Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  But then they arrowed into the vast plain below. She had a glimpse of inky dark, rumpled forests, pale yellow-lit towers spiking up at a somber azure sky—

  Here it came. Lands rushed at them. Then a flicker of dark. A whump and pop. Rush of cool air.

  —and they had flashed through the quick shadowed sheet of soil. Impossible to estimate the thickness. Then they shot out into the shadowy air again.

  This view was even broader. Dim but clear. She could see through cloudless layers, all the way to the Cobweb’s upper atmosphere, on each side. For the first time, she felt the extent of the giant cylinder. She used her binocs to close-up distant features that were, judging from the perspective, thousands of kilometers away … and hundreds wide.

  Big blue-white bubbles of water hung, somehow, like lakes in the air. Big glossy pipes that ran along the Cobweb’s length, several moored along one zone high in the atmosphere, toward the outer rim. She looked backwards. Gyres of gray clouds swirled behind them. They had already passed through the thickest part of the Bulge. Slow-motion hurricanes marked the outlet into the thinner length of the Cobweb, leading toward Honor. Cloud patterns nearby and below formed longitudinal streamers, as winds from the huge pipes bled out fresh air from nearer Honor.

  On distant platforms of land, she could make out buildings the size of mountain ranges, with entries at every angle. Tethers turned in the easy air above them. These huge sticks seemed designed to touch down at buildings, just close enough for passengers to get on, matching velocities. Then the treelike lengths of it moved on, laterally across the cylinder. She could not figure out how they worked, but the intent was clear. Movement, grace, intelligence, life in its purposes. Here was a living, interacting system that drew resources from both worlds, at its ends.

  She recalled a great classical poem that seemed to capture the shadowed strangeness of this.

  Coldhearted orb that rules the night

  Removes the colors from our sight.

  Red is gray and yellow white,

  But we decide which is right

  and which is an illusion.

  Faster now. The dark thickened as they flew down the slender hollow tube propelling them. Small amber light lit the pipe ahead—injection stations? She could see twinkling city lights sprawl across the distant level that stretched like an infinite plane. It was at least a thousand kilometers away, she judged, by perspective. But at this speed, only a few minutes away.

  She looked carefully around their pod. Bemor Prime sat, stolid in his carrier at the back, saying nothing. His orders were to behave like a pet. Keep him in reserve, as needed. Twisty was asking questions of the others, by highlighting things inside the pod, then imposing a question mark with a flick of a wrist. It knew human signals and was using them to pick up vocabulary and accent. It knew that imposing the circle-bar meant “verboten” on anything he didn’t like.

  Seeing her watching, Twisty asked, “Question on Bemor Prime? Why here?”

  “A pet.”

  “Is from Bowl, yes? I have digi-record of so such, from olden era.”

  “Yes, we spent time there. On the Bowl. Bemor Prime is my friend.”

  “I see.” Twisty pointed to a finger snake and imposed a?

  “Tool user. Engineer. Also from the Bowl of Heaven.”

  Twisty’s mouth twisted in a new way. “They think it heaven, they do.”

  Was that Glorian irony? Sarcasm? Beth made herself sit back. She had been tensed up, anticipating collisions that never came. Now she forced herself to slide lower. The couch made itself into a firm yet pleasant cushion. Ah.

  Twisty looked relaxed, its multiple arms akimbo at their knotted joints. She caught no smell from the alien, no signals in the blank face, as its scaly eyes slowly closed. Maybe a good time to begin their core task?

  Tutored by Earthside, in light of the Bowl experience, they had realized how deep the problem of communicating with Glorians was. The Glorian cartoon images sent suggested a contemptuous mind that disliked what humans saw as diplomacy. They had finally reacted, once SunSeeker arrived. But only then.

  So this might be somewhat like the history of talking to the AIs that became the Artilect ranks. Find out their base assumptions, their mind-set. Start there.

