* * *
Ash found the spidow in one of the little public rooms, using it as a library. The five-limbed, five-eyed, rust-red blob could hardly have been anything else. Still scary. But … “Hello, Anorak,” he said.
The spidow’s bulging head lifted from a video screen. He (it?) seemed to have no trouble tapping out commands. Its voice was rusty, echoing. “Hello, Ashley Trust. I’ve been reading about Glory and Honor. We don’t know much. You’re coming with us, aren’t you? Have you been studying?”
“Some. I’ve been reading and viewing, about Beth Marble and Cliff Kammash and their time on the Bowl. Do you know much about the Bowl?”
“No, I was born here in the ship—child of the biovats. The Bowl sounds wonderful. I’m sorry I missed it. I’d like to know Bemor, too. The ship’s tutors won’t let me research him, but they tell me a lot about the Bird Folk. They’re the ones who ran the Bowl until we came.”
We? Ashley thought. You’re an alien, but don’t think that way.… “Right. Bemor. I don’t know much either, but he’s one of the important Bird Folk.” Not quite an enemy, Ash thought. Not quite a friend.
“That’s right. Though there is information on Ice Minds and others, who seem to have control of the Bowl’s long-term direction. I do not fathom this well.”
Ash knew nothing of this, so said, “They tell me I’m going into the Cobweb. You, too.”
“Yes.”
“How are they training you?”
“Captain Redwing lets me read up as fast as he learns. Otherwise, I’m just supposed to study. And they’re going to make me smarter.”
Beth had said something about this. “Really? How? When? Can they do that to me?” Had they learned that on the Bowl?
“Just me, I think. I’m supposed to wait until we’re in the Cobweb. Beth says they’re going to tell the Glory contacts that I’m a … pet.”
“Pet.” Ash had been told to think of the creature as a juvenile, a child. But the bristly body was already huge. “How about the other, uh, Bowl people? Creatures? Handy and the finger snakes?”
“Just people, shall we call them? On this vessel of many varieties. Other intelligences, independent minds. But they’re all grown up. My brain isn’t big enough yet, but pretty soon.” There seemed a wistful tone to the remark.
NINE
GLORY PASSING
Here came the twin planets. Honor first. The moon had landscapes galore. A complex biosphere, oxy-rich. The terrain varied from high snowy peaks to a ghost city of white boxes in a flint and lava desert. Forests, seas, shimmering cloud banks. No obvious big cities. It looked like a lot of fun.
The Cobweb was a stretched line as they came in, flying along its side, getting a survey. As they approached, they got close-up views of huge spindly forests along its improbable length. Ovals of shimmering blue-green liquid hung in the thick bowers, low-g lakes. Twisty storms raged like blown tawny hair along the curving flanks of the forests.
The worlds whirled in their grand gavotte, their stately grace a dance in time, an orbital minuet kept strict by the constraint of the spindly Cobweb. Cliff watched from the bridge, entranced. He tuned in on the Artilects’ cross-chatter. They were delighted to be busy; staying alert in the dull decades of flight had irked them in odd ways. They were still bustling, updating themselves down at their kernel level, using new platform methods gotten from Earthside’s laser packets. The centuries of starship exploration—mostly robotic—were paying off. Data from myriad other starships now gave their Artilects better surveying ability, layered with masses of new astro knowledge. Artilects buzzed with their machine satisfactions, delight in old puzzles clarified, while new ones arrived at lightspeed. He heard one discussion between ’Lects about how the twin planet system formed:
—one body impacted a second, feeding a debris disk. Through accretion, two new bodies—
Another ’Lect intervened:
But! A giant impact is not a sufficient condition for two bodies being “double planets” because such impacts can also produce tiny satellites, such as the four, small, outer satellites of Pluto. None such here!
Another thin voice:
Those no doubt added mass to this Cobweb. Let us look for traces of primordial element ratios in the mass spec—
Cliff cut them off. There was plenty to think about in the data streams. He had learned that Earthside, once they heard from SunSeeker that the Bowl’s Builders had been early, smart dinosaurs, burrowed into geology. A huge academic industry grew around digging for the Bowl’s Builder traces. They deployed exotic specialties like archaeobotany and paleometallurgy, hard to fathom, even hard to spell.
