Shipstar (19 page)

But Asenath went on, her agenda becoming apparent. “The message from Glory is aimed at primates. The Glorians think primates are running the Bowl!”

Cackles, hoots, coughs, and murmurs. General hilarity, even among the assistants, who normally suppressed any show. “Good!” Asenath said. “Let them keep that misapprehension. Make the true rulers, ourselves, unpredictable.”

“We surely are that,” Bemor said sardonically. Yet something in his tone conveyed ironic skepticism.

Asenath made a submission-display flutter, but it was unconvincing. “Ideal setting for an entire suite of deception-maneuvers, yes. We will need cooperation of the primates to bring this off.”

Bemor turned to the primate and said in its tongue, “You follow this?”

Memor was surprised that Bemor articulated the alien fricative consonants quite well, directing breath with his tongue over the sharp edge of the teeth and into the capture hollows of his cheeks. It gave Bemor a solemn, echoing way of pronouncing the rather simple constructions the primates could manage. Memor had taken several sleep-times to master that, and her words still came out reedy and thin. Worse, the primate understood Bemor immediately, saying, “I don’t know your language.”

So Bemor gave a guarded version of their conversation, keeping it minimal, giving away nothing, omitting of course anything the primate could use. Artfully done, Memor had to admit.

Tananareve’s first comment was a question. “What about the light-speed problem?”

Bemor said, “We think long. Perhaps few of us will live to arrive near Glory.”

“So you want to reply to their signal? Deceive them?”

Memor felt the primate showed insufficient respect for their company, but Asenath chose that moment to recover some role in the conversation. “My team is putting together a response for Glory. No great hurry, but there may be a time limit.”

Tananareve shot back, “What if the Glorians send out an exploring expedition of their own?”

“We can surely see it well in advance and defend properly,” Asenath said with a fan-flutter in ivory that said,
Such is obvious.

“You know about the gravity waves, right?”

Bemor said, “You imply, we should be wary of what weapons might they have?”

Tananareve stood, stretched, plucked some sweatfruit from an ample bowl. A show of indifference? Perhaps this was all the primate could do, since it could not give feather displays or more subtle signals. With a mouth partly full of the fruit—a grave social error for the Folk—she said, “Well, I sure would be.”

“I believe,” Asenath said, “and Contriver Bemor may amend this, that the Lambda Spear can be revived?”

Bemor made a ring-show of blue and green, meaning “yes,” for he knew the primate could not grasp this.

“What’s that?” Tananareve said.

“It is a truly terrible device, able to alter the fundamental constants of a small region of space-time, upon command,” Memor put in.

Her eyes widened. “You use this … how?”

“With great care, obviously,” Bemor said. “We can project such an effect only over long distances, so to avoid being in the realm affected. It is appropriate for defense on a system-wide scale.”

“It comes to us,” Memor added, “from the Time of Terror.”

“I’d love to hear the story,” Tananareve said.

“I can show you a worked example of how we avoid such dark times, soon enough,” Asenath said with a mild feather-rustle. “I have an appointment at a Justice Rendering. Duty summons.”

TWENTY

Cliff and the others were glad to get back into the warmer precincts of the Bowl underground. They rested in a large view space that gave them warmth, yet through a broad portal gave a closer view of the “vacuum flowers,” as Irma termed them. They ate the food they carried, and the Sil leading them brought water from a small delivery system lodged in the hard rock walls. The Bowl’s outer hull was intricately woven through with passages, rooms, narrow little living quarters, and shops for what looked like repairs. As well, they passed by warrens that seemed to be where the finger snakes lived and worked. In some of the shops, snakes wearing harnesses labored at rack arrays, doing metal and electronics work. They were intense little creatures of glistening, gunmetal blue skin, beady eyes focused at close range on implements usually smaller than a finger—a human finger, not the bigger boneless ones the snakes used.

“Y’know,” Aybe said, “it’s kind of reassuring that in this incredible place, they’re making flanges and hex joints, pressure sleeves and shafts with ball joints.”

“Engineering,” Terry said, “is a universal.”

