“You bargained away your crust?” Beth asked, head shaking in disbelief.
“We had to renounce our high mountains, crowned in glorious snowcapped grandeur, indeed. Plus our deep oceans. Ours is a somewhat older world, so our plate tectonics was waning. Our crust was already, thanks to locking to our twin world, a lid. Beneath that roiled volcanic energies, much beloved by our arriving refugees. The Methaners knew how to stop even that gravid lower dance. They shaped our oceans into shallow seas and lakes and ponds. We only use the tops of those, for our boats and fish—so where is the loss?”
This was getting weird for Beth. Of course, Earthside had resorted to geoengineering to counter the fossil fuel burning overshot, more than centuries ago now—but this …
“All that, while you built the Cobweb?” she asked.
“It was a pact of great benefit. A grand deal, far back now in our history. The methane breathers are now happy in their hidden methane environment. They love to cower here.”
Cliff said, “Seems to me they’re basically cowards. Happy to have a place to hide.”
Twister shook his head in dismissal. “They continue to amuse and interest us—regard the Möbius strip you just enjoyed!”
“What were they running from?” Beth asked.
“And why?” Cliff added.
“Such secrets they never reveal. Whoever—or rather, whatever—sought them has not come here. Though for a while, our culture thought the Bowl was their dark enemy.”
Bemor Prime said, “We were merely interested. I gather from historical records that we passed by and your society sent lances of virulence at us.”
Twister made a grimace and poked his arms out in defiant fists. “We feared you. We still do!”
“Needlessly,” Bemor Prime said. “But what think the Methaners?”
Twister said, “They have no interest in leaving or venturing outside their dark primordial habitat. They are remarkable scientists and philosophers, I must admit. Their realm we would find dull. They prefer it because they value safety above all—and we believe their home world was volcanic, dire. They prefer to think, not to voyage—only their extremity and enemies drove them to shelter with us. They require only that we oxygen breathers commit to keeping their existence secret to any and all outsiders.”
“And then we came,” Cliff said.
“You we could not dissuade from venturing in, landing upon our Cobweb.”
“Why?” Beth asked. “You could’ve killed us all.”
“We are not so cautious as the Methaners. You and the Bowl are at the verge of joining the Great Conversing.”
“What’s that?” Cliff frowned with suspicion.
“The discussion carried out solely with gravitational waves. Among those truly advanced minds and technospheres. To speak in such august company requires high technical ability, thus eliminating the mere passing riffraff of the electromagnetic societies.” Twister drew himself up, spine rigid, sniffing with disdain. “We have no time for such.”
Beth knew from various feeds, gotten when moving through the Cobweb, that life had evolved on this world first, well before it did Earthside. It then spread to the other world, first via asteroid and comet impact, throwing material up and raining down on its satellite. The same DNA system, same set of amino acids as seemed inevitable—although both evolved very differently on the twinned worlds. The culture of these oxygen breathers grew under a giant moon beckoning in their sky. The Glorians at first thought that world, which clearly had clouds and seas and lands, was perhaps the land of the gods, or the place where their honored dead went to spend eternity. So, of course, as Glory evolved intelligences, they fixated on their fascinating sky.
Being tidally locked with each other from the beginning meant that they evolved culturally with a blithe assumption that life was common. Only astronomy taught them that it was rare. No life in the rest of their solar system. Little on planets around nearby stars. But then the Methaners arrived, apparently, with news implying a far more hostile galaxy. Maybe, Beth thought, it was the new guys in the neighborhood, the humans, who had to learn more hard truths here.
“Look,” Cliff said, “why the snazzy quantum gravity exhibition you just put us through?”
Twister lifted his shoulder as though releasing a burden. “It was a lesson. Methaners wished it. A test, perhaps.”
“Test of what?”
“How much we, and the Methaners, can rely upon your judgment.”
“About grav quantum mechanics?” Cliff asked, his voice irked. “Why the hell does that matter?”
