Bowl of Heaven

FORTY-ONE

This alien technology had a strange effect on him. Cliff looked at it with foreboding as they approached.

The towering sides of great obsidian-dark slabs let intricate designs play out in the elongated perspectives. Bladelike sheaths of a gleaming yellow metal soared up the flat faces, ornamenting it with geometric shapes that tricked the eye into confusions of perspective. Or Cliff’s eyes, anyway. Triple vertical vents like shark gills suggested a cooling channel.

It loomed above them as they dismounted from the magcar. In the last few hours, they had chased down innumerable narrow canyons, looking for Aybe’s “train station” somewhere near the base of the stony spire. After several false leads into literal blind alleys, their nerves got frayed. Coming back out of a canyon they knew would serve as a perfect trap for their pursuers above, they wondered what waited in the sky. Airplanes swam like sharks in the pale blue and seemed to frighten big flocks of birds into flapping anxiously away. Aybe hugged the magcar to the stone walls, moving into the open only when they were low on the horizon.

Then the magcar nearly ground to a halt, strumming and grinding in its bowels. Aybe had a hard time getting it to inch forward. After a tense while, it surged again. Following a winding gorge that slowly widened, they came upon what Cliff now realized should have been obvious — a broad, steep canyon of what seemed to be a conglomerate blending into green sandstone, water cut and layered. This canyon spread out after a few kilometers into an enormous plaza of rough stone, baking beneath the constant sun. They circled this, still keeping to the walls, until across the expanse they saw a lofty construction sunk into the mass of the rising spire. Cliff judged it to be at least a kilometer high. It took them nearly an hour to circle around to near its base. Then they paused.

Irma said, “Look, tracks.”

Wheeled transport had passed this way many times, leaving a spaghetti snarl of trails. Most were so faint, Cliff had to avert his eyes to see them.

Terry gestured. “Some gouged their way.”

Deep ruts were spaced about ten meters apart. Whatever had come this way stressed the very rock it moved on. The rut rims were rounded, so it must have been long ago. “They go straight into that,” Irma said, pointing to the open entrance at the center of the black façade.

They all hesitated. Aybe moved the magcar forward but again it slowed, muttered and snarled, and slowed even more.

“I hope it’s not failing,” Irma said.

“I can’t figure what’s up.” Aybe shrugged. “Tried the registers in these funny displays, popped open what I could. Most of it’s sealed tight, or has key slots I don’t have tools for. Not like I have the operating manual.”

“We’ve been driving it pretty hard now — ” Terry glanced at his right, which meant he consulted his interior software. “ — thirteen days. Maybe it needs an oil and lube.”

Irma sniffed. “Smells like a lubricant coming to a boil.”

Cliff let them talk it out, knowing there wasn’t any real choice. He turned his e-gear toward the sun. Once inside, he suspected there would be no chance to get a recharge.

“It makes sense,” Irma was saying. “And we’re at the entrance of this place, so — ”

“So we hide the car and see what’s inside,” Cliff said quietly. “Beat it if we find trouble.”

It was big. Also empty.

More deep ruts in the flooring showed where the big weight had come from. They followed, eyes constantly moving.

In the middle of a huge, high-ceiling foyer stood stonework on a pedestal. It was the size of a big man and rotated slowly on a magnetic suspension. All surrounding light seemed to radiate out from it, sparkling as rich facets shifted up and down the color spectrum.

Cliff moved his head, and fresh detonations of blue and yellow lanced out. The stone did not seem to have a fixed shape. As facets shifted across its surface, the very boundaries of the thing seemed to alter. “It’s hypnotic,” Aybe said.

Its light came from within yet played on what light fell on it — brilliant, soothing, stunning in its sense of eternal hard beauty.

Irma took out her laser and down-tuned it to flashlight level. She played it over the stonework, fetching forth bright, coruscating waterfalls of spectral glows. “What an artwork,” she said admiringly.

So it was, Cliff thought, but — “Turn your laser off. Maybe it’s an alarm.”

Irma blinked and backed away. The stonework subsided, its splintered light dimming. Plainly it fed on incoming light. “Let’s move,” she said.

They backed away from the stonework and followed the ruts toward a high arched entrance. Inside the next large cavern, they saw a huge door divided in two. “Looks like an elevator, all right,” Terry said.

“No button on the side to summon it,” Irma noted.

“Over millions of kilometers?” Aybe shook his head. “It’ll have to work like a train to — ”

Faint sounds from behind them. A rustling, then a clang. Cliff looked around. “There, lower left on the far wall. Could be a door.”

They scrambled for it. On close approach at a full run, Cliff saw it was much bigger than a human door and had a lumpy embedded ornament — maybe a lock? — in the middle.

As Cliff skidded to a halt, Aybe said, “Why run? Let’s take them on.”

“For what?” Irma spat out.

Cliff ignored them. The door didn’t respond to a simple shove and it didn’t look as though their lasers could quickly cut through the heavy metal around it — brass? Iron? He couldn’t think. The thumping noises from behind them were louder now. The ornament had a complicated opening at its center. And now he heard clumping footsteps and rumblings of something heavier.

He fumbled with the collar around the center and then Irma said, “Let me.” She took a tool kit out and tried several long slender instruments. It seemed incredible to Cliff that this could be an analog lock. He started to brush her aside but then thought, What would last here? Not digital nets, whose elements decay. No — simple hard metal.

Irma struggled and tried another tool. A third. A fourth. The sounds behind got stronger and now Cliff could hear some muffled jabber making sounds like words, but he was too frazzed out to think about them. Irma twisted hard — she had two levers in the complicated slot — and it gave.

The door was heavy and it squeaked as Irma and Terry shoved it open. Beyond lay darkness. They all stepped through and carefully tugged the door back. Irma turned her laser to illumination mode and they saw the rugged lock apparatus on the door’s center. Terry shoved one of Irma’s tools through the stay to stop it from locking them in, and they all pushed the door into its frame. No click.

“Is that smart?” Cliff whispered. “They can just push and know someone’s come in through it.”

Irma frowned. “Maybe so. They came so fast, as if they’re answering that alarm — must be from nearby.”

Aybe said, “If they’re caretakers, they’ll conduct a search. Maybe they can extract images from that stonework and know what we look like.”

“Let’s lock it behind us,” Cliff said. “Now.”

They did, releasing the rod and watching a big clamp take hold. “Now what?” Terry said.

They turned to peer through the gloom. Big machinery ran along one wall, secured with chains. Dust tickled his nostrils and coated his lips. It felt fine and acidic, the grime of millennia. Somehow this felt luxurious, as if he could fall into its soft domain. He had not realized how the silky texture of the restful dark felt like home.

“Cliff, come on,” Terry called, and he went to explore.

They were in a framing room that apparently wrapped around the “railroad” and held repair equipment. Large transparent walls showed them the railroad itself. There were indeed two sets of rails in the middle of the large corridor, running flat on the ground and tapering away into blurred distance. A blue radiance showed collars lining the rail tunnel, pale frames with luminescent inner rims of white.

“Big rail cars, must be,” Aybe said.

Cliff said, “Boxcars the size of a house.”

“That white light is getting stronger,” Irma pointed out.

“I feel a breeze,” Terry said. Howard was coughing in the dust that swarmed up from the floor.

Cliff could see four of the collars brighten, and the breeze got stronger and suddenly the white collars flared. In the hard flash, a crackling came sharp as something shot by and a muffled whump! — with a quick flicker — told them the thing had passed at high velocity. The window rattled —

Then the true surge wrapped through the side rooms, and the heft of it knocked them down. It was quick and delayed just enough so that Cliff knew what had happened only when he found himself flat on his back, blinking up into the dimly lit dark. He got up, rubbing his head where it had hit the dusty floor. He sneezed.

The others were up and wandering. Irma stood, legs spread and head down, gasping in the low oxygen. Howard rubbed his head, cursing. Terry got to his feet and leaned on the wall beside the big window and breathed in and out in a systematic way, eyes ahead.

Aybe got unsteadily to his feet, slipped, caught himself. His eyes wandered and he shook his head, gasped. “See those?” he asked, pointing at slim, shiny fibers, electrical ribbons attached at all four sides. “They’re dischargers. That flash — even through this thick window, my hair stood on end. This must be an electrodynamic system.”

Cliff remembered e-lifts Earthside that worked by charging elevators and then handing the weight off to a steady wave of electrodynamic fields. This might be similar.

“Did you feel that tremor as it passed?” Aybe said. “It didn’t just shake — the floor, it sank a bit. That ‘train’ is heavy.”

