Bowl of Heaven

FORTY-SIX

Beth stood in the entrance of the cave and listened as thunder forked down through immense, sullen cloud banks. They were stacked like a pyramid of anvils with purple bases. Down through them, leaping from anvil to anvil, came bright, sudden shafts of orange lightning. Fat raindrops smacked down, lit up by the flashes. Some of the glaring lances raced from one shadowy cloud to another and came down near them, exploding like bombs as they splintered trees.

“Majestic,” Fred said at her side.

“Terrifying,” she countered, but then admitted, “Beautiful, too.”

“Look at those.” Mayra pointed. In the milky daylight that filtered through the pyramid clouds, they watched moist plants move with a languid, articulating grace. Slowly they converged on the lightning damage. They came forth to extinguish the fires from those strikes.

“Protection, genetically ordained,” Tananareve said.

“Sure they’re not animals?” Fred asked.

“Do they look like animals?” Tananareve countered. “I checked, went out and lifted one. Roots on the end of those stalks. Roots that slip out easily from the soil when it rains.”

“But the rain will put out the fires.”

“Maybe they’re healing something else. We really don’t know how this ecology works, y’know,” Tananareve said.

“And the ecology’s only skin deep,” Fred said. “Ten meters or so down, there’s raw open space. Maybe the lightning can screw up subsurface tech.”

Beth listened to the full range of sounds rain makes in a high, dense forest. Pattering smacks at the top, gurgling rivulets lower, as the drops danced down the long columns of the immense canopy. The orchestrated sounds somehow encased her, lifted her up into a world utterly unnatural but somehow completely secure, while seeming still so strange.

Somewhere in this immense mechanism Cliff was … what? Still free? Captured and interrogated? Her skimpy communication with SunSeeker confirmed that he got through to them intermittently and was moving cross-country. That was all she knew, yet it would have to be enough.

The rain, wind, and lightning daggers swept her along in a sudden tide of emotions she had kept submerged. She longed for him, his touch, the low bass notes as he whispered in her ear of matters loving, delightful, often naughty. Lord, how she missed that. They liked making love while rain spattered on the windows, back there centuries ago. It gave them a warm, secure place to be themselves, while the world toiled on with its unending business. They had ignored the world for a while, and it ignored them.

Fair enough. But this whirling contrivance could not be ignored. It could kill you if you did not pay attention, and very probably would, she imagined. They would probably die here, and no one — Cliff, Redwing, Earth — would ever know, much less know why. Beth’s small band certainly did not remotely understand this thing. Why was it cruising between the stars at all — driven forward by engineering that eclipsed into nothingness all that humanity had achieved? Why?…

“Fred, that idea of yours, where’d you get it?”

He shook himself from his reverie. “Just came to me.”

“Straight out of your imagination?” Tananareve scowled at him. “Some imagination you got, to think dinosaurs — ”

“I didn’t imagine it, if you mean I concocted the idea. It just … came to me. Pieces all fit together. In a flash.” As if in agreement, a big yellow bolt knifed down through the shimmering sky and slammed into the rock of the hill above them. Stones clattered down.

“There’s no evidence for it,” Lau Pin said.

“That globe we saw,” Fred said. “It’s like Earth, but the continents are wrong. All mushed together.”

“Maybe the geologists got the continent details wrong,” Beth said. “It’s a long chain of reasoning, back seventy or so million years.”

“Never mind that!” Mayra suddenly said. “What fossil evidence is there for any early civilization? Where are the ruins?”

“That much time?” Tananareve scoffed. “Nothing left. Subducted, rusted away, destroyed in a dinosaur war, maybe. Look, guys, the Cretaceous–Tertiary Boundary shows where the asteroid hit. It shows through in only a dozen places around the Earth. Why would you expect anything to be left at all?”

Lau Pin swept an arm out at the churning trees, the walking plants, lightning slicing down from towers of dark clouds. “What’s the leap from some smart dinosaurs to this?”