“It is the grand issue. But as well, the Methaners doubt that you can be entrusted with knowledge of their lair. Or even that they are. They hope to be forgotten by their ancient enemies. To be assumed extinct. This refuge”—Twister swept it in with an all-hands gesture—“is their final redoubt. And now they are compromised, by your knowing this.”
This was going too fast for Beth. She knew vaguely that life could exist in the liquid methane and ethane that form rivers and lakes on Titan’s surface, sure. Slow, dumb forms lurked there, rovers had found, just as organisms on Earth lived in water. Those creatures would take in hydrogen in place of oxygen, then react it with a simple carbon gas—a dim memory from high school recalled a faint odor like garlic, yes. Instead of burning sugar with oxygen, Methaners would fart out methane, carbon plus four hydrogens, instead of carbon dioxide. Her school lab had been disgusting. No doubt the Methaners would find humans venting carbon dioxide just as ripe.
Triangler gestured into the gloomy vault beyond the transparent wall. Twister translated for it, “This is their realm. They ferment our world’s rock and lava, for it is their biosphere.”
More Triangler talk, which Twister rendered as, “They make their odd air and farm the very strata for their informing foods.”
Beth peered into the festering dark. So here was where soil got born—by Glorian design. Throats roared as limestone-white slime belched forth, drawn aloft by vacuum. Pools of it congealed into sulfurous stench and bubble-popping babble. Turd-brown floods gushed into the air and sucked at the yellow lava rivulets, livid streamers. Atop thick stony levels, these cauldrons steamed livid rust. Lakes gathered skirts of fresh bubbling dirt about them. A vision of a shrouded hell.
In mere minutes, rocks stuck out, growing, building on self-extruded ladders. Ripples in the mire stiffened. These dried and turned to rugged ridges, topped with ash-white ornaments that still twisted as they were born. Slimy life crawled onto pillars just congealing. Here was forced formation, driven by some microscopic imperatives. And among them, Trianglers strode and worked. They were Methaners, too, it would seem.
A sudden flash of electric blue arced across the enormous volume. It played along a boggish parchmentlike crust. Vapors like an angry whirlwind whipped up where the lightning struck. More sheet lightning ran along the ground. Fevered spikes of luminescence shot yellow sparks. The rock beneath their boots rumbled.
Cliff said, “What’s this stuff?”
Twister said, “You are aware that a planet rotating with a magnetic field generates currents, yes? Your own world. I gather from your copious library gift, is such. You evolved, as did we, between the plates of a planet-sized electrical capacitor. Your ionosphere atop your air is one spherical plate, your ground another.”
“Sure,” Cliff said. “So we get lightning, always adjusting the charges across our whole atmosphere.”
“The Methaners have engineered this planet to make better use of all the electrical energy—drawn, essentially, from the spin of the world.”
“So they run it underground?” Cliff asked.
Twister spread arms to suggest the entire space. “Usefully, yes. To fuel their enterprises, mysterious and chemical.”
“And it arcs in … here?” Beth asked.
“Guess so,” Cliff said uneasily. Wary, he stepped away from the wall.
Twister said abruptly, “The Methaner nearby just remarked to his colleagu
es—whom we see working in there. I have overheard them electromagnetically. It remarks that their authorities have reached a final conclusion. After inspecting you, judging your cadences and responses. They always require a meeting or witnessing of incoming aliens, such as you. Especially you.”
“There have been other, uh, visiting aliens?” Beth looked with wary glances at the Methaners in the space beyond. All of them had turned and now looked through the transparent wall. She felt that they were all focused on her. Intently.
Twister said sharply, “Here is a portion of how they evaluate you humans >>These primates hold firmly these beliefs, which come from their remarkable fast evolution: My child is more important than yours. My tribe is more important than yours. My bloodline is the most important thing in the universe. So emerge these ingrained traits. They make such primitive, recent primates—and those olders we know from the grav waves—not reliable. They cannot be allowed to know our place, our ways, our redoubt eternal.<<
“What the hell—!” Cliff barked.
A fizzing yellow fire spread over the wall between them and the Methaners. It hissed and sparked. Little blue-white jets arced from it into the sullen, moist air.
