Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
“What about finding Beth’s team?” Irma asked.
Cliff paused and felt their eyes on him. “I’d like to, sure. As far as we know, they’re in the hands of the Bird Folk. But where?”
“Maybe near the mirror zone?” Aybe asked.
“Because they sent that image from there?” Irma shook her head. “Could be just suckering us in.”
Cliff held his tongue. He hadn’t known when it happened how to discuss with the others the Beth image. He still didn’t.
“Y’know,” Terry said, “we’re going way out on a limb here.”
“Out on a limb,” Irma said, “is where the fruit is.”
Aybe said impatiently, “We need to get away! Why not take the first one we can get?”
They all looked at one another, as if realizing how little they knew and how few options they had—and nodded.
Cliff sensed a slight breeze. “Another one coming.”
They braced themselves. But this time there was no gale, just an amiable breeze carrying a
whooooosh
that ebbed away. A long series of blocky cars passed, slowing, slowing—
That distracted them from seeing the black carapace of a machine that stood on three legs beside a side wall. Its slender arms manipulated controls on a panel. It made a final move and the train stopped.
Down a side alley of the vast alien platform came bulky gray robots. Soundless, swift, they ran on tracks and held their big arms up, as if saluting. A team of six opened the side of one car and started unloading capsules stacked within. They moved with surprising speed, all coordinated and specialized—lifting, loading, moving the capsules down the alley and into the distant reaches. None of the robot heads turned to look at the humans watching through the viewport nearby; they worked like monomaniacs, which of course they were.
“See that control box against the side wall?” Howard pointed. “That machine used it and the train stopped.”
They studied the machines working, and Cliff felt a tremor beneath his feet. Again he had the sensation of something massive moving nearby. It seemed to pass perpendicular to the tracks he could see. “There’s another level,” he guessed. “The other axis of a grid, must be.”
“Sure, longitude and latitude on the Bowl,” Terry said.
“These tracks run to higher latitude,” Aybe said.
Irma asked, “How can you tell?”
Aybe grinned, nodded to her. “I have an innate sense of direction. In basic, remember when they set us down in a forest and told us to find our way home?”
Cliff did. He had flunked. It had made him fear being dropped, though he did well in the other field tests. “So?”
Aybe’s grin got wider. “I beat your asses, remember? I watched you straggle in.”
It had been embarrassing. Cliff felt his face burn at the memory. The Georgia pine forest was utterly flat, the trees packed in tight to get the best yield for pulp paper, so the going was tough—and the sky cloudy, so he couldn’t use the sun to navigate. He had finally paired up with a guy, then another, and they had found their way by using a search pattern, each staying within calling distance of the others. Not really a way to track in wilderness, when there might be predators or enemies, but it had worked. Sort of. Later he learned that he had nearly lost the cut for
SunSeeker
because of that. Even though he had been an Eagle Scout.
Irma’s mouth twisted sardonically. “So?”
Aybe glared. “Just that these are the tracks we should take to higher latitude. This train is headed the right way. It’s freight, no passengers we can see…”
“And?” Terry asked.
Aybe was making them wait for his wisdom. “Let’s have it,” Cliff said sharply.
“If we jump on this one, stay in the vacant cars, nobody will see us.”
Hop a freight,
Cliff remembered reading in a novel somewhere. A classical expression, apparently.
Irma looked dubious, eyebrows raised. Terry snorted. “We’d be stuck in a box!”
“Aren’t we stuck right now?” Aybe shot back.
“These are freight cars—”
Aybe held up his phone, thumbed it to a slow replay. “I got this while the first cars whizzed by.” The lead car had windows, and through them they could see oddly shaped seats or couches. There were rectangular machines on the far walls. “Looks like passenger seats. Nobody in that one, as far as I can see.”
Terry said, “Seems risky.”
Cliff held up his hands. “How do we do it, anyway? I don’t see a way—”
“There—” Aybe pointed down a side corridor. “I saw a doorway to the left, and I’ll bet we can get to it that way.”
