Bowl of Heaven

SEVEN

They left a skeleton crew of five aboard SunSeeker, with Redwing plainly sorry that proper ship command protocols demanded that he stay aboard. The crew left were enough to handle the hundreds in hibernation and maintain ship systems.

The descent team took ten down with them — Beth, Cliff, Fred, the Wickramsinghs, and five recently revived, who were still taking it all in. Cliff was nominally first officer, mostly because Redwing wanted to avoid the delay in reviving a ship crew officer. Cliff could barely keep the various ranks straight in his head and suspected they would quite soon matter very little.

Terry Gould and Tananareve started as per regulations by checking everyone’s gear and organizing it for rapid use if necessary. They had field packs, rations, water, lasers, and tech gear, all compact and rugged. The lower Bowl grav made it possible to carry more, so they had packed to do so. Cliff, Beth, and Fred spent most of the long flight checking and rechecking their gear, then reviewing the many multi-spectra maps they had made. On the flat regions there stood pillars, barely resolved — not pylons, but raised land formations.

“Buttes,” Beth said, sipping coffee. “Black-topped. Kinda like the American West but lots bigger. Looks like they rise all the way up to the sky roof. So the sealing barrier, that light blue stuff, ends at the rim of the butte.”

“Pretty high, too,” Fred added with a grin, plainly enjoying himself. “Nearly seven kilometers. Not as high as Everest, and certainly nothing compares to Olympus Mons, but worth climbing for fun. Always wanted to do Everest…”

Cliff kept his voice even and warm, and even managed a smile of sorts. “We’ll have to arrange it for you.” At times, Fred was touchy. As the ship rumbled, Cliff eyed Fred, who was lean and muscular and sported a permanent suntan. How had he gotten that in all their training time? Cliff had hardly been able to sleep. At least Fred didn’t talk much now as he concentrated on work.

The last long swoop of their descending orbit was tense. The cabins filled with a sour smell and everyone was on edge. It felt odd to be coasting down toward a huge landscape that stretched away to all sides, filling the sky — and yet still be in space. The Bowl wrapped around them.

No tug of deceleration or singing of thin air. Cliff looked at the wall screens. One showed SunSeeker above them, a pale blue thread of flame trailing. Another showed the top of the butte, nearly edge on and still a featureless black. Another, the “overhead” view toward the jet.

Cliff watched the ivory and orange streamers fight and roil along it. An idea struck him. “Abduss!”

The man was in the next acceleration couch, face pale, looking none too well.

“You studied the jet, right?”

“Uh, yes, Cliff…”

“What does it emit?”

“X-rays, microwaves, plenty of IR.”

“And?”

“Not much visible light. A lot of broadband radio and microwave noise,” the wiry man said, obviously glad to have something else to think about than their landing. “Very loud. Very beautiful.”

“I’ll bet that’s why we don’t pick up their transmissions — they avoid the visible region of the spectrum. Probably use direct laser feeds, instead — so no side lobes for us to pick up.”

“Ah, yes, they are clever,” Abduss said, and went back to looking fixedly at the land sliding below them. His mouth worked.

Lightning forked around the oval. Some kind of electrical process, like the big sheets of luminosity that came cascading down from Earth’s ionosphere? Cliff watched the quick, orange streamers. They slid around the butte, with glowing fingers probing at the lip.

The atmosphere’s membrane was a light blue shining sheet under them now. It was visible only at an angle. Sunlight glinted off long wave fronts that rippled in the sheet’s surface, making it look like a transparent ocean. Cliff marveled at the illusion, seeing beneath it craggy mountains and long, sloping green valleys as though they lay on an ocean floor. Somehow this made the whole construction both eerie and yet like a planet.

Now they tilted and their thrusters roared, rattling Cliff’s teeth. They skated along just above the membrane, and he saw that the waves were moving slowly, great undulating troughs driven by — what?

Like an ocean on Earth. Perhaps the rotation of this colossal artifact unleashed such waves, and they in turn affected the weather below. So did Earth’s atmosphere, after all; hurricanes came from the planet’s rotation about its poles. What oddities could they expect on this unimaginable scale?

He watched a long line of rain clouds caught in the crest of a wave. Angry blue gray clouds were corralled in the high peak, as if in rising they cooled and let go their moisture. His eye followed the cloud-racked crest to the far horizon. A marching regimental rainstorm. He felt a cold sensation of strangeness at this sight. The idea of a rainstorm that stretched long and slender over distances far greater than continents made him suck in his breath.

Now they were above the black pillar, descending. Cliff’s stomach fluttered up into his throat. He clenched his teeth as Eros rolled and dived, wrenching around as Beth slammed them hard into their couches.

“The butte!” she shouted. “Damn!”

Abduss shouted, “What? What is it?”

Pause. “It’ll be fine,” she said flatly with forced calm. “I can figure this. Keep your crash webs tight. Someone should have noticed.” Beth was talking through clenched teeth.

Abduss frowned. “What is — ?”

“That’s no butte. We’re inside a hollow tube! The surface is — I don’t see a surface, it’s in shadow, seven kilometers down.” Thrust went away. “I don’t want to run out of fuel. I’m going to assume there’s a floor and it’s flush with the forest. Abduss, can you get me anything with radar?”

Cliff’s throat was dry and his voice cracked. “Floor as opposed to … what?”

“As opposed to a hole that goes right through the Cupworld and out into space!”

Abduss said, “What?” His eyes showed a lot of white.

“Suppose it’s a through-out tube, to save the trouble of going around the whole Bowl. That’s what it looks like in a full-spectrum picture.” Beth gestured at a stack set of views. In some, stars hung in the opening.

“Uh, so?”

“We could go right through. What’s radar say? You can get an angle on the floor now, right?”

Abduss nodded and worked his board. He was sweating.

Cliff ventured, “We’d be picked up with SunSeeker, no problem.”

“Maybe,” Beth said tensely. “Unless somebody slams the door.”

“There’s a bottom down there,” Abduss said. “Watch yourself, radar says it’s not flat.”

