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  This book is for John Varley, Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Shaw, Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Robert Reed, and others of the Big Object Society. On to larger things!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We conferred on scientific and literary matters with many helpful people. Erik Max Francis, Joe Miller, and David Hartwell gave detailed comments on the manuscript. And of course Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson were first.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS, COMMON TERMS

  SUNSEEKER CREW AND TERMS

  Captain Redwing

  Cliff Kammash—biologist

  Mayra Wickramsingh—pilot, with Beth team

  Abduss Wickramsingh—engineer, with Beth team

  Glory—the planet of destination

  SunSeeker—the ramship

  Beth Marble—biologist

  Eros—the first drop ship

  Fred Ojama—geologist, with Beth team

  Aybe—general engineer officer, with Cliff team

  Howard Blaire—systems engineer, with Cliff team

  Terrence Gould—with Cliff team

  Irma Michaelson—plant biologist, with Cliff team

  Tananareve Bailey—with Beth team

  Lau Pin—engineer, with Beth team

  Jampudvipa (shortened to Jam)—an Indian petty officer

  Ayaan Ali—Arab woman navigator/pilot

  Clare Conway—copilot

  Karl Lebanon—general technology officer

  ASTRONOMER FOLK

  Memor—Attendant Astute Astronomer

  Bemor—Contriver and Intimate Emissary to the Ice Minds

  Asenath—Chief of Wisdom

  Ikahaja—Ecosystem Savant

  Omanah—Ecosystem Packmistress

  Ramanuji—Biology Savant

  Kanamatha—Biology Packmistress

  Thaji—Judge Savant

  Unajiuhanah—Senior Mistress, Keeper of the Vault Library

  OTHER PHYLA

  finger snakes—Thisther, male; Phoshtha, female; Shtirk, female

  Ice Minds—cold life of great antiquity

  the Adopted—those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl

  the Diaphanous

  FOLK TERMS

  Analyticals—artificial minds that monitor Bowl data on local scales

  TransLanguage

  Long Records

  Late Invaders

  Undermind

  Serf-Ones

  the Builders—the mix of species that built the Bowl

  Third Variety—Astronomer variety

  Astronauts—Astronomer variety

  Quicklands

  Kahalla

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters, Common Terms

  Part I: Essential Error

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Illustration 1

  Part II: Sunny Slaughterhouse

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part III: Status Opera

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part IV: Sending Superman

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part V: Mirror Flowers

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part VI: The Deep

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part VII: Crunchy Insects

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part VIII: Counterthreat

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part IX: On the Run

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Illustration 2

  Illustration 3

  Illustration 4

  Chapter 29

  Part X: Stone Mind

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Illustration 5

  Chapter 32

  Part XI: Double-Edged Sword, No Handle

  Chapter 33

  Illustration 6

  Illustration 7

  Illustration 8

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part XII: The Word of Cambronne

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part XIII: The Diaphanous

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Illustration 9

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part XIV: Memory’s Flickering Light

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Afterword: Big Smart Objects

  I. How We Built the Books

  II. Fun with High Tech

  III. Bowl Design

  Books by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  PART I

  ESSENTIAL ERROR

  It is better to be wrong than to be vague. In trial and error, the error is the true essential.

  —FREEMAN DYSON

  ONE

  Memor glimpsed the fleeing primates, a narrow view seen through the camera on one of the little mobile probes. Simian shapes cavorted and capered among the understory of the Mirror Zone, making their way to—what? Apparently, to the local express station of mag-rail. Very well. She had them now, then. Memor clashed her teeth in celebration, and tossed a squirming small creature into her mouth, crunching it with relish.

  These somewhat comic Late Invaders were scrambling about, anxious. They seemed dreadfully confused, too. One would have expected more of ones who had arrived via a starship, with an interstellar ram of intriguing design. But as well, they had escaped in their scampering swift way. And, alas, the other gang of them had somehow evaded Memor’s attempt to kill them, when they made contact with a servant species, the Sil. So they had a certain small cleverness, true.

  Enough of these irritants! She would have to concentrate and act quickly to bring them to heel. “Vector to intercept,” Memor ordered her pilot. Their ship surged with a thrumming roar. Memor sat back and gave a brief clacking flurry of fan-signals expressing relief.

  Memor called up a situation graphic to see if anything had changed elsewhere. Apparently not. The Late Invader ramship was still maneuvering near the Bowl, keeping beneath the defensive weapons along the rim. From their electromagnetic emissions, clearly they monitored their two small groups of Late Invaders that were running about the Bowl. But their ship made no move to directly assist them. Good. They were wisely cautious. It would be interesting to take their ship apart, in good time, and see how the primates had engineered its adroit aspects.

