Bowl of Heaven (6 page)

They had awakened him to make this decision, and so far he had shied away from it. Now Cliff had a slender moment to wonder at his own ideas, if he’d followed them far enough.
Life’s a gamble.
He had a gathering, foreboding sense—and a heart-pounding curiosity that would not give him rest.
Life persists.

Redwing’s mouth firmed up. “Let’s do it.”

*   *   *

Beth had the flight plan Alfvén numbers tuned just about right. She found it gratifying to see the ship respond to her helm, even though it was a bit spongy. It took eleven days to make the swerve. There were dark days when it was not clear whether
Seeker
was responding correctly to the maneuver. The magnetic scoops rippled with stresses but performed to code. With Abduss checking her every move, she brought them through, though not without some polite arguments.

Cliff and Beth spent a lot of time in their room together. The warm comforts of bed helped.

She preferred taking ginger snaps from her recovery allotment of “indulgences.” These she had selected for just this, a crisp bite floating on sugar, to the richness of chocolate chip, which she also had because Cliff liked them. Though with either she always had a cup of cocoa, the warm brown mama she needed, Cliff had carried none but stern Kona coffee in his wakeup stash. No cookies at all.

“What do you remember about going into the chill-sleep?” she asked while they licked crumbs off each other.

He smiled dreamily. “They said I would feel a small prick in my left hand and I thought that was funny but couldn’t laugh. Could barely crack a smile. Then—waking up.”

Beth grinned and finished her cocoa. “I thought of the same dumb joke. Not that, in your case, I know what a small one feels like.”

The remark got more laughter than it deserved, but that was just fine, too.

Beth said with a thin voice, “Y’know, looking at that round thing from this angle, first thing I thought was, it seems like a giant wok with a hole at its base.”

“You’re thinking about food again. Time to eat.”

Her old fear subsided while she worked, and to keep it at bay she indulged herself with Cliff. He was the sun of her solar system, had been since the first week they met during the crew selections trials. Her parents had both died the year before in a car crash, and that cast a shadow over her application, in the eyes of the review board. They wanted crew with a long history of steady performance, no emotional unsettled issues that might boil over years later.

Losing the two central figures of her life had eclipsed her joy, made her withdraw. She had not thought of the affair with Cliff as an antidote to her grief, but its magic had played out that way. He brought out the sun again, eclipse over, and it showed up in everything she did. Especially in her psych exams and, more tellingly, in the return of her social skills. Later, in training, she had learned that about the time she met Cliff, she was slated to be cut in the next winnowing. As she put it later, “Then Cliffy happened to me.” The visible changes in her had saved her slot. Then her performance at electromagnetic piloting, a still-evolving new discipline, had excelled.

She was here because of him. She let him know that, in long, passionate bouts of lovemaking. Sex was the flip side of death, she had always thought—the urge to leave something behind, ordained by evolution way back in the unconscious. Their sweaty hours “in the sack” (not a phrase she liked, but it sure fit here, because Cliff used a hammock) certainly seemed to confirm the idea, as never before in her admittedly rather scant love life. At meals, she was afraid that it showed in her face, which now reddened at the slightest recollection of how different she was now, wanton and happy and well out of the eclipse shadow.

One evening, after she had set them in a long, curving arc toward the bowl, the captain allowed spirits to be broken out. They held a sort of impromptu group brainstorming session, with Mayra presiding as de facto referee. Ideas flew back and forth. What would they find up ahead? What the hell could the bowl
be
? Squeezebulbs were lifted, and lifted again. Beth got them all laughing. There was singing, predictably awful, which made more laughter. The captain drank more than the rest of them put together and she began to understand the pressures the man was under.

*   *   *

The maneuver they were planning was astonishing. The jet was far denser than any plasma
Seeker
had been designed to fly into. But
Seeker
’s specs were broad enough to include collisions with molecular clouds. You never knew what you would run into in interstellar space, Beth thought. Never the bowl, not that, but
SunSeeker
had been made robust.