“I don’t know.” Fred shrugged. “Depends on what the smart ones thought, how they saw their world.”

“There’s no fossil evidence for smart dinosaurs,” Lau Pin said. He went back in the cave to turn their fire. It was cooking the last of the big carcass they had brought from the warehouse, and the yamlike roots. It had started smoking again, probably from rain blowing in, and they all had a coughing fit.

“You can’t judge intelligence from the size of skulls,” Beth said, “and anyway, dino skulls are plenty large. Look, they had grappler claws, a start toward hands. Later on, some dinosaurs had feathers — that’s where birds came from. There’s plenty we don’t know about that era.”

Fred nodded and then said quietly, “There was one clue. When I saw that great holo of how they built this Bowl, I looked at the star in the distance. It looked a lot like the sun.”

“That’s it?” Lau Pin snorted dismissively.

Another shrug. “Started me thinking.”

“They were really smart, built this — and got wiped out by a rock even we could deflect away centuries ago?” Mayra said. “Come on.”

Fred shrugged yet again. “No answer. Maybe they got caught in a cultural phase where they stopped watching the skies. Look, it’s an idea, not a complete theory.”

As Mayra argued with Fred, Beth watched her. The deep furrows on Mayra’s brow had gone away and the worry lines at the eyes, too. She seemed better about the death of her husband, and had even laughed a bit. But Beth was sure that Abduss was never far from her mind. Nor was Cliff from hers, of course. She would never forget the squashed Abduss she had seen, still breathing for a short while in milky spurts, frothy saliva dripping like cream down to his ears while his cracked skull leaked brown blood into his eyes.

Beth shook her head to sweep away the image. She left them to their discussion and sat down near the cave entrance to savor the scent of the rain. As a little girl, she had loved that smell — freshness enveloping her, fragrances boiling into the air. They weren’t on Earth, but it felt the same. “This Bowl has a lot of similarities to Earth, yes? Maybe the really strange stuff, like those walking plants, are from other worlds.”

Fred nodded eagerly. “Or tens of millions of years of directed evolution.”

“Point is,” Beth said, “even if Fred’s right, how do we use the theory? How can it help us?”

Lau Pin stretched, drew in a clean lungful of moist air. “Sleep on it, I say. Fred, you get your ideas how? Dreaming?”

“No, but I have them when I wake up. I go to sleep thinking about things, problems — and when I wake up, there’s an idea there. Maybe wrong, but … it’s like getting a note from another part of myself.”

Beth got up and patted Fred on the shoulder. “I suspect that’s why you made SunSeeker crew, too. Didn’t you figure out the high-voltage capacitors in the ramscoop?”

He smiled. “Yeah. That was fun. That was a neat puzzle.”

“Sleep again, after you take the first watch. Maybe the part of you that never sleeps will come up with more ideas.”

Beth unfolded her cushion from her backpack and inflated it with long, deep breaths. A part of her eyed Fred’s lean stance framed by the cave’s mouth. Wait a bit, get it on with him? You’re horny, alone — do something. But she brushed the impulse away. Don’t complicate a team that’s barely getting by.

By the time she was ready to sleep, the rest were distributed back through the small cave, grateful for some shade and the storm’s muting of the constant sunlight. She squinted through the clouds and could barely see the star’s disk.

As she dropped off to sleep, she thought of Cliff again. He had always been better at fieldwork than she was, and she hoped maybe he understood this weird place better. Would she ever find him in this huge world-machine? “G’night, Cliffy. Wherever you are.”

She hugged her blow-up pillow and smelled the rain and thought of places secure and warm and far away.

FORTY-SEVEN

Memor had always enjoyed the serene voyaging these living craft afforded. She looked down on the slow passage of rugged terrain and breathed in a luxurious sweet aroma. The mucus of this great beast had been engineered to carry a delicate fragrance unlike anything else. Its scent was a luxury and settled the mind, though chaos raged all about them. She allowed herself another lingering taste, then turned with an appropriately severe expression.

