Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Cliff kept his voice even and warm, and even managed a smile of sorts. “We’ll have to arrange it for you.” At times, Fred was touchy. As the ship rumbled, Cliff eyed Fred, who was lean and muscular and sported a permanent suntan. How had he gotten that in all their training time? Cliff had hardly been able to sleep. At least Fred didn’t talk much now as he concentrated on work.
* * *
The last long swoop of their descending orbit was tense. The cabins filled with a sour smell and everyone was on edge. It felt odd to be coasting down toward a huge landscape that stretched away to all sides, filling the sky—and yet still be in space. The Bowl wrapped around them.
No tug of deceleration or singing of thin air. Cliff looked at the wall screens. One showed
SunSeeker
above them, a pale blue thread of flame trailing. Another showed the top of the butte, nearly edge on and still a featureless black. Another, the “overhead” view toward the jet.
Cliff watched the ivory and orange streamers fight and roil along it. An idea struck him. “Abduss!”
The man was in the next acceleration couch, face pale, looking none too well.
“You studied the jet, right?”
“Uh, yes, Cliff…”
“What does it emit?”
“X-rays, microwaves, plenty of IR.”
“And?”
“Not much visible light. A lot of broadband radio and microwave noise,” the wiry man said, obviously glad to have something else to think about than their landing. “Very loud. Very beautiful.”
“I’ll bet that’s why we don’t pick up their transmissions—they avoid the visible region of the spectrum. Probably use direct laser feeds, instead—so no side lobes for us to pick up.”
“Ah, yes, they are clever,” Abduss said, and went back to looking fixedly at the land sliding below them. His mouth worked.
Lightning forked around the oval. Some kind of electrical process, like the big sheets of luminosity that came cascading down from Earth’s ionosphere? Cliff watched the quick, orange streamers. They slid around the butte, with glowing fingers probing at the lip.
The atmosphere’s membrane was a light blue shining sheet under them now. It was visible only at an angle. Sunlight glinted off long wave fronts that rippled in the sheet’s surface, making it look like a transparent ocean. Cliff marveled at the illusion, seeing beneath it craggy mountains and long, sloping green valleys as though they lay on an ocean floor. Somehow this made the whole construction both eerie and yet like a planet.
Now they tilted and their thrusters roared, rattling Cliff’s teeth. They skated along just above the membrane, and he saw that the waves were moving slowly, great undulating troughs driven by—what?
Like an ocean on Earth. Perhaps the rotation of this colossal artifact unleashed such waves, and they in turn affected the weather below. So did Earth’s atmosphere, after all; hurricanes came from the planet’s rotation about its poles. What oddities could they expect on this unimaginable scale?
He watched a long line of rain clouds caught in the crest of a wave. Angry blue gray clouds were corralled in the high peak, as if in rising they cooled and let go their moisture. His eye followed the cloud-racked crest to the far horizon. A marching regimental rainstorm. He felt a cold sensation of strangeness at this sight. The idea of a rainstorm that stretched long and slender over distances far greater than continents made him suck in his breath.
Now they were above the black pillar, descending. Cliff’s stomach fluttered up into his throat. He clenched his teeth as
Eros
rolled and dived, wrenching around as Beth slammed them hard into their couches.
“The butte!” she shouted. “Damn!”
Abduss shouted, “What? What is it?”
Pause. “It’ll be fine,” she said flatly with forced calm. “I can figure this. Keep your crash webs tight. Someone should have noticed.” Beth was talking through clenched teeth.
Abduss frowned. “What is—?”
“That’s no butte. We’re inside a hollow tube! The surface is—I don’t see a surface, it’s in shadow, seven kilometers down.” Thrust went away. “I don’t want to run out of fuel. I’m going to assume there’s a floor and it’s flush with the forest. Abduss, can you get me anything with radar?”
Cliff’s throat was dry and his voice cracked. “Floor as opposed to … what?”
“As opposed to a hole that goes right through the Cupworld and out into space!”
Abduss said, “What?” His eyes showed a lot of white.
“Suppose it’s a through-out tube, to save the trouble of going around the whole Bowl. That’s what it looks like in a full-spectrum picture.” Beth gestured at a stack set of views. In some, stars hung in the opening.
