Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  Redwing now recognized a signature of low-grav evolution of both plants and animals: Don’t worry about leverage, max out circulation of fluids and air.

  Viviane hungrily reached for one of the ripely blue fruits resembling teardrops, only to have a spider knock her away with a vicious kick. Twisto, though, lazily picked two of them, and the spiders backpedaled in air to avoid it. He wondered what musk or gestures Twisto had used; it seemed scarcely awake, much less concerned.

  “We tailored this raw food for your species,” Twisto said, offering chunks of the ripe fruit he had somehow sectioned out with a single quick stroke; maybe the arms had a knife appendage? They ate, ruby juice hanging in droplets in the humid air. Redwing looked around, wondering at the slantwise opportunities. Corridor canyons rimmed in shimmering light beckoned in all directions. This thing was truly immense. “Wonderful,” Redwing managed. He had watched many Bowl wonders from aloft, back there in time. This was here, immediate, full of smells and sounds and lived-in alien reaches.

  Viviane and Redwing tugged on a nearby transparent tube as big as they were, through which an amber fluid gurgled. From this anchorage, they could hold steady and orient among the confusing welter of brown spokes, green foliage, metallic-gray shafts, and knobby damp protrusions from all angles. Three-dimensional moving in a crowded space was a tough job for land-loving primates.

  Around them, small animals scampered among knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting visible yellow farts with a tart taste that wrinkled noses. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry, momentum along every vexing vector.

  “Lots of razzmatazz,” Viviane said eagerly. “What do you think is going on, inviting us here?”

  “Dunno,” Redwing grunted, telling true. He was trying to take in all this hurry-scurry, see what was behind it. Fieldwork; not what he really knew.

  He was glad for the pause. They had demanded rest before taking off toward this odd, apparently living ship. Sleep cycles still ruled for primates immersed in completely different astral clockwork. He and Viviane spent their sleep time not getting a lot of it. They had showered and then fell to touching and tasting and finding that it felt new and good, each gaze and gasp returned, each succulent savor driving their desire for more, sating and kindling at once. But they were more than two centuries old, by the clock, so they had taken their time. He wanted that again, soon.

  “Come, please,” Twisto said. He cast off smoothly, and they followed down a widemouthed, olive green tube.

  Redwing was surprised to find that they could see through its walls to green layers beyond. Raw sunlight filtered through an enchanted canopy. Clouds formed from mere wisps, made droplets, and eager cone-shaped emerald leaves sucked them in.

  Twisto darted away, out of the tube. They followed hand over hand into a vast volume dominated by a hollow half-sphere of green moss. A bar of hot yellow sunlight reflected and refracted far down into the living maze around them.

  Twisto was eating crimson bulbs that grew profusely in grapelike bunches. Viviane reached for some—and the bulbs hissed angrily as she plucked one loose. All bluster—the plant did nothing more as she bit in.

  “We can’t be sure this ecosphere works for us chemically,” Redwing said.

  Twisto shook his head as he beckoned them into a more narrow passage. “Not so. We have tailored it for the helicity of your proteins and other chemical aspects.”

  Redwing said, “This whole big ship?”

  “That is why the ‘ship,’ as you term it, took a while to develop its internal chemistries—at least, here, where we dwell. We did not wish to endanger you, and so sorted local working biological patterns to fit. This we can readily do, for our abode is rife with many species, and one must be hospitable.”

  Redwing tried one of the purple bulbs and liked the rich, grainy taste. “You brought us here for some purpose, I suppose?”

  “Surely.” Twisto lazily blinked, a ruby tongue lolling—which seemed to Redwing oddly alarming, wolfish—spun playfully in air, clicking his teeth in a disjointed rhythm, and seemed uninterested in answering in detail.

  “This is a product of the Cobweb?”

  Twisto yelped in high amusement. “No, far older.”

  “Somebody planned this that long ago?”

  “Some body? Yes, in that era, the body planned—not the mind.”

