Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “Gotta be a hundred,” Terry said.

  “Older, I’d say. Went through the tail end of the Age of Appetite, he told me once. Pretty nasty time.”

  “He’s a pretty nasty guy,” Aybe said, and then sucked loudly on a long bone until they could hear him drawing air all the way through it, a hollow slurp.

  “Look,” Cliff said mildly, “plenty of people live to well over a hundred and fifty now. Redwing’s not what I’d call old.”

  “By ‘now’ you mean ‘when we were Earthside,’ right?” Terry said. “God knows how old people live there now.”

  That made everyone think of the abyss of time separating them from everyone they knew, Cliff saw. He let that ride for a while. Quert nodded to him, seeming to understand. Then it was time to move on.

  They hiked away from their latest rough stone shelter into a clearing sky. There were local horizons here, but now the stray clouds skated over those near horizons and the sweet blue air above cleared further. Cliff had not seen before this sharp, sure atmosphere that he knew was deeper than anything on Earth. Yet now few clouds intruded into a shimmering sharp air. The piercing point star of the Bowl’s governing sky still hung above them, of course. But he and his team had moved along the slope of the Bowl for many days at high speeds, one way or the other, and now the star—Cliff had named it Wickramsingh’s Star, he recalled—shone not at the absolute center of this sky, but at a slight angle. Its jet seemed now to plunge more deeply toward them. Its streamers turned with elegant grace, pale orange filaments laced across the gauzy firmament. He watched its slow swirls as they slogged across a broad hill. The humans hung back from the Sil advance point men—though some of their Sil party, he had finally realized, were women. He still could not tell their sexes apart with assurance. The Sil didn’t seem to have strong binary distinctions between sexes in looks, dress, or behavior. Their occasional puzzled glances at Irma might come from that. Maybe, Cliff realized, humans were just more sexually restless than these Sil.

  Shapes darted around in the forest. Cliff had seen that with constant sunlight, creatures had to be on guard all the time. Prey had eyes that looked broadly, like rabbits’ bulging eyes, or insects’ compound eyes—all designed to see at wide angles. Predators, as on Earth, had good depth of field, with eyes looking mostly forward, and wide-spaced for maximal 3-D perception.

  Irma walked beside him, shouldering her pack where it wore on her, and said brightly, “Ever think, how come we’re seeing so many bipeds?”

  Cliff tried to remember that he actually was a biologist. “Um. Hadn’t thought. But look, as I recall from lectures, anyway, Earthside bipedalism was really nothing more than an oddball vertebrate artifact.”

  She adjusted her hat against the sunlight. “Those back there, the Kahalla, they couldn’t pass for us, not even in a dim room. Humanoids, though, for sure. Same basic design. But they’re from a tide-locked world, not like Earth at all. Odd.”

  He kept watching the forest slipping by as they marched on. But theory was fun, too. He bit off a bit of a sweet root they’d pried up from the ground, under Quert’s instruction, and said, “Convergent evolution, must be. Those Kahalla prob’ly had four-limbed ancestors, just like us. Back Earthside, the arthropods always had limbs to spare, but not poor old mammals like us. We’re bipeds because we started with four limbs, and developed climbing skills, then tool use. That left two limbs for walking, so that pressure forced us to stand up.”

  Irma took some of the sweet root, ate through all the rest of it, and smiled. She, too, endlessly scanned the passing trees and vines, and searched the skies. You learned to stay alert after so long in the field. “Yeah, Earthside, bipeds are really rare. Except for birds, who’ve got ’em because they invest so much in wings. For invertebrates, the closest thing to that vertical posture is something like a praying mantis.”

  Cliff thought on that as he slapped a fat bug that wanted to use his hair for a nest. “A mantis has four legs.”

  Irma’s voice always went up in pitch when she had an idea. “You’re skipping my point. We saw one biped far back, right? Big lumbering thing that ignored us, dunno why. Then the Sil. Now these Kahalla. All had heads with faces, two forward-looking eyes and jaws and a nose.”

  Cliff saw her point. “Not a necessary arrangement, right. Just look at arthropod faces. Scary, because they’re just close enough to ours to look threatening, horrible.”

  “Those Kahalla though, had pointy faces, eyes more on the side.”

