Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Oh.” A quiver of alarm, quickly vanishing from the bland, unlined face.

  “Your story finally came out, decades after we left.”

  “Oh.”

  “Seems you did some industrial espionage, learned some state secrets, and used secrets and wealth to get yourself aboard this ship. Must admit, you paid a lot to risk your life.”

  “Adventure of a lifetime, sir.”

  “I thawed you early, knowing these facts. Here’s your chance to redeem yourself.”

  “I’m grateful.” Ashley was smart enough to see immediately that playing contrite was best. So he had known.

  “You expected your story to blow.”

  A nod. “History bats last. In my case, I had maybe a year or three before the accounting snagged me. I would’ve gotten a life sentence, maybe several to make sure. Even signing on for the outer system worlds meant they’d eventually find me. This mission got me away for sure.”

  “You paid off people to fake your qualifications.”

  A rueful smile, tilt of head, nice-guy shrug. “Pricey, it was.”

  “Your fortune?”

  More of the rueful smile. “Nearly all. Going interstellar is like death and taxes, you can’t take it with you. ‘When the ship lifts, all debts are paid.’ Heinlein.”

  Redwing dimly recalled interviewing Ashley, among the hundreds to be cold-sleeped. “You went out well. Media liked you. Flights of angels sang thee to thy rest. Now the play starts again.”

  Ashley gave a quick frown, not getting the reference.

  Redwing waved him away. “Stay straight this time.”

  * * *

  Cliff was glad Ashley had left the bridge; the guy gave him an itchy feeling. Ashley wanted to be called just Ash, and he also wanted to know Cliff’s opinions on all sorts of stuff—not just the whole Bowl fracas, but how things worked among the crew, how to treat the aliens, what did Cliff think about A or B or C. Then, with a we’re all buddies here look, whom Ash should look out for. Cliff’s reply to that was, “Redwing. Everything else is a detail.”

  He didn’t want to feel that close to the guy, so pointedly said, “G’bye, Ashley.” Then he put on a command cowling, to better talk to an Artilect melding including the major housekeeping functions, Dr. Ops, and another who would run parallel on their rendezvous ahead, who preferred to be called Granny Nanny. Before syncing in, Cliff listened intently to SunSeeker’s pops and groans, and atop that the long subsonic throbs like organ notes. Bridge rule: Always listen to the ship. The deceleration had gone on for years and now was maxed, its magnetic mouth spread wide to scoop and devour the solar wind. The lucky solar storm was high in both energy and flux, and the ship shed momentum as they neared Glory. Centuries to get here …

  Their magnetic prow now worked with fiery displays as it chomped up the thicker solar wind plasma. As watch officer, he tracked the pulsing, dancing magnetic field lines, visible as yellow fountain sprays on the wall screens. The Artilects extracted electrical energy from this through induction, driving their deceleration jet harder. Such forces rippled through SunSeeker, popping the creaking of the decks, tipping the ship farther into the star’s gravity well. Cliff liked listening to the snap and snarl of spiky plasma waves, an odd translation into audio that sounded like whalesong playing behind the patter of sizzling raindrops. When they used the ice giant planet’s large magnetic field to trim away more speed, they had gone cruising near a large, cloud-shrouded moon. Beth found a thick atmosphere rich in oxygen. Biosigns, too. Intriguing, so Redwing had Cliff launch a roboflitter to cruise by and drop in an observing dirigible. The returning pictures showed great flapping birds and gas balloons in the high atmosphere. But such life was not their immediate goal, no. Their slingshot arc brought them on a bearing toward Glory, still moving fast.

  The Artilects had surveyed all the system’s planets, updating and sharpening the heritage data from Earthside astronomers. Most were uninhabitable by humans, though a few showed chemical signatures of life, and even microscopic life drifting in its high clouds. A small, rocky Marslike world seemed to have vegetation growing all over its surface, like a farmed sphere without oceans and sporting a few sparkling lakes.