The motor thrummed again. High thrust. Pings and pops in the ship.

Cliff didn’t try to speak. Beth was talking her way through it, and that was nerve racking. “It’s flat, Abduss. There’s a hole in it, a pit with stars at the bottom. We want to land, right? Not go through to the outside. Hey, there’s light at the bottom! And here we go — ”

Eros surged, then danced sideways under Coriolis force.

EIGHT

She set them down less than two kilometers from the butte wall, on a cluttered ledge that was perhaps four kilometers across. There was a wall along the inner rim. Beyond that, the universe peeked through a hole ten kilometers across. She made the ship linger on its jets, finding a bare spot. They thunked down and felt the tug of centrifugal gravity.

She looked toward the butte face. Pale ivory light spilled out along the bottom of the wall, from a row of windows running from tiny to huge.

They all felt the significance of the moment, but there was no time for reflection. They didn’t know what waited outside, but talking wasn’t going to tell them anything.

They emerged from the scout ship in full space gear. Cliff listened with half his attention to Fred reporting to Redwing. The lightspeed time gap was seventeen seconds and rising. They stood at the foot of Eros, looking into the light. Into a row of glass boxes of increasing size, with forest on the far side.

“Air locks,” Fred said, and laughed happily. “With transparent walls.” He stopped laughing when nobody joined him. “That one at the far end is fifty or sixty times as big as Eros. I guess they have to pass big machinery, given the scale of this, well — ” He groped for a word, then laughed again. “Describing all this isn’t easy. Captain Redwing, are the helmet cameras working?”

“We want one of the little locks,” Cliff said.

These gigantic structures weren’t funny; they were daunting. The one ahead would easily pass Eros, and it wasn’t the largest.

Redwing, lightspeed delayed, barked on comm, “Cameras are working. Definition isn’t good. Keep talking, Fred. We’re lonely up here.”

Beth added, “And nobody’s coming out to greet us, either.”

The smallest hatch that seemed to be an air lock wasn’t a good choice. It was no bigger than a child. Cliff had picked one big enough to pass a couple of elephants, Beth judged. They brought the cart rovers down the ramp from Eros and lined up their cargo in front of the air lock. Their suits weighed lighter on them in the lesser grav.

Beth felt odd indeed, looking through two walls of faintly blue cliff to see … trees. Spindly black trunks, soft pink fronds, carrot-topped — but trees. They set to work opening the air lock.

Only they couldn’t.

For three days, they tried to find a way into the air lock. The task took all the gear they had in the lander. Beth got tired from lugging apparatus out to the working area, setting it up, trial testing, integrating, then listening to the arguments about the results.

People under stress, she observed, need to argue. It lets off steam.

The team looked for obvious controls in the window/walls, but the surfaces were translucent, smooth, unmarked. They were synthetic diamond, at a guess. Carbon, anyway. Mounted on a blue interior wall were odd protrusions that might be controls — “For something with big fingers, or clumsy,” Fred reported to SunSeeker, now half a lightspeed minute away. But on the outside there were no manual assists, nothing like a computer interface they could recognize, not a lever or a valve. In a way it made sense: defensive architecture.

They tested the cliff wall — a hard shell, rising straight up with a vacuum on one side and on the other an atmosphere. They could see the weather was heavy with sleeting rain the second day, and cloudy the next. Looking up the height of the transparent inner wall was like taking a cross section of the sky, with clouds sometimes stacked against it. Slowly winds blew the clouds around the enormous boundary of the butte. While the others labored, Beth and Cliff took time to watch the trees and soil and small darting things that flitted among the swaying trees. Something foxlike almost escaped a pouncing bird.…

An alien world. It was like standing on one side of a museum diorama, only they were in skin suits and packs. And the other side was a living world just doing its business.

Quick flitting birds like swallows, but much bigger. They were fast and sometimes flew in formations. Bright splashes of color amid snarled undergrowth looked like flowers with petals, but threw tendrils through the underbrush. Why? Trees of curious zigzag trunks and branches. Scampering slick-skinned blue gray things — like squirrels? same niche? — leaping on the ground and into trees. Odd angles in the tree limbs, gnarled things like nests or goiters, a broad-winged thing flapping through …

Howard kept making analogies to Earth life. Sometimes they worked, but other features made no immediate sense. Strange and wondrous. Gradually Howard stopped talking to Cliff and just made notes.

Redwing got irritated that they could not find a way in. He started giving orders in a stern tone. Eros’s crew stopped answering. People got prickly, Beth noticed without surprise.

Beth figured there was some signal they were supposed to give, but the blank, smooth, slick face of the air lock wall gave no clue about what to try. Here was the abstract problem of communicating with aliens, brought down to a concrete level.

Beams of particles, laser pulses, microwave antennas brought to within a meter — none made any difference, or provoked so much as a change of color in the eggshell blue wall.

The third day they were standing around the big microwave beamer they had hauled out, Beth with her gloved hands on her hips, gazing down in frustration at the rig, which had done nothing to the barrier. Fred said very calmly, “Something moving in there.”

They all turned and saw a big colorful creature walking out of the trees. Swaths of blue, yellow, and magenta seemed splashed over it in elaborate designs. A big narrow head, with a long nose between two large eyes, swiveled and watched with stately elegance. The native looked to be at least three meters tall and strode forward on legs that articulated gracefully, taking great long strides. Mouth like a stubby beak. Spindly long arms ending in complicated hands. It came forward quickly, carrying something tubular, and then three more like it appeared from the trees. They seemed to stroll, taking their time but covering ground quickly.

Beth stood absolutely still, but part of her realized that this would be the first remark at the sighting of intelligent aliens. She said quickly, “They’re … beautiful.”

“Birds,” Cliff said. “Those colors — they’re feathers.”

“Smart birds?” Fred asked.

“Hey, crows are smart,” Irma said. Then shrugged. “Somewhat.”

Howard Blaire just gaped at the Bird Folk, his gloved hands flat against the glassy surface. He’d run a semi-private zoo in Maryland on Earth. He’d collected animals too. He’d been something of a star, bringing weird animals onto television shows. Cliff had asked Redwing to revive him because he was familiar with varied environments and animal behavior.

