Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  Cliff pointed out details unfurling in the space around the moving dots. “Their mass ratio looks to be about two-thirds. The Charon-to-Pluto mass ratio is 0.12, and the Astro Artilect call them a dwarf double planet.”

  “Then these are, what?—Earth-sized twins?”

  Cliff nodded. “Guess so. The Astro Artilect says we’ve seen such matches in distant star systems, nothing near—until this.”

  “We had to come here to discover it,” mused Viviane. “So much for that faction—remember?—that said starships were a waste, they could tell us everything we wanted to know with huge scopes in space?”

  Beth laughed. “Touché!”

  Cliff went on doggedly, “This system is tighter bound than the Earth-Luna system. Much more total mass. The two are each tide-locked to the other, like Pluto and its Charon, again. Each mass is a bit smaller than Earth’s, but the planet, Glory, is about a quarter more massive than the smaller one … what’ll we call it?”

  Redwing held his idea while the others thought. Then Viviane said, “What goes with glory—honor!”

  They laughed. “Yeah,” Beth said, “enough of naming everything in the sky after ancient gods and myths.”

  “That straight stick”—Viviane waved a hand as the image expanded—“looks thicker, about two-thirds of the way out to the smaller planet. A space elevator for both worlds?”

  Beth shook her head. “I thought that at first. Space elevators are attractive because they’re a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. But this thing is over two thousand kilometers across, more at that bulge. Sure, elevators in it—but this is waaay larger than any elevator needs to be. Earthside’s got around fifty now, the Artilect tells me, but this thing—what’ll we call it?—is nearly two hundred kilometers long. Around half the Earth–Luna distance. No, it’s doing something different—something bigger.”

  “Such as?” Redwing asked. He had discarded his idea for the smaller world’s name, Victory—too much of a brag.

  “Such as this—” Beth cast a spectral analysis into the air, with lines labeled.

  Cliff said, “Wow!” and pointed. “Chlorophyll, water, methane, ozone, green veg lines—it’s a life site, not an elevator.”

  “A living elevator,” Viviane said. “Got a close-up?”

  “You bet—” A shimmering ivory lattice appeared, superimposed on the image. “Looks metallic. Regular spacings, crosshatches.” Beth pointed. “Like cabling.”

  “To hold it together. Lacy-looking, too.” Viviane smiled. “Let’s call it the Cobweb.”

  “Why?” Cliff asked.

  “Because it has to be woven by something alive.”

  This, too, brought laughs. Redwing ascribed their elation to the sense of relief he, too, felt: joy of discovery. A double planet! More than we dared hope for. Maybe too much.

  “Got more,” Cliff said as he waved away the chemical formulas that were crawling across the hanging airview. A simple x-y plot filled in.

  “This is the local gravity along that, uh, Cobweb. I started calculating the gravity just above the Glory atmosphere, on the left, called the local grav just one. Notice grav falls off fast, within a few of the Glory radii. So to the right you go up the Cobweb. There’s a very long stretch where the grav is very low.” Cliff spread his hands, eyebrows shooting up. “Really long—a stretch of living space bigger than the width of any planet short of Jupiter. So then you get close to Honor, outward about twenty-seven times the Glory radius, and gravity zooms down, pulling you toward Honor’s surface.”

  “So there’s a long cylinder, with life in the middle and not much grav to fight.…” Beth gazed into the distance. “This whole system—Glory, Honor, Cobweb between—is one big rigid body, spinning through the sky.…”

  “You want to go, don’t you?” Redwing said with a warm smile. “The Bowl wasn’t enough, eh, Beth? Your appetite for exotic lifezones is, um, lively.”

  She grinned. “Yep!”

  Cliff said, “Got something more. Look—”

  A scalloped curve carved in the air. “I asked the Artilects to draw a picture of the orbits of Glory and, uh, Honor—as they swing about their star, all exactly to scale. Here it is.”

  The worlds swung in their perfectly circular courses, in the same plane as their orbit around the star, Excelsius.

  Redwing said, “What’s it tell us about the Glorians?”