Stars buried in a cloud could ionize spherical shells around them.
SunSeeker
might have to brave a cloud, and so the plasma spheres. Its prow sprouted lasers that could identify solid obstacles up to the size of houses, and vaporize them with a single gigawatt pulse. The lasers were tough, hanging out in the plasma hurricane near
SunSeeker
’s bow shock. They were going to need that.

Wickramsingh’s Star was moving counter to the galaxy’s rotation. That was somewhat unusual, though not rare. They were headed the same way, because Glory’s system lay behind Sol, in the sense of the rotation most stars share in the immense beehive pinwheel that is a spiral galaxy. That was why they had not noticed the star’s oddity before—the bowl cupped around the star, so they could not see it from
SunSeeker
or from Earth. As
Seeker
overtook the system, moving directly behind, the star had suddenly seemed to pop into existence from behind its shawl. And it was quite nearby.

“Mmmmmm. It’s moving how quickly?” Beth asked in the next meeting. Five of them just fit five monitor chairs in the control room.

“More than ten thousand kilometers per second,” Mayra said.

“Look, that’s damn fast.”

Mayra beamed. “Yes. I was keeping this precise fact for the right moment.”

“And that’s nearly our ship velocity. Sure seems high for a star.”

Abduss nodded. “A bit less than ours, so we overtook it. But yes, unusual for a star.”

They glanced at each other and Beth wondered why the Wickramsinghs liked unveiling mysteries one step at a time. A cultural thing? Maybe they just hadn’t wanted to shock her too much, so soon after revival? She had to admit, her head was still feeling a bit woozy—and not from the cold or the drugs. Conceptual overload. If she hadn’t seen the thing on the screens with her own eyes …

Try to think straight.
Beth asked, “Could … could the flares we see at the center of the star be responsible?”

Mayra shook her head. “How? Surely they are caught by the cap.”

Beth drew herself a sketch with an unsteady hand. “The flares point toward the cap, and the star is accelerating away from the cap? And there’s a hole in it.”

Abduss said, “I wondered about that. The cap keeps away, even though the star’s gravity attracts it.”

She thought of such colossal masses in flight, the balance of forces necessary to keep them from colliding. How? “What’s moving all this?”

“The jet escapes, driving the entire configuration forward,” Abduss said. The Wickramsinghs shook their heads, apparently still amazed at the immense contraption. She could see why they had awakened Cliff first, rather than Redwing. Cliff’s specialty lay in dealing with the oddities of life that Glory might hold, at being flexible. A biologist, true, not an astrophysics type. Yet he had devised the idea of flying up the jet, and they hadn’t.

A long still silence … and an idea came, lifted an eyebrow at her. She recalled suddenly that old phrase for understanding: to see the light.

“The missing element, it’s—the light,” she said. “The whole setup has to be using the starlight from Wickramsingh’s Star.”

“How?” Redwing asked skeptically.

“Let’s get as many spectral views of this thing as we can on the approach,” Beth said.

She had her add-ins working so sent a question and got back

SPECTRAL SYNTHESIS-BASED ABUNDANCE MEASUREMENTS OF
F
E AND THE ALPHA ELEMENTS
M
G
, S
I
, C
A
,
AND
T
I
—

—so she realized she would just have to rely on ship’s diagnostics visually presented. This was going to be the perfect collision of shipboard smart systems and the unknown—with her in the middle. At hallucinogenic speeds.

She had a big fat intuition and nothing more. Everyone had a right to their own intuitions, but no one had a right to their own facts. Best to let the facts speak.

*   *   *

Now came Beth’s moment. Piloting is not a committee event. Even Redwing could only watch and make decisions, while the artistry of magnetic steering lay in Beth’s hands.

“Wish me luck,” she said with strained bravado as the ship drifted into the pearly plume of the jet.

Cliff hugged her and kissed her cheek, but she was already riveted on the lively screens curving before her acceleration couch. He whispered, “Good luck, yes,” and retreated to his own couch, within watching distance.

Wickramsingh’s Star was a smoldering beacon seen through the knothole that let the jet escape. “What’ll we call it?” Beth asked from the board.

“Knothole, then,” Redwing said tensely.

Near the star’s hot spot, at the foot of the blossoming jet, coronal magnetic arches twisted in endless fury. Storms jostled one another all over the star, brimming with X-ray violence. It almost seemed as if the red dwarf had a skin disease.

