Greg Bear - Beyond Heavens River

Beyond Heaven's River

Beyond Heaven’s River

Greg Bear

An [e - reads ] Book

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information

storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or

persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First e-reads publication 1999

www.e-reads.com

ISBN 0-7592-2258-4

Author Biography

Greg Bear’s stories and novels have won him an important place in the science fiction community.

Initially, Bear was an illustrator for SF novels in the 1970’s. He has since gone on to a prolific writing

career. His short story, Blood Music, which he later rewrote as a novel, won him both the Hugo and

Nebula Awards. His acclaimed work includes DINOSAUR SUMMER, ANVIL OF STARS, ETERNITY

and DARWIN’S RADIO. He is married and lives in Washington State.

Other works by Greg Bear also available in e-reads editions

Eon

Slant

Songs of Eearth and Power

Moving Mars

Legacy

The Venging

Hegira

To my mother and father,

Dale and Wilma Bear

On the literary side,

this book is for Joseph

Conrad and Lafcadio Hearn

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Beyond Heaven's River
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
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Beyond Heaven's River
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
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Beyond Heaven's River

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

One

Out of the parsec abyss came little more than the twenty-one centimeter whisper of hydrogen, God’s

favorite element. To the listeners, mechanical and human, it amounted to dead silence.

Alae Waunter entered the translucent blister of the Ear, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She put the

equipment through several reference tests. Everything checked out. She frowned and replaced a short

strand of reddish-brown hair.

A parsec away and over three years ago, the noise of an entire civilization had stopped. She tuned the Ear

up and down the spectrum, passing the harsh whikker of the star, the cold murmurs of the outer gas giants

in the solar system, the song of radiation trapped in ballooning magnetic fields. Then she focused,

limiting her reception to the tiny point of the Perfidisian planet. There was nothing but cosmic

background. They had been on station, listening through the Ear, for twenty-six years and nothing like

this had ever happened before.

She flipped the switch which cut the Ear out of the circuits and altered reception to non-radiative

communications. From the murmur of spaces below the Planck-Wheeler length came an even more

profound silence.

Somehow, the Perfidisians had managed to blanket the most subtle signs of their presence. Or …

She froze. If something drastic had happened, they could be out of a contract, out of the work they had

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pursued for more than a quarter of a century.

Oomalo Waunter walked into the Ear naked, drying himself with a towel after a swim in the seatanks. He

was the same height as his wife, with thin brown hair and pale skin. Despite his constant exercising, his

body was smooth and faintly chubby. “What’s up?” he asked.

Alae didn’t answer. She took out special attachments and plugged them in one by one. The Ear expanded

to thirty thousand times its usual size. The station’s power sources whined faintly.

“I don’t hear anything,” she said.

“Let me give it a try.” He repeated the tests she had made, then tried a few more. He checked the strain on

their power sources and pulled the Ear in several thousand kilometers. “Sounds like an empty hunk of

rock,” he said. For all the time they had been on line, the Perfidisian planet — otherwise known only by a

long serial number — had presented an image of heavy overbuilding, industry, mining, a general air of

frantic if mysterious busyness.

The Perfidisians were unpredictable, prone to erratic migrations which no one had yet made any sense out

of. Though the distant world had been their base of operations for over five thousand years, it wasn’t

inconceivable that they could have packed up and stolen away, even in so short a time as a day. Very

little was known about them; the Waunters had never found out anything significant, nor, so far as they

knew, had any of the other listeners spaced at even greater distances.

Alae moistened her lips and looked through the Ear’s misty walls at the fog of stars. “If they’re gone —”

she began, her voice trembling.

“Shh. No.” Oomalo put his hand on her shoulder. For weeks at a time they didn’t touch each other, or see

each other. The station was huge and they had worked out a routine over the years, leaving each other

alone much of the time. But they had not grown apart. Oomalo sensed her distress and it made his

stomach twist. “There may be more here,” he continued. “I mean, it may be an opportunity.”

