Bowl of Heaven

THIRTEEN

A Serf-One brought Memor a delicious skreekor, fragrant with the scent of its own fear. She ate it with lip-smacking pleasure while she watched the invaders.

The skreekor was an ample beast, about the size of the new invaders, but certainly far more tasty. This one was lightly spiced and big enough for a midwake meal, six or seven bites. It had been preserved by radiation; its taste was savory but slightly stale. It did not wriggle, in a final gesture of its knowledge of the right order of things. Memor paid no attention to the smaller bones that snapped as she ate. She would disgorge them later.

She’d wondered if the invaders could do magical things, tricks beyond known science. This was most unlikely. They had not presented any real problems, though the Folk had responded slowly. The aliens now seemed safely confined. One was injured or dying. Their gear was unfamiliar, but it seemed crude. They fumbled with their toys and jabbered endlessly. Primates always seemed to do that, as ancient Bowl records showed from similar adaptations of the four-limbed. In their simple forms, it made them easier to hunt, though they never seemed to learn that.

The group that escaped had shown not cleverness, but panic. Mere luck had aided them. But luck was occasional. No matter what their strange origins might be, their frenetic movements showed intelligences not able to deal with new elements. Or incapable of planning, an even worse sin. Perhaps, indeed, the only true sin.

They were dull creatures, as well. They had no coloration feathers — indeed, no feathers at all. Camouflage was therefore beyond them. How simple! From what odd world had they descended?

They seemed incapable of conveying meaning with even their elementary skin signals — and so incapable of nuanced speech. Talk from their wiggly mouths, and antic hand gestures, had to somehow suffice. The females displayed mammal signatures, bumps and curves, and lesser mass. Curious. How did sexual selection occur? Through such constricted pathways? What sour, diminished channels they used! And so tiny! Memor wondered how to teach them to speak the Tongue.

Of six Astronomers and twice that many Serf-Ones, only Memor had been trained in TransLanguage. She had long thought there would never be a chance to use her training. Vast time would pass before the world came near Target, where they expected to find their first intelligent species in many million-folds of time. Now Memor’s TransLanguage and neurological sensing arts would advance her prospects. Her pulse quickened agreeably.

The Target Folk were powerful; that much was obvious to any telescope array. But they had never shown interstellar ambitions, judging by the lack of visible fusion torch signatures near their star, or large constructions.

Still less likely was this startling appearance of visitors. Such were discussed in the Long Records, but none had come for a countless time. Until now, suddenly, from behind. A crafty approach. The Astronomers were plainly disconcerted by their drawing near. A vast failing, really. Yet now that Memor was female, all seemed somehow clearer. This was an opportunity!

But at first it was not Memor’s, for it had not been Memor’s watch for many, many Turns. Plus, she had been he in those times, and thus had less judgment. Yet she, in the racked torture of the Change, had seized the moment, banding with others of the Dancers, and so now could show her newfound abilities in judgment. This would surely help her career. The prospect warmed her, beyond the pleasure of anticipation. She was on the cusp of a great era; of that, she was sure.

Memor had been trained long and diligently in TransLanguage, because one of every generation must be educated, to pass on the skills. She’d never hoped to use those elaborate methods of transcending ordinary language, designed in antiquity for speaking with these Target species, these candidate Target Folk. The Bowl’s beamed transmissions at the approaching ship and at the Target had never been answered, but that did not reflect a failing of TransLanguage. There could be many reasons why the Target Folk did not reply.

Or … Were these aliens Target Folk at all? The thought struck her, apparently from her Undermind. She would have to trace its origin.

No doubt they might be from the Target sun, still scores of light-years ahead. Memor’s great heart thumped agreeably at the very idea — but their big ramship had come from behind the World. Unless, of course, they thought to conceal their origins. But Memor was sure routine Astronomer observations would have picked up their fusion plume, had they approached from the Target direction.

Call these chattering things something else for the moment, then. Call them Late Invaders.

There were feeds from cameras in Sector 1126. Memor watched in hope of learning more. A second group of Late Invaders was running loose there … but for five wakes they never came near a camera. Perhaps they were more clever than they seemed at first?

There must be living invaders in the big ramship, too. Memor watched it on her input screen as it now arced around the sun, shedding momentum, grasping its way forward with magnetic claws. She had wondered if it would come back, if it would attempt rescue of its small invaders. But in over five wakes, it did nothing but maintain its almost-orbit, thrusting a little against the pressure of stellar gas. Perhaps they were benign. For now.

Memor bristled her feathers, air humming richly through them in a darting pride-song, to match her thumping heart. Joy of life, that brings such opportunities.

She opened her Undermind, a narrow window for now. This could refresh her thinking. It was like a sudden shaft of crimson light, startling to her Overmind. She could feel thoughts and emotions wrestling endlessly there, combining and mating. A rich bed of vibrant murk. She thought of these roiling notions as a sort of food for her Overmind, endlessly wriggling. So different, so oceanic, as female …

Deftly she dipped in. Notions purred. Slick sounds keened at moist harmonies. Richness! She might need some new combination of previous ideas, properly cast in a pale glow of fresh scrutiny, to deal with this emerging situation. Perhaps she would even have to let the Undermind churn until it produced something fresh. That had happened seldom, but the possibility was exciting. Memor would come into her own then, her talents in demand. She could ride her Undermind to become perhaps even Overlord. Thus did Astronomers rise in the pyramid of status.

Moving the invaders was going to be tricky. She needed ideas there, yes. Memor wondered how long they could go without food. They couldn’t eat anything through those pressure shells, could they? Better to get them out of the vacuum.

And now the Serf-Ones were docking the Maintenance Craft. Carefully they worked, with much worried chatter, afraid of giving the slightest offense to their superiors. As was proper.

The invaders offered no resistance. There would have been no point, and this behavior showed some modicum of intelligence, plus that rarer quality, judgment. Compared to those who escaped, these might be a superior type of primate. If there were such among such a ragged, hairy species lacking any of the lushness that came from alluring feather discourse.

Three huge Astronomers surrounded them and urged them forward with stamping feet. That signal transcended language. The invaders moved, half carrying, half towing the injured one of their kind. They huddled close together, puny things overawed by the size of the Astronomers. Their anxious primate gestures gave them away.

Seven much smaller Serf-Ones went ahead of them through the air lock, carrying gear.

The invaders stopped moving on the other side, eyes agog — an expression of wonder common among many species. Perhaps they were startled by the contrast: grass and huge trees and vast flocks of wide-winged birds, all in microgravity. Memor saw that teams of Serf-Ones had set up a force-fence. Excellent. The invaders were properly imprisoned.

Now Memor sent an Astronomer off with a flock of Serf-Ones to fetch food. She instructed the crewperson carefully: They must find something of every kind. Skreekors, hairies, bugs, fruit, bark, grasses. No telling what these things might eat, though their amino acid composition was common in Bowl experience. Memor was aware that most life-forms were restricted in their diet, their environment, cycles of sleep and mating and feeding, heat and cold … a thousand things, but particularly diet. These creatures might starve to death no matter what she could do.

So Memor was eager to feed them, but also to teach them. She let her Undermind purr forward on ideas of how to do so. These poor creatures must learn something of her, and she of them, before they died in microgravity.

“Mayra,” Fred said, “did you get pictures of that chain of bubbles?”

Mayra looked at him. She said, “Buildings. Domes, but not just half spheres. We build that way too in lunar gravity. I snapped some pictures on my phone, but I thought you might have seen something.…”

Fred said, “I was too sick, and hungry. Didn’t notice.”

“Well, we followed a ridge after we passed the bubbles. You saw the ridge? It ran right here.”

Beth said, “It’s not going to matter. We’re fenced in. Do you suppose they’ll let us starve?”

“We’re in a garden. There must be something to eat. Rabbits?”

FOURTEEN

When Cliff awoke, Irma was sitting next to him, hat tilted, standing watch with concentration. She winked and said nothing.