Terry said, “How do we get on one?”

“Find out how to stop one, first,” Cliff said.

Terry smiled. “Then — where do we go?”

The big question. “Away from here,” Cliff said. “That’s what we’ve been doing all this time — move, dodge, try to learn.”

“What about finding Beth’s team?” Irma asked.

Cliff paused and felt their eyes on him. “I’d like to, sure. As far as we know, they’re in the hands of the Bird Folk. But where?”

“Maybe near the mirror zone?” Aybe asked.

“Because they sent that image from there?” Irma shook her head. “Could be just suckering us in.”

Cliff held his tongue. He hadn’t known when it happened how to discuss with the others the Beth image. He still didn’t.

“Y’know,” Terry said, “we’re going way out on a limb here.”

“Out on a limb,” Irma said, “is where the fruit is.”

Aybe said impatiently, “We need to get away! Why not take the first one we can get?”

They all looked at one another, as if realizing how little they knew and how few options they had — and nodded.

Cliff sensed a slight breeze. “Another one coming.”

They braced themselves. But this time there was no gale, just an amiable breeze carrying a whooooosh that ebbed away. A long series of blocky cars passed, slowing, slowing —

That distracted them from seeing the black carapace of a machine that stood on three legs beside a side wall. Its slender arms manipulated controls on a panel. It made a final move and the train stopped.

Down a side alley of the vast alien platform came bulky gray robots. Soundless, swift, they ran on tracks and held their big arms up, as if saluting. A team of six opened the side of one car and started unloading capsules stacked within. They moved with surprising speed, all coordinated and specialized — lifting, loading, moving the capsules down the alley and into the distant reaches. None of the robot heads turned to look at the humans watching through the viewport nearby; they worked like monomaniacs, which of course they were.

“See that control box against the side wall?” Howard pointed. “That machine used it and the train stopped.”

They studied the machines working, and Cliff felt a tremor beneath his feet. Again he had the sensation of something massive moving nearby. It seemed to pass perpendicular to the tracks he could see. “There’s another level,” he guessed. “The other axis of a grid, must be.”

“Sure, longitude and latitude on the Bowl,” Terry said.

“These tracks run to higher latitude,” Aybe said.

Irma asked, “How can you tell?”

Aybe grinned, nodded to her. “I have an innate sense of direction. In basic, remember when they set us down in a forest and told us to find our way home?”

Cliff did. He had flunked. It had made him fear being dropped, though he did well in the other field tests. “So?”

Aybe’s grin got wider. “I beat your asses, remember? I watched you straggle in.”

It had been embarrassing. Cliff felt his face burn at the memory. The Georgia pine forest was utterly flat, the trees packed in tight to get the best yield for pulp paper, so the going was tough — and the sky cloudy, so he couldn’t use the sun to navigate. He had finally paired up with a guy, then another, and they had found their way by using a search pattern, each staying within calling distance of the others. Not really a way to track in wilderness, when there might be predators or enemies, but it had worked. Sort of. Later he learned that he had nearly lost the cut for SunSeeker because of that. Even though he had been an Eagle Scout.

Irma’s mouth twisted sardonically. “So?”

Aybe glared. “Just that these are the tracks we should take to higher latitude. This train is headed the right way. It’s freight, no passengers we can see…”

“And?” Terry asked.

Aybe was making them wait for his wisdom. “Let’s have it,” Cliff said sharply.

“If we jump on this one, stay in the vacant cars, nobody will see us.”

Hop a freight, Cliff remembered reading in a novel somewhere. A classical expression, apparently.

Irma looked dubious, eyebrows raised. Terry snorted. “We’d be stuck in a box!”

“Aren’t we stuck right now?” Aybe shot back.

“These are freight cars — ”

Aybe held up his phone, thumbed it to a slow replay. “I got this while the first cars whizzed by.” The lead car had windows, and through them they could see oddly shaped seats or couches. There were rectangular machines on the far walls. “Looks like passenger seats. Nobody in that one, as far as I can see.”

Terry said, “Seems risky.”

Cliff held up his hands. “How do we do it, anyway? I don’t see a way — ”

“There — ” Aybe pointed down a side corridor. “I saw a doorway to the left, and I’ll bet we can get to it that way.”

Terry shook his head. “I doubt we — ”

A clanking came at the big door they had come through. It was locked and secured with a metal bar Irma had found. They stared at the heavy door as the noise — rattles, bumps, jarring hits — got louder.

“They found us…,” Terry said. “Damn — ”

The rattles stopped and so did Terry. Pause. A buzzing sound from the large door.

Cliff said, “They’re cutting in.”

Aybe said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Irma raised an eyebrow. “To … where?”

Cliff looked at the robots. They were nearly done unloading. He leaned against the hard, transparent window and saw in a long perspective other docking platforms, with milling robots. It was a long train.

He didn’t like being forced into a move. If you’re on the run, though …

“Let’s do it,” Cliff said. “Now.”

Nods, some resigned sighs. They had brought most of their gear in backpacks and stuffed cargo pants. They ate some of their food as they watched the robots finishing up; less to carry. Cliff worried about getting on this train, but there seemed no other plausible option. How would they eat? When should they try to get off?

The robots were nearly done when they angled down the left side corridor. There were periodic windows. Cliff could see similar robot teams unloading or loading other cars. They trotted along, looking for the passenger cars. “Let’s pick it up,” he called out. If the train left and they were trapped …

They ran for five minutes until they saw the sole passenger car, the leader of a long line that stretched far into the rear. This one was longer than the freight cars and had big windows. And it looked vacant.

No robots seemed to be around it. They went through a kind of lock with a pressure seal flexible frame, and onto the dock. Robots labored in the distance but took no notice of the humans. The car door slid easily aside, and they spread out to see if anyone was aboard. Nothing, though the place had a damp smell like a zoo. A forward-viewing window showed the tunnel ahead, lit every hundred meters or so by phosphor walls giving an ivory glow.

They tried the rectangular machines bolted to one wall and found that they yielded food — or what passed for it here. Punch and grab, an analog system. Some wrapped things fell into the hopper. They looked like dried cat litter but smelled not bad.

They stayed out of view of the windows. Cliff felt tired. Howard looked worse. There was blood in his scalp.

They watched carefully, but the machines that passed by outside seemed unaware of anything wrong. Just as he sat down, the train accelerated away without any warning. Irma had found a big door with pressure seals on it and was about to open it when the train started. She sat down hastily and they found the seats adjusted to their shape automatically, and warmed to a comfortable temperature as well. After so long in the magcar, Cliff let himself relax.

But the train kept accelerating. He sniffed the air and tasted the tang of ozone. The ride was smooth and he went forward to see. They were hurtling forward at a speed he estimated, from the rapid fluttering of the passing wall phosphors, at over a hundred kilometers an hour. Yet the acceleration increased still.

He sat next to Aybe and said, “We’re still accelerating.”

“This is a big place. This system is already better than any e-train I ever rode on. To move around it in, say, a week, means this thing has to get into the neighborhood of a hundred kilometers a second.”

“Um. Maybe they take longer.”

“I hope not. Those food machines can’t — wait, maybe they can make food from scratch.” Aybe blinked at the thought.

Cliff worried that he had led them not into a trap, but into a death voyage.

FORTY-TWO

Redwing watched the Bowl’s enormous landscape slide by in the distance and reflected on how, decades ago, he had been something of a scientist, too. He’d become a spacer because of that.

And from that he’d won the habits of mind that led him to lead a band of scientists and engineers to a new world. This thing, the Bowl, was not a world, but a huge contrivance. It gave the appearance of being nearby, because he could see patterns resembling those he had watched for wonderful hours, in low Earth orbit. Yet it was tens of millions of kilometers away, its sealed-in atmosphere deep and strange.

The comparison deceived his eye. Here the atmospheric circulations he had studied as a young man were utterly different and vast beyond comprehension. The star’s light fell uniformly, or nearly so, across the Bowl. But it never set, and so drove none of the night-day winds that shaped the movements he had studied, the stately currents of atmospheres on Mars, Earth, Titan, Venus. The Bowl always kept the same attitude toward its star, too. That meant no seasonal variations, no hard winters or hammering summers. He had savored long ago — centuries in real time! — crisp autumn skies, with their bright, blazing fall colors, and then after the cold months, the promise of spring. None of that happened here. Aliens had designed in the steady shine of a small star and its jet. No night. What would want to live in endless day?