They had relayed all they had heard for twenty-six years, so that their employers could feel that the

puzzle of the Perfidisians was being solved, — how slowly. They had never known precisely who their

employers were — the contract had been confirmed only on their end, with assurance in the form of

credits formally registered and accepted by proxy twice yearly on Myriadne, Tau Ceti II.

“What kind of an opportunity?” she asked.

“Maybe they’ve left … that’s possible. But if so, we’re the first to know about it. There could be an entire

planet down there, waiting for us, complete with artifacts.”

Alae nodded. “I see that. What if they haven’t left?”

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“We take a risk.”

Perfidisians had been known to go to great lengths to maintain their privacy. They were notorious for

ruses, double blinds, and subtle violence — the kind of mishaps which couldn’t be blamed on any

particular party.

Alae didn’t regret the decades spent on line. She felt no resentment — there had been no hardships. The

work, in fact, had been ideally suited for them, bringing the peace they had never had working on other

jobs. Before they had bought into the station — an old, reconditioned Aighor starship — they had spent

the first five years of their marriage in miserable uncertainty, going after opportunities which had

collapsed under them, twice declaring bankruptcy, with their equipment seized … All because they had

taken chances, faced risks, and not been very lucky or smart. On line, whatever weaknesses had brought

them to ruin so often were not in evidence. They had done their work well.

But still, hidden away was a yearning she would never rid herself of — thoughts of all the things they

could have done, could have been.

It would be days before the next line of listeners noticed the change.

Opportunity.

Alae slapped a test module on the panel and pushed her way past Oomalo, walking down the oval

corridor to the ship’s old Aighor command center. Her footfalls were the only noise. She wanted to put

her hands over her ears to hide from the silence. A quarter century of routine had made decisions

agonizingly difficult. Oomalo followed. They sat in the twilight of the half-awake control consoles,

smelling the dust and the cool electronic odors. Human-form chairs had been welded to the floor plates

when the station had been re-outfitted thirty years ago.

Most of the pathways and living quarters had been tailored for human occupation, but the command

center was much as it had been for the past ten thousand years. The light on its consoles glowed with the

same spectrum chosen by the last Aighors to crew the ship. Alien displays indicated that the dormant

engines were still in working order.

They could be brought to life by touching three spots on a metal panel. The station could revert to a

functioning starship in less than a minute. They could be in the Perfidisian system within a day. Within a

day they could be dead, or they could count themselves among the wealthiest and most influential

humans in the galaxy.

Alae glanced at her husband. “None of our risks were like this,” she said. “Stakes were never so high.”

He turned to the ancient position charts around the perimeter of the direct-view dome. “We’ve been here

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a long time,” he said. “Perhaps long enough. If you think it’s worth the risk.”

Alae looked at the alien consoles with silver-flecked gray eyes, lips tight, one fist gripping and

ungripping the fabric of her pants. “Let’s start before the others learn.”

Oomalo leaned forward and pulled a plastic cloth away from the console. An amber metal plate with sixty

symbols glinted in the red light of the slumbering monitors. He touched two of the symbols. The console

brightened. A human computer had been interfaced with the old Aighor machine. “We’re going to enter

the Perfidisian system,” Oomalo told the computer. He consulted more up-to-date charts on his tapas, a

small personal computer, then gave the tag-numbers and geodesics to follow. The computer translated.

The old ship made hollow, resentful noises, but it complied. Their view of the stars in the direct-view

dome was cut off.

Before pressing the third symbol, Oomalo broadcast a formal message to their employers, severing the

listening contract.

There was an old, established law. The first beings to set foot on a world not inhabited (or likely to be

inhabited) by other intelligent beings could claim the world for themselves, or for the interests they

represented. Nothing in their contract held them torepresent their employers.

The Perfidisians were among the most powerful, and certainly the most mysterious, species in the

Galaxy. Information about them would command enormous prices. And the Waunters would command

the information.