“Uh, so?”
“We could go right through. What’s radar say? You can get an angle on the floor now, right?”
Abduss nodded and worked his board. He was sweating.
Cliff ventured, “We’d be picked up with
SunSeeker,
no problem.”
“Maybe,” Beth said tensely. “Unless somebody slams the door.”
“There’s a bottom down there,” Abduss said. “Watch yourself, radar says it’s not flat.”
The motor thrummed again. High thrust. Pings and pops in the ship.
Cliff didn’t try to speak. Beth was talking her way through it, and that was nerve racking. “It’s flat, Abduss. There’s a hole in it, a pit with stars at the bottom. We want to land, right?
Not
go through to the outside. Hey, there’s light at the bottom! And here we go—”
Eros
surged, then danced sideways under Coriolis force.
She set them down less than two kilometers from the butte wall,
on a cluttered ledge that was perhaps four kilometers across. There was a wall along the inner rim. Beyond that, the universe peeked through a hole ten kilometers across. She made the ship linger on its jets, finding a bare spot. They thunked down and felt the tug of centrifugal gravity.
She looked toward the butte face. Pale ivory light spilled out along the bottom of the wall, from a row of windows running from tiny to huge.
They all felt the significance of the moment, but there was no time for reflection. They didn’t know what waited outside, but talking wasn’t going to tell them anything.
They emerged from the scout ship in full space gear. Cliff listened with half his attention to Fred reporting to Redwing. The lightspeed time gap was seventeen seconds and rising. They stood at the foot of
Eros,
looking into the light. Into a row of glass boxes of increasing size, with forest on the far side.
“Air locks,” Fred said, and laughed happily. “With transparent walls.” He stopped laughing when nobody joined him. “That one at the far end is fifty or sixty times as big as
Eros.
I guess they have to pass big machinery, given the scale of this, well—” He groped for a word, then laughed again. “Describing all this isn’t easy. Captain Redwing, are the helmet cameras working?”
“We want one of the little locks,” Cliff said.
These gigantic structures weren’t funny; they were daunting. The one ahead would easily pass
Eros,
and it wasn’t the largest.
Redwing, lightspeed delayed, barked on comm, “Cameras are working. Definition isn’t good. Keep talking, Fred. We’re lonely up here.”
Beth added, “And nobody’s coming out to greet us, either.”
* * *
The smallest hatch that seemed to be an air lock wasn’t a good choice. It was no bigger than a child. Cliff had picked one big enough to pass a couple of elephants, Beth judged. They brought the cart rovers down the ramp from
Eros
and lined up their cargo in front of the air lock. Their suits weighed lighter on them in the lesser grav.
Beth felt odd indeed, looking through two walls of faintly blue cliff to see … trees. Spindly black trunks, soft pink fronds, carrot-topped—but trees. They set to work opening the air lock.
Only they couldn’t.
* * *
For three days, they tried to find a way into the air lock. The task took all the gear they had in the lander. Beth got tired from lugging apparatus out to the working area, setting it up, trial testing, integrating, then listening to the arguments about the results.
People under stress, she observed, need to argue. It lets off steam.
The team looked for obvious controls in the window/walls, but the surfaces were translucent, smooth, unmarked. They were synthetic diamond, at a guess. Carbon, anyway. Mounted on a blue interior wall were odd protrusions that might be controls—“For something with big fingers, or clumsy,” Fred reported to
SunSeeker,
now half a lightspeed minute away. But on the outside there were no manual assists, nothing like a computer interface they could recognize, not a lever or a valve. In a way it made sense: defensive architecture.
They tested the cliff wall—a hard shell, rising straight up with a vacuum on one side and on the other an atmosphere. They could see the weather was heavy with sleeting rain the second day, and cloudy the next. Looking up the height of the transparent inner wall was like taking a cross section of the sky, with clouds sometimes stacked against it. Slowly winds blew the clouds around the enormous boundary of the butte. While the others labored, Beth and Cliff took time to watch the trees and soil and small darting things that flitted among the swaying trees. Something foxlike almost escaped a pouncing bird.…
An alien world. It was like standing on one side of a museum diorama, only they were in skin suits and packs. And the other side was a living world just doing its business.
