The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  In the world of science fiction, Benford has received many awards including the Nebula for Timescape (1980), still one of the most realistic time-travel novels. Among his more recent novels is Cosm (1998), involving an artificially created micro-universe, while some unusual worlds will be found in Worlds Vast and Various (2000), which contains this story.

  1

  THE FIRST CREWED STARSHIP, the Adventurer, hung like a gleaming metallic moon among the gyre of strange worlds. Alpha Centauri was a triple-star system. A tiny flare star dogged the two big suns. At this moment in its eternal dance, the brilliant mote swung slightly toward Sol. Even though it was far from the two bright stars it was the nearest star to Earth: Proxima.

  The two rich, yellow stars defined the Centauri system. Still prosaically termed A and B, they swam about each other; ignoring far Proxima.

  The Adventurer’s astronomer, John, dopplered in on both stars, refreshing memories that were lodged deep. The climax of his career loomed before him. He felt apprehension, excitement, and a thin note of something like fear.

  Sun B had an orbital eccentricity of 0.52 about its near-twin, with the extended axis of its ellipse 23.2 astronomical units long. This meant that the closest approach between A and B was a bit farther than the distance of Saturn from Sol.

  A was a hard yellow-white glare, a G star with 1.08 the Sun’s mass. Its companion, B, was a K-class star that glowed a reddish yellow, since it had 0.88 times the Sun’s mass. B orbited with a period of 80 years around A. These two were about 4.8 billion years of age, slightly older than Sol. Promising.

  Sun A’s planetary children had stirred Adventurer’s expedition forth from Earth. From Luna, the system’s single Earth-class planet was a mere mote, first detected by an oxygen absorption line in its spectrum. Only a wobbly image could be resolved by Earth’s kilometer-sized interferometric telescope, a long bar with mirror-eyes peering in the spaces between A and B. Just enough of an image to entice.

  A new Earth? John peered at its shrouded majesty, feeling the slight hum and surge of their ship beneath him. They were steadily moving inward, exploring the Newtonian gavotte of worlds in this two-sunned ballroom of the skies. Proxima was so far away, it was not even a wall-flower.

  The Captain had named the fresh planet Shiva. It hung close to A, wreathed in water cirrus, a cloudball dazzling beneath. A’s simmering yellow-white glare. Shimmering with promise, it had beckoned to John for years during their approach.

  Like Venus, but the gases don’t match, he thought. The complex tides of the star system massaged Shiva’s depths, releasing gases and rippling the crust. John’s many-frequency probings had told him a lot, but how to stitch data into a weave of a world? He was the first astronomer to try out centuries of speculative thinking on a real planet.

  Shiva was drier than Earth, oceans taking only forty per cent of the surface. Its air was heavy in nitrogen, with giveaway tags of eighteen per cent oxygen and traces of carbon dioxide; remarkably Earth-like. Shiva was too warm for comfort, in human terms, but not fatally so; no Venusian runaway greenhouse had developed here. How had Shiva escaped that fate?

  Long before, the lunar telescopes had made one great fact clear: the atmosphere here was far, far out of chemical equilibrium. Biological theory held that this was inevitably the signature of life. And indeed, the expedition’s first mapping had shown that green, abundant life clung to two well-separated habitable belts, each beginning about thirty degrees from the equator.

  Apparently the weird tidal effects of the Centauri system had stolen Shiva’s initial polar tilt. Such steady workings had now made its spin align to within a single degree with its orbital angular momentum, so that conditions were steady and calm. The equatorial belt was a pale, arid waste of perpetual tornadoes and blistering gales.

  John close-upped in all available bands, peering at the planet’s crescent. Large blue-green seas, but no great oceans. Particularly, no water links between the two milder zones, so no marine life could migrate between them. Land migrations, calculations showed, were effectively blocked by the great equatorial desert Birds might make the long flight, John considered, but what evolutionary factor would condition them for such hardship? And what would be the reward? Why fight the jagged mountain chains? Better to lounge about in the many placid lakes.

