Bowl of Heaven: A Novel - Hardcover

ONE
 
 
Life persists.
He recalled those words, his nervous mantra recited as the soft sleep came closing its grip with chilly fingers—
—and so he knew he was alive. Awake again. Up from the chill-sleep of many decades.
He was cold. His memory was blurred, but it told him he was on an odyssey no biologist had ever ventured on before, a grand epic. He was going to the stars, yes, and they had given him the stinky sulfur gas, yes, the first creeping chill ... and that was ... it.
But beyond that flash of memory, all he could think of was the incredible, muscle-shaking chill that spread like a sharp ache through him. He was too numb to shiver. Somewhere a loud rumble rolled up through his body, not heard but felt. The cold ... He thought hard and with effort opened his sticky eyes.
Trouble. His gummy eyelids slammed closed against a crisp actinic glare. He must be in the revival clinic. Slowly he pried them open, still numb with cold. He focused with effort, looking for the joyous faces of his fellow colonists.
Not there. Nor was Beth.
Instead, the worried frowns of Mayra and Abduss Wickramsingh made him groggily anxious as they worked over him. Their faces swam away, came back, drifting above like clouds as the cold began to recede. He was tired. His bones ached with it. After decades of sleep ...
Hands massaged his rubbery legs. Lungs wheezed. His heart labored, thumping in his ears. His throat rasped with a sour wind. He was finally starting to shiver. Sluggish sleep fell away like a mummy’s moldy shroud.
Think. The Wickramsinghs were paired by ability, he recalled in a gray fog, self-sufficient and solely responsible for the three years of their watch. Mayra piloted, and Abduss was the engineer. They were fairly far down the queue, maybe twenty-seven watches.... How far along were they? It hurt to figure.
They turned him on his side to work on his stiff muscles. The massaging sent lancing pain, and he let out a muffled scream. They ignored that. At least he could see better. Against the hard ceramic glare, he could see that no others of SunSeeker’s 436 passengers in cold sleep were being revived. A capsule was running its program, though, so someone was coming out behind him. The bay was empty. Carboceramic tiles were clean, looking like new.
As a scientist, he was not slated to come out until the infrastructure staff was up and running at Scorpii 3, the balmy world that everybody called Glory, that no eye had ever seen.
So they were maybe eighty years into the voyage. Not enough to be near Glory. Something was wrong.
Mayra’s lips moved, glistening in the hard light, but he heard nothing. They worked on his neural connections and—pop!—he could hear. The dull rumble hammered at him. Interstellar surf.
“Okay? Okay?” Mayra said anxiously, mouth tight, her eyes intent. “What’s your name?”
He coughed, hacked. Once his throat was clear of milky fluid, his first words were, “Cliff ... Kammash. But ... Why me? I’m bio. Is Beth still cold?”
They didn’t answer at once, but each looked at the other.
“Don’t talk,” Mayra said softly, a smile flickering.
Definitely trouble. He had known the Wickramsinghs slightly in training, remembered them as reserved and disciplined, just what a cryo passenger would wish in a caretaker watch team.
And they were good. They got his creaky body up off the slab, kind hands helping, his muscles screaming. Then into a gown, detaching the IVs. Up, creaking onto his feet. He swayed, the room reeled, he sat down. Try again. Better ... a step. First in eighty years, feet like bricks. They helped him shuffle to a table. He sat. Minutes crawled by as he felt air swoosh in and out of his lungs. He studied this phenomenon carefully, as though it were a miracle. As perhaps it was.
Food appeared. Coffee: caffeine, yes, lovely caffeine. Nobody spoke. Next course, soup. It tasted like nectar, the essence of life. Then they told him, as he eagerly slurped down a big bowl of fragrant veggie mix grown aboard. Halfway through his third bowl, he became vaguely aware that they were talking about an astrophysical observation that required his interpretation.
“What? Mayra, Astro is you,” he shot back. “Every pilot has to be.”
“We need a different viewpoint,” Mayra said, her dark eyes wary. “We do not want to bias your views by explaining more now.”
“We are reviving the captain, too,” Abduss said.
He blinked, startled. “Redwing?”
“It’s that important.” Abduss was unreadable. “He will awaken in another day, his capsule says.”
