“Let us say, we have different aims in life.”
“Will that be of any danger to us?” Cliff asked. “We lost people all the way along, exploring the Cobweb and that moon, or rather your sister planet.”
Anarok said, “To keep the bark on the wood, Glory is dangerous everywhere.”
This was the first time the Captain of the skyfish had ventured a metaphor—apparently meaning to face facts—so Beth asked, “Why?”
“I have never been ashore there, so cannot say. There are secrets we should not know, legend has it.”
Cliff said, “Really? Why?”
Anarok paced, moving a bit gingerly against the increasing deceleration, seeming not to mind the rumbles and shakes. “You of Earthsystem have learned the first steps in the long history that led to our way of seeing life.”
Beth reflected that with much of the solar system inhabited and feeding resources back to the home planet, it made sense that a compound idea, earthsystem, worked. In the Cobweb, this became a lived dynamic experience, like wind on the skin, or the tremor in the ground from rushing fluids in huge tubes nearby, or lightning sensed through shut eyelids.…
Anarok said, “Planets and moons are where life came to be, but the worst places for life for mobility. Because a planet like Glory’s gravity is strong, life cannot escape from it without our help. Life has been stuck here, waiting for our ancient building of the Cobweb, for several billion years, immobile in its planetary cage. Yet some ancient events gave our forebears cause to relish remaining on Glory. These avoid the flavors and implications that we of the Cobweb embrace.”
Her face remained blank, implying nothing, but Beth noticed that her hands twitched a bit. This had the feel of a set speech, one Anarok had worked on, and now delivered with an air of stiff inevitability, a truth that had to be announced.
Having often enough on this expedition opened her mouth only to change feet, Beth decided to shut up. Anarok wasn’t going to go beyond what clearly were her orders. But … orders from whom or what?
Still, the Captain said in an offhand manner as she left, “I believe Glorians at times refer to the Cobweb as the Forest of Incandescent Bliss. But they do not come into it.”
Before Beth could figure that out, here came the stresses. The skyfish popped and groaned worse than ever. The wall views slowed but blurred from the air turbulence outside.
Beth felt herself sink into the wraparound brace chair. The skyfish’s floor had extruded for them, and now with a whisking sound it closed around her body as she closed her eyes. Their cabin had rotated to the right angle to endure the surge. They had made remarkable time getting here, since the skyfish got a burst of strong air pressure as they entered the tube. Then it was simply a fall: down they came, buffered so they did not bash into the transparent tube walls. Though inside the Cobweb’s atmosphere, the view had been strikingly clear, as Glory loomed ever larger. Now with some effort, Beth could turn her head and see the planetary curve arcing in the window. Stretching landscapes yawned, varying from high snowy peaks to a flint and lava desert.
As the air jet outside slowed them, extracting energy from the exercise in this narrow tube, she could still see tapering up and away the now far broader Cobweb base. Its exponential curve was more obvious here, stacking against Glory’s increasing gravity.
Beth sighed. She missed already the slow, oceanic pulse of the Cobweb. What spider had woven it? A billion-score mob of them … Somewhere in it, their frail little expedition had to find a place to live, thrive, grow.
Cliff said against the grip of deceleration, “Can’t figure how a high-pressure jet can slow us enough—”
—and didn’t get a chance to finish before he was answered. A monotone voice, no doubt artificial, said, “Now engaging our conducting skin. The magnetic field coils around our conduit tube will inductively couple to us, slowing our craft and harvesting the energy electrically.”
Cliff barked, “Ha! So—electromag braking, too. Should’ve known they’d do something smart.”
“Thrifty, too,” Beth added as the grab of the brake took hold, pressing her down into the ever-clasping chair that seemed to know her body well. It even massaged her cramped areas, a delightful hum caressing her lower back. Where can I buy one of these?
