Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  Redwing dialed up a chef’s salad. “We’re recording everything we can get in electromagnetics from the Bowl surface, but there’s not much,” he said.

  Beth asked, “What are you doing with our allies? I mean the—”

  “Snakes? They kind of give me the willies, but they seem benign. We’re helping the finger snakes unload that ship you hijacked. Those plants will do more for them than for us, don’t you think? Shall we house them in the garden? We’ll have to work out what to give them in the way of sunlight and dirt and water. Want to watch?” Redwing finger-danced before a sensor.

  The wall wavered, and yes, on the visual wall there were finger snakes and humans moving trays out of the magnetic car. Beth saw these were new crew. Ayaan Ali, pilot; Claire Conway, copilot; and Karl Lebanon, the general technology officer. The ship’s population was growing. They moved dexterously among the three snakes, struggling with the language problem.

  Beth muted the sound and watched while she ate. Silence as she forked in flavors she had dreamed of down on the Bowl. No talk, only the clinking of silverware. Then Fred said, “The map in the big globe? It looked alien, but it’s blue and white like an Earthlike planet.”

  “Could that have been Earth in the deep past?”

  “Yeah. A hundred million years ago?”

  Redwing said, “Ayaan says no. She pegs that clump of migrating continents to the middle Jurassic. Your picture was upside down, south pole up. Argue with her if you don’t agree.”

  Fred shook his head. “I can recall it, but look—I sent Ayaan my photo file, so—”

  Redwing called up a wall display. “There is a lot of spiky emission from that jet. Seems like message-style stuff, but we can’t decipher it. Anyway, it fuzzed up your pictures and Ayaan had a tedious job getting it compiled. She compiled, processed, and flattened the image store. Piled it into a global map, stitching together your flat-on views—here.”

  Fred read the notes. “Of course … All those transforms have blurred out the details, sure. So now, look at South America. Just shows what looking at things upside down and only one side, will do. Now, rightside up and complete, I can see it. How could I have missed it?”

  Beth said kindly, “You didn’t, not really. We were on the run, remember? And this doesn’t look a lot like Earth, all the continents squeezed together. But you were right about the Bowl having some link to Earth. Tell the cap’n your ideas.”

  Fred glanced at Redwing, eyes wary. “I was tired then, just thinking out loud—”

  “And you were right.” Beth opened her hands across the table. “Spot on. Sorry I didn’t pay enough attention. So, tell the cap’n.”

  Fred gazed off into space, speaking to nobody. “Okay, I thought … wow, Jurassic. A hundred seventy-five million years back? That’s when the dinosaurs got big. Damn. Could they have got intelligent, too? Captain, I’ve been thinking that intelligent dinosaurs built the Bowl and then evolved into all the varieties of Bird Folk we found here. Gene tampering, too, we saw that in some species—you don’t evolve extra legs by accident. They keep coming back to Sol system because it’s their home.” Fred remembered his hunger and bit into his cheese sandwich.

  A smile played around Redwing’s lips. “If they picked up the apes a few hundred thousand years ago, then they could have been en route to Glory for that long. They’re definitely aimed at Glory, just like we were. Beth?” Beth’s mouth was full, so Redwing went on. “All that brain sweat we spent wondering why our motors weren’t putting out enough thrust? The motors are fine. We were plowing through the backwash from the Bowl’s jet, picking up backflowing gases all across a thousand kilometers of our ramjet scoop, for all the last hundred years of our flight.”

  Beth nodded. “We could have gone around it. Too late now, right? We’ll still be short.”

  “Short of everything. Fuel. Water. Air. Food. It gets worse the more people we thaw, but what the hell, we still can’t make it unless we can get supplies from the Bowl. And we’re at war.”

  “Cliff killed Bird Folk?”

  “Yeah. And they tried to repay the favor.”

  * * *

  Beth had expected some shipboard protocols, since Redwing liked to keep discipline. But the first thing Redwing said when they got to his cramped office was, “What was it like down there?”

