Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  Murmurs from behind her egged her on. Analysis, tension-relieving talk, cheers—all just a chorus she ignored.

  “Plus, ladies and gentlemen, it’s radioactive as hell around here,” Beth said, adding brightly, “but an interstellar surfboard—that’s us—is designed for that.”

  They slammed ahead, losing speed. She surged forward in her harness, adjusted, and surged again. Surfing the big one. Ride of a lifetime. If you survive …

  The prow tried to fight sideways but she jockeyed it back. Again. And again. Each time she got the feel of it better. Offhand she noticed she was drenched in sweat. No wonder I can’t smell their fear anymore.…

  She caught a glimmer refracted through the streaming plasma ahead, a small sphere wobbling toward them—Wickramsingh’s Star. The bowl flattened, became the sidewise horizon. The ship howled with its labors.

  For Beth, time ceased to mean anything. She countered every veer and vortex, kept them straight, swore, blinked back sweat—and they were through.

  The sky opened. Abruptly they were rising above a silvery plain. The jet hammered at them still. “Wonderful!” Cliff choked out, still hanging forward in his harness. Hollow cheers, ragged. They were rising above a vast white plain, but slower, slower—and then they turned again.

  “Getting out of the jet,” Beth said, as if passing the butter. If they stayed in the jet, they’d be slowed further, back through the Knothole and out again.

  “We’re taking a lot of ohmic heating in the skin,” Abduss said, voice tight with worry.

  “I can barely hold the vector,” Mayra said calmly. Cliff knew by now the subtle tones of tension in her voice.

  The white-hot jet plume thinned, then seemed to veer aside. Rough turbulence struck, slamming them around in their couches, bringing fresh metal shrieks from the ship.

  “Out!” Mayra shouted. “We’re out.”

  “I’d say we’re in,” Redwing said.

  They cheered and all eyes were on the screens. Now they could see the inside of the bowl … and it was a vast sheeted plain brimming with light. They rose swiftly, peeling off from the jet to the side, plasma falling behind, vistas clearing. Again there curved away over the misty distance great longitude and latitude grids in sleek, silvered sections the size of worlds. The sections had boundaries, thin dark lines, demarking different curvatures of a greater mirror—and from that their eyes told them that these were all focused far away.

  Silence. In a whisper Abduss said, “Mirrors … reflecting the sunlight back, inward, onto the star. That’s what causes the hot spot.”

  Beth nodded, awed. Yes—otherwise the huge curved mirrors would have blinded them instantly.

  They slewed to the side, turning, the screens taking in, across the immense celestial curvature, hazy tinctures of … green. She zoomed the scopes pointing inward along the great spherical cap. The lower latitudes of the inner bowl teemed with intensely green territories and washes of blue water. Lakes—no, oceans. The eye could not quite grasp what it saw. They were cruising along near the jet axis, and before them unfurled a landscape of arcing grandeur.

  Beth calculated angles and distances. Any of the grid sections had a larger surface than the entire Earth. Each boasted intricate detail, webs strung among green brown continents and spacious seas, framing immense areas.

  And her vision was all getting foggy with fatigue. Aches seeped through her.

  “I’ve had enough,” Beth said. “Climbing up that jet burned away our velocity enough. The bowl and star system were moving pretty fast, and now we’re in their rest frame. We’re marginally trapped in the potential well of that star.”

  Captain Redwing said, “You what?”

  “Captain—”

  “No, it’s okay, I get it,” he said suddenly. “The scale of this thing, it’s just mind-scrambling, Beth. The bowl is the size of a little solar system, right, and you can just leave the ship circling the sun, right? Are we too close? Will we heat up too much?”

  “We’ll be okay.” She visibly straightened, her pale lips firming. One last effort. “I’ll leave the ramscoop idling, keeping the fields high, so we won’t be sprayed with radiation. It runs rough that way, but we have no choice. We’ve matched velocities with the system, so it’ll be months before we could be in trouble. We’ll be in an eccentric orbit, right, Abduss? I’ll be back at the controls before anything can happen, but somebody stay on trajectory watch, please.”

