Shipstar (15 page)

Beth was still blinking in pure astonishment. Her father had centuries ago called this a
whatthehell moment.…
She had met uncountable aliens, fled from some, killed some, eaten many—but
this
 …

The viewing angle expanded, and walking in from the right was a … human. Beth gasped.

The man wore a blue skintight suit with a red cape, big head, black hair—clearly a man, yes. Muscled, striding forward proudly—and the alien third arm struck out, caught the human in the face. A nasty slap. The man staggered back. The alien made a half turn and thrashed the man, slamming him away and then grabbing him by his right shoulder, twisting him into full view. There was a large red
S
on the man’s deep blue chest.

“Superman!” Beth did not know whether to laugh or just gape. She did both.

The alien leaped, twisting in air, kicking Superman in the gut. He went down hard on the rocky ground. The graphics were good—Beth could see Superman’s shock, surprise, pain. Dust puffed up where he fell. Vigorously the alien leaped high, paused while it made more mouth-gestures directly toward the viewer—and came down hard on top of Superman with obvious relish, slamming down with both big feet. Superman’s mouth opened in shock and surprise, eyes bulging, showing white. The alien fanned its two arms, whipped the third one that seemed slim and sharp—and brought it down on Superman’s head. The lash brought blood streaming from Superman’s left ear and—incredibly, splashed big red gobbets on an imaginary window between the scene and the viewer. The blood ran down in rivulets while the alien raised all three arms into the air, head back.

The effect made Beth rock back, as if the blood had flown in her face. She gasped.

Prancing, whip arm twirling, the alien proceeded to dance on Superman. It sent more kicks to the head and gut as the opportunity arose. The alien looked full at the viewer as it pranced, eyes even bigger. Its image swelled to fill the screen, and the eyes glowered at the viewer.

Stop.

A long silence.

“Pretty clear message, I’d say,” Redwing clasped hands across his belt and leaned back in his flex chair.

Beth could not take her eyes from the alien head, its threatening expression frozen. “They eavesdropped on something, TV I guess, or…”

“And chose to send a message a child could understand:
Stay away.
”

SIXTEEN

Cliff had handed him a problem from hell. How to stop the Folk from killing a lot more of an alien species, to intervene with big things Redwing had never seen, minds unknown … or else do nothing. “Nothing” looked like the right answer, but he didn’t have to like it.

He had the shipmind call up readings on this from the ancients available on the ship’s database of all human cultures. These long-dead voices had never confronted any remotely similar problem, but came as close as humans could: Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Churchill, Lao Tzu, Kant, Aristotle, Niebuhr, Gandhi, King, Singh. Interesting, thick reading—but it made him think about his life in perspective. Maybe he could use that if he survived this whole huge thing. But for now, alas … No help there.

The best solution was to get Cliff’s team out of that place. Then the Folk would stop trying to capture or kill them. Bargaining could begin.

The brief comm burst Cliff had managed to get through to
SunSeeker,
fighting through the electromagnetic haze-screen the Folk had put up, gave the cartoon files and some optical spectral data that fit Glory exactly. No question where it came from.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Glorians were sending the Bowl a threat. But it used imagery of Superman, of all things—an antique “superhero” (he had to look the term up) from the expansionist phase of the Anglo-Saxon era. Technically, of course, that era was not over. It had merged with the larger economic unification of Earthside. English was the obvious unifying language—larger, richer, with simple introductory grammar. Irregular verbs galore, of course, but by the time the interplanetary phase of economic expansion was well under way, there was no competition. Mandarin, Cantonese—they came from a productive society, as did Hindi—but nobody could write them well, and they didn’t work simply with digital culture anyway. Plus the Chinese culture didn’t have the flexibility of the Anglo structure. The other Asian cultures did a bit better, but English was as set into the world culture as the qwerty keyboard. History ruled.

So a comic book figure like Superman, his Pedia base said, fit with the modern social structure, too. Other archetypes like Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein had clear roles, but fit uncomfortably with the world culture. The other superheroes of the twencen were modeled on men like animals—bats, spiders, apes. Superman, tellingly, was an alien. Yet he fit into human society seamlessly.

