Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

“They report in steadily, each staying a good distance from the others. We get plasma signatures in ample arrays. The coins feed on the plasma itself and change momentum by electrodynamic steering.” She could not restrain herself, beaming. “Beautiful!”

  Karl nodded. “And they got good news, in a way. Remember, before we sighted the Bowl, our scoop underperforming? Turned out it was eating a lot more helium and molecular hydrogen than ordinary interstellar space has. Some of it got ionized by our bow shock and then sucked into the main feeder.”

  “Ah, but it doesn’t fuse—got it,” Fred said. This was the first time he had spoken during the entire meal, and everyone looked at him. “Hard to tell from inside the ship that it wasn’t getting the right food.”

  Beth didn’t see, but wasn’t afraid to ask, “So?”

  “Those useless ions slowed us down, just pointless extra mass—and not fuel.” Fred dipped his head, as if apologizing. “Sorry if I get too technical. My obsessions don’t translate well.”

  Everyone around the table laughed, including Redwing’s rolling bark. “Don’t put down your assets, Fred,” Redwing said. “Even that dinosaur idea.”

  Beth appreciated Redwing’s methods but wanted to move this along, so she asked, “So our drive’s okay? We’re managing to keep it flying in interplanetary conditions, after all—which it was never designed to do.”

  “That’s what the smart coins tell us. We’re actually getting more plasma than we would if we were in near-Earth space,” Karl said. “The jet snarls up some, so we get a bit more blowoff plasma from it.”

  “That star isn’t behaving like a main-sequence one, either,” Redwing said. “I had the Astro Artilect look into it. It says we got the spectral class wrong at first because of the hot spot—it swamped some spectral lines. But as well, the whole jet formation active zone makes the star act funny.”

  Ayaan Ali asked, “You mean those big solar arches we keep seeing? Big billowing loops. They dance around the hot spot, and every week or two they blow up in huge, nasty flares.”

  “Right,” Karl said. “Those help build the jet, somehow—I really don’t see how to build so stable a pillar of plasma from the storm at its feet. Those storms give the jet its power and blow off other plasma, too. The jet’s base storms also spatter out a big, highly ionized solar wind—which helps us scoop up more fusion fuel, too.”

  Beth nodded, feeling more than a bit out of it. “Pleasant to have some good news for once.”

  Redwing said quietly, “So the smart coins tell us we have some room to maneuver. Good indeed.”

  Smiles all round. Fred nodded enthusiastically.

  A new flight deck officer Beth didn’t know well, one of the recent revivals, came into the mess. “Captain, we’re getting a tightbeam laser signal from the Bowl. Did a translation in digital format. It’s in Anglish. Visual’s cutting in and out. But we can tell who it is—it’s Tananareve.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  As he sat waiting for the signal to stabilize, Redwing recalled the hammering noise that worked through the ship’s plates in the trial run, as acoustics bled from the ramscoop magnetic fields into the marrow of their bones. At the departure reception, a president of one of the major ship builders said lightly of the din, “To me, it’s the sound of the cash register.” It had been a major achievement not to deck him right there.

  And even better later, when the medical teams were putting him under, to reflect that when he next opened his eyes, the ship builder would be dust.

  Now the background rattles and pops and long rolling strums were second nature. He listened all the same, as a captain should. Now he heard a crackling and a carrier hum. Then “—hope this gets through.”

  To Redwing, Tananareve’s smoke-and-whiskey voice said she had been through a lot, but the timbre of it spoke of her resolution. The screen was blank, but audio came with little pips and murmurs in the background, perhaps static, perhaps the background noise of some alien place.

  “How goes it?” he said.

  After a delay of only five or six seconds, her shaky voice answered carefully, “It goes.”

  Then she coughed. “They … they here want me to talk to you about cooperating on a message. You’ve seen the feed from Glory, right?”

