Bowl of Heaven

by Gregory Benford; Larry Niven

  “So the whole structure has a clean division. The cylinder’s for living, the mirror for propulsion.” Fred shook his head. “What an idea.”

  “What kind of mind would even think of it?”

  “Something with a long time horizon. This whole construct accelerates very slowly.” Fred looked at the jet in the distance, a brilliant ivory pillar of ever-shifting tendrils. “That plasma’s pushing a star.”

  “Odd minds, gotta be. But engineering’s a universal. Things work or you change them.”

  “You want to reverse engineer this place?” Fred grinned, nodding his bald head so it caught the gleam of the lights. “Good. Good.”

  Cliff had close-upped the region where sunlight reflected off the atmosphere membrane. He and Fred kept up their banter while he tried to see deeper. The shiny surface was probably some tough but thin layer to keep their air in—19 percent oxygen, 72 percent nitrogen, and traces of carbon dioxide and noble gases. Then he saw it. A patch that didn’t reflect.

  They used the maximum magnification of the scopes and then called Redwing. “I think we’ve found an area sealed off from the membrane,” Cliff said, showing him the barren circle. “It’s about a hundred kilometers across.”

  “How can they tolerate it? Won’t their air leak out?”

  Fred said, “Maybe they opened it for us, just recently. A thing this big can take a little loss.”

  Redwing looked at every view, across the spectrum, before finally saying, “Open areas, yeah. Makes sense. Apparently for landings from space?”

  “That’s what we figured,” Fred said.

  “Solves our landing problem, then,” Redwing said with a thin smile of satisfaction. “Let’s go in.”

  SIX

  If your heart is large, Memor thought, and contains volume enough to envelop your adversaries, then wisdom can come into play. One can then see their transparency, and so then diffuse or avoid their attacks. And once you envelop them, you will be able to guide them along the path indicated to you by your own hard-won wisdoms.

  He shook himself. This insight came from some new part of him … the restless part of his mind that would soon be her mind. For Memor was now amid the fevered straits of the Change.

  Not the optimum time to confront a crisis unlike any within the last eight-squared of generations. Lifeshaping should be done in peace, but that was not to be Memor’s destiny. He would be female within a few short cycles, but he had not yet lost the male’s sense of reach and joy, the Dancing. He could even smell the seethe of fructifying change within him. Hormones raged; molecules fought for dominance in his bloodstream. Fevers came in like chemical reports from a raging battlefield. These changes had been designed by the Founders and their following generations, now well sanctified by endless eras. Memor knew his shifting moods and jitters paid the cost of acquiring greater wisdom. But the cost was high and hard to endure amid a crisis.

  “Order descends,” the Prefect called in ancient tones for the assembly of Astronomers.

  “Order prevails,” came the answering chorus as they took their places of rest beneath the great dome.

  Memor let the details of unfurling discussion play over him. He kept his body still while his inner mind fretted at the vagrant impulses within his changing self. Even his Undermind, normally serene, showed a surface wrinkled by fretful winds. Waves of knotted concern broke across its steady currents.

  The technical summary was as he had heard. A starship of boldly simple design approached from aft. Diagnostics astern had seen it turn and approach, as though their flight had not been directly for the Bowl. Perhaps they were bound for the star ahead, where the gravitational waves emerged?

  The audience of Astronomers murmured. Speculation fueled their excited chatter. Monitoring the approaching ship’s transmissions picked up several bursts directed back along the ship’s path. Trailing satellites had picked up these, yet intensive study by the linguist minds gave little more than a simple sense of their grammar and contextual constructions. Their habits of mind as revealed in language did not seem remarkable. Linear logics, few layers of meaning. Indeed, they seemed like their ship—primitive, yes, but ambitious to undertake full starflight in such a flimsy craft. The consultant engineers—small creatures, timid in the presence of full-sized Astronomers—pointed out odd features in the magnetic configuration, and announced that they would like to inspect the long, slim craft. Much sharp discussion followed.