  Redwing looked puzzled.

  Beth gave him a weak smile. “I’m going to sleep.”

  She staggered out. Behind her she heard Redwing’s, “How can anyone leave this?”

  And then Cliff was with her, guiding her, but lurching a little himself.

  FOUR

  Beth thrashed and jerked awake. The hammock shuddered. Her legs and arms were cramping from armpit to fingertips, hip to toes.

  The dream faded. The controls weren’t under her hands; the ship wasn’t roaring through a plume of star-hot plasma. She hugged herself and tried to sleep. Cliff wasn’t there. How long had she been sleeping?

  Presently she gave up and went to the bridge, her boots thumping, bringing her fully awake. Her hands were trembling, though. Not what you want in a pilot …

  “Hi,” Cliff said, grinning. “Redwing left me on watch. Abduss is computing an orbit for us, unless he flaked out, too.”

  Beth was famished. She got out bread and fruit and ate as she watched the displays. She was just a little jealous of the others, who must have been watching for hours. And it was glorious.

  Structures fanned out from the Knothole. She was now watching from the other side, gazing down at a vast sprawl. Her eyes kept tricking her, making her think this was all nearby, like looking down on Earth … but she was gazing over interplanetary distances. The tubing around the Knothole must be tremendous, the size of continents.

  Far below the ship stretched away the wok-shaped mirrored shell, faring into a ring of green-tinged ocher. Between SunSeeker and those lands was a shimmering layer—atmosphere, she guessed. Held in … how? She squinted and thought she could catch a sheen, the star reflecting from some transparent barrier. A membrane? She squinted at what seemed like millions of square kilometers of clear plastic sandwich wrap. The diffuse layer stretched away toward the distance, where she saw the lands of the belt—the great cylindrical section that formed the thick rim of … Cupworld? She didn’t like Redwing’s term but couldn’t think of a better one. No mirrors there. Continents, yes, cloud-shrouded and green. Deserts as well, sandy and bright under the unending glare of a star that never set. Indeed, never set on all this colossal construction. And what lives here?

  Her hands were trembling even more.

  This immensity was impossible, too much; Beth looked away.

  “They’ve made a world … a habitat out of the bowl,” Mayra said wonderingly. “A vast green thing.”

  Beth took a long breath. For safety—pilots must be focused—she took her hands off the command boards.

  Cliff thumbed up a display board. “We worked up a sketch to get the essentials of this thing in one view. Have a look.”

  She studied the line drawing, feeling woozy. “Yes, right. You’ve labeled the regions out from the axis with the equivalent gravs…”

  “Yup, and the clumps in the edge plain are supposed to be topological features. Only my splotches are bigger than whole planets, a lot bigger.” He waved his hands helplessly, grinning. But he frowned, too, worried at her fatigue.

  “Right, hard to grasp the scale—this is inconceivable, but a sketch helps. You caught how the jet bulges out near the star.”

  More hand waving. “Looks to me like the magnetic fields in it are getting control, slimming it down into a slowly expanding straw…”

  “A wok with a neon jet shooting out the back … and living room on the inside, more territory than you could get on the planets of a thousand solar systems. Pinned to it with centrifugal grav…”

  “They don’t live on
the whole bowl. Just the rim. Most of it is just mirrors. Even so, it’s more than a habitat,” said Cliff. “It’s accelerating. That jet! This whole thing is going somewhere. A ship that is a star. A ship star. We humans only built a star ship.”

  * * *

  There wasn’t much redundancy among SunSeeker’s auxiliary boats. Designs were modular: tanks or skeletal cargo carriers could substitute for passenger shells.

  There were two fliers, Hawking and Dyson, twin lifting body designs. “We can’t use reentry vehicles,” Redwing decided. “We’d tear holes in whatever’s holding the air in.”

  Abduss said, “Captain, these are the tankers.”

  “Ceres and Eros are tankers, too, for mining asteroids. We just add the tank,” Redwing said.

  Mayra said, “There aren’t any asteroids or comets. The locals must have cleaned out everything that might have threatened their habitats, or even used it all to build the bowl.”

