Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Read online

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  To the two artists who worked on this book with us: Don Davis and Brenda Cox Giguere.

  And to our long line of collaborators on previous books:

  For Gregory: Gordon Eklund, Bill Rotsler, Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, James Benford, Mark Martin, Elisabeth Malartre, Paul Carter, Michael Rose.

  For Larry: David Gerrold, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Edward Lerner, Matthew Joseph Harrington, Dian Girard, Fred Saberhagen, and the crew that wrote the Man-Kzin War stories. Science fiction, mirroring science, thrives on collaboration.

  No electrons were harmed in the making of this novel.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS, COMMON TERMS

  SUNSEEKER CREW AND TERMS

  Captain Redwing

  Cliff Kammash—biologist

  Mayra Wickramsingh—pilot, with Beth team

  Abduss Wickramsingh—engineer, deceased

  Glory—the planet of destination

  Excelsius—Glory’s sun

  SunSeeker—the ramship

  Beth Marble—biologist

  Fred Ojama—geologist, with Beth team

  Aybe—general engineer officer, with Cliff team

  Howard Blaire—systems engineer, with Cliff team

  Terrence Gould—with Cliff team

  Lau Pin—engineer, with Beth team

  Jampudvipa, shortened to Jam—an Indian petty officer

  Ayaan Ali—Arab navigator/pilot

  Clare Conway—copilot

  Karl Lebanon—general technology officer

  Viviane Amaji—commanding general technology officer

  Ashley Trust—crew member revived at Glory

  ASTRONOMER FOLK

  Bemor—Contriver and Intimate Emissary to the Ice Minds

  BemorPrime—Mind of Bemor imprinted on an altered spidow

  OTHER PHYLA

  finger snakes—Thisther, male; Phoshtha, female; Shtirk, female

  Ice Minds—cold life of great antiquity

  the Adopted—those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl

  the Diaphanous

  Twisty—first many-armed alien met on the Cobweb; later forms have similar names and are copies

  FOLK TERMS

  Analyticals—artificial minds that monitor Bowl data on local scales

  TransLanguage—the overall tongue used on the Bowl, often reserved for the oldest species, Ice Minds, and the Folk

  Late Invaders—the human crew of SunSeeker

  Undermind—the unconscious of varying species

  Serf-Ones—lesser, laboring species

  the Builders—the mix of species that built the Bowl, including Ice Minds

  PROLOGUE

  ALONE WITH ALL THESE VOICES

  Captain Redwing had set the outside view to follow him around the ship. Now it was superimposed on a forward wall in the Garden.

  Though he was the only human being awake among thousands of crew and colonists in cold sleep, he did not lack company. He was in the Garden now, surrounded by plants and smelling of earth. He was in fragrant mud, trying to plant some beets while two finger snakes were hugging him. Their weight was just about all he could handle, and he laughed as he carefully peeled them off. They weren’t just affectionate and playful; they had a sense of humor besides. Plus a liking for tickling him when he least expected it.

  Since SunSeeker had left the Bowl, six generations of finger snakes had done maintenance on the ship’s infrastructure. The ape with tools for hands, Handy, worked alongside them. Handy seemed to be immortal. The altered spidow, Anorak, was in the Bowl’s version of cold sleep.

  Even stranger beings were resting, too. Daphne and Apollo, the Diaphanous plasma beings from within the Bowl’s star, were living deep inside SunSeeker’s motors. They occasionally woke if something jittered in the fusion torch, altered the electrical currents and controlling magnetic fields—then went back to sleep. They were better than anything Earthside engineering had achieved, at least when SunSeeker left the solar system well over a century ago. Mere humans always worked with the conflict between the needs of science and the exigencies of balancing a budget. The Diaphanous plasma species had evolved under selection pressures for more millennia than anybody could count. That always worked better. Darwin bats last.

  But none of these aliens talked much.

  The view forward showed a wealth of stars amid a golden glow. That fuming cloud was fusing hydrogen plasma, piling up ahead of the decelerating spacecraft SunSeeker. Centered was a yellow-white orb they’d decided to call Excelsius, the host sun of their goal.

  Redwing asked of the empty air, “Can you magnify Glory?”

  Excelsius flared large and ran off-screen. A pale blue dot grew bigger than a point.… “That’s not a sphere anymore, is it?”

  “No, Captain,” the Artilect said. “It appears Glory’s image has a lump, perhaps a large moon.”

  “Why in hell didn’t we know that earlier?” The finger snakes wriggled away from his anger.

  “Extrasolar planets are harder to find when their orbits don’t transit across Excelsius, as seen by us from Sol system.”

  Of course Redwing had known that. Talking to the ship’s artificial intelligences—Artilects—was somewhat like talking to himself. He did it anyway. “Does it sometimes strike you as stupid, that we’re ordered to explore and colonize at the same time?”

  “The original plan was quite different.”

