Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Redwing could see the strain in Jam’s face, but the man would never mention it, of course. “How long can we keep doing this waltz?”
“A day, perhaps two.”
“Then what?”
“We must use the reaction motors.”
“We can’t afford to burn real fuel.”
“I know.” Jam’s watery eyes studied Redwing’s face. “But I cannot alter the laws of mechanics.”
“To me, Jam, that means something between diddly and squat. Time to do some hard thinking, or we’re going to lose touch with our people.”
Redwing had almost said
my people,
but thought better of it. Too possessive, even for a captain. He had to seem sober, focused, yet somehow above the fray, thinking about the larger prospects.
To give Jam some time, he walked the length of the full deck, eyeing the display boards for signs of trouble. They had few crew up, to conserve on supplies, but heads looked up as he passed, his face observing yet detached.
He passed by the Bio Preserve and on impulse cycled through the lock. A strong stink of dank animal sweat wrinkled his nose. One of the pigs had gotten out of its enclosure. It ran up to him, squealing, sniffing, and farted. This turned out to be an overture. It crapped on the deck, turned, and dashed away.
Damned if he would clean it up. He called out to Condit, the field biologist, and pointed to the mess when the woman appeared. She shrugged. “Sorry, Cap’n. It got around me while I was recharging their food.”
“What do they eat?”
“Anything. Table scraps, human dander from the air filters. Even their own dung if you let them.”
“Maybe you should. Serve ’em right.”
She nodded, taking him seriously. “It might help in the nutrient recycling, yes. We trap eighty percent of nitrogen value in our urine, but getting much out of solid waste is hard. Maybe we should feed our wastes to the pigs.”
Something in Redwing liked that idea.
Let them eat shit! Marie Antoinette had it right.
But he kept his face blank and said, “Look into it.”
Back in the central corridor, he sucked in the dry, stale ship air with relief. He had to carefully avoid letting his sense of humor off its leash.
He hoped nobody here had access to records of his older self. Decades before
SunSeeker
was building, he had scorned the whole idea of interstellar arc-ships, and written a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the program. He proposed that they simply send out robot ships with a single message that read,
Make ten exact copies of this plaque with your name at the bottom of the list and send them to ten intelligent races of your acquaintance. At the end of four billion years, your name will reach the top of the list and you will rule the galaxy.
A joke, quickly forgotten. The Review Board that passed on starship command hadn’t seemed to turn it up, anyway. Or they overlooked it. But now he couldn’t be that jokester.
As Redwing returned, Jam looked up. “Cap’n, I think we could—” He paused, as if this might be too much of a leap. “We could, ah, perhaps gather some reserve plasma by, by approaching the jet again.”
“Too dangerous. We nearly lost it all, flying up that thing.”
“We can come close to it, without entering the turbulent heart.”
Redwing smiled.
Turbulent heart
wasn’t a bad description of how he felt. “Scoop up plasma, store it?”
“I believe we can, using the capture cross section of the magscoop, when we extend it again.”
“That’ll take us away from the Bowl, though. A big delta-V.”
“We can make it up, I calculate, with the reserve plasma gathered by an approach.”
Jam’s steady eyes said,
Your call.
“We’ll lose touch with Beth, right? No hope of reaching Cliff’s party with Ayaan’s jury-rigged antenna, either.”
Jam nodded. “Surely true, yes. But we can make a strong boost when we arc down along the Bowl, and return within perhaps ten days.”
“Plan it out,” Redwing said slowly. “I want to give Ayaan a crack at reaching Cliff, then we’ll see.”
“Yes, sir.”
Redwing paced again, wishing he had more options. Regret that he had not gone down in the landing party surfaced again—a gnawing black dog, but he submerged it. His judgment had been right, even if it did mean he spent his time bottled up here.
In some of the preflight training, to help them deal with the media, he had attended a showing of older ideas about interstellar travel. It was both funny and appalling. One of the earliest, from the Age of Appetite, had featured a dashing starship captain who always went down to planetary surfaces to investigate. Nobody questioned the practice! Of course, they had lots of other wish fulfillment trash ideas—faster-than-light travel (and this was after Einstein!), aliens who spoke English of course, teleportation for quick jaunts wherever they wanted. Nobody explained why that didn’t yield an economy with infinite resources. After all, the transporter could just as easily make extra food or devices or money; anything at all, even people.
