Shipstar (40 page)

He tried to imagine what that meant to those living there. Then he made himself stop.

A booming roll came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.

“Plasma densities nearby are rising. Our exhaust is getting blocked again,” Beth said.

“This is how it started before,” Karl said. “To break down air, the voltage is—”

“Megavolts,” Clare snapped. “Got it. If that happens, stay flat. Stick your head up, it’ll draw current, fry you.”

“You think they—it—is trying to kill us?” Beth said. “This could be communication.”

“Strange way to do it,” Redwing said.

“Retaliation for thrashing the jet, I’d think,” Fred said. He had come onto the board so quietly no one noticed him.

“I’m getting rising inductive effects close to our skin,” Beth said. “Must be Alfvén waves rippling in on the scoop fields. Higher electric fields—”

Redwing felt his hair stand on end. He hit the deck.

Sparks snapped. Everyone flopped onto the deck and lay flat. A bright yellow-white line scratched across the air. More lines sputtered. They arched and twisted. Some split, and yellow green strands shaped a tight shape—

“Human form!” Fred said from the deck. “They’re making our image. They know what we are.”

The shape wobbled and throbbed in the fevered air. Carved in shifting, crackling yellow lines, it was like a bad cartoon. Stretched legs, arms flapping, wobbly head, hands first spread then balled into fists, the whole body flailing. Then it was gone in a sizzle and a flicker.

Beth said, “Can they see us?”

“Who’s ‘they’ anyway?” Clare said. Her face was flushed, lips compressed. “They’re trying to jam our fusion burn, get us to stop, I suppose. So they’re sending us an echo, an image of us to—make some kind of communication?”

The shape popped up again. Outlined in crackling yellow and orange, the figure wriggled and sputtered.

“Let me try…” Clare raised a hand slightly into the singed air. A long moment. Then slowly, twisting and shuddering, losing definition in the legs, the figure moved, too. It raised its left hand, mirror image to Clare’s right. Air snapped around the dancing yellow image. The hand flexed, worked, wriggled itself into … fingers. A thumb grew, extended, turned red, and contracted. Now the crackling image filled itself in, a skin spreading yellow-bright and warped and seething. The body grew a head, and it struggled to make a mouth and eyes of pale ivory. The electrical fog flickered, as if barely able to sustain the sizzling voltage.

Clare slowly flexed her fingers. The fingers twitched, too, suffused in a waxy, saffron glow. The body hovered in the air unsteadily, holding pattern, all the defining bright yellow lines focused on the shimmering, burnt-yellow hand.

“Let’s try to signal—,” Redwing began.

The arc snapped off with a pop. There was nothing in the air but a harsh, nose-stinging stench.

Clare sobbed softly. Fred jumped up and turned in all directions, but could see nothing to do. The only sound was the rumbling fusion engines.

“Let’s get back to stations,” Redwing said.

Clare laughed with a high, nervous edge. She got up and resumed the copilot chair. Everyone got back into bridge position, unsteady and pensive.

Fred said, “The low-frequency spectrum has changed.”

“Which means?” Redwing asked.

“It’s got a lot more signal strength. Let me run the Fourier—” His fingers and hands gave the board complex signals through its optical viewers. “Yep, got some FM modulation, pretty coherent.”

“Someone sending? Now?” Beth said. “Maybe they want to talk?”

“This is really low-frequency stuff,” Fred said. “The antennas we use to monitor interstellar Alfvén waves, to keep watch on perturbations in the magscoop. Never thought we’d get a coherent message on those!” Fred brightened, always happy to see a new unknown.

Karl had gotten up and now stood behind Fred’s chair. He said, “That fifteen kilohertz upper frequency—look at the spike. Amazing. Antennas radiate best if they’re at least as large as a wavelength, so … that means that the radiator is at least thirty kilometers across!”

Redwing tried to imagine what big structure could send such signals. “Is there anything on radar of that size in the jet?”

The answer came quickly: no.

“How can we decode it?” Clare asked. She stood and walked over to see Fred’s Fourier display.

