Bowl of Heaven (7 page)

Now the jet was visible to the unaided eye as they neared it. They could see it as a pearly churn lit with darting flashes of blue and yellow—recombination of the plasma, Abduss said, atoms condensing out of the torrent and sputtering out their characteristic spectra. The control deck lights were ruby for visibility, stepped far down. A direct view through a window would have burned out their eyes and set the room aflame.

As it flowed away from the bowl, the long jet was oddly tight. Beth close-upped the views. “Looks like the jet narrows down at the Knothole, then flares out. Look, some regularly spaced bright spots in the outflow.”

“An instability, I would gather,” Abduss said. He was fidgeting but he kept his voice calm. “The jet must have been magnetically squeezed as it passed through the Knothole.”

Corkscrew filaments crawled along it, Beth saw, like one of those old barber poles. They could now see longer along the luminous lance of the jet as it speared through the opening, an exact circle far bigger than the span between Earth and its moon. Mayra trained all their scopes on the rim of the circle. The microwave spectrum crackled with bursts of noise from the spaced bright spots: pinched-in electrons singing their protests.

*   *   *

Abduss close-upped the bowl at a good angle and Cliff felt his heart leap as the resolution grew.

In the side-scatter of the star’s somber rays, they saw what looked like enormous coils, bathed in lukewarm beauty. “Those are bigger than mountain ranges,” Abduss said in a whisper.

Without thinking it through, Cliff had expected that whatever built the bowl had long since died out. Decay, collapse, extinction—these were the fates of whole species hammered on the anvil of time, not merely of civilizations. This thing had to be
old.
But it still worked. The star’s solar wind got funneled stably into the jet, pushing the whole vast construct to high velocity. What could have thought of this, never mind actually build it?

Beth began getting stronger signals in the microwave spectra—a rising buzz of electromagnetic signals as
Seeker
neared the cap. Mayra began to detect a haze of watery nitrogen at the innermost edge of the circle, farther in than the coils.

“Air?” Beth asked aloud. No one answered. Cliff thought about the inner surface of the bowl, a land holding millions of times Earth’s area.

And more: Close-upped through the churning refractions of
SunSeeker
’s plasma shroud, the shell clearly rotated as a single piece. “Of course,” Mayra said. “Centrifugal gravity.”

They merged their measurements and built up an image on the main screen. The bright plasma jet pierced the bowl’s hemisphere through a ribbed hole. “Kind of like a weird teacup,” Redwing said. “Cupworld.”

For long moments no one spoke. Then Redwing said with elaborate casualness, “Abduss, check if there’s any new tightbeam traffic from Earth.”

“There has been none for—”

“Now,” Redwing said firmly. Beth understood: Abduss needed something to do.

The deck took up a long, deep vibration none of them had ever heard before, an ominous bass note they felt rather than heard. “We’re entering the edges of the jet,” Beth said tersely. “Picking up—well, plasma surf, I guess you’d call it.”

Redwing frowned. “Full brake. Cycle the magnetics.”

“Roger.” Beth worked the large board, eyes never still.

The bowl seemed to swell quickly. “We’re locked in on the jet.” The deep bass note swelled. “And—slowing. We’re flying straight up the jet.”

SunSeeker
made its agonizing turn. To pivot the ship on its plasma plume demanded the skill of an ice skater, combined with an acrobat, spinning in three dimensions under thrust. In interstellar space, where most hydrogen is a gas and not broken into ions and electrons,
Seeker
ionized the gas ahead with a shock wave driven by its own oscillating magnetic snowplow. The pressure waves plunged ahead, grabbing the electrons available and smacking them into the hydrogen gas molecules. Properly adjusted—which took Beth only moments to tune—there was enough time for the hydrogen to break up into protons and electrons. The gas fried into a torch of fizzing ions. That left a plasma column just ahead of the ship, ready to be netted and swallowed by their magnetic dipole scoop, then fed down into the fusion reaction chambers. The trick was to torque the ship while riding atop this angry, spitting column.

Seeker
curved sideways by a mere few degrees, letting the target star gain a little on them. Then they curled behind it. Lacy filaments played before them as the jet grew near. They swerved fully into the jet with a hard, wrenching turn that slammed them all against the left arms of their couches for … forever.