  “Huh? No, I mean—”

  A surge of momentum set them all awry. The ship was accelerating, and tremors rippled the walls. Redwing and Viviane held on to some sturdy yellow shrubs that grew out of the wall. Long, shuddering bass notes rang through the air.

  Twisto seemed to enjoy this. He let the stuttering momentum changes bounce him around, giving off a cackling approximation of laughs. “In far great antiquity, there were beasts designed to forage for iceteroids among the cold spaces beyond the planets—ooof! Such were of the commerce which built the System Solar. Economics, you would call it. Trade in volatiles—huunh!—and metals rare, molecules of great use to the glory days of Glory—ahh! Those ancient life-forms could breed. More copies always needed. They knew enough of genecraft to modify themselves. Forced evolution—ah! Perhaps they met other life-forms which came from other stars—I do not know; such truths are long buried—uh! I doubt that it matters. Time’s rude hand shaped some such creatures into this—oof!—and then came the quickening.”

  Twisto managed to punctuate each phrasing with a bounce from the walls, relishing it all.

  Viviane held on with effort and asked, “Creatures that gobbled ice?”

  Twisto settled onto a sticky patch on the wall, held on with two legs, and fanned his remaining legs and arms into the air, letting the bounces ripple his trunk. “They were sent to seek such, then spiral cargo into the inner worlds.”

  “Water for—?”

  “Glory, in its quickening era. Damages had decreed a dry planet, as I recall from our scattered history. The outer iceteroid halo was plentiful, and much employed.”

  “Why not use spaceships?”

  “Of metal? They do not reproduce.”

  Viviane looked skeptical. “These things would give birth, out there in the cold?”

  “Slowly, yes. Our forebears brought about the great opening-out, culminating in vacuum life. On Glory as on your world, life crept from ocean to land, and then to sky. The next great leap could only come from intelligence, which could escape the sky into vacuum.”

  “How’d they make it?” Viviane persisted.

  “Sunlight falls inversely with the square of distance from a star, yet volume increases as the cube. So greater realms provide niches for life to harvest sunlight, on ever-larger platforms, fertile fields. They could then use the resources of vacuum versus pressure, the weightless building of bodies. Immensity was easy. Plus a delicious freedom of slow-gliding movement.”

  This Twisto had a penchant for poetry, Redwing noticed. Which might mean he knew how to use his growing grasp of Anglish language to conceal, as well. “How long are we talking about? To make a deep space ice-eater, I mean.”

  “Time for evolution is deep, a million or more of your orbital periods. Circumstance has worked on it. More so than upon your kind.”

  “Is this big space, uh, fish, smarter?” Viviane asked.

  “You humans return to that subject always. Different, not greater or lesser.”

  Viviane said, “I figured it must be smarter than us, to do all this.”

  “The same impulses apply to all such intelligences, I would judge,” Twisto said. “For you primates as well as our minds, what was once terra incognita becomes, inevitably, mere real estate. So we move on, governed by the deeper imperatives.”

  Viviane held on as the ripples in the tube wall gradually faded. “What?”

  “I speak of, to use a train of your short words, entro, evo, info.”

  “What?”

  “I like to collapse your somewhat cumbersome words, you see. So that entro denotes entropy, the process of increasi
ng disorder, as in your second law of thermodynamics. Then evo means evolution of living organisms, absorbing energy and thereby resisting entropy. Then evolution devises that info—or information—when collected and processed in the nervous systems of these organisms, enables them to wage their war against entropy. This is the grand—what would your word be?—ah yes, grand opera of all intelligences—”

  “Where’s it taking us?” Redwing cut in.

  “To meet with others of its approximate kind.”

  “Who pilots it?” Viviane pressed.

  “It flies like a bird, without much conscious bother—much as you walk by falling, then catching yourselves. And it thinks long, as befits a thing from the great slow spaces.”

