Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
The trip lasted a long time amid bare dim lighting. He thought of talking to the others, but now he knew it was smarter to just rest when you could do nothing. He fell asleep, dreamed of discordant sights and sounds and colors, and just as on the train, came awake only to the tug of deceleration.
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
—S
TEVEN
W
RIGHT
Beth stood in the entrance of the cave and listened as thunder
forked down through immense, sullen cloud banks. They were stacked like a pyramid of anvils with purple bases. Down through them, leaping from anvil to anvil, came bright, sudden shafts of orange lightning. Fat raindrops smacked down, lit up by the flashes. Some of the glaring lances raced from one shadowy cloud to another and came down near them, exploding like bombs as they splintered trees.
“Majestic,” Fred said at her side.
“Terrifying,” she countered, but then admitted, “Beautiful, too.”
“Look at those.” Mayra pointed. In the milky daylight that filtered through the pyramid clouds, they watched moist plants move with a languid, articulating grace. Slowly they converged on the lightning damage. They came forth to extinguish the fires from those strikes.
“Protection, genetically ordained,” Tananareve said.
“Sure they’re not animals?” Fred asked.
“Do they look like animals?” Tananareve countered. “I checked, went out and lifted one. Roots on the end of those stalks. Roots that slip out easily from the soil when it rains.”
“But the rain will put out the fires.”
“Maybe they’re healing something else. We really don’t know how this ecology works, y’know,” Tananareve said.
“And the ecology’s only skin deep,” Fred said. “Ten meters or so down, there’s raw open space. Maybe the lightning can screw up subsurface tech.”
Beth listened to the full range of sounds rain makes in a high, dense forest. Pattering smacks at the top, gurgling rivulets lower, as the drops danced down the long columns of the immense canopy. The orchestrated sounds somehow encased her, lifted her up into a world utterly unnatural but somehow completely secure, while seeming still so strange.
Somewhere in this immense mechanism Cliff was … what? Still free? Captured and interrogated? Her skimpy communication with
SunSeeker
confirmed that he got through to them intermittently and was moving cross-country. That was all she knew, yet it would have to be enough.
The rain, wind, and lightning daggers swept her along in a sudden tide of emotions she had kept submerged. She longed for him, his touch, the low bass notes as he whispered in her ear of matters loving, delightful, often naughty. Lord, how she missed that. They liked making love while rain spattered on the windows, back there centuries ago. It gave them a warm, secure place to be themselves, while the world toiled on with its unending business. They had ignored the world for a while, and it ignored them.
Fair enough. But this whirling contrivance could not be ignored. It could kill you if you did not pay attention, and very probably would, she imagined. They would probably die here, and no one—Cliff, Redwing, Earth—would ever know, much less know why. Beth’s small band certainly did not remotely understand this thing. Why was it cruising between the stars at all—driven forward by engineering that eclipsed into nothingness all that humanity had achieved? Why?…
“Fred, that idea of yours, where’d you get it?”
He shook himself from his reverie. “Just came to me.”
“Straight out of your imagination?” Tananareve scowled at him. “Some imagination you got, to think dinosaurs—”
“I didn’t
imagine
it, if you mean I concocted the idea. It just … came to me. Pieces all fit together. In a flash.” As if in agreement, a big yellow bolt knifed down through the shimmering sky and slammed into the rock of the hill above them. Stones clattered down.
“There’s no evidence for it,” Lau Pin said.
“That globe we saw,” Fred said. “It’s like Earth, but the continents are wrong. All mushed together.”
“Maybe the geologists got the continent details wrong,” Beth said. “It’s a long chain of reasoning, back seventy or so million years.”
“Never mind that!” Mayra suddenly said. “What fossil evidence is there for any early civilization? Where are the ruins?”
“That much time?” Tananareve scoffed. “Nothing left. Subducted, rusted away, destroyed in a dinosaur war, maybe. Look, guys, the Cretaceous–Tertiary Boundary shows where the asteroid hit. It shows through in only a dozen places around the Earth. Why would you expect anything to be left at all?”