*   *   *

Starships do not easily change directions. Sweat popped out on Beth’s brow; a swipe of her hand on a touchpoint started a cool breeze. Throughout
SunSeeker,
joints strummed, echoing in the long corridors. Auxiliary craft shifted and strained on their mountings. Beth wondered if the ship could take it, and then if
she
could.

Finally they straightened and felt the push of the sun’s jet against their magnetic collector fields. Beth surged forward from the deceleration, straps cutting into her. In the wraparound omniview screen, set to all parts of the spectrum, plumes of incandescent plasma skated and veered around their prow. Their total speed was higher than the star’s, but as they came around under the great bowl and into the furious jet, another force came into play. She felt it, became alarmed, then understood.
SunSeeker
began to twist, corkscrewing steadily around in the rushing plasma torrent. They all felt the grinding force of it, a giant’s slow twirl.

“Y’know, I was kinda wondering what held this jet so straight and tight,” Beth said in a conversational tone, her hands moving quick and sure over the many induction controls. “Magnetic fields do the job, generated by a current in the jet itself.”

“Uh, so?” Redwing said. He was not a technical type, she recalled.

“Somebody’s designed this to use the star’s own fields, sucking them into a jet. They form those helical filaments we saw on our approach.”

“Currents?” Mayra was alarmed. “We are mostly metal, a conductor—”

“So the currents are running around us, but not into us. Conveys angular momentum. Same as airliners flying through lightning on Earth. But—what a ride! Feel the twist!”

Beth turned to grin at them all and saw startled dismay.
Okay, not everybody likes surfing.
An acquired taste.

“Hey, I’ve got us under control. No sweat. It’s a big magnetic helix.”
Put forward the best news, worry about the rest later.
“And that means we’ll follow a longer path, take more time—so we’ll get more deceleration out of the jet.”

No change of expression.
Passengers!
No fun in them …

*   *   *

They ran hard and hot for hours and then hours more. Beth felt the strain, but somehow didn’t mind. Riding the plasma knots without battering the ship was … well, fun. Her heart was pounding away joyfully. Excitement did that for her as nothing else could. She had been a skydiver and surfer and skier, savoring the sensation of dealing with artful speed.
Zest!

But whenever she grinned, Redwing frowned. After a while, claiming that she needed the stretch, she got out of her harness and couch and stood while she worked the board. The AIs were laboring hard, carrying out a lot of the minor adjustments. For a while there, the ship gained a lot of charge on seams and edges, and Beth was afraid something would start shorting out. Too many electrons jockeying on the skin. But then she blew the charge off with a proton-rich plasma pulse—pure inspiration, plus freshman physics—and they got right with Mister Coulomb again.

She stayed standing. This was like surfing the longest wave in the universe, buffeted and sprayed and
rough—
but it thrilled her to her soul, every zooming kilometer of the way.

And here came the Knothole. She got back into her couch.
Fun’s over … maybe.

Somebody was talking behind her and she let it go. Pilots don’t listen to passengers, not if they’re smart.

Beth lunged painfully forward into her shoulder straps. The bowl ahead yawned like a flat plane—with a bull’s-eye target. She could see intricate ribbing around its polar opening, a ridge around the Knothole.
Engineered current-carrying circuits, bigger than continents?
Something had to make the magnetic fields that shaped plasma from the sun, fields that were also pushing against their ship now with a fierce, blinding gale. Something huge.

“No trouble decelerating now,” she said matter-of-factly, to calm the others. She need not turn to look at them; she could
smell
their fear. They swam upstream against the jet. Now the magnetic braking was worse than anything
Seeker
had ever been designed for. The ship popped and groaned. The bowl came rushing at them. Deep bass notes rang through the ship, vibrating Beth’s couch, rattling everything.…

Focus.
She flew through the bowl’s exhaust Knothole, hugging the edge to avoid cremation. A noose of magnetic fields at the Knothole boundary tightened the jet like water in a constriction. Flow velocity rose against the ship. Running creases crossed the shock waves they rode. She saw the bowl was thicker at the Knothole than elsewhere—to carry bigger stresses? And eerie lightning played along the Knothole rim.