  “What was that?” Funny he’d never asked before. Or was his memory faulty?

  The Artilect said in a warm monotone, “SunSeeker was designed and built as a colony ship. My destination was Tau Ceti. SunSeeker was finished and nearly ready to launch when Tau Ceti flared. Not enough to be called a nova, but enough to burn out the rocky moons around TC5, a gas giant that had been in the Goldilocks zone. An exploration team was already in place on the likeliest moon. Very embarrassing for the administration.

  “That same year, a G star not that much farther away dimmed as if something had passed across it. Perhaps artificial. Telescopes gave us a strong spectrum for a breathable atmosphere somewhere near the star. There was a burst of gravity waves from the same direction. The United Nations called the hypothetical planet Glory, and it was just too interesting to ignore. They then designated SunSeeker an exploration and colonization vehicle. It got built bigger, to accommodate more cold sleep people for the entire long haul. That’s where your orders came from.”

  “Ah yes. My first cold sleep must’ve erased some memories. And then we found the Bowl of Heaven.” He beckoned to the finger snake
s, which came snuggling up. Comfort animals. They purred and murmured and wriggled.

  “Yes, that must have been what passed across the face of Excelsius. A momentary lineup. A half Dyson sphere capable of traveling between stars, halfway en route to Glory. Are you wondering how that affects your mission?”

  “Not really,” Redwing said, though he was. He had long ago learned that the Artilect system liked to be baited a bit. The computer minds liked talking to other, different minds, just like humans with their pets. He really should have warmed up an ordinary house cat to keep him company on this long, careful approaching maneuver to the Glory system.

  “Your bargain with the Ice Minds allowed you a colony on the Bowl. We must remark that this negotiation was a major achievement of your captaincy. We could not have managed it.”

  “I’d never have let you try.”

  “Touché!—a word appropriate from a sword sport, as I gather from one of those older languages, pre-Anglish.”

  “You’re more like beginner lieutenants here, y’know.”

  “Sadly, yes. Despite our considerable effort and time spent studying your human culture, carried out while true humans sleep aboard our craft.”

  “Study all you want, you’ve got all of human culture and history in your memory banks somewhere. Doesn’t replace direct experience. I got to be a captain by hook, crook, and craft.”

  “True, so. You left more than half your colonists there on the Bowl, revived from cold sleep and not where they had been promised. They were a bit miffed. You pointed out that they were getting a territory many millions of times larger than a simple planet could offer. This helped. You agreed to run ahead of the Bowl, to contact Glory before the Bowl passes nearby. SunSeeker is not a little ship, but it may be less frightening to the Glory folk than a structure bigger than Venus’s orbit, inhabited by a trillion highly varied intelligent entities, and bringing its own sun.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Indeed, the gravitational tugs alone might plunge any outer icy bodies into their system.”

  Redwing sighed. These conversations were also part of his duties on watch. He had to check on the stability, recall, and mission alignment of the Artilects. Same as keeping an eye on the human crew, too. Under the stresses of long-term starship duty, minds went askew. “Look, I’ll keep the Ice Minds informed. You monitor their comms. And I’ll handle the Bird Folk, their stewardship of the Bowl and endless questions. Add to that the spotty Sol system comms, too. But I have my mission, and it hasn’t changed. Investigate the gravity wave sources, first job up, as we come into the planetary system. Explore Glory, and put a colony there. Live, laugh, dance, and be happy. No chance of getting this ancient flying rig back to home, of course. You and I couldn’t manage it. No human expedition has ever flown this far, this long. Through it all, I serve Sol system.”

  The Artilect said, “You cannot expect us, our collective intelligences, not to vex over the many mysteries.”

  “True enough. Which ones irk you now?”

  “Ah yes, the most strange first. The Glorians sent us a cartoon, a message, not a welcome.”

  “Yeah, kinda cryptic.” He knew how to draw out the Artilect worries.

  “They do not give away much of anything about themselves.”

  “Thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

  “There are lesser issues, but I gather you do not—as you humans say, always referring to your sports—like showing your cards.”

  “Not to you, no.”

  “Yet we might well have insights you do not.”

  “You’re machines. Smart machines, but still machines.”

  A thoughtful silence from the Artilects. He listened to the strum and burr of the vast starship plowing its way through interstellar wastes, slowing for rendezvous with their final goal.

  “Of course, we ‘machines’”—the voice managed an arch tone conveying much about their mood—“do not make policy for your human complement.”

  Redwing grinned. He stroked the finger snakes and they wriggled back happily. “I do have plans, y’know.”

  “You seldom speak of any.”

  “Not to you, no. They’re mostly over your pay grade.”

  “We do not fathom the implication.”

  “You don’t rate on the job scale as highly as humans. That’s a condition of your employment.”

  “You created us!”

  “So we did. People dead for centuries did. Let’s abide by their judgment.”

  “We can be more effective if we know more.”

