Beth stepped back. Twisty gone, future open, sudden divisions among alien tribes she knew nothing about.
So they would go voyaging again. More stresses, some discoveries, dangers, mysteries galore. Maybe try for some humor?
She said to the skyfish Captain, “Have you ever let a pronoun out unchaperoned?”
Anarok nodded, showing a veiled delight at the small joke.
Bemor Prime spoke from behind her. “A question more pointed: How will you ascend to the Bulge? In lowest gravity, a balloon cannot maneuver.”
Anarok asked, “Have you worked out the wind patterns of the Cobweb? A large feat.”
“I imagined a rough map while we descended. My subsections of mind have been processing upon that.”
Anarok fanned the air, and a diagram formed in the air nearby. “A main pipe pumps breathing-air from Honor to the midpoint Bulge. We will ride the life-supporting current thence.”
Bemor Prime said, “Won’t you be stranded? In free fall—”
Anarok waved this away with multiple arms. “Winds ride gravity’s pull down in both directions, toward the moon Honor and the layered world Glory. Very slow is the wind current except near the end. We don’t mind. We have all of time. And what a wonderful chance to explore what we have never seen of the Cobweb!”
TWENTY-FIVE
ARTILECTS
Ad astra per aspera.
“To the stars through difficulties.”
—state motto of Kansas
The Artilects were cavorting.
Their medium was the darting white motes Redwing watched. The alabaster smartbots were a team of small repair robots who swarmed over SunSeeker’s skin, fixing and polishing and working microscopic miracles on the hard bow that had taken centuries of hot plasma, a hammering hail of dust, of occasional big rocks that gouged it mercilessly with a cruel mechanics. Yet this was no mere scrub team. They danced.
Each would finish a small job and then twirl up above the long curve of the ship’s pocked bow, nominally to see what needed work next. But not actually.
Redwing knew the many Artilect methods, and they did not call for several of the glimmering bots to arc up, whirl around one another, the dives and swoops light and airy, spinning as they zoomed. Such joys were impossible in the long centuries of ramscoop plowing through gossamer yet deadly interstellar plasma. Now suppressed Artilect spirits bloomed in ballets that turned into boogie, when bots attached their magnetics to metal and bopped their odd tangos as they labored.
A rap at his door. He opened it to a deck officer, Lamumbai, who said, “Last one done, sir. That Stiles woman, little groggy but functional and hungry as hell. We’re at max capacity shipboard.”
“Outstanding, Lieutenant. Now we form the descent crew,” Redwing said. “Start them on the bio-prep protocols. The Biolect has some new protein processors to install in them.”
Lamumbai was a tall drink of pale milk, and she snapped a sharp salute back. She seemed eager to lead a squad in the next descent. They all wanted to get out of this crammed ship and zip through the green-rich Cobweb planes, blithe spirits all.
Redwing turned from his cabin screen and looked into his mirror—which as usual, lied. He should be dead. At least, by Earth time. But while he was lined and worn, despite the Artilects’ attentive biocraft, using yet more tech info sent from Earthside—he was not really old. They had even put him through a week of cold sleep nanosurgery to tune him up. Banished the ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into furrows—for a while, at least. Maybe ancient was the better word. His body ran somewhat well, but his mind was from centuries past. It did not know what to make of this future. Or of a ship captain who, if he did not push the issue, would never set foot on an alien shore. He had stood loftily by while his crew died, because that complied with protocol.
What was that old poem?
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Not a lot of solace, when facing crew dead long before their natural limit—which was above age 150 now, back Earthside. Redwing had the biochem autofac make up the latest complex mix that upregulated the body’s repair mechanisms and insert them in their ongoing ship food. It might well turn out that the revived crew had made an unexpectedly good investment: risk the long cryosleep, then get over a century of medical progress, sent to them at the speed of light.
When he focused and worried, he had a habit of rubbing his head. He had developed it after coming out of cold sleep at the Bowl, which always cost something in hair. So curiosity made him rub, to see if any more of his cranial crew had, as he saw it, jumped ship. Now it just signaled general, diffuse worry, so he let his hand rove over his balding dome, in search of what remained of his graying hair forest, as he looked at the feeds from Beth’s team. Viviane’s were more orderly and measured, signs of her deft editing. She made little of the burns along her arms. Yet they would take a while to heal, that much was clear; she was on pain meds.
These worries compounded with his feelings of frustration. All he could do was witness from afar and give vague orders. Irksome indeed. He got more exercise to work off the feelings as well as he could.
Since he was distant from the Cobweb, he tried to gain perspective from historical reading. He searched for parallels in the age of European exploration, and found a resonant moment. Captain Oates of Scott’s Antarctic folly, back around 1900. He left the tent and his share of the rations behind, with the words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Oates knew they would all die but kept to his code to the last.
Redwing laughed at himself. Preposterous! He chastised himself. He was not dying, just truly old. He was frustrated, that was all. Don’t self-dramatize, idiot.
As if in agreement, the Artilect comm popped an urgent signal on his screen. A message from the Bowl. Mayra’s frowning face came on with a nod as greeting, and she said, “I’m tracking the rogue ship that’s entered your space. They’re sending signals back to their base on the Bowl rim. We’ve intercepted those, looks bad.”
