Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  To ready them for the low-grav, Redwing had ordered the normally 1 g torus to spin at a tenth of that, to get near the Cobweb grav in the Bulge. She took a 2k run. Soon enough, her muscles warmed, some aching and others numbed from unusual moves. Low-g was an art unlike zero-g. Running was more like flying in a dream, silky and slow.

  On to the field gear. She zipped the suit up nice and tight, then pressed an electro switch on her wrist, and it grabbed her like a loving glove. It would be sexy if your body were voluptuous, but most in their suits looked like cartoons, not people, and some of the men with more detail than she liked. The joints sighed when she moved or bent over.

  The suit ankles were baggy and the smartsuit prompts could be irritating—it had the personality of a nagging mother—but considering all the work their onboard Artilect management did, the suits were a miracle of upgrades from Earthside. Pockets and belts and straps let you take many tools, yet were slim. Handy for towing nets of gear behind them in low-grav. Helmets had IR and UV and even radar, zoom and fisheye; pressure sensors; and medical readouts. Suits for Bowl creatures had been designed on the Bowl. They were skintight, all prettier than SunSeeker’s suits. Tech kept advancing, the one constant of history.

  Beth felt a little tired, so fed the stim-pack into the suit’s auto-med reservoir, asked for and received a dose, saving the rest for the field.

  When they were all suited up, they resembled some sort of Raygun Gothic look from an oldie chromium-corseted spectacle vid.

  Most revived crew were young, and hadn’t spent the years on the Bowl. They moved into their suits with the heedless flexibility of the youthful. They were going in head-blind, with none of their embedded contacts to Artilects running. This seemed correctly cautious. Any Glorian smart-tech seeping in could be a threat.

  * * *

  Ashley pulled his tank top up over his head and stared at himself in the full-length mirror. He pushed down his jeans, then his boxers, and imagined a crewwoman seeing him nude for the first time. Feet average sized, hair on his toes that he should probably take care of. He liked his legs just fine, but his thighs were wide and embarrassingly muscular. Still there, from his field workouts, back a century or two ago. He tried standing at an angle, a twist at his waist. Some improvement. In that position, it was easier to see his ass and notice that it was not as pert as it had been at twenty-two. He clenched both cheeks, hoping that tightened its look. He sucked in his tummy and pulled his pecs up high, trying to present them like pastries in a bakery window. Maybe he would take some time to boost his confidence. He could ask the Artilects to manufacture him one of those “dream masks.” They could generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, take him through an imagined seduction. Practice!

  Would Beth Marble like him? The other women? Were the goods good enough? He pouted his lips and ran his hands over his thighs, masking their expanse. Maybe.

  * * *

  Beth caught up to Cliff in a lean corridor near the suit-up section. “How ’bout a bit of bubble lovin’, babe?”

  “Uh, sure. Need to get my mind off gear problems.” He checked his ship schedule popup in his right eye. “Good! Pool’s free. C’mon.”

  They headed for the zero-g spherical pool. “How about we zone-play Beethoven’s Sonata in F Minor this time?” she asked.

  “Sure, a fave. Not just because it goes hammer-hard at the end.”

  “My point, yes.”

  They had to cut across radially and at a node came upon Redwing talking to a squat, bulky guy. The captain turned and waved a hand at the man, who carried some field weaponry. “Here’s our military background specialist—Tommy Campbell.”

  Beth and Cliff said the usual greetings. “You’ve caught up on our expedition history, Lieutenant Campbell?” Beth asked.

  “Think so, plenty of it,” he said with a wary grin, showing a mouthful of craggy teeth. Campbell’s bass voice carried a note of sliding worry. “Frankly, now, I’m uneasy about losing control of the ship, y’see, with this tricky kind of landing. Never trained for comin’ in slantwise, into a cylinder. Unpowered.”

  “We have no choice,” Redwing said. She could hear in the captain’s voice a tensile note, doubtless born of pulling together a coherent team to do such a strange job. This was more complex and bewildering than even the Bowl incursion. And look how that had turned out—the team split, one captured and the other fleeing into the vast wilds of an alien construction. Their Glory landing was planned to be conventional, shuttles setting down on a planet. Nothing like sliding into a vast tube.