Some of the snake teams were working now on a large, intricate wall. They worked with a fevered energy, clacking and hissing to each other and slithering adroitly over copper arrays. This wall lay behind where the humans watched the dim landscape of the hull. Hull ice was thick here, and vacuum flowers lapped against the transparent portal. Cliff touched the window and had to snatch his hand away at a sudden sharp pain. He feared it was so cold, his fingers would freeze to it. Quert had said there were multiple vacuum layers in these transparent walls, but the cutting cold came through.

“That’s it,” Aybe said, “these corridors are below the mirror zone. We’re at the edge of a big mirror area, too. This whole section of the Bowl must be chilly.”

It seemed so. So the land beyond was extremely cold, dotted with rock that formed roofs over areas of gray ice steeped in dark. Following Quert’s advice, Irma played her laser beam, set on dispersed mode, into those dark spaces. In this flashlight mode, they were surprised to see odd, ivory-colored things moving with agonizing slowness.

Aybe asked what these were. “On our way here we saw bizarre life-forms feeding on ice, but those—”

Irma said, “Those slow creatures with mandibles and eyestalks, yes—like lobsters, but living in high vacuum and low temperatures.”

Terry eyed the moving gray things. “These shapes are amorphous. More like moving fluids.”

“Ice life,” Quert said. “Kin to ice minds.”

Irma said, “So, ah … You brought us here to…”

Quert let the silence lengthen, then said, “Sil want speak.”

“To…?”

“Ice minds.”

“What can we do?” Irma asked.

“Ice minds speak to you.” Quert made eye-moves that might imply hope or expectation; it was still hard to tell.

“Won’t they speak to you?” Terry asked.

“Not speak Adopted.”

Irma said, “You mean, species brought onboard the Bowl? Why not?”

“Ice minds old. Want only new.”

“Y’know, those blobs in the shadows are moving, together. Toward us,” Aybe said.

“Watchers,” Quert said. “Allied with ice minds.”

Cliff said, “So you were ignored before—,” and saw that now the vacuum flowers were opening and turning. “Why … why are those doing—?”

Quert gestured at the vacuum flowers that abandoned their slow sweep of the sky, dutifully tracking nearby stars for their starlight. They rotated on their pivot roots toward this transparent wall.

The company fell silent as the flowers began to open fully, from their tight paraboloid shapes that focused sunlight on their inner chemistry. Slowly they nosed toward the wall where humans and Sil watched. As they did so, they blossomed into broad white expanses, each several meters across.

“They’re really large,” Irma said. “Still hard to imagine, plants that can live in vacuum, and bring in starlight from over a large area. To feed … Quert, did you mean these flowers provide energy for the whole biosphere living out there, on the hull?

Quert simply gave eye-signals, apparently a “yes.” Then the Sil said, “Commanded by cold minds,” and would say no more.

The thin glow of the jet brimmed above the horizon here, and some flowers seemed focused permanently on that. It seemed an unlikely source of much energy, for the plasma was recombining and emitting soft tones in blue and red. On the other hand, that was steady though weak and some flowers had perhaps evolved to harvest even such dim energies.

They were all transfixed as the radiators spread open and completed their pivot toward the humans. There was silence broken only by the faint sound of air circulating, as the field of flowers—Cliff swung his head around to count over a hundred within view—then began to pulse with a gray glow. Behind the flower field the stars still wheeled, cutting arcs in the black. The humans stood mutely watching, their heads tilted up to see the spreading flowers, who in turn clung to the rotating hull. The gray glow built slowly, the whole flower display assuming a shape like a giant circle flecked with light, staring at them. Cliff felt a chill wash over his skin that was not from the temperature.
This is truly alien.…

A pattern began to emerge. In the dim light their eyes had adjusted, and so the brighter flower circles made blotchy spots while the darker flowers accented a contrast … and the entire array began to form a speckled image.…

A picture came into view. Irma gasped. “It’s Beth’s face—again!”

The picture was crude because there were fewer pixels to be had from the flowers, but still Cliff found it unsettling. He gazed at the cartoon of Beth Marble while others talked on. Finally he said, “Reasonably close, too. Whoever commands these vacuum flowers knows the method they used with the mirror zones. They’re using this to get our attention.”

Quert gave a rustle of agreement. “Ice minds.”

“At least her lips aren’t moving,” Terry said. “That gave me the creeps.”