The old ship went above space-time as smoothly as a leviathan through arctic seas. For three hours there

was nothing around them; the ship was their universe. It was at least ten thousand years old, from the

third-stage Aighor civilization, and a sizable three kilometers from bow to stern. They had purchased it at

auction from Crocerian free merchants. Oomalo sat in the human-form chair, watching the dreams higher

spaces always coaxed from his mind. Matter behaved with subtle differences when removed from the

reassurance of its natural realm. In grossly tuned bodies like a ship’s hull, the effect was minimal, but

computers had to be adjusted to override dangerous errors and misconceptions. The human brain and the

nerves of the body were self-adjusting over periods of several minutes, but vague distortions and fancies

washed over a person and made concentration difficult. Some experienced ecstasies, others nightmares.

Alae Waunter gripped her chair arms tightly, face rigid, eyes pressed shut. Her pupils twitched behind

closed lids. She was lost in a quandary of choices. After so many years, she could hardly imagine having

power over other people, havinginfluence . Perhaps it would be the same as never being ignored, never

being bothered for petty reasons, never disdained. When she spoke, others would listen. She had never

been influential before coming on line. She had never had much of anything before the partnership and

marriage, before the ship. Together they had earned a good living, but there was something more …

Blue skies. Beautiful places to live, human places. Spacious houses without ship noises. Sometimes she

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felt she was becoming an Aighor, surrounded by so much that was non-human. But making choices had

always bothered her. So much to lose. So often, they had lost. For a time she had believed something

powerful and invisible had been appointed to punish them, discourage them, because they had not been

daring enough. Now they were daring. Now they would fly right into the realm of the Perfidisians, and

they would possibly die — or worse — would discover that the Perfidisians, or some power like them,

had been the appointed discouragers all along. She tensed. A small back portion of her mind pursued the

idea, flinging out vision after vision of a Perfidisian hell, cages with sticks being poked incessantly,

escape opportunities turning into more chances for failure, orchestrated failure and disappointment. Her

arm muscles knotted. Until now, at least they had had peace. How foolish to risk peace for the chance of

cages and sticks, mud on their faces as they crawled away and were captured. How foolish even in the

face of influence, beating the odds, blue skies and fine places to live. She should have thought it out more

carefully, but it was too late now. The decision had been made.

Oomalo unstrapped himself and made his way carefully to relief facilities. There he defecated, washed,

and ordered a meal. He didn’t bother to ask if Alae needed anything. Warping was a brief visit to her own

private hell, and it was impolite to disturb someone so involved.

He felt mildly drunk. He leaned against the wall outside the relief center and ate a piece of bread, eyes

almost closed. He wondered what it would be like to have trillions of words of desired information to sell.

But his fancies were vaguely boring. He had never disliked life aboard the station. It was comfortable,

secure, and interesting. He could spend many more decades exploring the old ship, adding to his picture

of the civilization that had built it. Being rich probably wouldn’t give him problems any more interesting

than the ones he already had.

But he respected Alae’s decisions. She had decided to contract-purchase the old ship and offer it as a

listening station so close to the Perfidisian system. Her offer had been snatched up quickly by their

employers, and the ship had been paid off and signed over to the Waunters for a thirty-year contract, with

reversion after twenty-five years. The ship was technically theirs now. And it was due to her that his life

was as interesting as it was. He knew exactly what he offered her in return: a means to give her plans

solidity.

The period ended none too soon for Alae. The ship fell from strangeness, and the direct-view bubble

cleared. Stars and clouds of stars, perspectives almost unchanged, waited as always. She pressed her

temples and nodded as if to sort her tumbling memories back into place. Then the hell passed and she

stood to go with Oomalo to the Ear.

Silence still. They put the ship into a long, cautious orbit, down to the tiny pinprick that was the

Perfidisian planet.

From a thousand kilometers the surface was gray and blue, splotched with rust-red and bands of ochre. It

was covered with a cross-thatch of what may have been roads at one time. No natural landscape

remained, and no prominent artificial structures. Everything had been scoured away, leaving the surface

reasonably smooth, with no irregularities greater than four to five meters. Alae shot the sunlit crescent

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during one orbit, and swept microwave and other sensors from pole to pole. There was mild weather but

no oceans; updrafts but no mountains; oxygen but no plant life. No life at all.