They stood there for long minutes and the Bird Folk did just about the same, staring through the wall. They made quick, jerky movements with their two slender arms, moving their long necks sideways and jerking their beak-mouths. It was easy to see them as birds who had replaced wings with arms, but as well, they had a lightness and grace to their gait, an elegance of motion that recalled no creature of Earthly origin. Beth found this enchanting, a sort of dance she had never seen before.

The newcomers did not make any move to open the lock. After a while, Cliff poked a finger at Fred and Irma Michaelson. Irma was one of the recently revived crew, a plant biologist. “Go forward. Make hand gestures about opening the lock.”

The Bird Folk seemed excited when Fred and Irma approached, beaks flapping — but they did not answer the hand signals and gestures. They gawked. They talked to one another. They fingered the various burdens they carried on belts and vests.

Beth watched them closely — the humans were all recording visual and audio, of course — and decided the Bird Folk didn’t wear clothes at all beyond appliance wear like packs and belts. They had long swaths forming colorful patterns all over their bodies, particularly at the neck. Some wore what looked like headsets, or else ornamental hats. The backs of their heads had multicolored coxcombs of astounding profusion. Every one was different, with intricate bursts of color interwoven in rubbery pink combs, some nearly a meter long. They were tall, the biggest maybe 2.5 meters high.

Redwing’s voice said on comm, “Company. About time! Fred, keep me posted.” Fred didn’t answer.

More Bird Folk appeared, came forward, and seemed to talk to the others. Body language: strutting, bowing, fluffing of feathers. Plenty of beak flutter, speaking. Cliff reported, “We’ve got two species — at least two species — call them big and medium. Medium is still bigger than we are. Big defers to medium. Big carries sacks under the neck or on the ramp of its back.”

First contact was turning out to be entirely a spectator event.

They stopped using their beamers on the wall for fear that the Bird Folk would take it as an attack. So everybody stood there and looked.

Beth chuckled. They had come light-years, met an obviously intelligent species — and neither could do much but gawk.

The tension of it finally got to Cliff. “Let’s all go back inside. Maybe that’ll provoke them to do something.”

Beth thought this was a good idea; their suits were running low on reserves of air and power, anyway.

Nothing happened the next day, either. Some Bird Folk came and went, but came no closer to the lock.

The humans made a more elaborate camp: pressure tents, stores of water, microwave stoves. Maybe that would give the aliens some idea of how they lived, Beth thought. With guard duties assigned, someone was always watching the Bird Folk, capturing every move on video.

They all invented theories about why the Bird Folk did nothing — Captain Redwing had half a dozen — but without any way to check them, it seemed futile. So they had meetings and talked to Seeker and tried ideas.

More Bird Folk appeared. They formed loose ranks and stretched beyond view. Over a thousand of them, by Abduss’s camera-count. Irma wondered, “Maybe they don’t have much technology anymore? Or are they just the local animals?”

“They’re carrying things,” Abduss pointed out. “Not just the neck sacks. Those three Bigs are towing … what? Something big, five meters long. Made of metal, looks like.”

More waiting. More Bird Folk.

Cliff, mostly just to break the impasse, suggested they cut through the wall. Even diamond wouldn’t stand up to what they had for tools. Go straight through the outer door of the air lock. Maybe they could find and work interior controls.

There were objections, of course. This was a crucial moment; don’t make any moves that might be taken as aggressive. This view held sway for a full day, until Irma asked just how long they would wait, doing nothing. Until SunSeeker ran out of air? That would be centuries.

Biggest of all, there was the problem of cutting their way in. Nothing had worked before. So a team tried high-intensity gas lasers, tuned to an ultraviolet frequency that the air lock wall totally absorbed. It worked in trial runs, cutting in quickly, blowing off a carbon vapor.

They set up the laser outside the air lock. By now they had an extensive audience of Bird Folk. Beth felt uneasy working under their gaze. They just watched. Were they waiting for something? Certainly their steady stares implied a remarkable calm. Or, she reminded herself, a remarkably alien consciousness.

Redwing wondered on comm if this was some sort of test. Maybe the Bird Folk weren’t interested in strangers who couldn’t figure out how to get in?

They started in the middle of the outer lock door. As they worked, their acoustic detectors on the lock picked up a hissing sound. The Bird Folk were filling it with air! Celebration!

… but the lock did not open. What did this mean? The Bird Folk just looked at them, eyes glittering. Beak-mouths working. Even some odd moves, like dancing.

Pressure in the lock, with vacuum outside, made the job more difficult. Nobody wanted the atmosphere jetting out suddenly. For safety, they built a chamber around where they wanted to cut, to hold the pressure. Then the laser punched all the way through.

Through their first cut they slid a small pipe, just to sample air. Breathable, barely — high in CO2, warm, a bit lower in oxygen, humid and with minor differences from Earth’s. Had the aliens figured out human tolerances? That seemed unlikely. But the molecular ratios fit the measurements SunSeeker had made in its first studies.

“Earth’s oxygen level is as high as it can be without igniting spontaneous fires in summers,” Howard said. “Maybe biospheres generally run up to that limit, then stop — or else they burn themselves back to our levels.”

“Never thought of it that way,” Beth said, her voice hushed. “This place stays warm all the time. Maybe that draws down the optimum oxy level a little.”

They were all in awe of this place, moving quietly, trying to take it all in.

Howard said, “The more I see, the less I know. Some of these plants and animals are clearly evolved from Earth. Some clearly aren’t. Cliff, I think this thing — Bowl — went to Earth and picked up some life-forms. The birds are a maybe. I’d need to see a skeleton. Cliff? Anyone? What do we do next?”

This was clearly the captain’s call, despite a lightspeed gap of four minutes. Redwing dithered; this was far outside his leadership skill set. They all finally got him to realize that they needed an exploratory plan. Some wanted to explore the Cupworld, at least enough to restore Seeker’s depleted stores. But they needed crew with the lander, too. The Bird Folk wouldn’t wait forever … would they?