  Across Beth’s face emotions flickered. “Imagine you can see land in the sky. You can tell it’s far away because even the highest clouds are brighter, and you can’t see stars at all. The sun blots them out. It gives you a queasy feeling at first, land hanging in the distance, no night, hard to sleep…” She took a deep breath, wheezing a bit, her respiratory system adjusting to the ship after so long in alien air. “The … the rest of the Bowl looks like brown land and white stretches of cloud—imagine, being able to see a hurricane no bigger than your thumbnail. It’s dim, because the sun’s always there. The jet casts separate shadows, too. It’s always slow-twisting in the sky. The clouds go far, far up—their atmosphere’s much higher than ours.”

  “You can’t see the molecular skin they have keeping their air in?”

  “Not a chance. Clouds, stacking up as far as you can see. The trees are different, too—some zigzag and send long feelers down to the ground. I never did figure out why. Maybe a low-grav effect. Anyway, there’s this faint land up in the sky. You can see whole patches of land like continents just hanging there. Plus seas, but mostly you see the mirror zone. The reflectors aren’t casting sunlight into your eyes—”

  “They’re pointed back at the star, sure.”

  “—so they’re gray, with brighter streaks here and there. The Knothole is up there, too, not easy to see, because it’s got the jet shooting through it all the time. It narrows down and gets brighter right at the Knothole. You can watch big twisting strands moving in the jet, if you look long enough. It’s always changing.”

  “And the ground, the animals—”

  “Impossible to count how many differences there are. Strange things that fly—the air’s full of birds and flapping reptile things, too, because in low grav everything takes to the sky if there’s an advantage. We got dive-bombed by birds thinking maybe our hair was something they could make off with—food, I guess.”

  Redwing laughed with a sad smile and she saw he was sorry he had to be stuck up here, flying a marginal ramscoop to make velocity changes against the vagrant forces around the Bowl. He didn’t want to sail; he wanted to land.

  She sipped some coffee and saw it was best that she not say how she had gotten a certain dreadful, electric zest while fleeing across the Bowl. Redwing asked questions and she did not want to say it was like an unending marathon. A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted.

  To wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was—well, a consummation requiring digestion.

  She could see that Redwing worried at this, could not let it go. Neither could she. Vexing thoughts came, flying strange and fragrant through her mind, but they were not problems, no. They were the shrapnel you carried, buried deep, wounds from meeting the strange.

  PART II

  SUNNY SLAUGHTERHOUSE

  After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.

  —ITALIAN PROVERB

  NINE

  Cliff stood at the edge of the ruined city and tried to get his eyes to work right.

  This world looked … strange. Shimmering green and blue halos hovered around the edges of every burned tree and smashed building. The jet scratched across the sky had its usual twisting helical strands around its hard, ivory-bright core … but there, too, an orange halo framed it, winking with vagrant lights.

  Okay … shake the head, blink. Repeat. The colored halos dimmed. He made himself breathe long and slow and deep. Acrid smoke tainted the dry
air.

  In the second Folk attack, he had gotten hit again. Irma had stitched the wound in his right shoulder and then … he slept. It was strange to sleep for days and nights—though those words meant nothing here, where the ruddy star hung forever in the same spot in the sky. Yet he had slept long, his irked back and aching bones told him.

  He had come out of it, stiff and dry and jerky. A bit foggy, he watched the Sil deal with their wounded and put out the widespread fires. He had just woken up and now, after a breakfast of odd foods and stale water, felt pretty well. The halos ebbed, faded. With Irma he stood watching the Sil work. Their lithe bodies slumped and sagged. They were naturally limber, dexterous creatures, but not now.

  Irma said, “The skyfish came over this part while you and I were trying to help carry that heavy ammo the Sil use. Blasted everything.”

