Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  Tananareve watched the opalescent walls shimmer with hot perspiration. Memor remarked that these were “anxiety dewdrops,” brought out by the laboring muscles of the great fish. The shimmering moist jewels hung like gaudy chandeliers, lit by the blue glow of hydrogen flares and phosphorescent yellow bands that ran across the high ceiling. One of the drops, bigger than Tananareve’s head, fell from high up and spattered at her feet with cutting acid odor.

  Bemor shifted his bulk and remarked, “The new signal from Glory is coded in a different manner. We are having difficulties decoding it, except for a few images.”

  Memor shifted into Folkspeech. “Best not to let the primate know. Show what images you have.”

  Tananareve felt her pulse speed up but kept her face blank and made a show of turning to gaze out at the view. A huge bird was flapping by below, eyeing the skyfish. Casually she stepped away to the spot where, leaning forward, she could see reflected in the transparent window the projection Bemor was showing Memor. It was an animated series of images. A man in a white robe advanced into view and something leaped at him. It was an alien with ruddy skin and three arms. It jumped at the man, and huge feet kicked him to the ground. The alien wore tight blue clothes that showed muscles bulging as the view drew closer. The alien head was like a pyramid with sharp chin and bones like ribs under tight, ruddy skin. Two large black eyes glinted at the man, who was getting up, his smiling face mild and his long blond hair flowing. He was holding forward an object—a wooden cross—to the alien. Tananareve saw suddenly that the man was Jesus. The alien leaped on the man, hammering him with feet and two fists. Its third arm was bony and sharp, with nasty nails tapering to points. The alien slammed this into the head of Jesus, shattering the skull into pieces. Blood flew into the air and Jesus collapsed. His body lay still. The black alien eyes looked straight out from the screen Bemor held and thick lips pulsed, swelling and narrowing in what must have been some kind of victory gesture.

  The sudden raw images startled her. A surge of anger tightened her throat. She made herself keep still and watched the bird flap out of view on its four wings.

  “Ah,” Memor said, “similar to the earlier one. But look—we are intersecting the tadfish, as we had hoped to. Now we can deal with these primates, brought together.”

  Tananareve saw swimming in the filmy air below them a gossamer tube shape. Fins stroked all along the barrel body as it rose from the forest below. Somehow, she realized, the Folk had found Cliff’s team, and now had them cornered.

  PART XI

  DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD, NO HANDLE

  It is not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It is because we dare not venture that they are difficult.

  —SENECA

  THIRTY-THREE

  “What’s that?” Irma pointed.

  Hanging among cottony clouds, near to the woody horizon, was a thing that struck him as a silvery, flapping blimp. Coming toward them.

  “What’s that?” Cliff echoed to Quert—who scowled.

  “Escape,” Quert said. “So you say?”

  “From what?”

  “Folk know where we are. Track us.”

  “They can?” Terry asked.

  “Makes sense,” Irma said. “They must have sensors embedded in the original frame that holds the Bowl together. Any smart building does. The trick would be managing such a torrent of data.”

  Quert gave an assenting eye-click and fell silent. The Sil took their orders from Quert and studiously let Quert alone speak for them. Cliff wondered about this but did not want to bring up or question an arrangement that was at least keeping his small party out of the hands of the Folk.

  When the spidows gave up the chase, the tired party of Sil and humans had moved on awhile, crossed a stream that Quert said spidows could not, and then stopped without a word. Cliff could feel the adrenaline collapse; he had gotten used to it after so many scares and flights. He wondered how the Sil managed crises. The same play of hormones?

  Some cold food with water from the convenient spring made them all feel better. Cliff had little storage left in the electronics he had carried all this time. He had chronicled all the places he had been and enjoyed looking back over the images. One from a good while back he liked, a clear day when the great sweep of the Bowl and its jet was sharp and clear. Too often the deep atmosphere blocked long views with enormous stacks of cloud. He had caught some of the team in the foreground, slogging along near a zigzag tree.

  “You’re keeping notes?” Irma asked. “I filled my data storage a long time ago.”