Cliff won the draw to lead an exploring party through the door they would cut. As pilot, Beth stayed with the shuttle party. The two of them didn’t like this, but they were short of crew, and nobody else had the right mix of skills. Beth grimaced at Cliff, and they made it up to each other that night.

Or at least that was their excuse. Nobody wanted to admit being afraid.

NINE

They started the next morning — not that there were any sunrises here.

Cliff’s team were four men and Irma, all muscular and tall and athletic. Beth and Cliff did not like being more than a few meters from each other, but they overcame that.

They followed Greenwich Meridian morn, of course, because the sun never set on the British Empire and certainly not here; the reddish star always hung in the sky at midafternoon. The star’s jet was a furious neon line scratched across the sky, adding diffuse shadows. The eerie landscape confused their eyes and unsettled the mind.

They could not be sure if the Bird Folk slept, though Irma had compared camera runs and found that each did take a few hours of closed-eye time, still standing up. They never seemed to sit; maybe their knees locked. Nor did they fly.

Cliff had come to think of them as like ostriches. Far prettier and more graceful, but there was a similarity. Could such birds have built the Bowl?

The gas laser took three hours to eat through the outer lock door. On broad-beam, it then cut an arc big enough for humans to squeeze through. Cliff went first. He felt very vulnerable, hurried and impeded by his pressure suit, crawling through a hole not much bigger than his torso.

By then the laser was short on charge and overheating. The operators — two engineers, Lau Pin and Aybe — shut it down and worked over the gas chamber fittings, which were looking the worse for wear.

Irma passed him some gear, then wriggled through. Cliff watched the Bird Folk for reactions. The big ones nearby fluttered a little, stamping their big feet, then went back to their steady stares. Much rippling of feathers, glorious runs of color.

Irma was through, and Terry Gould was having some trouble. “Let’s move!”

Cliff felt alien eyes on his back as he got his five through the hole. Aybe came through, and Howard Blaire. Hustle, hustle, hustle. They had planned to put a plate over the round bore hole and let one of the party partake of the lock air. Getting set up for this, Cliff happened to look behind them.

The hole had changed. It was lopsided … and smaller.

He blinked some sweat from his eyes, smelled the sour flavor of the helmet. He had spent too much time inside. The hole still looked lopsided. As he watched, the rim of it wrinkled, changed color, crinkled at the edges and … grew. Inward.

Not diamond after all.

“Block it!” he cried, lunging at the hole.

They wedged some fittings into the gap. Abduss had a hand laser on his tool belt and he cut some more metal bars to jam the hole from the butte side. These stuck … then bent … and snapped in two and flew away with lethal force, bouncing like shrapnel around the air lock as the hole tightened further.

Howard cried, “Ow!”

“It’s self-repairing,” Beth called over the comm. “Get out — now!”

“Can’t — it’s already too small.” Cliff eyed the rate of closing. “It regrows just about as fast as we can cut it.”

They stood helplessly watching the wall ooze into place, like a liquid. The laser team struggled to get it back in operation, but —

“Too late.” Cliff stepped away from the narrowing hole. He scowled at the Bird Folk. “Why do I think they saw this coming? No wonder they didn’t look bothered.”

“They knew something else, too,” Beth said. He followed her pointing finger.

He hadn’t noticed the dust motes rising behind Eros. Cascades of white light came from everywhere.

“That dust. It’s been there, ticking at the corners of my eye,” Beth said. “More every minute.”

Until suddenly they were all glowing, as if bright sunlight were falling into the butte. Cliff heard shocked voices in his earphone, and Beth shouting, “Into the ship! Tananareve, you at least, get into Eros!”

Four of Beth’s team were still in the pressure box they’d built around the air lock’s wall. The fifth must be Tananareve, and she was running for Eros. She stopped when a hexagonal thing covered with lumpy protrusions rose through the Star Pit behind Eros.

Jets of ice white lowered the hexagon toward the floor of the butte.

Everybody was talking over comm — panic and anger and shouted orders that made no sense. Cliff watched the thing descend in the vacuum outside, tremendous compared to Eros. All happening only hundreds of meters away.

It might as well have been a light-year. The hole in the air lock kept narrowing, and the ship that looked like an assembly of boxes and rhomboids and coiled tubes settled down nearby. Out of it came a lumbering machine on wheels.

Soundless, the horror unfolded. The machine had a transparent cowling that looked like the atmospheric membrane, a shimmering pale blue balloon. Inside that sat three Bird Folk, working controls, staring at consoles that flitted across the walls in splashes of vibrant color. They moved with jittery intensity. Cliff made himself study the three and saw that they had different feather markings, and looked larger than the bigger variety on his side of the air lock. They moved with a lumbering, muscular purpose.

Three more of Beth’s team were free of the pressure box. Coiled tubes unwound on the wheeled tank. These reached Tananareve, caught her. They plucked her up none too gently and dropped her into a cargo hold behind the cabin. Arms reached for the other crew, yanked them up one by one, added them to the hold.

Then the tank rolled back toward its ship, up a ramp, and was gone. Just like that, Beth disappeared. Just like that.

Horror paralyzed him while his own crew still fought the hole’s steady closing. Nothing worked. Cliff watched but could think of nothing to do. Their shouts came through on comm. But he heard it all through a cottony buffer, the words hollow and refracting. Meaningless. He dimly realized that he was in a state of shock, numb, unable to process the events. Part of him had shut down.

The hole sealed itself up — a neat engineering trick, Cliff admitted distantly. He did not see the flicker of motion outside. Three tall Bird Folk were standing beside the air lock. They were of the third variety. They had the same markings as the ones in the crawler outside, and with a level, steely concentration they gazed impassively in at the humans.

Something thrummed up through his feet. He turned and on one of the lock walls a set of symbols flashed, rippled, changed in a cadence. He sensed a change in the pressure. Behind the three taller Bird Folk the crowd backed away, their leathery mouths working. The three were somebody important. Maybe a funeral guard …

“They’re going to open the inner lock door,” Irma said with an odd, flat calm.