It still felt funny waking up in this perpetual daylight. Humans had evolved in a daily rhythm, and the strangest thing about this place was its constancy. No sway of day and night, no dance of the hours. The sun stood still, a permanent glare in the sky. He could read nothing from the slant of sunshine, since it never varied, and he missed the sunsets of the California coast. Living in perpetual day was the ultimate jet lag; it never went away. He knew from Earthside experiments, done in preparation for starship building, that people in constant illumination tended to develop longer sleep cycles.

Above, the scratch across the sky that was the jet bristled with festering luminosities. He could see tiny hairlike threads slowly flex and turn amid the tossing motes that burned with furious energy. Was this what a galactic jet looked like up close? It was brightest near the star, cooling as it coasted outward toward the Knothole. The nearer jet reddened so it sent diffuse, pink shadows rippling among the leaves. Nothing as spectacular as a sunset, but intriguing and unsettling.

The badger had wandered off, Irma told him. They gave it an hour, though, in case it was lying in wait.

They set off again, more cranky than before, from the odd sleep they had managed to get. Like a clotted rain forest, the dense copse of slender trees enveloped them in moments, fronds and puffball clumps blotting out the sky. The soil was a soft loam, with little bushy understory. This reminded him of dry eucalyptus groves in California, still and aromatic and whispery. The smells were tangy, odd, not at all like the medicinal eucalypt aroma. Game paths laced through it, hard packed dirt with some brown droppings. He sniffed some; turds appeared to have a universal pungency. The same basic chemistry, he surmised.

And more than game could use these bare throughways. Or stalk parallel to them. He waved to the others and they angled away from the easy game paths, not without some grousing.

“Carnivores lie in wait along these,” he explained in a whisper. “We might look like tempting game.”

“We’re primates,” Howard shot back.

“And nothing ate monkeys in Africa?” he retorted.

When he started his fieldwork in grad school, he could barely tell raccoon tracks from bobcat. Now he knew earthly tracks and scat and had been automatically cataloging what he saw underfoot here. Alien tracks fell into the same general categories, hooved and padded and birdlike, but some had spindly hexagonals, which he could not fathom. Scat looked pretty much the same.

They saw some game, too. These were flickers of tawny flanks among the trees, glimpses of hides with natural camouflage that faded away into the hushed silence. Howard whispered that maybe they should shoot one.

“And carry it along?” Cliff answered. “We can hunt when we set up camp.”

“Near water,” Irma said. Cliff nodded.

They passed under a chattering locus in the high branches and stopped to gaze upward through binocs. “Monkeys,” Howard said. “Swinging around, with big tails.”

“Really?” Cliff recalled the barking bands at the San Diego Zoo and used his binocs to bring one of the quick shapes into focus. A rude purple throat display, huge yellowed teeth, darting small red eyes, but — “Yeah, kinda like monkeys, anyway. But not mammals, I’d say. No obvious genitalia. Can’t see teats, either.”

“So primates evolved here, too?” Howard let it trail off into a question.

“Maybe they’re just getting started,” Cliff said softly. He wondered if, given a few millions of years, these protomonkeys could overcome the aliens they had seen. Not likely. As soon as the primates became noticeable as competition, the smart aliens would prevail. Established forms usually had the advantage, and there was nothing automatically better about primates.

“Look down there,” Aybe whispered, pointing. A creek glinted green among the shade trees below.

They approached too fast, in Cliff’s opinion — he called out to them to hold back. Predators liked watering sites. This wasn’t Earth, where dawn and dusk were the natural hunting times, as herbivores came for a drink. Carnivores could be hunting any time at all.

But there was nothing waiting near the creek, so they all had a good long drink. It tasted cool and fine, and on impulse Cliff plunged his whole head in, glad to be free of the grit and sweat of the last few — days? There were no days here, he reminded himself. He would have to think of a new word.

He recalled a calculation Wickramsingh had done back on Seeker. Take the Earth and spread it into a bowl the size of this Cupworld and it would be maybe a centimeter thick. Here in the stream-cut hills, he could see cross sections of the land. The soil was a conglomerate, like coffee grounds peppered with chunky gray rock. No strata, of course. There had been no real geology here.

To get hills hundreds of meters tall, the Builders (he thought of them as deserving the capital) must have chewed up Jovian-size masses. They had transformed a whole solar system. That explained the absence of asteroids and other debris around the star. They’d had to be removed; otherwise they could’ve smacked into Cupworld later, punching an unfixable hole, draining the atmosphere. He had to stop thinking of their surroundings as being just a planet. It was … well, a vast contrivance. With all kinds of weirdness living in it. On it.

After resting above the creek, they followed it downhill. The creek bank revealed more conglomerate rocks, round yellowish balls fixed in grainy sand. Cliff wondered how the designers of this place had laid soil and water down on a huge, spinning carousel.

Plainly they had to put down some mass, a meter or two of rock or water, to keep out cosmic rays. But the scale … again and again he came back to the vastness of this place. The whole idea seemed both gargantuan and surrealistic — mute testimony to the deeply alien nature of its builders. Who — what — would do such a thing? Those birds? Somehow, he couldn’t see it. They didn’t seem that smart.

In a while they came to a dense spread of trees and within it found a lake. Flies buzzed around a thick margin of reeds, and they found no easy way to get to the water. Cliff wondered if he could take a swim in it. His skin itched. Maybe later.

A thing buzzed by his head. It had six wings, about the size of a sparrow. Maybe it played the role of dragonflies in freshwater wetlands, he guessed. Convergent adaptation. Willowlike trees hugged the shore, but taller and with twisted, helical trunks. Convergent evolution seemed to have led to pollinator plants, too — bigger stamens and longer, twisted pistils, but the same strategy. Shrubs somewhat like laurel sumac mingled with tall trees vaguely like closed cone pines. Still, some of the plants were bizarre, with canopies permanently pitched toward the star, and bunched leaves like parabolas. There were mosses, too, bryophytes, ferns.

Howard was whispering into his phone. He was loving this.

They camped, but still Cliff thought it a bad idea to light a fire. They slept again, badly, with Howard and Irma taking watch. Voices called in the woods — chirps, snorts, ominous grunts, buzzes and bellows, oddly pleasant trilling songs. Alien melodies.

They circled around the lake, keeping to bristly brush and trees. They were getting better at keeping a clear field of fire; the badger had taught them well. Three people covered while two moved, then the reverse. This meant eyes caught any reaction among the nearby foliage. They startled game but did not fire.

Sharp odors welled up from everywhere and peculiar fowl flitted noisily. They honked and sang and sometimes sounded like fire alarms. Cliff noted that there seemed to be plenty of small birds darting in and out of the bush branches, slipping their pointed snouts into the many long-tubed, sweet flowering plants. Never was there a species he could recognize, yet the patterns were recognizable. Sunbirds, hummingbirds, same strategy. When threatened, some fluffed up their feathers to make themselves look larger and barked odd calls — territorial defense as in most nectar-eaters, like orioles. Others had the sharp beaks of those who preyed on insects, like wrens or the short, triangular beaks of seed eaters like finches and sparrows. Evolution here had produced skills similar to those on Earth; he found this reassuring. In the lesser gravity, birds had apparently beaten out many land animals. They were bigger, too — fat and confident. Apparently a 10 percent or so difference in local g made a big change in the balance of living types.

He’d have to talk this through with Howard when they had the chance.

He had seen flying frogs leap from stream levels to high branches, flapping short distances on webbed legs. The predators of the high sky hovered long before they dived, able to sustain their altitude with big, slow-flapping wings. The insects here were bigger, too, for some reason, though with the same many-legged gaits as on Earth. This was indeed a different place — and how different, how truly alien, they could not fully know yet.

Plus, the smart bird aliens. Was he being narrow-minded at first, thinking smart birds unlikely? But of course, these were huge birdlike ones … and he had not seen any fly. Maybe they resembled ostriches who gave up flying and gained technology.

Howard held up a hand, pointed, hunkered down — they were getting better at hand signals.

Along a narrow stony beach lay some long reddish brown things like bulging crocodiles, lounging in the perpetual noon. They grunted as they moved. Their bodies were long and scaly, with a short, blunt snout. A lazy yawn showed many serrated yellow teeth.

“Those are for tearing chunks out of big prey,” Cliff whispered. “Our crocs dine on small fish, chickens, small pigs. These eat bigger things.”