And behold, they had uncovered clear evidence of ancient technologies more than 150 million years old. There were even broken-up fossil bodies of dinosaurs about twice human sized, with clawlike hands that nonetheless had opposing thumbs. Their pelvic frame let them stand erect, some three meters high. These had forged a solar-system-wide civilization, built the Bowl around Sol’s distant companion star, and gone voyaging.
The Bowl’s Folk were distant descendants of those, now deploying feathers. This echo of how Earth’s birds had evolved, from later, dumber dinosaurs, was an uncanny resonance. Those smart dinos left behind had died out finally in the big asteroid impact—which had come from a fragment disturbed in the Oort cloud. There was timing evidence that the “killer asteroid” was in fact a comet nucleus, coming in at about fifty kilometers a second, infalling from the wake of the departing Bowl. That set the stage for the later-emerging humans. Reverberations of those primal dramas sound still, here.
Cliff breathed out slowly, watching their rush along near the Cobweb, headed for the grav turnaround. The captain entered the bridge in full dress uniform, neatly pressed, brass gleaming.
* * *
Redwing took them on a long, shallow dive through the Glory upper atmosphere. A tad risky, but worth it, he had announced. He called his senior officers into a squad formation behind him. Videos of this would launch for Earthside, and humanity’s tens of billions would study the crew’s lined, expectant faces. His was in front.
Their slide-around trajectory let the Artilects sip from Glory’s high air and pronounce it livable. Whispery frictions also stole enough velocity to let them arc outward into a bound orbit, about half as far from Glory as its moon, Honor.
On Glory’s nightside, they were a fireball arcing across the stars. But there were no city lights below, no signs of tool builders. Yet the air held organic molecules, and from those the instruments found the DNA here was left-handed—and so compatible with Earthly life-forms. This was the thirteenth life-bearing planet surveyed, and all had the same twist, what the bio people termed helicity. Maybe life had migrated among all the stars of the galaxy and sown their worlds with compatible molecules.
Redwing ordered the air samples kept and studied, not reported immediately. SunSeeker’s Biolects would get the first say, when the report finally got sent. This wasn’t standard procedure. The ship could fail at any moment, depriving Earthside of the data. Earthside had instilled in starship officers an attitude toward rules that approached mystic reverence, but Redwing ignored many of the rules they sent him. Captain Cook had it easy, exploring the Pacific; no dispatches from London could reach him.
Redwing smiled to himself, savoring the moment. He had good reason to hold back biodata, he felt. A starship was not merely a cylinder of dead metal but a living, breathing organism that had itself evolved through the long centuries of flight. Everything got updated from fresh Earthside information. New gear came out of the printers, got retroed into the running ship. So, too, in biology. Their ecosystems, parasites, and symbiotic links between animals and the bacteria in their guts, the creatures on their skin—all fed into the intricate mix.
He needed their Artilects to fathom Glory’s air, and that of the Cobweb’s to come, first. Earthside could wait.
He peered at the big bridge screens as odd twisty clouds slid below. Glory’s
surface. The clouds curled and writhed. The little azure seas had dotted island chains, evidence of plate collisions. On Earth, the ocean plates were more dense than the continental ones, so when they met, up spurted volcanic plumes that built islands and refreshed soils. Something like that had happened here, Redwing surmised, but with different tides because of the locked-in dynamics. Though the twin planets danced, faces together, there was enough spin motion to drive the gavotte of continental and ocean plates. Or … was even that grand feature the work of the Glorians, an artifice to make their worlds swirl and evolve?
And … where were the Glorians? He could see no cities, no road networks, not even dams or canals. Glorians did not clump together, like humans. So … where were they?
TEN
GRAPPLER
We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
—URSULA K. LE GUIN
Think of magnetic fields as rubber bands. They flex and grip but cannot be broken except under extreme distress.