Now she could see, as they fell, the great sweep of Glory. A filmy envelope above the curve of the world, and below that lurked an eggshell blue ocean. Towering cottony clouds dotted the glimmering sea, casting oddly angular shadows across its wrinkled shimmer. Each blazing white pinnacle had an echoing dark twin cast on the curved blue plain. Plunging down toward a brown continent, the Cobweb was an arrow of brute engineering. Knife-edge cloud wedges thronged around the Cobweb.
Beth clasped her headphones, cutting out the rumbling roar of the skyfish under stress. Unlike descent into a natural atmosphere, their transparent tube let her study the outside air. She studied the proud cloud-Matterhorns that steepled up so grandly. Now they descended through one, a cloud mountain that thronged with circling life. Huge birds, it seemed. Sharp-winged and yet puffy, like balloons. Maybe a slow predator, seeking some high-altitude prey, in that eternal dance?
They were coming in fast. As if it knew what she wanted to see, the walls close-upped the coming continent. Huge glossy-green forests, spidery river networks, mossy islands dotting them. Pregnant thunderheads glowered in purple. Cloud chains along the land-sea edges, blooming like vapor mountains in the sun’s radiance.
“We’re coming in damn hard,” Cliff said, voice tight.
Beth found she could not even speak against the force pressing her down. But suddenly she saw above an elaborate water-web of flow channels a snap of immense lightning. The forking yellow arced not to the ground but to a tall silvery tower. Just beyond that was another identical spine of metallic grace, and within an instant, it, too, got hit with a bright hot-yellow bolt. They’re harnessing the lightning. Taking energy from the big rotating generator that the Cobweb makes, whirling through Glory’s natural magnetic field.
This, atop the Cobweb system that used gravity as an energy storage-and-release system, with valves that would not let much air pressure uselessly escape.
“Thrifty,” she murmured, to calm herself as they slammed down toward the surface at blistering speed.
Glory’s horizon flattened as they plunged. Clouds ripped by outside their transparent tube. Virga fell in silvery veils between massive decks of ivory vapor. In the distances, she saw low mountains, nothing like Earth’s Rockies or the Himalayas. A flatter world, then. Over the hills, a rising wind wrinkled the milky sky.
Cliff’s voice was strained. “We’re not slowing enough.”
The crushing deceleration crushed her chest, but she managed, “They know … what they’re … doing—”
But not so. Here came the hilly plain, far too fast. To all sides, the Cobweb’s downward swoop broadened. But they were zooming toward the plain—
“Ahhh!” Cliff cried.
She added a shriek to his.
They headed in. The land rose up and slapped them in the face—
Darkness. Black all around them. They were still decelerating hard. Kilometers above a broad lit landscape.
A long moment of confusion. Cliff said, “What the—?”
They burst out into full brilliant light. Falling above a platform rich in vegetation. Beside pillars thick and gray, rooted below and nailing into the roof above.
Beth looked up at a glowing ceiling. An approximation of sunlight poured down from it.
Cliff said, “It’s another sphere inside … inside what we thought was Glory’s surface.”
“Yup,” was all Beth could manage to say.
More gadzookery awaiting.
THIRTY
THE HOLE WEAPON
Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about. That’s simply prudent.
—ROBERT CONQUEST’S “First Law”
Redwing and Viviane carefully tracked th
e flow of cargo out from the main coupling port. Redwing cast cautious eyes over the swarm that glided by them. All around them were life-forms moving inward, coasting into a subtly lit volume too large to quite grasp. Hundreds of meters yawned away, all around, fully thronged. It was hard to track moving vectors in all three dimensions.
Like damn near everything in this cockamamie system, he thought. Hard to get the feel of, if you evolved on a flat plain, held down by gravity.
Twisto led them as they floated out into a confusing mélange of clacking small spiderlike workers, oblong animated oval packages, furred and tailed and awkwardly angled things. Through this storm of shapes, they went into forking side tubular passages that led away into blue-green profusions.
“The air’s fresh,” Viviane said, giving a sniff that was, Redwing noted with pleasure, both deft and dainty. “So this place—this big being, like the last one—was also tuned for humans?”