  He saw a bottom-screen crawl line from the bridge comm system say they had picked up the full feed. The screen flickered, and then suddenly an image of Tananareve snapped into full color view. Against a black rock background, she looked haggard and pale but her eyes flashed with flinty energy. Nothing more in view. Her clothes were the field-issue pants, shirt, and jacket she had gone down in, looking beat up and patched. She also wore an odd gray shawl around neck and shoulders. There was dirt on the left side of her jaw and scratches along the neck. Overall she looked worn down.

  “Yes, we have. Very odd,” Redwing said. Best to be guarded. He knew her captors were listening and wished one would step into view. He hungered for a feel of what these aliens were like.

  “The Folk, these aliens call themselves, they want to work, to, uh, collaborate with us—with you, Captain—on making a message. Something to send to Glory.” Her eyebrows rose on you, and Redwing wondered what that meant.

  Something in her voice had roughened, maybe from being in the field so long. It was Anglish with the corners knocked off. She laughed suddenly. “The civilization at Glory, they seem to think we’re running the Bowl. My, um, mentors, they want to leave it that way. Keep themselves in the shadows, at least until they know something about Glory. But they need our help for that.”

  “Outstanding. What do they want to say to the Glory Hounds?”

  “Captain, they’re still fighting about that. They’ll have to talk to us first.”

  “That’s it? What about Cliff’s team?”

  He could see conflict flicker in her face. So could Beth and Karl, sitting behind him, judging from the way they stirred in their seats. They were in Redwing’s cabin because he wanted to keep this first transmission from the aliens, after months of silence, from the rest of the crew. It was always a bad idea to let crew see policy being made, especially if it was on the fly, as this might have to be. “I … don’t know anything … about that.”

  Her hesitations told more than the words. She was probably trying not to let the Folk know how much she knew. Then, to confirm his hunch, she very carefully gave him a wink with her left eye. Left: something wrong. A common code in visual reporting, all across the Fleet. Right meant things were right but more was to be said.

  “So why don’t they let Cliff’s team go? And you?”

  Hesitation, a side glance at whatever was directing her. “They need me as translator.…”

  “And Cliff’s team?”

  “And as for Cliff, they don’t know where he is.” A right-eye wink this time. What could that mean? That the Folk knew something but not enough to use?

  “So if we work with them on a Glory message, what do we get?” It was time, he judged, to put something on the table. Let them go first.

  “You are all welcome down here. There is plenty for us.” She said this straight, no inflection, staring straight at the camera as if this were a rehearsed line.

  “Thanks, but mostly we want supplies for the ship. And information.”

  “I believe they want to help with ship repairs.” Again the straight stare, no eye movement.

  “We don’t need repair. We figured out that we’d been fighting their jet backwash for a century. Once we’re full up on ship stores, we’ll be on our way.”

  For the first time, she showed a darting, skeptical squint of the eyes. “That isn’t what they have in mind.”

  “Tell them we will exchange delegates, perhaps. We can’t house more than one or two—”

  “They want you, Captain, for negotiations in person.”

  “Not until they release you and Cliff’s people. They’ve been in the field a long time, need medical and some R and R. You, too, Tananareve.”

  “I believ
e they have something more … lasting … in mind.”

  “Such as?”

  “They mentioned a generation or two. Enough time. They say, for species to get to know each other.”

  “I’m a ship officer with orders to carry out. I’m conveying colonists to Glory and cannot change mission.”

  Hesitation, side look, pursed lips. “I … gather they like to sort of collect species, to live here, to work with them.”

  “I can’t spare people. Colonizing a whole planet takes teams, and they’re barely big enough as it is. Cut our numbers and then downstream both halves—those we left with you, and those we took—would get inbred.”

  A pause, her eyes dancing, looking off to the side. “They … they say they find us very interesting.” The flat way she said it told him that she was also not saying a lot, and he would have to guess it. But what?