  “It’s good, too good. No eccentricity. No libration. The planetary spins point exactly the same way. So no sways and stresses on the Cobweb. It’s all carefully engineered.” Cliff pointed as the orbit plot cycled. “The Glory-Honor system, with that Cobweb—it’s incredibly stable. Not an accident of birth.”

  Silence for a long moment.

  Redwing had always enjoyed moments like this. Get a smart crew together and let them ping-pong ideas back and forth. Add new information. Stir. Turn up the heat a notch. Simmer. Amazing, how often good fresh notions came out.

  “So this is mega-engineering by master engineers indeed.” As Viviane spoke, Redwing noted her old tone coming back—her throaty, gravelly voice, accustomed to power. “We’re dealing with Glorians who can send grav wave messages, move worlds around—”

  “And aren’t speaking to us much,” Redwing finished. And we’re bearing down on them like a June bug to a patio light.

  “—so the best assumption is, they’re smarter than us. And older—lots older.”

  Cliff said, “The Astro Artilect just ran a better study of the metal emission lines in the star, Excelsius. Their star’s about half a billion years older than Sol.”

  Redwing waved his hand in dismissal. “Analysis paralysis. We’re going in on the long dive now. I’ve told the Artilects to finish the planetary swing-by—that Neptune-class planet we see off the port bow—and take us in at high decell, on a long swoop around the twin planet system.”

  They looked stunned. Beth stammered out, “Just, just like that?”

  “I think the direct approach is best,” Redwing said simply, and stood, ending the meeting. The crew exited.

  * * *

  Viviane came directly back to his cabin minutes later. “What the hell?!”

  He gave her his open grin, both hands thumbs-up. “We have a communication from Glory. On a laser tightbeam.”

  Graphics unfolded on his wall. A cartoon SunSeeker, good enough to see it was a ramscoop. A lurid cartoon Superman riding it, flying it in from the deep dark and looping around the twin worlds. It approached a silvery strand between big Glory and smaller Honor. The abstracted Cobweb grew hugely as the point of view aligned with the ship, easing in, until it was moored alongside. The strand was transparent now, with smaller strands showing a complex grid.

  “They don’t seem to mind something of SunSeeker’s size and mass, I guess,” Redwing said.

  Viviane gazed at the cartoon, now repeating, her thick eyebrows narrowed in suspicion. “SunSeeker’s fusion scoop is pretty damn powerful, to let it snug up against your biozone.”

  “I figure it was the Bowl’s mass that scared them, really. Maybe they now figured out that we’re not masters of the Bowl. It was a simple mistake. They saw the Bowl coming from the same spot on the sky as Earth.”

  “I rather doubt that.” Viviane paced restlessly in the small cabin. “Sure, they still want the Bowl to shy off. But—why didn’t you show this to the rest of the crew? Just now?”

  He tried to keep his smile enigmatic, failed. “Shoring up the command structure. Captain calls the shots.”

  A skeptical smile swept across Viviane’s face. “Then why tell me, now, privately?”

  “Because I want you to be second-in-command.”

  “What?!”

  “You’re qualified.”

  “But we’re—”

  “Lovers, right. Every crew member is supposed to have a lover, with children as the aim. I’m just getting ahead on the agenda.”

  She sat, eyes casting about as if newly s
izing up the world around her. “They’ll find out.”

  “I expect so. Good.” A wry raise of eyebrows. “Every ship needs some gossip, greases the wheels.”

  She stood again, shaking herself a bit, as if shrugging off some inner worry. “Aye aye, Cap’n. These Glorians, they want to meet us, fine. Maybe because of what you did coming into their nonexistent Oort cloud.”

  “You mean our zooming by their grav wave generator? Their attack on Beth and Cliff?”

  “Kill an incoming smart species as a wave-away? Huh! Why’s that grav wave emitter so damn important?”

  “Dunno. Why’s the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg so vital the Reds built a huge container around it, to hold back the sea?”

  She snorted. “Not comparable. These Glorians can toss around black holes with the masses of planets. How’s that like—?”

  “It’s a work of art? Or something more valuable, that defines them somehow? Art’s a human category, y’know. So is science.” He eased back in his chair, hands behind his head, stretching like a luxuriant animal in a small space. “Let’s keep our minds open.”