So air currents did not flow up from the spot where the star was directly above, since there were none. Or rather, it was the Knothole, where the Jet passed through. No Hadley cells, polar swirls, trade winds, or barren desert belts wrapping around the globe. Instead, here the effect of spin held sway.

He could see long streaming rivers of cloud begin above the ample dark blue seas, then arc over distances larger than the separation between the Earth and its moon, driven to higher latitudes of the immense Bowl. Purple anvils of sullen cumulonimbus towered up to seven kilometers above landscapes of mottled brown and red. The scale of all this violated his sense of what patterns could be possible. Clearly the whole vast contraption had been designed to hold everything constant — steady sunlight, no big differences of temperature to drive storms or trade winds. It left him with no intuitions at all of how weather got shaped.

Climate came from the spin, then. To pin its inhabitants to the ground, they spun it — and then got curious Coriolis effects.

Abruptly the name alone brought back his grad student days. That had been more than half a century ago, and there leaped to mind a drunken song of the climate modelers.

On a merry-go-round in the night

Coriolis was shaken with fright

Despite how he walked

’Twas like he was stalked

By some fiend always pushing him right!

Apparently Coriolis had been a mild man, but his force made hurricanes, tornadoes, jet streams, and assorted violences. Those should occur here — and as he thought it, he saw a brilliant white hurricane coming into view of the screen on his office wall. That slow churn of darkening clouds was the size of Earth itself, spinning its gravid whirl toward the shore of a huge sea. Trouble for somebody, he thought. Or some thing.

The knock on his door drew him back into the humdrum reality of SunSeeker.

Karl’s lean face was all smiles, which could be good news. There’s a first time for everything, Redwing thought. But the lean man folded himself into the guest chair and unloaded the bad news first.

“There’s a progressive crazing of those transparent ceramic windows we use for the astronomy,” he began. “Caused by mechanical stress or maybe some ions that get through the magnetic screen. Limits their working life.”

“You can fix it?”

He waved a hand lazily, somehow sure of himself. “Sure, got the printer making new ones right now. The external robos can slap them on when done, and I’ll feed the old ones in for materials stock. Not why I came to see you, Cap’n.” The slow smile again, above dancing eyes. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Good to hear,” Redwing said automatically. This was maybe the twentieth notion Karl had delivered this way. The man did deserve some credit, for he had spruced up the ship and made it run better. But the man was so focused on his machines that he was not much further use as a deck officer. Redwing could see Karl was settling in to bask in the tech details, and it was more efficient to just let him work through it.

“I’ve been tuning our scoop fields for the plasma we’re getting from that small star,” Karl said. “It’s not like protons incoming at a tenth of light speed, so I had to retune all the capture capacitors.”

Redwing knew the big breakthrough that made starflight possible, though it relied on tech you never saw from the bridge. The method of catching the sleet of protons, slowing them down between charged grids for electrical power, then funneling them into the fusion chambers where a catalyst worked the nuclear magic — it all happened in the halo around the ship, and then the burn occurred in its guts, where no one could ever go. We ride on miracles.

He nodded, waiting for the idea.

“So we’re flying with a scoop a thousand kilometers across now, all supported by nanotube mesh. Bigger funnel than we had before, ’cause the plasma’s weaker. I tuned it all up — had to use the full complement of our external in-flight robos, too.”

“I like the ride now,” Redwing allowed. “It doesn’t wake me up nights.”

Karl beamed. “Glad to hear it. Lowers the structural stresses, too. Then I thought — this scoop arrangement we’ve got isn’t optimal for where we are, so what would be better?”

Redwing wanted to ask him to just spit it out, but that didn’t work well with tech crew. “I’ll guess — the Jet?”

Karl’s face fell. “How did you know? If — ”

“What else do we have in this system?” Redwing asked with a grin. “Had to be the Jet. Plus, you know we flew in here through that Jet. What a ride!”

Karl looked surprised at Redwing’s enthusiasm. The man was elaborately casual, but conservative to the bone. Useful in a deck officer, where a captain had to balance personality types against one another. A captain had to know when to take risks, not tech lieutenants.

Redwing had always thought that life’s journey wasn’t to get to your grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to tumble in, wrecked, shouting, What a ride! But he could see from Karl’s puzzled expression that the man thought captains should be sober-minded authority figures, steady and sure, without a wild side.

“Well, sir, yes — I looked into that. The scoop settings we had then weren’t as good at sailing up the Jet as the ones we have now, so…” Karl hesitated, as if his idea was too risky. “Why not use SunSeeker as a weapon?”

Now this was an idea. Not that he understood what it was, but the flavor of it quickened his pulse. “To…”

“Let me walk through it. Remember when we saw the mirror zone changing, painting a woman’s face on it? I was outside with robot teams to repair the funnel struts. I could see it direct, right out my faceplate. Incredible! It was Elisabeth, the one they captured with her team, mouthing words.”

Redwing gestured slightly to speed him up and Karl took the hint. “Even that — which lasted maybe an hour, then repeated every day or so — had an effect on the Jet. Gave it less sunlight, I guess, or just rippled the light over the Jet base. Big changes! A day or two later, I saw little snarls propagating out from the base of the Jet, at the star. They grew, too, moving out.”

“We all did.” It hadn’t seemed much different from the variations Redwing had seen, over time — knots in the string. He was still amazed the bright scratch across the sky was so stable.

Karl leaned forward, eyes excited. “The mirrors focus on that spot, delivering the heat to blow plasma off the star’s surface. Plus, there are stations circling the base of the Jet that must somehow generate magnetic fields. I’m guessing those big stations then shape and confine the Jet. So — ” Karl cocked a jaunty grin. “ — why not show them what we can do to the Jet?”

Redwing exhaled a skeptical breath. “To do what?”

“Screw it up!”

“So it — ”

“Develops a kink instability. The disturbance grows as it advances out from the Jet base. It’s like a fire hose — you have to hold it straight or it snarls up and fights you like an angry snake.”

“Then when it gets to the Bowl…”

“I’m thinking we could force the kink amplitude to grow enough, it’ll snake out sideways. If it hits the atmosphere containment layer — that sheet that sits on top of the ring section — then it can burn clean through it.”

Redwing studied Karl’s eager face. This was world destruction on a scale Redwing had never imagined. Should he have?

“Then there’s the sausage instability — we get those sometimes in the funnel plasma, before it hits the capacitor sheets and slows down. A bulge starts in the flow, say, starting from turbulence. That bulge forces the magnetic fields out, and that can grow, too, just like the kink. You get a cylinder of fast plasma that looks like a snake that’s eaten eggs, spaced out along it.”

“So it gets fat and can — ”

“Scorch the territories near the Knothole, where the Jet passes closest to the Bowl. Knock out their control installations there, I bet.” The words came flooding out of the man. “I’ve studied them through our scopes, and they’re huge coils all around the Knothole mouth. I bet they’re magnets that keep the Jet away. Magnetic repulsion, gotta be.”

Redwing was aghast, but he couldn’t let Karl see that. “We do this by flying into the Jet?”

“More like tickling it. I can work out how we can zig across it, then zag back at the right time and place to drive an instability.”

“Near the Jet base, by the star?”

“Okay, so it’ll get a little hot in here, I grant you that.”

Good to know he would grant something, at least. For a man proposing to kill the largest imaginable construct, he seemed unfazed.

“At no danger to SunSeeker?”

“I can tune the funnel parameters, do some robo work on the capacitor sheets. Fix ’em up.” Karl smiled proudly. “I ran a simulation of running SunSeeker across the Jet already. There’s a problem slicing through the hoops of magnetic stresses at the Jet boundary, sure. We cut through that and it’s smooth sailing, looks like. Statistically, a Monte Carlo code shows we don’t get bumped hard — ”

“I recall a statistician who drowned in a lake that was on average fifty centimeters deep.” Redwing smiled dryly.

Karl hastily retreated. “Well, we can just skim the Jet first, try it out.”

“I’d like to see the detailed analysis, of course.” He narrowed his eyes deliberately. “Written up in full.”

If this crazy idea ever got anywhere, he wanted it documented to the hilt. Not that there would be any kind of superior review in his lifetime, Redwing mused, but it was good to leave a record, no matter what happened. Karl nodded and they went on to discuss some lesser tech issues.

After he left, Redwing stood and watched his wall screen show the unending slide of topography he still thought of as below, though of course SunSeeker was orbiting the star, not the Bowl. The hurricane was biting into the shoreline now, sowing havoc. Somebody was suffering.