  A strange world, well worth the decades of grinding, slow, starship flight, John thought. He asked for the full display and the observing bowl opened like a flower around him. He swam above the entire disk of the Centauri system now, the images sharp and rich.

  To be here at last! Adventurer was only a mote among many – yet here, in the lap of strangeness. Far Centauri.

  It did not occur to him that humanity had anything truly vital to lose here. The doctrine of expansion and greater knowledge had begun seven centuries before, making European cultures the inheritors of Earth. Although science had found unsettling truths, even those revelations had not blunted the agenda of ever-greater knowledge. After all, what harm could come from merely looking?

  The truth about Shiva’s elevated ocean only slowly emerged. Its very existence was plainly impossible, and therefore was not at first believed.

  Odis was the first to notice the clues. Long days of sensory immersion in the data-streams repaid her. She was rather proud of having plucked such exotica from the bath of measurements their expedition got from their probes – the tiny speeding, smart spindle-eyes that now cruised all over the double-stars’ realm.

  The Centauri system was odd, but even its strong tides could not explain this anomaly. Planets should be spherical, or nearly so; Earth bulged but a fraction of a percent at its equator; due to its spin. Not Shiva, though.

  Odis found aberrations in this world’s shape. The anomalies were far away from the equator; principally at the 1,694-kilometer-wide deep blue sea, immediately dubbed the Circular Ocean. It sat in the southern hemisphere, its nearly perfect ring hinting at an origin as a vast crater. Odis could not take her gaze from it, a blue eye peeking coyly at them through the clouds: a planet looking back.

  Odis made her ranging measurements, gathering in her data like number-clouds, inhaling their cottony wealth. Beneath her, Adventurer prepared to go into orbit about Shiva.

  She breathed in the banks of data-vapor, translated by kinesthetic programming into intricate scent-inventories. Tangy, complex.

  At first she did not believe the radar reflections. Contours leaped into view, artfully sketched by the mapping radars. Calibrations checked, though, so she tried other methods: slow, analytical, tedious, hard to do in her excitement They gave the same result.

  The Circular Ocean stood a full 10 kilometers higher than the continent upon which it rested.

  No mountains surrounded it. It sat like some cosmic magic trick, insolently demanding an explanation.

  Odis presented her discovery at the daily Oversight Group meeting. There was outright skepticism, even curled lips of derision, snorts of disbelief. “The range of methods is considerable,” she said adamantly. “These results cannot be wrong.”

  “Only thing to resolve this,” a lanky geologist said, “is get an edge-on view.”

  “I hoped someone would say that.” Odis smiled. “Do I have the authorised observing time?”

  They gave it reluctantly. Adventurer was orbiting in a severe ellipse about Shiva’s cloud-wrack. Her long swing brought her into a side view of the target area two days later. Odis used the full panoply of optical, IR, UV, and microwave instruments to peer at the Circular Ocean’s perimeter, probing for the basin that supported the round slab of azure water.

  There was none. No land supported the hanging sea.

  This result was utterly clear. The Circular Ocean was 1.36 kilometers thick and a brilliant blue. Spectral evidence suggested water rich in salt, veined by thick currents. It looked exactly like an enormous, troubled mountain lake, with the mountain subtracted.

  Beneath that layer there was nothing but the thick atmosphere. No rocky
mountain range to support the ocean-in-air. Just a many-kilometer gap.

  All other observations halted. The incontrovertible pictures showed an immense layer of unimaginable weight, blissfully poised above mere thin gases, contradicting all known mechanics. Until this moment Odis had been a lesser figure in the expedition. Now her work captivated everyone and she was the center of every conversation. The concrete impossibility yawned like an inviting abyss.

  Lisa found the answer to Shiva’s mystery, but no one was happy with it.

  An atmospheric chemist, Lissa’s job was mostly done well before they achieved orbit around Shiva. She had already probed and labeled the gases, shown clearly that they implied a thriving biology below. After that, she had thought, the excitement would shift elsewhere, to the surface observers.