“Let’s give them plenty room,” Irma said.

Aybe pointed. “But what’s — ?”

It rose out of the deeper dark water. A long neck uncurled upward with strands of weeds dripping from its flat, rubbery mouth. The brown eyes gleamed with wet curiosity as it looked at them, mildly interested but taking its slow time.

“An herbivore,” Cliff said, awed. “Like a…”

“Dinosaur,” Howard supplied. “What the hell kind of place is this?”

“Convergent evolution?” But that seemed unlikely, and he stepped back as the thing rose like a slippery mountain — dark with a white belly, legs like pillars, long slick neck and tiny head. “It is. It’s a … dinosaur,” Cliff said, a chill running through him. “From Earth. Has to be.”

Irma said, “The aliens, they stopped at Earth?”

“Must’ve sent ships, anyway. They must’ve picked up some of our — Earth’s — ecology,” Howard said as if entranced, eyes rapt, prophesying. “Like we were doing, bringing species alone in sleepstate — only more so.”

“It’s interested in us,” Aybe said, taking a step backwards.

“How do we know it’s not a meat eater?” Irma said.

“We don’t.” Terry turned to leave.

“Their native ecology here must been overrun with alien species. So … Cliff? It’s too good, this place, too like Earth. That’s why. They imported Earth life.”

“Maybe. Maybe,” Cliff said, grimacing. “Reassuring, isn’t it? If that’s the explanation.”

Irma backed away, too. “Let’s go.”

Cliff smiled. “Don’t miss the lesson. We can eat some things here, and it can eat us.”

“Y’know,” Irma said, “they could’ve just hauled some dinosaur eggs and other life here on ships, passing by our solar system, a long time ago.”

Cliff nodded, eyeing the massive, slow shape with fascination. It grunted. “So the Earth forms could’ve taken over parts of the Cupworld, and lasted this long.”

The huge thing sluggishly waded toward them, pausing to rip reeds and lily pads from the water and gulp them down. A muddy reek came from it on the soft wind. It was slow but steady, and Cliff motioned them to back away. “It’s a herbivore, I’d say, but interested in us.”

“Not for eating, though,” Howard said, “so why — ?”

“If it steps on you, what’s the difference?” Aybe was moving faster, towing a grunting Howard by his belt.

They got away from there. Irma led the way, in case some predator moved to block their exit. None did. They faded back into the forest.

Cliff now felt apprehensive. He realized that they had been taking this place as a pseudo-Earth, and indeed in many ways it was — but that also meant it held forms that summoned up in them ancient fears. None of them had seen dinosaurs except in movies, but the sight of one tapped also into a deep reservoir of primate vigilance.

Aybe said, “Now we know the trajectory of the Cupworld better. We extrapolated a naïve straight-line trajectory and folded in star motion, too. It may have been near Earth over sixty million years ago.”

“What’s ‘near’ mean?” Irma asked.

Aybe rolled his eyes as he calculated, adjusted his hat, shrugged. “Say, five light-years. How old was that dino back there, Cliff?”

“Maybe a hundred million years ago. I don’t recall the classification or the dates real well. I’m a field biologist.” Abruptly he laughed. “Didn’t think at the time I’d have any use for those paleontology classes.”

In a clearing, Irma automatically moved to their right flank and said, “Y’know, Earth wasn’t in the same place in the galaxy hundred million years ago. So Cupworld might’ve been following some different trajectory, not just some straight line from Earth to here.”

Howard said, “Right. Stars move a lot in that time.”

Irma kept a wary eye out, whispering, “Face it, we don’t have a clue what these aliens — the smart ones, I mean — are doing. Touring the galaxy on a slow boat? What kind of mind does that?”

“A slow mind,” Terry said. Cliff had noted that the man didn’t say much. When he did, it was well thought out. “Maybe an immortal one?”

“As a biologist,” Cliff said, “I kinda doubt that anything lives forever. Once you stop reproducing, the force of natural selection stops working. Traits that gave you short-term benefits come back to haunt you.”

Irma said, “But if you have biotech galore — ?”

“All bets are off,” Cliff admitted. “Maybe the Builders — that’s what I call them, the ones who made all this — lived pretty damn near forever. But Cupworld has been on its way for at least millions of years. Maybe even sixty million — that’s when the dinosaurs died.”

This sobered them all as they made their way upslope, keeping their eyes on the surrounding forest. Cliff recalled a training hike into the Ecuadorian rain forests he had taken while he worked on his doctorate. The instructor had told them that the three weeks they spent upriver of the Amazon would be “meet-yourself experiences,” and that seemed to capture a deep truth. Exploring made you know yourself better, like it or not. Self-knowledge is usually bad news.…

Without warning, a leathery thing the size of a greyhound came at the point man, Aybe. It ran quick and sure, as if it had preyed on something that looked like them before. Aybe shot it at a one-meter range, blowing a laser hole in its forehead. The big yellow eyes of the thing fluttered and it fell, kicking, rasping out a last breath. It looked like a reptilian dog, scaly and tough, with thick haunches and a powerful set of clamping jaws.

They stared at it. “Good shot,” Terry said.

Irma said brightly, “Let’s make a fire, roast up big chunks of meat.”

Cliff worried about detection, but didn’t stop them from gathering wood. Their amino acid scans had shown the basic same as Earth, and DNA had the same structure too. Maybe they were universal? An old folk song about moonshine cooking rang in his mind. Don’t use green or rotten wood, they’ll get you by the smoke.… “Don’t use fresh fallen branches,” he called out. “Look for dried-out ones.” Terry looked scornful at this, but others nodded. They had uneven woodland skills. Cliff still had to remind them often not to talk so much, a rule every field biologist knows.

Around the campfire — carefully set under dense leafy boughs, to capture and spread the billowing gray stink, which was nearly transparent — they set into the fresh roasted haunch meat with gusto. Terry wished for a good red wine to go with it, got some laughs.

They ate but were not sleepy. So they pushed on, looking for a safe water source, a spot with clear fields of fire. Nobody wanted to spend a sleep time in trees. But what was the alternative? Cliff was still wrestling with the problem of what to do, but he had to shush them after the meal, and that made him worry more. Leadership was a bitch, he decided. More like being a schoolmarm …

“Look, we’ve got to remember one big fact: These creatures don’t have any natural caution about us,” Cliff said as they made their way up a steep slope under spreading canopy trees of fat emerald fronds.

Aybe said, “Doesn’t that mean they’ll be easy to hunt?”

Cliff gave him a wry look. “Sure. But it also means the predators have no reason to fear us. Remember that.”

FIFTEEN

Memor decided to isolate her prisoners from the vast species richness of the World. Her Undermind provided the idea, and she instantly knew it was correct. She had watched the logics working in their moist, blue green connections, and understood the entire thought-chain.

The World’s wealth would stun them, surely. The blue green abundance would prove shameful to such primitives. They might even commit group suicide, humiliated beyond tolerance. Their cages she ordered made hospitable, but nothing more.

Further, her underlings saw that these small creatures found every avenue of escape blocked. Isolation was best, both for them and for scientific study. It was simple to devise transport to put them tens of millions of miles from natural air, water, vegetation, the ripe bounty of the World. Ancient records said something of the sort had worked well against the last invaders, rendering them compliant. Then again, she had to feed them.

She had found a good solution. The greenhouse was a series of verdant ledges set near the World’s axis of rotation and thrust. The Jet burned a searing injunction in its sky, pointing back at the Star. Sunny and mild, this was a unique preserve, a rightful richness that fed the Astronomers and gave them restful grounds for strolling and contemplation.

Surely, as the species that tended the course and the health of the World, and so provided for their servant species, Astronomers deserved such cloistered wealth. Since time immemorial, the plants that grew there, the animals and birds that lived on the plants and each other, had all been deftly altered to match microgravity. Such was the wisdom of the Ancients.

In this lush paradise, Memor allowed the Invaders some small latitude. She had not stripped the Invaders of their equipment, because she didn’t know what would kill them. No doubt some of their implements, so odd and crude, were sacred to them, or used for amusement. Very well; Memor was generous.

