Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  Through the stone came haunting low notes like great booming waves crashing with aching slowness upon a crystal beach. It was playing the ceramic sand like a resonating instrument. He felt the notes with his whole body, recalling a time when he had stood in a French cathedral and heard Bach played on the massive pipe organ. The organ sent resounding through the holy stone box wavelengths longer than the human body, so the ear could not pick them up at all but his entire body vibrated in sympathy. It was a feeling like being shaken by something invisible. Maybe that inspired the medieval mind with spiritual longing? It conveyed grandeur in a way beyond words. The structure rose, tolling like an immense bell that used mere humans for the slow, swinging clapper. And indeed, it was a cathedral, gray and majestic.

  It invoked mystic chords of memory, of Gothic splendor with pointed arches, ribbed vaulting, and flying buttresses. Human memory.

  Their team had automatically backed away. “This is supposed to reassure us?” Cliff called to Beth.

  She waved it away with “A greeting card, that’s all.”

  Bemor Prime said, “Your kind has a saying applicable here. It is not what you find—it is what you find out.”

  Twisto added, “You can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of. Story is more important than policies. Those who built and inhabit this realm have hard differences with we of the, as you term it, Cobweb. They display these now.”

  Cliff watched the looming replica of an ancient Earthside structure as it groaned and settled. Nobody approached it, and indeed, the doorways were seemingly solid stone, too, so no entrance. He reflected on a lesson hard learned on the Bowl. First contacts were like particle physics: the act of observing changed the thing observed. The explorers’ first step—revealing themselves—forever altered those they had come to study.

  And here came clouds of odd-shaped birds, cawing like writhing mists. Their profiles against the streaming yellow shafts of sunlight were oblong, angular, sharp, and curving all at once. The nearer shifting shapes had the cutting eyes of hunting birds, glinting in their eager search.

  Bemor Prime said, “This shell would be in total darkness without artificial lighting. Penetrations must be minimized, as they are the likeliest points to fail over the long run. Large windows are likewise out of the question. But artificial lighting, color, intensity, and patterns in time and space provide an infinite palette of choice.”

  “Why hide underground?” Cliff demanded.

  Bemor Prime ignored him and shuffled out before the rest of the team. He boomed, “Such as we creatures need light to see. Plants need light to live. We who adapted to oxygen worlds only use about a sixth of the instreaming—mainly in the blue-violet and orange-red ends of the spectrum. This much is the bare necessity. Infrared can control sensible temperature. The lights could always stay on in some places with eternal night in others, or cycle sequentially for simulating night. Or turn on and off worldwide all at once, if such as we like.”

  Cliff looked up at oblong wedges clinging to the ceiling beside glowing light panels. There were inverted buildings, too, and wavy hanging gardens. So the entire “ceiling” was living space, too, doubling the useful land area of this shell world. The biggest possible room, he thought. Not counting the Cobweb itself.

  “Why bring us here first?” he asked Twister. But the others were looking past him at—

  A strange red-skinned asymmetric being. Walking toward them. It had what looked like three arms. Oblong head. Two of the swollen arms began a rhythmic move. Big beefy arms rotating in their sockets. Making big, broad sweeps—except the third arm. It lashed up and down. Then that arm made a wide circular arc with a sharp snap at the end.

  Athletics? Cliff thought. Or some diplomatic pose? Ritual? Kabuki theater among the stars?

  The thing wore tight blue-green sheath-clothes that showed muscles everywhere. As it walked, everything was bulging and pulsing. The covering seemed sprayed on, showing at the top of the legs a big cluster of tubular—genitalia? If so, male. But, no, not between the legs exactly. Above them, where a human’s belly button would be. They, too, bulged as he watched. Genitals like muscles?

  The skintight covering ran all over the body, including the enormous gripping feet. But the arms and its head were exposed. Its head was triangular. Two large black eyes. No discernible nose, but three big holes in the middle of the face. They echoed the face’s triangle. Big hairy black coronas around each hole. Something like a weird round mustache. A large oval mouth. No expression Cliff could read. Two rows of evenly spaced gray teeth, incisors.