Cliff said, “Aybe!” The man’s head jerked around, wide-eyed. “We’re going out the instant there’s room. Here, give me that hand laser.”

Someone called, “We shouldn’t make any fast moves. Just be — ”

“We’ll make a run for it,” Cliff said loudly. “Everybody, get all the gear you can into your packs.”

He had to try the laser himself. It worked, a brief flash. He watched the aliens. This was dangerous and he was in charge. But he was damned if he’d let his crew get scooped up like Beth.

What to do? He looked up into the bowers of the forest. Some looked dry. Last night’s rain was long gone.

“Burn the trees,” Cliff called. “No shots toward the birds.” The lock door somehow slid aside, though Cliff could see no housing it fed into. The door just shortened along one side. A puff of ivory fog swirled around it, humidity freezing out as it expanded. Cliff shouted “Stay together!” and was first through the opening.

The big Bird Folk, third variety, were twenty meters away. The Mediums and Bigs were edging back, giving them plenty of room. Cliff aimed the laser at the trees nearby and blew hot spots in them. They burst into licking, hungry flame.

The Bird Folk backed away, all of them, arms up in defensive gestures, legs stuttering in fast, short paces. Aybe helped the fire along with dried brush he snatched up. The rest of the crew copied him, moving to their left, behind Cliff. Irma was pulling Howard along.

The trees crackled and gave off plumes of oily smoke. Cliff heard high-pitched calls that he guessed came from the Bird Folk, but there was no time to think, only to run and shoot at the trees, keeping as many burning trunks between them and the Bird Folk as he could. Bowers in the trees exploded with muffled bangs, showering the air with sparks.

The aliens did not move fast. A breeze whipped down from the muggy sky and slid down the butte wall. It gushed out at the base, pushing the flames toward the Bird Folk. Cliff and Aybe formed a team, Cliff watching to be sure they did not get flanked, Aybe shooting at more trees, the others staying close. Inside their suits, they did not have to fight the smoke. Cliff could see legions of the Bird Folk staggering away from them, into the safety of the forest.

They kept on the move long after the Bird Folk had vanished in the growing firestorm. The land began to rise and they pushed on up it, getting enough height to see. The forest ran to the fuzzy distance. Nowhere were there any signs of a town or even a tall building. The fire had gathered momentum and now surged away from the butte wall. They had created a disaster.

Cliff was elated. Panting, the others grinned … except Howard, who sat like a sack of potatoes as soon as the rest stopped moving. Cliff finally had a chance to look at him. A three-inch sliver of metal protruded from Howard Blaire’s arm, through a slashed sleeve. Nasty and bloody — shrapnel from the attempt to block the closing hole.

Given his ripped suit, Howard was breathing local air already. Tananareve got his suit peeled down, extracted the metal shard — Howard refused even to wince — and stopped the bleeding. She had him patched within minutes with a “walking anesthetic” that would not impair his ability to move. Howard stayed silent through it all, looking at the many odd details of the flora and fauna, still doing his job. He even caught something like an insect with his free hand and held its buzzing body for inspection. “Big wings, eyes I don’t understand. It seems — ouch!” The creature shot away.

Cliff gave a hand signal and they gingerly opened their suits to the outside air. Fragrant with odd odors, thick, a bit sour — but the first natural air any of them had breathed in years.

Victory, of a sort. Cliff savored the moment.

He took time to pull the metal spar out of Howard’s arm. It stuck in the bone, then jerked loose. Irma had her medkit open; she handed him antibiotic gel, then superskin spray. They all pooled their medkits and made a selection. Howard asked, “Painkiller?”

Irma asked, “Could you still run? Wait, here’s a local anaesthetic.” She rubbed white cream generously over the bleeding wound.

Beth and the others were back there, probably captured by now. He tried not to think about that.

They pushed on. Howard was able to run with them, but he didn’t speak. He sweated a lot and seemed in shock. He’d been one of the last to be warmed up from the sleep. Cliff suspected he’d been hit with too much strangeness. Just like them all.

TEN

Beth’s team took positions to cover all directions. Tensely they waited and watched. Things were moving. They crouched at the edge of the great bare plain, their backs to the closed air locks.

The space above the Star Pit had become dusty, vague. Dust motes don’t behave that way in vacuum, floating, sparkling, drifting up in currents. Beth never noticed. She and the others were watching Cliff and his team in the air lock, still trapped, still trying to find controls they could work. Then — outside the pressure box, above the tremendous pit in the floor of the butte — space came alight.

All the motes were aglare, lighting Eros and the bottom of the butte and the line of air locks. Through the Star Pit rose a building, a skyscraper, a tremendous hexagonal prism festooned with coiled gray snakes. Metallic snakes. They began uncoiling. Some of them glared white at the head end. Others ended in grabbers, mechanical hands, clusters of nostrils that might be little rockets or sensors.

Beth and three others were inside the pressure box, up against the air lock wall. Tananareve was outside. A huge boxy thing was descending on them. “Look out!” Beth had time to call. “Get away from the Big Box!”

A look and a gasp, and Tananareve ran. Behind her the Big Box settled carefully. A wall in it split. A smaller wedge-shaped thing rolled out on tractor treads.

Consternation blared in her earphones. Beth turned around to see that the hole they’d burned through the aliens’ air lock was closing. The Wickramsinghs and Lau Pin were trying to jam stuff into it, blocking Cliff from climbing through. Shit! Howard Blaire started to try anyway, then pulled his arm and head out and hurled himself backwards as some of the blocking struts bent, then exploded.

A snaky arm from the tractor plucked Tananareve from the shadow of Eros and set her inside the Big Box. Another, much larger grab reached out of the bigger vehicle and closed around the human-built pressure box. Air puffed in momentary frost, and Beth felt the pressure change. She looked for the chance to escape, to run.

