Bowl of Heaven (2 page)

They had all ridden her out into the Oort cloud, tried the engines, found the flaws that the previous fourteen ships had tested. Ran the AI systems, found the errors in rivets and reason, made better. In the first few generations of interstellar craft, every new ship was an experiment. Each learned from the last, the engineers and scientists did their work, and a better ship emerged. Directed evolution on the fast track.

Now they were ready for the true deeps. Deep space meant deep time, all fleeting and, soon enough, all gone.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a man’s voice said from behind them.

It was Karl, the lanky head flight engineer. He had an arm around Mei Ling and seemed a bit bleary and red faced. From a snog-fog burst, Cliff guessed. Mei Ling just seemed extraordinarily joyful, eyes glistening.

Beth said, casting a sideways glance, “Yes—and we’re counting on you to keep her happy.”

“Oh yes, I will,” Karl said, not getting the double entendre. “She’s a great ship.”

Mei Ling got it, arched an eyebrow, and nodded. “Saying good-bye to the world, are we? How do you think they’ll think of us by the time we arrive?”

Beth said, “I’d like to be remembered as the world’s oldest woman.”

They all laughed. Mei Ling asked Cliff, “Hard to say farewell to it all, isn’t it? You’ve been over here at the view most of the evening.”

She had always been quick to read people, he recalled. She would understand that he needed merriment now. That they all did. “Um, yeah. I guess I’m a man of the world; my trouble is I’m trying to find which world.”

They all nodded soberly. Then with a quick, darting grin, Karl showed off his newest trick. In the low centrifugal grav, he poured a dark red wine by letting it fall from the bottle, then cutting off the right amount with a dinner knife before it hit the glass. Three quick slices, Mei Ling rushed some glasses into place, and done. “Impressive!” Beth said. They drank.

“Got some news,” Karl said. “Those grav waves near Glory? No signal in them. Just noise.”

“How does that help us?” Beth asked. Cliff could tell from her expression that Karl was not her sort, but Karl would never know.

“It means there’s not some supercivilization on Glory, for one thing.”

“We already knew there are no electromagnetic signals,” Mei Ling said.

“Well, sure,” Karl said. “But maybe really advanced societies don’t bother with primitive—”

“Hey, this is a party!” Beth said brightly. Karl took the hint. He shrugged and led Mei Ling away. She had some trouble walking.

“Cruel, you are,” Cliff said.

“Hey, we won’t see him for centuries.”

“But it will seem like next week.”

“So they say. What do you think about the grav waves?”

Just then a Section head broke in, using a microphone to get above the party noise, which was still rising. “We just got a launch congratulations from Alpha Centauri, folks! They wish you good speed.”

Some hand clapping, then the party buzz came back even stronger. “Nice gesture,” Beth said. “They had to send that over four years ago.”

Tananareve Bailey spoke behind him. “It probably came in a year back and they’ve been saving it.” Cliff hadn’t noticed her approach. She was more covered up than most of the women, but gorgeous, an explosion of browns and orange against black face and arms. She stood with Howard Blaire, once a zookeeper and something of a bodybuilding enthusiast.

Beth nodded. “Once we’re in flight, the delay times will mean we’re talking to different generations. Spooky. But you were saying about the grav waves—?”

Howard twisted his mouth, trying to recall. “Look,
SunSeeker
was nearly built before LIGO 22 picked up those waves. It took all the time we were out on our field trials to verify the detection. More time to see if there was anything in it—and apparently there isn’t. No signal, just some noisy spectrum. No, we’re going to Glory because a biosphere is there. One of the Astros told me these grav waves probably come from just accidental superposition. A good chance there’s some pair of orbiting black holes far across the galaxy, but the Glory system is in the way—”

“That’s what I think, too,” a familiar voice said. They turned to find a red-faced Fred, back again, obviously a bit the worse for wear. “Can’t get good resolution on the source area, and Glory’s over in one corner of a degree-wide patch in the sky. The grav waves could be from anywhere in there, even in another galaxy.”

Beth looked at Cliff and gave him her covert rolled-eye look, saying, “I’m a bio type, myself.”