Quick flitting birds like swallows, but much bigger. They were fast and sometimes flew in formations. Bright splashes of color amid snarled undergrowth looked like flowers with petals, but threw tendrils through the underbrush. Why? Trees of curious zigzag trunks and branches. Scampering slick-skinned blue gray things—
like squirrels? same niche?—
leaping on the ground and into trees. Odd angles in the tree limbs, gnarled things like nests or goiters, a broad-winged thing flapping through …
Howard kept making analogies to Earth life. Sometimes they worked, but other features made no immediate sense. Strange and wondrous. Gradually Howard stopped talking to Cliff and just made notes.
Redwing got irritated that they could not find a way in. He started giving orders in a stern tone.
Eros
’s crew stopped answering. People got prickly, Beth noticed without surprise.
Beth figured there was some signal they were supposed to give, but the blank, smooth, slick face of the air lock wall gave no clue about what to try. Here was the abstract problem of communicating with aliens, brought down to a concrete level.
Beams of particles, laser pulses, microwave antennas brought to within a meter—none made any difference, or provoked so much as a change of color in the eggshell blue wall.
The third day they were standing around the big microwave beamer they had hauled out, Beth with her gloved hands on her hips, gazing down in frustration at the rig, which had done nothing to the barrier. Fred said very calmly, “Something moving in there.”
They all turned and saw a big colorful creature walking out of the trees. Swaths of blue, yellow, and magenta seemed splashed over it in elaborate designs. A big narrow head, with a long nose between two large eyes, swiveled and watched with stately elegance. The native looked to be at least three meters tall and strode forward on legs that articulated gracefully, taking great long strides. Mouth like a stubby beak. Spindly long arms ending in complicated hands. It came forward quickly, carrying something tubular, and then three more like it appeared from the trees. They seemed to stroll, taking their time but covering ground quickly.
Beth stood absolutely still, but part of her realized that this would be the first remark at the sighting of intelligent aliens. She said quickly, “They’re … beautiful.”
“Birds,” Cliff said. “Those colors—they’re feathers.”
“Smart
birds
?” Fred asked.
“Hey, crows are smart,” Irma said. Then shrugged. “Somewhat.”
Howard Blaire just gaped at the Bird Folk, his gloved hands flat against the glassy surface. He’d run a semi-private zoo in Maryland on Earth. He’d collected animals too. He’d been something of a star, bringing weird animals onto television shows. Cliff had asked Redwing to revive him because he was familiar with varied environments and animal behavior.
They stood there for long minutes and the Bird Folk did just about the same, staring through the wall. They made quick, jerky movements with their two slender arms, moving their long necks sideways and jerking their beak-mouths. It was easy to see them as birds who had replaced wings with arms, but as well, they had a lightness and grace to their gait, an elegance of motion that recalled no creature of Earthly origin. Beth found this enchanting, a sort of dance she had never seen before.
The newcomers did not make any move to open the lock. After a while, Cliff poked a finger at Fred and Irma Michaelson. Irma was one of the recently revived crew, a plant biologist. “Go forward. Make hand gestures about opening the lock.”
The Bird Folk seemed excited when Fred and Irma approached, beaks flapping—but they did not answer the hand signals and gestures. They gawked. They talked to one another. They fingered the various burdens they carried on belts and vests.
Beth watched them closely—the humans were all recording visual and audio, of course—and decided the Bird Folk didn’t wear clothes at all beyond appliance wear like packs and belts. They had long swaths forming colorful patterns all over their bodies, particularly at the neck. Some wore what looked like headsets, or else ornamental hats. The backs of their heads had multicolored coxcombs of astounding profusion. Every one was different, with intricate bursts of color interwoven in rubbery pink combs, some nearly a meter long. They were tall, the biggest maybe 2.5 meters high.
Redwing’s voice said on comm, “Company. About time! Fred, keep me posted.” Fred didn’t answer.
More Bird Folk appeared, came forward, and seemed to talk to the others. Body language: strutting, bowing, fluffing of feathers. Plenty of beak flutter, speaking. Cliff reported, “We’ve got two species—at least two species—call them big and medium. Medium is still bigger than we are. Big defers to medium. Big carries sacks under the neck or on the ramp of its back.”