Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  We now wish to know the Glory masters ourselves, to join in their company.

  That is why the Bowl now feels itself ready to approach. Before, we did not dare.

  Viviane blinked. “Self-organizing magnetic fields, smart bellies full of plasma, harvesting energy from the jet. Somehow, maybe through those Ice Minds, speak Anglish? And bigger than planets?” She made a long whoosh sound and collapsed theatrically onto the bed. “Too damn much to deal with.”

  Redwing smiled. “Recall that banner? ‘Star-Craving Mad’? You and I, we came on this together because our affair—no, better word, our love—was brimming in us, and we didn’t want to give each other up.”

  “So now we’re getting something stranger, crazier, than we ever imagined? Fair enough.” On impulse she leaned over and kissed him.

  He liked that, and the next hour they devoted to more basic issues. Starting with a great big juicy smooch. She liked seasoned men. Liked their wrinkled skin, their bunched muscles, their sullen musk, their sober gleam, their wise vigor, their earned heft—

  At the end of it, both still off watch duty, he sat up and said, in his back-to-business voice, “Been thinking. Look, the Bowl is on a journey that takes it all over a chunk of the available galaxy. They should’ve settled most of the local arm by now. But these Bird Folk, they’re deeply conservative. They don’t leave colonies.”

  “So? Why this interest in the Glorians, then?”

  “Exactly the puzzle. The grav wave emitter, maybe.”

  Viviane knitted her brows. “Um. They say that’s because the Bowl is perfect, yes?—suited for the smart dinosaurs that built it. Warm, stable, predictable weather. Endless afternoon. They don’t want to leave it. So?”

  “Then who’s doing the exploring? The outliers, deviants—like Mayra’s brigands, the ones who’ve slipped away, zooming out from the spinning Bowl brim, headed our way. But the Bowl’s a soft, easy environment, compared to real worlds. The Folk don’t want to advertise this, but it’s pretty clear. They tried colonies and failed. After millions of years in this nice, steady place—heaven, right?—they don’t work out well on planets.”

  Viviane gazed at this relaxed, leathery man of crinkled face and realized that she did indeed, literally more than a century after she met him, love the lug. He had hated not going down to see the Bowl, and now faced an even stranger place he would probably have to just watch from his ship command. Yet he still gave the feeling of always leaping to meet something, of going forward with joy and anticipation. Might as well say it: “I love you, yknow.”

  * * *

  Beth liked what Redwing had said in his last officer briefing: he picked the star’s name because “Excelsior is a Latin word often translated as ‘ever upward’ or ‘still higher’—which fits our goals here.” An elegant phrase. It helped to think such fine thoughts while she was cleaning the latrine.

  She was deck officer for the Four Elementals that kept them going: air, water, carbon, and data. Shipboard ecology wasn’t just some science here; it was life itself. Toilets neatly separated solid and liquid waste—nature gave them separate exits, after all—and the urine got recycled, since it held 80 percent of the useful nutrients. Kitchen scraps, of course, went back into the greenhouses. In the early spacer days, there was humdung, the Earthside euphemism, for building the topsoil. Soon enough, Earthside had reduced the term to TOTS, an acronym for “Take Out the Shit,” which quickly became a hip shorthand Earthside for “doing drudge work.” The one trick the bioengineers had not yet managed was converting most of the solid wastes to anything human-useful or even non-sickening. From bioslurry to digester, out came molecules the ship used in its omniprinters, mostly building gadgets from carbon.

  Following the chem feeds, she entered the processor chamber. The printers looked like whiskey stills: round bellied, high necked, rising into the spreading fingers of a solar tree. Strong spirits in that still, spirits of the vacuum between stars, of shuffling atoms. Beth regretted that the physics did not allow viewing windows in the nanofacturers. She always wanted to look down through a pane of pure and perfect diamond at the act of creation. Maybe creation was best left unseen, a mystery. All just atoms, friend—minuscule machines, smaller than viruses, clever knots of atoms scavenging carbon, passing it up the buckytube conduits to … she realized: yes, lunchtime.