She and the other, lesser species watched to see if the Invaders would divest themselves of their pressure suits. They did strip the wounded one, but failed to learn from the experience. For some no doubt primitive reason, the rest remained dressed for vacuum when they went to sleep.

They slept twice as long as an Astronomer would have, and all woke more or less at once. Perhaps this was a species defense mechanism?

They stripped down then to a lower layer of cloth. So scrawny! Memor doubted they were hiding anything from her. More likely they kept themselves covered as a birth control measure, taming their primordial impulses. Or perhaps they used outer coverings to control temperature in an altogether wilder environment than the World’s. Lesser species of the World had similar mechanisms, and could even use simple tools.

Memor watched carefully as they designated a toilet area, and used it in turn. No sharing. Perhaps a status ritual? They tried various bits of what Memor had set for them as food, an elaborate crescent array that would serve as a biology lecture, too. They did not eat grass or bark or water weeds, but they did eat an amazing variety of higher protein content foods. Omnivores! Memor had once wondered if they could feed themselves at all. In the World there were species that could not; they needed servants who could process and serve food. Biology had many strange flowstreams.

Some of what they had were tiny cameras. Memor watched them making records of what they saw. They spent much of their effort recording the arrays of possible food sources. When she knew they used meat, and knives, she supplied whole carcasses; they photographed these and the dressed and cooked meat, too. Plants raw and peeled. Servitors and Memor herself.

Her lessers had returned with reports on the cell cultures harvested from the Late Invaders. The Late Invaders had similar methods of genomic patterning methods. Was DNA a universal, then? Memor knew that it was not. But they could come from one of the Seed Worlds the Ancients reportedly tried to fertilize.

Memor wondered if these Late Invaders could genetically engineer tools and machines not to degrade in a biosphere. The Ancients had bequeathed enzymes to synthesize devices, so the World grew apparatus needed by the Folk.

Turning sunlight and water into machines was the Higher Way, and these Late Invaders did not seem to have mastered that pathway to greatness. They might be able to edit genes, or transplant them to another crop; such was simple. But their devices did not have the elegant cast of grown apparatuses. So they quite probably ate simple foods, too, and lived lives of primitive needs. Yet built ramscoops.

Memor pondered this and decided to try fish. She ordered admitted to their ample cage some varieties with appropriate chemistries. No need to not be generous, after all. They should be made comfortable in their final days.

SIXTEEN

Coarse, smelly, wet soil stretched away, embedded in a gray metal mesh. You couldn’t call it the ground, Beth thought, not in almost zero gravity, not with a straight face. More like a sheet of stucco with plants growing in it. The stuff ran away from them in muddy sheets for what looked like thousands of kilometers.

She had climbed into one of the spindly, triangular trees and surveyed the landscape. The soaring fence was far off, tens of kilometers. Beth judged that it ran up as far as the plastic sky. “It’s as if they’ve imprisoned us in a dull, wet, brown Australia,” Mayra said. “Lots of room. Lots of space to hide.”

Abduss grumbled, “We’re about to starve to death, too.”

“Working on it,” his wife said, grinning.

Lau Pin said, “Let’s at least get out of these damn suits. We can do a better splint job on Tananareve.”

In the early, fractured talk the big one in charge identified itself as Astronomer — a rank, apparently. She — definitely a She, a slit wreathed by crimson feathers — used star charts and pictures to make the point, assisted by slowly pronounced words in their language of grunts, call, piping songs. The Fourth Variety of locals Beth called Porters. Like other varieties, they were feathered like flightless birds, but built more like lizards. Their limbs and toes were long and limber. In the near free fall here, they were still flightless, but they could leap long distances. The Astronomer, whose “close-name” was Memor, had shown them this right away. Beth thought this might have been some kind of display to instill submission; certainly the long, hooting calls Memor gave sounded joyous and dominant. Most of the other Astronomers wore harnesses, and used them for carrying.

The big Third Variety who led them was a hunter. Was the alien a he — or she? Where were the genitalia? Anus under the tail, just like Earth’s birds. Call it he, then — he carried a long-tubed gun and gleaming, curved knives. He looked like an efficient killer.

They never went past the fence. The Porters did the carrying. In short order they came straggling back with small corpses and bigger slabs of meat — and roots and fruit and grain and twigs, all gathered at the Astronaut’s direction.

The Astronomer had big, nimble four-fingered hands, though she wasn’t doing much with them. Porters did most of the work, and their long hands were dextrous too. They laid their loot in a pattern, a long arc, plants to the left, meat to the right. Swallowing saliva, stomach rumbling, Beth waited for them to finish.

The Porters backed away. The Astronomer came ambling forward, and she was huge. It amazed Beth that she could pick up such little things with her long, jerky arms: bunches of grain, a ravaged muskratlike corpse, a small globe that looked like a striped melon. The moving mountain picked up something and grunted or trilled, raised it toward her huge, thick-lipped mouth and made a warbling, keening sound — the same sound each time for that gesture.

“Eat?” Beth wondered aloud. The Astronomer made a deep bass sound. Gestured with an arm.

They were being taught.

Until Lau Pin snarled a curse, stalked forward under the Astronomer, and reached up.

People froze. Beth waited for him to die.

The Astronomer dropped the little melon.

Lau Pin caught the melon. He held it up and brandished a knife big enough for killing. “Melon. Knife.” He cut the melon, “Cut,” and bit into the slice. “Good,” he called back. Buried his face in the orange flesh. “Eat.” Lau Pin jogged back, turning his back on the Astronomer, and cut a slice for Tananareve. “Give. Eat,” he said, and she did.

They all did. Eagerly.

Each time Lau Pin spoke, the huge feathered Astronomer replied with a bellow and a gesture, his long fingers tracing curves in the air. Those might be easier to repeat than the sounds, Beth thought. She noticed that Tananareve was awake and paying rigid attention. Her hands moved in response to the Astronomer’s Sign language.

The Astronomers also included some called Astronauts, who seemed to be those who could patrol the vicinity of this place. They were big, lumbering sorts who barely noticed the humans. They hooted at one another in long, rolling calls.

But more important, the principal Astronomer had buckled her knees in what seemed to be good-bye, and gestured: She had left them their tools.

That seemed amazing to Beth. Lau Pin had used a knife and he still had it. That was reassuring. Beth tried something else.

She chose a slab of red meat — “Steak,” she pronounced it, optimistically — and set it on a rock. “Beamer,” she said, and held up a microwave projector. They’d tried to use it to cut through the wall of the aliens’ air lock. She plugged it into her backpack power. Turned low, it cooked the meat in a few seconds. They set the beamer aside, cut up the meat, and ate. Beth carefully plugged the beamer into its solar panel charger. The meat tasted wonderful and in her hunger she forgot about the alien.

Mayra and Fred, of course, were photographing everything with their cell phones, and now so was Lau Pin. Good. The power wouldn’t run out for months.

When they were finished, they still had the beamer. And several knives, Abduss’s gun, and the pressure suit helmets. We must look pretty harmless, Beth thought wonderingly. A matter of size?

Abduss stretched, yawned, and said, “I’m wiped.”

With her belly full, Beth suddenly felt the wave of exhaustion. She thought, Don’t be silly, it’s only … well, duh. The sun was at sunset, vertical to the glassy wall and horizontal to wet soil embedded in a coarse mesh, and it wasn’t going to set. Ever.

She called to the Astronaut, “Sleep,” and to her companions, “Sleep.”

Memor spoke a word. She watched, and when she saw her captives turn unresponsive, she turned toward the air lock. Beth tried to watch her, but her legs dragged. She felt soooo very tired.…

So did the others, she could see. It was logical. They were trapped, depressed, so took refuge in sleep. It made sense. Let their unconscious selves sort out all the new, strange, and alarming. No reason to fight it.

SEVENTEEN

They had a long slog through the rumpled hills. That took days. Without more understanding, they had no plan, no destination. They needed to learn. But without a goal, Cliff knew, morale would evaporate. Even fear, which was driving them now, would ebb.

When they got tired, Cliff called a rest. Nobody argued. They soaked their hats with water and put them over their faces, falling asleep instantly. Gratefully.

They stirred themselves nine hours later, but without breakfast. Food was short.