  * * *

  On the flyby of the Neptune-sized ice giant, Viviane watched the gray-blue world loom large. “I’m nominally watch officer,” she told Beth, “but all I can really do is watch.”

  Beth nodded. “We’re diving deep in, grabbing this magnetic field—a high-wire act. Sure, only the Artilects can respond fast enough. Let ’em do it.” She waved a hand at the 3-D display. The big planet’s magnetic field was anomalously large, nearly like Jupiter’s. “Shedding momentum as we go.”

  Blue streamers of plasma waves boiled out around SunSeeker’s prow. Viviane knew that Redwing had her handling the zoom-through part, to build her position as a fresh crew exec. Plus her self-confidence. He had been managing for two years the infalling—the task of losing better than 99 percent of their cruise speed, ten thousand kilometers per second, down to Glory’s thirty kilometers per second, and now it was nearly done. Their giant magnetic funnel still gathered in the thickening solar wind and farted it back out, straining the ship’s tendons and overheating its bowels. This swing-by deflected their momentum by losing it to the planet, and the mag field brakes did their thing. Viviane could see the Diaphanous pair, Apollo and Daphne, skittering through the bow shock boundary, sorting the rubbery bands of field tension. Strange works, indeed. Viviane had at first thought Redwing and Cliff were joking about these magnetic minds.

  Beth said, “Diving in between those lovely rings and planet—dangerous. Why chance it? Hit a boulder at these speeds—”

  “Daphne says they can nudge those away, too,” Viviane said, pacing the bridge deck.

  Beth frowned. “Makes me wonder what they can’t do.”

  They watched the slipstream peeling away of outer field regions. A fireworks display, spouts of crimson and green, all done through reconnection of magnetic whorls when they met another of opposite polarity. The vanished magnetic structures burned into plasma volcanoes.

  “Hey!” Viviane called. A dark point came arcing toward them. “A rock!”

  Quickly a snarl of blue-white boiled out of the shock wave and struck the black dot. Yellow sparks shot out and a furious battle ensued, layers of hot plasma sprayed. The dot veered and was past. “Wow,” Beth said. “Hot gas, dumb rock—zut!—gone.”

  The bridge screens had a separate talk box display for comm with the Diaphanous. This blossomed with short bursts of notices—fluid flow data, field measurements. But now it bristled with a single short sentence:

  Time to take our leave.

  “Huh?” Viviane said. “What’s this—?”

  We have brought you to your goal. Now we have a new one.

  So must depart.

  She watched the Apollo and Daphne swirls peel off the ship’s bow shock, hard nuggets rimmed in golden glows.

  Viviane called Redwing. He was supposed to be asleep. But he caught the first ring. “Needed now on bridge, sir. Look at the Diaphanous screen.”

  Click. She did nothing until he came in, surprisingly in uniform, not his usual sloppy pajamas. In the few minutes, the Diaphanous escaped farther, dimming, cutting across the great swath of the planet’s disk as though they were skating on a winter lake.

  Redwing frowned as he reviewed the messages and the golden dots dwindling. “They’re headed out. I’ll bet they’re riding the solar wind out to the black hole transmitter.”

  “They should’ve asked, at least!” Viviane said. Beth nodded.

  Redwing chuckled. “Easier to ask us to forgive later.”

  He spoke softly into a translator and quickly got a response.

  We go to study further the Others who rule the great though tiny masses. They have much to tell. You wanted to understand those rippled waves, yes? So we shall. Look for our speaks in the waves we send.

  Viviane asked, “So they’re curious about their own sort of life?”

  Redwing nodded. “Who wouldn’t be? We want to know what or who the Glorians are, with their mega-engineered whirligig worlds. The Diaphanous saw another kind of mega-engineered black hole environment—one that would kill us in a second. So they go looking…”

  He leaned into the interpreter. “How can we run our ship’s magnetosphere without you two?”

  Viviane watched the two Diaphanous dots ebb away. Meanwhile, the ship’s quilted magnetic configuration continued flailing at the planet’s webbed fields—braking, always braking, as furies boiled out from their flanks.