Lau Pin swept an arm out at the churning trees, the walking plants, lightning slicing down from towers of dark clouds. “What’s the leap from some smart dinosaurs to
this
?”
“I don’t know.” Fred shrugged. “Depends on what the smart ones thought, how they saw their world.”
“There’s no fossil evidence for smart dinosaurs,” Lau Pin said. He went back in the cave to turn their fire. It was cooking the last of the big carcass they had brought from the warehouse, and the yamlike roots. It had started smoking again, probably from rain blowing in, and they all had a coughing fit.
“You can’t judge intelligence from the size of skulls,” Beth said, “and anyway, dino skulls are plenty large. Look, they had grappler claws, a start toward hands. Later on, some dinosaurs had feathers—that’s where birds came from. There’s plenty we don’t know about that era.”
Fred nodded and then said quietly, “There was one clue. When I saw that great holo of how they built this Bowl, I looked at the star in the distance. It looked a lot like the sun.”
“That’s it?” Lau Pin snorted dismissively.
Another shrug. “Started me thinking.”
“They were really smart, built this—and got wiped out by a rock even we could deflect away centuries ago?” Mayra said. “Come
on.
”
Fred shrugged yet again. “No answer. Maybe they got caught in a cultural phase where they stopped watching the skies. Look, it’s an idea, not a complete theory.”
As Mayra argued with Fred, Beth watched her. The deep furrows on Mayra’s brow had gone away and the worry lines at the eyes, too. She seemed better about the death of her husband, and had even laughed a bit. But Beth was sure that Abduss was never far from her mind. Nor was Cliff from hers, of course. She would never forget the squashed Abduss she had seen, still breathing for a short while in milky spurts, frothy saliva dripping like cream down to his ears while his cracked skull leaked brown blood into his eyes.
Beth shook her head to sweep away the image. She left them to their discussion and sat down near the cave entrance to savor the scent of the rain. As a little girl, she had loved that smell—freshness enveloping her, fragrances boiling into the air. They weren’t on Earth, but it
felt
the same. “This Bowl has a lot of similarities to Earth, yes? Maybe the really strange stuff, like those walking plants, are from other worlds.”
Fred nodded eagerly. “Or tens of millions of years of directed evolution.”
“Point is,” Beth said, “even if Fred’s right,
how do we use the theory
? How can it help us?”
Lau Pin stretched, drew in a clean lungful of moist air. “Sleep on it, I say. Fred, you get your ideas how? Dreaming?”
“No, but I have them when I wake up. I go to sleep thinking about things, problems—and when I wake up, there’s an idea there. Maybe wrong, but … it’s like getting a note from another part of myself.”
Beth got up and patted Fred on the shoulder. “I suspect that’s why you made
SunSeeker
crew, too. Didn’t you figure out the high-voltage capacitors in the ramscoop?”
He smiled. “Yeah. That was fun. That was a neat puzzle.”
“Sleep again, after you take the first watch. Maybe the part of you that never sleeps will come up with more ideas.”
Beth unfolded her cushion from her backpack and inflated it with long, deep breaths. A part of her eyed Fred’s lean stance framed by the cave’s mouth.
Wait a bit, get it on with him? You’re horny, alone—do something.
But she brushed the impulse away.
Don’t complicate a team that’s barely getting by.
By the time she was ready to sleep, the rest were distributed back through the small cave, grateful for some shade and the storm’s muting of the constant sunlight. She squinted through the clouds and could barely see the star’s disk.
As she dropped off to sleep, she thought of Cliff again. He had always been better at fieldwork than she was, and she hoped maybe he understood this weird place better. Would she ever find him in this huge world-machine? “G’night, Cliffy. Wherever you are.”
She hugged her blow-up pillow and smelled the rain and thought of places secure and warm and far away.
Memor had always enjoyed the serene voyaging these living craft
afforded. She looked down on the slow passage of rugged terrain and breathed in a luxurious sweet aroma. The mucus of this great beast had been engineered to carry a delicate fragrance unlike anything else. Its scent was a luxury and settled the mind, though chaos raged all about them. She allowed herself another lingering taste, then turned with an appropriately severe expression.
