Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  “What?! Use a black hole to take out an intruder. Overkill.”

  “Or multitasking. There is more we have detected. We now see a very-high-velocity jet coming from this hole. It is using the ship mass by drawing it into a disk around itself. This is a spinning disk of matter, guided by electric and magnetic fields. This makes a high-velocity jet fork out of one pole. That drives the hole harder still.”

  “To push it back out of this system?”

  “We can project its probable forward trajectory now. It is heading into the sector of the sky where the Bowl itself is moving.”

  “Take out the rogue ship, eat it, kill the incursion—then use that mass to go after the Bowl itself?” Redwing was appalled.

  “There is a certain admirable economy of effort to the idea, we must agree. The tiny hole has an electromagnetic self, as well. Something like our Diaphanous.”

  “So it has an intelligence riding along on it, too?” Redwing paused. This was getting to be a high-stakes game with rules he had never even thought about. “From their own forms, I guess.”

  “No doubt informed by contact with our plasma minds, from our solar system. Our neighborhood, as it were.”

  Redwing grimaced. “I recall that the Bowl visited here long ago.”

  “True, though details are concealed by the Bowl inventories, as nearly as we can grasp. The Ice Minds reveal little of their deep history.”

  “This is an old rivalry?”

  “Ancient agonies, we fear.”

  Redwing frowned. “And we’ve stumbled into it.”

  “A great human writer long ago remarked that the past is not over; it isn’t even past.”

  * * *

  Mayra, this message is for you and Bemor. Let Bemor decide where it goes from here.

  Your brigand ship launched from the Bowl is no longer an issue. The Glorian grav wave system launched a mini black hole, which caught up to the intruder vessel. The hole is eating the intruder. We can see the ejecta, driving the hole back out of the system. Mass is fuel for it.

  The black hole has been maneuvering since then, using the mass from the intruder as a jet. It’s too soon to tell, but we think it’s aimed to hit the Bowl. Moving damn fast. At best, you’ll get a near miss.

  See if you can get Bemor to tell you what happened during the previous encounter between Bowl and Glory. We’ll ask Bemor Prime. Maybe he’ll talk.

  Keep in touch. By now, the Bowl and SunSeeker are only a few light-days apart.

  Hate to think what that hole can do to you. Or how you can defend against it.

  * * *

  The vibrating skyfish reached the thick middle of the Bulge with tapering speed. Rumbles rolled through the flooring.

  On the large flow screen, Beth could see the blue-tinged whorls of deceleration turbulence. They were the size of small towns, curled around the skyfish to lessen the tremors aboard. How this got done was yet another physics mystery.

  The skyfish looped sideways as the local grav dropped to a few percent. Poppings and groans resounded through the craft. Flow velocity was max at the pipe center, and the exit tube the Captain chose was small, mere kilometers across. They passed through a series of step-down pressure locks—giant doors dilating in languid luxury. Beth and her team watched from the rear of the skyfish bridge as their ears popped and the big fish shuddered from pressure waves. Then they burst into full sunlight amid a bewildering complexity of platforms and shapes filling the vibrant blue-white sky. All in near-zero gravs.

  Captain Anarok turned to her passengers and said with multiple-hand gestures, “You and we have been inside our generous host longer than is best. I suggest we all”—grasping for the right word, her many eyes wandering—“frolic.”

  They left the meaty skyfish swimming in the silvery sky, and cavorted among the candy-colored jungle of the Bulge. In grav of a few percent, flying with some handily made wings attached to arms was simple. Bird thou never wert … until now.

  Beth found it all to be dreamlike, in pigment schemes of pink and gold. Moving trees sporting primary-colored party dresses glided by. Creatures enjoyed no grav constraint, so they saw things they named snoutfish, bonnets, flateggs, fedoras, bug-angels. There were animals like elongated triangles, a whole array of shapes that seemed aerodynamically impossible but geometrically familiar—rhomboids, cones, strips, red flying isosceles triangles with wing flaps, sucky tubes, buckyballs, and structures layered like unfolding onions that peeled open to eat.

