Bowl of Heaven

TWENTY

Tananareve stared at the shambling beast looming over her and made herself not cringe.

Keep your head held high, her mother’s spirit reminded her. She had to, anyway, because the alien towered over her like a mobile mountain.

This thing smelled, too. Its thick musk made her eyes water and she sneezed.

Memor had brought yet again an odd thing made of plasticlike, squeezable stuff. The vast beast set the thing before her and stepped on it. It squawked, hissed, then got up and walked around on stubby legs. A life-form? Now it ran off in a panicked, lurching gait, as if afraid.

Just the way I feel, she thought. Each time, Memor brought a little thing that surprised her a bit. But what did they mean? A calling card?

Memor made a resounding speech of woofs, yips, and growls. Plus the seemingly mandatory feather-fluffs, fan displays with suites of multicolored synchronization, and ruffles that sounded like whispery drumrolls. Tananareve got the drift — was she awake?

“Of course I am,” she said back, in words that sounded more like growls. This seemed to please it. Every meeting began this way, and Tananareve still hadn’t figured out why. Or the calling cards.

Haltingly, Tananareve asked Memor for help in finding food they could eat. She felt somewhat comic, mimicking the alien’s huffing, bass word-structures in her high, lilting notes. But her meaning got through somehow.

Memor bowed, a gravid gesture of understanding. The huge thing lumbered around, trumpeting orders to its lessers, trying to find leafy boughs that the human could try. She caught a combination of rough consonants that seemed to mean, “fodder for eaters of meat and grasses.” At least it apparently knew some organic chemistry.

She kept to the ropy vines Beth had settled her into for comfort. Tananareve felt safer here, too, lounging back among this aromatic wealth. Her dark skin blended into the shadows.

Anything was better than the awful rattling box they’d had to endure coming here. She had felt better from the moment they were shooed out of that by Godzilla-like birds.

The forest was oddly comforting. Plants here, adapted to near free fall, looked odd. The usual supporting structures were gone, so huge leaves and blooms hung in the 0.1 g from slender branches. Many had no obvious parallel to Earthly vegetation. They looked like slender spiderwebs with splashes of puffball decoration.

Serf-Ones, as the Astronomers called them, had been busy building an enclosure when the humans were harried into the Greenhouse, as they called it. The Serf-Ones inside the enclosure worked steadily but avoided people. Maybe they were scared of crushing the much smaller humans.

The atmosphere seemed to cling in her lungs, muggy and sweetly fragrant. After the ship’s carefully modulated air, it was pleasant, moist and not chilly. They were still in low gravity, though. The Bowl here had just enough spin that stuff tossed up would eventually settle.

The aliens thought big. Their enclosure was far larger than it needed to be. Of course, the entire Bowl exceeded any imaginable idea of limits. Should that tell them anything about the psychology of those who built it?

Tananareve noticed that Lau Pin was getting restless. He paced, climbed some of the thin, layered trees, got into arguments seemingly out of boredom. After several days of this, he announced that he was going to explore. He didn’t want company, either. Beth didn’t like that, but she had no real authority here. She wasn’t going to go herself, not with Tananareve injured and needing looking after.

She was trying to convince Abduss to go with Lau Pin when abruptly he just hiked away, not waiting. Beth shrugged and said with lifted eyebrows to the others, “Guess he just doesn’t like us.” Still, Tananareve knew that Beth worried. That was her nature.

Lau Pin was gone for well over a day. He returned (he admitted) when he started wondering if he could find the way back, even though he used slash marks on the large, barked trees to guide him. He reported finding nothing different, just endless vegetation. No hills taller than fifty meters, just enough to get streams to glide downhill. It was eerie, he said, watching a broad creek easing along over rocks, but not chuckling with the splashes it would have made on Earth. Low g did that, taking the zip out of life in odd little ways. He had never reached the turning back of their enclosure. Even in 0.1 g, the wall was too high to jump and its smooth lattice made climbing impossible. He guessed that the Serfs had dropped the tall, chicken-wire walls from some craft flying above. “It’s enormous, this cage they’ve stuck us in, at least tens of klicks across,” he said.

“Maybe they want us not to get claustrophobic?” Abduss suggested. “Living in the Bowl, maybe they’ve evolved to like room.”

“So we should, too?” Lau Pin rolled his eyes.

“Come on, Astronomers are huge. They need room,” Mayra said. “Fred, what do you — ?” Fred was glowering at one of the skyeyes hovering nearby. “Never mind.”

Fred Ojama wasn’t taking imprisonment well. He was withdrawn, sullen. In some ways, he was worse off than Tananareve.

Beth asked Lau Pin, “Were there more of those head-sized sensors floating around?”

Lau Pin grimaced. “Two followed me the whole way.”

Nobody liked the ever-watching spheres the size of a human head. They seemed to navigate by whispering jets. Lau Pin had studied them and found there was a strong magnetic field near them. Mag lift? Indeed, it was nearly a hundred times Earth’s surface magnetic field, running parallel to the ground here. Abduss guessed it might have to do with running the Bowl, perhaps helping stabilize it with magnetic pressure.

Tananareve listened to all this behind the soft insulation her meds gave her. She was content to lie back and observe through cottony air. There were plenty of vines that in small gravs didn’t bow in graceful catenary curves, but shot straight out. These connected to plants that were crowded layers of great broad leaves. The leaves were as big as Tananareve and firmly attached to barnacled branches. Those long limbs were so large, she could not see where the gradually thickening, dark brown wood ended. Among the green and brown leaves scampered and leaped many small creatures. They capered among odd long, pearly white strands as thick as her arm. These connected like spokes across the open spaces — lanes that cut through the thick green stands of web-trees. She could not figure out what the pale fibers were part of, unless it was some plant of enormous size, its details lost among the distant growths that lay along the big tunnels that brought light and air.

She suddenly saw that her whole mind-set was wrong here. This was not an Earthlike forest. The landscape is designed. Sculpted. But it looks like Earth’s nature preserves.