Terry shook his head. “I doubt we—”
A clanking came at the big door they had come through. It was locked and secured with a metal bar Irma had found. They stared at the heavy door as the noise—rattles, bumps, jarring hits—got louder.
“They found us…,” Terry said. “Damn—”
The rattles stopped and so did Terry. Pause. A buzzing sound from the large door.
Cliff said, “They’re cutting in.”
Aybe said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Irma raised an eyebrow. “To … where?”
Cliff looked at the robots. They were nearly done unloading. He leaned against the hard, transparent window and saw in a long perspective other docking platforms, with milling robots. It was a long train.
He didn’t like being forced into a move.
If you’re on the run, though …
“Let’s do it,” Cliff said. “Now.”
Nods, some resigned sighs. They had brought most of their gear in backpacks and stuffed cargo pants. They ate some of their food as they watched the robots finishing up; less to carry. Cliff worried about getting on this train, but there seemed no other plausible option. How would they eat? When should they try to get off?
The robots were nearly done when they angled down the left side corridor. There were periodic windows. Cliff could see similar robot teams unloading or loading other cars. They trotted along, looking for the passenger cars. “Let’s pick it up,” he called out. If the train left and they were trapped …
They ran for five minutes until they saw the sole passenger car, the leader of a long line that stretched far into the rear. This one was longer than the freight cars and had big windows. And it looked vacant.
No robots seemed to be around it. They went through a kind of lock with a pressure seal flexible frame, and onto the dock. Robots labored in the distance but took no notice of the humans. The car door slid easily aside, and they spread out to see if anyone was aboard. Nothing, though the place had a damp smell like a zoo. A forward-viewing window showed the tunnel ahead, lit every hundred meters or so by phosphor walls giving an ivory glow.
They tried the rectangular machines bolted to one wall and found that they yielded food—or what passed for it here. Punch and grab, an analog system. Some wrapped things fell into the hopper. They looked like dried cat litter but smelled not bad.
They stayed out of view of the windows. Cliff felt tired. Howard looked worse. There was blood in his scalp.
They watched carefully, but the machines that passed by outside seemed unaware of anything wrong. Just as he sat down, the train accelerated away without any warning. Irma had found a big door with pressure seals on it and was about to open it when the train started. She sat down hastily and they found the seats adjusted to their shape automatically, and warmed to a comfortable temperature as well. After so long in the magcar, Cliff let himself relax.
But the train kept accelerating. He sniffed the air and tasted the tang of ozone. The ride was smooth and he went forward to see. They were hurtling forward at a speed he estimated, from the rapid fluttering of the passing wall phosphors, at over a hundred kilometers an hour. Yet the acceleration increased still.
He sat next to Aybe and said, “We’re still accelerating.”
“This is a big place. This system is already better than any e-train I ever rode on. To move around it in, say, a week, means this thing has to get into the neighborhood of a hundred kilometers a
second.
”
“Um. Maybe they take longer.”
“I hope not. Those food machines can’t—wait, maybe they
can
make food from scratch.” Aybe blinked at the thought.
Cliff worried that he had led them not into a trap, but into a death voyage.
Redwing watched the Bowl’s enormous landscape slide by in
the distance and reflected on how, decades ago, he had been something of a scientist, too. He’d become a spacer because of that.
And from that he’d won the habits of mind that led him to lead a band of scientists and engineers to a new world. This thing, the Bowl, was not a world, but a huge contrivance. It gave the appearance of being nearby, because he could see patterns resembling those he had watched for wonderful hours, in low Earth orbit. Yet it was tens of millions of kilometers away, its sealed-in atmosphere deep and strange.
The comparison deceived his eye. Here the atmospheric circulations he had studied as a young man were utterly different and vast beyond comprehension. The star’s light fell uniformly, or nearly so, across the Bowl. But it never set, and so drove none of the night-day winds that shaped the movements he had studied, the stately currents of atmospheres on Mars, Earth, Titan, Venus. The Bowl always kept the same attitude toward its star, too. That meant no seasonal variations, no hard winters or hammering summers. He had savored long ago—centuries in real time!—crisp autumn skies, with their bright, blazing fall colors, and then after the cold months, the promise of spring. None of that happened here. Aliens had designed in the steady shine of a small star and its jet. No night. What would want
to live in endless day
?