Yet those Age of Appetite people had the dream, too. They just didn’t think much about how it would take hardship and death in the teeth of the unknown.
He made himself smile and say encouraging things as he paced the deck, and kept his musings to himself, as always.
They were rattled. Cliff could see it in their faces.
“I wonder,” Irma said as they ate cold meat beside their sailcraft, “if the Birds planned to hunt us, back when we came through the lock?”
Aybe snorted. “Of course not! They were treating us as equals—”
“—and they tried to capture us,” Terry finished for him.
“We didn’t give them much chance to negotiate,” Aybe insisted.
“They grabbed Beth’s party,” Irma said. “And look at what they did to those odd primates. They were tool users, too!”
Howard said mildly, “We can’t gamble that they’ll treat us differently.”
“I agree,” Cliff said. “Focus on what we do next.”
Terry said, “I still think we should see what their society looks like, but at a distance maybe, see—”
“Too dangerous,” Cliff said.
Howard nodded. “But sailing along in the desert zone, that’s dangerous, too—and doesn’t teach us much.”
They all agreed. Terry said, “I’m getting tired of sitting in that rig, boosting it over outcroppings when we hit a snag, searching for water. And the dust storms! We’ve got to get some better transport, or we’ll be hunted down.”
More agreement. Cliff began to see an upside to the horrifying kills they had witnessed. Fear concentrated attention. “Let’s hunt up meat, grab some sleep, move away in the morning.”
Howard and Terry brightened. They actually enjoyed hunting the nasty lizards, so they set out toward the nearest dry area. The black and brown things usually lived under cairns of rock they had shouldered into place. The trick was to catch them outside, and Terry had shown a talent for luring the quick-footed, hissing beasts with the old game meat left over from previous kills. They didn’t seem to mind eating their own kind. “Maybe they’re alien lawyers,” Irma had said, and got a laugh.
Aybe fished out the mesh he had found before, unfolded it, and began tinkering with it, using his tool kit. Irma went looking for likely edible plants, but as their discipline demanded, always stayed within earshot. Cliff tried to relax. He had not been sleeping well. This ever-warm, sunlit prospect was as good as he was going to get, the new norm in his life—so he dozed.
Only to be awakened by a shout from Aybe.
“Uh, whazzit?” Cliff said, coming out of his sleep. He had been dreaming of Beth and didn’t want to leave the warm comfort of the illusion.
“I got it!” Aybe had arrayed the mesh in a tree for support. His beamer was patched into it and he excitedly waved the phone at Cliff. “I got
SunSeeker
’s carrier indices.”
Cliff snapped awake. “What? You can talk to them?”
“Damn low power, audio might not work—but I’ll send them a text message.”
Cliff watched and Aybe’s face danced. “They answer! It’s Redwing.”
Aybe stared at the phone and called, “Sending a file!”
Long minutes dragged by while Cliff and Aybe stared at the phone display screen. Finally it chimed and a picture appeared—a big purple globe. A green upright finger symbol stood at the bottom right of the screen. “I’ve seen that thing,” Aybe said. “The finger, green—maybe that means it’s okay to eat?”
“Hit the next page,” Cliff said.
A dozen pages confirmed several plants they had eaten. Cliff said, “How’d Redwing get this?”
“Must be from Beth’s group,” Aybe said, “relayed through
SunSeeker
.”
“Just what we need,” Cliff said. “I saw one of those. That other one, too. Wait—I got it. This is a menu!” The next pages gave plant and animal pictures with two red fingers crossed, clearly warnings. “And an anti-menu. The red ones are dangerous to eat. The blue, okay.” He looked up, grinning madly. “Boy, that Lau Pin is sharp.”
Looking through the menu, Cliff thought about the colors of edible food here. Evolution geared animals and people alike to like the colors of things that were good or benign—blue for skies and clear water, white for snow. People disliked browns and dark colors linked to feces and rotten food, and reds that might mean spices or poisons. Plants had evolved those as warding-off signals. He hoped Beth hadn’t taken risks to discover all the menu’s contents. Then—
“Wait,” he said to Aybe. “I’ll bet they got that data straight from the aliens.”