He had seen that this Bowl, like a real planet, still had tropical wetlands, bleak deserts, thick green forests, and mellow, beautiful valleys. No mountain ranges worthy of the name, apparently because the mass loading would have thrown something out of kilter. But terrain and oceans galore, yes, of sizes no human had ever seen. But some minds had imagined, far back in ageless time.

The truly shocking aspect of Karl was not his idea, but the eager way he described ripping open the atmosphere cap. That would kill uncountable beings and might even destroy the Bowl itself. Redwing watched the Coriolis forces do their work. He tried to see how the global hydrologic cycle here could work — and then realized that this wasn’t a globe, but a big dish, and all his education told him nearly nothing he could use.

Still, there were beings down there of unimaginable abilities. How could they survive a storm that lasted for weeks or months? That was the crucial difference here — scale. Everything was bigger and lasted longer. How long had the Bowl itself lasted? Somehow it had the look of antiquity about it.

And the creatures who made and ran it — they had both great experience and long history to guide them. Surely they would know what had just occurred to Karl.

Just as surely, they would have defenses against visitors such as Karl.

FORTY-THREE

The e-train zoomed on, at speeds Cliff estimated to be at least ten kilometers per second. Astronomical velocities, indeed. Maybe Aybe was right, arguing that to get around the Bowl in reasonable times demanded speeds of 100 km/s. The blur beyond their windows showed only the fast flickering of phosphor rings as they shot through them, until even those blended together to become a dim flickering glow.

They broke up to explore the long passenger car. There were roomy compartments with simple platforms for sitting and sleeping, and rough bedding supplied in slide shelving. Howard discovered the switches after the first hour aboard, while searching for more food. Cliff heard his shouts and came running.

“Look!” Howard said proudly when all five were there. He slid to the side a hinge switch near a compartment door. He slid a switch on the wall, and the compartment ceiling phosphors dimmed to utter dark.

They hooted, clapped, and Irma did a dance with Aybe. It was as though they had gained their freedom — freedom from sunlight.

Irma favored exploring the rest of the car, and they did. Compartments varied in size and style, mostly in the arrangement of platforms. Irma remarked, “These can accommodate passengers of varying sizes and needs. Fit to species, I guess.”

Cliff nodded. “The Bird Folk are big, sure, but some of the forms we saw from a distance were smaller. Interesting, to have intelligence in a range of body types.”

“But why is nobody here?” Terry insisted.

Aybe added, “And nobody at the station, ’cept robots.”

“Maybe they don’t travel much?” Irma wondered.

No answers, plenty of questions. The passenger car was over a hundred meters long and ended with a pressure door, where the car narrowed down. “Let’s not go further,” Irma said. “Great find, Howard, that light switch. Let’s use them, huh?”

Aybe found something that sounded like a grinder in the tiled floor of an otherwise bare room. “That’s gotta be the head,” Terry said. Starships used nautical terms, and soon they were calling the train’s nose the bow.

They ate before sleeping. All along, mealtimes had been important, just as they had been in their interplanetary training missions. On the Mars Cycler, Cliff had learned ship protocols and how to deal with short-arm centrifugal gravity (which made his head lurch the first week when he walked), but the most important lesson was the social congruence. Eating together promoted solidarity, teamwork, the crucial judgments of strengths and flaws they all needed to know. In a crisis, that knowledge let them respond intuitively. Here, where danger was never far away, those unspoken skills had quickly become crucial.

“What do we do when we pull into the next station?” Terry asked, munching one of the odd foods that he had squeezed out of a tube — which then evaporated into the air with a hiss, once emptied. How it knew to do this was a topic of puzzled discussion. Cliff watched them as they all pretty obviously — judging from expressions as they ate, each reflecting inwardly after the excitement of pursuit — wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

Too late, Cliff thought but did not say. He recalled another favorite phrase of his father’s: Life is just one damn thing after another.

The train ran on in its silky way, electromagnetics handing off without a whisper of trouble. Cliff lay back and relaxed into the moody afterglow of eating more than one needed. The low hum of the train lulled him but he summoned up resolve to say, “We need to stand watches, same as before. Terry, you’re up first.”

Groans, rolled eyes, then the slow acceptance he had come to expect. Cliff made the most of it, standing up and trying to look severe. “We don’t know anything here. We’re not camping out anymore. This is a train, and it stops somewhere. When it does, we’ve got to be able to hide or run.”

They nodded, logy with the meal, as he had planned.

Howard said, “We should break up, too. Don’t clump up, so they can bag us all at once.”

Cliff didn’t like the pessimism behind that, but he said, “Good idea. But not alone.”

Long silence. Terry glanced at Aybe, and Cliff suddenly remembered that one of them was gay. Which one? For the life of him, he could not remember. Damn! All this time —

Too late. Didn’t matter anyway: Howard, Terry, and Aybe would be sharing. Nobody alone. Cliff and Irma —

Terry and Aybe looked at him, long steady gazes, and he realized that they knew. He would be with Irma and the compartments sealed off very nicely, thank you. Never mind who was gay, the big issue here was about him and Irma. He had been ignoring it. So consumed with his own emotions, he had not thought through what happened to a small band with cross-currents working below the surface. Now that they were inside again, back in a moving machine, somehow everything suppressed in the pseudo-wilderness of the Bowl melted away. It was about the old elementals — survival, sex, the splendor of the deep sensual accents. Life.

Realizing that left him speechless, which he also saw was a good idea. Life is just one damn thing after another.

“So what happens,” Terry said evenly, “when we stop at a station?”

Irma said quickly, anxiously, “We need an exit.”

All agreed. They trooped to the back end, aft on the starboard side, to consider the pressure door. “We’ve got to try it,” Terry said.

The door opened with a shove. It led to a short lock chamber, and in the wall was a simple pressure gauge — long-lasting analog, of course — with release valves. Simple stuff, artifacts so clear they could serve generations without an instruction manual.

They factored through into a dark room that lit up slowly when they entered, phosphors brimming with sleepy glows.

“Freight,” Terry said.

Dark lumps of webbed coverings secured units the size of Earthside freight cars at multiple points. It all looked mechanically secure and professional, robot work of a high order by Earthside standards.

Aybe said, “We fall back to here?”

“We don’t have much choice,” Terry said.

“If we start to slow down, send an all-alert,” Irma said.

“Who’s up on watch?” Terry asked innocently.

“You,” Cliff said. He hadn’t much hope the thin, angular man would stay awake more than five minutes beyond the rest. But it was good to set some standard, even if it was obviously not going to work. In their tired eyes he saw that they knew this, too.

So they went back, chose compartments, and cut the phosphors. For the first time in their new, strange lives here, blessed night descended.

Cliff sat up. A subtle long slow bass rumbling came through the floor. He blinked, thinking fuzzily that maybe he was under a tree, maybe some animal was nearby — and suddenly knew that this was real, solid darkness. Not shade. It wasn’t going away.

He found the wall switch and powered up the phosphors. Irma jerked, shook her head, shot a palm up to block the light. “Uhh! Noooo…”

“Got to. We’re slowing down.”

Cliff clicked on his phone, sent an all-alert. Until this moment he hadn’t thought if the walls of this train would block the signal. Well, too late —

“I’m up,” Irma said unconvincingly. She got unsteadily to her feet, pulling on her gray underpants.

Cliff couldn’t help himself. He started laughing, quick bursts of it. He bent over, tried to stop, couldn’t. The laughs slowed, developed a hacking sound.

“What?” Irma said, struggling into her cargo pants.

He made himself stop. “I — I was thinking about … sex.”

Skeptical frown. “Uh, yeah?”

“No, not now. I mean — just that — I worried about us and them, Terry and Howard and Aybe. Last night. Never realized that sleep was the big thing we all wanted.”

She grimaced, yawned, stretched. “Well, yeah. This is a sleep high — feels so good.”

“Wow, yes. I musta slept — ” He glanced at his phone. “ — oog … fourteen hours.”

“And you thought about sex?” She tried to smile, failed, rubbed her eyes.

“Not really. Just thinking about the team, y’know — oh, hell. I’m not up to speed.”

“Speaking of — ”

Yes. The train was slowing. They had been so joyful, they’d ignored it. He hastened into his own pants, boots, backpack, field gear. All he had, now. Into battle, maybe.

He went out into the corridor, pulling up his backpack harness. He had run away from enough threats to know that you never can count on going back for your gear. Terry and Aybe were already there, standing warily as they looked out the windows at the dark sliding by.

“Y’know,” Irma said, “we should’ve looked for underground places to sleep.”

“We did. We ran into nothing like this train station, but yeah, we shoulda looked harder.”