  He nodded, dimly recalling the fevered hours of carrying heavy cargo on rolling flatcars. Their wooden frame carriers held long cylinders of shaped shells with elementary fuses on the underside. It paid to be careful with them. Hard, dumb, sweaty work it was, while they heard hollow hammer blows rain down like a distant drumming wrath of sky gods. The concussions rolled over them and he had learned pretty quickly not to look up or back too much, because the occasional orange-hot fragment or buzzing shrapnel came that way. Once he had seen a zigzag tree burst into flame after a sizzling meteor slammed into it. He had helped throw water on it, then dirt when they had to. The burning city took all the reservoir water, and then that ran out, too.

  After they got it put out, the humans went back to hauling ammo. The Sil guns hammered hard, trying to take down the skyfish. The brown and green football blimps churned across the sky and aimed lasers, antennas, and some kind of fire weapon down on the city.

  He distracted himself by thinking how the skyfish could work at all. Its elaborate fins could flare out, capturing wind like a sail, and driving the gasbag forward. He guessed the huge creature could trim on this by shifting mass inside itself, getting a torque about its center of mass to navigate. This can be somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking with its big side fan-fins spread out. It had big eyes and blister pods, maybe evolved from some balloonlike species. A bioengineered creature used to slowly patrol the air above the Bowl.

  He had watched the battle and recalled how this place had been only a short while before. The Sil had their pride, of course. Their first full awake time in this large Sil city, the five visiting humans had to be led around, shown the town. They saw ancient majestic buildings of stacked stone, gleaming shiny statues to great dead savants, beautiful swooping curves and ramps and towers, then spindly ceramic bridges over moist green gardens and sprawled homes. They exhausted their reserves of oohs and ahhs. It was indeed a fine city of untold ancient origin.

  Not now.

  During the battle, at least five of the living skyfish had circled, covering each other against any Sil artillery. When the guns barked up at them, a shower of beams and missiles cascaded down, silencing the crews. The pain beam was terrifying. When it struck, Cliff could see the shocked fear come into the Sil faces. They turned and ran, some snatching at their skins as though they were on fire. At the sensory level, they were.

  The pain gun was a microwave beam that excited Sil nerves with agonies that made them fall, writhe, scream. It deranged some, who howled and jerked and ran in chaotic bursts. Others had the sense to run steadily out of the beam, if they could. The effect was intense, immediate, and ended Sil resistance where the beams struck. The pain projectors were soundless, which made them even more horrifying. These were the standard Folk weapon to panic opponents, and they worked their silent terror well.

  But humans did not feel it at all. Some difference in the neural wiring made them immune. So Cliff, Aybe, Terry, Howard, and Irma hauled ammo and tried to stay alive. The skyfish wallowed across the air above the Sil city and brought flame spouts to bear. Some forked down green rays that seared buildings and people alike. The enormous living sky creatures systematically burned along geometric paths, and whole blocks of homes and factories burst into yellow flame.

  The Sil brought their archaic weaponry to bear and blew shredding blasts into the skyfish underbodies. Once Cliff heard an enormous hollow whoosh that thundered down like a bass note. He and Irma looked up and saw a skyfish belly explode. A huge yellow ball licked around the green skin and trailed up the sides.

  “Hydrogen,” Irma said brightly. “That’s their buoyancy gas.”

  Howard said, “Helium must not give them enough lift. Tricky.”

  “Oh, come on, where would they get helium?”

  Another skyfish was floundering now, spewing fluids from multiple wounds, losing altitude, veering erratically. The city below it boiled with flame. The great beast slid down the sky through realms of smoke. Its crash was like a green egg crumbling in slow motion as it burned.

  The destruction lumbered on amid roars and bangs and the sour stench of flame. Not long after, a nearby explosion Cliff never saw caught him. He took hot fragments in his left side and arm and went down. Then it all got fuzzy, the licking flames filmed over by a gray screen of pain.

  He recalled seeing the skyfish turn and begin their ascent. They rose quickly, buoyed by the spreading fires below. Someone said the huge blimps would mend and rearm at higher altitude and might come back … and then it all went vague and he fell away into troubled sleep.