Twisto gave his smothered chuckle. “Parts of it only. Our biospheres resemble yours, except we have more complex proteins. So tuning here is a minor matter.”
“How come?” Redwing asked, frowning. Compared with Viviane’s sublety, he wondered if he was overdoing the martial masculinity bit.
“Similar convergence of chemical evolution,” Twisto said with a professorial air. “Surely you know all similar worlds share this, down to and including your planet-bound earliest ‘humans.’”
“So what do we do here?”
“To speak with those who directed that you come here, O Captain, we must move onward and be careful.”
Viviane asked, “To save our skins?”
“Your skin?”
“I guess you don’t have skin, just fur.”
“It does not seek my fur, no,” Twisto said.
“And who is ‘it’?”
“What, not who. You must experience it to know.”
Redwing used the moment to simply watch the plethora gliding by. A memory stole over him from long ago, when in late teenage years he had begun backpacking by himself. He had been an ambitious, focused, son-of-a-bitch competitor. But being alone in nature taught him that the really satisfying things are offered free, for nothing.
So he began going out in the fall for a little hunting, mostly deer and grouse. He would wait silently for the game and meanwhile saw the white veil of frost on the grass and the leaves turning delicious reds and yellows as they rattled in the swooping winds. A day in the hills alone, watching a crimson sunset and later, over a crackling campfire, a silvery moonrise—these mattered. A darting bird in the wind above a stream murmuring in the woods—all the most fundamental elements hominids had evolved for were free to everybody.
Now he was immersed in this enveloping, natural strangeness. Floating, trying to take in all three dimensions in constant motion—dizzying. Yet somehow it felt comfortable. The Glorians had evolved in utterly different directions, yet now their creations mustered contentment within him. That in itself was odd and should disturb him … yet did not.
He noticed that in zero-g, his gut was pooching outward now in a way that, in a more enlightened country like, say, Classical France, would perhaps be considered virile. Here it just looked fat. He was trying to take this all in when his comm buzzed.
It was Mayra on an audiovisual-compressed signal. Amazing that the tightbeam could pick them out at this range, buried inside a huge creature that no doubt absorbed submillimeter waves readily. But maybe there were conduits in the meaty walls of this huge place, to let signals through.
With a few touches, he could explode her face view into the air in front of him. The voice was scratchy but clear enough.
“Captain, SunSeeker, I’ve been trying to get feedback about the black hole you say was launched at us. I gather the Glorians somehow accelerated their black hole, using as propulsion mass some of the Bowl renegade ships it passed through. Quite a feat, turning your victim’s structures into fuel as you destroy them! We don’t have equipment in the colony to sense it ourselves. The Bird Folk aren’t responding, and the Ice Minds pretty well told us to butt out.
“But! I’ve got a squirt on navigation from the Folk Council. Their expectations are holding true. Just verified in finer detail what you guys found incoming to the Glorian system. There is virtually nothing in even the Excelsius inner Oort cloud.” Mayra waved her hands, raised eyebrows. “Nothing! Nothing but the black hole array.”
Viviane was watching and said, “As before?”
Twisto was watching, too.
Redwing paused it—he’d hear it later. He explained that as they had come barreling in past the grav wave transmitter, their distant, many-frequencies scan of the volume turned up no sizable chunks of mass. Back in his young days, Redwing’s trial ramscoop voyage into Earth’s Oort cloud had checked standard theory and found the entire cloud had maybe a hundred Earth masses of comet heads—asteroids and iceteroids, most of them a kilometer or less in size. Trillions of them orbited in long lazy curves. But not around Excelsius at all.
“So the Glorians scooped up all those trillions and…” Viviane’s eyes goggled a bit as she thought. “And made them into black holes? Don’t believe it.”
Redwing laughed. “Doesn’t matter if you do. They needed a convenient source of compressed mass, way out from their star.”
“But how? Start with ice and rock…” Her voice drained away.
“Slamming it all together, somehow.”
“Some pretty impressive somehow. That must have taken—”
“A million years? More?”
