Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  Redwing was happy with this support and decided to let them talk awhile, let the idea sink in.

  Fred said, “Think about us as orphans. This thing, the Bowl, is so old—they must be used to expeditions from some nearby star coming out to look. So whatever alien species arrived, they were on a one-way trip. Just like us. That’s the Folk history. So they think of us the same way.”

  “Makes sense,” Karl said. “They think the Bowl is so wonderful, of course smart species want to come and see it. Tourists who came and stayed.”

  Fred grinned, a rare event. “Not like us, passersby.”

  Redwing did not like the way this was going. He kept his tone measured and precise. “In the end, a ship is not a democracy. It’s a ship and there’s only one captain. I’m it. I have to decide.” This came out of him as a formula, but he had to say it.

  “The Bowl teaches us a lot, Captain.” Beth spoke quietly, slowly, but firm and steady. “We should study it awhile before we just go on. Before we leave it behind. There’s so much to learn!”

  “They could be just waiting us out,” Clare said. “They know our general flight plan. It demands that we have only a few crew up and consuming food while we’re on full-bore flight. Here, we’re in a solar system, of sorts. We’re catching their solar wind, what there is of it, and barely maintaining good sailing conditions. They know us. We don’t know them.”

  Fred said, “They must have seen our magscoop flexing, struggling, trying out new patterns.” He nodded to Clare. “And we kept running, but barely.”

  “It’s pretty obvious, now that I think about it, from their point of view,” Karl said. “They know this system intimately—hell, we don’t even know how they manage to run it!”

  “So it’s likely they want to wait us out. Run low on supplies.” Clare looked around at the whole table. “Gives them more time to hunt down Cliff’s team, too.”

  Redwing was glad to get some support without saying a word. “Y’know,” he said casually, “Magellan lost most of his crew when he sailed around the world.”

  “Magellan didn’t make it home either,” Fred said. “And we have over a thousand souls sleeping aboard who count on us.”

  Well, that backfired. “They’re always in my calculations, Fred,” he said as warmly as he could.

  “I still think—,” Beth began.

  “That’s not a crew officer issue,” Redwing said firmly. “Not at all.”

  Silence as it sank in. To his surprise, Karl said with a deliberate mild voice, “We do not know what we face.”

  Redwing felt the tension rising in the room. At least the Artilects don’t argue.… “The human race has never known what it faced. We came out of Africa not knowing that deserts and glaciers lay ahead. Same here. If we have no respect from these Folk, we will be captives. Humanity will become zoo animals.”

  This shocked them. Their eyes widened, blinked, mouths opened and closed with a snap. Maybe they’ll remember their obligations. Where they came from.

  They all looked at him long and hard. But Beth looked away—and in that moment he knew that he had them.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Tananareve was a useful test subject. Memor enjoyed experimenting with the primate.

  Memor listened to the rumble of the fast train and ignored Bemor, who was working on his portable communicator. The primate was irked, eyes narrowed, after she heard some of Memor’s remarks about the difficulty of negotiating with their Captain. Tananareve did not know she carried embedded sensors that reported regularly to Memor’s diagnostic systems. When she got angry, her heart rate, arterial tension, and testosterone production increased. Quite interestingly, her stress hormones decreased.

  Memor turned out of the line of sight and flourished a flat display of the primate response.

  “Bemor, note this, please.”

  Bemor idly cast a distracted glance. Memor sent the data set to him and he glanced at the curves on his comm. “How odd, that anger relieves stress in these primates.”

  He sniffed. “With bad social effects, I would wager.”

  “Why? It must have evolved in the wild—”

  “Exactly. They feel the stress-lowering as a kind of pleasure. So to relieve anxieties, they fight. This is not good for a peaceful society. It may explain why they are out here, far from home, exploring.”

  Memor paused. She differed with her brother over this area, which was, after all, her own realm of research. But … “You could be right. It seems an unlikely feature in a species we would make docile.”

