Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
The inside was even roomier, with a ceiling ten meters high above a single gigantic space. It looked like a museum: items standing free or floating on thin wires Beth couldn’t quite see, all squashed into whatever space would fit. A vast ceramic green ramp ran round the spherical wall.
“Watch for anything moving,” Lau Pin said. “Fred, Mayra, Tananareve, you in the middle. I’ll take point. Beth?”
“Rear guard.”
Here on the floor was a shifting mound, almost flat but with ridges and pools. Patches of ocher and pale green writhed and then spread out. After a minute, it repeated. It made no sense at all until Tananareve said, “Continental drift.”
Beth said, “We still don’t know—”
“Which planet. True.”
They walked among what must be model spaceships, and with a flicker were suddenly in a three-dimensional movie. As they crossed some unseen threshold, it rose abruptly all around them, a starscape riddled with swarming dark dots.
Beth stepped back quickly. The dots vanished. That much furious motion, anything could be hidden … but there wasn’t anything alive here except her own people, visible as long as she wasn’t in the hologram. They had spread out a little, looking for enemies—barring Fred, who stood stock-still, caught by the dancing dots.
She stepped back in. Chaos danced in flickering light around her. Anything could sneak up on them under these conditions, but she couldn’t look away. Fred sighed beside her, mesmerized.
The sensaround opened in deep space.
A tiny knot of yellow white sat at the exact center of the display. The field of view was a hemisphere so big, she could not grasp it without turning her head. Stars sprinkled the sky, but she could recognize no constellations.
Slowly the point of view rotated. Maybe that was the nearest star? But, no—a ruddy yellow disk swam into view at her far left. The disk fumed with small storms, and she could see magnetic arches soaring above the brimming bright churn. Clearly this star was smaller and redder than Sol and pocked with dense black spots. The vision slid farther, the star moved right, and tiny ships came in view. They had blue bubbles midship, probably fuel blisters. They tugged huge hexagonal containers, hundreds of ships all heading toward …
A vast pale crescent swam into view. She watched the framework of long, spiky girders that curved around complex guts. Between these were long loops like wedding bands, glowing. The thing was so large, it cast deep shadows over a bee swarm of ships, all tending to the large structure like worker insects.
Farther away orbited tumbling rocks, mostly tinged with white. Flames shot along their faces, and fumes billowed out in spheres. Those must be immense smelting systems laboring in the high vacuum. Big clouds of white and amber gas rose from them, expanding until they dimmed to transparency and faded. The view crossed a smaller star, glare white, brighter than the rest of the sky.
Still smaller ships flitted among the mining operations. Some hauled massive girders through cylindrical arrays. Out the far end emerged long struts with a glaze on them, shimmering in the orange red starlight. Some kind of hardening process?
Dirty gray blobs hovered in the distance. Beth realized these were iceteroids, like those humanity exploited in the Oort cloud of Earth—condensed out when the sun was born, rich in volatiles. Beside them flitting ships shepherded enormous orange balloons. These filled with gas that was born in the tiny orange fires at their base. Mass and elements for the construction, she guessed.
Then the milling swarm of mote-sized ships became a blur. Time speeded up. The huge thing they were building took shape. Girders aligned and layered. Scaffolds unfolded and crossbars buttressed those. Joists and brackets the size of planets formed in the haze of buzzing motion. An enormous geometry emerged. It was the Bowl.
Flitting shapes, too small to see clearly, wove a tapestry of black lace around the budding hemisphere. This array glowed suddenly, a flash of white light. Gas blew away from the structure like a fading fog.
This is a history lesson,
Beth thought.
The natives here must want to keep aware of how they came to be … and so leave places like this so the message is not lost, a tradition sent down through deep time.
The camera eye view closed in. Beth could see intricate maneuvers of silvery ships as they worked their way across the surface of the Bowl in the making. They laid down layers and pillars that lapped around the hemisphere, and the camera eye followed them, sliding over the lip of the Bowl into … a thick flock of ships, all ferrying volatile bags, the orange balloons she had seen before. Flashes like lightning arced through the bags of gas. Above the bottom of the Bowl, these came free. They slipped through holes in a nearly invisible upper layer, gliding downward toward the floor of the Bowl.