  Cliff shrugged. “I’m either lazy or just plain picky. After the first week, when I was taking shots of every flower, tree, animal, insect, bird—well, harder to be a scientist when you’re on the run.”

  “One thing you’re not is lazy.” She looked at his small working screen. “Notes for each shot, even.”

  “I do them at our rest stops, like this.”

  But there was no real resting, as the Sil made clear.

  Quert eyed the humans. “We not go under now. Best not.”

  “Into the tunnels?” Aybe asked. “The trains? They’ll catch us there?”

  Slow steady eye-shifts. “Soon. Yes. Best not go in tunnels.”

  “I kind of liked those fast tunnels,” Aybe said.

  “Folk hold them now.”

  “So … what do we do?” Terry persisted.

  “See there.” Quert’s slim arm pointed. The small silvery thing hung in the distance above a dense forest ridgeline. It moved slowly and the sun reflected winking spots of yellow and blue from it. “Tadfish.” The Sil around him shuffled uneasily but as usual said nothing.

  “We’re getting away in that?” Irma frowned doubtfully.

  “Best way,” Quert said, and they moved forward steadily. “Hide in sky.”

  Cliff wondered at the Sil social conventions, and their psychology. They were all in mortal danger but the Sil showed little jittery nervousness. Quert ruled absolutely. In contrast, he had to deal with ongoing questions and doubt from Aybe, Terry, and Irma. Only the need to move on, endlessly on, kept him in shaky control.

  The tadfish was coming this way and as they entered the nearby forest of vine-rich trees and brush, Cliff could see it had a deft grace to its movement, though he could not see how it did so. Tendrils of vines yearned for the sun, though some turned at another angle, apparently partial to the jet’s rosy rays—specialization at work. The woods had a thick cloying stink, but were so thick overhead that the tadfish crew could not possibly see them below. Animals scampered away in their path, but there were plenty more concealed. From endless movement, Cliff had picked up ways to sense the life around them. Some animals here were superb at hiding, skinnying up into dense trees, or burrowing in hidden pits like trapdoor spiders. Others just flew away on quick stubby wings, fluttering fast enough to discourage pursuit.

  Aybe and Irma walked with him, and Sils were both point and rear guards. The Sil somehow kept themselves in good order, Cliff saw, while the humans in their worn cargo pants with big flap pockets were drab and saggy. The Sil had patched those up for the bedraggled humans, back in the all-too-brief rest period following the battle with the skyfish. All that now seemed a long time ago. More wear had made their clothes ragged and rough. In contrast, the Sil had loose-fitting, lightweight tan and dusty white jumpsuits that never looked the worse for wear. They could be cleaned by just dipping them in water and connecting them to the Sil onboard and solar-powered back-batteries. Apparently some electrical method rejected ions the cloth disliked and knitted up broken fibers. The humans marveled at this.

  Cliff let himself relax for a moment and enjoy the one sure thing he knew here—life: wild flocks of strange things wheeling and crying high overhead; guttural lowings and crisp cacklings from the forest around them; a smelly cloying carpet underfoot, springy, more like moss than grass, starred with bright stalks like flowers; zigzag trees silvery and ripe with flapping life, big coppery-winged thi
ngs that shrieked and dived at humans when they could. Somehow the big things knew not to go after the Sil, who used their arm-arrows to slice them from the sky. Cliff hit a few with his laser and so did the others and they sank to the ground after that, going for cover.

  They managed to get some sleep. Cliff woke up several times, slapping and swearing at bugs that got into his clothes. Terry kept warily watching the trees and shrubs. The spidow encounter and the bird attack had made them jumpy. There were a lot of ropy vines, and gibbering small things rushed among them, sometimes hurling down oblong red fruit as if to drive the intruders away. A Sil caught one fruit and bit into it, made a twisted face, and tossed it aside. Cliff saw a long vine move on its own and pointed. “A snake. Adapted to trees, probably disguises itself as a vine.”

  Quert heard and nodded. “We call sky pirates.”

  Irma chuckled. “Why?”

  “Intelligent. In a way.”

  “Really? What do they do with intelligence?”

  “Save food for hard times.”