Cliff led by example, roving through the nearby copse of trees and bushes in search of edibles. There were plenty of berries and some fat leaves, but testing by taste was dangerous even on Earth.

But what choice did he have? He smelled them for sourness, tried a tongue touch, and if all seemed unthreatening, would bite in. Sometimes this worked with berries and the fat-leaved plants and he got a sweet burst of juice. Other candidates stung like mad and he quickly washed them away with water. He did this several times, returning with a hatful of berries or flavorful leaves. He made them memorize the plant features before eating. The others welcomed fresh food and some caught on, following him in his prowling. Irma was best at this.

The guys seemed to think that they were cut out for hunting. Howard and Terry said they had some experience. Cliff half listened to their bragging amid a discussion of guns. He had glimpsed something large in the bushes — a quick flash of brown hide, then a soft flurry that sounded like hooves, fading. If this had been Earth, he would have guessed it was a deer.

Howard and Terry went out together, making a show of it. Surprisingly, within an hour, they brought back something that looked like a large rabbity grazer, furry and with ears that pitched upward from the flat, level skull. Cliff looked at the odd ears that cupped skyward, and realized that they must be for hearing birds — diving predators, probably. He had never seen such an adaptation on Earth. It was testimony to how important flying was here.

Skinned, the critters had interesting skeletal structure and internal organs. Cliff sectioned them out and tried to understand how they worked. Odd fans of bones, lumpy organs with no apparent function. Some made sense, most not. He needed a real lab.…

They cooked the pseudo-rabbits over a small fire, taking care to keep it hot and show no smoke. Under some spreading canopy trees, the little smoke that did rise got trapped and spread, so they hoped nobody could see it at a distance. Cliff thought they needed their spirits lifted a bit, and warm food again did the job. The meat was tasty, dark and gamy, and very welcome. “See anything that looked like a deer?” he asked them.

Terry nodded. “How’d you know? Four-footed, at least, and meaty — but it had teeth.”

Howard added, “And antlers. Looked pretty weird. Kept sniffing the wind, like a predator. Looked like more trouble than it was worth.”

Aybe said, “We should save our lasers for defense, anyway. I thought we should have tracked and cooked that badger thing we shot before.”

“It looked hard to kill,” Cliff said. “And we were in a hurry.”

Aybe shot back, “And now we’re not.”

Cliff took a long breath of musky air. Might as well bring up the tough issues while they were all relaxed, bellies full. “Look, we’re wandering. We need an agenda.”

That brought on plenty of discussion but few ideas. He had expected that — they needed to vent. Anxiety came out as talk, rambling and vexed. Danger and hardship made for bad reasoning, but if he could defuse their frustrations, they could all then work better together. So they talked for a while, mostly hashing over we-shouldas and we-couldas, and finally Cliff said, “The past is prologue. What do we do next?”

“Find the others,” Howard shot back.

“How?” Cliff asked.

“Maybe make a link to SunSeeker.” Howard paused, obviously not having thought very far ahead. “They can maybe link to Beth.”

Cliff did not want to step all over anyone’s ideas; give and take was how you worked forward. He said carefully, “We don’t have anything that can reach SunSeeker.”

“How about our lasers?” Irma said. “If we could send a simple Morse message…” Her voice trailed off, seeing the difficulty of even locating the ship in a sky that never darkened.

Aybe saw how this was going, his eyes moving swiftly around their little circle, and said briskly, “First, figure out how this crazy place works. That will tell us how to get on top of our situation.”

Cliff agreed, but it was best to let the ideas come from others. As they tossed thoughts around, he wondered at his own developing social skills. His career had focused on technical abilities — mostly useless here — not management ones. Here he would have to get this little band through unknowable threats — much harder than just keeping employees happy, a task that had always bored him. But this was lots more interesting, and nobody else seemed to want to lead. None of the expedition’s actual, official leaders were here. Though as someone had remarked in Leadership Training, the important skills can’t be taught.

They kicked this around for a while and finally agreed to what Cliff thought was obvious, without his having to say a word. Good — but talk took time, and he doubted they had a lot of time to spare.

The next two Earth days, they spent moving warily across the strange yet oddly familiar landscape. Trees with limb decks, zigzag trunks, spirals — on low hills with running streams and shallow arroyos. Cliff kept track of how long they all slept and found it was steadily increasing.

Irma commented on this. “Y’know, they did Earthside experiments while preparing for starship life. People under constant illumination had sleep–wake cycles that got longer and longer. Without the sun, they lost track of time.”

Terry said, “So that’s why shipboard lighting follows the sun cycle.”

Aybe asked Cliff, “How does anything get regulated here, then?”

“I don’t know. Biology without outside timing, no day or night — we have no experience with that.”

They hunted small game, using spears they made — and got nothing bigger than the pseudo-rabbits. Still, it was fun and they celebrated their rare victories with ragged cheers. They were urban types, and the skills of stalking came hard. Maybe it helped that the rabbity grazers were used to attacks from the sky, so were less adapted to ground predators.

But there had to be intelligent life somewhere here. They could see fields in the distance — great plains of crops stretching between the forks of two converging river valleys. Grass crops, Cliff guessed. They worked their way closer, staying in the hills and staying within the trees. Still, Cliff was startled when they came up behind a few silent, trudging figures. Not human.

“Careful,” Cliff whispered. They crouched down.

The shapes were crossing a foggy slope ripe with thick aromas. Out of the mist came shambling shadows, slow and silent. Cliff switched his distance specs to infrared to isolate movements against the pale background and found the figures too cool to be visible. In the mist they were ghostly, slim shapes. Legs, but no arms.

“The farmers?” Howard whispered.

“No.” Aybe peered closely at the ponderous, spindly forms. “Plants.”

“What?” Now Cliff heard the squish squish as limbs labored.

In the murky light, they watched as crusty pods popped from the trunks of great trees. Stubby limbs peeled away from their parents and found unsteady purchase on the ground. They were about two hands high and a mottled green. The slow, deliberate birth came moist and eerie in the quiet.

Cliff watched in awe. Working their stubby legs forward with grave slowness, the roots freshly pulled from soil and then moved onto wetter ground that enjoyed better sunlight. The air brought the scent of their sharp thorns to him, a tinge of acrid poison. The young needed defenses here.

They watched the animated seeds find new spots and with great, slow care settle down to take root again. To Cliff, this method extended animal mobility to plants, perhaps made easier in lower gravity. The others looked incredulous and uneasy, though Irma nodded when he advanced his idea. Certainly these plants were not dangerous, but their strangeness unsettled. Cliff realized that they had all been thinking of this place as mildly different, just the sort of world you would see in a movie, complete with dinosaurs. Reassuringly ordinary in just the right way. He had to guard against such comfy illusions.

They moved on warily. Soon they saw spreading below their hill a vast plain of green grain. A heady aroma blew up from the crops on winds that wrote sweeping patterns across the valley.

Irma pointed. “Look — those farmer folk we saw back at the lock.”

With time to observe, they could see the farmers were leathery at some joints but otherwise sported plumage that rippled with colors in intricate designs. Clad in loose-fitting coveralls, they formed teams that worked on snaking tubular watering systems, focusing the misty, arcing plumes over great distances. They worked hard in their fields, using four-footed animals to draw and plow.

“It’s like farming centuries ago,” Terry observed. “Hard work, very little powered machinery.”

“It’s not as though they can drill for oil, is it?” Aybe said.

“Plenty of solar power available,” Terry said. “And this has gotta be the most high-tech place in the universe.”

“Maybe they like manual work,” Howard said. He looked at their skeptical faces and shrugged. “Just because we’ve been living the rugged life for a while and find the idea unappealing doesn’t mean these things do.”

Irma raised skeptical eyebrows. “Could be, I suppose. But — ” She zoomed her vision and stared at the field below. “ — they’re coming.”

Cliff looked closer. “Not the farmers. Something else.”

Irma added, “Yeah. Fast.”

These were even bigger, with long necks — something like elongated, feathery racehorses that strode on two legs, with long wiry arms held forward for balance as they cantered. Plenty of rich plumage but a muscular look to them, especially in the legs. Clothed only at the middle, they had thick belts with things like tools dangling from them. As Cliff watched, one of them looked around and eerily looked right at him. It was running hard but held its head fixed, the eyes large and glittering. Not farmers, no.