The phosphors were pulsing as the train passed by, their gray hoops fluttering so slow now, he could see the flicker. “I see a platform up ahead,” Aybe said.

Cliff went forward. Harder glows showed the prospect ahead. He close-upped it with his binocs. There were teams of robots, standing in gray files. Beyond them … figures on the platform.

“Back into our rooms,” Cliff said. Irma came up, still a little bleary eyed. “Seal the doors, too.”

“What if some Bird Folk are assigned to our room?” Terry asked.

“Then we deal with it as it comes,” Irma said, rolling her eyes.

The small surges of deceleration came slower now. Each segment of the rail line handed off to the next smoothly. Cliff went into the same compartment as Irma and they fell silent. This one had a window and they crouched down to be invisible from outside. The train slowed without any braking sound. Cliff felt hungry and fished out some of the salty food stock he had gotten from the machines. With plenty of water, it was bearable. They were long past the point of testing everything before eating now.

The train stopped. They waited. Distant clanks and rumbles. Irma and Cliff finally cast darting glances out the window. This went on and on. Robots trundled by, some as large as a car, their forward opticals never wavering. Irma put her hands on the floor, to feel any vibration from doors in their car.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like a snowball in hell.”

Footsteps outside, faint and hesitant. Stop, pause, then going on. Again. And again, closer.

The footsteps stopped outside. Cliff took out his laser and held his breath. The door had a mechanical lock that, despite their supposedly having secured it, now rotated. Cliff stepped forward and jerked it open.

A sleek, tawny creature held up its large, flat hands and said in slurred Anglish, “I share no harm.”

Cliff glanced along the corridor, saw no one, gestured inward, and stepped back. The alien moved with grace, shifting its body to wedge into a corner, leaving the most space for the humans.

Irma said, “You speak … our language.”

“Astronomers shared language with lessers, to make hunt easier. I loaded into my inwards. Please forgive my talk error. We were to seduce you into friendship giving out.”

Cliff said, “Is anyone else coming on this train?”

The slim alien paused and consulted some internal link, Cliff judged, by the way it cast its gaze to the side. Cliff realized by standing they were visible to the platform and quickly squatted down. The alien mimicked this, bending as though it had no joints, only supple muscle.

“No. Distribute was to be, but I erased the possibility.”

Its skull was highly domed, with high arches and a crest running along the top. Those and its short muzzle would give it strong jaw muscles, a classic predator feature. Yet it had no retractable claws, or maybe they were just relaxed. As he watched, the thick fingers extended sharp fingernails. Ah! Cliff thought. Binocular vision, too, with eyes that flicked restlessly from Irma to him.

“Erased?” Irma said cautiously.

It spoke with a low, silky growl that carefully enunciated vowels, as though they were strange. “Intersected controls so alone could greet you. And in keeping-with, deflected the pursuit team to the train orthogonal to this line.”

“So we are safe here?” Irma persisted, focused intently on the alien.

“For short times.”

“Why are you here?”

“To achieve consensus with you. We must bond to our joint cause.”

“Which is?” Cliff said, bouncing quickly up from his squat to see the platform. Robots moving, no life-forms.

The alien made a short, soft, snorting sound. “Return to full sharing life.”

To Irma’s puzzled look — had it learned how to read human faces? — it said, “For all the Adopted.”

“Which are — ?” she asked.

“Many species, low and high. We are bonded here. We seek-wish to return-voyage our home worlds.”

“You are from — ?”

It made a sound like a soft shriek. In its large round eyes Cliff saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality. The sensation of connection unsettled him. Why did he feel this way?

Then he had it — this was a smart cat.

“We will help you, if we can,” Irma said. He saw at a glance that she felt the same as he.

“But we are only a few,” Cliff hedged.

“You share-voyage with many in a ship that can damage-share the Astronomers.” This came out as a fast, hissing statement, eyes widened.

A forward lurch came then, rocking them all on their haunches. Cliff stood up with some relief. Nobody on the platform. The train surged into its heavy acceleration again, pressing at them.

“Oops! Let’s get into some chairs,” Irma said. “And tell Howard and Aybe and Terry. Breakfast!” She broke into a broad grin that cheered him up, out of his confusion.

FORTY-FOUR

Memor was glad she had not brought her friend, Sarko, for this was a rude and joyless place.

From their vantage here, she could see the long flanks of composite rock, carved by ancient rivers. This was bare country, left behind when topsoil had fled downhill in the far past. Now its canyons had a certain majestic uselessness for habitation, which made it perfect for an assembly of search parties. They could survey the low gravity forests that began at the canyon mouths below — a blue green ocean. Long, undulant waves marched across that plain of treetops, stretching into the distant dim oblivion. Those lofty reaches ranked among her favorite natural wonders, the gift of low gravity. There, one could “swim” in the trees, buoyed up by their fragrant multitude. The vast trees stood impossibly tall, swaying in the warm breezes that prevailed here at high latitudes. And the aliens lurked among them, surely.

“Do you have any amenities?” Memor asked the attendant, one of the lesser forms known as the Qualk, who sported an absurd headdress. Perhaps it was meant to impress her? That seemed unlikely, but one never knew.

The Qualk fluttered in tribute for the attention paid to him and gestured with an obliging neck-twirl toward the refreshments. Memor moved forward with grave energy, aware that all those in this field station watched her.

A Savant approached. “Astronomer, we have heard stories, ones we cannot believe — ”

“Inability to believe is no insurance,” Memor said, but laconic irony was lost on this small, squirming one with anxious eyes.

They were assembled for her. More fretful eyes, from a variety of the Bird Folk and some minor members of the Adopted. Memor allowed suspense to build as she quaffed a tangy drink and munched a crunchy thing.

“You are all here, leading your teams, to find the escaped aliens. How is that proceeding?”

Some restless shuffling, sidewise glances. The governing Savant moved to the fore. “The Packmistress sent us — ”

“Never mind your prior instructions. What did you encounter?”

The Savant flicked looks around but could not avoid Memor’s gaze. “Of course, we have not found the aliens. By the time we hear of them, they are gone. We could follow — after all, we have mobile troops, total air cover, local sensors — but they elude us.”

“Why?”

“They seem able to move across terrain without regard for borders or the ancient constraints we all feel. They came over our regional boundaries, moving in natural terrain with concealment. We backtracked them and saw that they skirted our settlements and found ways around our checkpoints.”

“You are not alone. There are two of their parties, far across our lands, and they both seem better at this than we.”

The Savant nodded, said nothing.

They would come to her, this murderous band of Late Invaders, Memor thought. She had set upon the mirrors a portrait of the leader of the primary group, a face many worlds wide. “Come to me.” The leader would certainly know that she had not sent that message, but the others would not. They had every motive to link somehow, and then they could all be caught.

But there was no certainty in this, and a worse danger loomed. So Memor persisted, “Is it the Adopted?”

“What — what do you imply?”

“Do they speedily report?”

“Well — ” More furtive glances. No escape.

“I take it your reply is no?”

“Ah. Yes.”

“You mean no?”

“Yes.”

“And why is that?”

“The Adopted somehow — I have no idea why! — do not obey. They have heard of these aliens.”

“And so?”

“They somehow…” The local Savant cast more anxious eyes. “These primates are unAdopted. Many ages have passed since the last invasive intelligences gained a foothold on the Bowl. This I truly do not understand — but many of the Adopted see them as … admirable.”

A voice nearby said, “Improper genetic engineering, then. Or else there has been a slide in the Adopted’s conditioning, occasioned by genetic drift.”

An image from their Underminds, more likely, Memor thought. An ancient archetype running free, from the times when the Adopted were on their own. She huffed, worried, but gave no other sign of her true reaction. She had read and seen images of alien invasions, far back — many twelve-cubed Eras ago. No Astronomers now living were alive then. Though Astronomers were the longest-lived of all the Folk, even they faced a hard fact: The Bowl swam by life-rich worlds seldom. Still rarer were those planets inhabited by sentients — those who could perceive and know — which were of use to the Folk. Still more rare were aliens of sapience — entities who could act with appropriate judgment. The universe gave forth life reluctantly, and wisdom, far more so.

These alien primates, alas, had both — in quantities they surely did not deserve, given their primitive levels of development. Plainly some harsh world had shaped them, and cast them out into the vacuum, untutored.

But she was forgetting her role here. She snorted out anger, spat rebuke, and gave a reproaching feather display of brown and amber. “Admirable!”

“I regret to deliver such news.”

“I had no such reports before.”