  “Course, I’ve been briefed about all this, ah, through the Artilects,” Campbell said. His dark skin crinkled as he struggled to conceal something, she guessed. He seemed a man of few words, many of them mumbled. “They really know how to do up the history, with pictures and statistics and all. Was telling the cap’n here, I spent a lot of time studying, not much time socializing.”

  “What’s bothering you?” Beth insisted.

  “Ah…” Campbell pulled a troubled grimace, reluctant to admit something, then decided and said flatly, “Okay, gotta say. What kept me in my bunk was those, the aliens in the corridors.”

  “Finger snakes?” Beth asked.

  “Those are creepy enough, sure—talking reptiles with tiny hands at their tails! And the five-legged spider. That Bemor thing from the Bowl. It’s a hellava big bird-thing feathered dinosaur.”

  She frowned, wondering how a tough military type could confess to this. “You haven’t gotten to know them, is all. They’re not animals. They’re another kind of intelligence.” He’s going down to the Cobweb? she thought. But, of course, a combat type who had not been on the Bowl would see all this through an old, Earthside lens.

  Redwing waved a dismissing hand. “We’re having a touchdown dinner soon. Extra rations. Pasta goes well with the fake wine, too.”

  Beth nodded and with Cliff hurried to the spherical pool. A quickie, then.

  * * *

  The landing dinner was rich in calories, thin in alcohol. Nobody should go into an alien terrain with a hangover. Cliff ignored the earth-dark humor crews everywhere used to lighten their load and to wrestle down their dread. He fell asleep wrapped around Beth and awoke with troubling dreams.

  Myriad details flocked around as they got into the descent vehicles. These sleek winged ships were made for plane-skimming an upper atmosphere, skating to dissipate heat and momentum, and then land like an airplane. Now they would fly into an atmosphere sideways, and not have to fight gravity’s heavy hand.

  “I thought of playing “Pomp and Circumstance” for you,” Redwing said on comm. “Graduation, in a way.”

  Cliff’s ship lock yawned and he went in, Beth behind him. They found their couches and checked their personal gear in a net holder. No one in the twenty-crew team said a word.

  “So I’ll just say, ‘Go well forth,’” Redwing sent, in a traditional departure from the early days of the big opening-out into the solar system. “Move, see, send.”

  Time crawled as the pilot carefully took them out. Cliff had seen Okala Ubanafore’s body aboard in the gear compartment, shroud-wrapped in white, then belted himself in. He had a screen feed from the outer skin, so he watched them back away. Instead of peering ahead, he shifted the omni-feed to look back at the ship. Its sleek skin was now a scuffed and marred vessel, gouged by innumerable plasma gouts. Grooves nicked by rocks moving past at relativistic speeds. Stained, rumpled, and painted strangely by browns and rouges, like an aging whore out of time.

  They headed for the upper film layer. As promised, a round hole opened in the barely visible film to admit them. A thump came as swarms of Sprites darted out of the scout’s belly to run parallel to the Cobweb’s cylinder. They would keep watch along the flanks, each communicating with the others like fireflies. They swarmed away with a surreal, insect beauty.

  He rehearsed the smartsuit prompts, which could be irritating—it had the personality of a nagging mother. Still, considering all t
he work their onboard Artilect management did, the suits were a miracle. Pockets and belts and straps let you take many tools, yet were slim for a thin atmosphere like Earth’s.

  They glided through a second film layer. It obediently opened in an oval pucker. Having a layered atmosphere seemingly helped run this cylinder. The Bowl had its many miracles, and Cliff knew there would be new, strange ones here, too. And another layer, this one a film that looked a glazed blue in the distance.