  “How does it fly? To orbit—?” The question spoken, Viviane stopped, as they all saw the answer. Their tube opened on the vista astern. They now shot above and away from the linear Cobweb colossus. At this distance, Redwing could see why, incoming, they had chosen the name. The silvery helical strands glowed with reflected sunlight, binding and supporting. A thin haze hung beside it against the black of space, dimmer than stars but more plentiful. There was a halo around it, a busy bee swarm like fireflies drawn to the structure’s immense ripe wealth.

  They watched silently. One mote grew as they sped near it. It swelled into a complex structure of struts and half-swollen balloons. Sinews like knotty walnut ribbed it. Fleshy vines webbed its intersections. Other moving dots lay fore and aft of them, some spinning slightly, others tumbling.

  But all were headed toward a thing that reminded him of a pineapple, prickly with spikes but also bristling with slow-waving fur. Around this slowly revolving thing a haze of pale motes clustered.

  They watched an orange sphere extend a thin stalk into a nearby array of pale green cylinders. It began to spin about the stalk. This gave it stability so that the stalk punched radially through the thin walls of its … its prey, Redwing realized. He wondered how the sphere spun itself up, and suspected that internal fluids had to counterrotate. But was this an attack? The array of rubbery green columns did not behave like a victim. Instead, it gathered around the sphere. Slow stems embraced, and pulses worked along their crusted brown lengths. Redwing wondered if he was watching an exchange, the cylinders throbbing energetically to negotiate a biochemical transaction. Sex among the classical geometries?

  But they saw now that only parts of the huge thing were solid. Large caps at the ends looked firm enough, but the main body revealed more and more detail as they approached. Sunlight glinted from multifaceted specks. Viviane realized that these were a multitude of spindly growths projecting out from a central axis. She could see the axis buried deep in the profusion of stalks and webbing, like a bulbous brown root.

  She recalled Twisto’s remark about words robbing mystery, and just watched.

  “Hold to the wall,” Twisto said quickly.

  “Who, what’s—? Oh. Grab, Captain!”

  The spectacle had distracted him from their approach. Now the fibrous wealth of stalks sticking out from the axis grew alarmingly fast. They were headed into a clotted region of interlaced strands.

  In the absolute clarity of space, he saw smaller and smaller features, and realized only then the true scale of the complexity they sped toward. This thing was as large as a mountain range. Their cone was a matchstick plunging headfirst into it.

  The lead limbs struck a broad tan web. It stretched this membrane and then stuck. Another huge green catcher’s mitt had damped the bounce.

  Viviane asked, “What is this?”

  “A larger consortium of minds and bodies. It desires to swallow us, yet again, along with your primate knowledge.”

  “Swallow?!”

  “And digest, in a friendly way.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  BOUND FOR GLORY

  Beth lay still while her nanoplague protection ran in the suit/body interface. It was time, after a long stay in the Cobweb, to let it update and check. It gave her prickly feelings, like a deep itch. Her heart thumped as she watched the view go by, and slowed as the methods calmed her.

  She needed it. She and Cliff had told the skyfish operating system to give them absolute privacy. “Propagation privacy,” she had told Anarok, hoping the subtlety would work. Maybe it had; she always wondered how much subtle surveillance these aliens used, despite assurances to the contrary from Twisty and Anarok. It had been a while, too.…

  Their lovemaking had a fervor with an edge of desperation neither had quite realized until it fell on them like a sudden storm: to build a separate world together, fast enough, close enough, deep enough, slow enough, hard enough, sweet and tender—and only them in it. A dazed look had spread on both faces, as if in the aftermath of being hit by a hasty truck, though with no broken bones apparent right away.

  “Great, isn’t it?” To Cliff, she gestured at the transparent walls of their cabin. They were in nearly free fall down a transparent pipe, the route Anarok had found for them. Some parts of the great skyfish biozones were moldier than a bag of sweaty socks left behind in a gym locker, and on purpose. Humans steered clear of those and their odd inhabitants; there were aliens here she didn’t want to study or even breathe near.