The field of view closed in on the shimmering layer. It was the atmosphere’s boundary shield. This billowed out as it held in the pressure of gases emptying forth. On the Bowl floor, gushing geysers spouted thick ivory clouds. Other ships skimmed along the ribbed understory of the floor, spewing masses of brown and black—the topsoil, falling into place.
This was an Origin Story. Somewhere, the small red sun had spawned the creatures who built the Bowl. Why didn’t it open on a planet where the builders began? There were none in the black sky. If the red star had planets, they were small. So maybe the creatures’ world was far away, orbiting the first bright spot she had seen. Maybe the builders came from near a distant companion of this small sun.
Now the measureless basin turned. The bee swarm of working ships was an earnestly working fog as they spun up this world in the making. The soil settled and blue haze spread throughout the skin of atmosphere. Darting flashes lit the troubled high clouds. Monsoons swept the ragged continents, and seas sloshed.
The system evolved. Storms lashed immense, windswept lands. A joist on the backside popped free and the bee swarm surrounded it as gouts of dirt and gas became a volcano into a vacuum. Patched, the system ground on, spinning up. The shimmering sheet holding in the atmosphere flexed and rippled as angular momentum warped it.
Time ran faster. She was not sure how she knew this, but surely it would have taken a very long time to form a working biosphere. Yet now she saw the air clear and gray clouds form in high stacks like pancakes. Green lands spread like a bacterium overwhelming a curved petri dish.
Beth could see the Knothole now through the clearing atmosphere. In an arc around it, mirrors blossomed in lines, like yarn wrapping around the floor of the Bowl. The dark patch of the Knothole bristled with large gray shapes that she supposed must be large magnet cores being built. Slowly the center resolved and she could see stars winking in it.
The winding up of the mirror fields slowed as the last strands of it popped into being. Now the mirror fields jittered and flashed as they came alive. Her view tilted and swam toward the edge of the Bowl, where knuckles of burnished metal grew. Quickly the mirror field gained a slick metallic sheen. Fitful sprays of blazing colors worked in it.
The mirror fields showed sparkling oranges and reds. They threw images of the small star into view, flickering and finding their patterns, settling in. Abruptly a thin line of boiling plasma arced in and played in the spaces above the Bowl. The plume steadied, stuttered—and lanced through the Knothole.
Thin at first, the luminous Jet thickened. Snarls worked along it. Dark spots. A filament broke free and lashed across the envelope that held in the atmosphere. The Jet snapped off. But the damage was done: the atmosphere’s skin darkened and massive plumes of air shot out. A blur of worker ships stopped that.
The view turned toward the reddish star. Its corona boiled with hoops of magnetic force, making giant high bridges around a white-hot point. That was the mirror focus spot, and more ships tended to it with anxious energy.
With a jerk the Jet lanced out again. It speared exactly through the Knothole. The repaired skin of the atmosphere reflected a pale image of the Jet.
Now this Bowl of the past resembled the vibrantly alive presence of today. The point of view backed away from it, and the constantly flickering swarm of worker ships faded.
Imperceptibly, the system of star, Jet, and Bowl began to move. It swam across the blackness, the Jet’s raging brilliance drowning out the icy stars. The vast contrivance glided with aching slowness away from the distant yellow white star.
Leaving the system, she guessed. It could not make a pass near that star without risking disruption of whatever planets might orbit there. The Bowl became a vessel bound for the distant pale lights, the firmament of beckoning stars.
Only the starscape remained.
Lau Pin, Fred, Tananareve, and Mayra looked around themselves. It was, Beth thought, a little like being on LSD. A trip into a distant, wondrous time.
In the dark she could see through the globe’s smoky glass. Gigantic Bird Folk were walking underneath.
Fred said, “I think I see.”
Mayra said, “We all saw, Fred.”
Tananareve said, “I think I see why primitives died out when they ran across advanced civilizations.”
Lau Pin said, “It strikes me that if there’s only one way into here, there’s only one way out.”
Beth: “We can’t leave now. We’re surrounded.”