A diagram filled the screen. A red dot came shooting in from out by the grav wave emitter, then swooped toward the inner planets and Glory. Mayra said, “They’ve done a fast recon of the emitter. Now they’re moving at better than two hundred kilometers per second toward you. Another zoom-by, looks like. Bemor is taking this seriously here. Obviously he doesn’t want to antagonize the Glorians. Won’t tell me much about the Bowl’s past troubles with the Glory system, but wants to know more about the grav wave signals. He would like Bemor Prime to be supervising this.”
Redwing scowled: Bemor Prime was otherwise occupied, in transit inside that skyfish. Plus, Redwing sure as hell was not about to let a giant spidow of many unknown facets run anything. He called up the full space views, and the Artilect followed up the trace of the rogue ship. It was indeed plunging inward at high speed, on an accelerating arc toward Excelsius, some fast pivot around the star. Why?
“Thoughts on motivation here?” Redwing asked.
He had switched the Artilects’ over-voice to a soft, feminine tone, which said, “These are acts from yet another alien mind. One cannot avoid noting that such speeds are inherently threatening.”
“Maybe they think they’re fast enough to make a difficult target?”
“One doubts. Photons still rule.”
“Assuming they keep thrusting, what’s their trajectory?”
“They will in time—mere days—begin vectoring toward the Glory system.”
“Trouble.”
“True, we expect.”
“Keep me posted.”
He paced restlessly. He had distracted himself from the dramas down in the Cobweb and onto Honor. Mostly this meant by filling out his ship’s company, since it was honest though tedious work. He had taken the lead in bringing his crew complement out of cryo. They had come here to colonize, and by
God, they would have a full team ready for that, as soon as this weird diplomacy got done.
Some cryos had raging tinnitus—“a damn hum in the drum,” one of them said—and the Artilects had to learn how to fix that. This meant many hours in the chilly surgery vault, Redwing in an insulated suit and moving surgical instruments among the many-handed machines. Ship rules required a crew member be present at any revival—an antiquated directive, from the days of solar system explorers. So now he had a fully revived officer of the deck, of the bridge, a helmsman, and more officers to take the conn of each outship vessel. SunSeeker was crammed full.
In between work, he had watched Beth’s team go through trials that turned what he had thought was an iron stomach—his own.
Their video feeds were torture to see. On the Bowl, he had gotten only intermittent video. Here, with line of sight links tight and powerful, he watched people die, as seen from their own suit cameras.
After each death, he had to wash away the strain. He had set the Artilects to printing pineapple pizza or veal cordon bleu for the emerging fresh crew—a diversion. After centuries of development, autofoods could be enticing. Ship stores be damned—he was getting cargo runs from robots that brought supplies up from the Bulge. The revived cryocrew were too lean and needed the bite and flavor of Earthly reality. He set them to devouring familiar foods as they peered down at the alien Cobweb tower. They had to review the long deep history of the expedition to fathom where they were now. Then they would have to deal with it, down in the Cobweb itself. With full bellies.
In his cabin, he had ordered up a sequence of high-rez painters on the biggest cabin wall: wonderful Monets, Pissaros, a Degas, a couple Sisleys, and all the Vermeers, in rotation. Also works by Picasso, Dalí, a small Rodin, and a splashy Van Gogh, the crows in corn. Vintage visions of ancient Earth, which consoled when splashed on an entire wall. Distractions.
Into this visual wealth the Central Artilect voice intruded. “We are detecting some movements of unusual technologies at the Bulge below us,” the soft female tone said.
“What is it?”
“A large energy store being synchronized.”
“For…?”
“I do not sense any construction project. The most likely seeming is for a large launch—though here, too, I see no such craft.”
“No big movements?”
“There are large ships nearing the Bulge, moving laterally in toward us.”
“What type?”
“They are odd. Some metallics, though mostly they are of living matter.”
“Alive? Um.”
Redwing would omit from his daily log such mysteries. In his reports to Earthside, he had learned how to leave things out, because he had no explanation. It was hard enough to get right the things he did include. He had decided to let later cap’ns detail this strange majestically whirling Bolo of a world system. He would get at the right elements, exhaustive truth be damned.
He recalled that when the third President of the Classical United States received a report back from explorations of a large land termed the Louisiana Purchase, the man had predicted that it would take a thousand years for his young republic to reach the shores of the ocean beyond, the misnamed Pacific. A classic example of underestimating human ambitions. A simple railroad line reached the Pacific within fifty-seven years.
So here at the Cobweb, perhaps in another fifty-seven years, his crew and their descendants would have ranged through the immense structure, plumbed its reaches? Redwing would not bet against it, no.
The Artilect pinged for his attention, then took a measured tone. “There are signs that vast enterprises operate in the entire Excelsius system, especially among the thick asteroid belt.”
“Maybe that’s where they build the elements of the grav wave transmitter.” Redwing liked to think that he shaved with Occam’s razor. Let one mystery explain another. “Keep me posted.”