“This is truly absurd,” Memor said. “We have dozens of airfish aloft and much airplane coverage. Yet the prey keeps ducking belowground, eluding us.”

The Captain of this armed airfish gestured with indifference. “We will turn them up. They exited the Longline transport at the station below. They can surely not go far — Wait, see those Sils?”

The reed-thin male peered at a large wall display. Small life-forms filled narrow canyons of tan rock. More of the Adopted species, one Memor had not seen before, were coming into the crowds, arriving apparently by foot. Good — an agricultural culture, with low technologies and simple ways.

The Captain drawled thoughtfully, “They cluster in several canyons. No dancing, no parades or ceremony. This is not their usual communal gathering.”

“You know well these…?”

“Sils, we term them. Always an unruly lot. Not the first time, my dear Astronomer, that I have taken to air to discipline these.”

“The problem persists?”

“Yes, has worsened steadily. The Sils are among the worst of the Adopted. They are not much evolved beyond carnivores, so I suppose we should not be surprised. Herbivores — why did we not bring more of those aboard?” The Captain blinked, taken aback by his own outburst.

“Because herbivores are seldom intelligent,” Memor said dryly. “Good eating, though — we do have some of those.”

“Of course, of course.” The Captain turned and barked out quick orders to his staff officers. They were taking more rattling fire. The great beast that carried them protested in long grumbling notes that rolled through the walls that ran with juice.

Memor watched the living opalescent walls run with anxiety dewdrops, shimmering moist jewels hanging and spattering with an acid odor. Skyfish expressed their deep selves through chemistry, an unreliable, or at least largely unreadable, medium. They were perhaps the most successful of the Adopted. Taken from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant world long ago, they found the deep atmosphere of the Bowl a similar paradise to cruise and mate and turn water into their life fluid, hydrogen. Somehow the great ones of the early Bowl had managed to make these living skyships merge into the blossoming Bowl ecosphere. To cruise the skies in them was a voyage into history.

She turned when the Captain, now quite distressed, was done. “Can we disperse this crowd? They hamper our finding these primates.”

The Captain gave an efficient flutter of feather-arcs: agreement. “I can use standard suffering methods.”

“Do so.”

The Captain gave orders and the great belly of the skyfish began its laborious turn. Memor circled the observation deck, scattering small crew before her, to see how the Sils were moving. Streams of them came from all directions. Such crowds! Many walked, some ran with a dogged pace, others rode animals. They looked up at the skyfish. Some stopped and shook themselves, their rage evident. At what? Their target was the Longline station.

“Captain! When might the primates arrive here?”

“They could get here soon, Astronomer. It is possible. But we do not expect them to follow a simple route, staying on the same line. That would be too obvious.” This last sentence provoked an involuntary submission-flutter of amber and brown as the Captain saw the implications.

“They may realize we expect evasion.”

“Our strategy command thinks that unlikely — ”

“Humor me.”

“These Sil have no way of knowing — ”

“There are always betrayers, Captain. Information crosses patchwork boundaries, though we try to stop it.”

“I wonder, Astronomer, why your esteemed presence came here. Surely the primate invaders would not take a simple route — ”

“Do not presume to estimate the rationality of aliens. Nor their clever nature.”

“Surely you do not expect them — ”

“These Sils gather for a reason.”

“But how could — ? Of course, these Sils have given us trouble since my grandmother’s time. They see this as another device to — ”

“You are wasting time.”

The Captain hurried off to alter his commands. The skyfish eased lower as it wallowed across the air, toward the stony ridges that marked the Longline here.

Memor took some moments to review on her private mind-feed the background of these Adopted, the Sil. The Bowl had passed near their star as the Sil were still in hunter-gatherer stages. The Bird Folk found Sil promising, and brought many aboard. Those early Sil were long since left behind genetically — crafty they had been, yes, but not that smart. Something close to the far older Bowl primates, but with ambition, tool-making and better social skills, developed through group hunting. As usual, their first tools had been weapons. This always led to a spirited species, which could be positive — but not, alas, for the Sils. They made their periodic rebellions, and were periodically reinstructed, often genetically.

