Gregory Benford: Shipstar

The deserts were huge, too. Tan lands of grass went on over distances greater than the Moon was from Earth, with only dots of green beckoning where an oasis sprouted. Sprawling dry lands ended where water found its way to make moist forests. Storms spiraling in immense white-bright pinwheels churned with ponderous energies, raking across deserts larger than planets, and over forests so deep, no one could ever walk out of them.

How did anyone design a thing like this? A vast trapped atmosphere, oceans the size of planets, lakes like continents, yet no real mountains—maybe that was a clue. Of course, putting an Everest on the Bowl would make it lopsided and complicate dynamics. There could be no plate tectonics and so no volcanoes, but how did this biosphere circulate carbon and water? On Earth, a complex cycle a hundred million years long did the job. As well, Earth’s tectonic ranges forced air over and around them, generating the moving chaos humans called weather. The Bowl’s dwellers did not suffer from mountain wind shadow, or the combing winds that raced through narrow passages. Mountains made for stormy trouble on Earth. The Bowl was a milder place than planets could be.

But why build a whole contraption like this, when you could just move to Florida?

The question wasn’t just rhetorical. If he could fathom what built such a thing, and why, he might have a clue about how to deal with them.

Ping. His autosec reminded him of lunch.

He thought of it as the mess, very old school, but Fleet said it was a Starship Wardroom. He sat as usual for Meal 47, his current choice: classic turkey dinner, rich cream sauce and cranberries. He made himself not think about the simple fact that it was all made of ingredients centuries old; after all; so was he.

He had kept mistaking what Mayra Wickramsingh said at every meal: Nosh for me, it sounded like. After she and her husband, Abduss, went down in the disastrous descent to the Bowl, he had looked it up. The Linguist AI had a transform function, so it learned even through his mushy pronunciation; the AI found it was an Indian phrase, naush faramaiye, meaning “please accept the pleasure of savoring this meal,” which seemed like bon appétit to Redwing. Suitable. “ Naush faramaiye to you all,” Redwing said, bowing his head. The crew bowed back. Clare looked puzzled.

“Cap’n, I’m having trouble with the Artilect coherence,” Jampudvipa said.

Redwing still used AI as a shorthand for the shipboard systems that patiently oversaw operations, since that’s what everybody called them when he was growing up. But Artilect was the actual Fleet term, since integrated artificial minds constituted a collective intellect. It was useful to think of the systems as different people, engaged in a constant congress, discussing the ship’s current state. “What’s their problem?”

“They want to go back into full scoop mode.”

“In a solar system? We can’t get the necessary plasma densities.”

“I know.” Jampudvipa shrugged. “I think they’re showing mission fatigue.”

“Have you tried to give them some shut-eye time, one by one?”

“They resist it.”

“Enforce it. Tell them they need a psych reboot, only make the language prettier.”

This got rueful laughs around the wardroom table. “Diplomacy—not our strong suit,” Clare Conway said. She was more personable than most pilots, one of the reasons she had made the crew. Redwing had gone through her file while making his selection of whom to revive.

Ayaan Ali frowned. “It is serious problem, Artilect coherence. They start to disagree, to have their own ideas—trouble.”

“They want what’s impossible,” Karl Lebanon said. He folded his hands and leaned back against a bulkhead. As general technology officer, he shepherded Artilects through daily problems, plus a dozen other jobs. “We can’t go back to interstellar mode.”

Clare sipped her coffee. “They have to adjust our ramscoop intake in ten-second intervals, to optimize. That burns their attention reservoir, makes their duty cycles long. Stresses them pretty hard.”

“We’re getting system clash in our magnetic scoop system,” Karl said. “It’ll tire the Artilects and we’ll start getting torques, surges, inductive effects that wear down our gear.”

“Same small-scale coil problem?”

“Yeah. The system’s pretty stressed. Never made for this kind of low-velocity maneuvering. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them.”

Clare said, “A mechanical problem, fixable—but only if we could get a bot in the inductive chamber. Those we could maybe make, but present bot complement can’t do it. That choice set is not even in the partition menu.”

“We can’t downtime them?” Redwing knew the answer but if he let people talk, they felt better. All three chimed in with their versions of the same hard fact: A ship designed to work at interstellar speeds was a bitch to control in planetary orbit, and have any actual maneuvering capability. The Artilects were taking the brunt of it.

Redwing nodded as each spoke but ran his own inventory as well.

By this time his knees were sending angry messages that they wanted a trial separation. His weight workout this morning had pushed the limit too far, again. A warning sign: When he overexerted, he was working out unconscious worries. So he concentrated on Clare’s detailed tech talk and focused outward, nodding and keeping his gaze on her while thinking about all the crew. They worked well together, as the Psych Artilect Adept predicted, before Redwing had wakened the new members. How well would they do when Beth’s team came aboard? Only four left out of six, but—the ship would get more crowded and irritations would begin to build. He had a time window before he would have to decide whether to get out of this entire situation and cast off into interstellar flight again or—what? Go down onto the Bowl in enough numbers to accomplish a resupply and … what? Too many unknowns.

He let the crew run on for a while, noting that their uniforms were getting a tad messy, hair uncombed, beards a few days old. He would have to sharpen them up a bit, and now might be the time.

At least this crew would look better then, when and if they got Beth’s team aboard. They’d have to double on berths. Working spirit and order would be more difficult. A clock would start ticking.

He said mildly, “Officer Jampudvipa, with the Artilects going moody, should we be letting them run the bridge alone while we have lunch?”

Blinks, nods. Jampudvipa looked rueful, mouth turning down, and got up hurriedly. “Yes, sir. They’re in collective agreement mode but—yes.”

That let him focus on the others. “Beth’s team will be aboard in a few hours. That’s if we’re lucky and solve the problem we have to focus on now. Still, I want everybody spruced up—clean, shaven, bright eyed.” Nods all around, some repentant. He turned to Karl. “But the major problem is, how do we get them aboard?”

“I’ve got her photos of the vehicle they’re in—basically, a magnetic train car with locks facing outward, to vacuum,” Karl said. “But they don’t have their suits. The aliens, these ‘Folk,’ took those at capture.”

“So…” Redwing let them think a moment. “Can we match velocities and run a pressured conduit?”

“Not easily.” Karl’s mouth fretted as he thought. “We’ve got EVA gear, sure, but it’s one-man, for repairs.”

“How about the Bernal ?” Clare asked. “It’s for freight transfer, but we could maybe refit it for a fix-up flexi passage.”

“I don’t trust anything flexi to stand up to torques and stretches,” Karl said. “If we try it, yes, Bernal is the best craft.”