Bowl of Heaven
Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
C
ONTENTS
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Cliff Kammash—biologist
Mayra Wickramsingh—pilot, with Beth team
Abduss Wickramsingh—engineer, with Beth team
Glory—the planet of destination
Captain Redwing
SunSeeker
—the ramship
Beth Marble—biologist
Eros
—the first drop ship
Fred Ojama—geologist, with Beth team
Aybe—engineer, with Cliff team
Howard Blaire—engineer, with Cliff team
Terrence Gould—with Cliff team
Irma Michaelson—plant biologist, with Cliff team
Tananareve Bailey—with Beth team
Lau Pin—engineer, with Beth team
C
APTAIN
R
EDWING HAS FOUR CREW ABOARD
S
UN
S
EEKER
Jampudvipa, shortened to Jam—an Indian bridge officer
Ayaan Ali—Arab woman navigator/pilot
Clare Conway—copilot
Karl Lebanon—general technology officer
A
STRONOMER
F
OLK
Memor—Attendant Astute Astronomer
Asenath—Wisdom Chief
Ikahaja—Ecosystem Savant
Omanah—Ecosystem Packmistress
Ramanuji—Biology Savant
Kanamatha—Biology Packmistress
Thaji—Judge Savant
(The Adopted, those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl, will have further names used in Volume 2.)
Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time
—T
ENNYSON
, “Locksley Hall”
T
HE
L
AST
P
ARTY
Cliff turned from the people he was saying good-bye to and looked out at the world he would never see again.
The party roared on behind him. Laughter, shouts, hammering hard music. The laughter was a touch ragged, the music too loud, a forced edge to it all, and an electric zest fueled a murmur of anticipating talk. They had said good-bye already to relatives on Earth. Now,
SunSeeker
’s crew and passengers had to say farewell forever to the starship construction teams, the training echelons, the embodied political and economic forces that were about to launch them out into a vastness beyond experience.
The view was razor sharp, but it was of course a screen, adjusted to subtract the station’s centrifugal gyre. So Earth held steady and he could see the tiny silver motes of flung packages headed toward the
SunSeeker
complex. They trailed back toward the flingers on Luna, and another line of specks pointed toward the fatter dots of manufacturing complexes in higher orbits. A dingy new asteroid was gliding in on its decade-long journey. Already, silvery bee swarms of robo-factories accompanied it, hollowing out its stony core for a smelter colony. Glass-skinned biofactories waited for the work crews that would pounce on the asteroid prey, their liquid riches hiding behind fogged domes for sunlight to awaken them.
It struck him how much like artworks machines seemed in space. Here they suffered no constraints of gravity, and so looked like contorted abstracts of Euclidean geometries, cubes and ellipsoids and blunt cylinders that made mobiles without wires, moving with glacial grace against the faint jewels of brimming starlight.
Within the geostationary orbit, he could not see distinct satellites, even after he hit the magnification command and the screen narrowed in. Here, the busy swarm held luxury hotels for ancients now well over two centuries old. Religious colonies were more common but rather Spartan, and ships flitted like dappled radiance everywhere in the incessant sprawl of commerce. The solid Earth swam in a countless froth of tending machines.
He leaned sideways and caught the sheen of the Fresnel lens at the L1 point, a gauzy circle seen nearly on edge from here. It hung between Earth and the sun, deflecting sunlight from the still rather overheated planet. Adjusting patches twinkled in slow splendor.
“Y’know, it’ll all be fixed up fine by the time we even wake up.” Beth’s soft words came from behind him.
Cliff turned and his eyes brightened. “But we’ll be this same age.”
She blinked and grinned and kissed him back. “Hard not to love an optimist.”
“If I didn’t think we’ll wake up, I wouldn’t go.”