  Not so. Lissa took a deep breath and began speaking to the Oversight Group. She had to show that she was not wasting their time. With all eyes on the Circular Ocean, few cared for mere air.

  Yet it was the key, Lissa told them. The Circular Ocean had intrigued her, too: so she looked at the mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide that apparently supported the floating sea. These proved perfectly ordinary, almost Earth-standard, except for one oddity. Their spectral lines were slightly split, so that she found two small spikes to the right and left of where each line should be.

  Lissa turned from the images she projected before the Oversight Group. “The only possible interpretation,” she said crisply, “is that an immensely strong electric field is inducing the tiny electric dipoles of these molecules to move. That splits the lines.”

  “An electric shift?” a grizzled skeptic called. “In a charge-neutral atmosphere? Sure, maybe when lightning flashes you could get a momentary effect, but – ”

  “It is steady.”

  “You looked for lightning?” a shrewd woman demanded.

  “It’s there, sure. We see it forking between the clouds below the Circular Ocean. But that’s not what causes the electric fields.”

  “What does?” This from the grave captain, who never spoke in scientific disputes. All heads turned to him, then to Lissa.

  She shrugged. “Nothing reasonable.” It pained her to admit it, but ignorance was getting to be a common currency.

  A voice called, “So there must be an impossibly strong electric field everywhere in that 10 kilometers of air below the ocean?” Murmurs of agreement. Worried frowns.

  “Everywhere, yes.” The bald truth of it stirred the audience. “Everywhere.”

  Tagore was in a hurry. Too much so.

  He caromed off a stanchion but did not let that stop him from rebounding from the opposite wall, absorbing his momentum with his knees, and springing off with a full push. Rasters streaked his augmented vision, then flickered and faded.

  He coasted by a full-view showing Shiva and the world below, a blazing crescent transcendent in its cloud-wrapped beauty. Tagore ignored the spectacle; marvels of the mind precccupied him.

  He was carrying the answer to it all, he was sure of that. In his haste he did not even glance at how blue-tinged sunlight glinted from the Circular Ocean. The thick disk of open air below it made a clear line under the blue wedge. At this angle the floating water refracted sunlight around the still-darkened limb of the planet. The glittering azure jewel heralded dawn, serene in its impudent impossibility.

  The youngest of the entire expedition, Tagore was a mere theorist. He had specialized in planetary formation at university, but managed to snag a berth on this expedition by developing a ready, quick facility at explaining vexing problems the observers turned up. That, and a willingness to do scutwork.

  “Cap’n, I’ve got it,” he blurted as he came through the hatch. The captain greeted him, sitting at a small oak desk, the only wood on the whole ship – then got to business. Tagore had asked for this audience because he knew the effect his theory could have on the others; so the captain should see first.

  “The Circular Ocean is held up by electric field pressure,” he announced. The captain’s reaction was less than he had hoped: unblinking calm, waiting for more information.

  “See, electromagnetic fields exert forces on the electrons in atoms,” Tagore persisted, going through the numbers, talking fast. “The fields down there are so strong – I got that measurement out of Lissa’s data – they can act like a steady support.”

  He went on to make comparisons: the energy density of a hand grenade, contained in every suitcase-sized volume of air. Even though the fields could simply stand there, as trapped waves, they had to suffer some losses. The power demands were huge. Plus, how the hell did such a gargantuan construction work?

  By now Tagore was thoroughly pumped, oblivious to his audience.

  Finally the captain blinked and said, “Anything like this ever seen on Earth?”

  “Nossir, not that I’ve ever heard.”

  “No natural process can do the stunt?”

  “Nossir, not that I can imagine.”

  “Well, we came looking for something different.”

  Tagore did not know whether to laugh or not; the captain was unreadable. Was this what exploration was like – the slow anxiety of not knowing? On Earth such work had an abstract distance, but here . . .

  He would rather have some other role. Bringing uncomfortable truths to those in power put him more in the spotlight than he wished.