Twister backed away from the wall. “They are amassing great charge in that vault of theirs.” Its short hairs at neck and arms were standing out straight.
Beth called to her team, “Spread out!”
She felt an adrenaline jolt, a bronco charging through her veins. Here came something strange and dangerous, and she had no idea what the hell it was.
THIRTY-FOUR
ANIMAL CUNNING
The greatest contribution science can make to the humanities is to demonstrate how bizarre a species we are, and why.
—E. O. WILSON
Ashley Trust got the next call from the Bowl while in the mess hall, sponging up the last of a flavorful grasshopper curry. The autochef had been feeding people for centuries and knew what it was doing, with spicy flair. He was watch officer again, so didn’t have to consult the log to know this incoming was hours after the black hole was to strike the Bowl.
Bemor’s daunting image flickered on the screen, mad rainbows chasing each other across his feathers. “The Ice Minds have informed me that we have the black hole. Our battle was complex, a potential catastrophe for our entire Heaven.”
The scene jumped to a view of a strange landscape. Ashley had been reviewing all the records of the Bowl and so could recognize the site, unlike anything ever seen on a planet.
A broad seething plain. Ashley had conferred with the Artilects—there was one devoted just to understanding the Bowl. The immense landscapes needed three-dimensional analysis to train the eye. It was like a geometry lesson: his mind needed to wrap itself around what he was viewing. So now he could see that this was the ample waterway spanning the Bowl’s innermost plain—seen from the ground level, not from what had once been SunSeeker’s orbit about the Bowl.
This was the last platform before the atmospheric seal descended, isolating the living zones from the Knothole. The jet that drove the entire system forward was hanging in the sky like a blowtorch. It swirled in a slow helix, virulent orange-yellow strands hemmed in by the Diaphanous magnetic fields.
The water helped stabilize the Bowl’s spin. But this was no mild Mediterranean-style sea. It was a frothing swirl of whitecaps. The enormous plain ringing the magnetic Knothole had only a few percent of an Earth grav, directed nearly parallel to the slope of the outer Bowl precincts. Which here would mean nearly parallel to the ground, not perpendicular to it. Living there would be nearly impossible, except that it was built on ledges.
The Builders had countered this odd, sloping force by shaping platforms that jutted north and south, very nearly along the axis of spin. That formed plains perpendicular to the centrifugal force. Fair enough, but there was so little grav that seawater leaped into towering hills. Powerful winds forced huge waves that sprayed vapors and splashes high into the air. These slowly fell back and with a slow-motion grace furled into whitecaps, tossed by vagrant currents. The mist hovering near the surface was thick enough to choke a human, like harrying clouds of thick raindrops. Rainbows shimmered in all this watery chaos, making big multicolored eyes around every hummock of seethe. Low-grav weather was a fury.
Yet it was here the black hole attacked. Why?
Huge magnetic anchor fields sat near the pole of the Knothole. They worked like a buffer of invisible rubber bands. Ashley could see quick flashes zapping in the sky above. Orange sprites fought across the broad blue above dancing, frothing waves.
Above it all streamed the fiery jet. Oranges and reds and sparks of yellow filled a thick band scratched across the sky.
Ashley realized suddenly what the Glorians were doing. Using the fast-moving black hole, they were trying to disrupt the jet at its crucial point. If they could make the enormous energies of the jet lash to the side, it could split open the living zone. Scores of species would die. Maybe the whole big rotating thing would buckle and fragment.
True, back at the Bowl, Redwing had made something like that happen before. SunSeeker had ruptured the jet enough to make it furiously arrow into regions near the Knothole. That inflicted vast death and damage on the Bowl. Redwing felt he had to do it to save his crew and expedition.
Okay, maybe so. Ashley was in cryosleep then, so he got only the ship’s History Artilect’s version of the events. Redwing’s decisions at the time seemed necessary, to get the expedition free of the Bowl’s control and subjugation. The Folk of the Bowl had subdued many intelligent alien species. They came close to doing the same with SunSeeker.
