Shipstar (16 page)

Karl hadn’t thought this way.
Engineers don’t,
he mused, and then recalled that his three degrees were in electrical, mechanical, and astroengineering.
Okay, usually.
“Look, Karl. A few hundred years ago, we called people savages because they pierced their ears, ballooned their lips, wore trinkets in their nose, cut their hair so it looked wild or had no hair at all. They did weird stuff, had strange noisy dances and rites, and tattooed their bodies. Then, when I was growing up, everybody called that stuff hip and fashionable.”

“Uh, so?”

The lands below were back to mountains and seas—beautiful expanses, larger than the whole Earth–Moon system. Redwing never tired of it all.… “We can take cultural change, even stuff that comes back from our ancestors and looks odd. But we’re expanding, moving out into the stars.”

“Well, sure.”

“And so are the Folk. I guess they can take tattoos. It’s fashion, which means it’s over by the time people like us even hear about it. But I doubt they can take big new religions or political mobs that want to, say, take over piloting this contraption. They can’t allow that.”

Karl got it. He nodded eagerly. “And we thought we knew what conservative meant.”

“They can’t risk the wrong kind of change. And that’s exactly what we new-kid-on-the-block humans represent.”

PART V

M
IRROR
F
LOWERS

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

—M
ARK
T
WAIN

SEVENTEEN

Cliff and his party followed Quert at an easy, loping pace. The lower gravity made long strides easy, but the humans could not match the ease of the Sil’s fluid grace. There was no ground transport except the Sil city subway, but that had been damaged, too. Quert said it was intermittent and unreliable, “Smoke go in there. And … some say … be worse things.”

They made their way beyond the ruined Sil city and broke into open woodlands. It was a relief to suck in soft, moist air and just
move, escape
. No one looked back.

They paused on a short hill and Cliff could not resist a last perspective on the blasted landscape. Its once-proud ramparts and arches, its residential precincts, its lofty spires of what might have been elegant churches—all burned or hammered down to rubble. The Folk had no mercy. Yet he could see rising from rubble the tan buildings they had watched self-forming with a quiet, eternal energy. Seen at a distance, the fresh shoots of new life moved like stop-motion videos, eager plants rising to begin anew a city that surely, in the immense history of the Bowl, had been rebuilt myriad times. Cliff sighed and clasped Irma to his side. “It’s coming back. Slow but steady.”

“This place was made to replace itself. A technology that
counts
on having to regenerate. I wonder what it runs on.”

“Solar energy, reprocessed waste—did you see that molecular printer Quert used to make us your new carry-pack?”

She nodded and shrugged the new pack, easing the straps. “Great, some kind of light composite stuff. Made a molecule at a time, Quert said. It’s built exactly like the old busted one. Minus the broken frame, from when I fell down.”

Cliff shrugged. “If you hadn’t been down, that flame beam would’ve burned you.”

“Yeah, lucky break.” She puffed her overhanging hair back from her eyes, a classic gesture of bemused frustration. “Dumb luck. Poor old Howard ran out of luck.”

“Damn shame. He was always getting hurt, breaking something, even getting lost to go pee.”

“Some people are like that. Crew selection was by Fleet merits, y’know—not backpack experience. Résumés don’t account for plain old bad luck that keeps coming back.”

“Sure ’nuff—a big mistake. Next starship I’m on, I’ll remember that.”

She laughed and punched him in the arm, which drew sidelong glances from Terry and Aybe. Even Quert noticed.
Well, let ’em,
Cliff thought.
Not like it’s been a lot of fun lately.

Then they pressed on, turning their backs on the burgeoning city that would live again.

Quert led the way, with other Sil flanking them. They all carried weapons, long slim tube launchers. Their faces were grim, focused, and they did not seem to tire.

Relentless sunlight streamed down through the symphonic play of ivory clouds. Tall and cottony, they were so vast that parts of them were laced through with blue tinges of moist anvils. Clouds as anthologies: the anvils hanging in the soft mist of larger puffballs, lightning sheeting across denser, purple knots, all of it like separate cities of the sky, tapering away into the far heights. Here and there clots condensed out, their understories fading into rainfalls—sheets of pale blue falling great distances, then absorbed back into the air before ever striking the Bowl.