Redwing watched the screen display as magnetic claws lit in prickly yellow reached out for his ship.
“Kind of rattling, yes?” Viviane said at his elbow.
“I’m letting aliens move my ship,” Redwing said. “Sure I’m rattled.”
“Strong fields, getting stronger,” Cliff announced. The bridge was tense and Redwing kept the staffing low, letting others track the myriad ship systems from their own cabins. No need to open the door to crowd dynamics. He had learned that early, while tending to asteroid exploration and mining.
He studied all screens intently. They edged closer to the long cylinder that was the Cobweb. This near, it was becoming a wall, a gauzy blanket of air above a green and white expanse.
They had swept out from Glory and alongside the Cobweb for a detailed flyby. This was itself an intricate maneuver. The Glory-Honor system was really two big balls connected by a rod, all rotating about the center of mass—which was itself seventy-seven thousand kilometers out from Glory’s center. The whole system rotated about this point on the Cobweb, more than ten times the Glory radius of nearly six thousand kilometers. So SunSeeker had to slew as it flew, tracing an outward arc.
As they swept by the system’s center of mass, Redwing noted a big cluster of objects swarming around it, like a throng of anxious bees. Oddly, the Artilect synthesis feed said some were living matter, not metal or rock. He close-upped some, and indeed, they resembled worms, balloons, cylinders with fringes—all living, somehow like looking into a microscope.
All along the Cobweb flanks, and even buried inside the greenery, were its glinting, silvery strutwork ligaments. They reminded Redwing of the Bowl’s framing pillars, made from molecular sheets that took extreme stresses. Whoever the Glorians were—they were engineers on the same superior level as the Bowl Builders.
“Cap’n,” Beth said, “there’s a thin film over that atmosphere. Really thin. Instruments and the Artilects say there’s a tiny layer of ozone first. Then the oxy-rich air, with plenty of nitrogen.”
“Um. Ozone?”
The Uber ’Lect spoke directly to the bridge, sensing a question in Redwing’s voice. “Earth’s ozone layer, if compressed to a full atmosphere of pressure, would only be millimeters thick.” Its voice was warm and motherly, a tone Redwing had chosen to calm the bridge. Nobody minded when Mommy, as Cliff called it, spoke in her cozy, mid-Atlantic accent.
Beth nodded. “So all that ultraviolet shielding happens just inside the gas bag confining the Cobweb air. Neat.”
But the magnetic fields were not just rubber bands now.
They clutched at SunSeeker. Shown on-screen as yellow lines, they warped to slow the ship, tugging it toward the upper atmospheric layers of the Cobweb.
Time to turn off the ramjet? It interfered with the rising magnetic geometries of the Cobweb, and vice versa. Redwing decided he had to bite the problem off and be done. As the bridge crew watched, he instructed the Artilects to do that, trimming down the fusion burn to mere ship-interior power levels. The pinching fields that had shaped the plasma flare into its spike and driven them between stars … calmed … ebbed.
He felt a plaintive stab. Once he had loved his first car, a beauty running on hydrogen, just as this ship had with a dash of prickly isotopes. When the car gasped its last, he had been on his way into space service and knew he would never enjoy another. This was strangely similar. He hoped to set foot on a proper planet again, too. He had never gone onto the Bowl, and this Cobweb was no different, another vast machine for living. He had never imagined that on the scale of the galaxy, planets were somehow old-fashioned.
The throb of the decks now gone, Redwing listened as he heard running quick-speak from the Artilects. They were furiously coping with the Glorian artificial minds, their computer-say negotiating the dynamics that fetched SunSeeker in. He skipped the inevitable language translation hurdles and went straight to the physics. Magnetic tendrils wrapped into SunSeeker’s own fields and threaded like fingers from opposite hands, a firm grip. All without solid mass ever touching.