These Sils evolved first in trees — often a source of later troubles, for it gave them dexterous use of several limbs. Thus the Bird Folk bred quite deliberately for higher intelligence and tool use, by increasing artificial selection, testing the results, and directing their mating to enhance the effects. The Sil were domesticated and made smarter, suiting them better for the technological jobs needed to tend the Bowl. Troubles came when these wily ones rebelled, or worse, tried to expand their territory. The tragic solution was to be avoided, of course, but even that didn’t always work.

“Crews! Begin firing!” the Captain called.

Memor braced herself. This was the inevitable problem with using living beings to fly in the Bowl’s deep atmosphere. Of course, they could not use chemical fuels for every aircraft, as that would tax the farming regions beyond their endurance. Electrodynamic flight was preferred for long stays aloft, but was too delicate for the long skirmishes that regional patrol officers had to carry out. Skyfish, though, could bear up under the typically archaic weaponry Adopted species could bring to bear. Further, its immense vault of hydrogen made it ferocious in close air support.

As Memor watched, the crew used their flame guns on scattered Sil groups on the ridgeline. These were apparently spotters, for they were armed with simple chemical explosive weapons. As the skyfish slewed slowly to the left, it brought its flame spouts to bear. Gouts of rich golden flame raked the ridge. They were so close, Memor could hear angry shouts from the burning ridge, often followed by shrieks and screams as their last agony came to them. Not a delicious sound, but reassuring, yes.

Then the pain projectors came into play. Memor watched as the Captain adroitly directed the assaults, driving the Sil. The running, struggling Sil looked like herd animals in a panic. Then the green laser pulses destroyed them in densely packed groups. It slashed down, annihilating in fire and ferment. The Sil broke into fleeing remnants.

But the skyfish was taking hits as well. The simple Sil had fixed artillery set up with surprisingly mischievous warheads that blew shredding blasts into the underbody. Memor felt the floor vibrate as the great beast reacted, flinching from the wounds. A deep bass note rang and the wall membranes fluttered. In answer the gun crews poured on more pain projector power. Soundless, this was the standard weapon to terrify opponents.

Yet the artillery fire did not abate, even under maximum power. “The Sil surely cannot withstand — ” Memor broke off as she saw on the viewer the gun crews. Primates!

The Late Invaders had come. “Captain, use your lasers.”

The male displayed a corona of dismay. “Their fire has disabled our forward batteries, Astronomer. I apologize for — ”

The skyfish writhed as shrapnel struck it. Long rolling waves warped the moist walls. Equipment smashed down from their perches. Crew ran by, babbling of emergencies. Memor ignored this and said, “Your sting does not take with these primates. They have different neurons. You must use the gas-fed lasers.”

“We will get them up and running. A few moments — ”

A volley from below slammed into the great beast. Memor carefully descended, feet seeking a balance as the floor shifted — down a great curving stair and through a polished plate glass dilating door into the skyfish bridge. Chaos.

The Captain turned and bowed. “We have taken many hits, Astronomer. Perhaps we relied on the agony projectors too much — ”

“Perhaps?” Memor scarcely thought it necessary to point out that the skyfish was floundering, spewing fluids from multiple wounds, losing altitude, veering erratically. “Perhaps?”

“I propose we withdraw — ”

“If you can.”

“We can mend and rearm at higher altitude — ”

“If you can reach it.”

Skyfish had all the advantages of living technologies, but they had their own life cycles as well. The marriage of life with material was a great ancient success that made the Bowl biosphere work, but of course with drawbacks. Life-forms needed rest and could self-repair, and even with help could reproduce — and all that took time. In battle, at times knowing the organism’s limits meant having the wisdom to withdraw.