  * * *

  Nobody was ever fat on a starship. Muscular, maybe, from relieving the tension and boredom with exercise in the grav cylinder. There were never enough calories to afford good, old-fashioned fat.

  Long before, she knew that space crews generally focused on food because it was their sole link to a natural world, while living in a metal one. Cliff had said, “How about sex? That’s sho’ nuff old-time natural-worldy.”

  The mess had something vaguely resembling avocados. Viviane made a scrunched face. “Ugh! They’re the mayonnaise of vegetables.”

  Beth was trying to be social with the new officer, already deputy to Redwing though without knowing much, so she showed the menu. Viviane said, “So what’s this arch Artilect language of connoisseurs: ‘raspberry notes, elderflower aftertastes, prune flourishes,’ even ‘strawberry notes with a nutty aftertaste’—for fabricated wine?!”

  Beth laughed. “I’ll print some meat to match, okay, Commander?”

  “No need for rank, Beth. Earthside must’ve upgraded our Chef Artilect. Where do we source the nutrient broth for the cell culture? Plants require micronutrients, but a realistic animal taste takes cell lines that require high-level broths with far more complicated molecules.”

  Beth chuckled. “Uh, this ‘meat’ is more like pan-fried, printed-out flatpork—crispy bacon, sort of? Still, when it’s my chef week, I didn’t get many dinner guests until I upgraded to feeding my red worms to tilapia or fish in general. The pond is a tad skimpy right now. Been too busy with cold sleep work.”

  Viviane plunked down the wineglass and waved a coded figure in the air. Shimmering, a plot appeared in the air above murmuring conversations.

  “Just got this from the Astro ’Lect. It’s a close-up spectral survey of that odd bulge in the, uh, Cobweb.” Viviane paused in the scramble as everybody in the mess hall turned to see the display as it unfolded into a triangle, presenting the data to three groups.

  “Lots of lifezone molecules,” Beth said. “What’s the height mean?”

  “Distance from the outer solid level—can’t say ‘the surface,’ that thin reed isn’t a planet. So it’s the outer atmosphere, above the clear plant life.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  Beth poked a finger at the far left of the plot. “See that? An ozone layer, O3, keeps the ultraviolet out. Artificial, gotta be. Earth’s ozone layer, if it were at sea level, would be just an inch or two thick. Doesn’t take much, but it’s vital. So this ozone line is up around forty kilometers from the plants. Good insulation.”

  “Seems a lot like Earth,” Viviane observed, gazing at the close-upped views. “Long plant structures, with that silvery strutwork supporting them.”

  “Maybe they grew the thing in place?” Beth wondered. “Spider silk has a breaking strain twice that of steel, but thirty times the elasticity. It’s a type of liquid crystal that tiny insects can make, so on this scale…”

  “Who knows, right?” Viviane shrugged. “We came looking for weird alien stuff—here it is. But … you look worried.”

  Beth scooped up a handful of roasted, garlicky crickets fresh from the growvaults and munched, thinking. “Back when we started, discoveries about our bodily microbiomes have made me think that humans couldn’t live long-term in most of the solar system. We coevolved with Earth, so we can never really be healthy without it, not to the two-hundred-year life spans they have Earthside now.”

  Viviane nodded, guessing where this was going. “Conventional wisdom, then, as I recall. We’re expressions of dear ol’ Earth and depend on it. Spending too much time in a low-g environment might wreck our health. Fetuses might not
properly develop in low gravity—could be a real showstopper.”

  Beth realized they had been tiptoeing around the real issue. “So how can we adapt to this totally unknown environment and have babies? Right?”

  Viviane clapped Beth on the shoulder. “For that, I’m counting on our chief bio officer.”

  Beth laughed softly. “I’ve been digging through everything in the Earthside feed, thousands of news squirts and science and even politics … and found some crucial stuff.”

  “What?”

  “You know what the situation was like when we left. Earth run by the United Nations. They controlled Luna and had a large, aging fleet. Well, it’s still the most powerful actor in the solar system, but looks to be on the decline. Key issue was, people had to go back Earthside to reset their biostandards for a year or two, or they didn’t live as long. So Earthside had the economy in a bind—it cost a lot to go there, since they were a monopoly on Earthiness.”