Redwing had brought the ship into near-zero velocity as they braked into the flared portion of the Cobweb. SunSeeker had to keep maneuvering, since the Cobweb swept along at a rotation speed of about two kilometers a second here. The swelling Bulge—which seemed so important, Redwing thought of it already with a capital letter—was thousands of kilometers wider than the rest of the Cobweb, for obvious lifezone reasons. Here in the outer Cobweb’s reaches, far from the glowing crescents of the double planets, gravity along the Bulge was very nearly zero. Interplanetary shipments could nudge in here and offload under trivial grav stresses. Alien as the Glorian minds might be, they still took advantage of nature’s simple facts.
The Bulge loomed ahead, a huge labyrinth of woody, watery mass. To get sunlight into its interior, low-g forests alternated with globby blue seas, hanging in near-zero grav. Some stringy platforms the size of continents looked like deserts, stacked to the left and right of the Cobweb center, with plain empty spaces between to let air and sunlight in. Slender gleaming columns stitched all this together, some thick and others spindly. Airy arabesques abounded. To Earthly eyes, it seemed like stacks of plateaus beneath tarnished sunlight, threaded through with the silvery cables and mossy blurs like velvet.
The grappler fields plucked at the ship. The bridge crew studied the magnetic contours as they flexed. The atmospheric films moved, too. They puckered out, almost like a shallow kiss.
Here came the moment that crowned the long decades of interstellar flight, the Bowl years, the complexity of forging afresh an expedition toward Glory, with the Bowl prowling in the darkness, like an implied threat. The Ice Minds wrapped around the Bowl’s exterior had sent vague messages about Glory, yet refused to clearly say what they knew. Much less, whether the Bowl had ever visited here. Exasperating.
The bridge crew stood together, silent and in awe at what the screens revealed. Let them have their moment, he realized. He had things to do.
Redwing eased slowly into a sound-suppressing cowling, so the bridge crew did not notice. To the Artilects, he whispered a string of commands he carried solely in his head. If it’s not written down somewhere, it can’t be hacked, especially by the Artilects themselves—a technique he had worked out while piloting in the Oort cloud, two centuries ago. Ancient methods. Still worked.
His orders went directly to low-level structures below Artilect consciousness. That ensured the commands would be acted on immediately, the machine equivalent to an involuntary reflex, like a hammer tap to a knee. Such methods to keep humans in full control of Artilects were embedded since the Deutsch-Turing Algorithmic Act of centuries past. Now Redwing wanted the latest estimates on the Glorians.
Tutored by Earthside, Redwing’s crew gathered that communicating with Glorians might be somewhat like the history of talking to the AIs that became the Artilect ranks. So it was.
The Artilect tran
slation algorithms, improved further by countless transmissions from Earthside, were now beyond any human method. Squeezing out meaning was done not by feeding in detailed information, but by letting the Artilects read billions of “documents” sent quite readily by the Glorians. The information was basic science with a bit of cultural texts. Artilects never got bored, so they read those in Glorian-speak symbols and pictures. The Artilect web learned—just as Earthside computers had centuries back, to recognize cats and dogs by looking at literally millions of pictures. Eventually they worked out for themselves, without being programmed, the syntax of the Glorian languages.
“You’ve got better dialogue with the Glorians?” Redwing asked. Artilects needed no small talk to get discussion going.
“We must allow that a few of our sentences got their shoelaces tied together and toppled over. The Glorian tongues fester together, cough out meaning slowly. We remind you, Captain, that your Anglish is the result of Norman soldiers trying to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids. The Glorian talk-tangle unspools more than unfolds, letting its circularity build, a spiraling alien sentence.” The Artilect voice had steepened itself to an arch tone, giving an impression that they had emotions. They worked at seeming human.
“Will we be able to talk to them at all?”
“Perhaps. Their meta-tongue has an almost staggering amount of suffixal and prefixal machinery. Overall, a very complex grammar, and yet we Artilects have managed.”
“Um, for example?”
“In the early contacts, struggling with translation, the Glorians even exchanged definitions, such as ‘Life: Anti-entropic organization in chemical or electromechanical systems that, left unattended, tends to metastasize into more and various of the same.’ True, but somehow fails to grasp the import of the term, for us.”
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