“This beast is badly damaged. It’s frightened — feel it?” The floor and walls were vast lapidary membranes that now shook with a neurological spasm. Smoldering fumes rose amid the clanging discord.

“We relied too much perhaps on the agony projectors. In future — ”

“You have no future. We are so close to these primates, yet they prevail.”

“I can — ”

“Get me to my pod.”

“I believe we have the situation in hand, or soon will,” the Captain persisted. “My crews can quickly bring the laser — ”

“If the hydrogen vaults are breached, we shall have no further disputes. I will have my pod now.”

Memor loved the moist, fragrant membranes of skyfish, but prudence demanded that she not risk herself while this great being floundered and perhaps even failed. She swiftly followed the running escorts, down a long ramp and to the side farthest away from the rattling battle. Here her pod waited, with crew looking anxious. “Depart,” she said, “with speed.”

As they dropped away from the great belly of the beast, Memor wondered what this reversal might mean. There had been regional revolts before, of course. These Sil fit the age-old pattern — an Adopted species suffers some cultural or even genetic shift, and becomes difficult to manage. Standard strategy was to contain the conflict, using reliable nearby territories. Such struggles set up larger scale rivalries, of course, and with adroit handling, these could lead to calm. Once the regional Profounds played factions off against each other, stability emerged.

That would have to be done here — unless the aliens upset the usual forces. These Sil were canny creatures, a fairly recent addition to the Adopted. A mere twelve-triple-cubed Annuals had passed since their genetic alteration had pacified them. Perhaps it was time for a more fundamental solution — pruning.

But the primates had now shown that they were too destabilizing. Their ship, which might hold technologies of some use, might as well be destroyed. Those at large would have to be exterminated. It was a pity, for their minds were a fount of oddities, and study might reveal some of the features of the Folk in far antiquity — even before the opening of the Undermind.

Well, perhaps Memor could conduct some research with them, before the executions. That would be a just reward for her, after all the annoying troubles they had brought.

FORTY-EIGHT

Sitting on a riverbank beside lounging aliens, Cliff recalled his father showing him how to cast for fish.

The rhythm, first — how to cast the line with his elbow doing the real work and his wrist firm while the left hand payed out the line. A quick rainbow trout had leaped for it in a silver flash. He had felt it tug back and forth as it fought. When he reeled it in, the gasping body was a sacred, beautiful thing. He had thrown it back, on impulse, and his dad had laughed, comprehending the wonder of it.

No such goal here. He landed a big, floppy thing that watched him with huge round yellow eyes when he dragged its bulk up onto the shoreline. Oddly, once out of the water it did not fight. Maybe it expected to be tossed back in? If aliens did catch-and-release, maybe so.

He fidgeted the hook out — the fish mouths were bony and complex here — and turned with the heavy body in his arms. The Sil danced their heads around and made a high, murmuring noise. Slowly it dawned on him that this was their way of applauding.

One Sil came forward, took the fish, and did an astonishing thing. It cast the fish up and with a flashing knife blade caught the skin, tossed the fish up using the leverage, and spooled the skin off. It was a miraculous trick, skinning the fish — and then the Sil sectioned the fish, too, in slashing cuts as it turned in air. One of the Sil offered Cliff a hand-sized slice of sashimi.

Cliff took a bite out of courtesy. It was near tasteless, something like tai.

These creatures were quicker than the eye could see.

Their lands were different, too: lush greenery, few rocky landscapes, odd trees and big-leafed plants rich in fruit. Plenty of scampering small game, too, which the Sil must relish hunting.

He sat and thought about the Sil for a while and then of Beth. He wondered where she was, what she had learned. He recalled the soft brush of her hair on his chest when she hovered over him, sighing in low, sliding notes. He longed to see her, share the eerie wonder of this place with her. There might be trouble over Irma, but … but what?

He had deliberately not thought about the problem. Irma had been a refuge from the increasing tensions that came from roving in hostile territory, yes.… But was there more to it? He didn’t know.