Superman’s key assumption was that his disguise was just to put on glasses and business clothes and be an everyman. Then nobody, even Lois Lane—a character that reminded Redwing of his ex-wife—could spot him.
Every man a Superman.
What could be more obvious? Do your job, toe the line, the daily grind—but all the time you are free to imagine yourself leaping over buildings, flying through the air, flattening the baddies. Maybe even getting a date with Lois.

Redwing shook his head. Cultures could best be understood in the rearview mirror. Superman might work among the multitudes of Earthside, but such guiding archetypes were not what you needed in deep space. The interplanetary culture spawned Smoke, Ellipso, Whitethighs, and others. Such larger-than-life figures helped cultures understand themselves, turn their lives into stories.

So … Here among the worlds and stars,
this
was a frontier. Earthside hadn’t had one in centuries.

But the aliens spoke in that antique visual language. They must have used big antennas to pick up all sorts of popular media, broadcast over hundreds of years. Then, apparently, they finally saw the Bowl headed toward them. So they sent a brush-off message, using the cartoons that swerved around language and slammed home the point. Aliens stomping on Superman, beating him up, kicks to his head and gut, the finishing glower straight into the viewer’s face—classic, in its way. Any chimpanzee would get that right away. Even a smart one with a starship.

There were intelligent, technological Glorians who knew something about images with power—and they didn’t want the Bowl to appear in their skies.

Well, who would?
It had immense mass and its own star in tow. It couldn’t approach a planetary system without scrambling up planetary orbits. Coming to call meant the bull comes into your china shop and is in no hurry to leave.

A warning was understandable. Threats, comic book or not, might work.

But … no curiosity? No desire to embrace the strange, the alien, the obviously huge technology the Bowl implied? What kind of aliens were these Glorians, anyway?

Beth had said shakily, “I need to think about this,” and departed.

A sharp rap startled Redwing. He glanced at his desk, which pulsed with a reminder color.

Karl had knocked smartly on the door, right on time. Redwing got up and met him, shaking hands as he did sometimes with crew to show this conversation was more than ordinary. After all, the close quarters and endless waiting led, in classic fashion, to rumors, imaginary problems, and endless speculation.

“I carried forward those points you brought up,” Karl began.

“You’re done integrating the new crew?”

“Nearly. They’re slow, dazed. Some sleep pods didn’t work just right, it seems.”

“Anything serious medically?”

“No, just slow recovery rates.” Karl looked tired.

Redwing knew that rumor-mongering went double for the newbies. Some of the freshly revived had the checked-my-actual-personality-at-the-door look of people absorbing and not able to react. It
was
a surprise, yes. Not Glory on the viewscreens, but an immense, whirling landscape. Redwing had decided to let them get into the work cycle, then get to know them, see what teams he could shape from them. Dealing with the Bowl to get what Redwing wanted was going to be a complex game.

They needed supplies of volatiles and fusion fuel catalysts, just to depart and head for Glory. That was only the beginning, though.

Best to get things back on firm ground. He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desk. “You and I need to have a clear understanding of how the dynamics of this Bowl and star system work. It may be the only leverage we have over the Folk.”

“They’ve been running this place for a very long time,” Karl said. “I doubt it has any vulnerabilities.”

“Start with that jet. You’d think they’d have reached cruising speed and been able to shut off the plasma jet by now, but never mind that—”

“They can’t!”

Redwing looked skeptical. He liked playing this role, letting crew “educate him” and tumble out their ideas. While a lower-rank officer dealing with the myriad specialists a ship needed, he had learned that you could get to the point much faster this way. These were tech types first and crew members a distant second. “Ummm … Maybe they can’t.”

Karl rose to the bait. “Look, a grad student can show that the Bowl isn’t statically stable. I know, I checked with a shipmind nonlinear analysis, and I’m just an engineer.”

“Why not?”

“The Bowl’s not in orbit around the star. Turn off the jet, the star draws it in by gravity. It hits the star.”

“So the jet has to stay on.”

“This whole thing is dynamically stable, not static—same as we are when we walk. We take a step, fall forward, catch ourselves—only way to get anywhere.”

