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

apes a few hundred thousand years ago, then they could have been en route to Glory for that long. They’re definitely aimed at Glory, just like we were. Beth?” Beth’s mouth was full, so Redwing went on. “All that brain sweat we spent wondering why our motors weren’t putting out enough thrust? The motors are fine. We were plowing through the backwash from the Bowl’s jet, picking up backflowing gases all across a thousand kilometers of our ramjet scoop, for all the last hundred years of our flight.”
    Beth nodded. “We could have gone around it. Too late now, right? We’ll still be short.”
    “Short of everything. Fuel. Water. Air. Food. It gets worse the more people we thaw, but what the hell, we still can’t make it unless we can get supplies from the Bowl. And we’re at war.”
    “Cliff killed Bird Folk?”
    “Yeah. And they tried to repay the favor.”
    *   *   *
    Beth had expected some shipboard protocols, since Redwing liked to keep discipline. But the first thing Redwing said when they got to his cramped office was, “What was it like down there?”
    Across Beth’s face emotions flickered. “Imagine you can see land in the sky. You can tell it’s far away because even the highest clouds are brighter, and you can’t see stars at all. The sun blots them out. It gives you a queasy feeling at first, land hanging in the distance, no night, hard to sleep…” She took a deep breath, wheezing a bit, her respiratory system adjusting to the ship after so long in alien air. “The … the rest of the Bowl looks like brown land and white stretches of cloud—imagine, being able to see a hurricane no bigger than your thumbnail. It’s dim, because the sun’s always there. The jet casts separate shadows, too. It’s always slow-twisting in the sky. The clouds go far, far up—their atmosphere’s much higher than ours.”
    “You can’t see the molecular skin they have keeping their air in?”
    “Not a chance. Clouds, stacking up as far as you can see. The trees are different, too—some zigzag and send long feelers down to the ground. I never did figure out why. Maybe a low-grav effect. Anyway, there’s this faint land up in the sky. You can see whole patches of land like continents just hanging there. Plus seas, but mostly you see the mirror zone. The reflectors aren’t casting sunlight into your eyes—”
    “They’re pointed back at the star, sure.”
    “—so they’re gray, with brighter streaks here and there. The Knothole is up there, too, not easy to see, because it’s got the jet shooting through it all the time. It narrows down and gets brighter right at the Knothole. You can watch big twisting strands moving in the jet, if you look long enough. It’s always changing.”
    “And the ground, the animals—”
    “Impossible to count how many differences there are. Strange things that fly—the air’s full of birds and flapping reptile things, too, because in low grav everything takes to the sky if there’s an advantage. We got dive-bombed by birds thinking maybe our hair was something they could make off with—food, I guess.”
    Redwing laughed with a sad smile and she saw he was sorry he had to be stuck up here, flying a marginal ramscoop to make velocity changes against the vagrant forces around the Bowl. He didn’t want to sail; he wanted to land.
    She sipped some coffee and saw it was best that she not say how she had gotten a certain dreadful, electric zest while fleeing across the Bowl. Redwing asked questions and she did not want to say it was like an unending marathon. A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted.
    To wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was—well, a consummation requiring digestion.
    She could see that Redwing