  Memor counted herself fortunate that the seeking probe had now foun
d this one group, running through the interstices behind the mirror section. She watched vague orange blobs that seemed to be several simians and something more, as well: tentacular shapes, just barely glimpsed. These shapes must be some variety of underspecies, wiry and quick. Snakes?

  The ship vibrated under her as Memor felt a summoning signal—Asenath called, her irritating chime sounding in Memor’s mind. She had to take the call, since the Wisdom Chief was Memor’s superior. Never a friend, regrettably. Something about Asenath kept it that way.

  Asenath was life-sized on the viewing wall, giving a brilliant display of multicolored feathers set in purple urgency and florid, rainbow rage. “Memor! Have you caught the Late Invaders?”

  “Almost.” Memor kept her own feather-display submissive, though with a fringe of fluttering orange jubilance. “Very nearly. I can see them now. The primate named ‘Beth’ has a group, including the one I’ve trained to talk. I’m closing on them. They have somehow mustered some allies, but I am well armed.”

  Asenath made a rebuke display, slow and sardonic. “This group you let escape, yes?”

  “Well, yes, they made off while I was attending to—”

  “So they are the escaped, I take it. I cannot attend to every detail, but this was a plain failure, Attendant Astute Astronomer. They eluded you.”

  Memor suppressed her irritation. Asenath always used full titles to intimidate and assert superiority—usually, as now, with a fan-rattle. “Only for a short while, Wisdom Chief. I had also to contend with the other escaped primates, you may recall, Your Justness.”

  “Give up everything else and get us that primate who can talk! We need it. Don’t fire on them. If they die, you die.”

  Memor had to control her visible reaction. No feather-display, head motionless. “Wisdom Chief? What has changed?”

  No answer. Asenath’s feather-display flickered with a reflexive blush of fear, just before she faded.

  She was hiding something … but what? Memor would have to learn, but not now. She glanced at the detection screen, ignoring her pilot. Beth’s group had disappeared into a maze of machinery. There were heat traces in several spots, leading … toward the docks. Yes! Toward another escape.

  There had been six of these Late Invaders when they escaped. Now the heat traces found only five, plus some slithering profiles of another species. Had one died or gone astray? These were a social species, on the diffuse hierarchy model, so it was unlikely they had simply abandoned one of their kind.

  “Veest Blad,” she said to the pilot, “make for the docks. We’ll intercept them there. Fast.”

  TWO

  Tananareve Bailey looked back, face lined, sweat dripping from her nose. Nobody behind her now. She was the last, almost keeping up. Her injuries had healed moderately well and she no longer limped, but gnawing fatigue had set in. She was slowing. Her breath rasped and her throat burned and she was nearly out of water.

  It had been a wearing, sweaty trip through the maze she thought of as “backstage.” The labyrinth that formed the back of the Bowl’s mirror shell was intricate and plainly never intended for anybody but workers to move through. No comforts such as passageways. Poor lighting. Twisty lanes a human could barely crawl through. This layer underpinning the Bowl was the bigger part of the whole vast structure, nearly an astronomical unit across—but only a few meters thick. It was all machinery, stanchions, and cables. Control of the mirrors on the surface above demanded layers of intricate wiring and mechanical buffers. Plus, the route twisted in three dimensions.

  Tananareve was sweating and her arms ached. She couldn’t match the jumping style of her companions in 18 percent gravity without a painful clicking in her hip and ribs. Her pace was a gliding run, sometimes bounding off an obstructing wall, sometimes taking it on her butt—all assisted by her hands. It demanded a kind of slithering grace she lacked.

  Beth, Lau Pin, Mayra, and Fred were ahead of her. She paused, clinging to a buttress shaft. She needed rest, time, but there was none of that here. For a moment she let the whole world slide away and just relaxed, as well as she could. These moments came seldom but she longed for them. She sighed and … let go.…

  Earth came to her then … the quiet leafy air of her childhood, in evergreen forests where she hiked with her mother and father, her careless laughter sinking into the vastness of the lofty trees. Her heart was still back there in the rich loam of deep forests, fragrant and solemn in the cathedral redwoods and spruce. Even in recalling it all, she knew it had vanished on the tides of time. Her parents were dead for centuries now, surely, despite the longevity treatments. But the memories swarmed up into her as she relaxed for just a long, lingering moment.

  Her moment of peace drained away. She had to get back to running.

  In the dim light, she could barely make out the finger snakes flickering ahead of the long-striding humans. They had an amazingly quick wriggle. Probably they’d been adapted through evolution to do repairs in the Bowl’s understory. Beth had gotten fragments of their history out of the snakes, but the translation was shaky. They’d been here on the Bowl so long, their own origins were legends about a strange, mythical place where a round white sun could set to reveal black night.