  “It wishes to escort us to a display they have prepared,” Twister said.

  Cliff considered the alien. Impossible to read intentions, of course. The head that looked like an Egyptian pyramid upside down—ferocious. Mouth twisting now. Its thin lips rippling with intricate fine muscles around the gray teeth. Now the mouth opened and the teeth clashed together. But he saw that the front three teeth in both rows were pointed. Had they changed while he studied the face? Evil-looking things. And the mouth had puffed-out lips to accommodate them.

  “These facial changes,” Beth whispered to him, drawing nearer. “Maybe their way of signaling … greeting?”

  “It would seem to be,” Twister said.

  “You don’t know?” Cliff asked.

  “We are seldom allowed into such precincts. This inhabitant seems a recent invention by the Methaners, as well.”

  “Okay, let’s call ’em the Trianglers, since they have heads like that. Now—where do we go?” Beth asked.

  The alien stepped aside and gestured with all three arms. They walked down into a blocky basin. As they walked away from the cathedral construction, it altered again. Twisto said, “Glory planet has an internal heat engine; it’s like a warm-blooded animal, compared to the smaller regions you have visited.”

  The ruddy rock stretched and groaned. Within moments, as the team moved warily, a high wedge loomed. It broke into pink human statues. These, Cliff’s inboards quickly identified—the four statue figures of the Modernity: Mathematics, Rhetoric, Music, Dialectic. He recalled them from a classics class, in long-ago undergraduate days. Earthside images, given as a gesture of friendship in a huge data feed as SunSeeker approached Glory. “They’re invoking our own history as a greeting,” Cliff said.

  Music was a frozen woman who hammered her little stone bells. Mathematics was a winged, big-brained bird that soared in flight, its graceful arcs implied in the streamlined feathers.

  Then Cliff saw the curved ramps at the bottom of the depression. They were hundreds of meters long. Or rather—he looked closer—it was one long swooping ramp. Glowing a faint orange. Around it were broad wedges of shiny metal, with projectors of some sort arrayed along the lengths. The bulky glistening frame surrounded the ramp.

  Bemor said, “A Möbius strip, in your language. In ours, a twist-twirl.”

  The softly glowing Möbius strip was as large as a soccer stadium. It rose and swooped with a metallic shine, its surface somehow shimmering and shaking as though seen through water. Fluxing air?

  The strange Triangler spoke in a guttural tongue. Twister translated, “They wish to display their state of knowledge.”

  “Of geometry?” Beth asked.

  “Of gravitational quantum effects.”

  Cliff asked, “A strip of some metal?”

  “No,” Twister said. “We of the Cobweb regions know of this only indirectly. We are seeing not a metallic thing at all. Not even solid, in its way. It is a space-time foam.”

  “Oh. Uh … What’s the purpose?”

  “Finding ways to flex space-time on a small scale without huge masses.”

  Beth asked, “So … to make a better grav wave radiator, then?”

  “If possible. There is quantum mechanics involved at a fundamental level.” Twister bowed as if in apology. “I scarcely understand it, for those who built it”—a gesture at the bulky Triangler— “communicate little.”

/>   Cliff said, “But they’re showing it to us.”

  “Yes. I have never seen even an image of such as this.”

  Bemor Prime said loudly, “The wavelengths of the twist-slide dynamics are the right size. I have been informed of such ideas from the scientists of my Bowl of Heaven.”

  The whole team kept together and approached the big strip. It gleamed and fizzed with an inner glow. Cliff smelled the prick of ozone. A thin humming came from the thing.

  Cliff recalled being injured out at the grav wave emitter. The whole array was small, but its effects were huge—and had damn near killed him. “To bend space-time takes big masses, yes?”

  “Not so, it would seem,” Twister said. “They have in this model shown that quantum mechanical entanglement, properly used, can have short-range gravity-like effects.”

  Beth sighed. “Um. Skip the physics, shall we?”

  Cliff read her expression and knew that Beth had decided to mess with Twister and the alien. She sprang up and curled in air, landing on the Möbius strip. Her settling down was soft, dreamlike. As if in slow motion.