“So … no message,” Aybe said. “Just a calling card.”

Quert looked around and pointed to the wall behind them. The snake team was still working, this time with some armatures like waldoes. They had somehow extruded a flat tank from the wall, and snakelike machine arms were completing it. This was not repair but construction. They worked by coaxing features from a substrate that simmered with flashes of orange light. The whole working team was laboring with new members. A big lizardlike thing of crusted hide had four tentacles, each of which alone was larger than a finger snake, fissioning into more small ones that snakes did not have. Cliff watched one use fingernails, too, that deformed into helical screwdrivers, snub pliers, a small hammer. It was trimming away and adjusting features freshly drawn from the wall. Cliff glanced back at the Beth portrait, still frozen in a smile. When he turned, the work team was slithering away across the wall, as the central oval they left brimmed with orange glows.

Letters and then words seemed to drift to the surface of the wall, as if bubbling up from deep ocean water.

“It’s Anglish,” Terry said. “How do they know?”

“Ice minds,” Quert said. Across the Sil’s face—and across those of the other Sil with them, who had been quiet all along—the skin stretched and warped, framing the eyes. Did this mean joy? Fear? Impossible to tell. But there were no other signs of concern in the body, which remained still.

The script ran slowly.

We have ranged the Deep and kept history near.

We are not of you carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and light.

We ride here to preserve the greatness you have found now.

Long ago we shaped this traveling structure, when the warm folk came to us from deep within the whirlpools that girdled our suns. The warm folk gave us tools to build large. Some of us stayed among the comets, but we here have clung to the Bowl. We live through eons of time, and so have seen the many thousands of faces intelligence can assume. We dealt with them in turn. We are the Bowl memory.

Irma said, “This looks like a prepared lecture.”

Aybe nodded. “Must be. They’ve used it before. I guess if there are thousands of years between passes nearby other stars, you work up an all-purpose greeting.”

Terry smiled. “Boilerplate, huh? This doesn’t look like a greeting, though. More of an announcement, I’d say.”

“Intended to awe, yep,” Cliff said.

“As if this place didn’t impress us enough? Their Anglish is good,” Irma said. “They must have access to the Folk’s experience. But are we missing a point? These—Ice Minds—claim they built the Bowl.”

“Shaped it. Designed it, maybe,” Terry corrected her. “After intelligent warm life found them. After they ranged through the solar system and then the planets of this other little companion sun, after they worked their way into … would you say a mutual Oort cloud? And found these forests of supercold life. And the Ice Minds used them for engineering.”

“Or they could be bragging,” Cliff said. Nobody laughed.

They watched as the words faded and a long series of still pictures followed. Each came in at an easy pace, as though there were all the time in the world to show images of planets—crisp and dry, cloudy and cool, cratered yet with shimmering blue atmospheres—and stars, sometimes in crowded clusters, at times seen close-up and going nova in bright, virulent streamers, or in tight orbits around unseen companions that might be neutron stars or black holes. Wonders the Bowl had seen while driven forward by its jet. Portraits of the early Bowl years, Cliff gathered—the jet flaring and trembling in tangled knots of ruby and sharp yellow as the vast cup got under way.

For these ones that Quert termed Ice Minds there was indeed all the time in the world. The screen visions streamed on and the humans sat with backs against the rough walls to watch them. Strange landscapes loomed.

“They call us warmlife,” Quert added as the screen showed an iceworld. Against a black sky odd lumps moved, in a lake lit by a smoldering red light. There were dune fields, ponds, channels. The lake sat in a convoluted region of hills cut by valleys and chasms.

Aybe said, “I’d say that looks kind of like Titan, Saturn’s moon.”

“There was small life there,” Irma said. “Microbial, some pond scum, nothing more.”

“There’re moving forms on that screen,” Terry said. For this view the screen showed sequential shots. The lumps seemed like knots of fluid, assisted by sticks that crossed through the globular bodies. Blobs that somehow used tools like rods? These coherent colloids moved across bleak fluid that might be hydrocarbons like ethane. On the beach the lumps moved ashore with viscous grace, pulling themselves forward with extruded feelers that managed the sticks. “They’re clustering around that domed thing that looks like a termite mound,” Irma said. “Even blobs can build.”