Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  “We have long suspected so. You voiced such sentiments while in holding patterns above the Bowl.”

  “Right—I’m a ‘boots on the ground’ guy. Only I’ve spent over a century as far from real planet dirt as you can get.”

  “We so know.”

  Enough. Artilects could be canny and evasive. Redwing broke off the conversation.

  He had always known and long tried to conceal that he had a nagging problem with the, as he termed it, gray dog. A little cloud he waded through … the porridge feeling. It could be kept at bay if he just kept moving: voyaging, leading, just doing things. When he stopped—long ago, during an Oort cloud delivery of mining robocorps, crewing in the Alpha Cen backup voyage and return—the gray dog cloud would crash in. He had learned to fight it, and not just by doing more. Mostly, he had straightened himself out by going into long hikes and sails on the vast Pacific, down Earthside.

  But it also taught him something about being a captain. It was easy to think that the person steaming ahead is just fine, when sometimes they are simply trying to outrun their gray cloud. Or maybe, he thought, this was that sort of Wisdom of Age that mostly resembled weariness.

  How I will die out here? he thought. What disease or surgical procedure would have him in its tarantula grip? What indifferent and weary ship nurse would witness his last breath, his last second, the impossibly fine point to which his life would have been sharpened?

  Or … maybe that Increate thing had a better idea.

  TWENTY-SIX

  INTO THE BULGE

  If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

  —T. S. ELIOT

  Beth’s comm on the bedside table beeped. Cliff felt a spark of irritation. Of all things that cannot survive an interruption, heartfelt kisses ranked near the very top. Erections, more so.

  “Aaargh!” His head flopped back and he looked at the ceiling of skyfish flesh, warm and pulsing.

  Beth blew an exasperated puff of air upward. “Technology strikes again,” she said. “Just when our little seminar was getting interesting.”

  “Seminar? This was an advanced lab.”

  “I’ve got to get the team together. Let’s breakfast here, on some of the fabulous little appetizers I brought along from last night’s dinner.”

  “I thought you were the appetizer.”

  Beth laughed. “You seem to have forgotten that last night, we fell asleep in our fave way.”

  “Bliss not soon forgot!” Cliff rolled on top of her. She laughed. “You have the eyes of a doe and, as you showed with that tussle with Twisty, the balls of a samurai.”

  “Y’know, there’s no gold star for extra effort in this.”

  “There’s fun, though. Recall, shall we, the goal? That a baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.”

  Beth gave him her sardonic look, right side of mouth twisted down in a curl he found sexy. “Or maybe just, hey, we’re going to need a replacement pretty soon, so…”

  “We’re each over a century old, so this is needed exercise.”

  “Ha!” Beth sprang to her feet in one fluid motion. “Getting less grav already. We’re fully out into the Cobweb.”

  “Suddenly it’s back to biz again.”

  “You bet. Gotta get up to the bridge, see what we’re getting into.” Beth arranged her hair in a field-smart updo, twisting the strands to cohere, eyes distant.

  A black ball about the size of Cliff’s head was hovering a few meters away. Wings on either side of the ball fluttered invisibly fast, making a faint buzz. “I think that means the Cap’n wants to see you, too.”

  * * *

  On replay, Redwing carefully watched the skyfish ferrying his ground team. It lazily entered the huge ground complex at the base of the Cobweb. At this range, he had to use SunSeeker’s highest-resolution, integrated optical system to get enough definition. Comm with Beth’s team was spotty. The skyfish entered the sprawling complex, ran under a vast tube, jumped upward, and was suddenly out of view.

  Redwing pictured fan blades in the tube.… Nah, it was too big. Only a series of pressure locks could work. They could use the downward pressure of other tubes to drive the upward flows. Intricate fluid mechanics, on the scale of a minor continent. The whole hydraulic system was far larger than Earth itself. Whoever—or rather, whatever—had engineered this was batting in the same league as the Bowl Builders.