The crumpled pressure box had already risen too high. If she let go, she’d be killed. Like Beth herself, Mayra and Abduss and Lau Pin were clinging hard to whatever they could reach. The pressure box descended into a much larger cargo bin in the larger vessel.

Many of the walls in the alien ship were transparent, like thick, murky glass. Beth and the rest rolled or crawled out of the wrecked pressure vessel in time to see grapplers close on Eros and lift it against the Big Box’s hull. The thing was immensely strong.

The Big Box rose fast. In sudden hard and tilting thrust, Beth eased herself against the floor of the cargo bin, a smooth transparent surface covered with wedge protrusions so big that she had to wrap both arms around one.

Lau Pin’s voice rose above the general sounds of dismay. “Tananareve? Tana — Oh, shit.”

“Lau Pin? Where are you?”

“She rolled. We’re over … up against a wall. She’s out cold. Her arm’s broken, I’m pretty sure.”

Thrust eased. Vanished. They were falling. They clung to the tie-downs and waited.

ELEVEN

Beth shook herself, trying to keep track of time, at least.

She didn’t believe her in-suit displays. Days had passed.

Beth wrenched around, feeling sluggish. Bile slid up into her throat. She clenched, swallowed, forced it back down. Not the time to get sick.

She blinked at the passing scenery. Beneath her feet lay deep space, yawning vacuum. To the sides, slabs and beams and walls stretched away.

The back of the cup was sliding past. Occasional grapplers and other machinery came into view, some of it working. No living things, just robotic arms and, in the distance, locks. A weird, stressing vision.

She moved slowly. Her body felt numb, as though senses came through a filter. It took hours to get her crew together and make them work.

Fred recovered early. He watched passing scenery, mumbling notes to himself.

They spent the time taking care of Tananareve, and tying harnesses onto the lockdowns available on the walls. Nobody else had suffered anything but bruises and banged joints. Tananareve’s ulna was broken. She clenched her teeth and said little. They tried to set it and splint it, with dubious results. She had broken ribs, too, but there was little to be done about that. Mayra could inject painkillers through the suit. Tananareve fought it for a while, groaned, then went slack.

Meanwhile the Big Box rose behind the wok-shaped section of the Cupworld. Very little noise came through the walls of their chamber. Thrust came and went, with no sound of rocket motors. They must be moving by magnetic interaction, hovering so close to the cup that its curve was almost lost. They were close enough to make out hexagonal plates that made up the mirror, and tiny-looking motors on their backs, all mounted to a grid that seemed no thicker than spiderweb.

That trip was their first good chance to see anything of their tremendous prison. Stars shone in the hard black. Brute slabs of metal passed by. Clangs and grinding noises, usually with small jerks and electromagnetic noise.

A long series of plates passed by as they rose. These were a city block or larger on a side, with enormous arms to move the plate’s position. Beth felt that she was seeing the rear view of a giant array, devised to tilt the laminated wedges. Yet the huge areas were not thick. What could this be?

The mirror lands. They had seen those areas on their flight along the jet. Abduss had figured they reflected sunlight back onto the star’s hot spot, to boil the surface and drive the jet out. These plates, then, were able to tilt and yaw, adjusting the reflection of the mirrors on the other side from their Big Box elevator line. The whole array was like the smart telescopes Beth had seen, only not used to look at stars across interstellar distances. These drove their own sun through interstellar space.

The Big Box rumbled as it rose up the back of Cupworld, taking its time. Sometimes there was rattling thrust, sometimes not. The big alien Variety Three Bird Folk didn’t like heavy gravity, it seemed. No wonder, given their size.

They ate the food paste in their helmets, and thereafter went hungry. Not thirsty; the suits were made to recycle. They talked about food. They talked about whether they would starve. They wondered how much those huge aliens ate, and what they ate, and if humans could eat it, too. Occasional thumps, surges, rattles, hums. Mayra collected pictures of everything on her all-purpose phone, which had no reception, of course. She watched her team bear up.

Fred — was he watching everything? Or just wrapped within his own mind?

Nothing to do but look at one another and worry.

Their chronometers clocked four more days.

TWELVE

They slowed down as their adrenaline high faded. Cliff could feel the energy leak out of them. It left a sour taste in his mouth. They trotted, then walked. His own breath turned ragged, wheezing.

Cirrus clouds overhead fuzzed Wickramasingh’s Star into a gauzy reddish blur. Strange, layered forest lay in all directions. There were several decks to the high trees, separated by open air. Cliff wondered if these had evolved to allow the constant sunlight to reach separate layers as the tall trunks swayed in breezes. The oddly spray-topped trees were getting bigger as they moved over a ridge and down its slope. The trees were strange, often thick at the top and with rough bark.

He glimpsed plenty of birds flitting among the branches, and some very large, broad-winged ones hanging in the sky. Odd songs and squawks resounded in the high, thick canopy. At 0.8 g, it must be easier to stay aloft. Smaller birds flitted across the sky, too, in great chirruping flocks.

He suppressed the biologist in him and concentrated on seeing if they had pursuers. No sign of it, and the first two hours went without incident. All eyes surveyed the forest. Heads jerked at the sound of small things scrambling in the bushes. They were tense at first but slowly relaxed.

“We’ve got to live on the land,” Terry said at a break. “Conserve our supplies. Cliff, you’re the biologist. What can you see that we can eat?”

“Can’t tell at a glance, Terry. We need to do checks to see what here we can even digest. I’ve been looking for what’s chasing us.”

“Stay away from those aliens, right,” Aybe said. “We need to figure out what’s going on.”

Cliff had doubts as to what was possible, but kept quiet. This was a small group, and they had to learn to work together first, and stick to essentials. “How much food do we have?”

A quick inventory showed that he was carrying more than the others. They did carry gear that worked in concert, compact food, and not much else beyond personal gear, comm, and tool sets.

“Say, let’s hunt,” Irma said brightly. “I used to do that. Liked it.”

“Using what?” Terry’s expression told them he would not have expected her to be an outdoors type, though she was tall and strong. “Lasers take a while to recharge.”