Face problems as they come, he realized, had become his working rule. Irma sat down lazily beside him. “If you leave out these meaningful silences, I won’t fall asleep.”

Cliff shrugged. “No meaning at all. I’m just feeling good.”

She yawned. “My dad always said — ” She did a deep, boisterous male voice. “ — it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

“I already had mine.”

“Did you follow all that talk from Quert?”

“About being an ‘Adopted’ species?”

“Yeah, that whoever runs this place takes on board species from worlds they cruise by.”

“They have the room for it.”

“Not really a new idea, just bigger scale. I mean, we humans invented our own little niche evolution when we domesticated wolves.”

“Sure, and when we turned bottle gourds into containers. But equally, that let dogs and gourds colonize the human niches — catch a ride on an opportunity.”

“The Bowl is an opportunity passing by, with land to spare.”

“This is a clue to why they built this thing. It’s impossibly big, sure, using materials so strong, they rival the subnuclear struts we have in SunSeeker. But they haven’t let the smart species here overrun the natural environment.”

She sat up and watched a Sil try Cliff’s makeshift fishing rod. The Sil had their own, but were curious. It spun a line out a long distance with one liquid move. “You mean, they haven’t done what we did to Earth.”

“Right. And got to go star-hopping while they do it.”

“We evolved to take short-term predictions and make snap decisions using them. Long term isn’t our strong suit. Just look at the Age of Appetite — it ran more than two centuries!”

“Must have been fun.”

He applauded as the Sil caught a fish, uglier and even bigger than his. His noise made Sils nearby turn, startled, and give them long looks. Cliff recalled that if humans stared at each other for long, it meant they would either fight or make love. With the Sil, staring was clearly more complex. Their graceful faces used the eyes as much as humans used their mouths for signaling. Apparently right eye squinting and left wide open meant puzzlement.

He contented himself with just waving. Their eyes widened in appreciation.

“The 2100s were about digging out from the damage, getting the climate stable. Only way to do it was with a big presence in space, metals and rare earths from asteroids, a solar system economy. Then we got hungry for the stars.”

“They must’ve, too.”

“Then why not just send out ramscoops, like us?”

“Maybe they did. Maybe came to Earth and left no trace.”

“Haven’t we seen Earth species here?”

He nodded. “I’ve seen plenty of things I recognized. It could be parallel evolution — function calls out form, the same shapes. Like that fish. It’s god-awful ugly, but so are some fish I saw in the Caribbean.”

“Bet it tastes good, though.”

His stomach growled. “I’ll start a fire. That’s a good point — the twist of molecules, the chemical hookups here. They’re close enough to ours so we don’t starve.”

Quert appeared from the rich foliage, carrying a pack. “Swimmer! Good.” In one swift sweep, he took it from Cliff and said, “Cook we will.”

Cliff sniffed the air. “Woodsmoke. They already knew I’d catch something.”

“They’re smart. I wonder why they took such losses just to pluck us off that train.”

“They want out from under the boss who runs this.”

“Well, we sure can’t help them.”

“Probably not. We’re damned lucky to be alive.”

“Did you think we’d last this long?”

“Not really.” Cliff took a deep breath and plunged on, feeling awkward. “I … didn’t think we’d become lovers, either.”

She blinked and looked hard at the river flowing past, clear and cool. Avoiding his eyes. “We’re not, really. At least, I don’t love you.”

“Me either. ‘Utility sex,’ wasn’t that what you called it?”

She giggled nervously. “I did say that.”

“You and your guy were going to have a standard contract marriage?” he said to be saying something.

“Yup, when we got settled at Glory. Then I’d bring out my stored eggs and have a family. We figured a twenty-five-year contract would do that nicely.”

“Beth and me, we hadn’t gotten that specific. In all the training, there wasn’t time to…”

“To really think it through? Actually, it’s feeling it through that does the trick.”

“Um. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ I suppose.”

