*   *   *

They lost the Fred link. What Clare had called a cannon continued to follow them. Jam and Clare rolled the ship to escape. The magscoop flexed and fought as it reconfigured, seizing on whatever ionized solar wind it could grasp. They dropped down below the Bowl rim.

“No telescope could be that big,” Clare said. “Right? Captain?”

“Jam, is she right?”

“I’m going lower,” Jam said, concentrating on their trajectory. Long rolling waves hummed through the ship. “Scopes don’t need to be long, just wide to capture light. But to emit light…”

They were over the Great Plain now, decelerating a little to bring them past the rim. Clare said, “That does it. That long tube isn’t following us anymore.”

“Doesn’t want to fire on the Great Plain.” Redwing made it a straight assertion based on his intuition. That hid some of his relief.

Jam said, “Maybe they can’t. If it’s a cannon, and if it could swivel down to fire on inhabited turf … a civil war could get really nasty, couldn’t it?”

Redwing didn’t know, so he didn’t answer.

Ayaan said, “My lucky day. I’ve got fresh text from Cliff’s team. Spotty and noisy, but the software cleaned it pretty well. Want to see it?”

She put the long message on all their screens. Cliff’s team had discovered a tram system and learned to use it; had met aliens and fought a war with them as allies; those aliens had led them into the Bowl’s structural undergrowth. There were low-res pictures. They were eating well enough, and grateful for Beth’s menu instructions.

“Mostly they’re staying alive and moving,” Redwing said. There were smiles all around. “Great news.”

“But even if they’re not captured, they’re getting nowhere,” Ayaan added.

Redwing was getting near the end of his watch so handed off to Karl and went to his cramped quarters. They had snagged a cluster of messages from Sol system while beyond the Bowl’s lip, and the AI had them crisply decoded on his private computer. He told it to speak the messages as he ate dinner alone—Sri Lankan rice and chicken in a deep tangy sauce. One of the biggest threats to stability in a spacecraft was sensory deprivation of a subtle sort, and tasty food helped a lot. So would sex, but that was a dead end for a captain. There was a certain lady he’d like to revive, but the circumstances had to call for it—probably, when he needed large ground teams. There was nothing official between them, no contract, no conditional agreement. And big ground teams didn’t seem to be a good bet here anyway. He sighed, watched the great construct roll on below, and turned to the tightbeam communications.

There were some tech updates on the grav waves. He set them aside for Karl after a glance and read the executive summary. After centuries of study, Earthside didn’t know a whole lot more. The wavelengths and wave packets still implied huge masses waltzing around each other in complex patterns. Yet large aperture studies of the Glory system showed no such masses at all. Maybe grav theory was wrong, one message said. Or they were watching a source accidentally in the same spot of the sky and much farther away.

He read that “… final merger of two black holes in a binary system releases more power than the combined light from all the stars in the visible Universe. This vast energy comes in the form of gravitational waves, bearing the waveform signature of the merger.” Far too much power to be the Glory signature, but the waveforms were like those from the merger theory.

Or else, the summary said, “… the effect is fictional, made up somehow to deceive us.” Fictional? Maybe the language had changed. Facts never had to be plausible; fiction did. He snorted.

The last century or so of messages had taken on an odd flavor of exhortations to the same refrain—the glories of their mission and urging them on. Sometimes these carried overt religious tones, but this one was an eco-sermon. He told his software to mine it for real information.

Most of the real news was on biosphere management: Earthside, the carbon sequestration that had worked well was having side effects. The warmed, expanded oceans were building up their carbonates, a product from the deployed farm waste carbon dropped into them. Now some was coming back out. Seeding the ocean to capture CO2 by sweetening the ocean dead zones had also capped out, and the climate engineers couldn’t stuff more in. Alarm bells …

All the things put off for a few centuries were now biting back. The only thing Earthside had truly planned for on a centuries-long timescale was the starships.…

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.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.