Bowl of Heaven

viewing window showed the tunnel ahead, lit every hundred meters or so by phosphor walls giving an ivory glow.

They tried the rectangular machines bolted to one wall and found that they yielded food — or what passed for it here. Punch and grab, an analog system. Some wrapped things fell into the hopper. They looked like dried cat litter but smelled not bad.

They stayed out of view of the windows. Cliff felt tired. Howard looked worse. There was blood in his scalp.

They watched carefully, but the machines that passed by outside seemed unaware of anything wrong. Just as he sat down, the train accelerated away without any warning. Irma had found a big door with pressure seals on it and was about to open it when the train started. She sat down hastily and they found the seats adjusted to their shape automatically, and warmed to a comfortable temperature as well. After so long in the magcar, Cliff let himself relax.

But the train kept accelerating. He sniffed the air and tasted the tang of ozone. The ride was smooth and he went forward to see. They were hurtling forward at a speed he estimated, from the rapid fluttering of the passing wall phosphors, at over a hundred kilometers an hour. Yet the acceleration increased still.

He sat next to Aybe and said, “We’re still accelerating.”

“This is a big place. This system is already better than any e-train I ever rode on. To move around it in, say, a week, means this thing has to get into the neighborhood of a hundred kilometers a second.”

“Um. Maybe they take longer.”

“I hope not. Those food machines can’t — wait, maybe they can make food from scratch.” Aybe blinked at the thought.

Cliff worried that he had led them not into a trap, but into a death voyage.

FORTY-TWO

Redwing watched the Bowl’s enormous landscape slide by in the distance and reflected on how, decades ago, he had been something of a scientist, too. He’d become a spacer because of that.

And from that he’d won the habits of mind that led him to lead a band of scientists and engineers to a new world. This thing, the Bowl, was not a world, but a huge contrivance. It gave the appearance of being nearby, because he could see patterns resembling those he had watched for wonderful hours, in low Earth orbit. Yet it was tens of millions of kilometers away, its sealed-in atmosphere deep and strange.

The comparison deceived his eye. Here the atmospheric circulations he had studied as a young man were utterly different and vast beyond comprehension. The star’s light fell uniformly, or nearly so, across the Bowl. But it never set, and so drove none of the night-day winds that shaped the movements he had studied, the stately currents of atmospheres on Mars, Earth, Titan, Venus. The Bowl always kept the same attitude toward its star, too. That meant no seasonal variations, no hard winters or hammering summers. He had savored long ago — centuries in real time! — crisp autumn skies, with their bright, blazing fall colors, and then after the cold months, the promise of spring. None of that happened here. Aliens had designed in the steady shine of a small star and its jet. No night. What would want to live in endless day?

So air currents did not flow up from the spot where the star was directly above, since there were none. Or rather, it was the Knothole, where the Jet passed through. No Hadley cells, polar swirls, trade winds, or barren desert belts wrapping around the globe. Instead, here the effect of spin held sway.

He could see long streaming rivers of cloud begin above the ample dark blue seas, then arc over distances larger than the separation between the Earth and its moon, driven to higher latitudes of the immense Bowl. Purple anvils of sullen cumulonimbus towered up to seven kilometers above landscapes of mottled brown and red. The scale of all this violated his sense of what patterns could be possible. Clearly the whole vast contraption had been designed to hold everything constant — steady sunlight, no big differences of temperature to drive storms or trade winds. It left him with no intuitions at all of how weather got shaped.

Climate came from the spin, then. To pin its inhabitants to the ground, they spun it — and then got curious Coriolis effects.

Abruptly the name alone brought back his grad student days. That had been more than half a century ago, and there leaped to mind a drunken song of the climate modelers.

On a merry-go-round in the night

Coriolis was shaken with fright

Despite how he walked

’Twas like he was stalked

By some fiend always pushing him right!

Apparently Coriolis had been a mild man, but his force made hurricanes, tornadoes, jet streams, and assorted violences. Those should occur here — and as he thought it, he saw a brilliant white hurricane coming into view of the screen on his office wall. That slow churn of darkening clouds was the size of Earth itself, spinning its gravid whirl toward the shore of a huge sea. Trouble for somebody, he thought. Or some thing.

The knock on his door drew him back into the humdrum reality of SunSeeker.

Karl’s lean face was all smiles, which could be good news. There’s a first time for everything, Redwing thought. But the lean man folded himself into the guest chair and unloaded the bad news first.

“There’s a progressive crazing of those transparent ceramic windows we use for the astronomy,” he began. “Caused by mechanical stress or maybe some ions that get through the magnetic screen. Limits their working life.”

“You can fix it?”

He waved a hand lazily, somehow sure of himself. “Sure, got the printer making new ones right now. The external robos can slap them on when done, and I’ll feed the old ones in for materials stock. Not why I came to see you, Cap’n.” The slow smile again, above dancing eyes. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Good to hear,” Redwing said automatically. This was maybe the twentieth notion Karl had delivered this way. The man did deserve some credit, for he had spruced up the ship and made it run better. But the man was so focused on his machines that he was not much further use as a deck officer. Redwing could see Karl was settling in to bask in the tech details, and it was more efficient to just let him work through it.

“I’ve been tuning our scoop fields for the plasma we’re getting from that small star,” Karl said. “It’s not like protons incoming at a tenth of light speed, so I had to retune all the capture capacitors.”

Redwing knew the big breakthrough that made starflight possible, though it relied on tech you never saw from the bridge. The method of catching the sleet of protons, slowing them down between charged grids for electrical power, then funneling them into the fusion chambers where a catalyst worked the nuclear magic — it all happened in the halo around the ship, and then the burn occurred in its guts, where no one could ever go. We ride on miracles.

He nodded, waiting for the idea.

“So we’re flying with a scoop a thousand kilometers across now, all supported by nanotube mesh. Bigger funnel than we had before, ’cause the plasma’s weaker. I tuned it all up — had to use the full complement of our external in-flight robos, too.”

“I like the ride now,” Redwing allowed. “It doesn’t wake me up nights.”

Karl beamed. “Glad to hear it. Lowers the structural stresses, too. Then I thought — this scoop arrangement we’ve got isn’t optimal for where we are, so what would be better?”

Redwing wanted to ask him to just spit it out, but that didn’t work well with tech crew. “I’ll guess — the Jet?”

Karl’s face fell. “How did you know? If — ”

“What else do we have in this system?” Redwing asked with a grin. “Had to be the Jet. Plus, you know we flew in here through that Jet. What a ride!”