Memor sent a small underling into that tangle. It was a ferretlike thing with a big head and darting eyes. It fell from one leaf to another, slid down to a third, and landed on a catlike creature — which squashed like a pillow. With a shudder the prey died, provoking in Tananareve a pang of guilt. The cat-thing had wings and sleek orange fur. Her heart ached at the beauty of it.

Memor gruffed approval. With a few movements of its razor-claws, the ferret hunter skinned the cat and plucked off gobbets of meat and scampered to Tananareve with them. She bit her lip at the reek of the red gobbets, and pointed to the people tending their fire.

Tananareve watched as Memor’s minions snatched at tubular insects and crunched them with relish into a hash. They especially enjoyed ripping big fronds to shreds, picking out packets of ripe red seeds. Tananareve videotaped them at it, watched and learned.

One of the ferret-things brought her crimson bulbs that grew profusely in grapelike bunches. Memor reassured her with feather-fans of certainty that these were humanly digestible. She reached for some, and the bulbs hissed angrily as she plucked one loose. All bluster — the plant did nothing more as she bit in. She liked the rich, grainy taste. Far better than ship food, for sure.

The taste rode atop the bland dryness of the sedative she had taken. Here she was, in the most fascinating and terrifying moment of her life — and she was injured, dulled. Tananareve stopped herself from rubbing at her cracked ribs and her upper right arm, which throbbed from a nasty break. Nothing to be done about broken ribs except not move around, as Beth said, and risk jabbing a rib through a lung. Beth had splinted her arm quite deftly. Their emergency med kit gave her some pain relief, but that didn’t stop her restless mind.

She knew she wouldn’t be much use for a while, even with the quick heal salve Abduss applied to her aching arm. She hung relaxed in a secured bower of vines and plants and wondered how all this profuse life had evolved in near-zero gravity. Time to sit back, watch, and learn — which turned out to be, fathom what the alien called TransLanguage.

At university she had been good at the language game, learning French and Russian. Her secondary expedition job was to be alien translation. So now she had the job of dealing with the giant who identified itself as Memor — the name itself an approximation she had worked out to a sound like a bass humming, deep in its throat. She had imagined that, if they met aliens, there would be some orderly exchange of texts and recordings and, well, a method. Something like SETI messages, maybe, across a proper desk. Not here.

The other people were distracted, finding and choosing edibles, building a shelter, classifying Bird Folk varieties — which kept appearing to do work nearby, openly gawk, and flare their brilliant feather displays, rainbows of vibrant color. Squawking, too, in a language Memor dismissed with a gravelly grunt: unimportant.

Beth came to watch with her and change the dressings on her broken arm. “That bush over there smells like cooked meat,” Beth said. “Strange…”

They watched it uneasily. A ratlike thing as big as a dog but sporting an enlarged head came foraging by. Humans bothered it not at all. Beth pointed out that the animals here had no fear of humans because they had no experience. The rat-thing caught the meaty smell and slowed, tantalized. It lingered — and the bush popped. Spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away.

“A victory for the plants,” Beth said. “That rat will carry the seed, I’ll bet, until it dies.”

Tananareve said, “So then a fresh bush grows from the rat’s body. Smart.”

Memor approached, huffing and rumbling, and they both tried not to shrink from its size. It spoke and Tananareve translated to, “I, like you, have a meat tooth.”

Beth said, “Uh, charmed, I’m sure.”

“We try for you to find the eatables,” Tananareve translated again. She thanked Memor, and the mountain of flesh and rippling feathers seemed to bow at a sideways angle, lowering its arms and head.

Memor took them for a stroll in the awkward low g, explaining, gesturing with head and hands. It felt good to walk. All this helped improve Tananareve’s translating abilities. They passed by colonies of plants that clearly had a social life, communicating through pollen-sprays their needs and distresses.

Tananareve bit her lip and summoned up the courage to ask, “How do you … manage all this? Your … world-ship?”

Memor stopped and regarded them with big, solemn eyes. She spoke in long, rolling cadences and Tananareve struggled to translate. Her voice came in bursts as she got the meaning. “Fast learns, slow remembers. The quick and small instruct the slow and big by bringing change. The big and slow urges — dammit — call it constraint and constancy. Fast gets attention; slow has power. A robust system needs twice — I mean both. There is one great commandment: Stability is all.”

The sound of her voice was like stones rattling in a jug. Very large stones, boulders, in an immense jug.

Beth asked, “How old is this … world?”

After translations, Tananareve shrugged. “We don’t have the same time measures, but it’s old. I get the feeling Memor doesn’t want to say.”

“What’s it — okay, she — doing now?”

Tananareve looked up as Memor tilted her head back and went into the long trancelike state she had seen before. “I don’t know. She says it’s like talking to another part of her mind — that is, if I’m really getting the gist of her meaning.”

Memor wandered away, still in a daze.

Beth smiled and sat back into a conical bower of fleshy plants. “I’m amazed, just like all of us, at how fast you’ve learned.”

She gave Beth a quick, flinty look. Tananareve knew that her honey-toned Mississippi vowels made most crew members discount her. Talk that way, and people will knock twenty points off your apparent IQ, her mother had said. But she liked the soft, supple play of her accent, the stretched vowels and rounded consonants. “I’m even more so. Who would’ve thought that an alien language would have sentences at all? Much less, relating in a linear configuration with structures, a system?”

“And they’re not even mammals,” Beth mused. “I think.”

“I suppose, but we don’t really know. Kinda a hard subject to just bring up.” Tananareve frowned. “It was so easy to learn from Memor, just from pointing and acting out. Maybe the underlying chemistry and stuff doesn’t matter so much. I guess there are essentials in language after all. Not just in vocabulary and grammatical rules, but in their semantic swamps. Gad!”

“But you did it,” Beth said simply.

Tananareve shrugged. “Memor says she’s using ‘artful intelligences’ to help her. I suppose that means she’s computer linked.”

“Well, we don’t have that,” Beth said. “Maybe that’s necessary, to run a thing like this huge thing.”

“Could even our most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number-crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta stone? I doubt it.”

“Maybe they’ve met other aliens, learned something of how the whole galaxy talks.”

Sobering indeed, Tananareve thought.

“Still, it means we’re dealing with beings who have unseen resources,” Beth said.