  From her perch on a giant soft leaf like a wide balcony, she watched breakers of airstreams bursting in sheets of spray across the silvery Cobweb struts. Rectangular birds sang in resonance with this, greeting sunlight’s tilt with notes like cornets muffled in velvet. The lack of horizon or limit gifted the eye with shifts of scale and perspective, with tinkling splashes and sunstruck fireworks. Time and again, she thought, Gotta be some kind of trick, later realizing that reality is under no compulsion to make sense right away.

  Though humans still adapted poorly to near-zero grav, here artificial selection had made oddities everywhere. Animals galore: one orange pyramid pealing like a bell, an oval scampering thing calling like a disembodied guttural vowel, a slow water-tugging ratty creature scribbling leisurely across the yellowing sky, leaving a foggy trail.

  Right behind it, maybe in pursuit, came a table shape that stamped its hieroglyphs across the hazy clouds, using puffball purple clouds. Distant huge things like purple sharks with flashing fins came ripping by. Her team hid, small fry indeed, scared of the razor grins. In a spherical refuge like a firelit mangrove swamp, rectangles dipped into flowers with smacking lips, then flew off like lazy postage stamps.

  Cliff hovered beside her in this lofting circus. The team glided and flexed in the air, where gravity was a mere suggestion. “How often do we get the opportunity to see a warthog playing the harp?” he said, gesturing toward a swarthy thing making a ringing music from a constellation of tight strings in three lattices.

  Beth laughed, for the first time in quite a while. “That doesn’t come along nearly as often as it should.”

  The smart performer coasting across the velvet sky did indeed look piggy enough in snout and trotter, and lavishly tusked, too. Yet its eyes gleamed with a quick intelligence. It even smiled at them.

  Viviane had come out with them, using leg wings to spare her still-aching arms. She called, “There are a lot of fevered intelligences here.”

  Beth angled in alongside Viviane and called across the air, “Captain Anarok says talking to them demands more work than we can put in right now. Her kind, the species in the shapes like Twisty, can speak to us. These”—she waved, a broad sweep taking in the seethe of the sky—“are not equipped to do so, or maybe to bother.” Beth pointed to balls of birds that swooped and swerved together. “But sometimes the same old ideas get selected for. See? Bunching as defense against predators.”

  One of the big sharklike things came darting down. It scooped up some flapping prey from the edge of the bird bunch. The swarm must have numbered in the thousands, and they scooted away, the air filled with cawing conversations. This distracted them all, so the slim shape coming silently at them from behind was a surprise.

  Viviane was the first to see it. “Look—it’s one of ours!”

  The same landing craft they had taken into the Cobweb, apparently. It came gliding in, and its lower ramp extended. Beth felt an odd trembling in the metallic parts of her gear and realized that somehow magnetic fields were guiding the ship. It came to within a few meters, a hatch opened, and—there was Redwing.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  LANDS OF FLIGHT

  I would rather be pushing 1 c than pulling 1 g.

  I dream of being out in the Black,

  not down here in the Flat.

  —MARK O. MARTIN

  As he came down into the Cobweb’s atmosphere, through the high magnetic fields and compressed ozone layer, Redwing watched the long silvery cylinder swim toward him, a tilted s
et of layers. Valleys on the sundown side of the planes sank into darkness. A chain of snowy hills shone briefly. Other glinting shapes in the Bulge glowed red-orange, like live coals, where the sunlight caught their rotating facets. This was a moist vastness of air and layered lands, a wealth far grander than mere planets could muster.

  The Bulge platforms were wider than Earth continents and alive with sparkling enclaves. Immense shadows could cleave the clouds, which formed and dissipated like ghosts in a steam bath. The smaller moving landshapes left wakes among the decks of vapor, like those of ships on an ocean. Tropical thunderheads glowered where droplets formed, lit by angry lightning flashes, like wars between colossal gods. Elsewhere in the filmy atmospheric depths, cottony whitehead clouds recalled to his memory the blooming buds of white roses in gardens of Louisiana, long ago. Ice cream castles graced the seething air. They descended to the axis of the Bulge, vectoring toward the skyfish. What had seemed to be mere specks only moments before loomed large, and as the ship passed by them, Redwing saw the specks were the size of megacities, bristling with buildings of every imaginable shape.