“What? Oh, Shakespeare. Well, this is alteration” — she waved a hand at the Bowl, which hung like a shimmering haze across the sky — “beyond anything I imagined.”

“So…” He savored finally getting some use from his high school English, then sobered. He wanted to get something settled but didn’t know how. “We keep up with the … utility?”

She shrugged. “It helps.” Then she gave him a wicked grin. “That’s my story for now.”

“Might be trouble when we meet our mates.”

“Face that when it comes.”

He stood, stretching. He watched in the distance dust devils climb toward the roof of the sky, in an atmosphere so deep, he could see huge dark clouds that hung like mountains in the high, fuzzy distance. How were they ever going to figure out this place?

Aybe, Howard, and Terry arrived, carrying some plants they had harvested with the Sil. “Shoulda had you along, Cliff, so’s you’d know what these things are, if we can eat ’em. Howard spotted a lot of this.”

“My God, Terry, you’re drunk!” Cliff took the plants and checked them; they looked reasonable. But he couldn’t take his eyes from Terry and — yes, Aybe also had a bleary look.

“They gave us a drink, said it was refreshin’,” Terry said.

Howard said, “Tastes a little like pineapple wine. Bland. I was not tricked, boss.” He thumped his chest. “Alcohol.”

“I’ll say. The chemistry here really is similar.” Cliff waved them to the riverside. Might as well relieve the pressure when they can.…

Was ethanol a universal? It appeared in low densities in star and planetary system forming regions: simple organic chemistry. It was just sugars turning bad, so they formed a hydroxyl with carbon. Chimpanzees used it, too. Maybe all higher intelligences sometimes needed to escape from the prison of reason?

“So,” Aybe plopped down and said with the owlish manner of a drunk trying to pretend he’s sober, “where do we go from here?”

“There’s a price on our heads, boys,” Irma said. “I say stay here, rest up, learn from these Sil.”

“We can eat,” Howard said. “Nev-ever a given.”

“We need a plan,” Aybe said.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish,” Irma said. “But what’s our goal?”

“There’s enough room here,” Terry said with leaden profundity, “for everybody cold sleepin’ on SunSeeker to live.”

“But this isn’t a planet, it’s a park!” Irma shot back.

“Seems big enough for a million planets. Strange aliens. Room to make somethin’ new.” Terry nodded to himself.

Irma’s eyes and nostrils flared. “We didn’t cast off everybody we knew to come to this place!”

“Well, we’re here anyway,” Aybe said solemnly. “We don’t even know if we can get SunSeeker started up right again.”

“There’s damn plenty we don’t know, right,” Terry agreed.

Cliff eyed them and saw this was an idea brewing for some time among them. Carefully he said, “Look, we’re in a crazy place. But don’t let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination. We’re bound for Glory.”

In their pealing laughter he heard joy.

FORTY-NINE

The inhabited section of the Bowl, its vast ring-shaped rim, was what Redwing had come to call the Great Plain. Now SunSeeker crossed softly over the rim of the Bowl, and the Great Plain fell behind. Far below, the cellophane sky dropped to touch a rise in the Bowl’s understructure, bulging outward by a few kilometers, as they crossed the Bowl rim. “Stay well clear,” Redwing told Jam again. “We don’t want to burn holes in their sky with our magnetics.”

Jam grinned as if at a joke. “Yes, sir. Do your enemy no small injury.” He added, “Machiavelli.”

So the great ship floated past the rim with 100,000 kilometers to spare. Redwing watched, mesmerized, until Ayaan whacked his back with her fist. “Captain! I’ve got Fred Oyama!”

“Hot damn! Patch me through. Fred, need update on your condition.”

Ayaan said, “Talk past him. You’re twenty-three minutes apart at lightspeed, and all they can send us is text. Talk and I’ll text-connect it.”

“Yah. Fred, we’re cruising around back of the Bowl to see what we can see. Our last contact with Beth’s team had her in a cluster of caves. She’s worried about what low gravity is doing to their bones and such. Otherwise they’re safe. She should have at least a couple of months, but then they’ll all need SunSeeker’s hospital section.