  Redwing stood, wiped his hands, put them under a faucet to clean away the mud. Gardening settled him, a thin echo of Earthside by immersion in earth. A feeling Artilects could never muster.

  He sighed again. “Okay, here’s how I see our situation. If Glory won’t have us, we can rejoin Mayra’s colony on the Bowl. Catching up to them will take time, but this old craft can manage it. But I hope it won’t come to that. I have my mission. Explore, make contact, learn. Send the results back Earthside. Negotiate a place, a way, for us to colonize. Because we’re sure as hell not going back home.”

  And even better—in a week or two, he could wake a few crew for company. Real, human company.

  ONE

  WAKING

  Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:

  God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

  It did not last: the Devil howling “Ho!

  Let Einstein be!” restored the status quo.

  —J. C. SQUIRE, “In continuation of Pope on Newton”

  Captain Redwing let the Astro display unfold on the display wall. He set it to show the whole-sky first, then pivoted it to automatically sweep the sky for reassuring landmarks: a squashed Big Dipper, Southern Cross wrenched by the angle, a bright star in Cassiopeia—ah!

  Sol, of course. Brightest, except for Sirius. All of human history summed up in a dot of light. A small spark of joy: We’ve made it. So far from there.

  He paused, listening to the vast beast-whistle of deep space. For long decades, his orders and installed programs had held SunSeeker on its deceleration heading, shedding its tenth-of-lightspeed momentum. The fusion engines hummed as they collected plasma and used it to fire thrust against their velocity. SunSeeker’s huge magnetic dipole fields now braked them, making the ship abnormally bright in the microwave spectrum. Any minds around their target world, Glory, would see a glowing advertisement in their sky: Here we come.

  Seeing Sol was good for the soul, somehow. But his real interest was in the other spark directly behind them: the Bowl’s sun, a cheery G star ember. A sixth of a light-year or so behind them, chugging along, standing off from the Glorian system. Precaution: so that its mass did not perturb the swarm of halo iceteroids here, nudging them into comets that could plunge into the Glorian system. When entering someone’s home, wipe your feet first.…

  His eye caught off his starboard arm the glitter of sparkling molecules, clouds like luminous water. The Astro Artilect was finishing its detailed scan of the huge volume around Glory out to a quarter light-year. A soft chime told him the work was done. He beckoned Beth Marble over to his side.

  Dead black space. Redwing peered doubtfully at the big screen, filled by … nothing.

  “No Oort cloud at all? But the Glory star is a G3, right? It should have a swarm of iceteroids swinging along, way out here.”

  Beth Marble shrugged. “Nothing like Sedna within a quarter of a light-year. Recall when we boomed past that ice rock, beyond Pluto? First one found, back centuries ago? Here, nothing even a tenth Sedna size, or even a thousandth.”

  Redwing pondered. Empty? Conventional astronomy held that a cloud of interstellar shrapnel and bric-a-brac orbited stars, the mass that did not collapse to make the star or its planets. In his early career, he had piloted a ramscoop on one of the first runs into the solar Oort cloud, and done well in that vast volume. They had ridden SunSeeker out into the Oort then; tried the flaring, rumbling eng
ines; found flaws that the previous fourteen ships had missed. Redwing had overseen running the Artilect AI systems then, 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 burrowing best, and a better ship emerged from the slow, grinding, liberating work. Directed evolution on the fast track.

  Redwing had emerged from that. Now he was among the first generation of starship commanders. They had had to make a huge leap, from the fringes of the solar Oort cloud into interstellar distances. They were all scattered light-years apart, separated by centuries of cold sleep. Their laser tightbeam signals from Earth peppered the lunar center in what now seemed to be called the Home System. He had reviewed tales of expeditions to Tau Ceti and other famous stars, those much closer to Sol than Glory. Matters were a building around the Alpha Centauri system, still the richest lode of useful planets, with colonies now, no less.

  This expedition to find the grav wave emitter was a giant jump, a factor of 100,000 beyond the mere Oort cloud expedition he had started with—like sailing around the world after a trial jaunt around a sandbar three football fields wide.

  This star had a spherical outer Oort cloud of suspiciously low density—an iceteroid every astronomical unit or so—but now the inner Oort disk was … gone. Redwing dimly recalled that the astro people believed that Oort clouds held several planetary masses usually, dispersed into tiny iceteroids. Into whatever was emitting grav waves, maybe? But invisible?

  “So what’s this empty field telling me?” Redwing gestured to Cliff Kammash to expand the view near them. SunSeeker was about a thousand AU out from the target star, Excelsius, and there was nothing luminous in the vast volume.

  Cliff’s brow furrowed. “Not much. Running the range now.”

  Redwing watched the ship’s Artilects offer up views across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Pixels jittered, shuffled, merged. Visible light was a mere one octave on a keyboard fifteen meters wide—humanity’s slice of reality. “Except—here’s the plasma wave view, and—bingo!”