They swept in behind, lining up. The speed of overtaking was now visible from hour to hour as the bowl swelled. Beth went with little sleep, aided by mild performance drugs that she carefully monitored. Abduss and Mayra spelled her when she started to nod off. She stayed with the board, trying to remain steady through her jittery anxiety—
but aren’t pilots supposed to be rock-steady, girl?—
and couldn’t help but speculate. The bowl’s outside, seen in infrared, was crusted and simmering in the eternal starnight. Colossal structural beams coiled around it in a dark longitude–latitude grid. It hung there, spinning, dutifully following behind its parent star. Its cool nightside scarcely reflected any of the bright stars.

“The spectra look to be some metal–carbon composite,” Mayra observed. “Not like our alloys at all.”

Cliff had no important role in all this. He made the meals and washed up while the crew worked their bridge stations with unrelenting devotion. Every plot change they checked and rechecked. Beth could tell that Cliff was impressed by their close teamwork, once the goal was clear. They could focus on technical details at last, and were obviously happier to do so.

Cliff made himself fade into the background. He had little role here, but he didn’t sleep much either. Beth could read his unspoken thought: If he was going to die, at least he wanted to be awake.

In the unending din of the scoop engines, it was a struggle not to let feelings overly influence her thinking. Irritation mounted as she tried to do precise calculations and maneuvers. She projected all kinds of fantasies upon the growing mote as they screeched around, the ramscoop fields readjusting to a turning maneuver they had never been designed for. Artfully, Abduss and Beth used the star’s gravity to swing
Seeker
into the exact vector that the dwarf sun was patiently following.

Beth got edgy with their eyes on her—or was that the fatigue talking? Redwing sensed this, so he and Cliff spent their time writing the report for Earthside, with full data and visuals. They were on the bridge, sending it out through the laser link at their stern, when it struck her. What were the odds that
SunSeeker
would come upon Wickramsingh’s Star when their velocities were aligned?

Redwing looked startled when she pointed this out. “We’re both headed toward Glory. Damn.”

“They want to colonize Glory, too?” Mayra asked.

“Can’t be,” Abduss countered when he came onto the comm deck. “What would be the point? That bowl has tens of millions of times the area of a planet.”

This seemed an obvious killer argument. Still … their velocities were aligned. Bound for Glory. With Sol dead aft.

“Maybe they just wander from star to star?” the captain asked. “Interstellar tourists?”

Nobody answered.

Redwing said cautiously, “You were briefed on the gravitational waves?” and looked around.

They all nodded. “Can’t keep secrets from the tech types, boss,” Beth said without moving her eyes from the shifting displays.

Abduss said, “You suggest perhaps this construction, this bowl, is seeking the source?”

“Makes sense, I’d think. A puzzle, isn’t it?” Redwing looked around again.

Mayra said, “It is noise, or so scientists thought when we departed.”

“Any chance this bowl thing could be the source of the grav waves?” Redwing gestured. “Maybe this jet?”

“There are no masses of size that could make such waves,” Cliff said. “I read up on it while Beth was waking.”

Abduss said, “The Glory system has no obvious enormous masses either.”

Redwing thought. “Maybe they’re going to Glory for its grav wave generator?”

Cliff shrugged. None of their ideas sounded right.

“Not that intuition is a reliable guide here,” Beth said wryly, over her shoulder. She never took her eyes from the panels. Soon enough they got back to work, plotting and piloting. The intense work was a relief to them, a respite from the uncertainties of their lot. Beth saw Cliff come onto the bridge; he clearly envied them. At least their days were full.

They vectored in on the center of Wickramsingh’s Star’s bowl, keeping a respectful distance. Beth trimmed their velocity by cutting back the engines. “Maybe letting them rest a bit will make them run better later,” she said, but she didn’t believe it. The jet plasma running through the Knothole had plenty of fast ions in its plume, and these pushed steadily against their ramscoop fields. Shudders ran the length of the long ship. The deck hummed with long, slow tremors. For the first time in her life, Beth felt like an old sea captain, riding out a hurricane.