Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  * * *

  Redwing went through an extensive engineering review with them. Systems, flows, balances, malfunction indices. After hours of work, he was just as stumped as the ship diagnostic systems, which were better engineers than any of them. Nothing seemed wrong, but the ship could do no better. Seeker had performed perfectly in the first few decades, achieving their terminal velocity when the pressure of incoming matter on its ram fields equaled the thrust it got out of hydrogen fusion. They had been losing velocity through tens of light-years—slightly at first, then more.

  Crews had tested the obvious explanations. Maybe the interstellar gas was getting too thin, so they weren’t taking in enough hydrogen to drive the fusion zone at max. That idea didn’t pencil out in the detailed numbers. The fusion drive was a souped-up version of magnetic cylinders, each a rotating torus that contained fusing plasma. Boron–proton reactions were the burning meat and potatoes, the protons shoveled in fresh from the ramscoop. The rotating magnetic equilibria held fusing plasma in their bottles, releasing the alpha particles into the nozzle that drove them forward. It had worked steadily now for centuries. It looked fine.

  The next crew thought there was too much dust ahead, so perhaps the fusion burn was tamped down. They found an ingenious way to pluck dust samples from their bow shock and measure it carefully. Nothing wrong there, either.

  There were more ideas and trials, and now it was getting serious. They had started with plenty of spare supplies, but now it wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Our big fat margin of error got … eaten,” Redwing told them.

  Seeker would arrive nearly a century late. They might barely squeeze through, if the expected level of leaks and losses did not happen … but nobody wanted to calculate the odds of that. Because they all knew the odds were bad.

  * * *

  They all slept on their problems, and the next ship-day Cliff was first up. Another revival symptom—insomnia sometimes lasted weeks. Along with that, and no surprise: irritability. The damn noise wasn’t helping. The best solution was to say as little as possible. Meanwhile, his mind churned away at the deeper puzzle of the bowl that hung like a riddle on their optical viewing screens. The image rippled from plasma refraction, but Cliff could make out tantalizing, momentary patches of detail in it.

  The world as a bowl, he thought, trying to think of a better term. Flamboyantly artificial. What would choose to live in such a place?

  They held a meeting, and then another, without anything new turning up. At the end of another frustrating conversation, Cliff said quietly, “I want Beth revived. We need more minds on this problem, and we’re stalled.”

  Redwing pursed his lips briefly and shook his head. “We’d better keep lean.”

  “Only if we’re going to just forge on and hope things improve without our doing anything.” Cliff said it in a rush, finally getting out what he and Abduss had agreed upon.

  Before Redwing could respond, Abduss chimed in, “I found another slight decrease in our velocity this morning. Nearly a full kilometer per second.”

  A long silence, Redwing carefully letting nothing show in his face. The signs of strain in the man had been mounting. Little gestures of frustration, a broken cup, time off by himself, little social talk. The psychers back Earthside had a high opinion of Redwing’s leadership style, but to Cliff the man had seemed to be best at bureaucratic infighting. No managers to game around out here, though.

  “So whatever’s wrong, it’s getting worse,” Redwing said.

  Nobody answered.

  Cliff said carefully, “Beth has piloting and engineering skills, pretty broad.”

  Only when the words were out did he recognize the pun. Mayra smiled but said nothing. A pretty broad. And of course, Cliff’s longtime “associate,” as the polite social term had it.

  Redwing let a wry smile play on his face for a few seconds. “Okay, let’s warm her up.”

  They started Beth’s revival. The protocols were straightforward, but every case had variations. While the slow processes worked in her, they spent another two days looking at the slowdown problem, getting nowhere. The ship was flying hard, hitting molecular cloudlets and, increasingly, vagrant wisps of plasma. “That’s the plume from the jet we see,” Abduss said. “We’re starting to hit the wake.”

  Then the ramscoop would need to navigate, and there would be no data to let it know how to work. The artificial intelligences that tirelessly regulated the scoop fields were smarter than mere humans, adjusting the magnetic scoops and reaction rates—but they were also obsessively narrow. The AIs worked as well as they could, making estimates based on many decades of in-flight experience, guessing at causes—but they could not think outside their conceptual box. “Savants of the engine,” Mayra called them. Cliff wondered if she was being ironic.

