Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  “I see,” Redwing said, though he did not. “I’ll come back soonest. I’ll do the visit and choose my counterpart now.”

  Redwing turned his attention back to Anarok. “Glory, we’ve got to know what or who is on Glory. Would you take my team there?”

  “Yes. I am allowed so, and have not ventured all the way to Glory, as you term it, ever.”

  “Why not?”

  “Historical secrets. The Cobweb, as you term it, is our refuge from the ancient elements of Glory. Even those who dwell at the base of our construction have little to do with those who lurk beneath. Exchange of raw materials, the flow of gases and fluids, that is all.”

  “Sounds damn strange.”

  “There is much shrouded strangeness in our past. Part of our culture, as you must by now at least glimpse, is living in the moment.”

  “Um, so Beth says.”

  “One of our most revered sayings is, ‘The moment is far better than our past.’ So be it.”

  “Can you handle the whole descent? Get them to the surface?”

  Anarok paused to calculate. “We can. It will be a leisurely trip. There are no main pipes running winds downward from the Bulge. The smaller pipes are falling flows. We can simply join the drop. This makes for a more comfortable descent. Mostly they employ the energy gain from simple gravity. After all, we ride a living balloon. We wish to relax in the slipstream flow.”

  “Oh. How slow?”

  “We would expect about three rotations of Glory System, unless we stop for points of interest.”

  Redwing was daunted. “We’ll have to get back to you on that. It’s not out of the question. We want to explore your entire system. We seek to plant a colony here and prosper.”

  “This is surely possible. I predict Glory will not be your choice.”

  “We’ll have to judge that. It’s closer to our native world’s gravity, for one thing.”

  Anarok’s head waved in a circle. Redwing wondered, As if to imply doubt? The alien said, “I appreciate that but distrust that will prove decisive.”

  “You seem to know our biology well. Language, too.”

  “I admire your many dialects. For example, I have accessed for study your acoustic files—sent as your ship approached, I gather. On Glory, if I may attempt a different vernacular in Anglish, ‘Aye sweah ta Goahd ya bettah noaht doo thaht.’ I refer to Glory here.”

  Redwing blinked, somewhat dazzled by the swift turns Anarok’s conversation could take. The alien had spun as it spoke, too, another ambiguous signal. “We’ll … see.” He did not care to try an answering accent.

  Anarok turned full face to him and bowed, as if in imitation of a formal Earthside occasion. “I and my crew shall gladly take you in our living vessel, which you term a skyfish.”

  “Good, thanks. We’ll see.” Redwing scanned the sky where his team cavorted.

  Time to assemble them, then. Issue orders. Be the cap’n.

  * * *

  Beth liked the luxury of just watching a vibrant ecosphere without significant gravity. This was immense volume, and so a blizzard of species wafted through the obliging atmosphere.

  Humans perch on the top of the food chain, so few notice that it isn’t particularly easy to eat a plant. Like most living things, they have evolved an impressive array of defense mechanisms to avoid becoming dinner. Plants here did the same, with new opportunities in low grav. Defensive thick bark, tough leaves, thorns, spines, poisons, as on Earthside.

  But here plants could move without much effort. They had bulbs that jetted out defensive fumes while they coasted away. Or spikes like springs that impaled animals on poisonous sharp tips, and recoiled them to safety. There was not a big distinction between plants and animals, if gravity did not come into play. In turn, aspiring plant-eaters had evolved ways around those defenses—long bills to access difficult-to-reach nectar while pinning the prey plant, for example. She watched one birdy thing impale a hexagonal plant with branches, grabbing it with ropy feelers. A Darwinnowing sky symphony, in constant restless motion.

  “Time I got back to the ship,” Redwing called from over her shoulder. “More aliens to meet.” There was a springy joy to his tone.

  It was hard to watch in all directions, and he had come zooming over to her from behind a writhing yellow-green forest cluster. He edged past a slowly dripping stream that fed a slimy trellis with tendrils of mossy wealth. Richly ornamented birds like spiders with wings nested there.

  “There’s something strange near the ship,” he said as he softly landed on the grassy ledge where she had perched.