“This was a regional problem, noble Astronomer.”

“It is now a global one. These are dangerous aliens, afoot in our lands.”

Murmurs of agreement erupted. But Memor did not want agreement; she wanted action. “We do not know what they want. We cannot allow them to remain loose.”

The Savant caught her tone and lifted her head. “We shall redouble our efforts.”

Memor supposed that was the best she could expect of these rural provinces. They slumbered, while mastering the Bowl fell to their betters. She sniffed, gave a flutter display, and was turning away when the Savant asked quietly, “We hear tales of the alien’s excursions.…”

Obviously a leading question. How much did this minor Savant know? “You refer to — ?”

“One of the alien bands, these tales say, discovered a Field of History.”

“I believe the primary group stumbled upon one, yes. So?”

“Then they know our past. And can use it against us.”

“I scarcely think they are so intelligent.”

“They have eluded us.” Short, to the point. This Savant was brighter than she looked.

“You worry that they will know we once passed by their world? These primates were not even evolved when we were nearby.”

“We gather from the History that these invaders came from a world whose ancestors we once extracted.”

Memor trembled but did not show it. These unsuspecting types were lurching toward a truth they should never glimpse. She stretched elaborately, looking a bit bored, and said carefully, “Yes. I researched that. They were without speech, had minimal culture, few tool-using skills. Scavengers, mostly, though they could hunt smaller animals in groups, and defend against other scavengers. Those primates, once Adopted, further evolved into game animals. Not particularly good ones, either.”

This at least provoked a rippling laughter. Beneath it ran skittering anxiety in high notes. The Savant persisted, “They do not seem easy to Adopt. They may be angered to see what has become of their ancestors.”

Memor did not let her feathers betray her true reaction. The Savant was right, but for reasons Savants were not privileged to know. Rely on cliché, then. No one remembered them even a moment later. “The essence of Adoption is self-knowledge.”

The Savant nodded slightly, letting the matter pass when an Astronomer so indicated. Clichés, Memor reflected, were the most useful lubricant in conversation. Thus she missed the Savant’s next statement, which was a question — and so soon had to give a summary of what she knew of the aliens. How this could help, she had no idea, but it deflected attention from the real, alarming issue.

She began, “These spacefaring primates have a linear view of life that extends forward and backwards in time. I discovered this while examining their minds while they functioned, and realize that some of what I say may seem implausible. It is not.”

This provoked some tittering in the crowd, but Memor plowed on.

“They are very interested in the beginning of the universe, despite the general uselessness of this information now. Even more oddly, they fix upon the long-term fate of the universe, and have strong views on these matters. Some are even religious! To Astronomers, these are matters subject to many unknowns, too many to lend a sense of urgency to the issue. Yet the Late Invaders feel urgently concerned.”

A Savant asked, “How can that matter?”

“It has sent them out in their tiny, dangerous ship, yes?”

“To answer such vague questions?”

“Not entirely. Their deep drive, which they seldom know consciously, is to expand their horizons.”

“Why? What use can that be?”

“An anxiety fills them, drives them out. I could see it simmering in their Underminds.”

“I doubt such creatures could be Adopted,” the Savant persisted.

“It is our task to enlighten them.” Memor retreated into cliché again. “To erase this hunger for horizons, which evolution dealt them.”

“Do we know their origins?”

Memor disguised her lie with a ruffle-display of purple guilt. “I fear we cannot say yet.” It was truthful, in a way; she could not say.

“I meant, not what planet they are from, but why they have this anxiety?”

Memor had not considered that, and in a moment of guilty truth-telling, said so. Discussion wafted through the audience. She could see the teams who searched for the primates wondering why the discussion was so theoretical, but that was not crucial. The tone of this meeting was, though.

She took command again with, “We suspect they had to flee a hostile territory, and that crisis forced their evolution. Perhaps their numbers became too great for their environment, and the ambitious moved on to fruitful lands. This forced evolution of better tool-making and general, social intelligence.”

Now that she said it, the idea had some appeal. How did the primates get the urge to voyage forth in such frail ships? Because they were born on the move.

A Savant said, “They would flood our lands!”

Memor quieted their murmuring. “We can certainly contain that. We outnumber them by twenty orders of twelve-magnitude.”

Until this moment she had not fully appreciated how strange the aliens were, even though she had seen into their minds. This was the nub of it: They loved novelty, excitement, and motion — even though it might mean death.

Whereas the Folk wisely lived in the perfect conditions for them, precisely to give life a constancy, a gliding sense of time that belied the issues of beginnings and endings. The reward was a place beyond the natural places, a machine for living that spun, as did worlds, and yet did so to maintain the constancy that was the point of the Folk. They froze time for the span of their species and perhaps beyond. Evolution of the Folk of course occurred. But the aim of artifice was to constrain this, maintaining a close watch, so that the Folk could be in their exalted state. Thus they had thrived now through immense long tides of time, a fact well understood by each succeeding generation. The highest function of a species was surely to suspend the rude, blunt blow of happenstance, and control their own destiny. The Astronomers governed not just the relations between the Bowl and the heavens, but the Bowl Lifeshaping as well.

She thought on this, all the while letting the comments and open disputes work themselves through the assembly. When it had played out, she said with due gravity, “The primates may know some of our history — but it is so vast! They cannot comprehend it.”

This brought applause. The Adopted held as a matter of faith and history that the Bowl’s serene constancy was the goal of all wise life. So did all the intellectual classes — Savants, Profounds, and Keepers. So what if primates knew a tiny fraction of the Saga?

Of course, her true mission here was to damp their fears. She reminded the audience of their resources, and let members of the search teams tell of their glancing contacts with the primates. None from the party who had lost their magcar, because the primates had killed them all. She mentioned this, to set the stage.

Now they would rehearse the enveloping movement planned to ensnare the roving primate band, the one that had found what they called the Field of History, which Astronomers termed the Past Worlds. A distant team would carry forward that hunt.

Memor asked, “So much for abstractions. I am here to direct your hunt for those who have already killed some of the Folk. I gather you recorded their entry at a Conveyance Station?”

Some of the Adopted nodded eagerly. “Yes, Astronomer! We have the sky creatures ready to depart.”

“Most excellent. A long while has lapsed since I experienced the thrill of running down dangerous prey. Let us take to the air, then.”

Nothing would get in their way now, since they had the primates located to a region. When captured, she forbade any questioning of them. A few chance remarks could wreck entire established structures of Bowl society. She could take no chance that anyone should come to know of the Great Shame.

FORTY-FIVE

The alien regarded them with its large eyes and made a curious squatting motion, its sinewy arms held out to the sides. With the large pancake hands and thick fingers, it formed a twisting architecture in the air. Its name was Quert, its Folk the Sil. Its graceful form moved restlessly, pacing among the odd chairs where the humans sat and ate. The train was moving fast now, and the staccato snick-snick-snick of the electromagnetic handoffs propelling it forward rang constantly in the background.

Quite deliberately it said, “Bon voyage. Buon viaggio. Gute Reise. Buen viaje. Viagem boa. Goede reis. Ha en bra resa. God tur. Bonum iter. ”

Silence. They all looked at one another.

Irma said brightly, “Those are words for parting. We are joining.”

“Misalignment?” the alien said. “Then — ” And silky words came from it, good-bye in several human languages.

Irma said slowly, carefully, “We are happy you have learned our languages. Very good. We all speak Anglish.”

“I have compressor knowledge. Now can adjust.”

Cliff said, “Where did you get such data on our languages?”

“Astronomers. They sent all to hunters.”

“You are a hunter?”

“We Sils, true. Also others.”

“What kind of others?”

“Others of Adopted.”

“Who are — ?”

“Those brought here. Not species made in Bowl.”

“From other planets?”

“True.” The big yellow eyes studied them all in turn. “Like you.”

“We haven’t been — ”

“Now to be Adopted. That is goal Astronomers.”

Irma asked, “Adopted … how?”

“Genes. Social rules. Status adjustment.” This came out as hard, firm statements from the narrow mouth. Cliff wondered about inferring emotions from facial signatures in aliens, but this case at least seemed clear. The constricted face oozed resentment.

“What next?” Terry asked, puzzled.

“Large sharing comes soon,” the catlike alien said. “Onto here I-we came to speak and share help. Have time now little.”

“Why?” Aybe asked. They were having trouble understanding the slippery slide of Quert’s words and the odd context.

“Stop soon, will. Others come.”

“So we — ?”

“Leave next stop. Must.”