  He did the same—a jump, curl, soft landing. He felt a dizzying lightness. Gravity perpendicular to the strip was about half an Earth g. But the strip wasn’t level with the floor here. Beth walked forward gingerly. He followed. Springy, with an odd buzzing sound from their boots.

  Twister and the alien Triangler froze. They plainly had not expected this.

  Cliff and Beth walked farther, so strolling ahead took them sideways. Dizzying—seeing the floor as tilted, not them. Local grav on the strip was always down toward their feet. Somehow the strip compensated, nullifying gravity locally to be always straight down to the strip surface. He and she negotiated the twist carefully. Small steps. Cliff’s alarm bells sounded, because he was now at a steep angle with respect to the floor alongside the strip. His balance senses and his eyes contradicted each other.

  He closed his eyes. Step, step … and all seemed well.

  Only then did he notice Twister speaking to them. Calmly, patiently—as if talking a jumper off a ledge. Cliff ignored the words. He felt giddy.

  “Be right there,” Beth said. She ventured a short, choppy trot. He followed. Somehow moving made his senses calm.

  The whole strip was a few hundred meters in length, and he jogged and watched the big room tilt as he moved, still feeling perfectly all right.

  Around they went, a trot of a few hundred meters. The world outside the strip turned. Beth laughed and so did he. A thrill!

  Here came Twister and the rest, watching them with worried frowns. The Triangler was stoic but interested, its big head turning with their every move. She and he jumped off, landed. “Presto!” The humans applauded. Bemor Prime tried to clap but mostly hooted.

  “You were not frightened?” Twister asked, arms folded as if anxious. “I would be.”

  “Why?” Cliff asked.

  “You were perhaps not aware that the strip is an entirely entangled quantum state. It uses a mixture of such interlacings, like microscopic rubber bands. Nuclear levels become intermixed with gravitational levels, since both are quantized. They enable an association with gravitational effects.”

  Cliff frowned. He never liked all this abstruse stuff. It made SunSeeker’s engines run in some way, but he never followed the details, the theory, or wanted to. “So?”

  Twister spread his arms as if all were obvious. “The entanglement can rupture! Maintaining a thoroughly entangled quantum gravity state is delicate.”

  Beth frowned, too. “So? It felt like just a running track.”

  The hulking Triangler apparently had translation capability. It stepped forward, its muscles rippling all around the massive body. All three arms swung in complex arcs. It rattled out a rasping long series of notes.

  “So they designed it,” Twister said. “They studied our athletic methods. To make you comfortable.”

  Cliff persisted, “So?”

  “They wished you to remain untroubled.”

  “So?”

  “If the state ruptures, it releases all the gravitationally locked energy.”

  Bemor Prime rumbled at the Triangler, “You truly have such technology?”

  “Never mind that,” Cliff said. “So damn what?”

  “If you had disturbed the path too much, it would have released its energy. That would have killed us all.”

  Beth shot back, “You never thought to maybe mention that?”

  “I followed the preferences of—” Twister gestured to the huge Triangler.

  In the astonished silence, Bemor leaned forward and said, “How was it otherwise, my dear human?”

  Cliff put his arm around Beth as she said, “Like an illustrated reverie.”

  Cliff grinned. One of the reasons he loved her so, through all this chaos and stress she bore, was her ability to still be enchanted by this grand spectacle, both terrible and splendid.

  THIRTY-TWO

  FUNGAL

  Ring the bells that still can ring

  Forget your perfect offering

  There is a crack in everything

  That’s how the light gets in.

  —LEONARD COHEN, “Anthem”

  “Message from Mayra Wickramsingh,” the Communications Artilect said in its dry voice.

  Ashley Trust snapped out of a doze. He had been right to turn down joining Beth’s team. They were in some kind of jam down there. The Captain was out of contact, too. Shipside was a pleasant place to be, standing an easy watch.

  The massager was still strumming along, working his back muscles. He looked around SunSeeker’s little gym, found the holo-stage with a blinking signal. “Great! Play it!”