  She stared up at the muscular, glistening snake that hung ten meters above their heads and seemed at least that long. It curled itself and leveraged onto another branch of a tall, spindly tree. Above it were cocoons of pale gray suspended among bare branches. “Like those?”

  Quert gave an assenting eye-click. “Call them—” He paused, searching for the right Anglish term. “—mummies. Smart snakes store so many. Sometimes mummies we use for fertilizer.”

  Aybe gaped at this and as they moved on, he said, “Mummies for … I don’t get it.”

  “Closed ecology, see?” Irma shrugged. “They have to keep everything moving.”

  “So does the Earth,” Aybe said. “At least, until we started industrializing space. Then we did metal smelting and manufacture in vacuum, where we could throw the wastes into the solar wind, and clean up the planet a bit.”

  “But this ground ecology is just a few tens of meters deep,” Cliff said. “Has no plate tectonics. Can’t hide carbon from its air. Can’t bring fresh elements up from far below, vomit it out from volcanoes.”

  Irma finished, “So you do that artificially. Plus you save resources. You might not get any more for a while. Or ever again.”

  He nodded at this elementary wisdom that could always bear repeating, especially on the Bowl. They were still trying to figure out the greater scheme here, as a long-term investment. A negotiation might come up ahead, and Redwing would need to know something about those on the other side of the table.

  That suited Cliff for now: seeing the Bowl as a puzzle. He had always been a problem-solver, a man who reflexively reacted to the unknown by breaking it into understandable pieces. Then Cliff would carefully solve each small puzzle, confident that the sum of such micro-problems would finally resolve the larger confusions. Irma thought the same way, one reason he liked her so much. On this endless trek through strange lands, they had grown to need each other. Every day was unnerving and wonderful at the same time, and for the same reasons. His whole team had gone into cold biostasis—always a risk—so they could reach an alien planet they knew very little about. Now they were immersed in that, multiplied by orders of magnitude. And they knew even less about this huge strange thing, the Bowl. It was daunting and thrilling, every day—in a place where there were not really days at all.

  Now that they had a clear destination, the team of Sil and humans moved on with renewed energy. As they mounted a low hill, they saw the tadfish was closer. “It lands there,” Quert said, gesturing toward the next hill.

  The slowly drifting football-shaped creature was maneuvering under tendrils of rain. Cliff remembered the one that had ravaged the Sil city and looked at its blister pods, wondering if the skyfish carried weapons there.

  “Virga,” Aybe said. “That’s the name for when water evaporates away before hitting the ground. See? It’s falling from clumps of altocumulus clouds up there.” Among towering, steepled clouds rain fell, to be absorbed by lower, dryer layers.

  “Tadfish drinking,” Quert said. “Hurry.”

  They came up on the strange creature through a cluster of zigzag trees thickly wreathed in green vines. The silvery tadfish settled down in a clearing near some ceramic buildings. Quert picked up the pace. Cliff watched the complex sheen of skin as it flexed and stroked its translucent fins. Some attendants clustered at its base as it settled down. Quert was taking them in a flanking approach through the zigzag and vine maze. The ground crew was Kahalla in bright, creamy clothes. They took a small party of passengers off, and Cliff could not see who or what they were as they went into the dun-colored buildings. The Sil did not slow down.

  With the humans struggling in the rear, the whole band sprinted from the last of the zigzags into the open pale dirt field and quickly across to the tadfish. They approached its face as its big green oval eyes peered down at them.

  Several Sil peeled off and took up positions between the tadfish and the buildings. Cliff came out of the trees and saw some of the Kahalla ground crew turn back. They started running toward the tadfish, and the Sil moved to block them. A Kahalla drew a weapon and one Sil flexed his arm. The Kahalla went down instantly. The other Kahalla backed off and the Sil advanced.

  Quert said, “They stay. Tadfish small. Not carry all of us.”

  “Ah.”