  “Yeah, but that didn’t affect us in cold sleep. So?”

  “So now Mars is independent. Got newer deep-space ships, very cohesive culture. Hell, they’re even getting funding for an ambitious plan to terraform their planet!”

  “Good! ’Bout time.”

  “But now the Martians and Belters don’t need to go Earthside. They’ve engineered their own biomes, replicated the whole huge Earthside bioframe.”

  Viviane got it. “So we—”

  “Can use our onboard vats and organic printers to make us hearty. We know enough.”

  “Great!” Eyes wide, hands dancing in air.

  Beth realized that every woman on the ship would be worrying about this. Not talking much, because ship discipline frowned on vague bellyaching. Viviane’s joy revealed much.

  “So I’ll write this up, hold a meeting, get the Biolects working on the general plan for adapting to—well, whatever that Cobweb thing is. So—”

  “We can have babies.”

  “Right. Back Earthside, this is still playing out. Fights over the technology, sometimes outright small-scale wars in the belt.”

  “When we left, Belters and Martians were complaining plenty about Earthers. They’d despoiled the one planet in the system with a blue sky, and were slow bringing it back to what it could be. Good to know that might get better.”

  To Beth, who had delved through decades of Earthside vitriol, Viviane’s words seemed both optimistic and trenchant. She let some chatter distract her as her overheard words spread through the galley and mess, just as she’d planned. But she mostly listened now, reflecting.

  The Bowl had made them look back across a gulf of not mere centuries or millennia, but on the grand scale of evolution itself. Maybe that was the true, deep purpose of coming out here among the stars.

  To see times that glowed and shimmered in memory’s flickering light. And then to go forward to Glory, a stranger landscape still.

  EIGHT

  REVIVALS

  Viviane watched “Jam” Jampudvipa’s hands fly over the command board as he worked with Ayaan Ali on the bridge. The man’s animation was infectious, bringing forth little jokes with slanting lips and dancing eyes. Laughter drove them even harder, joyous.

  Good. With Jam up and running, he could join the first party to make contact at the Cobweb. They were at minimum complement to carry out an expedition. “Not a planet landing,” Viviane remarked to Beth, “but then, you didn’t have one at the Bowl, either.”

  A twist of mouth. “No, so I figure I’m owed one.”

  “Hey, the Bowl had a bigger area than a skimpy planet by, what—three orders of magnitude?”

  “Not the same. The Bowl didn’t really have weather—”

  “Let’s see what Redwing says.”

  Beth smiled. “Already settled. I’m going down in the first party.”

  Viviane blinked. Just sleeping with the cap’n didn’t mean she could set policy, she realized. “So Ayaan Ali will be pilot when you’re gone?”

  “Not much piloting to do, I think.” Beth Marble pointed to a side screen, where the arc of Glory was now clear. “We’re supposed to lodge up against that bulge in the Cobweb. How we hold steady, I don’t know.”

  “Does Redwing? Some clue buried in those enigmatic Glorian messages?”

  Cliff Kammash came onto the bridge, overheard this, and grinned. “Captains are people who don’t grow up to realize they can’t be God.”

  They chuckled, nodded, and Beth said, “Cliff’s going with me. We have more experience from the Bowl.”

  Viviane agreed, realizing that the Bowl years separated the newly revived from an elite, and she was on the wrong side of that. “Who else? Are you really taking that spider? I gather he’s just half grown.”

  “Spidow. He’s a Bowl life-form, but they’ve tampered with his genes. His name’s Anorak, and that’s a done deal. The Bird Folk wouldn’t have let us leave the Bowl without that. We want other Bowl locals, too. But, Viviane, we can’t really put together an exploration crew until we have more of a plan.”

  They left it at that.

  * * *

  Redwing watched his wall as the Glorian system unfurled. The two waltzing worlds had a rhythmic elegance, two planets orbiting a common center of gravity, as they in turn orbited their star.