  Above the Cobweb yet below its outer filmy envelope lurked an eggshell-blue blob of an ocean. It looked both improbable and appealing in its glimmering sea surface. Towering cottony clouds dotted it, casting oddly angular shadows across its wrinkled shimmer. Thin yet luxurious, each blazing white pinnacle had an echoing dark twin, a shadow cast on the vast curved plain. Much of it was waters of different colors, confined by the merest of gravities. These were held somehow by surface tension into many-shaped constrictions both beautiful and yet somehow useful, a geometric symphony composed by brute engineering. Knife-edge wedges arose from some thermal vent effect. The cloud mountains thronged with circling life. Sharp-winged and puffy, slow and swift, predators and prey in their eternal dance. Plus plants in their oblique orbits, huge glossy-green ferns, spider-trees as big as cities, mosses like grasping hands clutching at the vapor wealth of the oblivious, pregnant thunderheads, glowering purple. Cloud chains bloomed like vapor mountains, standing strong and round in the yellow-bright sun of vibrating G3-class radiance.

  Now came the anchoring at the Cobweb. They slid across a continent-sized deck of vegetation and low hills. Filmy gossamer clouds billowed around them as they retroed in. A smooth glide, deep thumps, a tilt—and they were at rest in a vast meadow, dotted with odd, twisted, helical things that might be trees, adapted to a tenth of Earth grav.

  An ancient phrase leaped into his mind, a classic observation: “Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

  THIRTEEN

  BACKFIRE DRAGONS

  Essentially there are two types of intelligent high-tech life: species that have no hardwired inhibitors about killing their own kind … and those that do.

  All other filters aside, both are self-limiting in time and space. In the first case—for example, ourselves, derived from primates lacking fearsome natural weapons, and then too quickly evolving a brain big enough to crack the nucleus—are civilizations that, about the time they begin to penetrate extraplanetary space, enter the nuclear funnel and don’t survive.

  In the second case, an occasional species with fearsome natural weaponry—say, something like a velociraptor—has such inhibitors before going big-brain, and survives long enough to break out into interstellar space. This would be a Conquistador civilization or, if you prefer, Galactic Strip Miner: relatively benign to its own, but lethal to all or most external species. Sooner or later, though, one Galactic Strip Miner will encounter another and, in the resultant Sector War—utilizing antimatter weapons and the like—one or both go extinct. So there’s not much out there.…

  Beth surveyed the first ground team with a frown. Smart apes talking excitedly, getting ready to step into a huge unknown. Their long glide and thump-down on a grassy plain had stirred them into a buzzing froth.

  “Assemble!” she called over the clatter. They were all affixing gear to their suits, or else in smart tote bags. The ship term for them was Away Team, but she thought of this as the Firsts. Maybe, when this all got written up as history by their descendants, her term would stick.

  She could see on this side of the staging area Cliff, Ash Trust, Tommy Campbell, Jereaminy Tam, and wriggling off to the side, three finger snakes. The snakes were eager for excitement after all this time aboard. Their small quick hands flexed with eagerness in their spherical joints. Handy the multi-tooled apelike individual was having gear trouble. Let him sort it out. Viviane, as always, looked polished and assured.

  The others were forming up in lines. The Glorian entity had sent cartoon instructions that showed sixteen people on the Away Team, and Redwing decided to obey.

  Then, impossible to miss, Bemor Prime—sort of. The huge bulk was moored inside a transparent carry cage the size of a small car. It wriggled. The composite personality hadn’t learned how to move yet. It wouldn’t hamper him long, Beth thought. Bereft of his giant bird body, Bemor Prime was a spidow—and spidows were shaped and evolved for microgravity.

  The spidow scuttled restlessly about his carry. He didn’t seem unhappy with his caged state. He was just practicing—and observing. The compound eyes seemed somehow wise now.

  Beth recalled when she first saw a spidow on the Bowl, the chills it sent down her spine, her automatic gut-clench. The spiderlike things had come zooming through the forested low-grav prison the Folk had put her group into. Beth hadn’t been able to sleep well after that. Others had hoped that the huge beasts—Abduss had called them spidows, a species name, and it stuck—would ignore the humans. Maybe, they had thought at first, the beasts weren’t predators at all, just large herbivores? But one had killed her team member, and now Beth struggled with the skin-crawl she got from even looking at the thing. She had seen their bristly palps moving in a blur as the razor-quick spidows clutched the thick strands. It called up a fearful image of Earthly spiders that still made her shake.