So air currents did not flow up from the spot where the star was directly above, since there were none. Or rather, it was the Knothole, where the Jet passed through. No Hadley cells, polar swirls, trade winds, or barren desert belts wrapping around the globe. Instead, here the effect of spin held sway.
He could see long streaming rivers of cloud begin above the ample dark blue seas, then arc over distances larger than the separation between the Earth and its moon, driven to higher latitudes of the immense Bowl. Purple anvils of sullen cumulonimbus towered up to seven kilometers above landscapes of mottled brown and red. The scale of all this violated his sense of what patterns could be possible. Clearly the whole vast contraption had been designed to hold everything constant—steady sunlight, no big differences of temperature to drive storms or trade winds. It left him with no intuitions at all of how weather got shaped.
Climate came from the spin, then. To pin its inhabitants to the ground, they spun it—and then got curious Coriolis effects.
Abruptly the name alone brought back his grad student days. That had been more than half a century ago, and there leaped to mind a drunken song of the climate modelers.
On a merry-go-round in the night
Coriolis was shaken with fright
Despite how he walked
’Twas like he was stalked
By some fiend always pushing him right!
Apparently Coriolis had been a mild man, but his force made hurricanes, tornadoes, jet streams, and assorted violences. Those should occur here—and as he thought it, he saw a brilliant white hurricane coming into view of the screen on his office wall. That slow churn of darkening clouds was the size of Earth itself, spinning its gravid whirl toward the shore of a huge sea.
Trouble for somebody,
he thought.
Or some thing.
The knock on his door drew him back into the humdrum reality of
SunSeeker
.
Karl’s lean face was all smiles, which could be good news.
There’s a first time for everything,
Redwing thought. But the lean man folded himself into the guest chair and unloaded the bad news first.
“There’s a progressive crazing of those transparent ceramic windows we use for the astronomy,” he began. “Caused by mechanical stress or maybe some ions that get through the magnetic screen. Limits their working life.”
“You can fix it?”
He waved a hand lazily, somehow sure of himself. “Sure, got the printer making new ones right now. The external robos can slap them on when done, and I’ll feed the old ones in for materials stock. Not why I came to see you, Cap’n.” The slow smile again, above dancing eyes. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Good to hear,” Redwing said automatically. This was maybe the twentieth notion Karl had delivered this way. The man did deserve some credit, for he had spruced up the ship and made it run better. But the man was so focused on his machines that he was not much further use as a deck officer. Redwing could see Karl was settling in to bask in the tech details, and it was more efficient to just let him work through it.
“I’ve been tuning our scoop fields for the plasma we’re getting from that small star,” Karl said. “It’s not like protons incoming at a tenth of light speed, so I had to retune all the capture capacitors.”
Redwing knew the big breakthrough that made starflight possible, though it relied on tech you never saw from the bridge. The method of catching the sleet of protons, slowing them down between charged grids for electrical power, then funneling them into the fusion chambers where a catalyst worked the nuclear magic—it all happened in the halo around the ship, and then the burn occurred in its guts, where no one could ever go.
We ride on miracles.
He nodded, waiting for the idea.
“So we’re flying with a scoop a thousand kilometers across now, all supported by nanotube mesh. Bigger funnel than we had before, ’cause the plasma’s weaker. I tuned it all up—had to use the full complement of our external in-flight robos, too.”
“I like the ride now,” Redwing allowed. “It doesn’t wake me up nights.”
Karl beamed. “Glad to hear it. Lowers the structural stresses, too. Then I thought—this scoop arrangement we’ve got isn’t optimal for where we are, so what would be better?”
Redwing wanted to ask him to just spit it out, but that didn’t work well with tech crew. “I’ll guess—the Jet?”