  “Beth,” Tananareve sent over short-range comm, “I’m kinda … I … need a rest.”

  “We all do,” came the crisp reply. Beth turned up ahead and looked back at her, too far away to read an expression. “Next break is five minutes.”

  “Here I come.” She clamped down her jaw and took a ragged breath.

  Their target was an automated cargo drone. The snakes had told of these, and now the bulkheads and struts they passed were pitched forward, suggested they were getting close. Up ahead, as she labored on, she could see it emerge, one in a line of identical flat-bellied cylinders. Tananareve could see the outline of a great oyster-colored curved hatch in its side, and—was that? Yes!—stars beyond a window wall. She felt elation slice through her fatigue. But now the hip injury had slowed her to a limping walk.

  Without the finger snakes, this plan would have been impossible.

  She limped up to the rest of them, her mouth already puckering at the imagined taste of water. The three snakes were decorated in camouflage colors, browns and mottled blacks, the patterns almost the same, but Tananareve had learned to tell them apart. They massed a bit more than any of the humans, and looked like snakes whose tails had split into four arms, each tipped with a claw. Meaty things, muscular, slick-skinned. They wore long cloth tubes as backpacks, anchored on their ridged hides.

  Beth’s team had first seen finger snakes while escaping from the garden of their imprisonment. Tananareve surprised a nest of them and they fled down into deep jungle, carrying some cargo in a sling. The snakes were a passing oddity, apparently intelligent to a degree. Her photos of them were intriguing.

  Now it was clear the finger snakes must have tracked and observed their party ever since. When Fred led the humans to an alien computer facility, they were not in evidence. Fred had found a way to make the computer teach them the Bird Folk language. Among his many talents, Fred was a language speed-learner. He got the quasilinear logic and syntax down in less than a day. Once he had built a vocabulary, his learning rate increased. A few more days and he was fluent. The whole team carried sleep-learning, so they used a slip-transfer from Fred’s. By then he had been somehow practicing by himself, so it was best that he got to talk to the snakes first.

  They just showed up, no diplomacy or signposting. Typical snake character—do, don’t retreat into symbols or talk. When the finger snakes crawled through the door, somehow defeating Lau Pin’s lock, Fred said hello and no more. He wasn’t exactly talkative either—except, as he often rejoined, when he actually had something important to say.

  So after his hello, and a spurt of Snake in reply, Tananareve was able to yell at them. “Give you honor! We are lost!”

  Five snakes formed a hoop, which turned out to be a sign of “fruitful endeavor co
mmencing.” Tananareve made a hand-gesture she had somehow gotten from the slip-transfer. This provoked another symbol, plus talk. Formal snake protocol moved from gestures and signs into the denser thicket of language. Luckily, the highest form of Snakespeech was a modified Bird Folk structure that stressed lean and of sinew as virtues, so their knotted phrases did convey meaning in transparent, staccato rhythms.

  The finger snakes were rebels or something like it, as nearly as Tananareve could untangle from the cross-associations that slithered through Snakespeech. Curious, also. Humans were obviously new to their world, and therefore they began tracking the human band in an orderly, quiet way shaped by tradition. The snakes worked for others, but retained a fierce independence. Knowledge was their strong suit—plus the ability to use tools of adroit shape and use. They went everywhere in the Bowl, they said, on engineering jobs. Especially they maintained the meters-thick layers between the lifezone and the hard hull. In a sense, they maintained the boundary that separated the uncountable living billions from the killing vacuum that waited a short distance away.

  The snakes wanted to know everything they could not discover by their intricate tracking and watching. They knew the basic primate architecture, for their tapering “arms” used a cantilevered frame that bore a warped resemblance to the human shoulder. This, plus a million more matters, flew through their darting conversations. Snakes thought oddly. Culture, biology, singing, and food all seemed bound up in a big ball of context hard to unravel. But when something important struck them, they acted while humans were still talking.

  When it was clear that humans would die if they stayed at low gravity for too long, the finger snakes led them here: to a garage for magnetically driven space vehicles. Snake teams did the repairs here.

  * * *

  One of the finger snakes—Thisther, she thought—clicked open a recessed panel in the drone, so the ceramic cowling eased down. Thisther set to work, curling head to tail so his eyes could watch his nail-tipped fingers work. The wiry body flexed like cable. Phoshtha turned away from him, on guard.

  Tananareve was still guessing at genders, but there were behavior cues. The male always seemed to have a tool in hand, and the females were wary in new surroundings. Thisther was male; Phoshtha and Shtirk were female.