  “Sorry you have to go,” she said. “This is an unsettling sort of paradise. I think we’d like to linger here.”

  “Take some R and R, then. What do you think those zingoes are?”

  “Some way of tracking us.”

  “Right. Stay away from them, I’d say. They’ve probably got good defenses.”

  “They look like a pure phantasm.”

  Redwing leaned in, eyes fixed on her. “I wanted to have more time to talk over the stresses you’ve been under.”

  “I’m feeling better. Time does that.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Redwing sighed. “Look, we’re explorers here, not fighters. We trained way back Earthside to do that—recon, analyze, make sense of alien things we have utterly no experience with. Not weaponry.”

  “It’s foolish to fight aliens on their own ground. But they chose to.”

  “For reasons we don’t know. Yet.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve commanded many kinds of ships, but none of them were fighters. Miners and freighters and later on, explorers. My favorite weapon back Earthside was a thousand-dollar bill. Got me out of plenty of bad situations.”

  “Wish that worked here.” Beth made herself chuckle. It didn’t come out right, though.

  Redwing nodded, seeming to know what she was trying for. “We have to go forward looking for solutions, not regretting the team members we lost. There have been thirteen who didn’t make it through cryosleep, so far—just to get us here. You lost less than that while getting something done, exploring.”

  Beth shook her head. “And we’re just getting started, reconnoitering this huge thing. Hard to be optimistic about our chances. We’re amateurs here, Cap’n.”

  “Optimism, right. A very useful adaptation, when you’re facing the strange. It’s not cheerfulness, y’know.” He winked at her. “No need to pretend that. Optimism isn’t really in itself an emotional state at all. It’s a kind of meta-problem-solving state. Travelers need a ruthless optimism.”

  “I’ve been in the field for years, counting the Bowl. Maybe I’m wearing thin. Or wearing out.”

  He leaned over and clapped her on the shoulder. “Nonsense. Making the best of things is what courage means.”

  “Maybe put somebody else in this job. Cliff—”

  “You two are a team. You have different talents.” Redwing sat back, studying the endlessly changing sky of vibrant, chiming life. “Earthside, plenty of people who think they’re sophisticated think being optimistic is for simpletons. That it means a somewhat obtuse intelligence. Others consider it at best the luck of biochemistry.”

  “Some logic to that. That’s why R and R restores it?”

  “Helps, sure. But to keep it, you have to keep in mind that optimism for a leader is a policy. To lead, you have to maintain that. Sometimes, like now, amid the blackest moods.”

  Beth felt a dawning resolution. It felt solid. “You mean optimism is a … moral position?”

  “For me, yes. Optimism is part of the job.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Right. Helps to say it out loud. Optimism is a skill.”

  Beth nodded. She listened further as Redwing went on about supplies, staffing with the new crew just arrived, what it might mean to go all the way down to Glory. She indexed all this away to think about later. But the feeling that now stole over her came from that surprisingly clear idea. Optimism is p
art of the job. Yes.

  Redwing finished and stood. “Look, I’m taking Viviane back with me.”

  “Oh. Ah, because she’s wounded?”

  “That’s part of it. I need somebody smart and quick to go along with me, to meet this new strange stuff that’s loitering near SunSeeker. She fits the bill.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n,” she said with just the right lilt to maybe suggest that Redwing might possibly have other motives, too.

  Redwing allowed himself a smile with a knowing side twist. “Long ago, I heard an old Arab motto, fits here. ‘Trust in Allah but tie up your camel.’ Keep it in mind.”

  This time she actually did laugh, a big hearty one with a feeling of gratitude in it.

  She watched him go back toward the ferry craft he had come in. She had wanted more time with the old guy. More talk to steady her. To steady them all.

  Still smiling, she sat back to enjoy the spectacle. Here came the bustling, rustling sound of life in the gloriously raw. The slurp and click and hoot and pop and taps of many alien tongues. Nearby, the stream of pale blue hissed. A passing cylinder of burnt-orange forest gurgled and slopped. Something big boomed, a call like vast bubbles being blown in honeyed air. Clouds like white and violet ice cream mountains lofted solemnly in pursuit of something like a delicate fog, but with lazy wings. A feathery yellow tumbleweed rolled by, cackling.