  This system was very different. Along with the classical planets and Pluto, there were over a dozen roofed worlds in Sol’s system, where liquid water churned beneath protective ice. In the case of Titan, the roof was a methane atmosphere, above lakes of methane, lapping at waxy shorelines. Yet none of these promising sites showed life. So would none of the ice moons of this Glorian system have life? The other worlds did, so …

  Somebody had built a vibrantly living solar system here.

  * * *

  Glory’s sun, Excelsius, was a yellow dwarf of about a solar mass, with Glory’s orbit in the Goldilocks zone—but near the middle, unlike Earth, which is near the inner edge. Though Glory was about 250 million kilometers out, two hotter worlds circled far closer in. They had ferocious volcanoes spouting acrid fumes onto molten plains that shimmered like orange seas. The Artilects carefully inventoried these for useful assets in future and then focused on the Glory binary, the gamboling jewel of the system.

  Here came their goal. Beth signed in for bridge duty and Cliff thankfully relaxed, if only for a bit.

  “Look,” Beth said, flicking on a fresh screen view. “I’ve been doing the spectro work on Glory. The best we could do Earthside was some pixels that seemed to be all good news. Glory looked innocuous, a biosphere a lot like our own. I’ve confirmed that now. The right oxygen levels, water vapor, gas cycles that make sense. But—with no oceans. Plus no signs of technology. No signatures of odd elements in its air. No electromagnetic emissions. No signals at all. Kind of like a dry Earth a thousand years back.”

  “But that Cobweb—”

  “Got it, flyboy,” she said, punching him lightly on the shoulder. “Their home world is just as engineered as that spindly superelevator.”

  “You figure it’s just used to move stuff out to the moon, Honor?”

  “Too thick for just that—any well-built elevator can be just a slender reed by the time it’s out of the planet’s atmosphere. Nah, the Cobweb is a biosphere. More than a hundred times bigger than the habitable volume of Glory and Honor combined. Think of it as a penthouse suite, bigger than the city below it.”

  Cliff snorted. “All this time, we thought we’d do the usual. The classical. We’re carrying landing craft, reentry capsules for small teams. All for planets.”

  Beth waved this away. “The Glorians say we should just haul alongside that big broad part of the Cobweb. They use simple English in their signals. So … we do.”

  “Then what?”

  “Play it by ear, m’dear.”

  * * *

  Viviane was a problem, though the kind he liked to solve.

  Long ago, after Redwing had known a lot of actresses and models—as a shining starship captain-to-be, with all that showbiz arrogance—he had returned to waitresses because at least they smelled like food. Homespun. This was about the time he had early learned that when you sit on a barstool, never curl your feet under the rungs of the stool. That’s in case you’re sucker punched and there’s no give for your recoil. Just in case. It had happened to him only once.

  Not his greatest challenge, either. After that, he had faced down 144 oysters—weirdly, because it was twelve squared; don’t ask—just to see if he could finish them. He did, but ate nothing more for a day and a half, after which he decided he would not die. But it had been worth it. Somehow all these experiences wove together for him now: nostalgia for an Earthside that was centuries gone. And the life he had there.

  Viviane was the sole echo of that life, now returned from her cold sleep and just when he needed it. He had longed for the simple comfort of her when he revived from cold sleep at the Bowl. All along at Earthside, he had thought that he would, as required, come out of cold sleep at most two times during the nonstop
flight to Glory. That, the cryoengineers told him, was the defined duty of these long ramscoop flights. Cold sleep posed risks of degradation and, indeed, outright dying. Experiments with numberless animals, from mice through chimps, had worked out a rough, empirical model of how cold sleep would work over the immense scales demanded by interstellar flight. They built on cryonics, now a huge Earthside industry.

  But human cold sleep had gotten its trial only in the decade-long flights into the outer solar system. From that, blithe theory scaled to centuries. These centuries. Earthside wanted all the revival details for each crew member. The slowly expanding crew was bringing up new members every two or three days. So the Cryo Artilects learned a lot and reshaped each revival—or as some said, resurrection.

  Redwing had grown up in one of the tribes that had made a bundle out of the Native American casinos. His father had thought that money was life’s report card. Maybe God’s, too, for that matter. Money just walked in and jumped into Dad’s pocket, it seemed—much too easily. No challenge. Such born-into luck could have ushered Redwing into a comfy life, but he chose to sweat through MIT, gaining great grades and a wake of surly enemies, plus some slightly bruised hearts, including his.