Fred said, “I can look for correlates, but—hell!—we’re starting from knowing nothing about who the hell is—”

This time Redwing barely had time to register the prickly feeling on his hands and head before a crackling burnt-yellow discharge surged all along the bridge, snarling. The air snapped as they again dived for the deck. Redwing hit and flattened and saw Clare choose to stand against the nearest wall. A tendril shot forth and caught her. She twitched and crackled as the ampere violence surged through her. Her mouth opened impossibly wide, and a guttural gasp escaped—and then the mouth locked open, frozen. Smoke fumed from her hair. Her legs jumped and her arms jerked and she fell.

Her red coverall sparked at the belt. Tiny fires forked from her fingers as she struck the deck. Her hair seethed with smoke. She shuddered, twitched—was still.

Redwing did not move, but he noticed the tension had left the air. A seared silence came as acrid air stung the nostrils.

In the silence he could hear a last long sigh ease out of Clare, whistling between broken teeth.

Beth sobbed as they gingerly gathered around the singed body. Redwing wondered what he could do in the short time before the cylindrical alien ships arrived, climbing up the jet toward them.

THIRTY
-
EIGHT

Memor was roaring out of control. The two other Folk restrained her as she twisted and clawed at them. Their howls and wails blended together, even to Tananareve Bailey’s ears as she ran toward the enormous, thrashing things.

Her Folk attendants had scattered, not knowing what to do. They were backed against the walls, stunned into silence by Memor’s deep growls. Tananareve could tell they were too afraid to leave and too afraid to do anything. She saw that a figure among them lurked under a cowl, a humanoid with a gray metallic head, carrying three ruby red eyes that peered out from the cowl’s shadows. A cyborg, she guessed—mind downloaded into a metal body. Such things had begun to manifest Earthside in the era when they had departed, so perhaps it was natural that an alien form of embodied Artilects should have manifested here in a Bowl that was millions of years old. The cyborg had a crystal silicon carbide assembly, four arms, and sturdy legs. She had seen no artificial bodies in the Bowl but now here was one, an attendant to the Folk, cowering like the rest, against the pink living wall.

Tananareve glanced at all those pressed against the walls and now could tell they were all far too afraid, too devoted to the entire Bowl system, ever to see any other future. A stasis state where nothing changed.

Then there came a move, from the Folk.

Bemor acted. He held his genetic sister in a firm embrace while Asenath did something at the back of Memor’s head. Her great shape stopped writhing and shuddering and then slowly eased, her arms going slack. Memor’s eyes were distant, her face blank, breath long and heavy, a
whuff whuff
Tananareve had not heard before. Her big, nimble four-fingered hands twitched but did nothing.

Bemor turned from Memor, chuffing and labored, his face troubled. Blinking, he saw the humans and Sil. “We now know what you Sil have been spreading.” His voice came from the barrel chest, low and threatening.

Quert stepped forward, mild and calm, seeming utterly unafraid. Tananareve had met the alien Sil only moments before and was still trying to understand them. They were humanoid and walked with a fluid grace, their tan clothing adjusting itself to their movements. Quert said, “Glorian message came to human ship, the
SunSeeker.
”

Bemor huffed, stamped around, clearly calling on outside Artilects, and thinking on what they said, and finally himself said, “I am, yes, aware that our forward stations, orbiting from ahead of us, did not register the Glorian signals well and bring them to the proper level of attention. A bureaucratic error, alas. These stations have had no true news for many kilo-orbitals. They suffer from a sclerotic inability to adapt, to remain fresh.”

Quert said softly, “We know so. Sire.”

Bemor ignored this status salute. “These humans managed to get the Glorian mischief to you, the vagrant and difficult Sil.”

“It was important, surely you can see so, Sire. We spread such message through city-speak.” Quert spoke mildly but with eyes steady. “Then came more. Diagram of Bowl’s path. Much long history, strange tales the Glorians know.”

Bemor said, “Annoying! You had no need to be familiar with such.”

Quert did not blink. “Sil think opposite.”