Irma turned to show her hand-sized solar panel riding at her upper spine. “Mine’s already done recharging. Hunting is a good way to scope out the wildlife.”

“And vice versa,” Aybe the engineer said crisply.

“We should find water first,” Howard said, looking dry already, his clothes sweat-stained. His arm was healing fast and he showed few signs of any slowness. Vibrant health and response to treatment had been an essential in crew selection.

“We’re too easy to spot up here,” Cliff said, eyeing the horizon. “Water’s down below. Safer, anyway.”

They set off toward a denser stand of trees, using cover as they could, working down from the ridgeline. Irma insisted on taking the point position, hefting her laser intently, eyes jittery. After her came Aybe, and Cliff decided to give the man his own laser. He didn’t want to be the marksman and also have to scan the terrain, figuring things out as a biologist. As soon as he let go of the laser he felt downright naked, which was the point. Not having a weapon reminded him that he was not a hunter, but rather the wary, hunted stranger. They all were, but some didn’t know it yet.

Everyone seemed to accept Cliff as at least their temporary leader. It was best to appear pretty sure of yourself, he knew, so he did not share his own doubts.

So … What to do? Deal with the immediate. Learn, let time educate them all.

His first major decision came when he stumbled over a gnarled tree root and fell flat on his face. Getting up, tasting the sour taste of the soil here, he realized that he was tired. They all were.

His eyes felt grainy. “Let’s take a nap,” he said.

They groused a bit. Aybe was still pumped up with what Cliff judged to be adrenaline energy, but the others looked gray and drawn in the full daylight.

“How can we sleep in this glare?” Irma asked, fidgeting, ready to push on.

“In the shade.” Cliff said it flat and sure … and after a long moment, they accepted it.

Aybe said, “Let’s build a fire.”

“We could make some hot soup, tea,” Irma said, brightening.

Cliff shook his head. “The smoke will draw attention.”

Irma blinked. “From who? The aliens?”

Cliff nodded. “And maybe something else that we don’t know.”

“What’s our strategy here, then?” Aybe stood, hands on both hips. “Hide?”

“Yes. If we can.”

“For how long?”

That was the nub of it. “For now, yes. Get our bearings first. Then we’ll see.”

Aybe sniffed. “Not much of a strategy, I’d say.”

Cliff was tired, his back ached, and he didn’t want to deal with this now. “Luckily, you aren’t saying.”

Aybe shrugged and glowered. “What’s that mean?”

Cliff kept his voice mild. “We have to get oriented first.”

Aybe held the glower. “You’re giving plenty of orders here.”

Cliff sighed. He really was tired. “So I am. We’re in strange lands. I’m a biologist and the senior science officer in this team. Learn the life-forms first, find out what we’re dealing with — yeah, seems like a good strategy.”

“I don’t recall us electing you.”

Now Cliff shrugged. “This isn’t a constitutional convention.”

“I’ll say.” Aybe grimaced and opened his mouth to say more, and Irma broke in. “Running around here on our own, strange goddamn place, aliens, hell — where I come from, sounds like we’re cruising for a bruising.”

They all gave dry laughs and glanced at one another.

“Let’s get some rest, guys.” Irma looked at each of them in turn, beseeching.

Cliff nodded again. This issue wasn’t over, but it would keep. He might even remind them that he was first officer. Scientists didn’t pay much attention to chains of command usually, but this was not a lab.

Once they sat and ate, the momentum seeped out of them. They talked little and stared off into the distance — the forest that just felt strange and low valleys fuzzed by blue gray water and dust haze. The view was idyllic, still. A breeze blew through, aromatic and soft. Comforting. They were each still processing the dramatic events just past, trying to get some perspective. Too much had come at them too fast.

Then in the distance, Cliff saw a round blob high in the air. Dark, small, impossible to tell how far off even with zoom lenses. No discernible movement. He watched it for a while and wondered if it was some suspended artifact. Another mystery.

Cliff drank some water and curled up under some low hanging limbs. He conspicuously pulled his hat over his face. This was an important test, he sensed, peeking at them. They looked at one another once more. Irma shrugged. They settled in.

Cliff took the hat off and said, “Aybe, you up for taking the watch?”

“Uh, sure.” The lean, muscular man climbed up on a thick limb to improve his field of view.

The others laid out soon enough. Hats went on faces. Within minutes, somebody was snoring. The hard bright daylight remained.

He woke — two hours later, by his left eye watch — and sat up, disoriented. He had been dreaming of Beth, a jangled bunch of lurching images and a vague sense of threat offstage. Aybe was lying on the branch, head turned the other way. Cliff walked around and looked up at his face. Aybe’s eyelids fluttered and he jerked up. “I, I was — ”

“It’s okay. Sleeping rhythm’s going to be a problem for a while.”

They roused slowly. Howard still was gray, worn. Irma looked at his wound, and his eyelids fluttered with pain. In the enduring sunlight, they ate and drank and didn’t talk much. The air was dry and dusty and a breeze had kicked up dust clouds in the distance. Cliff wondered how anybody could figure out the weather here. There might be something like the Hadley circulation in the atmosphere, since the Cupworld wasn’t a perfect spherical surface — but the scales were immense. Surface gravity varied over the entire hemisphere, but not solar heating. He found it hard to think through the atmospheric dynamics. It seemed unlikely that Cupworld had seasons; no axial tilt. What carried moisture around, in what patterns? What happened to evolution, without the seasonal cycle?

He made them go downwind, slanting off the ridgeline. That way they could see whatever was interested in them, coming up ahead. Their rear guard could be pretty sure of no surprises — from animals, at least. The sapient aliens were after them with smart technology, so they could come from anywhere.

Out of the sky? Cliff gazed up into the gossamer blue bowl. Birds of many sizes flapped across the immensity. Their body designs were familiar, excellent examples of convergent evolution shaped by the laws of physics — but some were huge, oddly angular, and rode thermals until they vanished in puffy high clouds. He could not see the rest of Cupworld through the high white water haze, or the jet. No sign of industrial pollution, at least. The aliens were somewhere out there, looking for them. Their only advantage was the size of this place, its refuges.

