Gregory Benford: Shipstar

“Keep some plants. Air for us while we travel,” Phoshtha said. She wriggled away.

Lau Pin jog-hopped in the light grav, springing over to help Tananareve. “You okay? Shall I carry you?”

“I’m fine. What’s that whistling?” It was loud and now had a low rumble to it.

“We need to get aboard,” Lau Pin said, glancing around at the snake teams at work. “Quick.” He tried pulling her along by her belt, desisted when he saw her pain.

Tananareve walked over to a copper-hued wall, leaning against its warmth. The finger snakes chattered in their jittering bursts and oozed across the platforms with wriggling grace. She studied them amid the noise, and … let herself go.

She was back in the leafy wealth she had grown up in and, yes, knew she would never see again. She allowed her head to tilt back and felt her spine kink and lapse as it straightened and eased. Amid metal and ceramics, she thought of green. This odd construction they were moving through, a weird place bigger than planets, had its own version of green paradise … and was the only reason she had survived in it. The vast, strange canopies with their chittering airborne creatures; the stretching grasslands and zigzag trees; animals so odd, they threw her back into her basic biology—they were all natural in some way, yet … not. Someone had designed their setting, if not their species.

Those sprawling lands of the Bowl had been tolerable. These mechanical labyrinths below the Bowl’s lifesphere were … not. She had seen quite enough, thank you, of the motorized majesty that made such a vast, rotating artifact. Rest, that was her need now. She had to descend into blissful sleep, consign to her unconscious the labors of processing so much strangeness.

She let go slowly, head lapsing back. Easing was not easy, but she let herself descend into it, for just a moment before she would get up again and stride off, full of purpose and letting no soft moments play through her … Just for a while …

“Looks like the male is finished playing with the controls,” Lau Pin called.

Dimly she sensed the snakes moving by her. Thisther wriggled into the hold … then Phoshtha and Shtirk.

Tananareve came out of her blissful retreat slowly. Voices echoed odd and hollow around her. Lead infected her legs; they would not move without great strain. She made herself get unsteadily up onto two uncertain feet. Clouds in her mind dispelled slowly—something about green wealth, forests of quiet majesty, her parents …

She made her chin snap up, eyes fluttering, back on duty … and slowly turned to survey the area. Where’s Beth?

Clouds still grasped at her. Breathe deeply, keep it up.

Tananareve strode off to check around some angular buttress supports. No human about.

The snakes had crawled into the ship, fitting somehow into open spaces. Lau Pin jogged to join them. He glanced back at her, waved a hand, turned, went away.…

Still there were clouds. She listened intently as she tried to put one small foot in front of the other. Remarkably difficult, it was.

Rumbling, sharp whistling, chatter. Tananareve walked a bit unsteadily back toward the ship. Her vision was blurred, sweat trickling into her eyes and stinging.

The great curved door closed in Tananareve’s face.

“Hey,” Tananareve said. She stopped, blinked. Clouds swept away on a sudden adrenaline shock—

“Wait!”

The drone slid out of line and away, slow at first, then faster and faster.

“Dammit!” she shouted. “Damn—” She couldn’t hear herself over a whistling roar. Hot air blasted her back.

“Wait!” Beth Marble shouted. She could feel the acceleration building. The finger snakes were wrapped around support pillars, and her crew were grabbing for tie-downs. She found handholds and footholds while thrust pulled massively at her.

She wailed, “Tananareve!”

“She was sick,” Phoshtha said, recessed eyes glittering. “Thrust would have killed her. She would have slowed us.”

“What? You let—” Beth stopped. It was done; handle the debriefing later, in calmer moments. The snakes were useful but strange.

They were accelerating quickly and she found a wedge-shaped seat. Not ideal for humans, but manageable. There was little noise from the magnetics, but the entire length of the drone popped and ponged as stresses adjusted.

Lau Pin said, “I have SunSeeker online.”

“Send Redwing our course. Talk to him.” Beth couldn’t move; she was barely hanging on to a tie-down bar. “Use our best previous coordinates.”

“Okay. I’m having it compute from the present force vectors.” Lau Pin turned up the volume so others could hear. “Lau Pin here.”

“Jampudvipa here, bridge petty officer. Captain Redwing’s got some kind of cold, and Ayaan Ali is bridge pilot. What’s your situation?”

“We’re on our way. It went pretty much as we’d planned. Hardly anything around on the way but finger snakes. We’ve got three with us. Uh … We lost Tananareve Bailey.”

“Drown it,” the officer said. “All right. But you’re en route? Hello, I see your course … yeah. Wow. You’re right up against the back of the mirror shell.”

“Jampudvipa, this drone is driven by magnets in the back of the Bowl. Most of their ships and trains operate that way, we think. It must save reaction fuel. We don’t have much choice.”

Some microwave noise blurred the signal, then, “Call me Jam. And you don’t have pressure suits?”

“No, and there’s no air lock. No way to mate the ships.”

A pause. “Well, Ayaan says she can get SunSeeker to the rendezvous in ten hours. After that … what? Stet. Stet. Lau Pin, we can maybe fit you into the bay that held Eros before we lost it. If not … mmm.”

Lau Pin said, “The finger snakes don’t keep time our way. I think it’s longer for us. I’ll make regular checks and send them.”

“We’ll be there. And you all need medical assistance? Four months in low gravity, out in the field—yeah. We’ll have Captain Redwing out of the infirmary by then, but it only holds two. Pick your sickest.”

“Would have been Tananareve.”

The drone was gone. The system’s magnetic safety grapplers released with a hiss. Tananareve stood in the sudden silence, stunned.

A high hiss sounded from a nearby track. She turned to find a snake to stop the drone, call it somehow—and saw no snakes at all. All three had boarded the drone. Now the shrill hiss was worse. She stepped back from the rising noise, and an alien ship came rushing toward the platform from a descending tube. It was not magnetic; it moved on jets.

Tananareve looked around, wondering where to run. The ship had a narrow transparent face and through it she could see the pilot, a spindly brown-skinned creature in a uniform. It looked not much bigger than she was and the tubular ship it guided was enormous, flaring out behind the pilot’s cabin. The ship eased in alongside the main platform, jetting cottony steam. Tananareve wondered what she should do: hide, flee, try to talk to—?

Then, behind huge windows in the ship’s flank, she saw a tremendous feathered shape peering out at her, and recognized it. Quick flashing eyes, the great head swiveling to take in all around it, with a twisted cant to its heavy neck. She gasped. Memor.

Redwing looked out across the yawning distances, frowning.

Far down, there were all the artful graces of land and sea, suspended before a warming sun like a rich, steaming dish offered on a steel-hard plate. Everything was larger, grander, and strange.

The Bowl seas were light blue expanses larger than Jupiter, bounded by shallow brown edges. Across those ran arcs of grand wave trains, immense ripples that must roll on for years before finding a shore. At finer resolution, sediment plumes of tan and chocolate spread across shallow seabeds, feeding kelp straits of festering ripe green. Rumpled hill ranges were larger than Asia. Never driven by continental drift, these crosshatched the vast lands, carved by rivers that could cut no farther than the Bowl’s hull. Indeed, he could see places where wind or water had worn away the living zone, leaving patches of rusting metal. Under close-up, he and Karl watched teams repairing such erosions.