Then they got into a hot discussion Tananareve could not follow, so she stepped back a few paces, into the comforting circle of humans. She had not realized, living so long among aliens whose social signals were strange and hard to register, what a simple warmth came from her own kind. After so long, it felt like a profound blessing. As the Folk chatter waxed on around them—Bemor booming, Quert’s small voice in sliding syllables—she considered her fellow humans. This was so strange in itself that the mere phrase
fellow humans
said it all as she thought of it. She had competed for, and then signed on to
SunSeeker,
all for one solid purpose—to go to a distant star and begin a new civilization. Straight out, true enough—a species imperative, some had said, and so she had supposed. She did feel that, then. She had stored her eggs and planned to find a man who deserved them, and to do what she could, in some distant land among the stars, to bring humanity to a greater destiny.

Yet … now these fellow humans in their nervous chatting selves looked … strange to her. Their rambling, whispered words, their ill-concealed yet clearly frightened eyeball-jittering glances … all these seemed both familiar and yet edged in strangeness.

Cliff, for example, looked worn down. Skinny. Standard uniform but patched here and there, knees and elbows replaced, and tattered beyond easy recognition. Rough-cut beard, hair chopped into blunt wedges, a true wild man from many wearing days. Yet his eyes were watchful and quick, listening to his team and also sizing up the alien discussion going on a few paces away. He seemed somehow telescoped down a long range, so she could see him in a perspective she had never known. As a member of his species, he talked less than others and never stopped studying his surroundings. Watching him was to her now refreshment, consolation, peace.

Best to leave that for later, though. You met the alien on your own terms and what you took away might be unexpected. She had to use whatever perspective worked.

So Tananareve turned to Irma, smiled, and did the ritual girl thing, and got the whole story in a few minutes.

The Glorians had sent their own history of the Bowl’s long trajectory, plus some cartoon threats to stay away from Glory. Apparently they had been surveying all their galactic neighborhood for a great long time, while keeping electromagnetic silence. But now that the Bowl was steadily approaching, they resorted to a simple microwave signal train. And it told a truly ancient tale.

An event the Folk called the Great Shame was marked in the Bowl’s path. The Sil wrote it in their architectural messages. Their new city rapidly rebuilt after the Bird Folk smashed it. The new Sil array of parks, plazas, streets, and structures held an agreed code. This conveyed a message other societies ringed around the great expanses of the Bowl could see and use. Now everyone knew of the Great Shame.

Tananareve asked, “And why’s that important?”

“Because the Folk destroyed their own home world,” Cliff said. “As we saw. Earth. It looks like they blundered into the Oort cloud, and their gravitational impulse nudged the Dinosaur Killer comet, sixty-five million years ago.”

“So life changed directions,” Tananareve said, eyes distant. “Doomed the dinosaurs, but made us possible.”

“Must be more,” Irma said. “Must be.”

Memor thrashed and called in long strident shrieks. She raised her huge, thick-lipped mouth and made a warbling, keening sound. Bemor sheltered his sister twin through this and gathered himself, a big hulking presence, and said to them all, “The Sil did not truly know what they were doing. This is the Great Shame, yes. Now that it is known, the task of us all is to make clear that it came from an earlier species, and so does not imply that the Folk are responsible.”

Tananareve’s eyes flared, eyebrows arched. “Huh? C’mon—this ‘does not imply that the Folk are responsible’—but you caused it! And why’s Memor so distressed?”

Bemor shuddered a bit and in low bass tones said, “She is in conversation with her … Undermind. The Great Shame was merely a phrase to her. Now she has discovered that her Undermind concealed its meaning, to preserve her balance.”

“I thought you Folk could view all your unconscious,” Tananareve said.

“Not always.” Bemor hesitated, then with a rustle of feathers that she now knew meant he had made a decision, went on. “The proto-Folk of that ancient era, who committed the Great Shame, were unwise. They returned to their home system, flush with triumphant contacts with scores of nearby worlds. The dynamics of their parent system were well known to them, but wrong. Their data was gathered when the second sun—our star, now—was still in place. And perhaps they ventured too deeply into the large cloud of iceteroids.”

Tananareve was digesting this when Cliff frowned and said, “The Bowl has one great commandment—stability is all. Right? Having this Great Shame is a contradiction you don’t want to face—is that what’s making that one”—a nod to Memor—“so crazy?”

An awkward silence. Then Asenath said, “We Folk differ from those who built the Bowl. Those could not view their Underminds. The vagrant forces that arise in Underminds can be managed, if the sunshine of the Overmind shines upon them.”