Gregory Benford: Shipstar

Mayra said, “They’re scared. Why would you want to—?”

“Can they do it?”

“Yes, at the next stop. There’s a launch facility they use for traveling off the Bowl, but—”

“How do we shed the velocity?” Fred said.

Beth said, “Carefully, I bet. If they can launch, they must fire us off against the Bowl’s rotation, to bring the exit speed down to a manageable level.”

“ SunSeeker must be moving at a few tens of klicks a second,” Fred said. “To lose half a thousand klicks a second…” His voice trailed off into a croak, apparently at the magnitude of it. “… that’s not the way to do it, though.”

Beth watched the landscape zoom by outside. Were they slowing?

Mayra said, “They call it the Jumper.”

“A launch facility?” Beth asked. “Fred, what did you mean?”

“The obvious way to get off the Bowl is to go near the axis, where there’s nearly no centrifugal grav, so not a high speed. Then leap off into vacuum.”

“We’re headed that way, but—” Beth stopped. “Where is this Jumper?”

Mayra chattered to the snakes, and then said, “The next stop, if we take the right shunt. They say.” She looked doubtful, as if this was all moving too fast. Which it is, Beth thought, in more ways than one.

The finger snakes rattled their “shells,” which seemed to work like fingernails. She had seen them use those with lightning-quick skill, to manipulate the intricate tools carried in their side pouches. Now they made a noise like castanets—or, she noticed, like a rattlesnake about to strike. Each snake had four of them on their four fingers. Beth saw Mayra drawing back, her face a mask of alarm. “What’s—?”

“They sense great risk,” Mayra said slowly, “in taking a Jump in this hauler.”

“Not space rated?”

“No, a lack of ‘life caring’—habitat gear, I think. That noise, though … Ewww.”

“Yeah, kinda hard to take,” Beth said. The snakes were weaving now, standing on leathery, strong “arms” and straining up into the air. Their bodies seemed all ribbed muscle, eyes glittering as they glanced at each other.

Fred said, “Maybe they’re deciding whether the risk is worth it.”

“Worth what?” Mayra asked, her face still tight with alarm.

“Worth going with us,” Fred said. “That’s what you meant, right, Beth?”

“I figured there had to be a way to launch into raw space without going to the pole, the Knothole, to get the speed down. I guess there is.”

Mayra said, “That’s what the finger snakes imply. They’re working out whether to help us do that … I think.” A wry shrug. “Not really sure.”

Beth leaned forward, eyes still on the scenery flashing by above the perpetual night sky below. Yes, they were moving slower. Definitely. And was the grav here lighter? So they were moving toward the Knothole? “They can handle the tech for a Jump?”

“Yes, they say. But … they say it will be hard on us. A lot of acceleration, and—”

The snakes chattered and rattled and Mayra bowed her head, listening. “The seats will self-contour, so we will … survive.”

“It’s that hard?” Fred asked.

“High. We don’t have suits that baffle us against sudden surges.” Mayra shrugged. “It is not as though we could have carried them with us, all these months.” A slow sad smile.

Beth saw she was recalling her husband, who had died when they broke out of confinement, crushed by a hideous spiderlike thing. “What else?”

“They say there is little time to do it. As soon as we reach the next station stop, they must gain control of the shunting system. They say they can, the attendants there—mostly finger snakes—are old friends. Then they must move us into a cache that will ratchet us into a ‘departure slot’ as they call it. Then we move into line and get dispatched by an electromagnetic system. It seizes us, in a manner independent of the precise shape of this hauler … and flings us into space, along a vector counter to the Bowl’s spin.”

Mayra had not spoken so much in a long while. Beth chose to take that as a positive sign. She was right about gear; they had little and would be forced to use whatever came to hand. The seats here were oddly shaped and not designed for humans. The finger snakes had couches to strap into. Not so the bare benches she was sitting on. Still less so for the latrine, which turned out to be a narrow cabin with holes in the floor, some of them small, others disturbingly large.

She signed. “I know it may be uncomfortable. But it’s the only way.”

Silence. Even the snakes had gone quiet.

Lau Pin said, “We’re dead if we stay down here. They’ll catch us again. We escaped once; that trick won’t work again.”

Mayra and Fred nodded. Collective decision, great.

Beth noted the snakes watching her. They had somehow deduced that she was the nominal leader of these odd primates who strode into their lives. Maybe all smart species had some hierarchy?

“Okay, we do it. Notice we’re slowing down?”

Fred nodded. “Yeah, felt it.”

Lau Pin said, “We don’t have much time. Got to hit the ground and move fast. The snakes will tell us what to do.”

“Right, good,” Beth said. She glanced at Mayra. “And … what else?”

“Well…” Mayra hesitated. “It’s the finger snakes. They want to come with us.”

Redwing plucked a banana that grew in a weird toroid, peeled and ate it, its aroma bringing back memories of tropical nights and the lapping of waves. Cap’n’s privilege.

His comm buzzed and Clare Conway said, “We’ll need you on the bridge presently.”

“On the way.”

Yet he hesitated. Something fretted at the back of his mind.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.

His mother had made it happy. His father was away at one war or another while he grew up, and when he was home seemed absorbed by sports and alcohol. But that didn’t include playing catch with Redwing or coming to his football games. His mother had given him a birthday gift of a telescope and microscope, and a big chemistry set. He bought chemical supplies by selling gunpowder and other pyrotechnics to the local kids. So science had been in his bones from the time he could read. But there were other currents in the mix. He bought a bicycle and a better telescope with gambling cash. His mother, who was a bridge Grand Master, always played penny-ante poker with Redwing while they waited in the car for his music lessons to start. He then applied what she had taught him to the neighborhood kids. They didn’t know how to count cards or compute probabilities from that. They also paid to see him blow something up or dissect some poor animal as a bio experiment. He was without principle but soon had enough principal to advance. A university career and PhD led to space, where he really wanted to go. But this far ?…

Maybe, considering a “fault tree” analysis of his life, having a father who never gave him much time, Redwing figured he was socially unhappy enough to satisfy Hemingway. But finding fault wasn’t like solving a problem, was it?

He had been gaining belly weight in these long months skimming along the Bowl structure. Onboard physio analysis said cortisol was the culprit, a steroid hormone prompted by the body’s “fight or flight” response to stress. It had bloated him, listening to the plight of his teams fleeing aliens, and damn near nothing he could do to help.