  This spidow was still getting its head together, literally. Its tiny cowling lights blinked with signs of mental processing. Mind integration, on the go.

  The Bowl Folk had given humans this tech. Then the Artilects had whiled away their time in the decades-long voyage learning to use it, in simulations. Now the spidow was with them, up from its own form of cryosleep—which the Bowl Folk had developed long ago.

  Beth watched Anorak, who had calmed considerably in the last few days. The Bowl Folk had insisted that Anorak be in the landing party First Team. Beth didn’t like the idea, since communicating with Anorak was difficult. Maybe impossible, in fact, in a field deployment. But there were microphones, recorders, and cameras in the cage—and some hidden controls.

  So Anorak was letting the effects happen gradually, as the Bemor persona took over. An intelligence, imposed on an animal brain/mind. Tech beyond human imagining. Creepy, Beth thought. Not her decision, so she had done what officers do: take orders, keep her stiff upper lip in line.

  Cliff angled over, all harnessed up. “Go slow, watch your back, my father always said.”

  “Yep.” They were about to close helmets, so she leaned over and gave him a brisk kiss. “Mine, too. My father died centuries back and the longer he is dead, the smarter he gets.

  “Helmets sealed!” she called.

  Their in-ship biodetectors said the air outside was close enough to Earth-normal. Plus, no detected microbial irritants or potential fatal stuff. Good enough.

  “Pressure lock release!” she called to the Pilot Artilect. A hiss, the lock slid open—and sunlight flooded them.

  No one spoke. This was the moment for history, not to be spoiled by unnecessary small talk. That suited Beth. She had prepared nothing to say. She had always hated those “for tomorrow we rise at dawn” solemn speeches heard in dramas about exploring the solar system. So she copied Redwing. “Earth, we have made it. Go well forth, we shall.”

  Their in-suit connections consulting steadily with SunSeeker, they marched out in silence. Three soldiers of asteroid belt origin towed Bemor Prime.

  Beth watched their auto-launched microdrones buzz away. The Artilects were tending to those in their “stick monkey” command. The drones were flying around this Bulge in the Cobweb, gathering views of life-forms and the strum of an ecology carried out in zero-g.

  The team dispersed in a circle and waited. The long meadow before them lay quiet and placid.

  No greeting party.

  No sign of reception at all.

  Not what any of them had planned.

  Just a grassy clearing bounded by a forest that seemed a writhing mass of wide, hollow limbs. Every living thing seemed endowed wit
h light, airy mechanics. Translucent spiked leaves wove in an easy breeze, and diaphanous flowers of a shiny blue and glowing yellows. Trunks flared with spotty dabs of lichen. They twisted and bent in their slow-motion jostling for light and space.

  Beth knew that this plain was underpinned by struts, and so was clinging to a silvery tether trellis. That web spanned the gap between the twin planets, and its towers supported many stacked plains like this one. Like separate, though staggered, floors in a giant building.

  But the feel of it eluded her, so—“Doff your helmets,” she sent. “Might as well try out the air.”

  With sighs, the team sucked in the silky, moist atmosphere. The sweet taste made her blink. Not since the Bowl had she felt the open gusto of a true living place.

  A fitful wind blew, mostly toward Honor. Climate here would be wholly different, not like a planet. The rotating Cobweb would add slow currents; the sun would warm one side at a time, cycling through more than a week. No axial tilt, so no seasons. Weather inside a giant building, really.

  And here was their new sun. It was a cherry-tinged ovoid blur that wrinkled and resolved as it hung two hands above the meadow’s edge. Through the upper atmosphere’s clouds she saw an inverted rainbow, colors refracted and dancing. The sun was angling toward Glory as the system swung. A brief night would come within hours.

  The troops had opened Bemor Prime’s carry. The spidow climbed out cautiously; then its five limbs dug into the turf and anchored him. He wriggled, maybe in pleasure. As per the plan, he still wasn’t speaking, but the belt soldiers talked to him like the pet he wasn’t.