Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Karl’s face fell. “How did you know? If—”
“What else do we have in this system?” Redwing asked with a grin. “Had to be the Jet. Plus, you know we flew in here through that Jet. What a ride!”
Karl looked surprised at Redwing’s enthusiasm. The man was elaborately casual, but conservative to the bone. Useful in a deck officer, where a captain had to balance personality types against one another. A captain had to know when to take risks, not tech lieutenants.
Redwing had always thought that life’s journey wasn’t to get to your grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to tumble in, wrecked, shouting,
What a ride!
But he could see from Karl’s puzzled expression that the man thought captains should be sober-minded authority figures, steady and sure, without a wild side.
“Well, sir, yes—I looked into that. The scoop settings we had then weren’t as good at sailing up the Jet as the ones we have now, so…” Karl hesitated, as if his idea was too risky. “Why not use
SunSeeker
as a weapon?”
Now
this
was an idea. Not that he understood what it was, but the flavor of it quickened his pulse. “To…”
“Let me walk through it. Remember when we saw the mirror zone changing, painting a woman’s face on it? I was outside with robot teams to repair the funnel struts. I could see it direct, right out my faceplate. Incredible! It was Elisabeth, the one they captured with her team, mouthing words.”
Redwing gestured slightly to speed him up and Karl took the hint. “Even that—which lasted maybe an hour, then repeated every day or so—had an effect on the Jet. Gave it less sunlight, I guess, or just rippled the light over the Jet base. Big changes! A day or two later, I saw little snarls propagating out from the base of the Jet, at the star. They grew, too, moving out.”
“We all did.” It hadn’t seemed much different from the variations Redwing had seen, over time—knots in the string. He was still amazed the bright scratch across the sky was so stable.
Karl leaned forward, eyes excited. “The mirrors focus on that spot, delivering the heat to blow plasma off the star’s surface. Plus, there are stations circling the base of the Jet that must somehow generate magnetic fields. I’m guessing those big stations then shape and confine the Jet. So—” Karl cocked a jaunty grin. “—why not show them what we can do to the Jet?”
Redwing exhaled a skeptical breath. “To do what?”
“Screw it up!”
“So it—”
“Develops a kink instability. The disturbance grows as it advances out from the Jet base. It’s like a fire hose—you have to hold it straight or it snarls up and fights you like an angry snake.”
“Then when it gets to the Bowl…”
“I’m thinking we could force the kink amplitude to grow enough, it’ll snake out sideways. If it hits the atmosphere containment layer—that sheet that sits on top of the ring section—then it can burn clean through it.”
Redwing studied Karl’s eager face. This was world destruction on a scale Redwing had never imagined. Should he have?
“Then there’s the sausage instability—we get those sometimes in the funnel plasma, before it hits the capacitor sheets and slows down. A bulge starts in the flow, say, starting from turbulence. That bulge forces the magnetic fields out, and that can grow, too, just like the kink. You get a cylinder of fast plasma that looks like a snake that’s eaten eggs, spaced out along it.”
“So it gets fat and can—”
“Scorch the territories near the Knothole, where the Jet passes closest to the Bowl. Knock out their control installations there, I bet.” The words came flooding out of the man. “I’ve studied them through our scopes, and they’re huge coils all around the Knothole mouth. I bet they’re magnets that keep the Jet away. Magnetic repulsion, gotta be.”
Redwing was aghast, but he couldn’t let Karl see that. “We do this by flying into the Jet?”
“More like tickling it. I can work out how we can zig across it, then zag back at the right time and place to drive an instability.”
“Near the Jet base, by the star?”
“Okay, so it’ll get a little hot in here, I grant you that.”
Good to know he would grant something, at least. For a man proposing to kill the largest imaginable construct, he seemed unfazed.
“At no danger to
SunSeeker
?”
“I can tune the funnel parameters, do some robo work on the capacitor sheets. Fix ’em up.” Karl smiled proudly. “I ran a simulation of running
SunSeeker
across the Jet already. There’s a problem slicing through the hoops of magnetic stresses at the Jet boundary, sure. We cut through that and it’s smooth sailing, looks like. Statistically, a Monte Carlo code shows we don’t get bumped hard—”
“I recall a statistician who drowned in a lake that was on average fifty centimeters deep.” Redwing smiled dryly.
