THIRTY-ONE

Redwing watched the Bowl landscape slide by below, distracting himself for a moment of relaxation with the splendid view. Getting back to work, he switched to interior ship views. In the garden, on screens left and right, two finger snakes were slithering through plants, picking here, planting seeds there, while the third—the male, Thisther, darker and a bit bigger than the others—was playing with two pigs, all three having hissing and oinking fun. A laugh bubbled in Redwing’s throat—and still the big first question was there. What could I be missing?

Beth was due in a moment and he let the Bowl feed play on his display wall. He took out a tattered, yellowing paper. As part of his several-kilogram weight allowance it was nothing, but in his memories it was everything. His father had written it to him when in the Huntsville hospital from which he would not return. When he was ten, it had meant a great deal and now it meant more.

LIVE FULLY. TAKE RISKS. THINK CAREFULLY BUT ACT, TOO. SPEAK UP. KEEP MIND OPEN AND HEART WARM. DON’T JUST PASS THE TIME. LIVE LIVE LIVE!—FOR SOMEDAY YOU WILL NOT.

He recalled the man at his best: sawdust sprinkled in black hair, deftly pushing a Douglas fir two-by-four through the buzzing blade of a circular saw, then trimming it and taking a quick measure of the work by holding it against the studs, nodding in the damp fragrant sawdust air, plucking a nail from where he stored it in his front teeth, fetching a ball-peen hammer from its loop on his belt, two quick whaps and a finishing tap, a bright grin, then on to the next.

He stared at the paper scrap and then put it away, for perhaps the thousandth time. It was centuries old but still true.

Beth tapped on his door. He stood to slide the door aside and nodded with a greeting. They got right to it.

She sat across from him in his narrow cabin and he made a show of finishing a log entry. It was not entirely show. He had to keep on top of how SunSeeker sailed on the vagrant winds of plasma and magnetic fields. Plus preparations for the jet interception. And an anxious, overworked crew.

But Beth was the hardest. She had been down there for long months and managed to get back aboard, a striking feat. She had prestige with the rest of the crew. She regaled them with stories of aliens and exploits and weird doings down on the Bowl. She’d taken casualties and escaped from a prison. Figured out the alien landscape and made her team get across it. And fly back home in an alien craft. So he had promoted her two grades in the science officer ladder. When she got to Glory—and we will do that, by damn!—she would command the first landing. Still, her tight face promised trouble.

“We’re in an existential position here, sir,” she began.

“Right. We don’t have enough supplies to get to Glory. Our logistics were marginal when we sighted the Bowl. Now it’s hopeless. We’ve burned food and essentials hovering over this enormous thing. Plus time.”

Beth said with deliberation, “I mean, if we commit an overt hostile act, that sure does change the game.”

He nodded. Always concede the rhetorical stuff. “We have to start a clock running. Otherwise they’ll wait us out.”

“But their jet is the key to their Bowl. Damaging it is a mortal threat.”

“Sure it is. We don’t mean to shove a dagger in. We want to show that we can.”

Beth twisted her mouth into a wry grimace. “A pinprick, then?”

“That’s all.”

“These are aliens, Cap’n. Their civilization is older than anything we know. Hell, maybe than we can know. This maneuver, this provocation, is a huge gamble.”

“That it is.” He sat back and folded his hands on his desk. “One we’ve got to take.”

“Look, we don’t know how that damn jet operates. How the Folk run it. How unstable it is.”

“Right. Isn’t that how science works?” Redwing grinned. “If you don’t understand, do an experiment.”

Beth shook her head. “Plus we don’t understand the Glory message, or how the Folk really feel about it. I just … I worry.”

“So do I.” What could I be missing?

“There are risks to every choice. Maybe the right question is, do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?”

She sighed and got up. She was a bit wobbly. He wondered if she was truly fit for service as their backup pilot. On impulse, he got up and gave her a firm warm hug. With a sigh, too.