  SunSeeker’s Artilects emerged from primitive collections, somewhat like cellular automata. Those, resembling the weather, were doing things just as complex as human brains. Those were thinking, just not in humanlike ways. They were outside our context and our details. So Glorian purpose made sense only relative to a whole historical and cultural framework. To ask aliens what their purpose was, her team had to have them understand the historical and cultural framework in which humans operated.

  Twisty’s eyes opened with a jerk. It said slowly, “Your Heaven Bowl has veered. It will fly deeper into our planetary system. What is this new intent? Should we be afraid?”

  Beth said carefully, “You rule all of a solar system. Surely you are too powerful to fear the Bowl.”

  “You have conceived gods like that. I am not a god but rather, something like. Something you know not. A step up the ladder—I use here a description that resonates with your minds, though not in ours. Up the ‘ladder’ from your forms.”

  So it had guessed at Beth’s thinking, somehow. She felt a twitch of alarm. How did it do that? And … what to say to such a bald declaration?

  She recalled a set of methods Earthside had sent, after their Bowl experience. Describe our own evolution, as we see it. “Let us speak of what gives us—our species name is Homo sapiens—an edge. That is, our social skills. It gave us command over all other animals. Quite quickly, our social evolution turned us into the masters of the planet. Evolution favored not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.”

  Twisty flicked its eyes about and then, as if recalling instructions, made a curt nod with its odd head. “Our view is best shown in examples. Plants are energy binders. They came first. Animals are space binders, second to arrive. You humans are time binders. You see yourselves as controllers of energy, space, and time. All that is.”

  “Um. Fair, I suppose. You—”

  “Perhaps best to say, we do not share your species’ problems.”

  “So … what?”

  “We speak with others of like minds. You are not ready for this yet.”

  She wondered if this was something like a job interview. “Speak to them through gravitational waves?”

  “In part. You well know that gravitational waves have an intriguing, useful property. They propagate unperturbed once they have been created. No distortion. Impossible for species such as you to create and signal through, much less block. Though you can receive, if clever. That ability places the remote corners of the universe into our field of view. We discourse with like minds and species. Not you. Not the Heaven Bowl.”

  Twisty did not move or give any face signals as it rapped this out. Its voice was sharp and clear now. It was learning to speak with startling speed. The word to describe its cant was condescending, at best. She decided to probe.

  “So you don’t happen to see our worldview as significant?”

  “Your art, perhaps. It is primitive. But like those of other species, limited by your short history.”

  “How about the species of the Bowl?”

  Twisty responded with a restless twitch. It started in the limbs that fidgeted in the handlike protrusions. They jittered in and out, as if getting ready to work on something. “It is a historical problem. Now it returns. This concerns us.”

  “You tried to warn us off.”

  “Not you. Not your tiny ship. The Bowl.”

  “Ah! So your signals were to the Folk?”

  “I see you mean a species who believe they are the Bowl Masters. No, not them. The cold ones.”

  “What we call the Ice Minds?”

  “Those we knew. We speak to them only when needful.” Twisty had subdued its hands. Now the arms twiste
d like tree limbs in a lazy breeze.

  “Not otherwise?”

  “We confront different problems.”

  “May we help with those?”

  Twisty made its mouth into a curve like a semicolon laid on its side. An attempt at a smile? “As you humans would see it, we have used philosophy to resolve many.”

  “Philosophy? How?”

  “We decided they were not important.”

  And with that, here came the next dive into a plain the size of a continent.

  Beth braced herself; she couldn’t help it. They were moving at ever-higher speeds. This time the land below was hilly with sharp rocky peaks. Snow dotted some. It rushed up, and again came the rattling blot of darkness. They zoomed through the landform and, presto, were out.

  Twisty said, “We at times refer to this as the Forest of Incandescent Bliss.”

  “Oh? We call it the Cobweb.”

  “You omit the function, stress the construction. Is that typical of your species?”

  “When we see something new, we check the engineering first.”

  “Odd, is not of lasting importance to we of this Forest.”

  Beth did not say: It would be if you built it badly. “You built it when?”