“So they’re still in captivity. Um.”
“Maybe. The important thing is, we’re back in contact.”
“Sort of.” He sighed. “I lost
SunSeeker
’s signal again.”
“They’re moving, in orbit. Not easy to stay within range, even with these narrowband phones.”
“Good thing they were designed to work at long range.” Aybe chuckled ruefully. “Nobody thought they’d have to work over interplanetary distance, though.”
Hearing from Beth brought up a subject he hadn’t wanted to confront: that one quick moment of passion with Irma.
Sadly he remembered an old joke:
A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
* * *
By the time Irma returned, Aybe could tell her which of the plants she had gathered she could toss and which to keep. Howard and Terry brought in an odd-looking two-legged thing like a badger, which was edible. They skinned and roasted it and felt joyous.
Then they sailed away into the desert, to get space between them and the magcar Birds. Half an hour of skimming slowly over the fine-grained sand got them into a region of rocky ridges. None they couldn’t avoid, but it slowed them considerably. Howard was scanning the horizon for a better route when he called, “Something big coming.”
It was a dot in the distance that steadily swelled. “We’re more exposed out here,” Aybe said. “If that’s—”
“A magcar,” Irma said. She had binocs and counted out, “Two, no, three Birds in it.”
“No point in trying to run,” Terry said. “Those are fast.”
“But do we fight?” Howard asked.
Irma said slowly, “We don’t know for sure they’re hostile.”
Aybe said slowly, “Angling for a mangling, we are.”
Cliff silently cursed himself for not thinking how exposed they would be. “We can’t run or hide, so let’s do a reverse. Wave, hail them if they get close.”
They all looked at him as if he were crazy. “Keep your weapons concealed. If things turn sour, we shoot. But first I’d like to get up into that magcar.”
Howard said, “It’ll all be in the timing. If we have to shoot, I’ll take the one on the right. Terry, you get the left one. Irma, the third, wherever it’ll be.”
Irma followed the growing dot with her binocs and called, “Still coming, going left—ah!—they just turned toward us. We’re spotted.”
“Okay, now we look as though we want to be found,” Cliff said.
“And keep our lasers out of sight,” Howard added.
They spread out around the sailer as the dot grew rapidly. They started whooping and waving arms, dancing around. The magcar slowed, lowered until it was two meters off the ground. Three heads bobbed in the passenger area, and they still reminded Cliff of ostriches. As the magcar neared with a thin whining sound, he could see they wore harnesses that held odd-shaped tools. One was piloting, and all wore helmets.
The car stopped above the sailcraft, and he could hear a steady thrumming from it. He wondered how magnetic pressure could support such a mass so far from the conducting surface, which had to be meters below the soil. The Birds spoke to one another in high, chittering voices. Their heads jerked around, feathers danced in complex patterns.
Is that part of their speech?
The magcar rose to three meters.
This seemed ominous to Cliff. He backed away from the car and said to Irma, “If they produce weapons, we’d better shoot first.”
“Yes,” she said, “you call it.”
He called to the others, “If I say ‘start,’ then shoot them.”
Terry said, “I don’t think that’s necessary—”
“Let’s
show
them we’re peaceful,” Howard said, spreading his arms with hands held open.
Seconds crawled by. Cliff’s hand poised, tense, ready to go for his laser.
Two of the Birds stood up, and the magcar shifted a bit. It tracked a bit to the left, so the humans were bunched on one side now.
“Let’s try harder,” Aybe said, and called up to them, “We
are
peaceful.” He spread his hands.
Terry echoed him, showing bare hands. “Speak mildly,” he said. “Let them know—”
A net flew out of the magcar so fast, Cliff could not tell how it was flung. Quickly it wrapped across both Terry and Aybe—
ssssssp.
Somehow the net’s perimeter slithered around them and jerked hard—
ssssip-klick
—closing them in.
There was a snaky, thick ropy line at its peak, leading back into the magcar. It snapped taut. The net swept them off their feet. The line began hoisting them up.
Cliff was so shocked, it took him several seconds to realize that he was supposed to be in charge. “I—
Start!
”