“Hey, just the visible resources are incredible! Yeah, that may explain why Memor can teach me so well. She’s flexible. Nearly all human languages use either subject-object-verb order, or else subject-verb-object. Memor says she uses both, plus object-verb-subject, so she can adapt to us easily.”

Beth sat up quickly. “Something’s happening.”

Animals came fast, yelping, flitting through the nearby foliage. An insectlike thing fluttered by them. It was like a dragonfly whose wing sets moved at right angles to each other. A long-limbed jumping rat streaked by, using Beth’s head as a touchpoint, then gone. She flinched but managed not to cry out.

Then they both heard a long bass note sound through the bowers. Nearby, some of the long, thick white strands trembled. Something was tugging on them, sending low frequency waves ahead.

“Get down, cover up,” Tananareve whispered.

The deep note was louder. Or maybe it just sounded that way since everything else got suddenly quiet.

She looked down the long strands. They laced through the foliage with a clear path around them, almost like a tunnel in the air. Every hundred meters or so, they had an anchor on one of the thick, rough trunks.

A big hairy thing came into view from the distance. Fast. Spherical and ruddy, with six long legs or arms that moved with liquid grace. It flowed as if it were swimming, flicking long, thin legs out to pluck momentum from the white cables. Soundless. Tananareve judged it was ten meters across at least. A flying house.

She and Beth wrapped themselves away, but Tananareve left a slit open to watch the enormous creature pull and fly, pull and fly — zooming on by them with quick, nimble movements of the legs. It swept by, leaving a slight breeze with a prickly, acid aroma.

Then another. It looked the same, maybe slightly smaller, but even faster. Its legs sang with humming as they plucked, all a blur.

It followed the first around a far curve maybe a kilometer away. The sharp odor lingered.

The area around them was dead silent. Nothing moved. Slowly, slowly small rustlings started. The forest went back to business throughout the three-dimensional volume.

Beth whispered, “What was that?”

“A spider designed by an art deco mind.”

“I thought Memor was the top predator of this biosphere.”

“Me, too. But even we have bears and sharks.”

“What’ll we do?”

Tananareve thought to herself, Send not therefore asking for whom the bells toll. And if it starts ringing, start moving. “We’d better be getting on.”

Beth nodded, eyes big, face pale, and lips drawn. Tananareve was startled to see that Beth, who had always seemed to have rock-hard confidence, was scared.

TWENTY-ONE

The moist heat here felt like it could be cut into cubes and used to build a wall. Beth was glad to feel it. It wouldn’t be long before their clothes would get worn. At least there was a nearby stream running through so they could bathe and drink. Plus, the Astronomers let them make fire. She had wondered if Memor would intervene when they used the tools they wore around their waists, too, but apparently the immense aliens thought puny humans could do no real damage.

Damage, no. But maybe they could escape.

It had been several days since the huge spiderlike things came zooming through. Beth hadn’t been able to sleep well after that. Others remarked that the huge beasts — Abduss called them spidows — had ignored the humans. Maybe they weren’t predators at all, just large herbivores. But Beth had seen their bristly palps moving in a blur as they clutched the thick strands. It called up a fearful image of spiders that still made her shake.

Tananareve was healing quickly from the speed-heal salve Abduss had in his med store pack. But they were all getting restless, now that they had food and the basics. Mayra deftly climbed to the top of a particularly tall frond tree, lashing herself in with ply ropes when she got above a hundred meters’ height. She found feathered lizards that sported gorgeous fan plumage and could fly among trees, apparently evolved toward a monkey lifestyle. One variety she called mammoth monkeys. Like many things here, they were huge but not gorilla-like. They were shy, with attenuated, long arms and long torso, just built big and limber as a snake. They liked to swing on vines, apparently for amusement.

She could see farther from there, she reported, above most of the tree canopy.

Lau Pin and Mayra spent their time with heads together, inventing one scheme after another to escape. They even got Fred involved. His notions were crazier than theirs, but nothing stood up under examination.

Find if there’s some key to their enclosure, steal it. Only there didn’t seem to be anything obvious the serf breeds used to seal and unseal the boundary.

Find a way to fly away; in low gravity that should be pretty easy. But that wouldn’t get them out of their warm prison. It just meant they would be on their own, without the serf breeds to help them find food.

Surrender. Somehow. Already they were talking, sort of.

Lau Pin hotly objected to this view. “Should we sit here, as prisoners? We can explore a whole huge world out there!”

Tananareve said mildly, “How about those spidows?”

That sobered them all. Beth let their discussion run; it kept them busy and they might find a good idea. She got up to get some water from the daisy-cup cistern Lau Pin had made. Far up among the bowers, orange flashes arced and snapped from treetops into the gray, clouded sky. Only moments before, those clouds had been cheery, popcorn-white puffballs. Now they slid aside to reveal angry purple towers that tapered to infinity. Her hair stood up on her neck, and a warm wind tickled her hair, sure sign of air freighted with electricity. She turned to say something —

— and got knocked off her feet by percussive force. It felt like getting hit with a baseball bat and blinded by a virulent yellow flash. The others were sitting in the giant leaves and nearly got walloped by a felled tree that crashed through nearby. The air reeked of ozone. Small creatures lay around, some twisting and the others clearly dead.

None of Beth’s people was hurt, but they were certainly shaken. There had been no warning except the instant when she felt her neck hairs rising. She had always thought lightning struck golfers out on fairways swinging 4 irons to the sky, or farmers sitting on tractors in flat fields. Earthly lightning descended on anything taller than the rest of the landscape, like a sailboat on open water. But here she had been among trees and massive foliage.

Abduss said, “You were the only one of us standing.”

Beth frowned. “So?”

“Lau Pin measured a strong magnetic field here. We are on a spinning conductor that carries a strong field.”

Lau Pin snapped his fingers. “The same as a generator — a rotating magnetic field drives current. Charges move around on Earth because of that, so it’s the same for the Bowl.”

Abduss grinned. He always seemed happiest, Beth knew, when he was solving a puzzle. “Lightning is the celestial housekeeper, balancing out the overcharged land with the ionized top layer of the atmosphere.”