  “Ah, far past now.” Three arms waved the question away, each in a different jointed way. It reminded her of trees weaving in a slow storm.

  Twisty sat up, seemingly oblivious to the crushing acceleration. “I gather you study what you call biology?”

  “I do. Study of living things.”

  “So the plasma beings as well?”

  “We term them the Diaphanous.”

  “Ah, the thin and transparent, you mean. We have a similar expression—” Again, a band saw cutting into metal.

  She ached to get some points straight, but felt she was in some Oscar Wilde play where every remark probably meant something else. Or several other somethings. So she said, “Here’s how we think about other, smart beings—such as you. There’s cooperation apparent in all of the highly social species of our planet, Earth—”

  “So you name your world Dirt. Because you have little water?”

  “Uh, no, Earth is about three-quarters covered with water.”

  “Then should be Ocean.”

  “Maybe. We evolved in the dirt—or rather, in trees growing in dirt. So—”

  “Most worlds’ beings term their homes Oceans, we hear from our similars among the stars. Those Oceans resound with song. Alas, they have few arms”—it waved all its arms in a blur, like a dance—“and no fire. So they cannot come here, as you did, you Dirt people.”

  Viviane leaned forward to catch Twisty’s attention. “You’ve got millennia of observing behind you. The Bowl visited you, even. You know so much I’d like to learn.”

  Her outright plea was not according to protocols Earthside and Redwing had set out. Don’t show your hand early. Beth decided to let it go. Theory never survived collision with the field.

  Viviane said earnestly, “How common are desert worlds or water worlds? Do they produce intelligent land-based species at a much lower rate? Earth’s had a fine-tuned balance, water and land. Do planets with larger habitable areas, so larger populations, turn up more often?

  Twisty regarded this with his semicolon mouth. “We know your origin. And the Bowl’s, the same. You have all sprung from a greater habitable area than most life-bearing worlds.”

  “Ah!” Viviane brightened. “I’ve wanted to know that since I was a girl.”

  Beth was now certain that Twisty’s semicolon look was supposed to be a smile, because it was developing a sense of humor. Making fun of them, at least. She took a breath, caught Twisty’s eye—many were trying to now—and restarted. “Look, my point is, smart social species are based on some degree of altruism and self-sacrifice. Everybody knows the first rule is, you have to give to get.”

  “Plausible, though limited.” Still the semicolon smile.

  “Those ingrained social understandings work at deep levels. Those arose from natural selection at both the individual and the group levels. It gives us our sense of morality. So we presume—and it seems roughly true of all those we met on the Bowl—smart aliens came forth similarly. So they have a parallel sense of morality. Yes?”

  “In a way. I do notice, from your arts, that you love what you call stories, as well.”

  “Well, sure.” She wondered where this was going.

  “You have an inner theater. You cast yourselves into these little plays. Pay great attention to each other, especially faces.”

  She recalled an experiment with monkeys caged for a while with no view out. When the curtains drew aside and they could look out, they focused on any other monkey in view. “We enjoy that, yes. Plays, movies, reading—”

  “That appears natural because it evolved. Socially useful, I gather.”

  “Don’t you?” She thought of the Earthside feeds. Over centuries, the focus was constant: gossip, conflicts, celebrity worship, the latest hit video or novel or … endless human focus, yes.

  “In lesser ways. Your addiction to stories leads you astray.”

  “How?”

  “By making you think your lives are stories.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “If they have a point. I noticed your oldest stories, those you tell to children, always end falsely. Why?”

  “Uh, how … falsely?”

  “I believe the cliché—that is the right Anglish term, yes?—ends ‘And so they lived happily ever after.’ Yes?”

  “Uh, right. So?”

  “No one lives ever after, happily or otherwise.”

  She had honestly never thought of that. As a kid, she just knew that meant it was time to close the book.

  Twisty looked at her without expression. The Cobweb, or Forest, rushed by outside. Sunlight brimmed. She didn’t know what to say.