  “Really?”

  “We haven’t found anything at all,” Mayra said.

  “What, in four days? Four days to do a thousand years’ worth of astronomy in a brand-new solar system?”

  The Wickramsinghs were silent before Redwing’s sarcasm. Indeed, the autoinventory had found no asteroids. “It’s been vacuumed clean.”

  “Um,” Redwing said. “So nothing hits the bowl.”

  Cliff listened with half his attention; this wasn’t his business yet. The automatic search cameras were smart, quick. Probably Mayra was right: The whole solar system had been scoured long ago. But he didn’t want to cross Redwing over a minor point; best to husband his credit with the irascible captain. The man had gone without much sleep, too. Cliff had found him pacing the corridors, checking and rechecking ship status, when he was supposed to be asleep.

  He wished he had someone else to talk to about this, but the Wickramsinghs kept their own counsel. And Beth was sleeping. She’d done a lot of that, still recovering from cold sleep and the grueling flight through the Knothole.

  Redwing chopped air with his hand. “Okay, for the moment we’ll take that as given. No asteroids, no comets. We’ll put a tank on Eros. It can carry water, mine it out of a comet, even—and it can land. Landing legs and a high-thrust fusion motor. We thought there’d be moons.”

  Mayra asked blandly, “Where are you planning to land, Captain?”

  “Down there.” Redwing waved toward Cupworld’s green-tinged rim.

  “Yes, I thought so. If you land near the Knothole, you’ll be millions of klicks from any water source, and right on top of the systems that shape the electromagnetic fields. We could be perceived as a threat.”

  Redwing blinked. “You think so?”

  Mayra kept her face blank, apparently her way of being diplomatic. “We have no idea how the builders of this thing feel about visitors.”

  Cliff couldn’t resist saying, “At least they didn’t shoot at us.”

  Redwing grimaced; he had not been chosen for fighting skills. “They haven’t tried to talk to us. I don’t like that.”

  Cliff put in, “But, Captain, the rim is where all the water and farmland is. They must live there.”

  Mayra added, “It’s spinning around at thirty-four klicks per second, too.”

  Redwing nodded. “Higher than our orbital speed, right? Do we have onboard fuel to catch up with that spin?”

  Abduss said, “It will take a significant fraction of our onboard reserves, principally water for the nuclear rocket.”

  Redwing snorted. “All our onboard ships are fusion powered. We can fly wherever we like if we can get water from Cupworld. We’ll need the same trick to use any of them. Okay, say we see a lake. We’ll put SunSeeker in a nearer orbit and drop the lander from there. Beth will know how to do that. Cliff!”

  Cliff jumped.

  “Where shall we land?”

  They were asking him as the biologist. “It all looks like farmland and meadows and forests,” he said. “Different habitats, probably—see those ice fields? I don’t know how they create those, but our telescopes can’t make out individual trees. All I’ve got is a light spectrum, but clearly from spectral reflections, the plants are using chlorophyll, Captain. Land anywhere near water on the rim, I’d say, and refuel the tanks first thing.”

  Mayra asked, “Do we land on the inside of the bowl? Or the outside?”

  Redwing frowned. “Inside, of course. That’s where they live.”

  Mayra pursed her lips and said evenly, “They surely launch their own spacecraft from the outer surface. They could simply put their ships in elevators, lower them through an outer air lock, and let them go. Immediately the ships would have a thirty-four-kilometer-per-second velocity. All with no need to fly through an atmosphere, or out through the film that covers their atmosphere.”

  Cliff grinned. Mayra had been thinking as he did, asking how the hell this enormous contraption worked. “You think we could go in through their outer air locks? From underneath? Maybe to reenter, they have magnetic clamps or something to catch incoming craft. Maybe we could use those.”

  Mayra shrugged. “Suppose we do. How do we knock on the door?”

  Redwing mused, “They must have safeguards.…”

  “Even if we get in the door, they control the locks,” Cliff added. “We’d be caught.”