Beth said. “This came up through the ground, though.”

“Upside-down lightning, yes,” Abduss said thoughtfully. “Somehow opposite from our experience on Earth.”

“Upside down can still kill you,” Tananareve said. Goes with the territory.

They returned to the discussion. Tananareve repeated her remark about the spidows, and Beth said, “They get into this enclosure anyway. If we escape, we can just stay away from tunnels in the foliage. Back off if we see the spidow strands.”

They all nodded, but she could see they were grudging nods. Abduss made the point that they had now set up “housekeeping” here, had food and water and help from Memor’s servants. “Meanwhile, we know nothing whatever of Cliff’s group and of SunSeeker. They could be negotiating with the locals right now. Let’s wait. Give them a chance to make some progress.”

More talk as they ate some of a spongy, spherical fruit, and Abduss’s view emerged as the consensus. Beth had to admit there was some logic to it. “But we can negotiate, too.”

Tananareve said, “I’m getting better at translating. I’ll approach Memor about a deal. But what’s on our want list?”

In the way group decisions often occur, this was the signal to abandon escape plans. More talking to Memor got everyone off the hook. Their faces said they were glad to play for time. Escaping would be scary, and they had been scared plenty already.

TWENTY-TWO

The tiny primate learned quickly. Memor had the Serfs bring in a mindscan. This was an oddly compact version of the ancient devices. At her order, the techserfs had been working on it diligently since Memor summoned forth the customary device used by scholars, but scaled down to these small bipeds.

Here in the Greenhouse Terraces — a privileged verdant garden of vast natural wealth the size of the Old Continents — dwelled many vibrant, quite different creatures. The Astronomers had studied them since ancient long-gone eras of the Voyage. Their mental processes, as viewed in mindscans, told of the slow press of evolution even under the constant condition of the World. But now such crafts could aid in dealing with the Late Invaders — an idea that had come to Memor while letting her Undermind gush up into full view.

Memor persuaded the translator primate to enter the machine. Indeed, it — yes, she — seemed to like the prospect of leaving the corral. Serfs had erected the scan tunnel near the corral entrance, and the primate gazed about with quick interest at the technologies assembled.

Memor spoke warmly, using soothing tones and feather-fans of quiet resolve. Serfs attended the cautious Invader, chattering in their simple tongues, and soon all was ready.

The device worked surprisingly well. The Serfs had tested it against the arboreal simians, simple forms that were the nearest approximation to these Late Invader aliens. The primate female submitted to the device after being told that it would help the translations. False, of course. But useful, as so many passing illusions are when dealing with those less adroit. Memor sighed, a long, slow, and satisfying vibration it used to let its mind process data.

The scan revealed a brain startlingly different. Strange, yes — but Memor’s Undermind could see structural connections, similarities (primitive, to be sure) to the Astronomer-class minds honed by more Cycles than time could count.

The female disliked the incisive, magnetic lacing of the scan. Clearly so. She became uneasy, and with the Serfs attending to the process, Memor could see her anxieties forking like dendritic lightning fingers through a mind cloudy, veiled, mysterious. And … divided.

Memor experienced the exquisite tremor of an insight. An idea emerged fresh and flowering from her Undermind.

These awkward, tenuous aliens lived in a sort of middle scale. Their senses had evolved to perceive things on their own puny scale. Of course, they could not see bacteria, but they could sense minor dimensions. The larger scales of a world were beyond them, though — no doubt because they evolved on some gravitational mass, as Memor’s own ancestors had. They had a perceptual horizon limited by the curve of primitive worlds, seen at heights no more than their own stature. They must feel trapped here.

Still more shrunken was their sense of time. Typically they sensed the grind of orbital cycles, seasons, incessant day-night, the brute revolutions of planets. They lived in the mire of cyclic mechanics, sleeping and mating to the tick of some planetary clock. Slaves to time.

Memor had the Serfs interrogate the primate’s innate mind-time scales. They scampered about, using their instruments. The result was desperately plain.

The creature had a summing time of a few of its own eye-blinks, a trifling interval. It used that scale to integrate information. That meant that it could not delegate to its lesser parts the usual boring business of keeping itself alive. It had to keep incessant watch.

This was difficult to believe. The Folk had abandoned the drumming rhythm of short cycles long ago. That was the informing idea behind their pursuit of constancy — of freedom from the ticktock of early origins. Instead, the Folk dwelled on the eternal Quest through the Voyage.

This small, intense being was forced to worry about its housekeeping, such as digestion, excretion, even the intake and outblow of oxygen. Could it be so pointlessly busy? Difficult to know, but depressing to contemplate.

Such a short processing time meant that it could seldom spare computational power on issues beyond its own heart rate. It lived a poor, distracted life. Yet it had built a starship!

Did it even sense the gyre of evolution? Or of the World?

Memor pondered. Her Undermind worked, fretful and persistent as always, yet came forth with nothing. She inspected her Undermind workings, peeled back layers — yes, nothing. The Undermind was justly perplexed. So many questions remained!

Could these hairy bipeds fathom why their slavery to oscillations in dark and day made them primitive? Once even the Folk had submitted to such endless toils. But they had learned otherwise, had in the Deep Times built the World to escape such bondage to primitive cycles. In its way, this small thing represented the ancient past, brought forward by circumstance for Memor’s instruction.

When the alien came out of the scanning, Memor tried to get the female to speak. It was staggering a little, waving its small arms for balance. “I see you find our insightful machines a trial,” Memor said.

“You trying to pick my brains?” it — no, she; hard to remember; how could one tell? — shot back.

“I have analyzed your capabilities,” Memor said, which in a way was true.

“You goddamn smelly elephant-bird! You have no right — !”

Its noise carried little information. Hot-eyed fervor marked it, and even more its limbs whirled entertainingly, as if they were beset by breezes. The effect was comic. She had noticed this one was darker in hue than the others, which might mean it had spent more time in starglow, and so was older, and thus wiser. That was why Memor had selected her — hoping for a faint trace of wisdom in it. Futile, perhaps. But Memor did not know enough yet.

So Memor had the Serfs return it — her — to the scan. It squalled, of course.