  Memor felt distracted by the marinating changes within him. He sat out the usual time-honored dispute, Watchers—pejoratively called Sitters—versus Dancers. The Prefect called up ancient records and even voices from the far past.

  Past lore supported the Dancers, Memor thought. Unsurprising—stories of change are always more interesting than stories of stasis. Change is the essence of story, built into the mind by evolution’s strict dictates.

  Astronomers of ancient times had fired upon many ships, usually with the Gamma Lance. They had passed by many planets, explored and then ignored. These cases did not have many stories. The Watchers kept referring back to them.

  Memor stretched and tried to look alert. Watchers were boring, ponderous. But then, Memor was still male, and like Dancers favored variety, engagement. Wisdom came later. The Watchers were nearly all female.

  So Memor was in the middle here. He could sense the change to come, but he hadn’t lost the male’s sense of reach yet.

  The assembly took a long, deliberate time to glide through the vast library of the past. Memor coasted through the old records as if they were his own adventures. Zesty, colorful, shot through with ancient exploits. They enthralled him.

  The Bowl of Heaven never came too near a sun. It was too ponderous for that, and with its mass could perturb the orbits of life-bearing worlds. They did send ships, of course. But the Astronomers’ telescopes had always been superb; they knew the nature of a world or moon before an exploring ship ever set forth, fired into a solar system from the rim of the Bowl. Voyages to interesting planets always took hundreds of long cycles, aboard one or more great cruisers usually equipped with landers, sometimes with orbital tethers.

  Memor sat up, snorted, and focused on what had been mere droning history. Here, in one thrilling tale, the Bowl had come near a heavy world, too massive to support any adventurer. The mother ship hovered in the quasi-stable point beneath the largest moon. Ships angular and strange rose like sparks from the heavy world’s surface, rocket propelled. There was no orbital tether. Simple technologies. This was how the finger snakes had reached them—an artful species indeed.

  There followed hundreds of long cycles of negotiation, of studying one another. The little finger snakes had gained from this dialogue some trivial enhancement in their technology, nothing that could threaten the Bowl. The Bowl had learned little from them, of course.

  Then 256 finger snakes had returned to the Bowl aboard the mother ship. The small colony had needed little in the way of integration. They were more dexterous than most Bird Folk, good tool-users, and crafty repair artisans. You rarely saw them now; they lived underground. Memor was impressed that such small beings had ever attained spacefaring skills, considering how they loved their buried warrens.

  Lessons of ages unwound. The past scrolled on within Memor’s mind. Around him, other Astronomers huffed and grunted as they, too, experienced the deep realms. An elder snored. Out of respect, all let her sleep.

  Here, a bandit species had attacked approaching Astronomers’ exploring ships. The Astronomers had retreated. The Bowl’s defenses proved adequate, and so they had continued on, out of their range. A few scores of invaders had landed, been captured, been bred for docility. Four-limbed bipeds, they were, and they made good farmers.

  These named Sil had come as plunderers; they’d seen the Bowl as a high-tech civilization and wanted its secrets. Their early days after capture proved turbulent. Training worked its slow magic. The Sil were limber, dexterous creatures, invaluable today. Space suits allowed t
hem to work on the Bowl’s understructure. Their docility was not quite dependable, even now, after twelve million long cycles.

  Memor moved on through the stories. Images filled the air around him, long dead voices spoke in somber tones of musty triumphs.

  Here, a gas giant planet was home to living dirigibles. Probes managed to scoop up enough infant balloons to make a stable population. They bred in air, seldom touching down. The Bowl’s deep atmosphere gave them free, safe range. The bioengineers deftly tuned their genes for docility and strength. A million long cycles later, they were an indispensable part of the Bowl’s civilization. To take to air without expending fuel was a great pleasure, available to all the master Folk.

  Memor moved on through the annals of history, all the while fighting his trembles, fits, fevers. Is it worth all this to become female? Judgment is never wise while in restless agonies. He focused, lifting mind above body. His unmasked Undermind dealt with the aches and fevers, beneath his burrowing consciousness.