Quert flexed its hands. They had six fingers ending in sharp nails. The palm was broad and covered by fine hairs. Now that Cliff studied the creature, he saw it was clothed in a subtle woven fabric that mimicked the tan-colored fine hairs. Perhaps that helped camouflage it?

“How long do we have until the next stop?” Aybe asked, looking edgy.

“Short.” Then Quert stopped prowling and looked at each of them in turn. “The Sky Rule will come.”

“Those who are after us?” Aybe asked.

“I have fellows there. We may share violence.”

“We all?” Irma asked.

“Must quick,” Quert said with slippery vowels, and fished from its clothes an oddly sloped cylinder with a transparent lens at one end. “You carry force?”

“You mean weapons?” Terry asked.

“Wea — yes. My vocabulary adjusting. Do I need of your tongues other?”

“Those languages?” Irma thought. “No. But — the Astronomers gave you all those?”

“They had from other primates, or so said.”

“You can un-learn a language?”

Quert’s eyes then did something startling. They elongated up and down, an expression with no human parallel. Cliff realized it must mean surprise or puzzlement. Quert said, “Must do. Am crowded and slow now.”

Then the graceful creature sat at last and closed its eyes. Its eyelids vibrated as if shaken from behind and it did not move. Cliff noted the slowing of the snick-snick-snicks.

The electromagnetic handoffs now turned to braking. “Should we hide?” Howard asked. “If we’re to get out — ”

Quert abruptly sat up, shook its head. “Gone. Better.” It looked around at them quizzically, as if coming out of a deep sleep. “Yes. Get down so they not see. Then leave we.”

They went back into rooms and crouched below windows. A pale light rose in the walls outside, and they all brought out their lasers. These were nearly fully charged, since they had followed strict recharging rules in the magcar.

Quert crouched as the train slowed. Cliff sprang up as it stopped with a solid jolt and there were robots everywhere outside.

“Go time,” Quert said, and they went.

Out onto the platform, identical to the one at which they’d boarded. Robots of gray and green worked steadily on the freight cars and ignored them as they passed. They ran.

After some dim corridors they came out into a broad high-arched plaza under the relentless sunlight. Cliff slowed, stunned.

Hundreds of howling creatures like Quert sent up a warbling, sonorous call. They carried tubes and packs and looked well organized, formed up into ranks. They greeted Quert with high-pitched shouts and words that came over more as shrieks to Cliff. In the eyes of these aliens he saw jittery vigor, anxious turns of heads, a fearful energy. They seemed oddly human, but made small dances that broke out among them, knots of spinning joy within rectangular ranks. This stirred and confused him. The smell was like a crisp, fragrant corral. The humans ran through a corridor of celebration.

They nearly made it. Outside in the raw sunlight, the surging bodies made an impressive display, but halfway across a big canyon floor some zipping pulses came down abruptly from the ramparts above.

Screams, loud hollow thumps, panic. Cliff stuck close to Quert and ran for the canyon walls.

They got into a cleft in an orange conglomerate rock and were working back through it, led by Quert, when a heavy rolling blast caught them and slammed them to the ground.

Quert got up unsteadily. “Come … they.”

Strange whistling sounds came from the plain outside. Cliff glanced back as they jogged down the cleft. He could see a lancing green light surge down, a hard fizzing spark like a lightning flash you could see in full daylight. Answering deep explosions rocked the air. Pebbles and sand streaked by them with a whoosh. They ran harder.

They came out into a side canyon where more of Quert’s kind clustered. They grouped around black angular snouts that thrust up into the air. Guns, Cliff thought. No matter how alien this place was, form followed function. They stopped and Quert said, “We show now.”

The guns erupted in short, spatting flashes. Cliff ducked at the noise and tried to see what they were firing at. The narrow barrels recoiled like howitzers, but no spent shells ejected from their base. The barrels tracked slowly and the alien teams cheered.

“Get we over!” Quert yelled in a high, rasping voice.

“Where?” Irma shouted over the banging salvos.

Quert gestured to a rock bluff hundreds of meters away. There were at least a dozen of the long-barreled guns firing and aliens ran everywhere, shouting orders. We’re in a war, Cliff thought. And I thought we were getting away from trouble on the nice train.…

“Better do what they say!” Aybe yelled. “We dunno what’s up.”

Understatement, Cliff thought, and nodded. They started running, weaving away from the gun crews.

They got about halfway across, led by the swift Quert, when suddenly horrible screeches rose from all sides. Quert barked out a congested howl and fell to the ground. But Cliff felt nothing.

The guns stopped. Screams of agony came from all around.

“It’s some kind of pain gun!” Aybe yelled. “Gets them, not us.”

They hesitated. He had once been the kid who stood at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. Finally he had learned to do, not think, and navigate the chute as it came at you. A big moment, back when he was six years old. Now here it was again. Same answer: down the chute.

“Go!” He picked up Quert — surprisingly light, as if it had no bones — and sprinted forward. Where? With no guide, he just ran across the canyon. There was a tunnel in the canyon wall and the humans fled to it. Shrieks of terrifying pain came all around them. It was a long run through chaos, three hundred meters as fast as they could go. They made it, to the tunnel, leaping over writhing alien bodies, driven to hammer forward by barely controlled panic. He put the alien down.

Panting in the shadows, Irma gasped, “I couldn’t see who was shooting.”

“Up in the sky,” Aybe said in a hoarse voice, winded. “A smaller version. Of that living blimp. We saw before.”

Cliff looked down at Quert, who was sprawling, dazed. He edged out and looked up. A scaly brown football with fins was waltzing lazily across the sky. Big flat antennas hung down from it, probably the source of the pain ray. It moved like a fat, preying insect. The green beams cast down their burning lances.

He remembered feeling a pain flash once. His flesh had cried out, I’m on fire! He had looked down at his arm where the invisible beam was landing, and tried to say, This is just my nerves getting jangled, I can take this, but that didn’t work. The body ignored his mind, which knew the 95-gigahertz radiation was stimulating the nerves in his skin. His skin just kept screaming, I’m on fire!

Same effect here, different frequency. The aliens had different wiring. If you wanted to hurt them, you tuned for the wavelengths that forked into the nervous system and didn’t let go. Electromagnetics were the same everywhere; you just had to know the right frequency. Pain flowed into you on invisible wings.

The other aliens were running away. No, herded away.

The brown football was churning across the sky, angling its antennas toward the crowd it swept before it. He watched the hundreds of fleeing figures rush down the canyon. A rabble.

“Maybe they’re rounding these up,” Irma said at his side.

“Nope,” Aybe said beside her. “Getting them out of the way, yes. They’re after us. That was our reception committee, Quert’s people. The ones up there are running them off. I think — ”

Then there was no more thinking as the brown football forked down more of the green rays. This time the enormous hollow whoosh thundered on for endless moments. They ducked. Debris blew by them. Pebbles rattled against rock, and big orange, broad-winged birds fell from the sky, squawking as they died.

They stood and watched as the dust cleared. Cliff didn’t want to acknowledge what had happened, resisting what his eyes told him, until at his elbow Quert said in its slow, sliding sibilants, “Know we share with you. They kill us.”

“Where can we go?” Terry asked in a dry croak, eyes jittery.

Cliff felt the same — dozens of Quert’s folk had died a few hundred meters away. Thin screams came from there. And the football was moving this way.

Quert, too, seemed shaken, its face a frozen stare. Slowly the alien drew its eyes away from infinity and said softly, slowly, “We share under ways. Must cross open spaces now.”

“Why is that — ” Terry groped for a word, failed. “ — that thing in the sky shooting at you?”

“You they seek,” Quert said simply, eyes still dazed.

“So they’re after us?” Aybe asked, eyes wide.

“We heard you come. They know also.”

Aybe eyed the living dirigible. “So they’ll come after us.”

“And we. Oppose Astronomers now.”

“Then we have to nail them,” Aybe said firmly.

Cliff saw the logic. Their pursuers knew the terrain; they didn’t. “But we have no — ”

“Use their guns. Can’t be that hard.”

The cries outside diminished. They looked out carefully and saw the big balloon was dealing with their victims, slamming down shots at them. “Distracted,” Terry said. “Let’s blow a hole in them. They’re in range.”

If the enemy’s in range, so are you, Cliff thought but did not say.

Of course, the brown football turned and started beaming their pain gun again. The burst caught Quert while it was showing them how to aim and fire the auto-fed gun. Quert doubled up with the pain and went into thrashing jerks, head lolling back, eyes popping out as though pressure built inside its head. An awful sight.