Ah. Revelation dawned up from the Undermind. New data flowed into Memor, and she could see it working amid the low minions of her own mind. She could flick back and forth between her own mental understory and that of this Late Invader primate. A unique experience, laced with shadowy strangeness.

So … could she question the female while she was in the scan? She had never known this to be done, in all Astronomer history. Yet her Undermind pushed this concept up from its ripe swamps, and Memor saw the value of the idea. Onward, then.

The Serfs stood in awe as she called up the image-data, learning from it in quick bursts. She let the Undermind hold sway. Serfs could not of course understand, as they — indeed, nearly all of Creation — were all linear minds. Unified minds, yes — but with little Undermind. Serfs used a variant of linear thinking, just as did these Late Invaders, but apparently the Late Invaders had strengths Serfs did not. Certainly no Serf could have escaped from the traps laid for generic Invaders.

She scrutinized the alien brainscan with care. Hereditary neural equipment governed them. Primitive, indeed. Their minds were divided! Straight down the middle, a clear cleft. Most of Creation was so configured. Evolution had apparently used this often as an early, rudimentary precaution. The Folk shared this property as well, and it was common in this explored region of the galaxy, at least.

But there were new features here, as well. Simple forms of animals divided functions so that they could not interfere with basics, and so interrupt the fundamentals. Later, further up the evolutionary pyramid, various utilities like digestion, heartbeat, the underlying housekeeping — all became walled off in the mind, their work uninterrupted except in emergencies.

But some fundamental features of advanced minds were beyond these Late Invaders. Higher intelligence needed not mere utilitarian modes, but rather the creative ones. The source of cross-association, and thus ideas, had to be accessible. The Undermind was common to all sentient creatures — yet these primates could not see theirs! Only a mind unified at the upper levels, above the shop floor of bodily business, could have deep ideas, surely? Then a mind could manipulate them, force them on the twin forges of reason and intuition, into great leaps.

These aliens had no such ability. Their greatest drives, intuitions, associations — all lay concealed from their foreminds, the running agents and authorities of the immediate, thinking persona. They were primitives.

Yet they had built a starship.

Memor was shocked. In a while, she got control of herself and pondered. Interrogated her Undermind. Found no lurking answers. Perhaps the Undermind needed a rest. Often, sleep brought ideas.

TWENTY-THREE

Beth listened to Tananareve’s summary intently, brows furrowed. Better to hear it first and hash matters over, well before calling a group meeting.

“Incredible! They put you into some kind of device and then asked you to think about things?”

Tananareve shrugged. “A sort of CT device, I suppose. So I thought on command about astronomy, about SunSeeker, about what my left hand was doing while they put my right hand in cold water. Memor found it interesting, I guess.”

“Um. We have to use this.…”

Beth realized that she was acting instinctively like a leader now. Think, judge, act. That was what irked Lau Pin, she knew. But she intuited that the others didn’t want the sometimes impulsive, emotional, very young Lau Pin to take over. Too bad Lau Pin didn’t know that.

“It didn’t bother with the rest of your body?” Abduss asked intently. “No medical exam?”

“No, just that suffocating box with its foul scent. We had some of that in our physicals, remember?” Tananareve shuddered. “But this time — creepy, like snakes swarming over my skull.”

Mayra put an arm around Tananareve. “Maybe it was trying to improve translation?”

Tananareve snorted derisively. “I doubt it.”

“What did it feel like?”

Tananareve gazed off into the distance. “Like fingers in my head. I’d think something, then feel it slip away, as if something was … feeling it.”

“Um. Creepy.”

“You bet. Next time, if Memor does it again, I’ll deliberately think of something lurid. Just to poke at her.”

Beth started diplomatically, “I know how you feel, but that might provoke — ”

“Hey!” Lau Pin shouted, and came trotting over to the bower where the women sat, using the leafy enclosure to muffle their voices. His eyes danced. “I got a beamer signal — a message!”

“From Eros?” Tananareve asked.

“No, that’s what’s amazing. It carries SunSeeker’s bitcode. Message is loading now.”

Beth felt her pulse quicken. Lau Pin’s little beamer beeped and he put it to his ear. And scowled. Lips pressed into white lines, he handed it to Beth. “Captain Redwing. For. You.”

Redwing spoke rapidly in his usual growl, as if afraid the connection would drop out. She restarted the recorded message. “We saw the big electrical discharges up near the top of the Bowl. Filtered out the noise and found this beamer flag frequency. So if this works, here’s our situation: We can’t get much out of signaling the aliens. They acknowledged us, but they take their own sweet time about getting back to us when we transmit. We demanded your return. They say they’re learning our language ‘in person,’ so it’s more efficient to keep you. It’s just you, too, Beth. They won’t tell us anything about Cliff. So for now, try to transmit back. Beamers don’t have any real focus, but we’re now to the right of their star, as you see it, maybe thirty degrees. I’m focusing all our high-gigahertz-range antennas on that spot where the big electricals went off. We’re seeing flares, lightning the size of continents. Hope that didn’t fry you! Over and out.”

Beth smiled. The old-fashioned over and out was typical Redwing. To her surprise, she felt affection for the old hardnose. He butted his head at problems until they got solved.

She glanced at Lau Pin and saw it was time to mend fences. “Here, try to send. Tell him we’re okay but captive. Trying to talk to the aliens. Ask if there’s any chance they can send us supplies in one of the auto-landers?”

Lau Pin nodded and his mouth lost its irritation. “I’ll send some visuals, too,” he said. “Mayra? Mayra! Can I have your file of photographs? I’ll send mine also.”

“Sure,” Mayra said, and handed over her phone. “I don’t see what use he’ll get out of them.”

“Not him.” Lau Pin looked at Beth and said, “He’ll get Cliff sooner or later. We’ve been photographing what we can and can’t eat. Cliff’s party needs to know that.” His smile said, Why didn’t you think of that?

Cliff might have starved by now, she thought. Beth walked out into the middle of the little clearing they used as a gathering spot and called with more joy than she felt, “Hey, everybody! We caught a break.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Memor was puzzled. Only lowly beasts used divided minds. That was a known method of letting parts of the mind work separately, so that some efficiencies emerged from specialization. But it also meant that the mind could not function with all its many parts in the mix. That stunted split minds. This was conventional evolutionary theory, well verified by contact with many planets.