  “Look, we need to make a decision,” Abduss insisted. “Yes?”

  “I do, you mean,” Redwing said. He made a cage of his fingers and peered into it. He was pale and drawn, and not all of that came from his recovery from the long sleep. Nobody had slept much.

  Cliff said, “Maybe this is a godsend.”

  Redwing shot him a questioning glance. “You always had an odd sense of humor.”

  They had not gotten along particularly well in staff and crew meetings. Redwing had held out for making all Scientific Personnel de facto crew members, rigidly set in the chain of command. Cliff and others had blocked him. Scientific Personnel had their own, looser command structure that dealt with Redwing only near the top of the pyramid. Cliff was the highest-ranking Scientific Personnel officer awake. Of course, all that procedural detail was decades ago—no, centuries, he reminded himself—but in personal memory, it still loomed as recent.

  He tried a warm, reasonable tone. “If we hadn’t been slowed down, we’d be blazing right by this weird thing. No way we could even swing around that star—say, let’s call it Wickramsingh’s Star, eh? With joint discovery rights for all.”

  Thin smiles all around. They needed a little levity. Nobody aboard would ever make a buck from interstellar enterprises.… “But now, going slower, maybe we can make a small correction with a pretty fair delta-V, get a closer look at the thing.”

  Redwing looked blank. So did the Wickramsinghs.

  Cliff said carefully, “It’s artificial. Maybe we can—”

  “Get help?” Redwing’s mouth twisted skeptically. “I admit, that’s a bizarre object, but it’s not our goal to explore passing phenomena along the way. We’re headed for Glory, and that’s it.”

  Cliff had thought about this moment for two days. He spread his hands as if making a deal, splitting the difference. “Maybe we can do both.”

  Redwing’s face had already settled into the firm-but-confident expression that served him so well back Earthside. Then he paused, puzzled, and almost against his will asked, “How’s that?”

  “Say we use the plasma plume from the star. We’re running up into the fringes already. It’s rich in hydrogen, right?” A nod to Abduss and Mayra. “And a lot more ionized than the ordinary interstellar gas we’ve been riding through, scooping up with the magnetic funnels and blowing out the back, all these decades. For a ramscoop motor, this is high-quality input. Let’s use it to pick up some speed.”

  A heartbeat went by, two. Cliff thought, Keep it simple, and said, “That jet’s spurting straight out the back of the thing. Let’s fly up it.”

  Redwing asked, “Abduss, isn’t that plume moving at relativistic speeds? In the wrong direction? It’d slow us down.”

  Was Redwing right? Mayra was nodding. Recklessly, Cliff said, “That could work, too.”

  “You make my head hurt,” Redwing said. “What are you on about now?”

  “With what we’ve got for consumables, we’re going to arrive dead at Glory. If we can’t speed up, we’ll have to stop for supplies. Here, now. Make orbit around Wickramsingh’s Star. Deal with the natives.”

  They stared at him.

  C
liff played his next card. “We’re overtaking the star. Every hour makes a velocity change tougher.”

  Mayra’s eyes widened, startled—but surely she had thought of this?—and then she nodded.

  Redwing wasn’t a man to leap at a suggestion. But he screwed his mouth around, eyes seeking the low, mottled carbon-fiber ceiling, and said, “Let’s do the calculation.”

  * * *

  That took another day.

  While the others checked their screens and fretted, Cliff watched Beth come up out of the long dark cold and into his arms. He claimed the right to massage her sore self, rub her skin with the lotions and soothe away the panic that raced across her face, coming up out of decades’-long sleep. He watched her pretty face fill with color, rosy with freckles, her red hair still a vibrant halo. She had been uneasy about the whole prospect, kept it from him and failed, and now here was her fear again, in fluttering eyelids, vagrant jitters that flickered in her face—until her cloudy eyes focused, squinted, and she saw him hovering against the ceramic sky and a flush brightened in her, surprise racing, and she smiled.