“This is truly absurd,” Memor said. “We have dozens of airfish aloft and much airplane coverage. Yet the prey keeps ducking belowground, eluding us.”
The Captain of this armed airfish gestured with indifference. “We will turn them up. They exited the Longline transport at the station below. They can surely not go far— Wait, see those Sils?”
The reed-thin male peered at a large wall display. Small life-forms filled narrow canyons of tan rock. More of the Adopted species, one Memor had not seen before, were coming into the crowds, arriving apparently by foot. Good—an agricultural culture, with low technologies and simple ways.
The Captain drawled thoughtfully, “They cluster in several canyons. No dancing, no parades or ceremony. This is not their usual communal gathering.”
“You know well these…?”
“Sils, we term them. Always an unruly lot. Not the first time, my dear Astronomer, that I have taken to air to discipline these.”
“The problem persists?”
“Yes, has worsened steadily. The Sils are among the worst of the Adopted. They are not much evolved beyond carnivores, so I suppose we should not be surprised. Herbivores—why did we not bring more of
those
aboard?” The Captain blinked, taken aback by his own outburst.
“Because herbivores are seldom intelligent,” Memor said dryly. “Good eating, though—we do have some of those.”
“Of course, of course.” The Captain turned and barked out quick orders to his staff officers. They were taking more rattling fire. The great beast that carried them protested in long grumbling notes that rolled through the walls that ran with juice.
Memor watched the living opalescent walls run with anxiety dewdrops, shimmering moist jewels hanging and spattering with an acid odor. Skyfish expressed their deep selves through chemistry, an unreliable, or at least largely unreadable, medium. They were perhaps the most successful of the Adopted. Taken from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant world long ago, they found the deep atmosphere of the Bowl a similar paradise to cruise and mate and turn water into their life fluid, hydrogen. Somehow the great ones of the early Bowl had managed to make these living skyships merge into the blossoming Bowl ecosphere. To cruise the skies in them was a voyage into history.
She turned when the Captain, now quite distressed, was done. “Can we disperse this crowd? They hamper our finding these primates.”
The Captain gave an efficient flutter of feather-arcs: agreement. “I can use standard suffering methods.”
“Do so.”
The Captain gave orders and the great belly of the skyfish began its laborious turn. Memor circled the observation deck, scattering small crew before her, to see how the Sils were moving. Streams of them came from all directions. Such crowds! Many walked, some ran with a dogged pace, others rode animals. They looked up at the skyfish. Some stopped and shook themselves, their rage evident. At what? Their target was the Longline station.
“Captain! When might the primates arrive here?”
“They could get here soon, Astronomer. It is possible. But we do not expect them to follow a simple route, staying on the same line. That would be too obvious.” This last sentence provoked an involuntary submission-flutter of amber and brown as the Captain saw the implications.
“They may realize we expect evasion.”
“Our strategy command thinks that unlikely—”
“Humor me.”
“These Sil have no way of knowing—”
“There are always betrayers, Captain. Information crosses patchwork boundaries, though we try to stop it.”
“I wonder, Astronomer, why your esteemed presence came here. Surely the primate invaders would not take a simple route—”
“Do not presume to estimate the rationality of aliens. Nor their clever nature.”
“Surely you do not expect them—”
“These Sils gather for a reason.”
“But how could—? Of course, these Sils have given us trouble since my grandmother’s time. They see this as another device to—”
“You are wasting time.”
The Captain hurried off to alter his commands. The skyfish eased lower as it wallowed across the air, toward the stony ridges that marked the Longline here.
Memor took some moments to review on her private mind-feed the background of these Adopted, the Sil. The Bowl had passed near their star as the Sil were still in hunter-gatherer stages. The Bird Folk found Sil promising, and brought many aboard. Those early Sil were long since left behind genetically—crafty they had been, yes, but not that smart. Something close to the far older Bowl primates, but with ambition, tool-making and better social skills, developed through group hunting. As usual, their first tools had been weapons. This always led to a spirited species, which could be positive—but not, alas, for the Sils. They made their periodic rebellions, and were periodically reinstructed, often genetically.