  He had noted that academically smart people don’t clean up after themselves enough, and had little feel for how to work a room so that people believed in you. So onto spacecraft, right away, the great ol’ out and up, where neatness and sweetness both worked—in crew, anyway, though not so much in captaincy. He had made his rep in Mars exploration and exploitation. Been a real son of a bitch, sure, but he had gotten things goddamn well done. Maybe not the worst recommendation, considering.

  Then into the outer system, learning to run robo-teams of thousands in harvesting the myriad comet nuclei. His fleet of ships attached robodrivers to the iceteroids, sending them with a few km/sec delta-v into the inner system. There, asteroid miner colonies snagged the infalling water wealth. This was intensely profitable, and Redwing used the Earthside financial momentum to seek further long-orbit tasks. He ran crews that were all going to get rich, eventually. By the time he came back into what was by then called the in-system, he knew what he wanted to crown his career with—a starshot.

  Beth knocked loudly, interrupting his meandering memories, and came in, sober faced. “Problem, Cap’n. How can we anchor at that Cobweb? The Glorians’ messages say nothing at all.”

  Redwing eased back, hands behind head, relaxed gesture saying more than his words, and delivered in his butterscotch tone, “Our landers are geared for planets. We’ll use them as simple transfer vehicles, I expect.”

  Beth’s mouth twisted. “To go where, exactly?”

  “Into that Cobweb. Somehow.”

  “That’s it? How can we plan—?”

  “Gotta let go, Beth. Glorians are engineers three or four orders of magnitude bigger, and no doubt better, than we are.”

  “I’m a biologist. I have to know how we’ll go into that … thing. What supplies to take, whether their air is safe for us at all, what—”

  “So think like a biologist with a brand-new problem. Here, sit.” He broke out a tot of rum and handed her a small glass. “What’s evolution tell us about this place?”

  Beth blinked, her face crinkling with momentary confusion. After a sip and some quiet thinking, while Redwing sat without a hint of a smile, she looked up. “Okay, look at it broadly. Earthside, we’re it—nothing else can run and jump and climb and swim and lift and throw and so forth—like we can. We’re the most multitasking species ever. Our ancestors had that. So in this strange low-grav place, this Cobweb, we should expect the top intelligence to be just as versatile. They came from Glory and, given the time scale to build this Cobweb, must have adapted physically.” She stopped, eyes bright.

  “Good way to put it. We’ve gotta be versatile here, stop worrying so much.” Redwing eyed her glass, refilled it.

  “Thanks, Cap’n.”

  “Glad to.”

  Problem solved, kinda. Sometimes delay was smart. But they were rushing to Glory, and he felt deeply that amid such strangeness, schooled by the Bowl, learning fast was key.

  * * *

  Ashley bumped into Beth in the thin corridor outside the officer cabins. He was slim and projected a warm expression, voice flush with baritone sincerity. Beth knew she should be paying more attention to revived crew, so she chatted a bit. At his insistence, they strolled into the biozone, breathing in the moist, oxy-rich air and the quiet of the water-buffered chambers, deep in the ship’s core. At first he asked about shipboard procedures and details, but then his tone shifted, he moved a tad closer, and she got his game.

  So, use the direct method. “I’m married, you know. To Cliff Kammash.”

  “Ah! No, didn’t. Should’ve studied up more. That Bowl thing, still hard to comprehend.”

  She gave him the direct stare. “Not available.”

  “Got it.”

  Okay, make allowances; he’s a guy. “Look, I know what it’s like to come out of cold sleep. The stimulant stuff, enzymes and all, makes you feel like a teenager again.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “It’ll pass. Sooner than you’d like, maybe. Try one of the just-revived.”

  “I met a Viviane—?”

  “Nope, she’s somehow involved with Redwing. Stay away. Have you met Pupwilla Baen? Or Jereaminy Tam? The archaeologists.”

  “Yeah, they’re just up from the chill. I think they’re together.”