  There came a sudden voice, swift chippering sounds underlaid by deep notes, as if someone was speaking in two tones at once. Redwing thought it was the first truly alien thing in this transmission—speech built like a symphony, with several elements rendering part of the message in different sliding tones, sometimes highs and lows scampering over each other. Some notes rang hollow, others full. Yet all this was also oddly resonant, as if the play of words—if the screeches, grunts, trills, and mutters were that at all—made a larger work of greater scale.

  He really wanted to see who made that voice. The six-second delay was driving him nuts.

  She considered for a moment, looking off camera, and then said slowly, “They welcome us with … total hospitality. We can live here. They will assign a huge territory to us and help us set up a civilization comparable to—” She paused. “—well, what we had Earthside.”

  “Um,” Redwing said, keeping his face blank.

  “And … from what I’ve seen, there are rules to keep this whole big habitat working. They impose … order. They’re very, uh, firm about that. Make a mistake here, and you could endanger the whole place.”

  “Like any spaceship,” Redwing said. “Open a hatch the wrong way, and you die. Maybe everybody in crew dies.”

  She nodded and her eyes slid briefly to her left, then back. “I think so. They do say we should know for the long run that there are generous upper limits on population. We could have territory bigger than Earth itself. Really, we could choose what part of this whole huge thing we wanted. I’d guess we’d probably want to be on the Great Plain, where it’s point eight gravs and pretty calm, I gather.”

  “You make it sound pretty fine,” Redwing said in a flat voice, no inflection at all.

  Her tongue darted out, and she looked uncertain. “It is, in its way.”

  “We all have to come down? Leave the ship in some orbit?”

  She paused. Redwing now sensed a presence near her, the target of her glances. Somehow from the small sounds of muffled movement, shuffles, and long slow breaths, he felt something nearby. The source of that strange voice, yes. Maybe more of them, several aliens watching, listening, no doubt knowing through their technology what he meant as soon as he said it. And what else would they get from this conversation?

  “I … suppose so. They do want to study SunSeeker, they say. There are some aspects of the magnetic throat and drive they might be able to use. One of the Folk—a big one who seems in command, though it’s hard to tell, really—says the techniques we use may have been known a long time ago, and lost. So they’re interested.”

  “Lost? How old is this Bowl?”

  “They won’t say.” She frowned. “Maybe they don’t know.”

  Beth and the others kept quiet as Redwing’s face furrowed with thought.

  “And if we don’t like to stay long? And give over a lot of our people?”

  “They say this aspect of our interactions is not negotiable. They must acquire some of us.”

  “No deal,” Redwing said sharply.

  “Then … there will be … suffering, they say.”

  “We’ve come to threats pretty quick, haven’t we?” Redwing said with lifted eyebrows.

  She gave him a quick nod. Then the screen went blank.

  They sat in Redwing’s cabin a long time, watching to see if the signal came back on. It didn’t.

  PART VIII

  COUNTERTHREAT

  The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

  —ANAÏS NIN

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “They seem as recalcitrant as you implied,” Asenath said, leaning toward Memor and fluttering irked yellows about her neck. Her harsh warm breath rippled Memor’s ruff feathers, an unpleasant sensation.

  Bemor added, “More so.”

  They were ensconced in a shadowy side chamber after the transmission to the alien ship. The dark rock walls were of truly ancient times, furrowed with past attempts at adornment—panoramas that once depicted vast sagas of civilizations, long vanished. These had nearly worn away, leaving the striations and sparkles of the original grit-soil substance from which the Bowl was first built. The air of great, chilly expanses of time clung to them.

  Tananareve, the last remaining Late Invader prisoner, was bending, flexing, pulling her foot to her forehead, sitting up and lying down over and over with a weight on her straightened hind limbs. The motion was distracting. They were flexible creatures, indeed. Memor told herself that the primate was doing it for her health and tried to ignore it.

  Asenath restlessly gave an agree-flutter. “I do not enjoy negotiating with those who can see so little of their true position.”

  Memor gave a fan-salute of agreement but said, “They are new to all this. No doubt they wish to take their best possible outcome as a beginning position.”