These Late Invaders had brains split into hemispheres that did not always interact. Yet they had built high technologies! Quite shocking. Some of them had even evaded the Folk, as well — a shock in itself. These affronts to both experience and even reason demanded explanation.

So Memor summoned the female she had tested before. Had she overlooked some essential clue? Perhaps another viewing of her divided mind in action, plus active simultaneous use of her Undermind, would reveal an insight.

To do this she had to do the necessary mental work first. Carefully, she isolated herself from the Serf breed chatter. First she withdrew, letting sight and sound drop away from her. Inner peace came, sliding slowly. The world fell away. Gingerly, to avoid startling the working elements of her mind, she opened the vistas within.

Into her higher levels swept ruminations galore. Some of these thoughts mixed senses, as the unruly Undermind often did. Liquid amber lightning shot through her Inmind with a sharp, bristly scent — and Memor knew she was amid the chemical swamp of associations. Buzzing red flaps peeled back to reveal punctured pathways.

She was ready. So prepared, she began inspecting the biped’s mental landscape. Alarm rang down its corridors.

She delved into this and felt something else, a sort of … memory. Only it came freighted with feelings of desire, moist expectation, flaring scents. She saw the female as if in a mirror, looking at her and yet — yes, it was locked in embrace with a large male. They were lunging at each other.

She shot a glance at the female, lying flat on the preceptor bed. She was agitated, moving her legs and hands, clasping herself —

Memor realized that she was showing Memor how her kind reproduced.

Then, unmistakably, she heard her cackling rise. Laughter, it must be. The biped was making fun of Memor.

She rocked back, red anger flaring. This tiny thing was jeering at her, using her mind to send the insult.

She let her Undermind deal with this fresh event. Soon soothing cadences passed through her, damping the prickly irritation into milder currents. As this happened, she saw that the biped was now back to a normal state. Perhaps it — she — felt that she had made her point, and was now calming down.

Very well. She would do the same. This had taught her something profound — the bipeds were quick-witted beyond their limitations. She must remember that her brain was as large as Memor’s own.

The biped spoke directly to her. “I want to go back to my friends now.”

Of course. These were social creatures, and she felt — she could see directly — fretful emotions down in her Undermind. The Late Invader female could not feel this clearly, though, because she could not directly see her own mind.

Instead, she sensed a vague unease. In such moments, apparently, she wanted the company of her kind. Now that Memor saw this, she understood with her Overmind the sense of it. Evolution had to converge on such social chemistries, on any world. Because more often than not, the most adaptable thing one could do to survive and reproduce was to be cooperative and altruistic. This knowledge was an Absolute, time honored and proved often in the enduring history of the Bowl. Evolution never slept, even in the great constancy of the World.

Memor answered her warmly, trying to defray her inner, vexing storms. These aliens showed much mental evolutionary selection. Whether this arose naturally or from their own genetic tailoring, she could not perceive. Their hidden Underminds were an adaptive unconscious that let them size up their world quickly, set goals, decide. Of course: these bipeds had evolved in a place where speed was vital. In contrast, the Folk prized long-term judgment, because they planned for a larger scale of time. These primates were a fresh, young species, untried.

Somehow the bipeds’ methods worked, even at the chemical maintenance level. Their minds worked largely out of view of their “running-selves,” the surface mind that thought it was in charge, simply because it could not see its own minions below. Indeed, she now recalled that this female had used an expression, once: “I just had an idea.”

That must mean that notions simply appeared in their Overminds. They had no concept of where the ideas came from. Worse, they could not go and find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds were barred to them.

Astounding! Yet it worked.

Still, the danger of this strategy was their lack of true awareness. These creatures were strangers to themselves. So they decided issues without knowing the true elements behind the decision. Perhaps they did not even know why they chose mates!

This implied a further thought.

Did they have more mental freedom than the Folk … or less? To mask the Undermind from view — could that convey some benefit? Even though it was clearly a fearsomely destabilizing element, as the ancient history of her species had shown? The Undermind could unleash vast passions that swept whole societies. Unless, of course, their deep natures could be seen and regulated.

She had never thought this of another intelligence — that there could be any advantage to concealing the Undermind. The question struck at the boundaries of the Folk, their superiority — even their freedom.

She knew that one must believe in free will, despite the ability to analyze the mind to great detail. This rule applied even to these aliens. Its logic was simple: If free will was then a reality, one had made the right choice. But if free will did not exist, one had still made no incorrect choice. One had made no choice at all, not having free will to do so.

In this, the Folk and the Invaders were equals.

These tiny creatures had a rich mental life, but it was actually deeper than they knew. They had no overlook, from which they could view the vast continents of the adaptive unconscious below. They did not see the sobering landscape of the mind in all its fervent glory.

In their curious vessel, they voyaged amid a ship environment surely unlike their natural world. Perhaps they had not considered building a Ship Star for proper exploration of the galaxy. Or more likely, they could not attempt it, and so set forth in simple machines. They were young and raw, willing to suffer.

Their situation was then tragic. They had launched forth into the stars with brains evolved to deal with a world that bore only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in their present, awkward mind-machinery.

Perhaps, then, their deaths would be a proper release from such unnatural tortures.

TWENTY-FIVE

The message from Redwing had given them a lift. But the mood faded before a clear, quick question: So what?

Lau Pin’s beamer couldn’t rouse SunSeeker. It was a long shot, of course — Redwing could focus a megawatt of 14.4-gigahertz power on them, but Lau Pin’s beamer, even fully charged, delivered only a watt or two of unfocused signal.

So they were stuck. Beth watched them react to this. Then Abduss produced his own miracle, after a desultory day of chores.

“I have a bit of joy here!” he called to them all. In his hand was one of the useful flasks the Serfs had given them for their own housekeeping. Now that they had established their chore routines of getting and preparing food, the usual details of a stationary life, they had time to amuse themselves as they wanted. So they assembled, not expecting much. Abduss passed around the little cups the Serfs had made for them, ladling into them a murky fluid. “Toast!” he said loudly.