Viviane looked unsettled. “Must be more. We’ve had cities for less than ten thousand or so years. That’s nothing compared to … this.”
Redwing put his arm around her in the zero grav. “Recall the basic SETI equation by Drake? The big unknown was the lifetime of a tech civilization. Well, now we know of two with immense lifetimes—the Bowl and Glory. Both huge artificial constructions.”
Viviane rolled her eyes. “You said the Bowl was over sixty million years old. I don’t believe it.”
“Do. Point is, this built-out Glorian system has to be a million years old, at least—just to get a grav wave transmitter built, by slamming masses together to make the black holes. First they had to collect the Oort cloud’s trillions of iceteroids, shape them, do the smashing.”
“This is hard to even think about,” Viviane said.
“Yeah. Never mind how hard it was to actually do.…”
Twisto had listened to this intently. He leaned back and arranged himself, six muscular limbs folded in a complex cross-legged posture. His pelt was thicker than the Twisty one, and shimmered in ivory waves. He began to speak, soft and melodiously, of times so distant that the very names of their eras had passed away. The heavy-pelted, many-armed beast told of how long ago, Glorians had heard of greater intelligences in the vault of stars, through electromagnetic messages, some quite ancient. How they had fallen back, recoiling from blows to their deepest pride. The alien minds were both strange and grand, to the point of incomprehensible and overpowering. Many such had motives impossible to fathom. “So we Glorians tried to create a higher mentality through spreading intelligence through many species.”
“Overpowering?” Viviane asked softly.
“You have a word: off-putting. That, yes. So at first, we—or I should say, they—failed. As befitted so vast an intention. Even carefully forced evolution demands large volumes, many experiments.”
“So you set to building the Cobweb?” Viviane pressed.
“True, while we—I speak here of many species—tried many approaches to the spectrum of astuteness, to acumen along different axes of the clever.”
“More cooks, thinner broth?” Viviane ventured.
“Some would say such,” Twisto said, waving away the question.
They were near a large frothy brown bush that gave off an aroma oddly like cooked meat. Redwing sniffed and frowned. He was a bit hungry, so—
Twisto slapped a broad hand
on Redwing’s shoulder and pulled him effortlessly away. Twisto shushed them and pointed. A small darting ratlike thing with a large snouty head came foraging by in a drifting trajectory, sniffing, ignoring all but the meaty smell. It fanned its legs, slowed, lingered … and the bush popped. Sharply pointed seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and jerked away.
“Another victory for the plants,” Twisto said. “That scavenger will carry the arrow seed for an enjoyable while. Its body will nurture the tiny stab seeds in return for its narcotic sap. It will die happily. Then a fresh bush will grow from the rat’s body. So you see, we have fairly intelligent plants.”
Viviane said, “Should we consider catching that rat for meat, and not incidentally for the narcotic?”
Twisto’s eyes danced as he said, “You joke. Thank you.”
“I doubt we have learned much more about Glorians—your kinds—than your bit of history just now,” Redwing said.
“True.” Twisto plainly pondered how to put the next words, which came out slowly. “Our judgment of your arts and sciences—handsomely delivered in myriad texts, by your generous courtesy—is that you learn best by example. You generalize from particulars. Not by abstractions—which, after all, is what language is.”
Viviane said, “I always wanted to see some problems worked out. When I’m learning physics, give me an example I can wrestle with—is that what you mean?”
“More that you must experience our ways, our lands, and let our approach seep into you through that.”
“School of hard knocks, seems like,” Redwing said sharply. “We’ve lost crew members to predators.”
“And to process,” Twisto said, “as when your expedition encountered the Increate.”
“They burned to death,” Redwing spat out.
“I fear you are approximately right,” Twisto said.
“Approximately—!” This time Viviane flared.
“I mean they were not fully gathered in.”
“Into what?”
“A more nearly permanent form.”
“Where? How?”
“In the Increate. I do not know in detail the precise method used. Though it did seem to go awry.”
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 29