Bowl of Heaven (44 page)

“My God, Terry, you’re drunk!” Cliff took the plants and checked them; they looked reasonable. But he couldn’t take his eyes from Terry and—yes, Aybe also had a bleary look.

“They gave us a drink, said it was refreshin’,” Terry said.

Howard said, “Tastes a little like pineapple wine. Bland. I was not tricked, boss.” He thumped his chest. “Alcohol.”

“I’ll say. The chemistry here really is similar.” Cliff waved them to the riverside.
Might as well relieve the pressure when they can.…

Was ethanol a universal? It appeared in low densities in star and planetary system forming regions: simple organic chemistry. It was just sugars turning bad, so they formed a hydroxyl with carbon. Chimpanzees used it, too. Maybe all higher intelligences sometimes needed to escape from the prison of reason?

“So,” Aybe plopped down and said with the owlish manner of a drunk trying to pretend he’s sober, “where do we go from here?”

“There’s a price on our heads, boys,” Irma said. “I say stay here, rest up, learn from these Sil.”

“We can eat,” Howard said. “Nev-ever a given.”

“We need a plan,” Aybe said.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish,” Irma said. “But what’s our goal?”

“There’s enough room here,” Terry said with leaden profundity, “for everybody cold sleepin’ on
SunSeeker
to live.”

“But this isn’t a planet, it’s a park!” Irma shot back.

“Seems big enough for a million planets. Strange aliens. Room to make somethin’ new.” Terry nodded to himself.

Irma’s eyes and nostrils flared. “We didn’t cast off everybody we knew to come to this place!”

“Well, we’re here anyway,” Aybe said solemnly. “We don’t even know if we can get
SunSeeker
started up right again.”

“There’s damn plenty we don’t know, right,” Terry agreed.

Cliff eyed them and saw this was an idea brewing for some time among them. Carefully he said, “Look, we’re in a crazy place. But don’t let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination. We’re bound for Glory.”

In their pealing laughter he heard joy.

FORTY-NINE

The inhabited section of the Bowl, its vast ring-shaped rim, was
what Redwing had come to call the Great Plain. Now
SunSeeker
crossed softly over the rim of the Bowl, and the Great Plain fell behind. Far below, the cellophane sky dropped to touch a rise in the Bowl’s understructure, bulging outward by a few kilometers, as they crossed the Bowl rim. “Stay well clear,” Redwing told Jam again. “We don’t want to burn holes in their sky with our magnetics.”

Jam grinned as if at a joke. “Yes, sir. Do your enemy no small injury.” He added, “Machiavelli.”

So the great ship floated past the rim with 100,000 kilometers to spare. Redwing watched, mesmerized, until Ayaan whacked his back with her fist. “Captain! I’ve got Fred Oyama!”

“Hot damn! Patch me through. Fred, need update on your condition.”

Ayaan said, “Talk past him. You’re twenty-three minutes apart at lightspeed, and all they can send us is text. Talk and I’ll text-connect it.”

“Yah. Fred, we’re cruising around back of the Bowl to see what we can see. Our last contact with Beth’s team had her in a cluster of caves. She’s worried about what low gravity is doing to their bones and such. Otherwise they’re safe. She should have at least a couple of months, but then they’ll all need
SunSeeker
’s hospital section.

“We’ve solved the problem with
SunSeeker
’s motors,” he said, and decided not to give details. The ship had been delayed by the Bowl’s head wind, just enough to matter. Maybe
SunSeeker
could have veered around the Bowl’s wake and kept on to Glory, stretching their supplies to the max. But the Bowl was a bigger game, really, he decided. An unimaginable jackpot—if they survived it. Glory could wait.

Redwing watched Ayaan working their antenna system to keep him on target. Their technology was at its very limits, communicating over such vast, constantly moving ranges.

“We’ve fiddled some with the menu, including some biochem information, so I’ll beam you an update,
now.
” Ayaan nodded and pressed a key to send the prepared squirt.

