Gregory Benford: Bowl of Heaven

She gave him a rueful nod. “We won’t get booze on SunSeeker. ”

“In flight? Cap’n Redwing would frown.”

“He seems more the ‘throw ’em into leg irons’ type.”

Her laughing-eyed remark told them both that they needed celebration. It helped ward off the doubts, fears, and … an emotion he had no name for . So be it.

They stood with arms around each other’s waist and watched Earth’s wheeling, silent majesty. Into the rim of their view swam SunSeeker, looking much like a lean and hungry shark.

Yes, a shark waiting to swim in the ocean of night. The large mouth was the magnetic funnel, waiting to be turned on, furl outward, and begin the slow acceleration out of the solar system. That scoop would yawn and first dive close to the sun, swallowing great gouts of the solar wind as start-up fuel. Behind the head complex curved the hoop of the control deck, its ruby glow alive with workers. Cliff watched tiny figures in their worker pods putting finishing touches on the long, rotating cylinder of the habitat and cryostorage sandwiched between the supplies storage vaults. Then came the wrinkled, cottonball-white, cybersmart radiators that sheathed the drive system. Its cylindrically spaced vents gave in to the fat fusion chambers, big ribbed barrels that fed the final thruster nozzles. Wrapped around these in a saddle truss were the big yellow fuel pods that would feed the beast as it accelerated into the deep dark, then fall away. From there on, it would glide through the centuries inside a magnetic sheath, safe from the proton sleet ahead. SunSeeker was a shark for eating away at light-years.

They had all ridden her out into the Oort cloud, tried the engines, found the flaws that the previous fourteen ships had tested. Ran the AI systems, found the errors in rivets and reason, made better. In the first few generations of interstellar craft, every new ship was an experiment. Each learned from the last, the engineers and scientists did their work, and a better ship emerged. Directed evolution on the fast track.

Now they were ready for the true deeps. Deep space meant deep time, all fleeting and, soon enough, all gone.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a man’s voice said from behind them.

It was Karl, the lanky head flight engineer. He had an arm around Mei Ling and seemed a bit bleary and red faced. From a snog-fog burst, Cliff guessed. Mei Ling just seemed extraordinarily joyful, eyes glistening.

Beth said, casting a sideways glance, “Yes — and we’re counting on you to keep her happy.”

“Oh yes, I will,” Karl said, not getting the double entendre. “She’s a great ship.”

Mei Ling got it, arched an eyebrow, and nodded. “Saying good-bye to the world, are we? How do you think they’ll think of us by the time we arrive?”

Beth said, “I’d like to be remembered as the world’s oldest woman.”

They all laughed. Mei Ling asked Cliff, “Hard to say farewell to it all, isn’t it? You’ve been over here at the view most of the evening.”

She had always been quick to read people, he recalled. She would understand that he needed merriment now. That they all did. “Um, yeah. I guess I’m a man of the world; my trouble is I’m trying to find which world.”

They all nodded soberly. Then with a quick, darting grin, Karl showed off his newest trick. In the low centrifugal grav, he poured a dark red wine by letting it fall from the bottle, then cutting off the right amount with a dinner knife before it hit the glass. Three quick slices, Mei Ling rushed some glasses into place, and done. “Impressive!” Beth said. They drank.

“Got some news,” Karl said. “Those grav waves near Glory? No signal in them. Just noise.”

“How does that help us?” Beth asked. Cliff could tell from her expression that Karl was not her sort, but Karl would never know.

“It means there’s not some supercivilization on Glory, for one thing.”

“We already knew there are no electromagnetic signals,” Mei Ling said.

“Well, sure,” Karl said. “But maybe really advanced societies don’t bother with primitive — ”

“Hey, this is a party!” Beth said brightly. Karl took the hint. He shrugged and led Mei Ling away. She had some trouble walking.

“Cruel, you are,” Cliff said.

“Hey, we won’t see him for centuries.”

“But it will seem like next week.”

“So they say. What do you think about the grav waves?”

Just then a Section head broke in, using a microphone to get above the party noise, which was still rising. “We just got a launch congratulations from Alpha Centauri, folks! They wish you good speed.”

Some hand clapping, then the party buzz came back even stronger. “Nice gesture,” Beth said. “They had to send that over four years ago.”

Tananareve Bailey spoke behind him. “It probably came in a year back and they’ve been saving it.” Cliff hadn’t noticed her approach. She was more covered up than most of the women, but gorgeous, an explosion of browns and orange against black face and arms. She stood with Howard Blaire, once a zookeeper and something of a bodybuilding enthusiast.

Beth nodded. “Once we’re in flight, the delay times will mean we’re talking to different generations. Spooky. But you were saying about the grav waves — ?”

Howard twisted his mouth, trying to recall. “Look, SunSeeker was nearly built before LIGO 22 picked up those waves. It took all the time we were out on our field trials to verify the detection. More time to see if there was anything in it — and apparently there isn’t. No signal, just some noisy spectrum. No, we’re going to Glory because a biosphere is there. One of the Astros told me these grav waves probably come from just accidental superposition. A good chance there’s some pair of orbiting black holes far across the galaxy, but the Glory system is in the way — ”

“That’s what I think, too,” a familiar voice said. They turned to find a red-faced Fred, back again, obviously a bit the worse for wear. “Can’t get good resolution on the source area, and Glory’s over in one corner of a degree-wide patch in the sky. The grav waves could be from anywhere in there, even in another galaxy.”

Beth looked at Cliff and gave him her covert rolled-eye look, saying, “I’m a bio type, myself.”

Fred was a trifle intense, or “focused” as the psychers put it. Some found him hard to take, but he had solved a major technical problem in systems tech, which cut him some slack with Cliff. All crew had to have overlapping abilities, but for some like Fred, breadth was their main qualification. Of course, Fred was oblivious to all these nuances. He gestured at the screen. “Hard not to look at it — beauty and importance combined. The Mona Lisa of planets.”

Beth murmured approval and he went on, talking faster. “Even now, I mean — hundreds of bio worlds with atmospheric signatures, but no better’s been seen anywhere.”

Irma Michaelson passed by without her husband in tow, her head turning quickly at Fred’s remark. “You mean the new Forward probe data?”

“Uh, no — ”

“Forward Number Five just checked in,” Irma said. “Still pretty far out, can’t get surface maps or anything. Plenty of clouds, got a smidge view of an ocean. Shows the atmospheric thermo pretty well, I hear. We got the tightbeam relay just in time! We might need to do some atmosphere work to make it comfy.”

Beth asked, “What kind?”

“They say we may need more CO2. Glory’s a tad light on greenhouse gases,” Fred said so fast, he could barely get the words out. “Surface temperatures are more like Canada. The tropics there are like our mid-temperate zones.”

Now that we’ve terraformed Earth back to nearly twencen levels, Cliff thought, here comes another whole world.…