  Paradise, yes, with a small speck of humanity in it.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SKYLIFE

  We don’t have bodies, we are bodies.

  —CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  Redwing readied himself for leaving the ship again. He had arisen this morning with aches and irks, the aftereffects of his time down in the Bulge. Weightless did not mean easy effort. It allowed and often demanded twists, thrusts, wrenching work. Muscles complained about doing something new, at his age.

  The Bulge, an apt name for such a huge construction. He wished he were still there, but duty called. He had woken with the vague thought, Gonna go do some stuff today. Right. That’s it. For varying values of “some” … He let himself laze a bit. Memories flocked to mind when he closed his eyes and recalled. He had to process the myriad striking images he brought back from that beguiling, huge biosphere. After many years in the rattling metal box that was SunSeeker, the exuberance of the Bulge was overwhelming.

  He recalled the air life, some shaped sleekly like dolphins and in packs eating trees that resembled octopuses. He could not sort out the categories there, but it had been eerie to watch. The slim, snaky predators would bite off the trees’ florid green heads, shake the trunks like bodies until the limbs like arms got flexible. Then the hunters slammed the treelike things, which were screaming in low bass notes, against the firm platform they grew upon. Break them into bite-sized pieces. All done in darting flocks within a few minutes. Horror and wonder blended together as he watched huge cawing murmurations of bright fleecy animals take wing from writhing foliage, floating dreamlike around him as Redwing scooted back to his shuttle craft.

  Dozy memories banished, he got back into his semi-military self. Shower, shave, dress, check with Artilects, done. A fresh cryocrew brought up safely, too; good—odd name, Cheech Beldone, from the Mars group.

  Now for another adventure, leaving ship again. After decades of rattling around its confines, the very idea of going exo was thrilling.

  He met Viviane at the air lock. She had properly gone back to her cabin, to suppress ship gossip. She looked none the worse for wear, sharp and snappy in a freshly printed uniform. She even saluted, with an ironic wink.

  They rode a smaller shuttle out to approach the long snaky tube of a Livingship—a term the Artilects had translated from a raspy Glorian tongue. This ship itself was a tapered cone with yellow and green flanges. As they neared, they saw a halo around the cone like fireflies in the ripe sunlight glow. The dots of shimmering light swelled into complex structures of struts and swollen balloons with sinews like knotty walnut. Fleshy vines webbed among them in tangled intersections. They passed some, so soon many lay fore and aft, some spinning slightly, others tumbling. The cone grew and reminded him of a sprouting pineapple, prickly with spikes but bristling with orange fur that slowly waved, as if bizarrely saying hello. Around the slowly revolving cone, a haze of pale motes clustered.

  The piercing shine of everything reminded him of how hard sunlight was, unfiltered by air. In the absolute clarity of space, he saw smaller and smaller features among the mites hovering like feasting insects. This revealed the true scale of the complexity they sped toward—as large as a mountain. Their craft was a dot plunging headfirst into it.

  They reached the cone and entered a yawning muscular mouth—which did not swing open or dilate but actually opened like a real mouth, minus teeth, complete with a fleshy pink look to it.

  A gray quilted membrane like a huge catcher’s mitt damped the bounce into rippling waves, circular wall rhythms racing away. The sudden, sickening tug sent his stomach aflutter. The lurching lasted for long sloshing moments, and then they were at rest.

  Viviane said shakily, “Rough … landing.”

  With a rumble, the shuttle fit into a berth slot. The mouth closed and some golden phosphor radiance flickered into a bright probing glow from all the walls. Pressures adjusted. Ramp popped out. Helmets on and suited, they stepped down—and there was a spindly alien with six arms and an oblong smile. Its body rippled in something like a greeting.

  Redwing said, “Uh, judging from pictures, you’re—Twisty?”

  “No, though I am a reconstruction of what that being you termed Twisty was,” it said. Pause, an attempt at an angular smile. It didn’t work. “I suggest you term me Twisto to make the point. I am here to guide you.”

