Gregory Benford: Shipstar

“Glory’s not our kind of game, I’d guess. Not yet.” She shrugged ruefully. “It’s maybe a league up from what we can handle. The Bowl was tough enough.”

Redwing knew enough to wait. Her voice became soft, almost sympathetic. “But we’ll get there. The Bowl will get our first human colony to Glory. Long after I’m dead, sure—and I’m hoping to reach two hundred. Hell, more! But we humans, we’ll get there. And be waiting to meet up with you.”

Redwing frowned. “I have orders.”

“And crew. You’ll have nearly a thousand left in cold sleep. Plus, y’know, not all our people on the ground down there want to stay. Tananareve doesn’t! She’s had enough of the Folk, thank you.”

“Okay, I heard that. You want to reunite with Cliff, too. So you’ll join this Bowl colony you want.”

“Right. But not because of Cliff, especially. He’s important to me, sure, but—oh, that’s right. You probably know from the field reports—somebody must’ve blabbed, though it’s obvious— He’s been screwing Irma.”

“Well, I’m not prepared to reveal—”

“You don’t have to. Put people under dire threat for many months, and the prospect of death makes them set about being sure there’s going to be a replacement. Plus it feels good when the world threatens you. Hey, I’m a biologist.”

“I know. And Irma’s coming with us. So is her husband. You don’t—?”

“I don’t mind. Irma, Cliff—that was a ‘field event,’ as we used to call it. Whatever works in a pinch, I say. And … isn’t that party you talked about earlier about to start?”

A big sunny smile. And she gave him, unmistakably, a wink.

He got back to his cabin only a bit squiffed. Odd term, squiffed. He had inherited it from his grandfather, who had never given a definition. It was pretty clear, though. Pleasantly inebriated but in control. As a captain should be.

Redwing also recalled a parting remark from his commanding officer, just before he took the shuttle out to SunSeeker for his last transfer. Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery. You had to give them room.

There was plenty more to being a captain than bulldog stubbornness. Beth was good at giving him a different angle on events. It had been fun seeing her play with the finger snakes tonight. Who knew that they liked alcohol, too? There had been a lot of laughter, the pure long gasps that meant pressures were easing somewhere deep inside.

Beth was good, quite so. But she hadn’t seen that the Ice Minds wanted Tananareve to go forward to Glory on SunSeeker, as part of their exploratory advance party. Tananareve would be able to report back to the Folk—or maybe directly to the Ice Minds?—in an intuitive way. Better than the rest of the rude invader primates, since now they knew how her mind worked.

He still hadn’t told Beth all of it.

The ship would run up the jet, gulping plasma, boosting hard, and as it flew past the sun, SunSeeker would gain one more passenger. A Diaphanous would ride the motor. The Diaphanous thought that was a fresh opportunity, helping shape the magnetic geometry and exhaust parameters, while clinging to the ship and its scoop geometry. They’d never tried such a lark before. And maybe they wanted to meet up with the Diaphanous species on yet another star? Redwing suspected he would never truly know their motives.

SunSeeker ’s Artilects had already been brought up to speed on that. Would a magnetic pattern obey a ship’s captain?

That problem could wait. He shrugged off his uniform and decided to shower in the morning. He brushed his teeth and dropped the plastic glass as he tried to dump the waste rinse water into the tiny bowl his cabin alone had. Was he losing his ability to process alcohol? Well, so be it. After all, he was somewhere in his eighties.

He stared into the Bowl. They had called this huge artifact Wokworld when they first found it, but names were just pigeonholes. The feeling he had gotten, at first glance, seeing the vast spinning machine at a distance, was of some parasite grasping a star, sucking life from it. And charging forward, too, using that raw energy to move, forever restless, onward into the great night.

Beth had been a quick, sharp slap in the face today. She had made him see the bigger view of what they were here for. He owed her for that. And he would miss her, he just now realized.

Should he just stay here, dock SunSeeker somehow, and join the happy guys down on the Bowl? No. He had a clear duty and he would carry it out, even if all those who had ordered him were dead.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one, he had heard somewhere in his Fleet training. Somehow in this evening, with Beth’s help, he had made a lot of them.

On his wall he called up the real-time view of the landscape passing below them. They were headed for a good place to rendezvous with the lander they had sent down. The Folk would put Tananareve on board—and Aybe, who had just changed his mind; tech types often did. The Folk would send up supplies, and it shouldn’t take long to mate their comm gear with SunSeeker ’s, so they could stay in close touch with the Bowl, and get going again. Bound for Glory.

Yes—squiffed he was. Indeed, sir. Onward.

This Bowl was not so strange, after all. Maybe it meant that really advanced societies overshot their agenda, gliding for a while in the enameled perfection of their way of life, following habits deep-grained and evolved long before. So they correct and modify and engineer and correct again. Build big and think big and think again. The Bowl was the first big strange idea humanity had really met—terrifying and intriguing. And among many yet to come. Of that he was sure. Terrors can be mirrors, too.

Details. The tortured landscapes below passed before his eyes like an unending scroll. He thought of how the decisions that seem momentous in the moment, or even over a lifetime, were flickering instants in the life of the Bowl. These matters were too small to be observed by the Ice Minds, just single passing lives.

The Bowl had made them look back across a gulf of not mere centuries or millennia, but on the grand scale of evolution itself. Maybe that was the true deep purpose of coming out here among the stars. To see times that glowed and shimmered in memory’s flickering light.

He had a thought. Was there more than one Bowl, coasting around the galaxy? Maybe such things were a technological niche that others thought of and inhabited—very-long-view things, hard to quite grasp for humans. Maybe if alien species had the right precursor society—that of those smart dinosaurs, who loved warmth and sun and stillness—then their love of a forever summer would make them build such contraptions. If so, the blunt hammer of evolution gave another strategy to gain the stars, one different from smart, talky primates.

Whatever waited at Glory, in its stacked levels, there was a biosphere on top, a place to love beneath a star that had a sunset every day. Beings who lived in layers would be strange indeed, and humanity would have to adapt. Redwing smiled. If the Bowl had taught him anything, it was about human versatility. He would be alert when he reached Glory after a long sleep, and he liked his odds.

It couldn’t be stupid to voyage out in small vessels, to distant worlds where beauty and happiness would get redefined again and again. Even if Earth became a distant and perhaps wistful memory—as all his crew and himself would inevitably be, for sure—the expansion of human horizons was an ultimate good. Whatever built the Bowl had believed that, too. There was something comforting in that thought alone.