“They made sure we wouldn’t find anything obvious,” Oomalo said.

Alae cleared her throat and put the instruments on deep-crust scan. “Either that, or they’re masking it,”

she said. “It’s hard to believe they’d take the time to wipe a world clean.”

“Hard to believe they’d run away from a world in the first place,” Oomalo said. “But they have.”

The horizon scanner chirruped, and Alae aimed the display projector at her retina. “There’s one thing

left,” she aid. “A dome structure, about as large as our ship.”

“That’s it?”

“Standing alone on a smooth plain.”

“That’s where we land,” Oomalo said. Alae agreed with a nod, and they prepared a tiny probe for the first

surface venture. While Alae fueled the device, Oomalo went to get the lander ready. They dropped the

ship into a tighter orbit and released the probe into the atmosphere. The probe’s cameras recorded the area

around the dome during its descent. The pictures were monotone and conveyed little more information

than was obtained in scans from high orbit. The dome was featureless, three thousand five hundred and

sixty-one meters in diameter, surrounded by a plain of concretelike material.

Alae took a deep breath to subdue her spookiness. Everything was going too smoothly. She wasn’t

apprehensive about being trapped — they’d already come too close to worry about that. But a third

alternative was becoming depressingly clear.

There might not be anything left to bother with.

The probe set down without incident. It scanned the featureless hemisphere in three sweeps, two vertical

and one horizontal. The dome’s perfect outline was distorted slightly by internal supports — a deviation

of one or two centimeters where they touched the interior.

“Structure is sound,” the computer announced. “It isn’t designed with much flair or efficiency.”

“What’s it made of?” Alae asked.

The probe shot a tiny charge of superheated gas into the dome and analyzed the spectrum from the

resulting flash of light. “Structure is largely glass, with filaments of boron laced through it. There are

traces of lead and molybdenum.”

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The probe’s signal faded as they slipped into the planet’s shadow. There were no belts of trapped

particles, no way to analyze the atmospheric effluent of the vanished Perfidisians. The air was very weak

but pure. The planet was cold and asleep. There were only slight gravitational anomalies associated with

plate tectonics and the building of mountain chains — but there were no mountains. Alae guessed they

had been condensed, not scraped or blown away but simply pressed into conformity with a desired

reference level.

The swaths of red and ochre were due to impurities of iron and copper in the artificial surface, probably

caused by percolation of groundwater through the porous material.

Monotonous. Empty. Alae’s face was tight, and she pressed her teeth together grimly. It might be their

world now, but it was no treasure trove. She released some tension in a ragged sigh. Her neck muscles

were tightening. She abhorred the idea of letting the medical units calm her down, but if she got any more

wound up she’d have to. She almost wished everything were back to normal. Wanting something so

badly and not being sure it even existed was more distressing than anything she’d felt for decades. The

routine of the station had seeped into her body and thoughts, and she had no defenses against

overreacting.

“Med unit,” she said softly.

“This device will summon,” the computer replied. The smooth jade-green ceiling had been equipped with

tracks. Two medical units, cubes hanging from slender chrome poles, beeped behind her.

“Bring me down to relaxed and alert,” she said. “No impairment of CNS.” She stood and held an arm out

to the nearest cube. The second cube advanced and flashed lights in her eyes. She felt a prick in the skin

above her bicep. Her neck muscles loosened, and she was calm.

“Med unit suggests a brief training regimen to establish complete CNS control of emotional responses,”

the computer said.

“Noted. How’s he doing with the lander?”

“It’s ready,” Oomalo said behind her.

“Then let’s go down.”

From outside, a view they hadn’t seen since being positioned for listening, the old Aighor ship looked

like an asteroid carved from malachite. It was flattened, twice as long as it was wide, and featureless

except for the bumps and gouges covering its surface. It had been through at least a dozen major battles in

its prime, with countless wounds inflicted by unknown weapons, some large enough to have required

rebuilding the ship in deep space. The repaired sections were detectable only where they obviously

deviated from the original design of the ship.

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Greg Bear - Beyond Heavens River

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