  Captain Badquor let the Tagore kid go on a bit longer before he said anything more. It was best to let these technical types sing their songs first. So few of them ever thought about anything beyond their own warblings.

  He gave Tavore a captainly smile. Why did they all look so young? “So this whole thing on Shiva is artificial.”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose so . . .”

  Plainly Tagore hadn’t actually thought about that part very much; the wonder of such strong fields had stunned him. Well, it was stunning. “And all that energy, just used to hold up a lake?”

  “I’m sure of it, sir. The numbers work out, see? I equated the pressure exerted by those electric fields, assuming they’re trapped in the volume under the Circular Ocean, the way waves can get caught if they’re inside a conducting box – ”

  “You think that ocean’s a conductor?” Might as well show the kid that even the captain knew a little physics. In fact, though he never mentioned it, he had a doctorate from MIT. Not that he had learned much about command there.

  “Uh, well, no. I mean, it is a fairly good conductor, but for my model, it’s only a way of speaking – ”

  “It has salt currents, true? They could carry electrical currents.” The captain rubbed his chin, the machinery of his mind trying to grasp how such a thing it could be. “Still, that doesn’t explain why the thing doesn’t evaporate away, at those altitudes.”

  “Uh, I really hadn’t thought . . .”

  The captain waved a hand. “Go on.” Sing for me.

  “Then the waves exert an upward force on the water every time they reflect from the underside of the ocean – ”

  “And transfer that weight down, on invisible waves, to the rock that’s 10 kilometers below.”

  “Uh. yessir.”

  Tagore looked a bit constipated, bursting with enthusiasm, with the experience of the puzzle, but not knowing how to express it. The captain decided to have mercy on the kid. “Sounds good. Not any thing impossible about it.”

  “Except the size of it, sir.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “Sir?”

  A curious, powerful feeling washed over the captain. Long decades of anticipation had steeled him, made him steady in the presence of the crew. But now he felt his sense of the room tilt, as though he were losing control of his status-space. The mind could go whirling off, out here in the inky immensities between twin alien suns. He frowned. “This thing is bigger than anything humanity ever built. And there’s not a clue what it’s for. The majesty of it, son, that’s what strikes me. Grandeur.”

 
John slipped into his helmet and Shiva enclosed him. To be wrapped in a world – His pov shifted, strummed, arced with busy fretworks – then snapped into solidity, stabilized.

  Astronomy had become intensely interactive in the past century, the spectral sensoria blanketing the viewer. Through Adventurer’s long voyage he had tuned the system to his every whim. Now it gave him a nuanced experience like a true, full-bodied immersion.

  He was eager to immerse in himself in the feel of Shiva, in full 3-D wraparound. Its crescent swelled below like a ripe, mottled fruit. He plunged toward it. A planet, fat in bandwidth.

  For effect – decades before he had been a sky-diver – John had arranged the data-fields so that he accelerated into it. From their arcing orbit he shot directly toward Shiva’s disk. Each mapping rushed toward him, exploding upward in finer detail. There –

  The effect showed up first in the grasslands of the southern habitable belt. He slewed toward the plains, where patterns emerged in quilted confusions. After Tagore’s astonishing theory about the Circular Ocean – odd, so audacious, and coming from a nonscientist – John had to be ready for anything. Somewhere in the data-fields must lurk the clue to who or what had made the ocean.

  Below the great grassy shelves swelled. But in places the grass was thin. Soon he saw why. The natural grass was only peeking out across plains covered with curious orderly patterns – hexagonals folding into triangles where necessary to cover hills and valleys, right up to the muddy banks of the slow-moving brown rivers.

  Reflection in the UV showed that the tiles making this pattern were often small, but with some the size of houses, meters thick . . . and moving. They all jostled and worked with restless energy, to no obvious purpose.

  Alive? The UV spectrum broke down into a description of a complex polymer. Cross-linked chains bonded at many oblique angles to each other, flexing like sleek micro-muscles.