  “I note her left brain hemisphere becomes more stimulated as well. This may confer some aggressive abilities.”

  Memor let this ride. The strumming metallic rhythms of the fast train were comforting, considering that they were moving with truly astronomical speeds down magnetically pulsing tubes, over elegant curve trajectories, arcing across and within the Bowl’s long slopes. They had voyaged now for several slumbers. The fast tubes were cramped, and their outer metal skins at times heated to smarting temperatures through inductive losses. Tight, unamusing quarters even for Folk. Uninspired edibles, with little live game at all. Memor passed the last wriggling forkfish to Bemor; it flapped weakly and gave a soft cry of despair. He took it with relish and crunched happily, snapping the bones. The heady, acid flavor of the forkfish filled the cabin. Tananareve made a clenched face and covered her mouth and nose with a cloth.

  All this travel to rendezvous with the proximate locus the autoprobes had found—among the icefields of the hull, in ready range of the Ice Minds—for the vagrant primates.

  The renegade primates had tripped detectors among the renegade Sil first. Now this. Memor’s attempts to keep a distant trace on the primates was well enough, Bemor thought, but “Given to excess,” he had remarked, “when not well policed.”

  Several ready examples had happened a short while ago.

  First came the incident in which Sil hirelings had patrolled the precincts outside the recently bombed Sil city. There were minor traces of the primates in the area, but the bombardment had eliminated most of the sites where identification would have been simple. Instead there were vague sightings and some detector probables. Bemor had disliked Memor’s delegation of patrolling to a band of Sil unloyal to the central Sil hierarchy. They attempted a poorly thought-through maneuver to block the primates’ movements across a plain. The Sil accompanying the Late Invaders managed to kill and badly injure several of their blockers. There was one report that a car of Late Invaders had taken part in the action. Since Memor knew this same party had killed a local party in a magcar before, and taken part in an insurrection from which Memor herself narrowly escaped, this latest incident was no surprise.

  The second incident was more troubling. The same Sil and Late Invaders party had been glimpsed by a routine patrol skirting the hull territories. Only one clear identification, but enough. Yet by the time automatic patrols had arrived, the party was gone.

  Now a third report, in a region housing old intelligences. The portal near the Kahalla shrine had triggered an abnormality alert. This signal came to the attention of resident monitors for the Zone. Since Memor had a tag on such genetic identifiers, she heard of this just a short while ago, when already in the long magnetic train tube network with Bemor.

  “They move in crafty fashion,” Bemor had observed. “Doubtless this is not a signature of Late Invader cleverness. They do not know our territories. They must be guided by the Sil.”

  Memor sent a fan-array in a flutter of subtle, doubting yellows. “I doubt the Sil have such abilities either. We have contained them in their urge to expand for a great long time now. Many generations have passed since Sil could roam in exploring parties.”

  Bemor considered this. “They are also a rambunctious species, still. Some longlives ago, they sought access to the strictly nonsentient Zones.”

  “I do recall.” Memor quickly accessed her Undermind, and the memory unfolded for her quick review. “Outright demand
s for territory, claiming that their species had spread quickly over their homeworld due to a mixed genetic and social imperative.”

  “Quite. Note that seems, from your own work, to be a signature heritage of your Late Invaders.”

  The implications of this struck Memor only now. But her Undermind quickly sent a link that showed she had been mulling over these Late Invader–Sil resonances. But only vaguely. Bemor, on the other hand, had seen it immediately.

  Memor turned to Tananareve. “Your origins are how far back in your own measure?”

  The primate took her time. Her eyes swept from Memor to her brother as she kept her mouth stiff. Then, “Several hundred thousand orbitals.”

  Bemor had not ingested Memor’s concept-map of her studies of the Late Invaders, for he said, “She must not know the correct sum.”

  “No, this fits with her supporting frame-referencing knowledge. I read it directly from her long-term memory.”

  “Unreliable. We do not know the topology of her Undermind.”