“I’d like to pick you all up. We should at least plan to meet. It would be great if we could find a meet place. The trouble as I see it is that any site big enough to see from here would be like arranging to meet in Australia.” Redwing laughed, then remembered that he wouldn’t hear a response. “Too big. But if we could find something like a radio station, we could find each other there. We’ll look for antennas of any kind while we’re here.”

He paced the deck, trying to wedge in every thought before they lost the connection. “Of course, there’s no docking or refueling arrangements for us that we understand on the outer skin. Of course, we’ve lost one of our landers. Never mind, we still have the
Hawking
and
Chang
and
Dyson.
Your team has been without medical treatment for four months now. We need to debrief you.”

Not the best time, a link just when they were coasting out over the rim. “I’m looking at the back of the Bowl, seeing quite a lot of structure. Blems, bubbles, angular structures, crisscrossed lines … I’m zooming on an intersection … those are tubes networking … maybe a transport system. Looks like spiderwebbing.

“Bigger, shorter tubes right at the rim. Knobby gray structures big as … well, little moons. Like Ceres. Several of ’em. I can see the nearest one in motion. Really big. Too big to be a weapon. Helical lines running round the inside—”

Redwing’s internal alarm bells went off. “Karl, what do you think?”

Karl was standing alert, almost crouching. He said crisply, “Looks like they’re encased in magnetic field coils. Maybe some sort of offensive weapon.”

“Or telescope,” Clare said.

Karl shook his head. “Astronomy? Nah. No need for that long cylinder. Could be a laser of a kind we don’t know? Huge, in any case.”

“Looks like old-style cannon,” Redwing said. “Except bigger than makes any sense.”

Clare Conway said, “Maybe they fight planets.
Big
cannon. Captain, we’ll be looking right into that tube in maybe twenty minutes.”

Karl said, “The nearest of them is swiveling to engage us, sir.”

Redwing frowned. “Okay. Jam, start us turning. Stay away from the focus of that thing. Ayaan, do you still have Fred? Fred, give me some good news, will you?”

Jam said quickly, “With your permission, Captain, I’ll bring us back above the Great Plain.”

“Do that. Fred, we’ll be out of touch in a few minutes. We have a message from Earth. I’ll squirt it
now
.”

*   *   *

They lost the Fred link. What Clare had called a cannon continued to follow them. Jam and Clare rolled the ship to escape. The magscoop flexed and fought as it reconfigured, seizing on whatever ionized solar wind it could grasp. They dropped down below the Bowl rim.

“No telescope could be that big,” Clare said. “Right? Captain?”

“Jam, is she right?”

“I’m going lower,” Jam said, concentrating on their trajectory. Long rolling waves hummed through the ship. “Scopes don’t need to be long, just wide to capture light. But to emit light…”

They were over the Great Plain now, decelerating a little to bring them past the rim. Clare said, “That does it. That long tube isn’t following us anymore.”

“Doesn’t want to fire on the Great Plain.” Redwing made it a straight assertion based on his intuition. That hid some of his relief.

Jam said, “Maybe they can’t. If it’s a cannon, and if it could swivel down to fire on inhabited turf … a civil war could get really nasty, couldn’t it?”

Redwing didn’t know, so he didn’t answer.

Ayaan said, “My lucky day. I’ve got fresh text from Cliff’s team. Spotty and noisy, but the software cleaned it pretty well. Want to see it?”

She put the long message on all their screens. Cliff’s team had discovered a tram system and learned to use it; had met aliens and fought a war with them as allies; those aliens had led them into the Bowl’s structural undergrowth. There were low-res pictures. They were eating well enough, and grateful for Beth’s menu instructions.

“Mostly they’re staying alive and moving,” Redwing said. There were smiles all around. “Great news.”

“But even if they’re not captured, they’re getting nowhere,” Ayaan added.