Cliff said to Irma and Aybe, “Relax into tourist mode,” and they all chuckled, not because it was funny but because everyone needed an excuse to smile. They came into a flash of green, almost pornographically abundant in the smoky, almost rotting aroma of turned black earth, rains sweating down from passing squalls, air thickened with rich purpose. A vehicle purred past and from its big tailpipe a lush pale blue cloud gushed. Irma drew in a breath of it and said, “You can almost smell dinosaurs in that. It smells like a fossil fuel.”

Aybe sniffed. “Probably ethanol, but it sure smells rich.”

None of them had actually ever smelled the exhaust of a true oil burner, on an Earthside that was scrupulous about emissions. Only jet airplanes using turbines rated fossil fuel use, back when
SunSeeker
left the solar system. Cliff wondered if by now Earthside biotech had engineered anything like the skyfish here, living beasts that could float and fight.

He doubted it. What biological substrate could they start with to develop such bizarre forms? That made him consider how the Folk had ever engineered their skyfish. From some airborne floaters, found on some planet where thick air and light gravity made that an optimal path? Big, slow, made invulnerable by its size, like elephants or whales or a brontosaurus?
This place is like a museum of other life-forms,
he thought,
but one that keeps evolving. Maybe that was part of the point of building the Bowl itself? An ongoing, moving experiment with more room than a million planets?

They entered a broad plain of short grass, and there was a trampled, much-traveled track stretching into the hazy distance. Straight up in the air, though, momentary openings between the towering clouds gave a dim vision of the Bowl hanging in a pale eggshell blue sky. Cliff watched the watery vision of huge lands shimmer, a vision from all the way across this solar system.
Only it’s not any solar system we ever envisioned,
he thought.
More like a huge contraption made of a system’s parts.
Back on
SunSeeker
before they came down, Fred the engineer type had estimated the Bowl’s mass, and got more than Jupiter, more probably than there was in the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. Somebody had scavenged an entire expanse of space, maybe all the worlds that circled Wickramsingh’s Star, to make this thing.

Along the trampled path, occasional Sil held out strings of fish, stringy rootlike vegetables, a gauzy plant like a haze of wire. He realized these were for sale, but of course, the humans had nothing like Sil cash. Passing these hawkers, making poor imitations of the Sil
no no no
eye-gestures, they went by. Here and there a Sil stepped forward, lowered its head, and held goods up, waving them toward the humans—an offering. This struck Irma as an eye-widening surprise. Cliff knew enough to take some food, with eye-moves of thanks, and then wondered how to cook the food that began accumulating. All this occurred silently, for the Sil seemed to relish a gentle, still presence. It was usually hard to get them to talk at all, and when they did, they were terse.

Across the plain came small, darting vehicles sheathed in shiny silver metal. Some moved toward the humans, though most went their own way. A knot of about a dozen Sil cars eased up in the purring machines and shut them down. With proper greetings they got out to address Quert. They had a conversation taking at least twenty minutes.

That was long enough for the humans to sit near the cars and find out which of the gift foods they could eat raw. “Hand meal” the Sil called this. Sil talked while they ate. When Irma asked about that, Quert had consulted an electronic aid he sometimes used to translate, and said, “Sportive verse.” This apparently meant creating poetry, a ritual perhaps parallel to humans drinking alcohol and singing together.

They were hungry. There was a pleasant nutty spiral fruit that left a peppery taste. They ate it all and had moved on to a nearly rhomboid-shaped bittersweet fruit. Quert and three other Sil came over to the humans, doing the head-moves and eye-signals that always came before an important discussion. Cliff reflected on how much they had learned about Sil culture by simply watching their social cadences. Humans talked all the time, Quert had noted with genuine wonder, as though that were uncommon on the Bowl.

Quert said, “They gift movers to us.”

“We are gift happy,” Irma said, smiling and nodding. She was better at ferreting out the meanings of the clipped Sil sentences and echoing their manner. She kept track of the myriad eye- and head-gestures and tried to imitate them, though not always with much success. There had been some amusing errors, such as when she had inadvertently asked Quert if sex was part of their diet, or where the beds were to be, and then walked into the rather primitive male toilets. She could not then tell male from female Sil and had to be told, with furious elbow signals.