  The Astro Artilect went on in its reassuring, avuncular voice, in the mid-Atlantic accent Redwing preferred, “Previously, the only expected outcomes of large-body impacts of this sort were escape or accretion—that is, either the two bodies do not stay together or they merge into one, occasionally with a disk of debris. More recent Earthside findings suggest the possibility of another outcome—binary planets. The bodies stay mostly intact, but end in a bound orbit with each other.”

  Redwing was going to cut it off, but it said, “In a way, we of Humanity lived on such a world. Our moon stabilizes our planet’s spin and gives us our biological cycles. Two relatively equally sized planets would do the same for each other. Still, their exact alignment with the shared orbit around Excelsior provokes my own speculation.”

  “It’s been engineered, you mean,” Redwing answered as the Artilect paused meaningfully.

  “Indeed. So again we confront a vast, managed project, as we did the Bowl.”

  Redwing thought. “We got a lot of culture out of our skimpy moon. Much of our myths, religions, and stories, and eventually science, involved that bleak otherworld. How much more would the Glorians have gotten? They were given oceans and continents and forests they could see with naked eyes on the night sky.”

  Enough. Their swing-by was coming up, and he had to deal with myriad complexities: Logistics module, Incubation capsules, Longsleep revivals in progress, biopod bays, reaction control thruster systems. All needed parts and maintenance, but they didn’t have enough plain old atoms.

  SunSeeker’s magnetic fields shaped a huge mouth yawning over a hundred kilometers wide. The last years of braking had been like using an umbrella as a parachute, in a hurricane. The ship had shed energy while moving at five thousand times the speed that the first voyagers had when they returned Earthwise from Luna. Those ancient spacers had an atmosphere to peel away momentum into heat. SunSeeker had only plasma, thin as a wisp. But light-years of it, yes. In interstellar space, the ship scooped up a ton of hydrogen every day, ionized and heated it, and blew it out the back. Heavier ions it funneled inside to get mass for its printers and biosphere. But if a printer needed, say, indium, those were rare. Same for anything much above nitrogen in mass.

  SunSeeker had not voyaged seventy years from the Bowl to Glory all sealed up. It harvested. Centuries before, big energy technology had developed a scoop to grab wanted ions out of the fire in fusion reactors. SunSeeker copied that over distances bigger than mountains—silvery, fishlike, and more than four hundred meters long, it scooped in plasma and neutral matter alike, sorted them out, and deposited selected molecules in dollops useful to the ship’s printers. It dropped dangerous trash into the interstellar voids, too. All done by Art
ilects who had been carefully evolved to think of it as fishing, a sport.

  They loved the thick streams of solar wind they now plowed through, fat ions gurgling into their mag mouths. By fortune, SunSeeker’s infall took it across a big solar storm belching rich plasma, eagerly sucked in and providing needed braking.

  Still, now SunSeeker was running low on nearly everything. They had to go to the Glorians with humble hat in hand.

  A knock at the door.

  * * *

  Ashley Trust was slim though still muscular, despite the cold sleep. He had a blandly handsome, V-shaped face and alert eyes that glittered as he watched the sped-up worlds dance on the wall. Everyone expanded their scant roomscape with vistas, but this one was real live data.

  Redwing greeted him formally, offering some crisply roasted bugs and a bland fruit concoction. Redwing had decided to retain the erect manner and intense stare of his former colleagues, the early starship captains. They had to command ships over decades, into the outer Sol system, and rigidity paid off. Earthside data now showed that about a third of starships launched so far—that is, over the last two centuries—never reported back in and so were presumed lost. Several had explored Earthlike worlds and were slowly trying to adapt to their biologies, often eerily strange ones. Nobody else had found a smart species.

  Ashley had the usual questions, diffident and polite. The man remained standing, as per tradition, and solemnly nodded when Redwing told him to take the summary course he and the Artilects had prepared for revivals. Then came the hard part.

  “I got Earthside updates, mentioned you.”

  Ashley grinned. “I got my relatives’ log, if that’s what you mean. Even with people getting up above a hundred and fifty years in life span, I’m still generations away from—”