  Here, alien visitors had failed to accommodate to their new station in life. Genetic trickery had failed them, too … but a life-form derived from that world had become the skreekors, a valuable and tasty prey animal that could be eaten raw for the relishing. Memor hungered for one now, stomach squeezing, just from viewing the savory pursuit-and-devour sense concerts.

  Tales of successful change rolled by, all leading to today’s ideal ecological and political balance. The Bowl was a living thing, not a static tool. This incoming visitor was the first in many a million long cycles. Flaming them with the flare would be easy, though not trivial: it demanded managing huge energies with a deft touch. They’d done it before.

  “The Gamma Lance is primed,” a senior female said. She gestured at the star bowl. The starship plainly intended to fly into their jet. Foolish! The senior female said.

  Memor rose on unsteady legs to dispute. But what would we all lose? An interstellar ramjet of unusual design and audacity, at the very least. New modes of thought. Strangeness. Adventure! Memor sat, and others sang their vying songs. Discussion rolled on.

  Memor tried to follow the discourse, while giving no sign that he wrestled with his inner self. Strange emotions flitted through his mind, mingling with the ancient records in strange symphonies of thought. The best stories were never of maintaining stasis. Change meant action meant zest. Watchers held the balance of the Bowl, but Dancers had all the best songs. Of course, there had been times when a visiting alien was simply destroyed, but where was the entertainment in that?

  It might be that Memor, and Memor’s peers, would give too much weight to tales of change and advancement.

  Time would tell. But for now, Memor was a Dancer. He had to be.

  His inner struggles and outer sweats so preoccupied him that he very nearly failed to note that the Dancers carried the argument. Only when a friend pounded him with hearty congratulation did Memor discover that he had been made Master of the Task—and would have to deal with the approaching aliens, if they should dare land.

  “Why?” he asked a friend Watcher.

  “Because you are inventive. Also, you have enemies.”

  “My enemies would—?”

  “Hope you fail, yes.”

  Memor paused, but decided to go with the tide. He strutted a bit and bellowed hearty masculine thanks to all. Let them come!

  PART II

  THE TOUGH GET GOING

  Man is a small thing, and the night is large and full of wonder.

  —LORD DUNSANY

  SEVEN

  They left a skeleton crew of five aboard SunSeeker, with Redwing plainly sorry that proper ship command protocols demanded that he stay aboard. The crew left were enough to handle the hundreds in hibernation and maintain ship systems.

  The descent team took ten down with them—Beth, Cliff, Fred, the Wickramsinghs, and five recently revived, who were still taking it all in. Cliff was nominally first officer, mostly because Redwing wanted to avoid the delay in reviving a ship crew officer. Cliff could barely keep the various ranks straight in his head and suspected they would quite soon matter very little.

  Terry Gould and Tananareve started as per regulations by checking everyone’s gear and organizing it for rapid use if necessary. They had field packs, rations, water, lasers, and tech gear, all compact and rugged. The lower Bowl grav made it possible to carry more, so they had packed to do so. Cliff, Beth, and Fred spent most of the long flight checking and rechecking their gear, then reviewing the many multi-spectra maps they had made. On the flat regions there stood pillars, barely resolved—not pylons, but raised land formations.

  “Buttes,” Beth said, sipping coffee. “Black-topped. Kinda like the American West but lots bigger. Looks like they rise all the way up to the sky roof. So the sealing barrier, that light blue stuff, ends at the rim of the butte.”

  “Pretty high, too,” Fred added with a grin, plainly enjoying himself. “Nearly seven kilometers. Not as high as Everest, and certainly nothing compares to Olympus Mons, but worth climbing for fun. Always wanted to do Everest…”

  Cliff kept his voice even and warm, and even managed a smile of sorts. “We’ll have to arrange it for you.” At times, Fred was touchy. As the ship rumbled, Cliff eyed Fred, who was lean and muscular and sported a permanent suntan. How had he gotten that in all their training time? Cliff had hardly been able to sleep. At least Fred didn’t talk much now as he concentrated on work.