  Redwing recalled from Beth’s team report that the Increate had played a Bach Brandenburg—no. 3, Viviane had said. The very rocks and rills of this giant construction now knew human cultures, then. If it was true, as some poet said, that one can’t look out upon a sunset without sensing divinity, then the Bulge’s vastness made such a sensation mandatory.

  It was also true that one couldn’t close the door on that sunset and enter a darkened chapel where the organist played one of Bach’s toccatas and fugues, without sensing divinity. The music of Bach disturbs human complacency because one can readily understand infinities in its presence. As someone or something had known, when Beth’s team trod the Increate on a mountainside.

  In the studies Redwing had to make to qualify for this expedition, he pored through the old controversies about sending messages to aliens. In those distant days, messages inscribed on disks and plaques got attached to outward-bound spacecraft that might coast by a star in far-future eras. When asked what message to send, someone had said, “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.” Then he paused and added, “But that would be boasting.”

  But Bach had never thought of such majesties as those Redwing beheld now. One object he took at first for a vehicle: an ellipsoid bubble, apparently glass, smaller than the skyfish and drifting almost toward them. No motion inside. It didn’t carry some ambassador, then. Worth investigating later.

  As he stepped off the landing ramp and embraced his ground team in the feather-light gravs, he kept up his semi-stern cap’n face and voice. This was not a nice-guy moment; he reserved that for private talks. They had a meal of sorts, courtesy of the staff aboard the skyfish that loomed large in the distance. They all sat around on a stony formation and ate, like a picnic. Food first, always a good guide when the hard stuff lay ahead. Tasty, too.

  The most sensitive was his private talk off to the side with Beth.

  Earthside, people hired funeral directors to face death for them. No such distance came in the field. Beth and the others had faced it on the Bowl, buried the bodies, and moved on. Redwing had prior experience, in his outer solar system work. Here it was different, and he eased into the conversation to see how to release the tensions as best he could. A severe rash of team deaths shook the whole command structure. Their life force tried to push through the suffering and grief, and having a consoling word from a cap’n might help. Beth came first and gave him a feel for the whole team.

  He knew not to tell them it would get better in time. It would, but you did no good saying it. Memories lose their edge by fading. The press of events steals the sting. Certainly don’t say the dead are in a better place. Especially when you don’t think they’re anywhere at all, because that will come through in your voice, face, or somehow. Just don’t.

  All this transpired while the team got some relaxed rest, within view of where he and Beth sat. Beth nodded as he spoke, sighed, face complex in its moving expressions, emotions escaping in twists of lips, pinched eyes, arched eyebrows, jutted chin jabs.

  Beth concluded their talk by looking him straight in the eye, taking a deep breath, and saying, “I resign my post.”

  “Nope. You’re going on.”

  “My team holds me responsible.”

  “And so you are. But I can’t think of anybody here who can bring more field experience to bear.”

  “How about Cliff?”

  “Nope. You’re a team, and I won’t split you up.”

  “Cliff could take over—”

  “No. You’re a more natural commander.”

  “Who lost team members again and again.”

  “In unknown territory. Happens. The thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

  “No kidding!” She snorted. “So why go to Glory?”

  “Scope out this whole huge thing. Go to the origin—the bigger planet. We need to get a good general picture of what’s up here, why we can’t pry explanations out of these aliens.”

  “By going down to Glory? I hope that will tell us something.”

  “Hope is not a strategy.”

  “So what’s a good strategy?”

  “Go and look. The old three rules: move, shoot, communicate.”

  “Shoot?”

  Redwing grimaced. “When you have to, of course.”

  “Any protocols?”

  “Talk to whoever wants to. They’ll send a replacement for Twisty.”