  The tadfish mouth was still open. Quert ducked and ran directly into the mouth. This looked to Cliff like a very bad idea. He slowed as they approached the ruby red lip of the mouth and saw the floor of the mouth was a hardened cartilage, lime green and ribbed. He tromped in, boots rapping on the cartilage. A musky smell seemed to wrap around his face. He edged down a narrow passage to the left, dimly lit by amber phosphors in the fleshy walls. The walls pulsed with heat and he emerged into a long room devoted to the view out a transparent wall in the tadfish side. The humans were there but no Sil. As he crossed the room, he felt a surge and the tadfish took off, angling over the zigzags. It turned to bask in the wind and accelerated. Everyone caught their balance, bracing against the softly resistant, fleshy walls. Below he saw Kahalla figures running vainly toward some tow lines that had held the tadfish in place. They retracted, and a Kahalla raised a tube weapon toward the humans looking down. It sighted—then lowered the weapon and shook its arms in frustration.

  Irma said, “The Sil stole this thing.”

  They all laughed a bit in appreciation, relieved, and Quert came into the room. In its staccato manner, it confirmed that the Sil had kept track of when the tadfish would set down on its regular route and had rushed to get there just in time to seize the tadfish when the flight crews changed shift. “Good timing,” Terry said, and Quert gave a hand-pass that meant assent.

  Cliff did not remark that the Sil had not bothered to tell the humans what was up. Quert didn’t like debating policy; indeed, the Sil did not share the human appetite for endless talk and at times made fun of it.

  “So now we’ll ‘hide in the sky’ as you said.” Aybe scowled. “From what?”

  “Folk trace us. Saw at Ice Minds. Kahalla alert them.”

  They were rising fast above the spreading plain. The atmosphere became supersaturated, the air suddenly full of mist. Cliff looked out along the axis of his shadow and there it was forming, a huge round luminous rainbow. The circular rainbow popped into the halo air. It formed near the top of a mountain, aslant from the constant star hanging at his back. He could see five separate colors; the red was intense. Slowly the mist dissolved and the spectral promise faded away. Yet it moved him with its beauty and its quick demise.

  The tadfish walls popped and creaked. Irma said, “What’s that?” They rose faster. The fins outside beat in synchronous rhythm, and they heard a heavy thudding through the walls. “Is that its heart?”

  Aybe looked out the transparent wall. “Maybe the body is expanding. It must be making more hydrogen from water, filling itself out.”

  Cliff put his head against the oddly warm transparent window and only then
noticed a separate transparent bulge farther along the curving skin. It promised a better viewing angle. But the wall nearby had no opening. He saw no way to reach that bulge but ran his hands along the wall and felt a crease in the warm flesh. He pried at it, and with a rasping purr a sheet came free along a seam. A pressure seal, apparently. He peeled it back and saw a narrow footway lit by blue phosphors. A few steps took him to the transparent blister. From here he could see farther around the curve of the great flying balloon, and the stately ranks of flapping translucent fins.

  The view now was majestic and vast. The deep Bowl atmosphere fell off slowly with height, so a living balloon with a fishlike shape could rise a long way before the slackening pressure outside made it bulge. He looked down through many kilometers at the clouds flowing over the low mountains that only a short while ago, while they were running, had loomed in the distance. Refracted glows of the jet and star danced and coiled in deep clouds. Except for the slow thump of the tadfish heart, he felt as though he were hanging in air, seeing the Bowl as did the great birds he had seen far up the towering sky.

  He turned to rejoin the others and saw to his side another pressure seal. He felt it for a seam. Then Irma came into the cramped blister. “What’s going on?”

  “Look, we’re just passengers, can’t do anything but wait. Let’s see how this thing works. Might be useful up ahead.”

  Irma twisted her mouth in a skeptical curve. “I could use a rest.”

  “The more we know, the better.”

  Irma leaned against the warm wall and gazed out on the spectacular view. “Um, maybe. Me, I’ve got strangeness overload. Every day there’s more to digest. And on the run, too.”

  He smiled. “We’re in the belly of a beast already. Let’s not get digested.”

  She shrugged. “These passages are claustrophobic. Let’s leave Aybe and Terry back there—Quert’s brought some gloppy food for them and they’re wolfing it down. Tastes like a chicken-flavored milk shake. Hard bits in it, too, tasted like bitter snails. I can wait.”