Gregory Benford: Bowl of Heaven

“Are they hailing us?”

“There’s nothing obvious that we can figure out, no,” Mayra said. “There are many transmissions, not a long string. It looks like a conversation, perhaps.”

“So they don’t know we’re here, maybe.”

“We could hear the traffic once we were within view of the hole, I believe. Perhaps it comes from within the hemisphere, and leaks through. It is not broadcast for others to pick up — or so we think. And unintelligible, at least to us.”

Cliff eyed them both and said carefully, “I agree that the protocols call for my revival. But this is more than anybody ever visualized, when those protocols were invented.…” He was still dazed after a day awake. And cold; he rubbed his arms to get blood moving. “I wonder if you didn’t wake me too early, though. We’re not looking at plants and animals yet. If we wake too many of us…”

“Yes,” Abduss said.

“We’d run short.”

“We’re short now,” Mayra said. “That is the other problem. It is high time someone woke the captain, we felt.”

“So you did, right after me? Me, because my secondary specialty is in rations and ship biology. Mostly, though, I’m a field biologist. But sure, call me up. Then the cap’n, to take over all the other implications. Right.”

“And now we are happy to turn both problems over to you.” Abduss gave him a broad smile without any trace of irony. Mayra beamed, too. They had faced all this together, and the weight of it showed in their evident relief.

It didn’t take long to see why they were handing off to him and the captain.

The opportunity: an artifact bigger than planets.

The problem: SunSeeker was not performing to specs. The ramscoop drive was running at 0.081 of light speed, instead of the 0.095 engineering had promised.

Not a big difference, but in starflight it was crucial. At 0.081, their trip would take 550 years. They had stocks for a bit over 500 years.

Early space travel had been like this, with tiny margins of safety. Reaching the Moon six out of seven tries had been a miracle. They’d run aging X-planes for a quarter of a century, losing two shuttles before they built something better. Interplanetary travel still cut close to the bone, and interstellar was a crapshoot. And still there were always those who would take the gamble.

Of course, SunSeeker recycled everything — and, of course, the accounting never quite came out even. The flight plan had them arriving at Glory with time to find what they needed. Glory had a world with oceans and free oxygen, all carefully checked in the ozone spectral line seen from Earth orbit. And in the infrared, they had seen a broad disk of asteroids, too, comfortably farther out and with traces of iceteroids among them. The world or the rocks would give them the elements they needed: water, oxygen, dust to be turned to soil.

But this slower speed was eating their safety window.

He checked the log. Five watch cycles had worked on the problem in their ramscoop drive without really spotting a cause. None of them had wakened the captain. It was an engineering problem, not a command structure one. And they were on a centuries-long voyage.

The big magnetic fields at SunSeeker ’s bow drove shock waves into the hydrogen ahead, ionizing it to prickly energies, then scooping it up and mixing it with fusion catalysis, burning as hot as suns — but somehow, the nuclear brew didn’t give quite the thrust it had during field trials out in the Oort cloud. Considering how new relativistic engineering was, maybe this was not truly surprising.

Still, it had huge consequences. “We won’t get to Glory in time,” Cliff said.

The Wickramsinghs nodded together. Mayra said, “So…” She did not want to draw the conclusion.

“We have cut our rations to a minimum, all five watches, yes,” Abduss rushed in, eyes large. “It was a major decision we made, you see — to revive you and the captain.”

Cliff slurped down more coffee. It tasted incredibly good — another symptom of revival. “You’ve done the calculation. Can we make it?”

“Marginal at best,” Mayra said precisely. “The last five watches have run at the minimum crew number: two. Plus we are pushing the hydroponics to the maximum. We fear it is not enough.”

“Damn!” Cliff grimaced. Starve to death between the stars. “That’s also why nobody woke the captain. One more gut, one more pair of lungs. Until … yeah.” Until they saw the strange thing up ahead.

He knew the deeper reason, too. What could the captain do, after all? If the engineers could not find a solution, mere managerial ability would not help. So the engineers had followed the protocols that had been drilled into them: Follow mandates and hope for the best. Especially since an error could kill them all with relativistic speed.

They gazed at him, calm and orderly and patient, the perfect types for a watch crew. Which he was not. Too restless and a touch excitable, the psych guys had said. That was fine with Cliff; he wanted to see Glory, not black interstellar space. All crew were calm, steady types, or they wouldn’t have made the first cut in the long selection filters.

The Wickramsinghs were waiting. He was in charge until the captain woke up. That he did not understand the situation did not matter; he was a superior officer, so he had to make the decisions.

First, he had to rest. About that, the revival procedures were as hard-nosed as the mission protocols. At least that would give him a little time to think.

They found him twelve hours later, in the kitchen.

The first thing he ordered was a thorough study of the star they were approaching. The Wickramsinghs called up screens of data and vibrant images. This gave him a jumpy image of a star massing about nine-tenths of Sol’s mass. There were plenty of those in the galaxy, but this one was not behaving like a serene, longer-lived orange dwarf. Fiery tendrils forked and seethed at the center of the apparent disk. “There is blurring in the image,” Abduss remarked, “by the plasma plume.”

Squinting, at first he did not understand the implication of the roiling spikes that leaped from a single hot spot, a blue white furnace. “Ah — that spot is directly under the center of the artificial bowl, the cap.”

Abduss nodded. “Something is disturbing the star, making it throw out great flaming tongues. Very dangerous, I would think.”

They were coming up on this system pretty fast. Cliff thumbed in the whole data field. The obviously artificial disk — okay, call it the cap, because he could sense from the image that it was curved away from their point of view — the cap was not at all far away, maybe a few hundred astronomical units, where an A.U. was the distance from Earth to Sol. You got used to such enormous distance measures, in the relentless training all crew had to undergo.

He tried to remember when that was … centuries ago. Yet it seemed like just a few weeks.

He looked at the image and let his eyes see it as a curved hemisphere cupped around this side of the star.

They zoomed the optics in on the disk’s flares, having to go through several settings that blanked out the blue white hot spot on the star’s surface. The glare of the hot spot was fierce, actinic, bristling with angry storms, a tiny white sun attached to the bigger pink star like an angry leech.

Above the white spot raged the filigree spikes of streaming plasma. They whirled around one another like fighting snakes, burning as they rushed up from the hot spot. It looked like they should bathe the hemispheric bowl in licking flames. But before they reached the curve of the bowl, they dovetailed into a slender jet. Among the streamers, Cliff could see little blobs and bright flecks moving out from the star, swarming up along the jet, toward the neatly circular hole in the bowl and out into the sky.