  Only hours later did the survey Artilect pick up a possible skyfish detection. The angle of view collapsed the seen skyfish profile because SunSeeker’s system was looking down a steep angle. Data processing took long minutes to composite an image. It sprang onto the screen before him, and Redwing realized he had been holding his breath.

  There it was—moving fast along a transparent tube. Data ran on the screen edge, telling him the skyfish was already moving at nearly a thousand kilometers an hour, inside the flushing pipe that spanned several hundred kilometers width. “A pressure return system?” he asked.

  “This it appears to be,” said the Survey Artilect. “It is larger than the previous flow system they used to reach Honor.”

  “What goes down must come up.…”

  “At appreciably higher velocity, yes.”

  “Seems to me the team is pretty demoralized by their losses. I picked up plenty of muttering and swearing from their suit mikes. They thought they had them silenced. Beth, too.”

  “They have incurred serious loss.” No affect in the Artilect voice, of course. That was a way to say, Up to you, Cap’n.

  Redwing was used to the Artilects’ carefully tiptoeing around human personnel matters. Centuries of Artilect development had built social codes into them. Plus they honestly did not fathom social signals; they weren’t social intelligences, after all. More like solitary narrow geniuses, with some communication skills, so they could hand off problems to other, similar Artilects. “Beth is headed for the Bulge region. I don’t expect they can stay away from whatever that Twisty character represents, but some R and R is a good idea.”

  “I have no opinion. This is not my province.”

  “I know it isn’t. Those odd big ships headed inward toward us, what do you think they mean?”

  “Some other aspect of this entire solar system commerce, it would seem. Why they are living systems, we do not fathom.”

  “Right. I think I have to talk to Beth, her team, maybe replace some.”

  “This is not my province.”

  “As you said. Or is that your analytical voice?”

  “I am not privileged to analyze your role as captain.”

  “Damn right. I’ve been stuck in this damn ship for longer than any human ever lived—counting cryosleep, anyway. An explorer who never explored. Who never sucked in alien air. Got his feet dirty.”

  “I suppose that is true.”

  “Don’t go all polite on me. I’m just venting.”

  “This is not my province either.”

  Redwing frowned, growled, paced. His restless mood came from uncertainty, a cramped, clamped mood, plus a body full of no coffee. “Sometimes I wish you could sass some. Give me some pushback.”

  “This is not my province.”

  * * *

  Beth’s view from the skyfish bridge was hard to grasp. The skyfish itself trembled, shook, popped, and groaned. Standing on an unsteady deck, she tried to take in the panorama beyond.

  Outside, the rushing air made the sunlight ripple like looking through fast water. In the dim distance, she could see gray walls of the enormous pipe sweeping them along. They were flying as fast as a hypersonic plane. This transparent fluid return pipe was as big across as one of the smaller of the Classical United States of America, maybe a bit less. Meanwhile, her team was buried in the warm, moist flesh of this great beast. Alien surrealism. She blinked, taking it in.

  “Illustrious guest Elisabeth, you can now, after your fulsome rest, witness our hastening airy voyage,” Captain Anarok said.

  Beth said, “Impre
ssive. Large. So is your vocabulary.”

  The Captain bowed as if from a formal play. Beth recalled that SunSeeker had sent torrents of human culture, including many films and books, and no doubt Captain Anarok had digested them. Anarok said, “You generous primates have conferred upon our grateful selves so much bounteous cultural treasure, vast and various, that we would be rude indeed not to use it in our fulsome discourse with your ripely elegant selves.”

  “I admire your speed of learning our roughly built language.” Beth bowed in response as she said this, then let the outside spectacle capture her. She turned on her highest recording capacity, for later transmission to Redwing.

  “An education in precious oddities, it was,” Anarok said simply. “I gather your equally curious garment of sheep hair is not enough to support your mammal heating.”

  “Uh, this wool? My sole Earthside remnant.”

  Beth did not want to get into a clothes discussion with an alien who apparently needed no more than some fur. Not the moment for gal talk across the abyss of interstellar evolutions, no.

  She gazed out at the onrushing view. Life in the ultrafast lane.