  Bemor gave no feather-signals at all, but let his voice range down into low registers. “They are not negotiating from strength.”

  “I think they imagine they are,” Memor said.

  “I could not diagnose that from their speech,” Bemor said with a casual, superior sniff.

  Memor still felt uncomfortable around Bemor, and tried to tell herself that his dismissive murmurs and small feather-displays were not meant to offend her. Perhaps they were mannerisms he had evolved to deal with staff and lower workers? Stiffening her resolve with this thought, she allowed herself some of what the Folk termed “lubrications” on what she had learned, using images of the primate cast on a shimmering wall projection. “I have studied their ‘tells,’ their limited visible methods of adding meaning beyond their words. They communicate, process, and fully feel emotions by mimicking the facial expressions of others nearby. So I studied the subtle shifts in their Captain’s eyes, mouth, even the slight expansions and contractions of his nostrils. Apparently they have no ability to signal with their ears.”

  “Ah, their Captain is male? Unusual.” Bemor looked skeptical.

  “Bemor, there have been other Invaders who had male hierarchy leadership, yes?” Memor felt this appeal to his greater range of knowledge would mollify her brother. And give a nod to the very idea of male leadership, too—though he knew well that his prominence at high levels was a planned aberration in Folk social structures.

  “Of course, though we managed them throughout their Adoption to cleanse them of that destabilizing structure. They are now all proper matriarchies.”

  “But not the Sil,” Asenath said.

  “They are young, not fully formed,” Bemor countered.

  Asenath gestured outside the Citadel, toward where the primate was hanging from a tree limb, her legs raised to form a V. She remained in that position as the moments passed, but her eyes were on her captors. Distracting. “And that one—you watched her during the talk with Captain Redwing? She gave some facials.”

  “Of course. Tananareve is under therapy: well fed, often exercised. This local gravity is closer to her home world, too. A fairly simple creature, she is. And she used no unusual signals, as I could see.” The Late Invader was still watching her
, but surely Tananareve could not follow the swift, layered Folk speech. Simple commands, yes, but nothing sophisticated. She might overhear a word or two, but never the feather-nuances.

  “The eyes,” Bemor said. “What does a slow wink mean to them?”

  “Puzzlement, I believe,” Memor said.

  “Nothing more?”

  “Uh, I believe not.”

  “She used a long slow wink when questioned by that male Captain about the whereabouts of their other party.”

  “I noticed, but how much can a single small gesture convey?”

  “Could it be a sexual signal?”

  They all found this amusing, since sex among the Folk involved ritual feather-displays lasting through several mealtimes, classic dancing and cadences, song-trills of expectation and mutual agreed definition, then the ultimate mounting, all with urging songs and the completing union—not a matter to be taken lightly or often.

  Memor was pleased that this remark drew amusement; she was known for her humor. “They are storytelling creatures, transferring useful knowledge from short-term into long-term memory, with assigned significance, all by telling a narrative to themselves.”

  Asenath said, “They constantly update this?”

  “Without complete fidelity to the original, yes. Remembering a narrative alters it.”

  Bemor said mildly, “So they know their inner selves as fictional characters, written by themselves? Then rewritten?”

  After more agreeable and incredulous laughter, and then a timely arrival of small tasty animals served on sticks by the attendants, Asenath said, “I fear that adds to their lack of realism. We should remind them of it.”

  Bemor looked skeptical, with purple rushes at his neck. “That would be…?”

  “Memor, fetch forth your primate.”

  When Tananareve came hesitantly through the arch, the contrast of her spindly, pale skin and dull-toned clothes with the three large full-feathered Folk was striking. Her feet slapped the bare cold stones in her frayed boots and her breath wheezed as she got used to the moist, salty scents of life within a Citadel. She was only a bit larger than the attendants who sat dutifully near Asenath, Bemor, and Memor, their faces always tilted upward hopefully in the ivory light, watching to see what their superiors might need.