*   *   *

Karl showed him the external views of SunSeeker, freshly gathered by their small auto-cam bots that had flown around the entire ship. “She’s centuries old now, but holding up,” he said with a hint of pride. Karl was a bit stiff and formal, but he could not conceal his feelings completely.

The ship’s sleek after section hid behind the torus of the life zone. The shuttle cradles along the central boom were yawning yellow and orange cups for craft docking and vacuum maintenance bots. Micrometeorites had pitted the hull, and radiation burns splashed black filigrees along the flanks. The entire sleek design focused on the demands of starflight. Now their planetary-scale orbits made it hard to get adequate plasma into the magnetic funnel, and the ship barely ran. Fitful spasms sometimes passed through her, the coughs and sputters of a system hovering on the brink of shutting down entirely. The fusion fires in her belly ran soft, then hard, then not at all—until Karl and the crew could get them burning full and furious again. It reminded him of a fine ship built for the high seas, rotting beside a wharf.

Redwing nodded. “Fair enough. The mag systems, they can handle the jet?”

Ayaan Ali said, with a tired and exasperated sigh, “Our upgrades are basically fine-tuning. They seem to work. I’m pretty sure, from records and Artilect memories of Beth’s flight up the jet, that we can deal with the turbulence levels.”

“And if we can’t?” Redwing persisted.

Karl said, “The more plasma we get into our magscoop, the better. So we steer for the density ridges, held in by the helical mag field.”

Ayaan Ali pursed her full lips, and her long eyelashes flickered. Redwing recalled this was the closest she came to showing that she was irked. “The jet’s mag pressure is high. It and those fast-changing plasma pressures can punch our scoop around, too. They’re two orders of magnitude beyond our optimal design.”

Redwing saw himself as referee when crew disagreed on the tech issues, but in the end he knew he had to decide who was right. “How bad can it be if we lose our magscoop shape?”

“We’ll tumble,” Ayaan Ali said.

“And we can recover,” Karl said evenly.

They had the reliable Bear Down leptonic drive, the first to use the dark energy substrate as an energy stabilizer. Redwing did not pretend to understand its complex mechanisms that somehow drew power from the substrate of the very universe. Fundamentals were not his concern; its operation was. Karl pointed out endless details but in the end they had to play the hand they were dealt—a drive running on empty, unless they could grab enough plasma.

Ayaan Ali laid out the geometry on the big display screen that dominated the bridge. SunSeeker had to stay below the Bowl rim, or else come within the sighting angle of the domed gamma ray lasers sited there. Their “experiment” with flying a small package over the rim—and watching it disappear in a furious instant—proved that the Folk sense of diplomacy did not include letting them get out of the narrow cage SunSeeker now occupied. They could navigate in the space below the rim, down to the upper reaches of the Bowl’s air zones. Spread out as the Bowl was over hundreds of millions of kilometers, it exerted a small but steady grav pull on them. Thrusting with the thin plasma here offset that. And through the center of that volume the jet spiked like a living, writhing yellow lance.

Ayaan Ali’s 3-D display showed in detail the atmosphere’s partitions far below them. It was not continuous, or else pressure differences between the low-grav sections would cause the air to gather there to a stifling degree. Instead, firm walls isolated wedges of the Bowl, cutting off circulations to high latitudes. Yet the air zones allowed gas to flow throughout the entire circumference of the annular regions. This meant that the air could flow over zones covering the size of the entire solar system, creating weather patterns unknown on mere planets. But the air could not ascend to the higher latitudes—the “bottom” of the Bowl, toward the Knothole.

“Those partitions are a wonder,” Ayaan Ali said. “Made of some layered stuff that is flexible enough to have some give to it. But it’s hundreds of kilometers on a side!”

Redwing nodded, thinking again, What could I be missing? This thing was built by engineers who thought like gods. They must have methods we can’t see, can’t yet imagine.

Yet the Folk who ran this place had let Beth’s team escape. First from their low-grav Garden prison, then from the Bowl itself. Beth is quick, ingenious, a real leader, but still … They’re not all that smarter than we are. Bigger, though, Beth says. So how do they run this contraption?