Now the Glorians were trying something like that. The black hole sent sprays of electric blue plasma against the enveloping Diaphanous strands.
The intense magnetic fields that shaped the driving jet were highest here. Ashley watched the streaming battles that lit the sky above the frothing Knothole sea. The new, incoming Diaphanous rammed magnetic pressures against those bristly dipolar fields tightly bound to the black hole. Slowly, so slowly, the Diaphanous pushed the blue-white intruder. With huge forces that marched across the sky, they herded the magnetically strong black hole, using the clashing fields to guide it. Furious flashes told the silent story across the blue-black expanse.
Lightning, too, pealed across the sky. Mayra cried out and the camera briefly swung her way. Her hair was standing on end. She was rigid with pain. Electrostatic forces were working across the confused landscape.
There came a shower of colored chaos. Some kind of interference. A time stamp in the right corner showed 11:43 minutes of lost transmission.
“Damn!” Ashley said. How did that battle work out?
But then the screen flashed with coherent images. Bemor was booming “—but with our team of Diaphanous, successful. A glorious achievement.”
The foaming white sea still tossed. To one side, prickly balls glowed on spherical trees. One out-jetted gas. It ignited—hydrogen burning as a booster, its blue-white plume vibrant and roaring. The entire sphere tree lifted, rose, darted off.
“The black hole is captive,” Bemor said, plainly addressing SunSeeker. “We are learning its aspects. The Ice Minds have awaited this hour for longer than the human species has existed.”
Mayra’s voice came in from offstage: “We are hugely relieved. Captain, you copy? We’re safe. Awaiting your response. The Bowl is twenty-six hours away from Glory at lightspeed.”
Bemor overrode her with, “We are more than safe. The object was sent as a threat, and our Diaphanous have made the black hole into a gift. I’m told we can vibrate it. Something about masses orbiting each other—well beyond my humble training. The Ice Minds believe that within hours, we will be able to first communicate with gravity waves. They have wisely prepared a site for such strong forces. We have been ready for this moment, this ability to converse with those higher societies—for tens of millions of years.”
Mayra: “I’ll send more when I know more. Captai
n, this is likely to affect your expedition.” She clicked off.
Ashley said, “I’d like to answer.”
“You do not have that privilege,” said the Communications Artilect.
Ashley grimaced. “Look, the Bowl should know our situation. I wish I knew more.”
“Permission not given by prior order. You do not have the password phrase—”
Ashley stood, hands on hips, defiant. “‘Honor and Wit, fore-damned they sit, to each his Priest and Whore; / ‘Nay, scarce I dare myself go there, and you they’d torture sore.’”
A silence that somehow conveyed irritation. “Speak your news. Recording.”
“Ha! Mayra, this is Ashley Trust, currently aboard SunSeeker. There are ten of us awake, working comm with the two Away Teams. Those two are headed by Beth Marble on Glory and Redwing off on one of those bizarre living spaceships. Keeping contact is hard—masses blocking their comm, mostly, though could be some subtle interference, too.”
Ashley paused, thinking how to phrase the next part. “We’ve also got along with several of your finger snakes, who’re doing ship maintenance. Wow, who woulda thought? Smart snakes. They’re so good, makes me wonder how SunSeeker ever got along without them. The Away Team seems to have taken an elevator that dropped through Glory’s surface. That cut us off. No recent messages in any channel. Captain Redwing and his first officer, Viviane, have left the ship to visit an alien vessel. Bad practice, I think. They are also cut off. Dunno why. We’ll tell you more when we can. I’m frantically glad that the Bowl hasn’t been crumpled into a hypermass. Congrats! Ashley Trust, signing out.”
He smiled at the surveying lens of the Artilect system. It took some effort not to stick out his tongue at the peering Artilects and do a little victory dance. The so-smart Artilects seemed to think mere lazy humans could not memorize long phrases. Redwing always used those. It had been easy enough to hack into his reading list and find marked passages. Maybe the major talent Artilects missed was his favorite—animal cunning.
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