  “That’s a prey signature. I remember from high school, ‘Eyes front, likes to hunt; eyes on side, likes to hide.’ Seems to be a universal.”

  “Plus they had fur,” Irma said. “We don’t, because we overheated when we ran long distances—so we lost the fur.”

  Cliff nodded, recalling how lumbering those Kahalla figures had been. Bulky, ponderous, more like bears than people. And not a word had been spoken between them and the humans and Sil. Just glowers and postures, like the signals animals give. “Um, okay. So the Kahalla aren’t runners. Or talkers.”

  Irma said, voice rising more, “The Bowl is telling us that smart aliens converge to a humanoid form.”

  Cliff thought on that, never ceasing his scan of the forest around them. Or could be, somebody designed them.…

  Quert was ahead of them and now turned. “Not the Folk. Not like, your word, humanoid. We say, Sil Shape. Same thing.”

  “Um, yeah,” Irma said. “I wonder why?”

  “Come from self design, for Folk,” Quert said. “Ancient.”

  “So they have—what?—two arms and four legs?” Cliff asked.

  “Some do. Many others, two legs. Still all Folk.”

  Irma asked, “The Folk, do they really run things here?”

  Quert gave a downward eye-gesture, which Cliff now knew expressed polite doubt. “Ice Minds, they above Folk.”

  “How’s that work?” Cliff pressed.

  “That changes now. Since you came. We Sil work for Ice Minds too, now.” Quert brandished his small communicator, a pyramidal solid that could deform into a flat screen. Cliff had yet to figure out how that worked.

  Irma said, “What do you do for them?”

  “Brought you to them.”

  “That’s it?” Irma asked. “Why us?”

  “You disturb. Folk call you ‘Late Invader’ because you new. Ice Minds want to see you. Know you. So we bring.”

  “We’re just a small ship, passing by,” Irma said.

  “Something about Glory, I hear from Ice Minds. They want to know what you are, going to Glory.” Quert gave a head-shrug. “Not sure what Glory be.”

  “It’s a star right ahead of you,” Cliff said. “We can’t see it—your star’s too bright.”

  “Star ahead?” Quert’s face went blank, which meant the alien was thinking, giving nothing away.

  Irma said, “It’s a star a lot like yours, still so far away that it’s only a dot. Its planet has a biosphere with oxygen and nitrogen and the usual. We want to go there, live there.”

  Quert kept the blank look, but the eyes jittered up, down, around. The alien was undergoing an entire conceptual shift.

  Suddenly Cliff saw it. The Sil had been ushered into the view from the Bowl hull—the deep dark abyss of glinting stars—only lately. The Ice Minds had beckoned to them somehow, sent signals, and propelled forward the events Cliff’s team had then intersected. So Quert and the others had never seen the stars at all, until they brought Cliff’s team through the underground labyrinth and to where they could see the sliding panorama of the galaxy in full.

  The Sil had been like people trapped in a cave, never shown the sky. Their world, the world of all who lived on the Bowl, was an endless warm paradise in steady daylight. Their sun and jet obliterated perspective. The ordinary denizens never saw the stars, or the great plane of the galaxy hanging in a black firmament, dark and strange and sprinkled with twinkling jewel stars.

  That revelation had come to the Sil when th
ey were restless and angry. The Folk had suppressed them for ageless times, but now they knew where they were, who they were. All that had exploded into their world only lately. Cliff’s team had confirmed new truths, and so had made many tragedies come to pass—the battle with the skyfish, the bombing and firestorms of the Sil cities, so much else.

  Cliff started to say some of this to Quert. The alien still had the stiff fixed face, giving nothing away while it thought. But then movements caught their attention.

  The point Sil stopped, gestured, and muttered something in a low whisper. Head and arm gestures: something ahead, spread out.

  They all followed their standard tactic, moving off to both sides and seeking cover, then moving carefully forward. The humans had learned this in training, fire-and-maneuver. Each member of the Sil and human team moved only when others could cover with fire from lasers, arm-arrows.

  Ahead, a faint repeating clatter came through the trees and vines.