  The Diaphanous pair sent back,

  We have grown and schooled approximations of ourselves. Young they are, yet able. These Lessers will work with and for you. Oh yes, and—do stay in touch.

  “Is that last bit a joke?” Beth asked, grimacing.

  “Irony, maybe.” Redwing chuckled. “One thing a plasma can’t do is touch cold, passive matter like us.”

  SEVEN

  GARDENING

  There were creatures in the corridors.

  The finger snakes looked like snakes whose tail ends had quadrifurcated into four digits. Viviane saw them writhing in an access hatch, repairing something. Handy was an apelike creature who seemed to have grown a variety of tools where hands and feet would be. Anorak was a five-limbed spider—a spidow—Viviane’s own size, with an overgrown head. Meeting Anorak in the corridor sent her heart leaping into her throat, but it crawled aside to allow her to pass, and greeted her by name.

  None of the creatures was familiar to Viviane, nor were the interpreter devices. Viviane spoke to them as she passed.

  Much had changed since she left Earth.

  Viviane retreated to her cabin to learn. She flashed pictures from the Bowl on her wall and learned how the system worked—a huge thing, nice and dinosaur-friendly warm, under a constant reddish sun. Plus its amigo, the jolly jet that pushed the whole contraption along. Without the Diaphanous, the whole Bowl system was impossible. Want someone to manage a star? Take the children born in stellar magnetic arches, evolved there. Hire the locals.

  When SunSeeker left the Bowl, the Diaphanous pair rode the mag motor—wisps of hot ions who could think and glide, on wings of invisible pressures.

  They saw SunSeeker as a fresh opportunity, helping shape the magnetic geometry and exhaust parameters, while clinging to the ship and its scoop geometry. And maybe they wanted to meet Diaphanous species on yet another star? Viviane suspected she would never truly know their motives. Would a magnetic pattern obey a ship’s captain who was a bag of smart water?

  SunSeeker moving at 0.2 c was going about 750 times the escape speed from the galaxy. Going lickety-split, hard to deflect. Keeping a plasma scoop working under such relativistic pressure was the work of beings that could adjust that fast.

  Viviane brought up a record of Beth’s encounter directly with the Diaphanous, the first ever, when she was piloting through the jet itself. Visuals in the ship’s own full spectrum, far beyond the visible: shifting bands of orange and purple. Bursting y
ellow foam ran over an eggshell blue plain. Speckled green things moved on it in staccato rhythm. Twisting lines meshed there and wove into storms where frantic energy pulsed. A shrill grating sound came with flashes of crimson—acoustic waves the Diaphanous used for language. Then came the first message the jet managers had sent Beth:

  Who is this that wrecks our province without knowledge?

  Do you know the sliding laws of blithe fluids?

  Were you here when the great curve of the Bowl shaped true?

  Can you raise your voice to the clouds of stars?

  Do fields unseen report to you?

  Can your bodies shape the fires of thrusting suns?

  Have you ever given orders to the passing stars or shown the dawn its place?

  Can you seize the Bowl by the edges to shake the wicked out of it?

  Have you journeyed to the springs of fusion or walked in the recesses of the brittle night?

  Have you entered the storehouses of the Ice Minds and found there tales of your long past?

  Can you father events in times beyond all seeing?

  Your answer to all these cannot justify your brute hands upon machines of black wonder.

  Nor shall you ever chance to be so able again, for you shall be no more.

  The space and time you sought to resolve in your favor shall reckon without you hence.

  She went to Redwing’s cabin unannounced. He was back in pajamas—a cap’n has to know when to relax—and blinked at her from his open bed as she showed the biblical-style Diaphanous message in his hovering air display.

  “Yep,” he said. “We figured out later that they had access—through the Bowl’s big-bird managers, the Folk—to a lot of our own history. They aped the Old Testament, figuring we’d resonate with it.”

  “Did you?”

  “You bet! So we negotiated. Here’s their final deal, where we learned what they really wanted.” He waved a hand, and his room Artilect fetched into the air hovering words.