They made their way down a valley, seeing nothing much. Yet the air of strangeness kept them uneasy, on guard. Cliff led by example — always looking around, keeping them from talking. That way they could let their ears do the advance warning.

Irma got it. “Think like we’re in Africa,” she said. “Lions around every corner.”

The two new guys, Howard Blaire and Terry Gould, seemed capable tech types, but with little field experience. They didn’t hike well, kept talking. Irma shushed them a lot. The trees got shorter, and on all sides were brown bushes and tall gray grass. Birds trilled and sang in the tree bowers and stopped whenever anybody spoke.

They crept carefully into the high grass. In the dry perpetual afternoon, the stalks rattled as they brushed by. Thirty meters in, Cliff sensed something moving up ahead.

He felt a cold adrenaline shock trickle down his spine, his chest tightening. They went to ground in tall grass and watched a bobbing, tawny spike move across their path at about twenty meters ahead. Cliff saw the spike — a tail? — turn and then stop, directly downwind of them. They all tensed.

Then it moved off again, faster, at an angle. Maybe they smelled funny to it. Or maybe, he thought, it was going to get some buddies.

Crossing the grass had been a mistake. Their lasers gave them control of a ten-meter perimeter, but that shrank to how far they could see in grass or dense forest. They all got edgy. They got out of there fast and headed partway up the side of the narrow valley, to get viewing range. They were still seeking water. Cliff had them do an inventory on the way.

He had chosen to fill out his backpack carry weight, fifteen kilos, with other gear. Luckily, he had guessed right, and brought a light sleeping bag and cooking equipment. He had left behind all the techy gadgets and gimmicks available in Seeker’s supplies for planetary landing. Most of those presumed a power supply and backups. One item he had found and brought was a pair of sturdy boots and, most important, spikes for climbing trees — or anything fairly soft. Light, foldable carboaluminum, they weighed little and clamped snugly around the boots. They popped out on a sharp heel-clinking command — smart tech, quite cute.

They moved carefully and kept down talk to a minimum, but they were basically city types, able to keep the expedition’s technology running. Not a bad group for this place, which was, after all, an enormous machine. Their attention wandered after the first hour.

Without warning, something like a wiry, fanged slick-skinned squirrel leaped down on Irma and tried to eat through her hat. Howard snatched off her hat by its brim and hurled it like discus. The squealing creature hung on until the hat landed in thorns, then dived into the briars and was gone.

Irma snatched at her hat as if it would fight back. She was flushed and trembling. “Why’d it do that?” she asked.

“It thought you looked like some tasty thing, I figure,” Cliff said. He wondered what that thing might be, but kept the thought to himself. “Or maybe he liked your hat.”

There were worried faces all around. He waved the matter away and changed the subject. “Try to listen for water. Or better, smell it.”

“Smell it?” Aybe frowned. “Water doesn’t smell.”

“Sure it does.” Aybe and Terry really were a bunch of office engineers and computer types, he thought, living out their lives indoors. And they had been inside for a long time. Good thing they didn’t have to learn to build a fire or make bows and arrows. Or at least, not yet.

Except Howard Blaire, who was grinning at Aybe. Howard had run a private zoo, and collected for it, too. A field guy, he’d know the smell of water. “It smells fresh, kind of,” he said.

They sniffed the air as they moved. Cliff wondered why they had seen no aircraft. It was the obvious way to search, and anyway, wasn’t there routine air commerce? Anywhere on Earth, they’d have seen commercial flights by now. He recalled a glorious week rafting through the Grand Canyon, when the only sign of civilization was contrails scratched across the deep blue.

But this place was alien, and they should learn from it. What had his mother used to say? Problems are just disguised opportunities. Sure, Mom.

Maybe the natives were afraid of aircraft puncturing their atmospheric cap? He filed the puzzle for future study and went back to scanning the woodland they moved through.

They were halfway across a clearing when something charged them.

Irma got off a shot at something that looked like a giant red badger. The shot didn’t slow it down much. Cliff and Irma both walked backwards fast. Without a word spoken, the other three ran for the trees.

Irma shot at it again, and Howard, but it didn’t seem to notice. It turned away from them — for Cliff.

His fingers itched for a laser, but instead he ran for the nearest tree. He jumped, clicked his heels in midair, and had his spikes dug into the tree bark before he thought about it. Then he was up and over, just as the badger clawed up at him. He could hear teeth snap behind him. It was a pretty nasty beast, all big teeth and claws and temper. Smelled bad, too.

Cliff scrambled out onto a thick limb and looked around. His team was intact, making for higher altitude. The badger hadn’t gone after Irma, not after she hit its muzzle with a laser bolt. Aybe had been light on his feet and was now far up a big tree.

They were spread out but safe. The badger jerked and snarled when Irma and Aybe gave it some encouragement to leave. Cliff could see the laser bolts spouting puffs of gray smoke from its fur. They could not get through the thick mat.

Impasse. It prowled around their base trees for hours, spitting mad. Their laser bolts made it angry, but it didn’t go away. Maybe it was used to a waiting game, Cliff mused. And didn’t like to climb trees.

The badger seemed mammal-like, but that was just appearances. Convergent evolution fitted life to niches. Like marsupials compared to placental mammals: similar forms but completely different physiology.

Finally, after much shouted talk, they started to quiet down. Fatigue, again. At least it was shady here. He took a deep, moist breath from the twilight air beneath the trees, and let himself relax. He could feel the tension ease from his back and legs. This was the first real rest he’d had since coming through the lock. A long time ago, yes. His stomach growled. He fetched out stiff blocks of protein/carb mix and munched them thoughtfully. Their taste burst with lemony richness in his mouth and he carefully let himself have a gulp of water. Ah.

Then, resting despite the badger, he heard this world. It buzzed (insects?) and barked (predator pack signaling, territory assertion?) and twanged (what the hell?). The symphony of life, singing strange in a colossal zoo …

He fell asleep without meaning to. And dreamed of Beth — dark images, fraught with lurid worry.