Fred was a trifle intense, or “focused” as the psychers put it. Some found him hard to take, but he had solved a major technical problem in systems tech, which cut him some slack with Cliff. All crew had to have overlapping abilities, but for some like Fred, breadth was their main qualification. Of course, Fred was oblivious to all these nuances. He gestured at the screen. “Hard not to look at it—beauty and importance combined. The
Mona Lisa
of planets.”

Beth murmured approval and he went on, talking faster. “Even now, I mean—hundreds of bio worlds with atmospheric signatures, but no better’s been seen anywhere.”

Irma Michaelson passed by without her husband in tow, her head turning quickly at Fred’s remark. “You mean the new Forward probe data?”

“Uh, no—”

“Forward Number Five just checked in,” Irma said. “Still pretty far out, can’t get surface maps or anything. Plenty of clouds, got a smidge view of an ocean. Shows the atmospheric thermo pretty well, I hear. We got the tightbeam relay just in time! We might need to do some atmosphere work to make it comfy.”

Beth asked, “What kind?”

“They say we may need more CO
2
. Glory’s a tad light on greenhouse gases,” Fred said so fast, he could barely get the words out. “Surface temperatures are more like Canada. The tropics there are like our mid-temperate zones.”

Now that we’ve terraformed Earth back to nearly twencen levels,
Cliff thought,
here comes another whole world.…

He shook this off and listened to Fred, who was hurtling on bright-eyed with, “Once we learn how to suck carbon out of air really well, we can make a climate that will be better than what we were born into. Maybe better than humans ever had it.”

By this time, he was lecturing to a smaller audience. He gave them a crooked smile, as if to acknowledge this, and walked off into the crowd, which was getting predictably more noisy.

“A lot of anxious energy humming through here,” Beth said.

“An emotional bath,” Cliff said dreamily, and nodded at Earth. “The big issue down there is our ever-smarter machines demanding back wages. What’s retirement look like for a multicapillary DNA sequencer?”

Beth laughed, her eyes dancing. “I got a must-answer from SSC, asking what actor would best portray me in the series about us.”

“At least we won’t have to see it.”

She thumped the screen. “I keep thinking I’ll probably never see white curtains billowing into warm sunlit rooms on a lazy summer afternoon. We haven’t left yet, and already I’m nostalgic.”

“For me, it’ll be surfing.”

“Glory has oceans. A moon, pretty small. Maybe they have waves, too.”

“I didn’t bring my board.”

He saw the Arctic Ocean ice was at least visible, a heartening symptom of a planet slowly backing down from the Hot Age. The big chunk of Antarctica that fell off a century back and caused all the flooding was slowly regrowing, too. The Pacific islands were still gone, though, and might never appear again, worn down by wave action. No surfing there, ever again.

He noticed a phalanx of officers in blue uniforms and gold braid, standing smartly in ranks. Most were from the Oort crew and would not go out on
SunSeeker,
so were here for formality. The leaner Glory-bound crew stood behind the tall, craggy figure blinking into the spotlight but still quite sure he belonged there.

“Captain Redwing is about to speak,” a deck lieutenant’s voice boomed out over the speakers. They stood at sharp attention beneath the other banner proclaiming,

STAR-CRAVING MAD FAREWELL

Redwing was in full dress uniform with medals blazing, beaming at everyone, face ruddy. Cliff recalled he had divorced the wife who was to go with him, but he had not heard the inside story. Redwing kept his posture at full attention except for head dips to junior officers. He maintained a kindly smile, as if he were pleased the other officers were sharing their nice little thoughts. Still, he was an imposing man in uniform.

“A great exit line,” Cliff whispered, trying to edge inconspicuously toward the door. He cast a long look at Earth on the screen.

“Last night for separate quarters, too,” Beth said. “Would you like to stay over?”

“Wow, yes, ma’am.”

“I believe it’s customary.”

“Customary where?”

“Wherever it’s Saturday night.”

They threaded their way through the crowd, but the feeling still plucked at him. The noise and strumming music, the drinks and snog-fogs and quick darting kisses, faces lined and hopeful and sad, all passing by—but still, somehow, as if he wanted to freeze them in amber.