Karl hastily retreated. “Well, we can just skim the Jet first, try it out.”
“I’d like to see the detailed analysis, of course.” He narrowed his eyes deliberately. “Written up in full.”
If this crazy idea ever got anywhere, he wanted it documented to the hilt. Not that there would be any kind of superior review in his lifetime, Redwing mused, but it was good to leave a record, no matter what happened. Karl nodded and they went on to discuss some lesser tech issues.
After he left, Redwing stood and watched his wall screen show the unending slide of topography he still thought of as below, though of course
SunSeeker
was orbiting the star, not the Bowl. The hurricane was biting into the shoreline now, sowing havoc. Somebody was suffering.
He had seen that this Bowl, like a real planet, still had tropical wetlands, bleak deserts, thick green forests, and mellow, beautiful valleys. No mountain ranges worthy of the name, apparently because the mass loading would have thrown something out of kilter. But terrain and oceans galore, yes, of sizes no human had ever seen. But some minds had imagined, far back in ageless time.
The truly shocking aspect of Karl was not his idea, but the eager way he described ripping open the atmosphere cap. That would kill uncountable beings and might even destroy the Bowl itself. Redwing watched the Coriolis forces do their work. He tried to see how the global hydrologic cycle here could work—and then realized that this wasn’t a globe, but a big dish, and all his education told him nearly nothing he could use.
Still, there were beings down there of unimaginable abilities. How could they survive a storm that lasted for weeks or months? That was the crucial difference here—scale. Everything was bigger and lasted longer. How long had the Bowl itself lasted? Somehow it had the look of antiquity about it.
And the creatures who made and ran it—they had both great experience and long history to guide them. Surely they would know what had just occurred to Karl.
Just as surely, they would have defenses against visitors such as Karl.
The e-train zoomed on, at speeds Cliff estimated to be at least
ten kilometers per second. Astronomical velocities, indeed. Maybe Aybe was right, arguing that to get around the Bowl in reasonable times demanded speeds of 100 km/s. The blur beyond their windows showed only the fast flickering of phosphor rings as they shot through them, until even those blended together to become a dim flickering glow.
They broke up to explore the long passenger car. There were roomy compartments with simple platforms for sitting and sleeping, and rough bedding supplied in slide shelving. Howard discovered the switches after the first hour aboard, while searching for more food. Cliff heard his shouts and came running.
“Look!” Howard said proudly when all five were there. He slid to the side a hinge switch near a compartment door. He slid a switch on the wall, and the compartment ceiling phosphors dimmed to utter dark.
They hooted, clapped, and Irma did a dance with Aybe. It was as though they had gained their freedom—freedom from sunlight.
Irma favored exploring the rest of the car, and they did. Compartments varied in size and style, mostly in the arrangement of platforms. Irma remarked, “These can accommodate passengers of varying sizes and needs. Fit to species, I guess.”
Cliff nodded. “The Bird Folk are big, sure, but some of the forms we saw from a distance were smaller. Interesting, to have intelligence in a range of body types.”
“But why is nobody here?” Terry insisted.
Aybe added, “And nobody at the station, ’cept robots.”
“Maybe they don’t travel much?” Irma wondered.
No answers, plenty of questions. The passenger car was over a hundred meters long and ended with a pressure door, where the car narrowed down. “Let’s not go further,” Irma said. “Great find, Howard, that light switch. Let’s use them, huh?”
Aybe found something that sounded like a grinder in the tiled floor of an otherwise bare room. “That’s gotta be the head,” Terry said. Starships used nautical terms, and soon they were calling the train’s nose the bow.
They ate before sleeping. All along, mealtimes had been important, just as they had been in their interplanetary training missions. On the Mars Cycler, Cliff had learned ship protocols and how to deal with short-arm centrifugal gravity (which made his head lurch the first week when he walked), but the most important lesson was the social congruence. Eating together promoted solidarity, teamwork, the crucial judgments of strengths and flaws they all needed to know. In a crisis, that knowledge let them respond intuitively. Here, where danger was never far away, those unspoken skills had quickly become crucial.