  Beyond, the land cleared. Cautiously they worked their way to a vantage point on a small hill. A strip of neatly arranged, emerald green agricultural fields stretched into the distance to their left and right. Simple farm machinery worked in them, making whack-whack-whack noises. Directly ahead, the forest resumed several kilometers away. The crop was yellow and purple shoots that seemed to spray out like arrows from a thick brown trunk. These were three or four meters tall, Cliff judged, like trees with spokes flying out. The spokes were fat and had wide, fanlike flowers along their lengths. The air carried a fine mist of—what? Pollen?

  “We can cross that at a run,” Aybe said.

  Quert pointed to figures working in the field. They had trucks and a robot harvester that worked away, chopping off the shoots and dropping them into the trucks. The machinery worked with a regular whump whump whump. A breeze brought a heady sweet scent like orange blossoms with a cutting undertang. Everything moved with a slow rhythm, and the scene reminded Cliff of a monotonous summer he had spent on a farm in California’s Central Valley. He close-upped them and said, “They’re the same kind we left behind, those humanoids mesmerized by that ancient rock life. Kahalla.”

  “These special Kahalla evolve for farm work,” Quert said. “They stay here always on farm. Birthing and dying, all done here.”

  Irma asked, “They live in a village all their lives?”

  “Content. In balance.” Quert conferred with the other Sil in quick, scattershot bursts of unintelligible talk. They all looked wary to Cliff, as nearly as he could judge. The Sil had complex suites of expressions that darted across their faces, mostly coded in their eye-moves and the light-browed ridgelines above. Quert turned to the humans. “This Aybe right. Run fast across. See there?”

  Nearly directly across from them was a complex of low buildings the tan color of dried mud. “Their hatchery. Few Kahalla there most times. We cross, the Kahalla not see.”

  Cliff tried to take this in. A special form of Kahalla just for the grunt labor of farming? Had the Folk specially bred for that? And … hatchery?

  They moved through the cover of a long winding grove of zigzag trees. He and Irma thought the zigzag strategy was to get more sunlight under a constant sun, which meant more exposed foliage turned to the direction of the star, a reddish dot fixed firmly in the sky. The jet’s filmy light they ignored. Bristly branches and coiling vines sprawled along the thick zigzag trunks to harvest the constant sunlight. That made them useful cover, because the branches were thin at the top and thicker at the tree base. Easy to slip among and elude any watching eyes.

  Warily they stopped within easy view of the tannin brick buildings. As a Californian, Cliff seldom saw ceramic slabs stacked to great heights; his instinct said they were earthquake vulnerable. But there were no quakes here at all. He saw through binocs furry figures moving with lumbering, swaying bodies on two legs, moving slowly among the brick walls. He pointed to them.

  “Friends not,” Quert said with narrowed eyes and edgy eye-clicks.

  “These Kahalla will turn us over to the Folk?” Terry asked.

  Quert said, “Must,” and gave a downturned eye-move.

  The other Sil shuffled and eye-clicked in what seemed agreement, their feet shuffling, impatient. They seemed to feel there was no time to waste in pondering this problem. No point in trying to go around the long farming strip that faded away into the light tan color of the distance, which came from simple dust haze. No telling how long this farm was. An odd way to cultivate; why not in squared-off plots so you minimized the travel distance?

  “No time to think much,” Aybe said. “Ready to run?”

  They set off at a good pace. The Sil got out in front right away with their long graceful strides, taking long slow deep breaths as their feet came down. They seemed to have evolved for running. Humans had, too, but not this well. Cliff wondered if their home world, with somewhat lower gravity, had better shaped them for this part of the Bowl. Again he wondered, as sweat collected in his eyebrows and trickled down, stinging his eyes, what the Sil’s agenda was. Getting out from under the Folk, yes. But those big birds ran this place, and a few puny humans surely could not make much difference. A puzzle. But without the Sil, they’d have been nabbed by the Folk long ago. He let it pass.

  They made a good fast run across the fields, running close to the curious trees. The Kahalla were upwind of their crossing route, too, so that might be an advantage. Cliff was surprised at how easily he ran. He was in better physical condition now from so long on the run, and the local grav seemed lower here, too. But Quert’s head turned, surveying the whole area, as did all the Sil. They were worried.

