unfolded for her quick review. “Outright demands for territory, claiming that their species had spread quickly over their homeworld due to a mixed genetic and social imperative.”

“Quite. Note that seems, from your own work, to be a signature heritage of your Late Invaders.”

The implications of this struck Memor only now. But her Undermind quickly sent a link that showed she had been mulling over these Late Invader–Sil resonances. But only vaguely. Bemor, on the other hand, had seen it immediately.

Memor turned to Tananareve. “Your origins are how far back in your own measure?”

The primate took her time. Her eyes swept from Memor to her brother as she kept her mouth stiff. Then, “Several hundred thousand orbitals.”

Bemor had not ingested Memor’s concept-map of her studies of the Late Invaders, for he said, “She must not know the correct sum.”

“No, this fits with her supporting frame-referencing knowledge. I read it directly from her long-term memory.”

“Unreliable. We do not know the topology of her Undermind.”

“We will. But more important, I asked her. She gave a detailed history of their species traumas. Detailed and odd, but plausible. They were several times forced into small surviving parties, due to climate shifts. At one point they were barely above levels to avoid inbreeding in a cold place near an ocean. This built in a desire to expand—almost an assumption, I would say, that the lands far beyond the hills they saw could be better.”

Bemor huffed and shifted his bulk uneasily. In close quarters, his musk flavored the air and rankled her nose. She sniffed as a rebuke. “It is rare to proceed up through the stages of mental layering you describe. I cannot believe it would occur in so few orbitals of an ordinary star.”

“As I recall, the Sil also evolved high intelligence and tool use in a short while.” Memor fished up the details and sent them to Bemor.

A long moment of brooding inspection, a rumbling in his chest, wheeze of slowly expelled breath. “So they did. This explains their intuitive alliance with the Late Invaders.”

Memor said, “We have new data that the Sil have been privy to our general messages about the Late Invaders. They may have sensed this as their opportunity.”

Bemor turned to Tananareve. “You know of the Sil?” he asked in something resembling Anglish.

“Only what you have said of them,” she said.

“They are with the other escaped Late Invaders.”

“We were not invaders at all!” This animated the primate. “We came as peaceful explorers.”

He rumbled with mirth at this, but a quick startled expression on Tananareve’s face showed she thought it an aggressive sound. “Your peacefulness is surely moot, is it not? You of course we retained, but some others of you escaped.”

“We do not like being unfree.”

“And we—who of course did not fear any warlike abilities such as your kind might have—do not savor intrusion. We avoid having new influences introduced into our Bowl without adequate wise supervision.” Bemor said this slowly, as if speaking to a child, or to some of the slower Adopteds.

“I think by now all of ‘our kind’ would like to just get away from this place. We have another destination.”

“As well we know,” Memor said, flashing a humor her fan-signal to Bemor. “But that is also why we cannot allow you to arrive there first.”

A nod. “That’s how I figured it.”

“Can you also give an opinion of why your companions are allied with the Sil?”

Tananareve smiled. “They need help.”

“And why together a band of these is moving through the Bowl, using fast transport and undersurface methods?” Bemor huffed, drawing nearer the primate—who then shrank back, nose wrinkling.

“They’re on the run. Been running so long, maybe it’s a habit.”

Memor suspected this was a gibe but said nothing. Bemor persisted, his sour and salty male odor rising in their compartment. “Nothing more?”

She looked up at them both with a level, assessing gaze. “How about curiosity?”

“That is not a plausible motive,” Memor said, but saw that Bemor gave off flurry-fan-signals of disagreement.

“I fear it is,” Bemor said. “We try not to allow such facets of a species’ character to rule their behavior.”

Tananareve smiled again. “That’s what becoming Adopted means?

“In part,” Bemor conceded.

“Then you will savor our destination,” Memor said. “It will show you creatures you have never seen and quite probably cannot imagine.” No point in not using a touch of anticipation, was there? Some species appreciated that.

The primate said, “Try me.”