  So … When in doubt, dodge. She looked out at a welter of glossy crossbeams and pipes, streaming by in a blur. She could make out some because they were big—cylinders kilometers across, intertwined meshes that cross-braced themselves, frames and lattices gleaming, an impression of combined strength and suppleness. The Sun was getting brighter, coming away from being eclipsed by Glory, at their backs. It was still small, making shadows sharper and reflections more precise. Astro-viewing was more complex on this spinning barbell.

  “I … I’d like to hear your story.”

  Twisty rolled itself around on the silvery couch that clasped close. “That is a deepness not soon swum.”

  What command of Anglish! Twisty was learning fast. Probably had a link to some underlying computational resource, as well. “Okay, how’d you build this Cobweb?”

  “Through longer eras than spanned by your evolution.”

  “Um. How’s it work?”

  “Ah, I fathom your regard.” Twisty swiveled itself to face Cliff. Its arms flexed into a helical net, as though it was aping the long, weaving Cobweb structure they had seen from space. “We are a thrifty sort. Your laws explain, yes? Gravity makes our air fall, but we clasp it in pipe. Such as this”—his arms swept outward to the pod, its cylindrical track plunging toward Honor—“is in turn driving gas pressure below. Which lofts masses in other tubes. What goes down, must come up, suitably sheperded. All is a circuit. Like your blood, embodied.”

  Cliff leaned over from his couch, straining to be nearer—and his couch swiveled, turning him toward them. The soft buffeting aerogel smartly adjusted. “On our planet, same as yours, atmosphere clumps down. You keep this Cobweb pumping air over such distances?”

  “Your term capillaries applies, yes? Each Level, as we term them, manages its air and water. Hands off to its neighbor nexts, above and below. Gravity gives, takes. All is in flux.”

  Cliff shook his head in disbelief. “Gas and grav. So that’s how you keep everything running? Takes a lot of energy.”

  “Not so. And you say Cobweb, but Piston would be more accurate.”

  “Thi
s elevator we’re in,” Beth said. “We’re rushing down, fast as hell. By pressing air ahead, this pod drives another—somewhere?—uphill, to get here. Right?”

  Twisty made a nod, tentative. “This means assent, yes?”

  “Right.” She looked at Cliff. Engineering was his area.

  Cliff dutifully nodded. “I never heard of adjusting pressures across distances like planetary—” He stopped. “Nope, wrong. The Bowl does huge stuff like that, too.”

  “There is much more to show you than … plumbing. Of more grave import, as well.” Twisty gave a clear impression—though she could not quite say how—of being patient. This alien was picking up on social cues quickly. Its voice was getting more resonant, rounded. It summoned up an ever-larger range of Anglish vocab, too. Surely it was wired into some big, quick computational link. Still, the performance was impressive.

  Cliff eyed her and with a downward twitch and twist of his mouth told her he was going to press on with the engineering anyway. Fine. She had been watching the scenery as their acceleration fell off. The Honor surface was tens of thousands of kilometers away. She had estimated their speed in this pod as several kilometers a second, so they were out of the Bulge and getting near Honor itself.

  The fast-flitting images she caught taught a lot. This Cobweb was vast and various. Small towns in the middle of nowhere; great cities; towers and highways seething with urgent action. All amid abundant lands and wild regions, thick with forest.

  Now their comfy couches crawled like snails around the curve of the walls to reverse direction. A heavy deceleration clasped them. “Uh!” she heard from all around. Destination ahead, then.

  Twisty did not seem to mind. She had slowly realized that what she thought was its skin was in fact a smartsuit. It wriggled a bit, a shimmy of adjustment, then wrapped the body again. Now she could see that the sliding skinlike suit concealed parts beneath several of its arms. Humans kept their lower openings—as her mother used to say, both the sewer and the playground—in one crowded spot, end of the alimentary canal, between their legs. What Twisty had there was mysterious. Its two lower legs were spaced on opposite sides of its body, with ample blank space between for recessed eyes and folding ears. Her biological curiosity would have to await diplomacy.…