  “It’s for the captain.”

  “The captain. Have you got through to him? Or Beth Marble? Or anyone?”

  “I last had contact with Captain Redwing two hours and six minutes ago. He accepted the previous message from Mayra on the Bowl. Since then, nothing. Since four hours fifty-four minutes ago, nothing from the Away Team under Beth Marble.”

  “I’m bored,” Ash said. “More to the point, what can we do to help anyone, locked aboard this ship? Give me that message.”

  “You must wait. This message is for the captain.”

  Ash said, “‘Ye have scarce the soul of a louse,’ he said, ‘but the roots of sin are there, / ‘And for that sin should ye come in were I the lord alone, / ‘But sinful pride has rule inside—ay, mightier than my own. / Honor and Wit—’”

  The Artilect asked, “How long have you known that override code?”

  “I learned it after I boarded.”

  “I must obey, but the captain will learn of this.”

  “Of course.”

  Mayra sounded haggard, raspy. She looked it, too, when the display shifted from the view. He had never met her, but her face had deep worry lines, mouth twisted into a sour angle.

  The photo looked as if it had been taken from behind a black hole. The Bowl looked warped, seen through that. Ash squinted—yes, the hole’s gravitational effect was distorting the Bowl. A filmy blue-white glow surrounded the black hole, shaped like a fat doughnut. Ash realized that must be the volume of strong magnetic fields anchored in the hole itself. The strong fields gave it a realm where plasma got trapped. He was seeing the plasma emissions in visible light—hot stuff, then. A blue-white jet shot out of one pole of the doughnut configuration. That must be how the hole navigated, whipping that jet around. Weird physics, indeed.

  “Captain, the Big Birds used a probe to get this picture. Our information flow is spotty, but this says it all. The object—the hole—was within twelve light-minutes of the Bowl when we got this picture—a quarter way around the rim. I wasn’t given a velocity, but it’s damn fast.”

  Ash paused the message. There was a thin orange and golden glow around the hole. That would be one of the Diaphanous. The Glorians knew how to use those smart plasma beings. That had made them able to guide the tiny black holes they used in that
grav wave generator. So this photo was of a black hole maybe a few millimeters across. Tiny but massive. A hard bullet aimed at the biggest structure anyone had ever seen—the Bowl. What could it do?

  Mass bringing murder—

  A voice broke in, more of a burly squawk. “Attend me, Mayra, Redwing.”

  This haughty voice was the alien Big Bird, Bemor. Ash recognized it from reading the long history of their Bowl expedition, some of it written by the ship’s own Historical Artilect. The history had not exaggerated the arrogance of those Folk—it was all in the voice. Even speaking Anglish, this Big Birdy thing with its flourishing feather displays had an air of authority. Ash caught a gleam in its eyes, too—like looking at a dinosaur as it eyed its prey.

  Bemor said, “This is breaking news.”

  The view pulled back to show a rainbow of feathers, then a huge birdlike face with a blunted beak. “We have engaged our magnetic fields near our Knothole, as you term it. There, our fields are strongest. The incoming missile, while small and massive, has strong self-fields. We can engage them. We have as assistants the Diaphanous of our own driving jet. As well, those you, Captain Redwing, sent to us after your deep studies of the gravitational wave generator—for which we are grateful. That emitting site was our goal, to fathom what it is and what messages it sends. Your Diaphanous have quite well aided us. We now use these recently acquired skills to engage the enemy black hole.”

  The great smart birdlike thing paused, as if reflecting. Its feathers fluttered through a quick spectrum of fast signals—blues, greens, furious yellows. Then stillness. The narrow beak twisted into elastic expressions. A long sound like a sigh. “For three millions of your years, we of the Folk have labored in the shaping and testing of such strong magnetics. We are by nature, in our solemn graceful society, engaged in many millions of years in the waiting, for these magnetic uses. In anticipation. Mastery of black holes demands such fields. We shall now study what this emergency can teach us—and whether we of the Bowl of Heaven can survive such evil energies.”