They drank. “Moonshine!” Fred called.

Abduss looked hurt. “Wine. It is a wine I made from the esters of the fruit they give us.”

Lau Pin and Mayra both said, “Rotgut!” Mayra even hugged her belly in comic relief.

But they liked it anyway. Beth waved away her second cup and watched the others. They grimaced when they drank but that didn’t stop them, or their increasingly high-pitched laughter, the rude stories, obvious lies, raucous laughter, bright eyes. They needed release, after all that had happened. Alcohol was the easy road to all of that. Let this pass, she thought. She watched Fred Ojama, but he only grew more torpid. Presently he said, “I shouldn’t,” and set the cup aside.

The next morning most of them were hungover, griping and shaking their heads. They got their housekeeping jobs done and sat around and then the lumbering, smooth-feathered Serfs brought in cylindrical canisters, laying them at the feet of Mayra. She opened them carefully. Sniffed. “It’s — it smells like alcohol.”

Beth grimaced. The aliens had caught on that fast. To keep the prisoners quiet, give them the ancient chemical that consoles without illuminating. Smart, in a worrisome way.

Lau Pin, to his credit in Beth’s view, said, “I don’t like that they watch us. This proves they’re trying to…” He didn’t complete the thought.

Beth said, “What? Keep us sedated?”

Mayra objected, waving her arms. “They’re just catering to us!”

Lau Pin twisted his mouth into a sardonic curve. “Worse. They’ve got organic chemists, sure. But we’re lab animals here, not guests. The alcohol is an experiment to see how we react.”

Beth agreed. They broke up, since it was time nearly for lunch — according to their suit clocks, not of course to the unending sunlight here. Lau Pin drew the job of expanding and deepening the latrine, while the others cooked the fish and vegetables they had learned to harvest from the ample surroundings. Even simple jobs here demanded some learning, since working in 0.1 g changed everything ingrained in them. They managed, though without spirit.

Beth worried. No new word from Redwing, and they were settling into a routine now. Jobs assigned, a routine set up.

Lau Pin shouted. He came running from where they’d dug the latrine. “Come see! This topsoil is only a meter deep.”

So it was — which made complete sense. The Bowl was a thin layer built to face the central star, capturing sunlight. But it couldn’t be very thick without imposing huge stresses on the tension that held the Bowl together, just from mass loading. Here they saw that the entire ecology was rooted in soil only as deep as needed. Lau Pin had uncovered metal sheets and pipes, the underpinning of this odd building bigger than any world.

At lunch they mused aloud at the possibilities. “How about tunneling through?” Mayra asked. “How could we use that?”

Fred smiled derisively. “And let the vacuum suck us away? These aliens have some way to patch really fast, I’d guess — but not before we die.”

They all nodded. Beth looked around at their faces going slack and thought, We need to have a goal. Otherwise, we’ll turn into passive prisoners. She had learned what to do from her training. Get them focused. Do the next right thing. Now.

She knew it was true. In a tough situation, don’t avoid acting just because it’s easier or comfortable. Don’t lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

Abduss mentioned something in passing that cut off Beth’s reflections. “I found these strands of spidow web, must’ve been tossed aside when a Spidow repaired the network. They spin this stuff out, just as Beth said they must. I saw one doing it. Creepy! Anyway, I got the strands to fuse — ”

“Fuse how?” Beth pressed him.

“With a laser. Just warm the ends, stick them together.” Abduss smiled, obviously happy to have something to do. He produced from a sack he carried two meter-long pieces of the filmy white stuff that made the spidow web. “See? They can be retied, with heat. I suppose these pieces got cut off in some way — ”

“Then they can be made into long ropes,” Lau Pin said, eyes on Beth. “So we can use them.”

Beth smiled. “To get out of here.”

TWENTY-SIX

Never before had Tananareve wished so fervently for blessed night.

They had all slowly adjusted to sleeping in the incessant daylight, wrapped away in the long, moist, flexible leaves of the giant bowers. With pieces of the stuff, Mayra made them masks that helped them all get some shut-eye. Still, sleep was always troubled, her alarm senses waking her often to the occasional scamper, rattle, or caw. So when they agreed to arise and move, she was thick-eyed and muzzy.

Now they had to sneak away without the Serfs catching on. That was hard. Lau Pin led them stealthily away along routes he had explored. Tananareve had insisted she go, too, even though she had trouble getting through the root-rich terrain. Thin soil meant that trees spread their roots along the surface, making for tricky footing.

Abduss had risked his life for the long, ropy strands they carried in teams. He had walked kilometers away along the flat, forested terrace that confined them, to separate his acts from the others. A simple precaution, in case the spidows discovered him at work. Then he cut long segments of the spidow fibers and carried them away from the thread-corridor before a spidow came to repair it. This meant only minutes. Slicing through a thread sent a signal along the webs, and the huge things raced to make repairs. They looked and moved like a nightmare on a caffeine high.

“Time to light out for the territories!” Tananareve said gladly, when they had it all assembled. She saw Fred’s grin; nobody else got the reference to Huck Finn. They were tense, ready.

Time to go, then. But the pace wore her down.

Tananareve struggled to keep up with Fred and Lau Pin as they hauled the coils along on their shoulders, with leaves to separate the fat threads so they did not stick together. Her arm was mostly healed, but it hurt now and sweat popped out on her brow, trickling into her eyes in big fat drops, and stinging. Sweaty work, silently done, as they crept away from their campground. Serfs did not all sleep at once, apparently, and Tananareve had monitored them to find the time when a minimum of them were awake. The Serf sleep cycle took about three Earth days, by her reckoning.

They quietly stole away, leaving behind dummies of wood wrapped in the leaves, looking somewhat like sleeping humans. No Serfs raised an alarm.

Moving silently took concentration. The air seemed to coil up into her nose, filling her lungs with thick musk. They reached the barrier just as Tananareve was starting to feel woozy. Her arm ached. Lau Pin thought the tall, slick wall was slightly lower here, due to some sagging. A huge tree had fallen into it from the other side, pulling it down somewhat. It was uncomfortably close to a spidow corridor, too.