  * * *

  The last long swoop of their descending orbit was tense. The cabins filled with a sour smell and everyone was on edge. It felt odd to be coasting down toward a huge landscape that stretched away to all sides, filling the sky—and yet still be in space. The Bowl wrapped around them.

  No tug of deceleration or singing of thin air. Cliff looked at the wall screens. One showed SunSeeker above them, a pale blue thread of flame trailing. Another showed the top of the butte, nearly edge on and still a featureless black. Another, the “overhead” view toward the jet.

  Cliff watched the ivory and orange streamers fight and roil along it. An idea struck him. “Abduss!”

  The man was in the next acceleration couch, face pale, looking none too well.

  “You studied the jet, right?”

  “Uh, yes, Cliff…”

  “What does it emit?”

  “X-rays, microwaves, plenty of IR.”

  “And?”

  “Not much visible light. A lot of broadband radio and microwave noise,” the wiry man said, obviously glad to have something else to think about than their landing. “Very loud. Very beautiful.”

  “I’ll bet that’s why we don’t pick up their transmissions—they avoid the visible region of the spectrum. Probably use direct laser feeds, instead—so no side lobes for us to pick up.”

  “Ah, yes, they are clever,” Abduss said, and went back to looking fixedly at the land sliding below them. His mouth worked.

  Lightning forked around the oval. Some kind of electrical process, like the big sheets of luminosity that came cascading down from Earth’s ionosphere? Cliff watched the quick, orange streamers. They slid around the butte, with glowing fingers probing at the lip.

  The atmosphere’s membrane was a light blue shining sheet under them now. It was visible only at an angle. Sunlight glinted off long wave fronts that rippled in the sheet’s surface, making it look like a transparent ocean. Cliff marveled at the illusion, seeing beneath it craggy mountains and long, sloping green valleys as though they lay on an ocean floor. Somehow this made the whole construction both eerie and yet like a planet.

  Now they tilted and their thrusters roared, rattling Cliff’s teeth. They skated along just above the membrane, and he saw that the waves were moving slowly, great undulating troughs driven by—what?

  Like an ocean on Earth. Perhaps the rotation of this colossal artifact unleashed such waves, and they in turn affected the weather below. So did Earth’s atmosphere, after all; hurricanes came from the planet’s rotation about its poles.
What oddities could they expect on this unimaginable scale?

  He watched a long line of rain clouds caught in the crest of a wave. Angry blue gray clouds were corralled in the high peak, as if in rising they cooled and let go their moisture. His eye followed the cloud-racked crest to the far horizon. A marching regimental rainstorm. He felt a cold sensation of strangeness at this sight. The idea of a rainstorm that stretched long and slender over distances far greater than continents made him suck in his breath.

  Now they were above the black pillar, descending. Cliff’s stomach fluttered up into his throat. He clenched his teeth as Eros rolled and dived, wrenching around as Beth slammed them hard into their couches.

  “The butte!” she shouted. “Damn!”

  Abduss shouted, “What? What is it?”

  Pause. “It’ll be fine,” she said flatly with forced calm. “I can figure this. Keep your crash webs tight. Someone should have noticed.” Beth was talking through clenched teeth.

  Abduss frowned. “What is—?”

  “That’s no butte. We’re inside a hollow tube! The surface is—I don’t see a surface, it’s in shadow, seven kilometers down.” Thrust went away. “I don’t want to run out of fuel. I’m going to assume there’s a floor and it’s flush with the forest. Abduss, can you get me anything with radar?”

  Cliff’s throat was dry and his voice cracked. “Floor as opposed to … what?”

  “As opposed to a hole that goes right through the Cupworld and out into space!”

  Abduss said, “What?” His eyes showed a lot of white.

  “Suppose it’s a through-out tube, to save the trouble of going around the whole Bowl. That’s what it looks like in a full-spectrum picture.” Beth gestured at a stack set of views. In some, stars hung in the opening.

  “Uh, so?”

  “We could go right through. What’s radar say? You can get an angle on the floor now, right?”