  “I … what … cold…”

  “Don’t talk. Just breathe. Everything’s fine,” he lied.

  “If you’re here, it’s gotta be.” She reached for him anyway, grimacing at the effort. It was like a new sun coming up.

  THREE

  Beth Marble felt life coming back into her like a muddy, warm flow. Seeing Cliff first made her last thoughts—those fears of decades ago, as the sedative swarmed up in her—trickle away. He’s here! Looking the same. It worked! We’re at Glory, then.

  A few minutes ago in relative time, she had felt the old clammy panic. This could be the last sight I see.… And the adrenaline surge of dread still pounded through her. And I thought I was so ready, so sure.…

  She smiled at this memory of her former self and carefully put that past aside. What was that mantra in high school? Be here now.

  Cliff spoke, his words warm and steady. “Everything’s fine.”

  She answered with a croaking, “If you’re here, it’s gotta be.”

  His hands on her felt wonderful and she followed his whispered orders. Lie back, just take it, enjoy. Smell the cool metallic air. The spreading glow of tissues swelling, blood flowing at speeds her cells had not known for years, tingling, surges of pleasure as her senses revived … Hey, I could get to like this.

  Then she heard the growl of the ship.

  The vast majority of the crew had gone into sleep before SunSeeker even started, but as pilot she had stayed up for over a year as Seeker gathered speed. It felt good, to be at the helm of a starship, she recalled—even if the yoke helm was nearly superfluous, since electronics really steered the magnetics and lepton-catalytic fusion burn.

  So she knew the thrumming long bass notes that told her the ship was running full bore. She didn’t need to hear that; she could feel it.

  And the subtle tenor in the background, when Seeker was in reversed configuration, and so decelerating—it wasn’t there.

  She listened hard as Cliff’s hands welcomed her back into the world, and no, they weren’t at Glory. Something was wrong.

  * * *

  Redwing’s well-managed face was a study in guarded reluctance.

  He did not like any of the alternatives on the table. Nobody did. But Cliff could see in the doubting downturn of his mouth that he did not want to forge ahead into long, lean years, hoping the drive would improve.

  Abduss scribbled on a work slate. By this time, Cliff could read his expression pretty well. The man was steady and reliable, risk averse, with an automatic distrust of radical new ideas—just right for crewing the long years out here. Yet despite himself, Abduss was trying out the idea, and liking it. Now he had a share in a great discovery, and it was dawning that he wanted more. So did Cliff, for that matter.

  But mostly, Cliff wanted to live. With Beth. They could marry, after the longest courtship in history.

  Cliff knew enough to let the silence in their wardroom lengthen. Beth sensed the score now, and her careful look took in the tension: Redwing’s folded hands, Abduss and Mayra keeping their eyes on their slates. The background rumble of the ramscoop fusion engines was like a persistent reminder; Newton’s laws don’t wait. Redwing stared into space. In the end, Abduss looked up. “We could make such a maneuver, yes. But very vigilantly.”

  “What do you make of it, Beth?” Redwing asked softly.

  “I’m pretty sure the ship can be helmed in that accurately,” she said. “It’s within specs, the delta-V and aiming. I can tune the comm deck AIs to smooth it a bit. It’ll be a ten-day maneuver. But I do wish I knew why the engines aren’t working to design.”

  “Don’t we all,” Redwing said ruefully, unfolding his hands. “But we play the hand we’re dealt.”

  It was as though fresh air had come into the room. Four faces awaited the captain’s word.

  They had awakened him to make this decision, and so far he had shied away from it. Now Cliff had a slender moment to wonder at his own ideas, if he’d followed them far enough. Life’s a gamble. He had a gathering, foreboding sense—and a heart-pounding curiosity that would not give him rest. Life persists.

  Redwing’s mouth firmed up. “Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  Beth had the flight plan Alfvén numbers tuned just about right. She found it gratifying to see the ship respond to her helm, even though it was a bit spongy. It took eleven days to make the swerve. There were dark days when it was not clear whether Seeker was responding correctly to the maneuver. The magnetic scoops rippled with stresses but performed to code. With Abduss checking her every move, she brought them through, though not without some polite arguments.