Ayaan Ali pointed to the roughly conical section, shaded blue, that was their allowed flight volume. She said, “So we can cruise around in here, and zip across the jet when we want to. So far we’ve just circled it, mostly.”

Karl pointed at her simulation, which showed the bright jet purling down from the star, tightening as it neared the Knothole, then—as the display moved down, its smart eyes following his finger-point—beyond, where it expanded again, losing luminosity. That made the fast wind that SunSeeker had been swimming upriver against for a century, slowing them, costing them time and supplies. Coasting on the vagrant tendrils of plasma fraying off the jet had been a constant piloting problem, running Ayaan Ali ragged. Beth’s return had taken some of the burden from her, and together they would take on the reverse problem—flying into the jet’s thick, turbulent, moving cauldron of ionized particles and mag fields.

“I’ve calculated how to tip in near the top—that’s our sign convention, right? Top is as high as we dare get, just below the deflection ability of the gamma ray lasers. We turn and plunge down, toward the Knothole. We sway back and forth across the jet while we drive down. Thrust hard in a helix winding path.”

He had painted a red line in her simulation, standing for SunSeeker’s calculated path. Its helix widened as it got nearer the Knothole and the magnetic field lines—blue swirls embedded in the yellow and orange showing plasma—bulged outward in response. “See? We make the jet sway a little. A kink in the flow.”

Redwing thought he followed this, but decided to play dumb. “Which are?”

“I’m sure you went through the basic plasma-instabilities material, Cap’n. It was in your briefing run-up.”

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. He let it simmer a bit. “Karl, you will always answer a direct technical question and skip your idea of what I know. Assume I know nothing.”

“Sorry, um, Cap’n. Of course. Certainly. I meant that…” His voice trailed off, uncertain of anything.

Redwing bailed him out. “Like a fire hose?”

“Right! Fast water going through a fire hose, if it swerves a little, the centrifugal force of it forces the hose even more to the side. It corkscrews, makes a kink.”

“So it will lash the side of the Knothole? You’re sure?”

Karl paused, nodded. “More of a brush, I’d say.”

Redwing nodded. Ayaan Ali said, “I have some good news. We got a short signal from Cliff’s team—from Aybe.”

Redwing brightened. “Where are they? What—?”

“Here. They passed under the edge of the mirror zone and got out onto the hull. Found ice there. Then they had to take off. They got led to a place where there were something like, well, talking stones.”

Redwing leaned forward. “And those said…?”

A shrug. “We got cut off. See down there? They were in lands between that zone of hexagonal mirrors. The icelands, with some life in them, those are on the outer hull under the mirrors, which keep it cold. Then Cliff’s team and those Sil got to the drylands between the mirrors and this huge ocean.”

Redwing stared at the view. Even when Ayaan Ali brought up a max resolution image, there was nothing to show more than occasional towns and roads. Again it struck him how much of this place was endless forests and seas and ranges of tan hills. Very few large cities and plenty of room for wildlife. Why? Hard to evaluate a thing as big as this Bowl. Earth alone had plenty of habitats that a few thousand years back were places where the crown of creation would be a tasty breakfast.

Karl asked, “Those are—what, hurricanes on that ocean?”

“Seems so.” Ayaan Ali pointed to a few. “The big winds have lots more room to play out, too. Huge storms. Cyclones the size of planets.”

Redwing stood to end the meeting. “We’ll hit the jet in a few days, right? Keep doing your simulations and drills. Get some rest, too,” with a nod to Ayaan Ali.

Now that the die was cast, he needed some alone time. SunSeeker’s steady rumble always told you that you were in a big metal tube, only meters away from other people. And meters away from both a furious fusion burn and, not far from that, high vacuum. First he quietly made his way through the biozones, sniffing and savoring air that came fresh from the oxy-making plants, and avoiding the finger snakes in their happy labors. They were fun, but he was not in a fun mood.