Redwing was getting near the end of his watch so handed off to Karl and went to his cramped quarters. They had snagged a cluster of messages from Sol system while beyond the Bowl’s lip, and the AI had them crisply decoded on his private computer. He told it to speak the messages as he ate dinner alone—Sri Lankan rice and chicken in a deep tangy sauce. One of the biggest threats to stability in a spacecraft was sensory deprivation of a subtle sort, and tasty food helped a lot. So would sex, but that was a dead end for a captain. There was a certain lady he’d like to revive, but the circumstances had to call for it—probably, when he needed large ground teams. There was nothing official between them, no contract, no conditional agreement. And big ground teams didn’t seem to be a good bet here anyway. He sighed, watched the great construct roll on below, and turned to the tightbeam communications.

There were some tech updates on the grav waves. He set them aside for Karl after a glance and read the executive summary. After centuries of study, Earthside didn’t know a whole lot more. The wavelengths and wave packets still implied huge masses waltzing around each other in complex patterns. Yet large aperture studies of the Glory system showed no such masses at all. Maybe grav theory was wrong, one message said. Or they were watching a source accidentally in the same spot of the sky and much farther away.

He read that “… final merger of two black holes in a binary system releases more power than the combined light from all the stars in the visible Universe. This vast energy comes in the form of gravitational waves, bearing the waveform signature of the merger.” Far too much power to be the Glory signature, but the waveforms were like those from the merger theory.

Or else, the summary said, “… the effect is fictional, made up somehow to deceive us.” Fictional? Maybe the language had changed. Facts never had to be plausible; fiction did. He snorted.

The last century or so of messages had taken on an odd flavor of exhortations to the same refrain—the glories of their mission and urging them on. Sometimes these carried overt religious tones, but this one was an eco-sermon. He told his software to mine it for real information.

Most of the real news was on biosphere management: Earthside, the carbon sequestration that had worked well was having side effects. The warmed, expanded oceans were building up their carbonates, a product from the deployed farm waste carbon dropped into them. Now some was coming back out. Seeding the ocean to capture CO
2
by sweetening the ocean dead zones had also capped out, and the climate engineers couldn’t stuff more in. Alarm bells …

All the things put off for a few centuries were now biting back. The only thing Earthside had truly planned for on a centuries-long timescale was the starships.…

He turned on his wall screen and looked at the distant landscapes drifting past—low mountains crested in snow, vast forests, river valleys the size of Earthly continents. How
did
these creatures run their Bowl? It had to be far more complex than managing a mere planet.

Could the Bowl teach Earth something crucial about terraforming? That alone would be worth stopping for.

He made himself run through the rest of the tightbeam signals. There were some updates on performance modes of their onboard AIs, some hardware issues, suggested upgrades here and there. Most likely these came as feedback from other starships.
SunSeeker,
too, had tightbeamed back such reports. He was pretty sure the summaries he had sent about the Bowl were the most bizarre ever transmitted.

He captained a starship, but this enormous thing was a star that drove a ship, was the propulsion, a star that was the essence of the ship itself. It ran on fusion, too, like
SunSeeker.
It was a … shipstar.

So … who captained it?

END OF VOLUME ONE

•   •   •

VOLUME TWO:

S
HIPSTAR

WILL FOLLOW SOON
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We conferred on scientific and literary matters with many helpful people. Erik Max Francis, Joe Miller, and Joan Slonczewski gave detailed comments on the manuscript. Don Davis, Mark Martin, and Joe Miller and James Benford were of great help in technical issues. And of course, Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson were first.

F
OLK
T
ERMS

TransLanguage

Long Records

Late Invaders

Undermind

Serf-Ones

the Builders

Third Variety (Astronomer variety)

Astronauts (Astronomer variety)

T
OR
B
OOKS BY
G
REGORY
B
ENFORD

Jupiter Project

The Stars in Shroud

Shiva Descending

Artifact

In Alien Flesh

Far Futures

Beyond Human

T
OR
B
OOKS
BY
L
ARRY
N
IVEN

N-Space

Destiny’s Road

Rainbow Mars

Scatterbrain

Ringworld’s Children

The Draco Tavern

Stars and Gods

Playgrounds of the Mind

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHORS

LARRY NIVEN
is the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces. His
Beowulf’s Children,
coauthored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a
New York Times
bestseller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.