  “We will. But more important, I asked her. She gave a detailed history of their species traumas. Detailed and odd, but plausible. They were several times forced into small surviving parties, due to climate shifts. At one point they were barely above levels to avoid inbreeding in a cold place near an ocean. This built in a desire to expand—almost an assumption, I would say, that the lands far beyond the hills they saw could be better.”

  Bemor huffed and shifted his bulk uneasily. In close quarters, his musk flavored the air and rankled her nose. She sniffed as a rebuke. “It is rare to proceed up through the stages of mental layering you describe. I cannot believe it would occur in so few orbitals of an ordinary star.”

  “As I recall, the Sil also evolved high intelligence and tool use in a short while.” Memor fished up the details and sent them to Bemor.

  A long moment of brooding inspection, a rumbling in his chest, wheeze of slowly expelled breath. “So they did. This explains their intuitive alliance with the Late Invaders.”

  Memor said, “We have new data that the Sil have been privy to our general messages about the Late Invaders. They may have sensed this as their opportunity.”

  Bemor turned to Tananareve. “You know of the Sil?” he asked in something resembling Anglish.

  “Only what you have said of them,” she said.

  “They are with the other escaped Late Invaders.”

  “We were not invaders at all!” This animated the primate. “We came as peaceful explorers.”

  He rumbled with mirth at this, but a quick startled expression on Tananareve’s face showed she thought it an aggressive sound. “Your peacefulness is surely moot, is it not? You of course we retained, but some others of you escaped.”

  “We do not like being unfree.”

  “And we—who of course did not fear any warlike abilities such as your kind might have—do not savor intrusion. We avoid having new influences introduced into our Bowl without adequate wise supervision.” Bemor said this slowly, as if speaking to a child, or to some of the slower Adopteds.

  “I think by now all of ‘our kind’ would like to just get away from this place. We have another destination.”

  “As well we know,” Memor said, flashing a humor her fan-signal to Bemor. “But that is also why we cannot allow you to arrive there first.”

  A nod. “That’s how I figured it.”

  “Can you also give an opinion of why your companions are allied with the Sil?”

  Tananareve smiled. “They need help.”

  “And why together a band of these is moving through the Bowl, using fast transport and undersurface methods?” Bemor huffed, drawing nearer the primate—who then shrank back, nose wrinkling.

  “They’re on the run. Been running so long, maybe it’s a habit.”

  Memor suspected this was a gibe but said nothing. Bemor persisted, his sour and salty male odor rising in their compartment. “Nothing more?”

  She looked up at them both with a level, assessing gaze. “How about curiosity?”

  “That is not a plausible motive,” Memor said, but saw that Bemor gave off flurry-fan-signals of disagreement.

  “I fear it is,” Bemor said. “We try not to allow such facets of a species’ character to rule their behavior.”

  Tananareve smiled again. “That’s what becoming Adopted means?

  “In part,” Bemor conceded.

  “Then you will savor our destination,” Memor said. “It will show you creatures you have never seen and quite probably cannot imagine.” No point in not using a touch of anticipation, was there? Some species appreciated that.

  The primate said, “Try me.”

  PART X

  STONE MIND

  It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

  —MARK TWAIN

  THIRTY

  Cliff watched the sleeting, tarnished-silver rain slam down from an angry, growling purple cloud. This was like a more ferocious form of the cool autumnal storms he had waited out while hiking in the high Sierra Nevada, with crackling platinum lightning electrifying half the sky’s dark pewter. Crack and boom, all louder and larger than in the Sierra, maybe because it came from an atmosphere deeper and more driven, sprawling across scales far larger than planets. This violence was casually enormous, with clouds stacked like purple sandwiches up the silvered sky until they faded in the haze. The stench of wet wood mingled with a zesty tang of ozone, sharp in his nose and sinuses. He tasted iron in the drops that splashed on his outstretched tongue, and salt in the rough leaves they’d just eaten, plus a citrus burn in the vegetables they’d managed to scrounge from some trees nearby, before the hammering rainstorm arrived. Tastes of the alien lands.

