Gregory Benford: Bowl of Heaven

Food appeared. Coffee: caffeine, yes, lovely caffeine. Nobody spoke. Next course, soup. It tasted like nectar, the essence of life. Then they told him, as he eagerly slurped down a big bowl of fragrant veggie mix grown aboard. Halfway through his third bowl, he became vaguely aware that they were talking about an astrophysical observation that required his interpretation.

“What? Mayra, Astro is you, ” he shot back. “Every pilot has to be.”

“We need a different viewpoint,” Mayra said, her dark eyes wary. “We do not want to bias your views by explaining more now.”

“We are reviving the captain, too,” Abduss said.

He blinked, startled. “Redwing?”

“It’s that important.” Abduss was unreadable. “He will awaken in another day, his capsule says.”

Cliff felt a chill that was not thermal. Stores of food, water, oxygen couldn’t be recycled forever. That was the point in riding semi-frozen: They would reach Glory with enough stores to survive until they could replace what was lost.

“Four of us. Waking too many people would run us short,” he said. “What’s up?”

Again, the Wickramsinghs looked at each other and did not answer.

As soon as he could walk steadily, they showed him the viewing screens, and for a long moment he could not speak.

The spectacle was striking, both for what was familiar and what was not. SunSeeker was forty light-years from Earth, and yet he could identify many of the constellations he had known as a child in Brazil. Their familiar faces swam among a bright swarm of lesser lights, twisted here and there. On the scale of the galaxy, light-years did not count for much.

He immediately looked for their destination. A star not much different from Sol, Glory’s primary should be a white point dead ahead. It was there, reassuringly bright, though still five light-years away. Perhaps its brilliance was enhanced by SunSeeker ’s velocity? No, that was a small effect. More probably, brightened by his own longing to see, to breathe, to touch an Earthlike world, named Glory out of pure hope before any human eye had seen it. Pixels and spectra didn’t do the job.

Other stars brimmed in the rosy night lit by SunSeeker ’s bow shock. The ramscoop’s plowing through the interstellar gas and ionized hydrogen was an unending rainbow light show, filmy incandescent streamers curving around them as they plunged into the infinite night. Beyond that prow wash lay the spectrally shifted universe. Some of the glimmering stars were intriguing, constellations rearranged — but nothing compared to the nearby red sun.

“That’s the problem?” Cliff asked.

Abduss nodded. “It is a problem, but there is another, larger. We have been wrestling with this more difficult issue, but that can wait for the captain.”

Can’t these people ever say anything straight? He made himself say deliberately, “Okay, tell me what’s the big deal about this star?”

“We are overtaking it. When we came on watch, the star was not visible. There was a mild recombination source nearby, rather odd.” Switching to another channel, Abduss pointed out a diffuse ivory plume behind the dark patch.

Cliff frowned. “How long is it?”

Abduss said, “About three astronomical units. This is a signature of hydrogen recombining, after it has been ionized. This linear feature seems to be a jet, cooling off and then turning back into atoms. That’s the emission I made this map from, you see?”

“Um.” Cliff wrinkled his nose, trying to think like an Astro type. “A jet from a star. It didn’t jump out at you?”

Abduss tightened his mouth but otherwise did not move. “At first we did not even see the star.”

Uh-oh…, Cliff thought. Best to shut up, yes.

“We had much to measure. The jet did not attract much attention, as it seemed unimportant. Yet now we can see it to be related to the star — which suddenly appeared.”

Cliff nodded, smiled, tried to defuse the man’s irritation. “Perfectly understandable. Our problems are inside the ship, not outside. So … the star popped into view because it came around the rim of this … thing.”

Mayra murmured, “We became alarmed.”

“Nobody noticed the star before? Earlier watches?”

Abduss blinked slowly. “We could not see it.”

Cliff shrugged. In moderate close-up, the dwarf showed as a disk: it must be close. It was perched at the lip of a much larger arc of light. An ordinary star, little and reddish. He raised an eyebrow at Mayra.

“The spectral class is F9,” Mayra added helpfully. “Most likely the plasma plume means that this star must have been recently active. Early stars often display this.” Under magnification, the expelled matter looked to Cliff like a thin nebula, dim and old.

“But we don’t know it’s a young star,” he said.

“No, stars of this class have very long lifetimes.”

Cliff had never been much concerned with the fate of failed stars as they erupted and faltered. Spectacular, sure, easy to sell to contract monitors — but biology demands a stable abode. Still, he immediately guessed that this veil was a remnant of an earlier era in the star’s life, when it was blowing off shells of hot gas. A good guess, anyway — but of course, not his field. These details of stellar evolution had never interested him very much, since they had little to do with his specialty, the evolution of higher life-forms on worlds similar to Earth. A largely abstract pursuit until the Alpha Centauri discoveries of a simple but strange ecology there. That was what drew him to Glory; Beth was an accidental benefit.

So he shrugged. “Gas from a small star. Why wake me up?”

“You are the highest-ranked Scientific,” Abduss said.

Marya added, “And your specialty may be quite relevant.”

That remark just perplexed him. He felt hungry and tired and disappointed. And miffed, yes, with a raspy sore throat. He sucked in a deep breath. “I’m supposed to assess Glory’s biology, not be awakened to answer questions from the watch crew!”

They blinked, startled. He wondered if he was betraying more than the typical awakened-sleeper irritation they all had been warned about. Chill-sleep was reasonably safe, but coming out of it was not. Every crew member under its enforced hibernation cycle ran a 2 percent risk of subtle neurological damage from a revival, an irreducible price of seeking the stars. By waking him, they had forced him to double that risk. He’d be going back into the chill when he’d done what they wanted. He had rather blithely accepted the risk of several revivals when he became a senior science officer, he recalled, when it was entirely theoretical.

As well, no sleeper could be immediately returned to the vaults after revival. The medical risks were too great. So he was stuck for at least a month in the narrow rumbling quarters of the starship, eating the pallid food generated from ponics tanks. There was no way to avoid the perpetual growl of the fusion ramscoop. Filters could not erase the ever-shifting tones of turbulence as the ship surged through clumps of denser gas, riding waves of ionization — a moving electrical discharge, lighting up its neighborhood.

He had not been slated for revival on the passage at all, so his sensitivity to noise had not been an issue. And indeed, the shifting, grating clangor already irked him a bit. There was no way to damp it, so he would have to use noise-suppressing headphones. Certainly he would not have made the cut for active, awake crew.

The Wickramsinghs glanced at each other yet again, as if to say, Humor him — he’s a senior officer . Both inhaled deeply. Abduss said, “Please tolerate our unveiling this anomaly so that you may experience it as we did.”