In an eerie way, this was like a … ghost story. All these support people, likable and irritating and officious and sexy and, soon enough—all dead. Left behind. When he and the other crew awoke in orbit around Glory, more than half of these would be centuries gone. Even with the standard life span of 160 years now, gone to gray dry dust.

It had never struck him this way. Not knowing it, but
feeling
it. All this greatness, the human prospect—all that would be far behind them when they next awoke.

Cliff smiled a thin pale smile and thought,
This is the last time I’ll see Earth.
He looked at the swimming majesty of it, sighed with a sense of foreboding, and followed Beth.

PART I

W
AKE
-
UP
C
ALL

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

—A
NAÏS
N
IN

ONE

Life persists.

He recalled those words, his nervous mantra recited as the soft sleep came closing its grip with chilly fingers—

—and so he knew he was alive. Awake again. Up from the chill-sleep of many decades.

He was
cold.
His memory was blurred, but it told him he was on an odyssey no biologist had ever ventured on before, a grand epic. He was going to the stars, yes, and they had given him the stinky sulfur gas, yes, the first creeping chill … and that was … it.

But beyond that flash of memory, all he could think of was the incredible, muscle-shaking chill that spread like a sharp ache through him. He was too numb to shiver. Somewhere a loud rumble rolled up through his body, not heard but felt.
The cold …
He thought hard and with effort opened his sticky eyes.

Trouble. His gummy eyelids slammed closed against a crisp actinic glare. He must be in the revival clinic. Slowly he pried them open, still numb with cold. He focused with effort, looking for the joyous faces of his fellow colonists.

Not there. Nor was Beth.

Instead, the worried frowns of Mayra and Abduss Wickramsingh made him groggily anxious as they worked over him. Their faces swam away, came back, drifting above like clouds as the cold began to recede. He was
tired.
His bones ached with it. After decades of sleep 
…

Hands massaged his rubbery legs. Lungs wheezed. His heart labored, thumping in his ears. His throat rasped with a sour wind. He was finally starting to shiver. Sluggish sleep fell away like a mummy’s moldy shroud.

Think.
The Wickramsinghs were paired by ability, he recalled in a gray fog, self-sufficient and solely responsible for the three years of their watch. Mayra piloted, and Abduss was the engineer. They were fairly far down the queue, maybe twenty-seven watches.… How far along were they? It hurt to figure.

They turned him on his side to work on his stiff muscles. The massaging sent lancing pain, and he let out a muffled scream. They ignored that. At least he could see better. Against the hard ceramic glare, he could see that no others of
SunSeeker
’s 436 passengers in cold sleep were being revived. A capsule was running its program, though, so someone was coming out behind him. The bay was empty. Carboceramic tiles were clean, looking like new.

As a scientist, he was not slated to come out until the infrastructure staff was up and running at Scorpii 3, the balmy world that everybody called Glory, that no eye had ever seen.

So they were maybe eighty years into the voyage. Not enough to be near Glory. Something was wrong.

Mayra’s lips moved, glistening in the hard light, but he heard nothing. They worked on his neural connections and—
pop!
—he could hear. The dull rumble hammered at him. Interstellar surf.

“Okay? Okay?” Mayra said anxiously, mouth tight, her eyes intent. “What’s your name?”

He coughed, hacked. Once his throat was clear of milky fluid, his first words were, “Cliff … Kammash. But … Why me? I’m bio. Is Beth still cold?”

They didn’t answer at once, but each looked at the other.

“Don’t talk,” Mayra said softly, a smile flickering.

Definitely trouble. He had known the Wickramsinghs slightly in training, remembered them as reserved and disciplined, just what a cryo passenger would wish in a caretaker watch team.

And they were good. They got his creaky body up off the slab, kind hands helping, his muscles screaming. Then into a gown, detaching the IVs. Up, creaking onto his feet. He swayed, the room reeled, he sat down. Try again. Better … a step. First in eighty years, feet like bricks. They helped him shuffle to a table. He sat. Minutes crawled by as he felt air swoosh in and out of his lungs. He studied this phenomenon carefully, as though it were a miracle. As perhaps it was.