“Looks like they’re about a klick away,” Terry said. “We must’ve hit some trip wire or detector.”

Cliff had wondered how this place could have developed different intelligent species. Specialization for labor or life niches? They probably had genetic technology, so maybe had developed new species from some early root genetics. Humanity had yet to do that.

Enough thinking; it was hard to avoid it, his head full of questions. The runners, he saw, were perceptibly closer.

“Let’s get going,” Cliff said, and did so.

The menacing pursuers were fast and far more than anybody wanted to fight. Terry led the way, running as if devils pursued him — and just maybe, Cliff realized, they did. Humans had invaded this biosphere unannounced. They had not surrendered meekly, but instead fled from the air lock. No negotiation. Now they were ranging around in somebody’s territory, killing local wildlife to eat. The farmers seemed peaceful and simple, but that couldn’t be the whole story here.

But could they outrun those things?

On the run they decided, amid hoarse, barked consultation, not to return along their earlier route. There seemed little shelter there. Instead they headed downhill from the next ridgeline. They had learned a long, loping stride that took advantage of the lower gravity. No sign of pursuit yet in the forest behind them. They stopped to listen — panting pretty loudly, then holding their breaths to hear.

A distant chippering cry. Beneath that, low growling. Coming closer. “And they know the territory,” Cliff whispered.

They ran. Nobody suggested negotiations.

They hurried into a broad, low valley of gnarled trees. Some bore fruit, and Cliff felt a pang of hunger as they ran through these. It was moist here and soon they heard the snarl of water over rapids. The river was broad and Cliff wondered whether they could ford it. He glanced left and right and saw a long arched bridge. “That way!” They all veered toward the bridge, puffing heavily now.

Terry, who had started off fast, now brought up the rear. Not a distance guy, Cliff thought, and knew that he wasn’t going to last much longer, either. He tried to think of something to do. Anything.

He studied the bridge as they slogged toward it. He could hear the high, skating cry clearly now. Closer.

The bridge was made of stone cemented together, very old style construction. On the underside, though, were thick metal beams, ribbed and with flanges at each side. Rugged.

They reached the foot of the bridge. Maybe the lighter gravity gave them some edge here, but it was all gone. He slowed, thinking frantically. Stopped. An idea flashed.

“Hey. Let — let’s hide.”

Aybe gave him a sharp you’re crazy look. Irma was so winded, she just bent over and gasped.

“We’ll get run down,” Cliff said. “I wouldn’t count on our lasers taking these things out, either — they’re big and look pretty damn tough to me. And … they’re clothed. Belts, tools. Maybe they’re armed, too.”

He let this sink in while he puffed, and now they could hear the cries behind them quite well. They all looked at one another, gasping, coughing, and finally Irma said, “I can’t go much more. Let’s try it.”

The men nodded, looking relieved. Good psychology, Cliff thought — they still felt that they had to protect the woman. He trotted around to the underside of the bridge and grabbed one of the ribs. He hadn’t really thought this through, but when he put his boots on the side flanges, he found they fit, barely. The others watched as he climbed up the ribs. He then turned carefully to face down toward the water that swirled and chattered over rocks. With some effort, he could strain back and support himself against the beam.

The others looked up at him doubtfully. Aybe said, “Hanging with both hands? We can’t use the lasers from there.”

Cliff called down, “What else can we do?”

That decided them. They inserted themselves into the nooks between the beam flanges and with some grunting got pinned into place. It was an effort and he could feel his arm muscles working hard.

“Hold on as long as we can,” Cliff said. The chippering was close. “Quiet.”

Pounding of heavy feet. Growls from deep guts, wild shrieks, quick barks like commands. Thumps. Feet hammered at his back, or that’s how it felt, and most of them passed on. But then he heard a huffing from above, heavy long breaths. Feet padded around, slapping on stone. A rumbling bass grunt that seemed to go on forever. His stinging arm muscles had locked solid, his fingers trembling. The thing above wouldn’t leave. Maybe the pursuers had left one here to block their retreat?

He didn’t like this conclusion, but as moments crawled on he saw that it wouldn’t matter. Irma’s face was white with strain and Cliff wasn’t going to last much longer, either. At least they had caught their breath.

He didn’t dare whisper. Catching the eyes of the others, arrayed in the beam slots, he nodded down at the riverbank. They frowned, then got it. Cliff listened intently and caught footfalls above, a scraping that moved to the left of the bridge.

The stream splash might mask any noise they made. He nodded vigorously to them all and jumped down, landing as softly as he could. They followed as he moved to the right. Irma landed off balance, but Aybe caught her before she fell into the stream. Lasers at the ready, they ventured out from the bridge’s shadow.

The shape above came back toward the high stone railing. It towered above, a long snaky head looking across the river — and Irma hit it clean and sure with a long bolt. The head jerked, looked down at them with those big, glittering eyes — and toppled backwards. They raced around, got on the bridge — and stopped to gaze at the big thing.

A deep burn at the top of its skull trickled pale blood onto the stones. The eyes blinked, but the eyeballs did not move. Cliff unbuckled the belt from the thick waist and put it around his own. The tools were odd and heavy. He was tempted to take a look at them, but —

“What’ll we do with it?” Irma asked, beaming.

“Leave it,” Aybe said.

“This body will float away pretty quick if we toss it in,” Howard said.

They looked at one another and without a word lifted the body at several points. Getting it over the stony parapet was not as difficult as Cliff had expected. It was a bird, after all, something like a monster ostrich. They flung it over.

Irma said, “Its blood — I don’t think we can mop it up easily. There’s a lot.”

“Let’s get moving,” Aybe insisted.

“Which way?” Cliff asked mildly, scanning the far riverbank for movement.

Terry said, “Across — oh, I see.”

Cliff said, “They left this guy here to block our return. They’re probably trying to cut us off from those hills beyond and drive us back to the bridge. Pin us against the water.”

“So we stay on this side?” Irma asked. “Move downriver, say? At least it’s downhill.”

They looked at one another edgily and then all nodded. Collective decisions, Cliff realized, made it much easier to take if things went wrong later. Otherwise, they’d blame it all on him. They ran.

EIGHTEEN

Lau Pin hefted an eighteen-pound fish, turning it this way and that, inspecting it. A row of fins ran down each side, eleven on a side, diminishing toward the tail. Yet the fish looked odd, with ventral fins, long and wispy, narrow eyes, mottled green skin. “I’ll have to be careful,” he said. “Parasites.”

The Astronomer had left Lau Pin a ten-inch knife. He gutted and filleted the creature and cut it in slices. The flesh was pale, like a red snapper, Beth thought. There were angry red spots Lau Pin cut out. “I think I got them all,” he said. “Sushi? Or shall we start a fire?”

“Fire. Cook it,” Mayra said. “I do not feel lucky. It’s ugly.”

They broiled the meat on twigs. It was delicious, rich in oils and savory with a strange, tangy flavor. Spirits lifted and there were jokes about finding the right white wine to go with the fish. Or maybe margaritas all round? Beth was glad to get them in a good mood. The meetings with Memor had fascinated them all, but the brute fact was that they were prisoners listening to lectures. The thrill of contact with a real alien, telling them strange new views — even that had to fade. They were not idle scientists or philosophers. They had signed on to explore a new world, make a fresh home for humanity, to sail the stars. Their patience was limited.

Lau Pin rummaged through his tool belt and then gave a startled cry. “My beamer is live. It’s got signal.”

They gaped. He showed them that the signal light gleamed on his handheld communicator. “It’s tuned to the Eros systems. I’m picking up data from its onboards.”

“Any internals?” Tananareve asked wanly.

“Just status reports. Everything looks normal. It’s on auto-standby.”

“We must be somehow in line of sight,” Tananareve said.

Lau Pin scowled skeptically. “We’re an astronomical unit away from it, easily. This Bowl is huge. How could we hear from it?”

Beth felt a surge of hope. “It’s a smart system. If Eros doesn’t get pinged for a while, it must amp its transmission power to get a response. Maybe Cliff’s group can get it, too.”