  Furiously fast, here came one of the planes. It rushed at them, a broad landscape stretching away, outside the walls of the big pipe. Beth could see this plane of the Cobweb was varied in stony grays and glossy greens, some steep slopes like the High Sierra, peaks rising above prairies of bright yellowing grassy richness.

  Their speed made her flinch as the skyfish zoomed through the knothole up ahead. Her eyes told her it was like falling helplessly into the ground. Unsettled, her stomach answered. She gritted her teeth to hold back panic. Her last image before they shot through the hole in the plane was a glimpse: a strong wind whipped a froth of pearly fog across the dark stony lands.

  Then they popped out on the other side. She watched the broad plane fall behind. The upper face also had rich lands of green fields and odd, twisted ivory hills. They were in a zone of the Cobweb where life could cling to both faces of the plane.

  “What’s local gravity?” Beth asked.

  “We are at approximately a tenth of the Honor level,” Anarok said. “Soon enough comes what you fresh ones term the Bulge. A rather ugly term, I should say.”

  Beth mopped her hand over her face, wishing to wipe her cares away. Stay focused, she reprimanded herself. “That’s how it looked on our approach. We call that moving cup riding on the exhaust of a star the Bowl, same reason.”

  Anarok said, “You have been everywhere.”

  “Not yet,” Beth said, “but it’s on my list.”

  “We shall deal with your errant Bowl soon, I gather. A bandit element nears us at high velocity.”

  “I know nothing of that.” Best to be the diplomat.

  “We shall soon be at the—” A string of long trilling tones. “—you call the Bulge.”

  “What’s our plan?”

  “To linger where it is best to recover from your … events.” Anarok’s limbs folded along her torso. Her sucker of a mouth rippled. Her several eyes looked like dried peas. Reading an expression into all that was impossible.

  The airscapes rushed toward them. An eyeblink brought the next one closer, filmed with gauzy clouds. Looking aside, Beth could see the star Excelsius brim at Glory’s edge, shedding sunbeams along the axis of the Cobweb like pearly white brushstrokes flickering with their speed.

  “What does your term for this entire long cylinder translate as?” Beth asked.

  The Captain made a gesture of calming, her mouth working. “I would say, from the older texts, ‘a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time.’”

  “How beautiful. These platforms off to the side—”

  “We are entering the lower gravities. Some wish to dwell in smaller patches. These are easily suspended with buoyancy.”

  Anarok waved her several hands in an artful way, and the entire view shifted. The scene had been the simple forward prospect of the skyfish, but apparently this was an artificial effect. Now the focus was telescopic. As they furiously moved forward, it narrowed focus and brought up views of the flat areas suspended beyond the transparent pipe walls.

  Plus, more now: other objects swimming in the distance. Gossamer threads and colossal reflective spheres, tetrahedrons, cubes, rings, cones. A twisted architecture like a Möbius strip. Other geometric solids popping along, some with exhaust trails, spilling across the huge sky.

  Beth said, “This is sure some gadzookery.”

  The Captain said, “Lesser gravity drives evolution of exotics. I am of a conservative species, with humble genetics extending undisturbed back for longer than we have good data.”

  “Your species is not from here, the Cobweb?”

  “Oh, we evolved on Honor, for the most part. During the Building Era.”

  Beth could hear the implied capital letters. “How long was that?”

  “Let me calculate.…” A pause while Anarok’s eyes went distant, roved a bit, then snapped back to attention. “Longer than your species, which I gather was … about half a million of your years, including parallel, earlier variants, the slope-browed ones.”

  “Neanderthals, we call them. Really ancient. This Cobweb took—”

  “A bit longer than our own species, yes, and far more than yours.”

  Beth watched the Cobweb’s Levels fly by at these speeds, through rippling currents of the compressed fluids bearing them at vast velocity. Continents skating into view, shimmering in sunlight, then falling behind. The skyfish trembled beneath their feet. Hollow booms echoed. Sonic pressures adjusted in waves of ping, thump, and rrrrrh. Her team rustled nervously and ate well, served by the crew, as an anxiety release. Plus the food was aromatic, fat, and tasty after years of lean shipboard fare.