  Outside, the vistas were stunning. Dwelling platforms the size of continents yawned to all sides of their cabin. They fell toward and then through them with accelerating speed, drawn by Glory’s grav. She had now seen thousands of enormous living plates, coasting by at high speeds of several kilometers of altitude per second. By now, she and Cliff had gotten used to and overcome their elemental fear of slamming into a landscape, then popping out on the reverse side, seeing the plumbing and support struts of the underside in a glimpse dwindling overhead—and then here came the next, often utterly different landscape, and they were falling toward it, too, even faster. Bound for Glory …

  Not all the plates were done. One vast tan mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness. Huge stretches of simple grasslands lay beneath passing purple storms. Rock shelves were bare of life. It was as if, with all the materials for world making assembled, some Creator had desisted, gone away, and left everything on the point of being brought together. Works in progress. Little life lingered on the arranged mountains, plains, and plateaus. The country seemed still waiting to be made into a landscape hosting life.

  But most plates teemed with green wealth. Jungles, forests, deserts—all glided by. Her suit nudged her with This near-zero-g causes volume changes in your cerebrospinal fluid found around the brain and spinal cord. We are correcting for this. She ignored its buzzings. You should not indulge in such acidic foods, her underwear informed her, and she waved it all away.

  Here was wonder on fast-forward. Glory’s yellow-white sun slanting through the Cobweb flushed pale streaks of light across each plane. Amid some ruddy forests, a deep run of color like blood seeped. Sunbeams like luminous knife blades cut through thunderheads. At the far edge of plates, the sun rose out of nothing, a sunrise like the head of a great blazing eye, until it cleared the woody rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent, glaring at them.

  As she and Cliff let their suits work, their Artilect links yammered on about what they sensed. Using time-delayed signals to SunSeeker, the sights-sounds-smells cataloging rushed on. To her, the surrounds poured in and overflowed her heart until speech was useless. Leave it to the ’Lects to do the stamp collecting part of discovery; she wanted the lived one.

  Beth let her mind sop it all up. She wanted to walk straight on through the reddish grasses and over the edge of the plane she was seeing just now. Stride to the limit, on a world that bespoke the feel of the flat Earth illusion the ancients had suffered. Stride to the lip and gaze, as some had imagined Columbus would, at the limits of human exploration.

  “Ship!” she called. “Adjust visuals.” She had the wall system—an amazing contrivance that now took her voice commands—close-up the distant plane edge. Something like a tawny hawk sailed over the plane
edge, making slow shadows on the waving grass. The image of an edge to life somehow made her feel complete. Their comfy-couches were clasping them more firmly now as the skyfish decelerated. The walls and floor rumbled, and Cliff said, “Here comes the end of the dive.”

  As if reading his mind—which Beth would not rule out, seeing the biotech the skyfish routinely used—Anarok appeared, waved two arms. “We will now experience turbulence as the jet plume strikes us.”

  The wall shifted spectrum. The air flowing around them now showed purple traceries of slipstreams. But the lazily lapping lines now furled and flexed. They spun off small bright vortices that grew in the formerly smooth streams. Turbulence was slowing them.

  Cliff said, “I get how you let gravity get us down—simple straight fall, picked up ten kilometers per second on the way down. But what’s this jet going to do?”

  “We have been pushing air aside, all the way down,” Anarok said. “It brakes us. Now the Glorian fluid manager system directs a supersonic jet at us. That robs away our descent energy.”

  Cliff looked unconvinced as he eyed the whorls outside, getting brighter by the second and glowing with a more virulent purple. “So we get how many g’s?”

  “Only two, but for hours.” The skyfish Captain did not look disturbed at all. She simply slanted the body to accommodate the total force vector in their cabin. Somehow its flexibility could avoid the popping joints and clenched muscles humans used in such straits.

  What body engineering, Beth thought. She said, “I guess we’ll have a reception group, the usual?”

  “There will be a few. Mostly the natives desire little contact with us.”

  “Oh?” Cliff frowned. “Why?”