“If we can negotiate our way out of here, we can use homing to find Eros,” Tananareve said.

“Yes, great.” Beth made herself sound more optimistic than she felt. They had last seen Eros crushed into a bin in a Bird Folk spacecraft. “Lau Pin, can we use your beamer to send signals from Eros to SunSeeker?”

Lau Pin worked on it for moments, staring intently at the small solar-powered beamer that was barely larger than his thumb. “I’m trying the 14.4 gigahertz band, then the subs.… No, I can’t do over-commands from outside. Some kind of safety precaution.”

Abduss growled with frustration. They all looked crestfallen.

Beth couldn’t let that continue. Best to distract them. “Let’s review what we’ve learned, class,” she said with a smile. “Mayra?”

The normally quiet woman blinked and nodded. “When Memor brought those visuals — big constructs, dazzling perspectives — I got a feeling that she did that partly to impress us. You know, show the visitors some flashy capabilities.”

Lau Pin said, “I like that it — okay, she — uses voice and gestures. Easier to remember that way.”

Mayra said, “I liked those visuals it gave us on that screen. One was some kind of macroengineering in a planetary belt. I’ll bet that was their history. How they built this place.”

“She’s using those as attention getters,” Beth said. “Then she showed us those 3-D keyboards. I think she wants us to manipulate display machines. Only — she just spoke to them.”

Mayra asked, “So you think she wants us to learn their language, by picking up how to instruct those 3Ds?”

Lau Pin waved this away. “Maybe. Those images it showed us could be fauxtography, too. A phony story. Distractions, anyway. We’ve got to escape, not just sit and learn language.”

Beth nodded. She liked the wildlife around them, wanted to learn about it — and Cliff would love it, might be loving it now — but — “Right. Our bones are getting worse as we speak. We’ve got to get back to gravity.”

Cliff’s troop were doing badly on the basics: sleep and food. After crossing broad grasslands with clumps of trees for shade, they had seen no game worth pursuing for the better part of an Earth day. Some berries helped, and they found fresh water, a tinkling clear stream without signs of fish.

Following protocols, Irma went upstream and provided cover guard. The four men slipped into the cool waters gratefully. For several days they had all had intermittent dysentery and all needed to soak, a morale booster. In the first days, they had added a chloride pill to the drinking water but now used a solar-powered UV source in the caps of their water bottles to sterilize it.

Something broad, ribbed, and horned scuttled into a burrow at the shore. It looked to Cliff like an oval-shaped turtle with a razor-sharp crest. The burrow reeked, repulsive and rank, so they let it go.

Howard floated in a small muddy pool. He lay slack, grinning widely. “Y’know, I’ve been thinking. I figure our getting the runs is from chirality.”

Aybe asked, “Chirality? Spin?”

Aybe was an engineer, right. “Direction of rotation of molecules. Handedness. When a molecule isn’t identical to its mirror image.” Howard didn’t talk much and kept getting hurt, which made him even more closemouthed, so Cliff listened carefully. “Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed and our amino acids are left-handed. I think some of the life here has molecules opposite-handed, versus what we know.”

“How?” Terry asked.

“Remember how, two sleeps back, you were all raving about how great that purple fruit tasted?”

Aybe grunted at the memory. “And got ravenously hungry again in an hour. Pretty much like Chinese food, as the cliché goes — then we all got diarrhea.”

“That’s why I’m always hungry?” Cliff asked. He wished they had the chirality gear in the SunSeeker landing supplies. They couldn’t bring everything on the first lander.

“We all are,” Howard said. “We’re moving cross-country, burning calories, but some of our food is going straight through us — and burning our guts some, too.”

“We cook the meat,” Terry said.

“Sure, but all the prior biochem work we had, back Earthside, can’t offset microbes no human ever met. Montezuma’s revenge, y’know.”

Cliff said, “That comes from microbial pathogens, different problem. I ran the DNA checks. This ecology uses the same basic double helix structure in everything I checked.”

“Sure, but on other planets, the accidents of evolution could make the proteins and sugars different. If this Bowl has been cruising along, sampling ecologies, then there may be whole ecologies here based on L-glucose rather than our D-glucose, and D-amino acids rather than our L-amino acids.”

Aybe shrugged. “Sick is sick.”

Howard glared. “So L-glucose is interesting because it tastes just about as sweet as D-glucose, but passes through the gastrointestinal system completely unmetabolized. Throw left- and right-handed ecologies together here, and every life-form in the food chain has to choose one isomeric biochemistry or the other. Fruit sugars, fructose, will behave the same way.”

Cliff recalled that Howard had been a media figure of sorts. He ran a semi-private preservation zoo in Siberia, after the climate warming ran wild there, exhaling methane. He’d never have left Earth if a disaster hadn’t wiped out his patch of land, animals and all. The mission planners put him in because SunSeeker carried the makings of a zoo, intended as an ecology for the colony. Some critters wouldn’t survive and most wouldn’t be revived right away, but Howard could handle them. He and Aybe were butting heads for a bit until Cliff held up a hand.

“That explains why we get the runs? How sure is that?” Cliff said. “I thought I’d seen all the problems when I did that air sampling as we came through the air lock.”

“Biology never rests.” As if to illustrate, Howard slapped at gnats that swarmed around his eyes. “Better if we learned what’s got our handedness and what doesn’t.” Howard held up his phone. “I’ve got notes in here, beginnings of a menu.”

Cliff clapped him on the back. “Good stuff. You’re the food guide now.”

It made him glad to get some clarity on an issue they’d shied away from. Just talking about it and making rude jokes helped. Irma came ambling back and laughed, too.

Howard finally said, “Meat’s the best for us. Kills a lot of nasty stuff. Let’s find some.”

“Where?” Aybe asked.

“Look to all points of the compass.”

“Compass doesn’t work here,” Terry pointed out, and they moved on, following the stream.

At a rest stop hours later under some zigzag trees, Cliff wanted to get some game into their bellies and sleep, so when Howard pointed silently into the distance, they all crouched down and peered through their binocs.

“Looks like a squashed ape,” Irma said. “Meaty.”

It had a gray pelt and walked with a swaying motion, hips throwing the legs forward. A narrow head kept wary watch, and it was coming toward them.

“At least two meters high,” Aybe judged.

“Plenty of meat on it,” Howard said. His stomach growled.

“With that thick coat, lasers won’t be much good,” Terry said.

Irma said, “A head shot is tough, too. Look at those eye ridges — bony and not a large skull.”

“It’s not carrying anything in those hands. They look nearly like claws,” Howard said.

Cliff thought about killing a primate but … they were really hungry. He decided to say nothing.

“Let’s go to Howard’s points of the compass,” Aybe said, “and close in on it. Maybe get some spears?”

This zigzag tree had limbs that slanted backwards as the trunk angled left, then right. They cut off four limbs that were fairly straight and trimmed them down, sharpening their points with knives, searing the points hard with their lasers. They had all gotten quick and sure, handling their field gear, and the gray “ape” was only a hundred meters away when they circled through the tree line, working around it as it moved steadily on. The quarry looked around a lot but didn’t notice them.

On Cliff’s signal, they all closed in. The target was bigger than they were, he judged, by fifty kilos at least. It was watching the ground as they quietly edged closer. It climbed a short knoll and crouched down among the grassy tops. This helped shield them as they moved to within twenty meters of it. The quarry’s attention was focused on the ground and Terry, who edged up the slope, gave the hand signal to attack.

They ran up the slope with makeshift spears and the thing suddenly sprang up, eyes wide. Terry charged at it with a high-pitched yell and then suddenly stopped. “It’s got a tool kit!”

“Hold!” Cliff shouted. They stopped, spears still at the ready.

The creature drew out a slender instrument and pointed it at them.

“That a gun?” Aybe asked.

“Doesn’t look like one.”

Silence. Edgy foot shuffling. Cliff now saw their potential prey was not covered in gray fur but rather a formfitting garment of close woven cloth. From a distance it had looked like a pelt. It backed up, saw that it was surrounded, and crouched low. At its feet was a square opening, revealed by a hatch tilted back by a large handle. It had used the slender tool to unlock the thing, and the lid of turf swung wide open on a big, rugged hinge.