  Redwing liked that. He sat back and gave them all a glassy grin. “Makes it easy to choose, doesn’t it? We must retain our freedom of maneuver until we know what—whom—we’re dealing with. We go down through the atmosphere, then.”

  “We’ll have to bust through that film they have,” Cliff observed.

  Abduss added, “They might see that as aggressive. I would.”

  Redwing nodded. “But it’s the only way not to be cornered from the start.”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Cliff said casually. “They must have seen us. How come they haven’t come out to pay a call?”

  Abduss said, “Good, yes. I have received no electromagnetic transmissions, either.”

  “Funny,” Redwing said. “You’d expect at least broadcast radio.”

  “Perhaps they use point-to-point comm, laser links,” Mayra said. “Just as we do.”

  Redwing sat up straight, switching to his command voice. “Abduss, would we have time to hover? Pick a landing spot?”

  “Not much.”

  “We’ll take Eros,” Captain Redwing decided. “Get it ready as quick as we can. Now, do we need to thaw anyone else?”

  Maybe this was Redwing’s way of “building consensus,” as the leadership classes taught. Cliff said the obvious: “We’ll need twenty minimum to do anything on the ground.”

  “Let’s get started, then.”

  FIVE

  They kept wary eyes and instruments on Cupworld while they tended to the auxiliary ships. Beth brought SunSeeker into a useful orbit for making the Eros drop. They maneuvered carefully, but though they could see landscapes far below, the distances were vast. Even orbital rendezvous took weeks. This was not a planet.

  That gave them time to revive a selection they would need—engineers, maintenance people, “groundpounder” types who expected to wake up on a planetary surface. Redwing kept the numbers revived as low as plausible for the exploring party. They needed replacements for the current crew, who were all going down to the bowl, since the revived wouldn’t be physically able in time.

  Unsurprisingly, those woken up were quite surprised.

  Just looking at the external feeds could cause these newbies to freak out. Redwing quickly learned that it was best to have the recently revived brief the next batch. Cliff got tired of explaining their incredible situation.

  He spent his days surveying the lakes, rivers, and oceans of Cupworld—or as some called it, the Bowl; Cliff had tried to think of something descriptive yet high-minded, and failed. The dotted blue expanses had been well planned, apparently—no huge deserts or wastelands, good circulation of air currents and moisture.

  They awoke Fre
d Ojama first, so Cliff could work with a geologist while making the survey. “This isn’t geology,” Fred pointed out immediately. “It’s a, well, a building.”

  “A building the size of the inner solar system, yep,” Cliff answered. “But somebody thought it through. Look at how the lakes, rivers, and seas follow a fractal distribution.”

  Fred thought that through. “Best way to distribute water. Avoids deserts, maybe … but that patch looks like desert. And that patch of forest might be … No, never mind.”

  “Like symbols,” Cliff agreed. “Looks like writing. A super landscaper leaving messages. Like in Hitchhiker’s Guide, the guy who designed the fjords.”

  Fred looked blank.

  Redwing had hesitated to wake Fred Ojama. Fred’s bio listed him as borderline autistic. He’d barely made the height requirement. Nobody actually knew him very well. Not all the crew were social mavens, for psycher reasons. Redwing remarked that a cocktail party with no listeners was a noise fest, and there was an analogy there about teamwork. The list claimed Fred was a near genius, too, with a history of original ideas, and Cliff had wanted that.

  Cliff pointed to the boundary where the cylindrical part curved smoothly into the vast mirror dome. “I’m trying to figure out how it would be to live on the surface, when it starts to slant. The whole thing is rotating together, so as soon as the slope changes, centrifugal grav will be at an angle to the ground.”

  Fred zoomed on that area. “The rivers go away there. Just vanish into the sands.” He snapped his fingers. “I got it. The centrifugal grav works against the inward-sloping curve of the high Bowl. So water can’t flow up into the mirror area. That means the gravity alone can keep that big zone clear of life, I guess. Maybe even air.”

  Fred was smart. There weren’t dumb people on Seeker, just people with other tales or people you disagreed with. An important point to remember in arguments. “Sounds right. The mirrors are important. The builders don’t want them growing lichen or anything.”