  The rough rectangular buildings Quert called a hatchery loomed up, two stories high and no windows. They entered the complex, panting and sweaty, and made their way down the main corridor between the buildings. There were no Kahalla around at all. A few zigzag trees lined this main street of the place, their wood worn and gray. The Sil went down side passages, doing reconn, and in a few moments came running back fast. They shouted a word in Sil language and formed a defensive arc facing two passageways. Automatically the humans gathered in behind them, drawing weapons, looking anxiously around.

  Only when a Sil launched one of its arm-arrows did they look up.

  Things like meter-wide spiders came over the lip of the roof. They were white and clacked as they moved, surging down the wall on flexing black palps. Their legs were bristly and black; big angry red eyes glared at the sides of a squashed face.

  The first Sil arm-arrow lanced through one that was halfway over the edge of the roof. It scrabbled at the wall and fell with a smack at their feet. The Sil who had nailed it stepped forward, shot at another of the attackers, hit it at dead center of its circular body—then bent and plucked the arrow out, inserting it quickly back in the air sheath.

  The Sil were shooting at the things now, and the humans used their lasers. But there were plenty of the things, and they kept coming.

  They move more like crabs than like spiders, Cliff thought as the Sil fell back. He aimed at one of the things and hit it, but it just kept climbing down the wall toward them. His shot had gone through it near its edge, but that was not enough, apparently.

  They made small, shrill chippering sounds. They moved sideways with quick sure moves.

  Now Cliff recalled a relayed message from Beth when they had broken out of their captivity. “Spidows,” he said.

  Irma got the reference. “Those were huge, they said. These aren’t.”

  “Local adaptation,” Aybe said. “Our lasers blow through them but don’t kill, most of the time.”

  Five of the things took on a Sil. They crawled up its legs and bit deep with claws. The Sil howled. It batted at them and lurched away. That unnerved the other Sil as rivers of the midget spidows rushed down from other roofs and through the lanes nearby. Their high, shrill cries became a shriek. The humans huddled behind a thin line of Sils who were running out of their arm-arrows.

  Quert was driving arm-
arrows into the spidows but then shouted in Sil and then in Anglish, “Back through!”

  Cliff turned and saw a Sil had found, down a side corridor, a big frame door that opened. They all turned and rushed there. The spidows’ shrill cries rose as they came after the running Sil and humans. Several Sil tore branches off the zigzag trees along the way, snapping them off. They got through the doorway and into a big high room. The door slammed. Sil secured it.

  Illumination streamed down from a ceiling that simmered with ivory light. The place reeked of some sullen odor. It was damp and warm here, and the humans looked at each other, eyes wide, still surprised by the sudden ferocity of the spidow attack. The Sil muttered to each other. They were all standing under the heat beating down from above, panting in moist air flavored with an odd stinging taste.

  “Were … were those spiders?” Aybe asked.

  “More like crabs,” Cliff said.

  “They have a shell and move with a sideways crawl, lots of legs,” Irma said.

  “If there weren’t so many, we could just tromp on them,” Terry said.

  “But there are!” Aybe was scared and covered it with anger.

  The Sil stirred and murmured and Quert listened to them intently. The humans talked but no ideas emerged. The high keening cries of the spidows came through the walls. They all knew they were trapped, and the shock of it was sinking in, Cliff saw.

  “Let’s see what there is here. What this place is,” Cliff said. It was good to get them focused on something beyond their fears. They murmured, shuffled, and started to look around.

  Around them stood cylindrical towers with big fat orange spheres arrayed in a matrix. There were some kind of ceramic tubes laced through the crude baked brick frame, and those felt warm to the touch.

  “What are these things? A whole room full,” Irma said.

  Quert said, “Kahalla eggs. Hatch here,” and took two other Sil to prowl the room. Cliff followed down the line of Kahalla egg cylinder holders. The warm damp air was cloying. Heads jerked toward a scraping noise. They all saw a white carapace of a spidow scuttling away. It left behind a ripped-open Kahalla egg that dripped brown fluids on the red clay floor. The spidow had been eating it. A Sil stabbed it with a shaft of wood it had yanked off a zigzag tree outside. The spidow writhed, worked its claws against the shaft, and died with a faint squealing gasp.