Quickly they deployed their loops of spidow string. Lau Pin and Abduss began linking the coils, fusing them together with quick bursts of laser light, raising a stench like burnt milk. They had practiced this craft and now could seal the ends within seconds, playing the beams along the ends until they bubbled.

Tananareve took her position along the barrier, as they had drilled. The wall was transparent and slick, probably to keep animals from climbing it. Easily a hundred meters high, too. She looked through the wall at the jungle beyond. The wall was like ancient glass, with whorls and ripples that toyed with the view. She realized that that must be exactly what it was — glass so old, it had warped through its slow slide downward, for glass was a fluid. These must be some sort of standard wall, used for keeping animals within their range. But not, apparently, smart animals.

Working quickly, Lau Pin and Abduss fused the end of the coiled filaments to a chunk of wood. Lau Pin had cut and sized these days before. He had proved handy at woodcraft and more. The ropy, rubbery vines nearby he had built into a curious kind of slingshot — taut vines, a cantilevered flinging pouch, artfully angled struts. He and the others cocked his array back, grunting. The men had practiced this and seemed confident it would work. A tanned and stretched leaf held the wood block payload, the ropes straining at it. They all took their positions as Lau Pin counted down.

Tananareve had to admire how Lau Pin had made this with Abduss. The entire taut machine was like something from the Middle Ages — and they had built it from scratch.

“Fire!” Lau Pin couldn’t resist whispering.

The energy stored in the stretched vines sent Abduss’s payload shooting upward, arcing high. It cleared the barrier lip and started down on the other side. In 0.1 g, a slingshot had ten times the range it would have on Earth. That simple physics had led to many comic miscalculations as they learned to walk and work here on the terrace, but now the difference paid off. The soaring block pulled the spidow thread smoothly out of the coils. The block struck the ground with a thump she could barely hear.

“Over!” Lau Pin called.

Beth scrambled up the threads, hand over hand. The pale fibrous stuff was strong and slightly sticky, just enough to get a hold. She went up fast in the low g.

But something moved behind them.

Tananareve turned and saw two spidows moving off the threads about a hundred meters away, in the channel of their threads. How did they know? she had enough time to think. Vibrations? The stench?

Then the spidows came at them.

Abduss turned and fired his laser at both the approaching shapes. The spidows kept coming. He hit one in the four eyestalks and it bucked back, showing a mouth of converging black teeth like pincers. They made not a sound, but the wounded one reared up, as if to frighten them with its size. At that moment, Tananareve fired her laser into its belly. The thing came down with a crash. It didn’t move.

But its partner did not slow. It brushed aside big trees as if they were saplings, ripping some out by their roots. Abduss held his ground and Tananareve saw the others were going up the thread, hand over hand. She fired again but the second spidow seemed invulnerable. It took the bolts without a pause. She heard from it a high, thin shrill.

“Go!” Abduss called to her. “Up!”

She fired one last time at the spidow. It was moving slower but was only twenty meters away. Tananareve tucked her laser into her belt and leaped for the thread. Her arm gave a sharp spike of pain. She favored that arm and went up, hand over hand, kicking off against the wall to try to get more momentum.

The spidows could climb the thread, of course. She had not thought of that before. They had worried about the Serfs and Memor, but the spidows were the present threat.

She was halfway up when she heard a scream. She could not help looking down.

Abduss was under the spidow, and with a gurgle the screaming stopped. But the spidow did not linger. It tilted up and with its arms it grabbed at the thread. The arms were long and sinewy and moving so fast, they were a blur.

It launched itself upward. Behind it, Abduss looked like a tissue someone had crumpled up after a nosebleed.

It was coming for her. The thin, cutting shrill was loud now.

She pulled furiously at the thread, kicked with her toes. She could hear the huge thing sucking air in and out now with long, windy breaths.

The thread jerked with the weight behind her. She looked up and there was Lau Pin, aiming down from the top of the wall. A crisp sizzle raked the air near her head. Dazzles flashed in her eyes, evaporated away. Another sizzle. Her breath rasped and she ignored the snap in her shoulder.

Lau Pin held out a hand and when she took it he lifted her bodily free of the thread. With one hand he brought her to the lip and she angled herself over, rolling to stay out of his way.

He said, “No way I — ” Another sharp sizzle near her hand. The thread went limp in her hand.

She canted over the lip, gasping. Her hands grabbed it and she tumbled over, facing the wall. The brown and gray spidow mass was just below her. She thumped against the wall, mashing her nose. Blood drooled down her face.

She looked around. Lau Pin was falling away below her. He had laser-cut the thread and — the spidow was falling. It went straight down, getting smaller in slow motion. No sound now.

She hung there, holding on, watching it thud below. And flatten down, graceful and quick as a cat. Scrabbling legs, a long low mournful sound. It got larger then. It had absorbed the fall in its legs and now — it leaped for her.

Missed. Fell back. Would try again.

She let go with one hand, the weak arm, and turned her back to the wall, clunking into it.

Below were faces. The thread had fallen into coils below her and the others looked up at her. A long fall, over a hundred meters. They waved their arms and their mouths moved, but with the pulse pounding in her ears she could not make out what they said.

The spidow was coming. Maybe it had a way of clinging to the wall. She did not wait to find out.

A treetop beckoned about fifty meters below. It looked leafy and thick, with few branches showing. In this low g — no, not the time to do a calculation.

She gathered her feet and pushed off — toward the treetop.

She tumbled and tried to come down on her boots. When she hit, the leaves lashed at her. Branches snapped against her boots, arms; one caught her smack in the face. She hit a large limb, pain lancing into her ribs. It hurt badly as she tumbled headfirst through — into clear air — and managed to get her boots under her.

She hit hard. Collapsed. Rolled away, trying to get a look up at the spidow.

It came through the tree after her. Slamming through, snapping even the big branches, showering leaves and limbs down. It had punched its way through and crashed to the ground right beside her.

Beth shot it through the enormous, many-eyed head. It jerked, gave a high, thin wail — and went still.

When Tananareve looked through the wall, she could see Abduss, as still as the spidow.