She wore a sheath dress that definitely wouldn’t be going to Glory. It clung to her lithe body, wrapped close around her neck, and anchored at amber bracelets on her wrists. Her right showed bare skin colored like chardonnay as the dress polarized, giving him quick glances of flesh. The silky dress had variable opacity and hue she could tune with the bracelets, he guessed. He hoped this show was for him. People nearby were making a great show of not noticing. Just as most ignored the profusion of plunging necklines, built-in push-up bras, spangles, feathers, slits, and peekaboos. Plus codpieces on some of the guys, muscle shirts, the hawk hats that made a man look like a predator.
“A lot of overt signaling tonight, isn’t there?” Beth said dryly.
Not his style. “Bravado, smells like.” So he simply took her in his arms and kissed her. That was the usual best move, he had learned early on, especially if he could not think of something witty. Her green eyes blinked. Everyone continued not noticing. He wouldn’t see most of them ever again, after all.
This thought got underlined when a banner rolled across the room’s suspension ceiling. It was from the assembly teams who for years had worked with the crew, outfitting and running
SunSeeker.
HOPE YOU ENJOYED GIVING US THE BUSINESS
AS MUCH AS WE ENJOYED TAKING YOU FOR A RIDE
Terry and Fred came by on their way to the bar, laughing at the banner. “Funny,” Terry said. “We’re going on to Glory, and tomorrow they’ll be back at work on the next ramscoop. But they’re celebrating harder than we are.”
“Yeah,” Fred said. “Odd. They’re as glad to see us leave as we are to go.”
Terry said, “We’re all scarce types. All the psychers say so. Why wouldn’t anyone grab a chance at a whole new, fresh world?”
“Instead of staying here to fix the one we screwed up?” Cliff asked. An old issue for them all, but it still clung to him.
Beth shrugged. “We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.”
“It’s good practice,” Terry said. “The previous generations terraformed Earth first. Now it’s our turn with a whole new planet.”
A tray crawled past; you couldn’t use float trays in low-spin gravity. The tray was piled with exotic dishes and surrounded by diners who would not be eating this well for centuries to come. Fred joined them, then Terry, edging into the crowd with minimal courtesy.
“My, my,” Beth said warmly. “Ummm … maybe we should leave now?”
Cliff looked out over the crowd. Some Earth bureaucrat had on a leash a dog that closely resembled a breakfast pastry with hair. The dog was lapping up someone else’s vomit. Three others were laughing at the sight. Apparently most of the party was having a better time than he was.
No matter. This was surely the last time he would see most of them—the crews who had built
SunSeeker,
the endless bureaucrats who at least pretended to add to the effort, the psychers and endless engineers and trial-run crews who would never see another sun.… He grimaced and relished the passing moment. All moments were passing, of course. Some, more so. “My heart is full but my glass is empty.”
She gave him a rueful nod. “We won’t get booze on
SunSeeker.
”
“In flight? Cap’n Redwing would frown.”
“He seems more the ‘throw ’em into leg irons’ type.”
Her laughing-eyed remark told them both that they needed celebration. It helped ward off the doubts, fears, and … an emotion he had no name for
. So be it.
They stood with arms around each other’s waist and watched Earth’s wheeling, silent majesty. Into the rim of their view swam
SunSeeker,
looking much like a lean and hungry shark.
Yes, a shark waiting to swim in the ocean of night. The large mouth was the magnetic funnel, waiting to be turned on, furl outward, and begin the slow acceleration out of the solar system. That scoop would yawn and first dive close to the sun, swallowing great gouts of the solar wind as start-up fuel. Behind the head complex curved the hoop of the control deck, its ruby glow alive with workers. Cliff watched tiny figures in their worker pods putting finishing touches on the long, rotating cylinder of the habitat and cryostorage sandwiched between the supplies storage vaults. Then came the wrinkled, cottonball-white, cybersmart radiators that sheathed the drive system. Its cylindrically spaced vents gave in to the fat fusion chambers, big ribbed barrels that fed the final thruster nozzles. Wrapped around these in a saddle truss were the big yellow fuel pods that would feed the beast as it accelerated into the deep dark, then fall away. From there on, it would glide through the centuries inside a magnetic sheath, safe from the proton sleet ahead.
SunSeeker
was a shark for eating away at light-years.