  Beth sighed, nodded. “I think Captain Anarok is their more subtle delegate.”

  Redwing nodded. “I’m sure of it. They read you, then acted.”

  “Because I came to hate Twisty.”

  “Whoever is behind all this knew that. So they had Captain Anarok come in, take over, expel Twisty.”

  Beth laughed, tensions coming out in sharp barks. “Excrete him, yes.”

  “I wonder if that killed Twisty.”

  “Looked pretty fatal to me. Say, who is behind all this?”

  “Haven’t the slightest.”

  “You haven’t gotten transmissions from other sources in the Cobweb?”

  “Nope!” Redwing slapped his knees and gazed out at the 360-degree spectacle unfolding before him. A singular, odd joy went ricocheting through him. He was here—at last. In an alien wonderland.

  That glassy ellipsoid was getting attention from several of the Away Team.

  “Why? Makes no sense.” Beth was getting irked. “They got our whole goddamn culture!—sent on broadband tightbeam, fer Chrissake.”

  Beth’s anger boiled out in spurts, and Redwing let it. Sat back in the low grav that gave him a light-headed elation. “They’re playing their cards close to the vest. They tried to wave us off, with those cartoons of Superman getting beaten up. We came knocking on their door anyway. With the Bowl cruising by within striking distance. Look at it their way. Some kind of rough past with the Bowl.” Redwing paused, trying to see how to make this point work. “A past kick-ass smashup that happened before our species even evolved.”

  Beth blinked. “Uh … right. We can’t grasp what it means to be a civilization that old. Plus, alien!”

  Redwing hunched forward, reached out, took Beth’s hands in his. “They have grudges going back to before the Neanderthals. We have to step into that.”

  “How?” Her air of officer reserve slipped away, leaving a face lined with a brooding cast, a sadness in the eyes.

  “By reading the silences.”

  “Uh … meaning?”

  “Listen to what these damn mysterious Glorians don’t say.”

  “Gather data?”

  “Gather understanding.”

  * * *

  Cliff knew by ancient rumor, from far back when the SunSeeker’s crew selection started, about Redwing. He watched from a distance as the captain talked to Beth and could tell from her expression—which he close-upped on opticals—that he was working her out of her troubled
mood.

  The big captain was from one of the families that had made a bundle out of the Native American casinos. So good schooling in state schools, at least. Add that to how he’d breezed through MIT’s snappy engineering and astronav program, leaving a wake of friendly fans and surly enemies. Made his big-time rep in the runout of Mars exploration and asset-mining exploitation. Then he got swept into the asteroid boom, when Redwing had run robot worker teams, assisted by massive nuke autofreighters that took the long-orbit goods downslope in the solar grav field—metals and rare earths and oxy, water, methane. That was when cryosleep got worked out in animals and then people.

  That century-long economic wave, plus the fusion impulse engines, good reliable long-flight biospheres, a will and a way—and presto, the interstellar dream opened wide. Who would command them, considering the duty cycle? Awoken several times to check, repeated cryosleeps that could be fatal. No real hope of ever returning. The best candidate habitable planet dozens of light-years away—Glory. Redwing had been a real son of a bitch, sure, but only a son of a bitch would be likely to apply. The man had few lasting loves and no real family.

  Cliff knew he was going to have to follow stiffer orders, now that Redwing had come down. Fair enough. This would be a different Redwing than the shipbound captain who watched his ground teams but had never descended.

  While Redwing spent a long time with Beth, the team lounged for a bit in the low grav and warming sun. Half of them were playing around the glass ellipsoid as it drifted past.

  Cliff dozed.

  Then Beth came out of her session with Redwing, and The Man Himself emerged.

  “You’re ready to go down to Glory?” Redwing asked, sweeping away all the saluting stuff with a mere glance.

  Cliff decided to let this go with a shrug. “Sure, Cap’n. Got to cover the whole ground.” He knew not to mention the horror and surprise of it, and the beauty and the strangeness of it as well. Redwing did not look in the mood for second thoughts.