“If any of them come in—”
“We’re dead. Let’s keep looking. All the secrets are here. By the way, Beth, this has to be the map of the origin world.”
“Oh … almost.”
* * *
Over the next hour, two dozen Bird Folk passed them by. The human folk spent their time examining hundreds of spacegoing tools. Most were too cryptic even to be described. Mayra took pictures.
They gathered at one point to share dried canard bird meat. It was all they had left, save for a bar of chocolate Tananareve shared out.
“I think the Bird Folk are gone,” Beth said. “Do we feel lucky?”
“We feel hungry,” Tananareve said. “Somewhere around us, there must be something to eat.”
Six little world-globes ran in a row, three or four meters in dia
meter, half a kilometer apart. Worlds—big enough to show as spheres—but not all Earthlike. One was featureless blue, bigger than the rest. One was stark ice white, cracked around the equator. None of them had windows or openings.
The final bubble, an hour away, was another glassy sphere marked with land masses in a great blue sea. They moved carefully now, slipping from clumps of immense ferns to the shelter of occasional tree stands. Bird Folk of a variety Beth didn’t recognize were streaming into a great arch. Beth’s troupe moved carefully, but the Bird Folk were paying no attention at all. They murmured and whooped with odd, high singsongs.
Tananareve crept close against the glass, around the curve from the entrance. “Dancing,” she said. “It’s a dance hall.”
Lau Pin was beside her now. He stared awhile, then said, “Mating ritual.”
Beth said, “There’s a difference?”
The chuckles that followed this weak joke told her how tense they were.
Beth was up against the glass now. Slow, thumping music with skittering undertones. A simple song, cascading chords ornamented by lots of percussion. Lurching bodies, heads turned upward to the ceiling.
With sun and flare behind her, she and Tananareve might look like ferns, if they held still. There were platforms throughout the interior, on narrow pedestals, some topped with … sofas … nests? Thousands of Bird Folk, including a few gigantic Astronomers, were paying no attention to anything but one another. Some were dancing, some fighting, some … head to tail … that must be mating. But the Astronomers weren’t doing any of that. Were they there to supervise? Or as voyeurs?
“Nothing for us here,” Mayra said primly.
“But, Mayra, it must be a map of Glory! It’s the last globe in this park.”
“Get some photos, then.”
They did that, then went on.
The ridge continued toward the Bowl’s inner well. Vegetation was sparse here, offering less cover. There was nothing to eat.
And the next dome was silver, as big as several football fields, with a tremendous square opening and tracks running into it. Floating railroad cars ran in and out. They were open cages, and inside—
“Live animals,” Tananareve said.
“Plants, too. Warehouse,” Lau Pin said. “Anyone hungry?”
They crept in, hidden by the shadows beneath a slow-moving car, and rolled away before the cars reached the unloading dock.
There were Bird Folk around, one of the big varieties. Some might be guards, but most were working, moving stuff on and off the cars. What went on the cars was recognizable: crates of melons and plants and creatures from the humans’ garden-prison. What came off were ferns and reeds and grass, tons and tons of it. It must all be food for Bird Folk of various types, Beth thought.
She got the rest to hang back until they could see the patterns of movement. Once offloaded, the workers ignored the food. The humans waited, stomachs rumbling, and then approached a cage car. They kept to the shadows of squashes and melons as big as automobiles. They carved into the underside of one of these, juice gushing out, and began to feast.
Fred pointed to a grid on the wall, with a wind blowing into it. “We should be there,” he said.
“Why?” Beth asked.
“We stink,” Fred said.
They looked at one another … yeah. Nods. Bird Folk mostly had big nostrils. They would have a powerful sense of smell. Beth’s team moved under the air conditioner, taking melons and fruit and a dead mammal with them. The wind there was refreshing.
* * *
They feasted, and slept, and feasted some more. “The easiest way to carry food is in us,” Fred said, and was jeered for it, but they ate anyway.
“I think I see…,” Fred said.
Conversation had already stopped. Beth said, “What?”
“It’s going to sound crazy.”
Beth looked around her. “We’re living like mice in a gigantic alien supermarket,” she said, “inside a wok the size of the solar system. We’re all lunatics here, Fred.”