Cliff felt a chill that was not thermal. Stores of food, water, oxygen couldn’t be recycled forever. That was the point in riding semi-frozen: They would reach Glory with enough stores to survive until they could replace what was lost.
“Four of us. Waking too many people would run us short,” he said. “What’s up?”
Again, the Wickramsinghs looked at each other and did not answer.
*   *   *
As soon as he could walk steadily, they showed him the viewing screens, and for a long moment he could not speak.
The spectacle was striking, both for what was familiar and what was not. SunSeeker was forty light-years from Earth, and yet he could identify many of the constellations he had known as a child in Brazil. Their familiar faces swam among a bright swarm of lesser lights, twisted here and there. On the scale of the galaxy, light-years did not count for much.
He immediately looked for their destination. A star not much different from Sol, Glory’s primary should be a white point dead ahead. It was there, reassuringly bright, though still five light-years away. Perhaps its brilliance was enhanced by SunSeeker’s velocity? No, that was a small effect. More probably, brightened by his own longing to see, to breathe, to touch an Earthlike world, named Glory out of pure hope before any human eye had seen it. Pixels and spectra didn’t do the job.
Other stars brimmed in the rosy night lit by SunSeeker’s bow shock. The ramscoop’s plowing through the interstellar gas and ionized hydrogen was an unending rainbow light show, filmy incandescent streamers curving around them as they plunged into the infinite night. Beyond that prow wash lay the spectrally shifted universe. Some of the glimmering stars were intriguing, constellations rearranged—but nothing compared to the nearby red sun.
“That’s the problem?” Cliff asked.
Abduss nodded. “It is a problem, but there is another, larger. We have been wrestling with this more difficult issue, but that can wait for the captain.”
Can’t these people ever say anything straight? He made himself say deliberately, “Okay, tell me what’s the big deal about this star?”
“We are overtaking it. When we came on watch, the star was not visible. There was a mild recombination source nearby, rather odd.” Switching to another channel, Abduss pointed out a diffuse ivory plume behind the dark patch.
Cliff frowned. “How long is it?”
Abduss said, “About three astronomical units. This is a signature of hydrogen recombining, after it has been ionized. This linear feature seems to be a jet, cooling off and then turning back into atoms. That’s the emission I made this map from, you see?”
“Um.” Cliff wrinkled his nose, trying to think like an Astro type. “A jet from a star. It didn’t jump out at you?”
Abduss tightened his mouth but otherwise did not move. “At first we did not even see the star.”
Uh-oh..., Cliff thought. Best to shut up, yes.
“We had much to measure. The jet did not attract much attention, as it seemed unimportant. Yet now we can see it to be related to the star—which suddenly appeared.”
Cliff nodded, smiled, tried to defuse the man’s irritation. “Perfectly understandable. Our problems are inside the ship, not outside. So ... the star popped into view because it came around the rim of this ... thing.”
Mayra murmured, “We became alarmed.”
“Nobody noticed the star before? Earlier watches?”
Abduss blinked slowly. “We could not see it.”
Cliff shrugged. In moderate close-up, the dwarf showed as a disk: it must be close. It was perched at the lip of a much larger arc of light. An ordinary star, little and reddish. He raised an eyebrow at Mayra.
“The spectral class is F9,” Mayra added helpfully. “Most likely the plasma plume means that this star must have been recently active. Early stars often display this.” Under magnification, the expelled matter looked to Cliff like a thin nebula, dim and old.
“But we don’t know it’s a young star,” he said.
“No, stars of this class have very long lifetimes.”
Cliff had never been much concerned with the fate of failed stars as they erupted and faltered. Spectacular, sure, easy to sell to contract monitors—but biology demands a stable abode. Still, he immediately guessed that this veil was a remnant of an earlier era in the star’s life, when it was blowing off shells of hot gas. A good guess, anyway—but of course, not his field. These details of stellar evolution had never interested him very much, since they had little to do with his specialty, the evolution of higher life-forms on worlds similar to Earth. A largely abstract pursuit until the Alpha Centauri discoveries of a simple but strange ecology there. That was what drew him to Glory; Beth was an accidental benefit.
So he shrugged. “Gas from a small star. Why wake...