Bowl of Heaven

Redwing looked startled when she pointed this out. “We’re both headed toward Glory. Damn.”

“They want to colonize Glory, too?” Mayra asked.

“Can’t be,” Abduss countered when he came onto the comm deck. “What would be the point? That bowl has tens of millions of times the area of a planet.”

This seemed an obvious killer argument. Still … their velocities were aligned. Bound for Glory. With Sol dead aft.

“Maybe they just wander from star to star?” the captain asked. “Interstellar tourists?”

Nobody answered.

Redwing said cautiously, “You were briefed on the gravitational waves?” and looked around.

They all nodded. “Can’t keep secrets from the tech types, boss,” Beth said without moving her eyes from the shifting displays.

Abduss said, “You suggest perhaps this construction, this bowl, is seeking the source?”

“Makes sense, I’d think. A puzzle, isn’t it?” Redwing looked around again.

Mayra said, “It is noise, or so scientists thought when we departed.”

“Any chance this bowl thing could be the source of the grav waves?” Redwing gestured. “Maybe this jet?”

“There are no masses of size that could make such waves,” Cliff said. “I read up on it while Beth was waking.”

Abduss said, “The Glory system has no obvious enormous masses either.”

Redwing thought. “Maybe they’re going to Glory for its grav wave generator?”

Cliff shrugged. None of their ideas sounded right.

“Not that intuition is a reliable guide here,” Beth said wryly, over her shoulder. She never took her eyes from the panels. Soon enough they got back to work, plotting and piloting. The intense work was a relief to them, a respite from the uncertainties of their lot. Beth saw Cliff come onto the bridge; he clearly envied them. At least their days were full.

They vectored in on the center of Wickramsingh’s Star’s bowl, keeping a respectful distance. Beth trimmed their velocity by cutting back the engines. “Maybe letting them rest a bit will make them run better later,” she said, but she didn’t believe it. The jet plasma running through the Knothole had plenty of fast ions in its plume, and these pushed steadily against their ramscoop fields. Shudders ran the length of the long ship. The deck hummed with long, slow tremors. For the first time in her life, Beth felt like an old sea captain, riding out a hurricane.

Now the jet was visible to the unaided eye as they neared it. They could see it as a pearly churn lit with darting flashes of blue and yellow — recombination of the plasma, Abduss said, atoms condensing out of the torrent and sputtering out their characteristic spectra. The control deck lights were ruby for visibility, stepped far down. A direct view through a window would have burned out their eyes and set the room aflame.

As it flowed away from the bowl, the long jet was oddly tight. Beth close-upped the views. “Looks like the jet narrows down at the Knothole, then flares out. Look, some regularly spaced bright spots in the outflow.”

“An instability, I would gather,” Abduss said. He was fidgeting but he kept his voice calm. “The jet must have been magnetically squeezed as it passed through the Knothole.”

Corkscrew filaments crawled along it, Beth saw, like one of those old barber poles. They could now see longer along the luminous lance of the jet as it speared through the opening, an exact circle far bigger than the span between Earth and its moon. Mayra trained all their scopes on the rim of the circle. The microwave spectrum crackled with bursts of noise from the spaced bright spots: pinched-in electrons singing their protests.

* * *

Abduss close-upped the bowl at a good angle and Cliff felt his heart leap as the resolution grew.

In the side-scatter of the star’s somber rays, they saw what looked like enormous coils, bathed in lukewarm beauty. “Those are bigger than mountain ranges,” Abduss said in a whisper.

Without thinking it through, Cliff had expected that whatever built the bowl had long since died out. Decay, collapse, extinction — these were the fates of whole species hammered on the anvil of time, not merely of civilizations. This thing had to be old. But it still worked. The star’s solar wind got funneled stably into the jet, pushing the whole vast construct to high velocity. What could have thought of this, never mind actually build it?

Beth began getting stronger signals in the microwave spectra — a rising buzz of electromagnetic signals as Seeker neared the cap. Mayra began to detect a haze of watery nitrogen at the innermost edge of the circle, farther in than the coils.

“Air?” Beth asked aloud. No one answered. Cliff thought about the inner surface of the bowl, a land holding millions of times Earth’s area.

And more: Close-upped through the churning refractions of SunSeeker’s plasma shroud, the shell clearly rotated as a single piece. “Of course,” Mayra said. “Centrifugal gravity.”

They merged their measurements and built up an image on the main screen. The bright plasma jet pierced the bowl’s hemisphere through a ribbed hole. “Kind of like a weird teacup,” Redwing said. “Cupworld.”

For long moments no one spoke. Then Redwing said with elaborate casualness, “Abduss, check if there’s any new tightbeam traffic from Earth.”

“There has been none for — ”

“Now,” Redwing said firmly. Beth understood: Abduss needed something to do.

The deck took up a long, deep vibration none of them had ever heard before, an ominous bass note they felt rather than heard. “We’re entering the edges of the jet,” Beth said tersely. “Picking up — well, plasma surf, I guess you’d call it.”

Redwing frowned. “Full brake. Cycle the magnetics.”

“Roger.” Beth worked the large board, eyes never still.

The bowl seemed to swell quickly. “We’re locked in on the jet.” The deep bass note swelled. “And — slowing. We’re flying straight up the jet.”

SunSeeker made its agonizing turn. To pivot the ship on its plasma plume demanded the skill of an ice skater, combined with an acrobat, spinning in three dimensions under thrust. In interstellar space, where most hydrogen is a gas and not broken into ions and electrons, Seeker ionized the gas ahead with a shock wave driven by its own oscillating magnetic snowplow. The pressure waves plunged ahead, grabbing the electrons available and smacking them into the hydrogen gas molecules. Properly adjusted — which took Beth only moments to tune — there was enough time for the hydrogen to break up into protons and electrons. The gas fried into a torch of fizzing ions. That left a plasma column just ahead of the ship, ready to be netted and swallowed by their magnetic dipole scoop, then fed down into the fusion reaction chambers. The trick was to torque the ship while riding atop this angry, spitting column.

Seeker curved sideways by a mere few degrees, letting the target star gain a little on them. Then they curled behind it. Lacy filaments played before them as the jet grew near. They swerved fully into the jet with a hard, wrenching turn that slammed them all against the left arms of their couches for … forever.

* * *

Starships do not easily change directions. Sweat popped out on Beth’s brow; a swipe of her hand on a touchpoint started a cool breeze. Throughout SunSeeker, joints strummed, echoing in the long corridors. Auxiliary craft shifted and strained on their mountings. Beth wondered if the ship could take it, and then if she could.

Finally they straightened and felt the push of the sun’s jet against their magnetic collector fields. Beth surged forward from the deceleration, straps cutting into her. In the wraparound omniview screen, set to all parts of the spectrum, plumes of incandescent plasma skated and veered around their prow. Their total speed was higher than the star’s, but as they came around under the great bowl and into the furious jet, another force came into play. She felt it, became alarmed, then understood. SunSeeker began to twist, corkscrewing steadily around in the rushing plasma torrent. They all felt the grinding force of it, a giant’s slow twirl.

“Y’know, I was kinda wondering what held this jet so straight and tight,” Beth said in a conversational tone, her hands moving quick and sure over the many induction controls. “Magnetic fields do the job, generated by a current in the jet itself.”