Bowl of Heaven Page 35

  He turned on his wall screen and looked at the distant landscapes drifting past — low mountains crested in snow, vast forests, river valleys the size of Earthly continents. How did these creatures run their Bowl? It had to be far more complex than managing a mere planet.

  Could the Bowl teach Earth something crucial about terraforming? That alone would be worth stopping for.

  He made himself run through the rest of the tightbeam signals. There were some updates on performance modes of their onboard AIs, some hardware issues, suggested upgrades here and there. Most likely these came as feedback from other starships. SunSeeker, too, had tightbeamed back such reports. He was pretty sure the summaries he had sent about the Bowl were the most bizarre ever transmitted.

  He captained a starship, but this enormous thing was a star that drove a ship, was the propulsion, a star that was the essence of the ship itself. It ran on fusion, too, like SunSeeker. It was a … shipstar.

  So … who captained it?

  END OF VOLUME ONE

  • • •

  VOLUME TWO:

  SHIPSTAR

  WILL FOLLOW SOON.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We conferred on scientific and literary matters with many helpful people. Erik Max Francis, Joe Miller, and Joan Slonczewski gave detailed comments on the manuscript. Don Davis, Mark Martin, and Joe Miller and James Benford were of great help in technical issues. And of course, Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson were first.

  FOLK TERMS

  TransLanguage

  Long Records

  Late Invaders

  Undermind

  Serf-Ones

  the Builders

  Third Variety (Astronomer variety)

  Astronauts (Astronomer variety)

  TOR BOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD

  Jupiter Project

  The Stars in Shroud

  Shiva Descending

  Artifact

  In Alien Flesh

  Far Futures

  Beyond Human

  TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN

  N-Space

  Destiny’s Road

  Rainbow Mars

  Scatterbrain

  Ringworld’s Children

  The Draco Tavern

  Stars and Gods

  Playgrounds of the Mind

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  LARRY NIVEN is the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf’s Children, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.

  GREGORY BENFORD is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Irvine, California. Benford is the winner of the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his classic novel Timescape.

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