  So now, getting his eyes to see this place right again, it seemed odd to have the big world go rolling along without him. Sils labored nearby and gave the humans no notice whatever. There was a gray silence to their movements, but they kept on stolidly.

  Just like it will keep on after you’re dead, Cliff thought. The wide busy world of muscle work, weather changing, window washing, future judging, fast joyous dancing, racing heart in great passion, nose picking, fun talking, and bug swatting—all that will go merrily yea merrily along. If these aliens were never aware of your presence, they won’t be overwhelmed by your absence. But the same is true of the people you know, too. The world picks up the pace and moves on. Eternally.

  They were standing apart from the men—Terry, Aybe, Howard—at the city’s edge. The humans had all slept in a makeshift cave in the surrounding hills, to avoid the constant light. Here there were scraps of the lush greenery on the slopes amid the rocky landscape, with some odd trees and big-leafed plants rich in fruit. They were eating some of these, rather bland with lots of pale blue juice. Irma said, “Quert looks worn down.”

  Cliff turned to see the slim alien approach, its usually light-footed stride slow and lame. Quert’s voice was grainy, flat. “Onto here I-we came to speak”—a jerky hand gesture—“and wish share help.”

  Quert’s Anglish was still improving, and quite a few of the other Sil had managed to share the language upload and integrator AI. Cliff still found it striking that the Astronomer Folk had widely distributed—“among the hunters,” Quert had said—a software that taught Anglish with a few immersion sleeps. He had seen the squat little machine that “learn us” as Quert said, but had no idea how it really worked.

  Irma said, “We can labor beside you.”

  Quert’s large yellow eyes studied them all in turn. “Medical we are now at. The dead rot.”

  “They be many,” Irma said. The Sil had the most trouble with the irregular forms of to be, so they tried to use simple forms.

  “I sad be for our acts.”

  “You could not know the Folk would exact such a price,” Terry said, coming up to the group.

  “Many dead. Have not known before, fire on our city.”

  “You have lost the city, too,” Terry said.

  “No. Do not hurt for the city. We build again fast.” Quert paused for a moment, eyes distant, then said, “The city speaks what has happened to us. Everywhere on the Bowl, the wounds, they show.”

  “Sure,” Irma said.

  “When we have more to say, we rebuild, the city speaks again,
” Quert said. Irma didn’t understand, then.

  The Astronomer Folk had apparently hoped the varying species of this area would rally to the Folk cause, and use the Anglish to somehow ensnare Cliff and the others. For the Sil it had worked in reverse. The Sil had been festering under Folk rule for a long time, and had seized the opportunity of uniting with their small human band. Now they suffered for it repeatedly, as the Folk tried to find the humans.

  How long will they bear up? Cliff wondered. We’ve caused them huge losses …

  “How we help?” Aybe asked.

  Quert stood silent as its large eyes elongated up and down, rhythmically. The yellow eyes closed and the eyelids vibrated, as if shaken from behind. These expressions had no human parallel. Cliff had thought before that this must mean surprise or puzzlement, but now the alien made a curious squatting motion, its sinewy arms knotted in front of it. With the large Sil pancake hands and thick fingers it shaped a twisting architecture in the air.

  Then its eyes jerked open and it stood. Cliff was cautious in inferring emotions from facial signatures in the Sil, but this case at least seemed clear. The constricted face oozed sad resolve.

  “Dead are many. Have time now little.”

  Irma said softly, “You wish help with the dead?”

  “We may share violence. Share our ends also.”

  * * *

  The finely tended Sil city was now a chaos of jagged building shells, of splintered statues to great Sils now shattered into lumpy gray shards, of cratered streets, of angular trees sheared off at their roots or burned to cinders, of vehicles sitting gnarled and toasted, and the only sounds those of stones falling from half-crumpled walls. No groans, anymore. A city of dead.

  A grim procession clogged the few cleared routes. Sil shuffled along with blackened faces and torn skins, mournful angular faces with eyes that saw little before them. Some of them bore wounded; others bore their dead. None spoke. None needed to.