Gecko slippers let him walk the far reaches of the ship, out of the centri-grav torus. They were like weak glue on your soles, following the sticky patches on the walls. The zero-grav plants were matted tangles of beans and peas, with carrots that grew like twisted orange baseballs and green bananas that made weird toroids. A finger snake tunnel ran underneath. The snakes weren’t showing.

He went on into the hibernation modules, where what he thought of as the biostasis crew lay. Just sleeping, sort of, though hard to wake up. His footsteps rang as he walked the aluminum web corridor beside the solemn gray capsules. He didn’t want to call out of cold sleep enough people to crew a big landing expedition, not for the Bowl anyway. In the defrosting and training they would all have to triple up on a hot hammock, and shower once a week. As it was now, even the small present crew—nine plus Redwing plus three finger snakes—got two showers a week and didn’t like it.

Now that they were headed for a battle, of sorts, he realized how far from its expected role this expedition had come. This was not a craft built for war and neither were the crew. They had been carefully tuned for exploration and centuries of confinement. They were living in a constantly running machine where opening a hatch without proper precautions could kill you dead in seconds flat.

With that happy thought, he turned back. You’re worrying, not thinking. He could use some time with the finger snakes.

*   *   *

Rich garden smells slapped him in the face. He looked around him, seeing miniature sheep and full-sized pigs and chickens, clucking and grunting—and no finger snakes. Their tunnel was big enough, he could peer into it … but he went to the screens. If they weren’t in the tunnel, he’d still find them easily enough.

Now, what had the finger snakes left on-screen? They’d been watching the Bowl slide past, even as he had. No, they hadn’t: this view was following a cityscape as it rolled below SunSeeker. If Redwing understood rightly, that was a Sil city, newly rebuilt after an attack from the Folk. It looked quite strange. Streets and peaks like hieroglyphs, or wispy Arab writing.

He jumped when a flat head poked his elbow. “This they did hide,” said—Shtirk? Marked near the tail with a bent black hourglass. “Hide no more. A great shame.”

“Wait. Is this writing? So big?”

Its voice had a sliding, flat tone, faint. “Can see such writing from everywhere on the Bowl. This says the Bird Folk stamped their own world flat. A mistake in steering ended their bloodline. This was in a message … a message from the stars. Captain, yes please, how does a star send a message?”

Redwing dithered for a moment about how much to reveal; but he wanted to know what Shtirk knew. “You know what a star is? It’s like your sun, that sun, but much farther away. Stars have worlds, not Bowls but spinning balls. We have a message from one of those, from Glory. We haven’t been able to read it all, and it’s still coming in.”

“The Sil read,” Shtirk said. “Your bandits learn find the message from you, the Sil from them, then the Sil read. Now they tell us. Thisther goes to tell you all in command deck. Is it true? Bird Folk did smash their own world?”

Redwing laughed. “And they think they’re the Lords of Creation! Yeah, I believe it. I’ll put it to the others, and we’ll look through the message from Glory. But I believe it.”

*   *   *

Fred Ojama and a giant snake were hard at work at the control screens when Redwing found them. Thisther’s head and the fingernails on its tiny quick tail were close up against the controls, typing. Fred was saying, “Yup, yup, yup…”

“Fred?”

“Sir.” Fred didn’t turn. “If you’ll look past me … see the starscape? And the blue dot? The dot is the Bowl. The stars move, too. I’ve run this twice already. The Bowl left Sol system in Jurassic times, then tootled around to several other stars—not moving as fast as it does now. Then they came back between the Cretaceous and Tertiary. If the times hold, then the mass of the Bowl ruined some comet orbits that second time, and that was it.”

“It?”

“The timeline checks. They caused the Dinosaur Killer impact.”

Thisther said, “Great shame. They hid this for lifetimes of worlds.”

“My God,” Redwing said.

Thisther said in his quiet way, “But no more. All will know. They killed their own genetic line. Sil will tell all.”