“What do we do when we pull into the next station?” Terry asked, munching one of the odd foods that he had squeezed out of a tube—which then evaporated into the air with a hiss, once emptied. How it knew to do this was a topic of puzzled discussion. Cliff watched them as they all pretty obviously—judging from expressions as they ate, each reflecting inwardly after the excitement of pursuit—wondered what they had gotten themselves into.
Too late,
Cliff thought but did not say. He recalled another favorite phrase of his father’s:
Life is just one damn thing after another.
The train ran on in its silky way, electromagnetics handing off without a whisper of trouble. Cliff lay back and relaxed into the moody afterglow of eating more than one needed. The low hum of the train lulled him but he summoned up resolve to say, “We need to stand watches, same as before. Terry, you’re up first.”
Groans, rolled eyes, then the slow acceptance he had come to expect. Cliff made the most of it, standing up and trying to look severe. “We don’t know anything here. We’re not camping out anymore. This is a
train,
and it stops somewhere. When it does, we’ve got to be able to hide or run.”
They nodded, logy with the meal, as he had planned.
Howard said, “We should break up, too. Don’t clump up, so they can bag us all at once.”
Cliff didn’t like the pessimism behind that, but he said, “Good idea. But not alone.”
Long silence. Terry glanced at Aybe, and Cliff suddenly remembered that one of them was gay. Which one? For the life of him, he could not remember.
Damn! All this time—
Too late. Didn’t matter anyway: Howard, Terry, and Aybe would be sharing. Nobody alone. Cliff and Irma—
Terry and Aybe looked at him, long steady gazes, and he realized that they knew. He would be with Irma and the compartments sealed off very nicely, thank you. Never mind who was gay, the big issue here was about him and Irma. He had been ignoring it. So consumed with his own emotions, he had not thought through what happened to a small band with cross-currents working below the surface. Now that they were inside again, back in a moving machine, somehow everything suppressed in the pseudo-wilderness of the Bowl melted away. It was about the old elementals—survival, sex, the splendor of the deep sensual accents. Life.
Realizing that left him speechless, which he also saw was a good idea.
Life is just one damn thing after another.
“So what happens,” Terry said evenly, “when we stop at a station?”
Irma said quickly, anxiously, “We need an exit.”
All agreed. They trooped to the back end,
aft on the starboard side,
to consider the pressure door. “We’ve got to try it,” Terry said.
The door opened with a shove. It led to a short lock chamber, and in the wall was a simple pressure gauge—long-lasting analog, of course—with release valves. Simple stuff, artifacts so clear they could serve generations without an instruction manual.
They factored through into a dark room that lit up slowly when they entered, phosphors brimming with sleepy glows.
“Freight,” Terry said.
Dark lumps of webbed coverings secured units the size of Earthside freight cars at multiple points. It all looked mechanically secure and professional, robot work of a high order by Earthside standards.
Aybe said, “We fall back to here?”
“We don’t have much choice,” Terry said.
“If we start to slow down, send an all-alert,” Irma said.
“Who’s up on watch?” Terry asked innocently.
“You,” Cliff said. He hadn’t much hope the thin, angular man would stay awake more than five minutes beyond the rest. But it was good to set some standard, even if it was obviously not going to work. In their tired eyes he saw that they knew this, too.
So they went back, chose compartments, and cut the phosphors. For the first time in their new, strange lives here, blessed night descended.
* * *
Cliff sat up. A subtle long slow bass rumbling came through the floor. He blinked, thinking fuzzily that maybe he was under a tree, maybe some animal was nearby—and suddenly knew that this was real, solid darkness. Not shade. It wasn’t going away.
He found the wall switch and powered up the phosphors. Irma jerked, shook her head, shot a palm up to block the light. “Uhh! Noooo…”
“Got to. We’re slowing down.”
Cliff clicked on his phone, sent an all-alert. Until this moment he hadn’t thought if the walls of this train would block the signal. Well, too late—