  “To what?” Viviane asked, unclamping her helmet and sniffing the air. She nodded, okay.

  “Our many selves,” Twisto said flatly.

  Redwing noticed that this alien had improved pronunciation and tone in a few short sentences. Quick learner, then. “Look, Twisto—all that drifting stuff outside … alive?”

  “In a way. Are your ship bots alive?”

  “No, of course.” Viviane frowned and asked, “So are those bots?”

  “Not of metal, no. They do mate and use biochemical methods to do so. But even your bots can make copies of themselves.”

  Exasperation forked out in Viviane’s sharp tone. “You know what I mean when something’s alive.”

  “I am deficient in that,” Twisto said. “I am newly sprung from the former deep Twist-like base, to guide you.”

  Viviane snorted. “Well, if you don’t know what alive means, I can’t tell you.” Sometimes, Redwing knew, she was deliberately opaque. Maybe useful now.

  “Good,” Twisto said.

  “What?” Viviane shot back.

  “Talk is a trick for taking the mystery out of the world.” Twisto gave them a shrug and arced away, arms waving forward, so they followed, coasting into the cone’s interior.

  A fog-glow swathed the corridor. It furled open as they glided in. Redwing towed their baggage—food, manual gear, comm, the lot—in a bag on a short line. The walls sprouted growths like flapping ears, and beyond them coasted moving shapes. Redwing had to concentrate to realize these were alive … maybe.

  He was used to gravity that imposed flat floors, straight walls, and rectangular rigidities. Weightlessness allowed the ample symmetries of the cylinder and sphere. In the swarm of objects, large and small, he saw an expressive freedom of effortless geometries. Myriad spindly spokes and long limbs, wobbly rhomboids and slim ellipsoids jutted from the many shells and rough skins. Necessity dictates form, yes.

  Swiftly they cut through the insectlike haze of life, passing near myriad forms that sometimes veered to avoid them. Some, though, tried to catch them. These had angular shapes, needle-nosed and surprisingly quick. Redwing braced himself, wished for a sharp weapon—

  But Twisto waved these away and they obeyed. Redwing wondered how this wo
rked; Twisto didn’t seem to be using any tech at all. He put that aside to ruminate on when they got a quiet moment. If ever.

  A lurch. “We are a-move,” Twisto said.

  Viviane said tartly, “And just what are you?”

  Twisto laughed. “Not a what. I am not neutral, like the Twisty who met you. I am, in your terms, the inciter. The…,” pause for vocabulary, “… the male.”

  His face was constantly in motion, his expression changing in counterpoint to every twist and turn. It was a trait Redwing recognized, in a way: a storyteller.

  “I offer welcome from our great host. Besides us, it takes on cargo, as is its duty.”

  Viviane looked around warily. “What is this?”

  “A Goliath.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “A truly ancient term. I am translating.”

  “So what’s a Goliath do?”

  “It desires to swallow us. And learn while instructing.”

  “Swallow us? And we want that?”

  Crawly creatures worked busy around them. Many-legged, scarcely more than anthologies of ebony sticks and ropy muscle strung together by gray gristle, they poked and shoved their bulky cargo adroitly, forming into long processions. Redwing considered that these might be what smart ants became without gravity’s grind—furiously working insects the size of people.

  He and Viviane and Twisto followed the flow of odd, bulky cargo in green and orange. Redwing always found moving in zero-g was fun, though now he had quick moments of disoriented panic he managed to cover. The strangeness and possible danger made his pulse hammer and eyes dance. They floated out into a confusing mélange of clacking spiderlike workers, oblong packages, and forking tubular passages that led away into green profusion. The air was fresh and felt tuned for humans, he realized, and relaxed a bit. Only a bit, though.

  Viviane launched herself through the moist air of the great noisy shafts, rebounding with eager zest from the rubbery walls. The spiders ignored her. Several jostled her in their mechanical haste to carry away what appeared to be a kind of inverted tree. Its outside was hard bark, forming a hollow, thick-walled container open at top and bottom. Inside sprouted fine gray branches, meeting at the center in large, pendulous blue fruit.