“We’ve solved the problem with SunSeeker’s motors,” he said, and decided not to give details. The ship had been delayed by the Bowl’s head wind, just enough to matter. Maybe SunSeeker could have veered around the Bowl’s wake and kept on to Glory, stretching their supplies to the max. But the Bowl was a bigger game, really, he decided. An unimaginable jackpot — if they survived it. Glory could wait.

Redwing watched Ayaan working their antenna system to keep him on target. Their technology was at its very limits, communicating over such vast, constantly moving ranges.

“We’ve fiddled some with the menu, including some biochem information, so I’ll beam you an update, now.” Ayaan nodded and pressed a key to send the prepared squirt.

“I’d like to pick you all up. We should at least plan to meet. It would be great if we could find a meet place. The trouble as I see it is that any site big enough to see from here would be like arranging to meet in Australia.” Redwing laughed, then remembered that he wouldn’t hear a response. “Too big. But if we could find something like a radio station, we could find each other there. We’ll look for antennas of any kind while we’re here.”

He paced the deck, trying to wedge in every thought before they lost the connection. “Of course, there’s no docking or refueling arrangements for us that we understand on the outer skin. Of course, we’ve lost one of our landers. Never mind, we still have the Hawking and Chang and Dyson. Your team has been without medical treatment for four months now. We need to debrief you.”

Not the best time, a link just when they were coasting out over the rim. “I’m looking at the back of the Bowl, seeing quite a lot of structure. Blems, bubbles, angular structures, crisscrossed lines … I’m zooming on an intersection … those are tubes networking … maybe a transport system. Looks like spiderwebbing.

“Bigger, shorter tubes right at the rim. Knobby gray structures big as … well, little moons. Like Ceres. Several of ’em. I can see the nearest one in motion. Really big. Too big to be a weapon. Helical lines running round the inside — ”

Redwing’s internal alarm bells went off. “Karl, what do you think?”

Karl was standing alert, almost crouching. He said crisply, “Looks like they’re encased in magnetic field coils. Maybe some sort of offensive weapon.”

“Or telescope,” Clare said.

Karl shook his head. “Astronomy? Nah. No need for that long cylinder. Could be a laser of a kind we don’t know? Huge, in any case.”

“Looks like old-style cannon,” Redwing said. “Except bigger than makes any sense.”

Clare Conway said, “Maybe they fight planets. Big cannon. Captain, we’ll be looking right into that tube in maybe twenty minutes.”

Karl said, “The nearest of them is swiveling to engage us, sir.”

Redwing frowned. “Okay. Jam, start us turning. Stay away from the focus of that thing. Ayaan, do you still have Fred? Fred, give me some good news, will you?”

Jam said quickly, “With your permission, Captain, I’ll bring us back above the Great Plain.”

“Do that. Fred, we’ll be out of touch in a few minutes. We have a message from Earth. I’ll squirt it now.”

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

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

“Jam, is she right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned on his wall screen and looked at the distant landscapes drifting past — low mountains crested in snow, vast forests, river valleys the size of Earthly continents. How did these creatures run their Bowl? It had to be far more complex than managing a mere planet.

Could the Bowl teach Earth something crucial about terraforming? That alone would be worth stopping for.

He made himself run through the rest of the tightbeam signals. There were some updates on performance modes of their onboard AIs, some hardware issues, suggested upgrades here and there. Most likely these came as feedback from other starships. SunSeeker, too, had tightbeamed back such reports. He was pretty sure the summaries he had sent about the Bowl were the most bizarre ever transmitted.

He captained a starship, but this enormous thing was a star that drove a ship, was the propulsion, a star that was the essence of the ship itself. It ran on fusion, too, like SunSeeker. It was a … shipstar.

So … who captained it?

END OF VOLUME ONE

• • •

VOLUME TWO:

SHIPSTAR

WILL FOLLOW SOON.