“It’s intelligent,” Terry said.

The creature stepped carefully over and took hold of the lid. It murmured something and gestured with its long, angular hands. They ended not in simple fingers but with an array of flexible, multi-jointed appendages.

Cliff dropped his spear and stepped closer. About a meter below in the hole was a complex mechanical array. As they watched each other warily, a slight rumble came from the ground, vibrating his boots. The creature bent down and tripped two flanges to a new setting, ignoring them.

It’s got to be pretty confident of itself, Cliff thought.

It swung the lid back into place with a thump that broke the strained silence. It put away the tool and held out its hands, appendages up. They were twice as long as human hands and fingers.

“Is that a peace gesture?” Irma asked.

Intelligence gleamed in the quickly shifting eyes. It focused on Irma and Howard, who were standing together. Slowly it walked toward them. They glanced at each other uncertainly, and Cliff said, “Stand aside.”

With what Cliff thought was supreme self-confidence, the thing walked past the humans and continued on its way. It did not even look back or seem concerned that they might follow it. They stood awhile and watched it walk into the distance with a dignified, measured pace.

When Cliff turned from watching it, Aybe had the lid up and was examining the space below. The rumble was louder with the lid off but soon faded away.

“This is interesting mechanical engineering,” Aybe said. “I could squeeze down in there and — ”

“I’m hungry,” Terry said. “I was already figuring out how to roast that thing.”

“Can’t eat a smart alien,” Irma said tersely.

“I suppose not,” Terry allowed with a nod.

Cliff thought, People do on Earth … even primates. But said nothing.

They went back to the stream and managed to catch one of the oval turtles with the razor-sharp crest. They were all in a bad mood. They hit it with a rock and roasted it over a spit. Cracking the shell, they found leathery meat sizzling from the fire and giving off heavenly aromas. Tough, but no one hesitated.

NINETEEN

A small set of rocky ruins lay downstream. Big stones cemented in place, no obviously advanced technology. They seemed abandoned. Cliff wondered at their age.

They skirted these, and the river broadened into a lake that smelled of sulfur. A swamp dominated one side and unfortunately it was theirs. They tried moving through it but the sour muck sucked at their every footstep. A hundred meters of this made them stop.

“Leaving prints in this muck makes it easier for them to track us,” Irma said.

Terry looked exhausted again. “Look, we can only run so long. We’re not trained for this.”

Cliff nodded. “There’s gotta be a better way.”

There was, but not easy. They found logs and lashed them together with vines and strips of bark from the rotting fallen trees. No high chippering cries from behind, but they worked quickly together. Their discipline was getting better; nobody spoke more than the minimum. Cliff thought to himself, The forest always has ears.

At 0.8 g, the raft didn’t have to be as strong as on Earth. Cliff and the men took off their belts to bind together the gray logs. The mud reeked and they were glad to cast off into the shallow lake. Paddling with some broad branches was slow, but they caught a breeze and the smell got better. Cliff set them facing all four directions in case anything came after them. He could tell from their faces that they were worrying. Only partway across did he recall the dinosaur-like thing that rose from the last lake they had seen. That thing could capsize them easily here. But nothing did. Fish splashed, making them all jumpy, but nothing more came. This lake wasn’t deep enough to support something like that.

They landed in a thin forest on the other shore, a kilometer away from the swamp. Wind was increasing, sighing through the trees. At Cliff’s orders — he was getting used to just making them clear and direct, when speed was crucial — they hauled the raft beyond view, into the wispy trees. Then he had them take a break. He needed a pause and they must, too.

They ate the pitifully small provisions they carried, maybe thirty grams each. Irma made a joke about losing the weight she didn’t need, and they all laughed ruefully. Soon enough, it wouldn’t be funny. Cliff could feel his overalls clinging to him because he was burning up his stored fat, always hungry. He wished they had time to stop and take a swim just to clean their clothes. But who knew what was in those murky waters?

So they pushed on — and found a wreck within minutes. They had seen rusting debris before, but this was different, fresher. It was a crashed light plane, made of light composites, its rear section crumpled. The passenger seats were two meters apart. A two-seater for giants, no bodies, one wing smashed to fragments. The engine had plunged out of the body and jammed into the sandy soil. Most of the fuselage was smooth, though, undamaged. Some sort of carbon composite, he judged.

Cliff again wondered why they had seen no aircraft. This wreck looked recent. Then it struck him — if a big aircraft fell, it might punch a hole through the entire structure, venting the life zone to vacuum. So only small aircraft were allowed. And not many of those.

Only a few hundred meters farther on, they stepped from the wispy forest onto a flat plain of sand. There were no hills visible in the distance through a shimmer of heat haze warping the perspectives. Warm tan sand simmering beneath the eternal sun. A steady breeze at their backs seemed to urge them into this desert.

“We sure can’t go slogging across that,” Terry said, his face sagging.

“But those nasties behind us…” Irma’s voice trailed away.

“We need to get some distance between them and us,” Howard said.

Cliff let them toss it around and then said, “I don’t like the idea of standing out nice and clear against a desert.” Not an idea, but true.

“We’re trapped!” Irma said angrily. She looked wan, worn.

Aybe kicked at the sand and knelt down and used his magnifying scoper on grains in his palm. “I thought this stuff felt odd. Look.”

They took turns peering at the grains. Cliff was surprised. “They’re all round,” he said.

“Manufactured,” Terry said. “Maybe condensed out of a hot silicon and oxygen mix in zero grav?”

“Could be,” Aybe said. “If you’re building this place in high vacuum, starting from scratch, you don’t have rivers and beaches to make sand.”

Cliff looked at the stretching expanses, as flat as the lake had been. What moved well on — ? And it came to him.

“Sand without edges has got to have less friction,” he said.

Irma looked at him. “Uh, so?”

“Less resistance to a sliding surface. Let’s make a … sail craft. Let the wind blow us across this desert.”

“What?” Aybe was aghast.

Irma snapped her fingers. “Remember that downed plane? We could use the airfoils, cobble something together.”

At first they were puzzled, then disbelieving, then — remembering their pursuers — grudgingly, they tried it.

They had to drag the cut-down body of it for hundreds of meters. Terry pried the damaged wing away, and they used the wheels to keep the thing rolling. Cliff had time to look through the tool belt he had taken off the alien body. That seemed now like many days ago. He knew this meant he was getting near his limits. That was now a bigger problem for them all — telling when an Earth day had gone by.

In his stupefied fumbling, he finally saw that most of the tools were alien wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers for pentagonal heads — and huge. Hard to use, but not impossible. One he couldn’t understand turned out to be a laser. He spotted it because it had leads to attach to a solar panel that unfolded. The gear was quite well designed.

It flared on with a virulent pop. Everybody cheered. They cut through the unneeded metal with its actinic beam, slicing elegantly thin lines. It took care and contortions to shape the body into something clean and usable.

They reconfigured it into a sand-sailboat, making the usable wing of the plane into a sail. They screwed that in place with their new tools.

Luck was with them: the wind was picking up, still howling at their backs.

They set off by pushing the fat-tire wheels into the sand and then letting the wing turn into the full wind. Cliff held his breath. If it failed, they were stuck, backs against the desert.

It failed. The wheels got stuck in grit and they had to lever them out of the sand, digging with their hands. Then, with them all crowded into the long passenger compartment, they got stuck again. Sighs, drawn faces.

Terry had another idea. Cut off the wheels. Let it be a true sailboat, running on its skin. Cliff was so tired by now, he really had no faith in anything but sleep. But he let Terry shear off the wheels and struts with the alien laser.

They got out of the boat’s body and pushed. Sand ground beneath it, the wind blew — and it started to gain speed. Cliff ran alongside, pushing with raw hands until it had some momentum. Only then did he call, “Pile in!”

They yelled and shouted and got inside with weary last energy. In a few minutes, Cliff looked back and could no longer see the tree line. The wind purred around their sail as it picked up. They were skating across a great sand lake with no idea of what lay ahead. Into the unknown.

So what else is new? Cliff asked himself, and fell fast asleep.