The small, squat vehicles were actually simple to drive. They used hands and feet, just as Earthside cars did, and ran on an auto-gear system with adjustable constraints, mostly apparently magnetic. Indeed, its propulsion seemed magnetic, but it never rose more than a meter above the broad plain. Everything here, even the homes, seemed powered by electromagnetic induction, through the Bowl’s substructure. There were solar collectors everywhere, befitting a land where the sun always shone, and the self-shaping buildings were driven that way, too. Cliff could tell by the occasional tingling of electrical discharge that ran over his skin when he stood near the walls, as they surged up and formed elegant cusps and arches.

Quert showed Cliff how to drive the magcar, seeming to insist it was a guest’s privilege. That let him take the little thing out onto the broad plain, Quert in the copilot seat, and Irma and Aybe in the rather cramped rear seats. Their backpacks and gear went in racks on the roof, secured by a curious self-wrapping lattice that figured out its own way to secure the arrangement, tripped by a tiny tapping from Quert.

They headed on toward distant mountains, cloud-shrouded and mysterious. Quert then went into comm mode, using the inbuilt dash system to get in touch with other Sil, using a system Quert said the Folk could not intercept. Quert apparently had embedded acoustic receivers, for it peered ahead intently and subvocalized, face giving nothing away. Irma sat in the back, and the others were in another car, following close on the right side. Cliff took the odd magcar up to its highest speed as other car traffic thinned out. They were moving away from the Sil concentrations, but Cliff had no idea of their destination.

He did not notice nearby cars or anyone following until abruptly one drew up alongside them. It deftly came in and blocked them from the other human car. The two Sil inside did not look at him, but they matched exactly his velocity. Then the magcar started coming in closer. He thought nothing of it until they were only a car-length away. He slowed. They slowed. He sped up. So did they. Another magcar came in from his left, moving fast. Its driver also didn’t even seem to notice the three cars moving now together. They all peered straight ahead.
Maybe they’re a guard party?
he wondered.

Closer, closer … Cliff had time to say, “Quert—Quert?” interrupting the alien’s concentration, its eyes slowly coming fully open, as if it had been in a trance. “I think something’s—”

A third car came over fast from the left, slightly ahead. It slewed hard and set itself up exactly in front of their car.

Irma said, “Are these—?”

The lead car slowed, its big tail signal sliding in ruby red pulses across the back. Cliff had to step on the mag brakes, and the car hummed loudly. He tried to maneuver to the left, then right, but there was no room now, and then the car ahead braked harder.

Cliff slammed on the brakes. The three that had boxed him in hit theirs a few seconds later. The brake howl was a high
skkkrrreeeee,
all of them losing speed as fast as they could. The cars were identical, so they hardly separated at all as the howling deceleration threw Cliff forward. They all wore odd net belts that stopped Cliff from being heaved onto the windshield. His few seconds’ lead in decelerating meant he was now about ten meters behind them all as they slid to a stop, throwing gray dust and the humming loud and shrill.

Irma was saying something and Quert, too, but Cliff focused on the six Sil who jumped out of the magcars. They called short crisp orders to each other and reached into their workbelts.
Going for weapons,
Cliff thought.
Not guards.

The Sil ran around their cars and formed an orderly bunch, intent on Cliff’s car, shouting now. Quert gave its gravel growl and took off its web-belt. Irma gave an alarmed cry.

The only weapon we have, we’re inside.

Cliff saw what he must do. He slammed on the acceleration and shot forward. The car shook as he hit the Sil. Impact scattered them across the blunt shiny hood. Bodies struck their windshield and rolled up it, tumbling over the roof—dull thumps—and Cliff kept his foot on the accelerator until just before they hit the forward car.

They slammed in hard and the magnetic bumper pushed them back, lessening the impact. Their magcar’s hood crumpled. Alarms blared an odd hooting call in Cliff’s ears. Quert cried out in surprise and Irma went silent.