  “They might be just learning from each other. They wouldn’t be aboard if they weren’t willing to have children.”

  “How about that Nguyen woman, the field biologist.”

  “She’ll be out today, so fine. Give her a bit of adjustment time, then work your charms.”

  “Good tip. Thanks. Another matter?”

  “Go.”

  “The life-forms.” Ash gestured around himself. “None of them too big. Except this giant spider that let me pass in the main corridor. Huge! I almost freaked. Why isn’t it in here, in the bio section?”

  “He’s crew, or will be. Treat him as a child. Don’t get too used to him, though. Anorak will be going with us when we leave the ship, so we’ll be”—how much to say here?—“we’ll be upgrading his memory.”

  “Really? How—?”

  “I can’t say more.”

  As Ashley walked away, Beth wondered why he made her feel uneasy. Maybe she should include Ashley in the first landing party? And, if he was as charming as she expected him to be, add Nguyen. They were both younger than Beth and Cliff, especially after their wear and tear at the Bowl. Of course, in clock years, they were all around two centuries old. But dating, mating, birthing—all were deeply embedded in gut human thinking and would work themselves out even here, far from Earthside’s ecosphere.

  * * *

  “You think we should be arranging breeding pairs already?” Cliff’s face was a study in surprise.

  “It’s in the directives,” Beth said mildly. “I checked.”

  “Shouldn’t Redwing—?”

  “Hey, this is our children we’re discussing. Up to us.”

  “We don’t even know what the Cobweb biosphere is like.”

  “I’m not saying we conceive right now. Just thinking ahead.”

  She studied his face. About Cliff’s having bedded what’s-her-name back on the Bowl, in principle she had been theoretically okay. Simultaneously, she had been furious at him, feeling the standard humiliation and betrayal—yet she also felt an unexpected sympathy. The Bowl had thrown huge crises at them, beyond their wildest imagination. Amid that, fleeing capture, people sought solace. And bedded was wrong, too, for they’d never been near a bed.

  She set all such memories aside, breathed in, whooshed out as she smoothly said, to help him along, “We did agree on this.”

  “Yeah.” A shrug. “First, though … Gotta do the—what do we call it?—the landfall. On a tube world in high vacuum. At least the Bowl had honest dirt and
grav.”

  “Yes, indeed. Strangeness on stilts. I’ll detune only when we’ve got someplace to actually have children. In a grav well, too—dunno what effects to expect here. I’ve been holding these eggs for centuries, y’know—gotta use ’em sometime.”

  Her sloppy language was yet another measure of how tired she was. They climbed into bed, snuggled, kissed. Cliff fell away into slumber’s warm embrace, and hers, but she kept thinking as she stared into the absolute dark and listened to the strumming and creaking of a centuries-old ship lumbering to its final harbor.

  Before getting picked for SunSeeker’s expedition, she and Cliff were halfheartedly trying to conceive, which basically meant ditching birth control and “letting the universe decide.” More than a year in, with no pregnancy, it seemed the universe had decided. So now they were the couple who had been content to outsource this major life decision to whoever is in charge of the universe. But …

  While they had agreed to reproduce when they got to Glory, it had seemed a distant abstraction, another blank to sign. Now … newborns had never held much appeal for her. They seemed a bottomless well of urgent, indiscriminate need. Beth feared she would not know what’s needed—and being then besieged and trapped. In equal measure now, she feared being judged for all that. For instinctively retreating from rather than being drawn toward the shrieking blobs everyone else melts over.

  She had tried to understand this through all the Bowl saga. Then, revived from cold sleep, the problem arose anew, because their imperative at Glory was both to explore the alien world and populate it, if possible. A starship was so much a trapped world that she had sought relief in finally reading Sense and Sensibility, which wholly caught the tedium of that distant age. Boredom, gossip, and endless knitting—the lot of womankind.

  Yet that old novelist was strangely like being so far from Earthside. Slow communications, much worrisome silence. Austen conveyed not the thrill of receiving a letter but the hours and days of waiting for it, with needlework on your lap, and listening to the drip-drip-drip of rain. Same with fleeting contacts with Earthside, a distant abstracted lover not well fathomed.