  She saw Levels pass in review, like regiments of troops. Some were deserts, others tropical green paradises. Moisture made the difference. Some Levels sucked much from the tubular array, others less. The skyfish was in the largest and apparently fastest of the axial pipes. From it, side exit pipes sprouted, distributing air and liquids to lands sprawled on the planes.

  How Glorians decided which got what was unclear. The big difference here was that all Levels got plenty of sunlight, filtered by the outer ozone layer sheath, but in the long rhythm of the gyring worlds. Half the orbit, they saw brilliant sun, then plunged into a days-long night. Not the biosphere she knew Earthside, and for sure not the enormous lands cooking beneath the Bowl’s star. Here there was a layer of gold in the dull air hovering over a continent-sized garden. There, a floor of black foliage with spouting blue cloud decks, a ferment rich in confusions.

  So, as the Levels swept by, she saw similarities. Many forests were silvery—good reflectance to stay cool. Yet when a layer was heavily clouded, forests were greener, softer looking. They must have trained plants to regulate their temperatures by adjusting their reflectivity. Smart shrubs!

  “I thought I’d seen it all on the Bowl,” she said to Cliff, who was just arriving on the bridge. “This is a designer biosphere, stacked in a cylinder.”

  He grinned. “Galaxy’s biggest building, I’d call it.”

  “Um. Swinging around a star. A grand gavotte.”

  “I got lost coming here,” Cliff said. “There are some dank parts, smelled like a wet sheepdog and dead skunk had a fight.”

  “How is Viviane?”

  “I stopped to check her, ran the basic med diagnostics again. Holding up. Her arms look better. Bit cranky, as who wouldn’t be?”

  “Eating much?”

  “Minimal. She doesn’t like the grub here much.”

  “It’s decent, basics of proteins and some carbos. Tasty water…” Beth looked out at the spectacle and mused, “Since there are no natural forces that can do the jobs of cleaning the atmosphere here, how do they manage it? It’s tough, preserving a livable temperature, or recycling wastes.”

  Cliff shrugged. “They oversee all those processes themselves.”

  Beth
said, “This structure is big—immense!—in both size and time. So how have they kept so much wildlife when Earth didn’t?”

  “They built more room.”

  “Or they built more wildlife?”

  * * *

  Redwing watched the screen blossom into ruddy colors. The rogue ship from the Bowl had come back around the star, heading out now from its nosedive into the inner system. But then something hit it.

  “Looks bad,” he said. “What did that?”

  The Survey Artilect said, “Something tiny. We could detect only a slight plume approaching the ship—coming from behind it, in pursuit.”

  “What visible signatures of it, then?”

  “The rogue ship began spewing vapor, then debris. It seems something is tearing it apart.”

  “How?”

  “There are additional X-ray and even gamma-ray flashes—no, wait. I have just resolved the issue, by converging spectra. The rogue ship is being devoured by a black hole. I can see the radiation signatures from infalling mass. These display extreme Doppler shifts.”

  “Like that black hole radiator we saw on our way in?”

  “Apparently somewhat smaller in mass. But a black hole.”

  “Hell of a big weapon to use.”

  “Perhaps there is an artful message in this,” the Artilect said with a tone that Redwing knew denoted careful word choice. Cognition did not equal computation, the craft of the Artilects. Humanity through long centuries of trial and much error had learned that you do not even want cognition to equal computation. Do that, and you are getting in the way of making computation do things that are of genuine interest. The Artilects knew this, too, now. They had learned more artful tricks, buried in the endless narrow-band laser transmits from Earthside. But they were still software strings on electronic tracks inscribed in holy silicon.

  He said carefully, “‘Don’t come here’ seems to be the message.”

  “We of the conferring Upper Artilects”—here the tone shifted, getting stiffer—“using latest spectra, believe the incoming rogue ship was followed by a black hole. That small hole overtook the ship and is now eating it.”