With Terry, Cliff carried Quert into shelter. The pain gun cleared the area swiftly. Howard got a gun going and showed Terry how to manage another. They fired them intermittently as the brown football slowly made its way toward them. “Must be done killing the others,” Terry said laconically. “We got maybe ten minutes before they can do that to us.”

Cliff looked at the big lumbering thing in the sky, working its fins and — were those fans running under it? Yes, pushing the strange hybrid of life-form and engineering across the distance, maybe ten kilometers. Worse, the wind was with the thing.

They poured on the fire. The smart rounds burst into fragments as they neared the target, tearing into the wrinkled hide. Primitive weaponry, Cliff thought, and suddenly saw why. Quert’s kind were unused to warfare, he gathered. No steady gun crew discipline, a lot of strange shouting. They had not done it before, and these guns were their first real try. Battlefields, Cliff reflected, are not the best place to learn your lessons.

Abruptly came the counterfire. He saw green stabs for an instant and then the cliff wall nearby shattered. He knew this only as he shook his head, on the ground. It had slammed him down and now he saw everything through a spatter of fractured light and clapping, hollow explosions. Shock, he thought. He drew in a big lungful of air, flavored with the tang of dirt. He got to his feet and helped Irma up. Dust clouds blew away in the wind and he saw that their artillery piece was shattered where a large rock had hit it. A few meters to the side, and it would have killed them all.

“Other … other guns still work,” he croaked.

They limped to one nearby and Aybe jerked open the breech. “It’s loaded. Let’s give ’em hell.”

They got it to firing, following shouted instructions from Quert. Cliff knew he was still dazed and stood aside as Aybe and Terry aimed it. There were systems that did sighting mounted on the gun deck, pictures that homed in and locked. Quert told them again how to work it, speaking patiently and slowly from shelter. The pain gun was still going, he could tell — the Sil who darted out to help others jerked and cried with the sheeting pain.

The gun slammed out shots at the approaching target. “Aim for the underside.” Irma pointed. “There are portals there.”

Aim changed. Shots exploded into shrapnel just short of the yellow ports lining the bottom seam of the big balloon creature. They could see the impact, kilometers away.

“That’s a living thing,” Aybe said. “It’s gotta hurt.”

The creature was unused to this. It flinched when the rounds struck — long waves broke across its skin, like slow-motion impacts of a huge fist on flesh. It began to turn.

At its side, a smaller craft burst from a green pod. It was a slim airplane and fell away in graceful arcs. All the action was smooth, slow. Then their guns ran dry and a silence fell on the canyon.

“Astronomer goes,” Quert called weakly.

The huge creature hung in the air and small things began emerging from it. They crawled like spiders across the skin and covered the gaping red wounds with white layers.

“Fire some more?” Aybe asked. He had used up the ammo store.

“Don’t think we have to,” Irma said. She was getting her composure back, patting the dust from her pants and blouse, and even brushing her hair into place.

Everyone quieted down. Faces human and alien alike were drawn, tired.

Apparently that meant the battle was over. Soon the pain gun antennas were out of view and the effect ended. The Sil who had stayed came out of shelter, and a great mournful dirge sounded. Their voices merged in a long, rolling chant. They moved among the fractured bodies, turning them to the perpetual sun. The song rose up and reverberated from canyon walls. Quert splayed arms to the sky and joined in the deep long notes. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it for a long while, despite his pounding heart.

But at last the feeling ebbed. The flapping balloon creature was moving languidly away across an empty sky as teams crawled over it, mending. Quietly the humans left their post and Quert seemed to revive, shaking itself in quick vibrations of arms and legs, as if shaking off a mood. Quert led them away and into a long, narrow passageway through the far side of the ruddy canyon.

They walked in silence, absorbing what had happened.

“May return,” Quert warned. “Go.”

They hurried through an underground passage. They spent five minutes of running, pounding down channels as the chants behind faded away. Quert showed them what looked like an air lock and they went through it fast. Beyond was a dimly lit tunnel. In this they ran for at least half an hour, just Quert and five other of the aliens — who ran with unhurried grace, their paces light, long, and quick — and following them came the humans, slogging on with thumping feet.

Like gazelles, Cliff thought, and then went back to pondering what might lie ahead. He had led them into this and for quite a while now he had not known where it was going. Wandering and staying out of the hands of the Bird Folk had seemed obvious. Plus trying to learn — and those were the last things he had been certain of for a long time.

They reached a dock suddenly. But this was a vertical one with no-door elevators, chugging along at a speed that made it easy to step onto a descending plate. Quert showed them how and Howard jumped too heavily onto it, lost his balance, and fell to the floor. That made Terry laugh in a high-pitched way, while the others piled on.

Howard got his breath and they all looked at one another, aliens and humans alike. There was some odd commonality here he was too distracted to think about right now. Just assume it and see if it worked. Not a theory, but a plan.

Cliff staggered. His right leg went from a dull ache to a steadily building throb. Adrenaline high is fading. He felt the warmth from it flowing down into his boot. He sat down sloppily and breathed deep, sucking in air to calm his racing heart. Gingerly he felt the wound.

Irma said, “You’re bleeding.”

Cliff nodded, panting. “Flesh wound.”

Howard said, “We’re short of bandages.”

“I’m not as badly hurt as we’ve seen,” Cliff said. He tried a shrug. “I’ll get by.”

Irma had thought to take some of the clothing off the dead aliens. She handed him something shirtlike, cottony. With Irma’s help, he tore it into lengths and folded one to make a pad. He tied that over the wound, pulling to get it tight, and the compress seemed to stop the bleeding. He did this automatically, recalling practice they had all gone through. Centuries ago.

They went on, Cliff limping.

They came down steadily in darkness and stepped off onto a metal frame in the rock. Beyond the elevator was no rock at all, just ceramics and fiber beams and even burnished metal. There were struts and the usual squared-off construction in a gravity well, but also curved arches and round hatches. Quert led them through support structures, and suddenly one wall was transparent and Cliff was looking into blackness pocked by tiny colored lights. Stars.

“It’s … the backside of the Bowl,” Aybe whispered.

Somehow the view was at an angle to vertical, not straight down through the floor. Local gravity was different here. Cliff watched a distant craft swim across this night sky, lit only by starlight. Then a nearer sphere came into view, with three small ships nosed against it. A fueling station? It slid by fast and Cliff realized they were the ones moving, spinning to maintain centrifugal grav at half a thousand kilometers per second. All you had to do to launch a ship was let go of it.

He pressed his face against the cold transparent window, just as the others did, and looked at long lanes of structures stretching away in all directions. Endless detail into the distance, with gray robot forms working over some towers nearby.

Quert’s long vowels intruded on his thoughts. “Can see later. Now go.”

It was hard to leave the view. The perspectives reminded him that they were never far from the vacuum of space, no matter how familiar some of the Bowl could seem.

“Come!” Quert took them onto another dock and then very fast into a narrow capsule. They fitted into horizontal slots with support straps, and as Cliff got his into place they took off to a swift sucking sound.

Cliff unwrapped the bulky bandage he had made, and the sight was not good. A dark stain had pasted his pants leg to the wound. It smelled bad and was suddenly popular with nasty little flies that came swirling out of nowhere. With Howard’s help, Cliff shed the lower half of his peel-out trousers, unzipping to reveal the damage. There was an entrance wound on the right side of his calf and a matching, larger wound on the left. Water brought by the Sil washed off the crusted dark blood. The puckered openings were red and swollen.

Irma brought her first aid kit and pooled its resources with the kits of the others, each kit somewhat specialized. “Looks like some shrapnel went right through your calf muscle,” she said calmly. “The leg’s going to purple up.”

“It’s hard to walk on.”

“Then don’t.”

She and Howard worked for a while, injecting him and putting clean compresses on the leg. Cliff watched the sky where puffy gray clouds raced one another.

Irma patted him. “You’re not going to die.”

“That’s a relief. Don’t have to call my insurance guy.”

“You won’t lose the leg.”

“Even better. Hurts though. Got some fun drugs?”

That brought chuckles. “Ran out,” Howard said. “My fault.”

Irma said, “And your next question would be, ‘Where are we?’”

“And the answer…”

“Going to a Sil refuge. Their casualties are in the cars ahead. They lost a lot of dead.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. And his head was feeling like a balloon that wanted to soar into the sky.

The trip lasted a long time amid bare dim lighting. He thought of talking to the others, but now he knew it was smarter to just rest when you could do nothing. He fell asleep, dreamed of discordant sights and sounds and colors, and just as on the train, came awake only to the tug of deceleration.