“So what makes the whole star-and-Bowl scheme work?” Redwing had a hunch, but he liked to check it against somebody who really knew. It helped the intuition. Karl was just the type he needed.

“The jet comes off that glaring hot spot. The Bowl reflects a lot of the star’s own sunlight on that spot, making the corona far hotter than you ever see on the surface of a star. Somehow—here’s the real magic trick—the star’s own magnetic field gets wound up in that spot. Notice the star’s
spinning
—so it generates magnetic fields deep in its core, a dynamo. That leaks out, forms the whole region dominated by the fields—the magnetosphere—and that hot spot draws field lines in, wraps them around the jet as it forms. Then the field takes off with the incredibly hot plasma, trapping that pressure in a wraparound like rubber bands—and it all escapes the star. The magnetic field lines wrap around the plasma like tight invisible fingers, squeeze it, make it spurt out. The jet carries forward, slim as you like, straight for the Knothole—and passes through. The jet thrust makes the whole damned thing move forward, star and Bowl and all.”

“So?” Redwing knew he could appear incisive by just asking the obvious next question, interrupting the headlong spinning out of a whole complex story.

It worked. Karl blinked, seemed to come out of his techno-daze. “So … the magnetic fields hit the Bowl’s fields—”

“What fields?”

“The Bowl’s a huge conductor, spinning fast, with electrical currents running in it. It makes its own magnetic fields. I checked the lander data from when the teams went down. Strong fields, even at the top of that deep atmosphere. Keeps cosmic rays away, sure, but its real reason is—”

Karl blinked again and sensed he was going into lecture mode. Redwing just nodded.
Keep ’em anxious but focused,
his old cycle-ship commander had said.
They never really notice you’re leading them.

Karl slowed. “The Bowl mag fields, they catch the fields from the jet. I’ve got plenty of mag-depth photos of this. The Bowl shapes the jet and binds to it, both. That links the Bowl to the star. Of course, gravity’s making the Bowl want to fall toward the star—after all, it’s not in orbit or anything, just spinning around. But it can’t fall into the star—there’s a sort of dance between them. The star’s running away, thanks to the steady push it gets from the jet. So the Bowl is chasing it. To make the ride less bumpy, the system has those nice magnetic fields, acting like rubber bands you can’t break. See, magnetic fields always form closed loops.”

“Why?” Even Redwing knew this, but it was best to throw the occasional bone.

“Old Doc Maxwell. It’s the law.”

“So—”

Karl jumped right in, as Redwing had known he would. “The fields massage the Bowl, cushion minor excursions, smooth out the ride.”

“So the Folk can’t turn it off. Ever.”

“Do that, the Bowl crashes. I estimate it’ll take about a year to fall into the star. I’d love to see it—gotta be spectacular.”

“But it can’t happen. Because of the jet. So—how do we screw around with it?”

Karl blinked yet again, twice. “But … why…”

“We have people down there. Must be billions of smart aliens on the Bowl, too. We have to make a deal to get our people back. To get on to Glory.”

Karl looked at the Bowl view sliding by on the wall—forestland now, dotted with twinkling small seas, whitecaps outlining some where a strong wind blew down from somber gray mountains. “They’ve been safe for millions of years. Longer.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. But to make something like this—you have to have some large-scale ambition in mind.”

Redwing looked skeptical. “Touring the galaxy?”

“While you get a permanent suntan, yes.” Karl grinned. “And never get cold.”

Redwing nodded. “Never get cold—maybe a motive? Not just a small thing like going interstellar, but never leaving your home?”

Karl thought awhile and Redwing let him. When Karl spoke, it was a whisper. “Taking a whole culture, a world, so many species … on a ride that could last forever. Not just colonizing some planet. An eternal voyage. That’s got to be it.”

Redwing shrugged. “Over millions of years, your own species has got to change—maybe go extinct.”

“The whole thing will go unstable if you don’t have somebody to do the tweaks, keep watch, fix accidents.”

“For sure. Then there’s cultural change. But you can’t let the society decide the whole Bowl experiment is a bad idea. Then you die!”