Shipstar by Larry Niven, Gregory Benford Read Free Book Online Page A

pleasant aroma of warm food drew them. “How did that strike you?”
    “Strange. Might be history, might be propaganda for the masses.”
    “There’s a difference?”
    She smiled. “It was in a big park, elaborate buildings, the works.”
    Fred wobbled into the mess. Beth was feeling frail, too; there were handholds everywhere, and she used them. Surely she’d been longing for foods of Earth? There had been almost no red meat in the parts of the Bowl she’d seen. Beef curry? Its tang enticed. The mess was neat, clean, like a strict diner. Already Fred had picked a five-bean salad and a cheese sandwich.
    Redwing dialed up a chef’s salad. “We’re recording everything we can get in electromagnetics from the Bowl surface, but there’s not much,” he said.
    Beth asked, “What are you doing with our allies? I mean the—”
    “Snakes? They kind of give me the willies, but they seem benign. We’re helping the finger snakes unload that ship you hijacked. Those plants will do more for them than for us, don’t you think? Shall we house them in the garden? We’ll have to work out what to give them in the way of sunlight and dirt and water. Want to watch?” Redwing finger-danced before a sensor.
    The wall wavered, and yes, on the visual wall there were finger snakes and humans moving trays out of the magnetic car. Beth saw these were new crew. Ayaan Ali, pilot; Claire Conway, copilot; and Karl Lebanon, the general technology officer. The ship’s population was growing. They moved dexterously among the three snakes, struggling with the language problem.
    Beth muted the sound and watched while she ate. Silence as she forked in flavors she had dreamed of down on the Bowl. No talk, only the clinking of silverware. Then Fred said, “The map in the big globe? It looked alien, but it’s blue and white like an Earthlike planet.”
    “Could that have been Earth in the deep past?”
    “Yeah. A hundred million years ago?”
    Redwing said, “Ayaan says no. She pegs that clump of migrating continents to the middle Jurassic. Your picture was upside down, south pole up. Argue with her if you don’t agree.”
    Fred shook his head. “I can recall it, but look—I sent Ayaan my photo file, so—”
    Redwing called up a wall display. “There is a lot of spiky emission from that jet. Seems like message-style stuff, but we can’t decipher it. Anyway, it fuzzed up your pictures and Ayaan had a tedious job getting it compiled. She compiled, processed, and flattened the image store. Piled it into a global map, stitching together your flat-on views—here.”
    Fred read the notes. “Of course … All those transforms have blurred out the details, sure. So now, look at South America. Just shows what looking at things upside down and only one side, will do. Now, rightside up and complete, I can see it. How could I have missed it?”
    Beth said kindly, “You didn’t, not really. We were on the run, remember? And this doesn’t look a lot like Earth, all the continents squeezed together. But you were right about the Bowl having some link to Earth. Tell the cap’n your ideas.”

    Fred glanced at Redwing, eyes wary. “I was tired then, just thinking out loud—”
    “And you were right.” Beth opened her hands across the table. “Spot on. Sorry I didn’t pay enough attention. So, tell the cap’n.”
    Fred gazed off into space, speaking to nobody. “Okay, I thought … wow, Jurassic. A hundred seventy-five million years back? That’s when the dinosaurs got big. Damn. Could they have got intelligent, too? Captain, I’ve been thinking that intelligent dinosaurs built the Bowl and then evolved into all the varieties of Bird Folk we found here. Gene tampering, too, we saw that in some species—you don’t evolve extra legs by accident. They keep coming back to Sol system because it’s their home.” Fred remembered his hunger and bit into his cheese sandwich.
    A smile played around Redwing’s lips. “If they picked up the