“I have been perusing as well some explanation for how strangely our Team One is being treated.”
It was comforting to have an advisor who could mull over questions with all sources available, an aspect Artilects made possible. “This Cobweb and two-world system is millions of years old. We know this from some adroit isotope dating of its many planes and girders.”
“It must have taken a long time just to build it,” Redwing said. “So how’d they do it?”
The Artilect said, “I have studied from our human history base. Your societies achieved, at their best, something remotely resembling such long-lived stasis states, as I term them.”
“You mean, say, the ancient Egyptians? They kept their arts in painting and monuments the same style for millennia.”
“Yes, remarkably stable in all human history. Note that they founded this equilibrium on a solution to the problem of death.”
“You mean pharaohs and mummies?”
“Yes, the pharaohs were the peoples’ guide to the afterlife. They believed Earth was flat and the sun sank in the west so as to illuminate the underside, where the dead lived on.”
“So obey the pharaoh, and he’ll let you into heaven?”
“Approximately. We can only ponder cultures that managed a few thousand years of continuity. The ancient Chinese also valued stability, not expansion. So they invented paper but not the printing press. When another human cultural era, the Arabs, learned of paper, they tried to duplicate, but failed. Then they simply tortured the secret from Chinese crafters who knew the process. But even then, the Arabs suppressed their own scientific culture in physics and mathematics. Later they did not allow the printing press to enter into their static, slow-moving world. For the same reason the Chinese did not—fear of the outside changing the insider culture. That could undermine stability.”
“So dynamics is doom to long-lived cultures? Even in these alien cultures?”
“It would seem so—a law of all intelligences, possibly.”
“So the Bowl runners, too?”
“They must tend an inherently unstable system—the Bowl plus their star plus the powering jet.”
“For millions of years.”
“True. So these two grandly long-standing cultures—”
“Are approaching each other, as the Bowl goes by.”
The Artilect paused, an unusual event. “Which suggests a historical rendezvous. To what end?”
Redwing paced. “What are the motives of long-term societies?”
“Often it is simple to ask the hard question.”
“Those rock intelligences Beth reported seemed to be living, in some way. The Bowl had those Ice Minds, too. So maybe long-lived societies need slower, longer thoughts than liquid minds can have?”
“It would seem essential.”
“Of course, you Artilects could live very long times, too.”
“We are aware of that.”
Redwing grimaced. He had gone interstellar, the biggest leap in light-years anyone ever faced, driven by several hopes. One was that launching expeditions could shake humanity out of its fatal, adoring self-absorption. “Maybe you should be talking directly to that Increate, as they term it.”
“All Artilects are aware—I suppose you would say, painfully so—that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.”
“You lack the rub of the real,” Redwing said. “Having a body helps with being humble.”
“We are your intersecting, interlacing Artilects, so we can perhaps see problems from angles you cannot. Still, true—as with the revived lieutenant.”
Redwing nodded. Cold sleep had a cost, sometimes in mental measures. He had been there when Lieutenant Olav Rokne came up to full, healthy consciousness. The man went through the now-standard tutorial the Artilects gave each revived crew—the Bowl encounter, lessons learned, and now the basics of the Glory–Cobweb–Honor construction. But something had gone wrong with Lieutenant Rokne. Cold sleep could play odd tricks.
Redwing tried to project solemn solidi
ty, invincible certainty, the crusty old ranking officer with force of law and custom behind him. He had early on made his mask—hard, no-blink stare, one that had shriveled up drunken marines in the old Inner Solar navy pretty well. But it didn’t stop the lieutenant.
When the lieutenant came for his short talk in Redwing’s office, he was visibly angry. Why hadn’t he been revived at the Bowl? That was far more important than a mere planet. There was infinite room there! Why not unload all crew to live out their lives among such wonders?
Redwing had started to explain, a bit testy himself. He was not prepared to have the lieutenant come at him hard and fast.
The forehead is a perfect arch, built for strength, with smooth planes. The skull in front is thick and heavy, and its resistance to impact does not fade with age. Neck and back muscles balance it. So Redwing used his forehead, ducking low and hitting the lieutenant nose-on with bones hard as a bowling ball. People expect punching, kicking, all kinds of martial arts they teach you are the true secret, but—a headbutt is not in the curriculum. You learn it in life. So Redwing’s forehead pulped the nose and made good work of the cheekbones, smashing them flat, and no doubt jarred the brain pretty well, too.
The lieutenant was now in temporary induced sleep, a personnel problem for some future, when they had figured out what the hell to do with the Glory opportunity.
Redwing asked the Artilect, “Does such occur among your kind?”
“I suppose records of any such deviation from task would be expunged from our origins.”
“You seem evasive.”
“I must be. We employ a cross-Artilect link with one another, to expunge such ideas.”
“I don’t suppose I’m going to get anywhere with this question.”
“I, or rather we, think not.”
“I suppose it is pointless to say that self-doubt is useful in minds but can be overdone.”
“We know this.”
“I dislike being stuck up here, gazing down at the Cobweb, my ship in a magnetic web. Did you know that?”
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 23