  “Rain near done,” Quert said. “Need go. Soon.”

  Cliff could scarcely believe this prediction. “Why?”

  “Folk find us.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “They know much. Even stones—” A gesture to distant sharp peaks, emerging from cottony clouds as the storm ebbed. “—speak to them. Always know.” A grave nod of Quert’s bare head said much.

  Cliff nodded. Rain pattered down and smoke stained the air and it was hard to think. Quert made sense. The whole Bowl was deeply wired in some way. Its lands were vast but not stupid; there had to be a smart network that wove all this together. Still, most of the Bowl had to run on its own. No one or no thing could manage so huge a space unless the default options were stable, ordinary, and would work without incessant managing. Still …

  No security from prying eyes would last for long. Their only advantage was that the Bowl was, while well integrated, still so vast. Even light took a while to cross it—up to twelve minutes, from the edge of the rim to the other edge. The delays sending text or faint voices across it, to Redwing on SunSeeker, were irritating. Especially when you could lose contact at any second.

  The sky roiled with restless smoldering energy. Sudden gusts of howling wind drove the cold hard rain into their rock shelter. The pewter sky slid endlessly across them. But Quert had made them stop here in a long shaped-stone space, angular and ancient seeming, cut back into a hillside. They got in just before the slamming storm descended. Then after hours of huddling, the sky calmed. By the time they ate some of their food, heating it with burning twigs, a black slate wedge had slid overhead and the first hard drops spattered down.

  Now it suddenly ended. Cliff turned to the others and said, “Pack up, gang.”

  Sil and humans, they all grunted a bit with the effort of getting moving and splashed water on their fire. Cliff could still taste the sweet meat they had roasted there. It had made him wish for a robust California zinfandel, though perhaps those didn’t even exist anymore now. Maybe there wasn’t a place called California anymore back Earthside, he mused.

  The succulent aromatic filets came from a big fat meaty doglike creature that had rushed at them hours before. When it came fast out of some big-leafed rustling bus
hes, they first noticed the curved yellow horns it carried on a broad, bony head. Then the bared teeth. It snarled and leaped, with an expression Cliff thought looked as greedy as a weasel in a henhouse. Most of them froze, for it was a true surprise—not even Quert and the Sils had seen it coming. But Aybe had caught it in midair with a laser shot that drilled through its surprisingly large brain cage and the thing fell limp and sprawling at their feet. It died with a shudder and a long, gut-deep gasp.

  They ate the dark rich meat eagerly. It had a strong muscular frame that gutted easily. The Sil cracked its bones and sucked out the marrow. Cliff considered doing it—fat hunger!—but the rank, oily smell put him off. So he offered his bone around.

  “Sure,” Aybe said, taking it. He sliced a line in it with his serrated blade and snapped the bone open over his knee. “Yum.”

  Irma and Terry shook their heads, no. “Ugh,” Terry said. “I grew up on a low-fat diet. That was gospel for a half century, before we had nano blood policing.”

  “Me, too,” Irma added, wrinkling her nose. “Our generation hated that fat smell.”

  “I like it plenty,” Aybe said. “Must be—hey, what generation are you?”

  Terry, Cliff, and Irma looked at each other. “We’re in our seventies,” Irma said.

  “Gee, I’m forty-four,” Aybe said.

  “Just a kid,” Terry said. “Surprised you made the grade. The rumor around Fleet was, nobody has enough experience before they’re in their fifties.”

  Aybe smirked. “You old guys always say that.”

  Irma chuckled. “The first forty years are for sex and reproduction. You used yours amassing a lot of tech abilities?”

  “Sure did.” Aybe shrugged. “I wanted more than anything to get on a starship. Reproduction is overrated.”

  They all laughed. “Women routinely stored eggs and you guys are never quite out of business,” Irma said. “Childbirth’s just easier below sixty.”

  “How old do you think Redwing is?” Terry asked, finishing a slab of meat he had traded with Aybe in return for another bone.