She dispatched an AI to map the Knothole magnetic geometry and in seconds a color-coded 3-D map unfurled on a screen. “The noose we’re going through is bounded by dipolar fields,” she said abstractly. “And the dipoles are kept in line with another field, perpendicular to the dipoles—so the magnetic stresses can’t reconnect and die. Neat.”

Murmurs from behind her egged her on. Analysis, tension-relieving talk, cheers—all just a chorus she ignored.

“Plus, ladies and gentlemen, it’s radioactive as hell around here,” Beth said, adding brightly, “but an interstellar surfboard—that’s us—is designed for that.”

They slammed ahead, losing speed. She surged forward in her harness, adjusted, and surged again.
Surfing the big one. Ride of a lifetime. If you survive …

The prow tried to fight sideways but she jockeyed it back. Again. And again. Each time she got the feel of it better. Offhand she noticed she was drenched in sweat.
No wonder I can’t smell their fear anymore.…

She caught a glimmer refracted through the streaming plasma ahead, a small sphere wobbling toward them—Wickramsingh’s Star. The bowl flattened, became the sidewise horizon. The ship howled with its labors.

For Beth, time ceased to mean anything. She countered every veer and vortex, kept them straight, swore, blinked back sweat—and they were through.

The sky opened. Abruptly they were rising above a silvery plain. The jet hammered at them still. “Wonderful!” Cliff choked out, still hanging forward in his harness. Hollow cheers, ragged. They were rising above a vast white plain, but slower, slower—and then they turned again.

“Getting out of the jet,” Beth said, as if passing the butter. If they stayed in the jet, they’d be slowed further, back through the Knothole and out again.

“We’re taking a lot of ohmic heating in the skin,” Abduss said, voice tight with worry.

“I can barely hold the vector,” Mayra said calmly. Cliff knew by now the subtle tones of tension in her voice.

The white-hot jet plume thinned, then seemed to veer aside. Rough turbulence struck, slamming them around in their couches, bringing fresh metal shrieks from the ship.

“Out!” Mayra shouted. “We’re out.”

“I’d say we’re in,” Redwing said.

They cheered and all eyes were on the screens. Now they could see the inside of the bowl … and it was a vast sheeted plain brimming with light. They rose swiftly, peeling off from the jet to the side, plasma falling behind, vistas clearing. Again there curved away over the misty distance great longitude and latitude grids in sleek, silvered sections the size of worlds. The sections had boundaries, thin dark lines, demarking different curvatures of a greater mirror—and from that their eyes told them that these were all focused far away.

Silence. In a whisper Abduss said, “Mirrors … reflecting the sunlight back, inward, onto the star. That’s what causes the hot spot.”

Beth nodded, awed. Yes—otherwise the huge curved mirrors would have blinded them instantly.

They slewed to the side, turning, the screens taking in, across the immense celestial curvature, hazy tinctures of … green. She zoomed the scopes pointing inward along the great spherical cap. The lower latitudes of the inner bowl teemed with intensely green territories and washes of blue water. Lakes—no, oceans. The eye could not quite grasp what it saw. They were cruising along near the jet axis, and before them unfurled a landscape of arcing grandeur.

Beth calculated angles and distances. Any of the grid sections had a larger surface than the entire Earth. Each boasted intricate detail, webs strung among green brown continents and spacious seas, framing immense areas.

And her vision was all getting foggy with fatigue. Aches seeped through her.

“I’ve had enough,” Beth said. “Climbing up that jet burned away our velocity enough. The bowl and star system were moving pretty fast, and now we’re in their rest frame. We’re marginally trapped in the potential well of that star.”

Captain Redwing said, “You what?”

“Captain—”

“No, it’s okay, I get it,” he said suddenly. “The scale of this thing, it’s just mind-scrambling, Beth. The bowl is the size of a little solar system, right, and you can just leave the ship circling the sun, right? Are we too close? Will we heat up too much?”

“We’ll be okay.” She visibly straightened, her pale lips firming. One last effort. “I’ll leave the ramscoop idling, keeping the fields high, so we won’t be sprayed with radiation. It runs rough that way, but we have no choice. We’ve matched velocities with the system, so it’ll be
months
before we could be in trouble. We’ll be in an eccentric orbit, right, Abduss? I’ll be back at the controls before anything can happen, but somebody stay on trajectory watch, please.”