  Cliff and Beth spent a lot of time in their room together. The warm comforts of bed helped.

  She preferred taking ginger snaps from her recovery allotment of “indulgences.” These she had selected for just this, a crisp bite floating on sugar, to the richness of chocolate chip, which she also had because Cliff liked them. Though with either she always had a cup of cocoa, the warm brown mama she needed, Cliff had carried none but stern Kona coffee in his wakeup stash. No cookies at all.

  “What do you remember about going into the chill-sleep?” she asked while they licked crumbs off each other.

  He smiled dreamily. “They said I would feel a small prick in my left hand and I thought that was funny but couldn’t laugh. Could barely crack a smile. Then—waking up.”

  Beth grinned and finished her cocoa. “I thought of the same dumb joke. Not that, in your case, I know what a small one feels like.”

  The remark got more laughter than it deserved, but that was just fine, too.

  Beth said with a thin voice, “Y’know, looking at that round thing from this angle, first thing I thought was, it seems like a giant wok with a hole at its base.”

  “You’re thinking about food again. Time to eat.”

  Her old fear subsided while she worked, and to keep it at bay she indulged herself with Cliff. He was the sun of her solar system, had been since the first week they met during the crew selections trials. Her parents had both died the year before in a car crash, and that cast a shadow over her application, in the eyes of the review board. They wanted crew with a long history of steady performance, no emotional unsettled issues that might boil over years later.

  Losing the two central figures of her life had eclipsed her joy, made her withdraw. She had not thought of the affair with Cliff as an antidote to her grief, but its magic had played out that way. He brought out the sun again, eclipse over, and it showed up in everything she did. Especially in her psych exams and, more tellingly, in the return of her social skills. Later, in training, she had learned that about the time she met Cliff, she was slated to be cut in the next winnowing. As she put it later, “Then Cliffy happened to me.” The visible changes in her had saved her slot. Then her performance at electromagnetic piloting, a still-evolving new discipline, had excelle
d.

  She was here because of him. She let him know that, in long, passionate bouts of lovemaking. Sex was the flip side of death, she had always thought—the urge to leave something behind, ordained by evolution way back in the unconscious. Their sweaty hours “in the sack” (not a phrase she liked, but it sure fit here, because Cliff used a hammock) certainly seemed to confirm the idea, as never before in her admittedly rather scant love life. At meals, she was afraid that it showed in her face, which now reddened at the slightest recollection of how different she was now, wanton and happy and well out of the eclipse shadow.

  One evening, after she had set them in a long, curving arc toward the bowl, the captain allowed spirits to be broken out. They held a sort of impromptu group brainstorming session, with Mayra presiding as de facto referee. Ideas flew back and forth. What would they find up ahead? What the hell could the bowl be? Squeezebulbs were lifted, and lifted again. Beth got them all laughing. There was singing, predictably awful, which made more laughter. The captain drank more than the rest of them put together and she began to understand the pressures the man was under.

  * * *

  The maneuver they were planning was astonishing. The jet was far denser than any plasma Seeker had been designed to fly into. But Seeker’s specs were broad enough to include collisions with molecular clouds. You never knew what you would run into in interstellar space, Beth thought. Never the bowl, not that, but SunSeeker had been made robust.

  Stars buried in a cloud could ionize spherical shells around them. SunSeeker might have to brave a cloud, and so the plasma spheres. Its prow sprouted lasers that could identify solid obstacles up to the size of houses, and vaporize them with a single gigawatt pulse. The lasers were tough, hanging out in the plasma hurricane near SunSeeker’s bow shock. They were going to need that.

  Wickramsingh’s Star was moving counter to the galaxy’s rotation. That was somewhat unusual, though not rare. They were headed the same way, because Glory’s system lay behind Sol, in the sense of the rotation most stars share in the immense beehive pinwheel that is a spiral galaxy. That was why they had not noticed the star’s oddity before—the bowl cupped around the star, so they could not see it from SunSeeker or from Earth. As Seeker overtook the system, moving directly behind, the star had suddenly seemed to pop into existence from behind its shawl. And it was quite nearby.