Bowl of Heaven

TWENTY-SEVEN

The Citadel of Remembrance loomed larger than Memor recalled from her young days, so long ago. The high ramparts loomed like mountain cliffs over the gathering assembly. Fog trailed strands of pale luminance that frayed into brilliant amber fingers, like a twisting dome over them all. She admired the new additions to the Citadel, feeling the immense powers lodged here. That august force seemed more like a state of nature than a power, but such was the point.

That the Citadel could well be her place of execution did not fully overcome her awe. Instead, it gave her a delicious blend of fear and strangeness that her Undermind relished. She could feel the strumming presence of it and knew she would have to keep it carefully controlled. Her Undermind could slip words and even phrases into her speech, in its eagerness. And eager it was; she could feel the hopeful spikes of feeling. Drama was rare in an Astronomer’s life.

She shuffled her feet in the required way, said the right things, and needed scarcely any promptings from her inboards. They knew the steps but not the sway, and it was safe to ignore them here.

Memor hung back from the slowly ambling crowd of Astronomers, relishing the trumpeting salutes of greeting they gave. She always used the tone of these as a diagnostic of the collective mood, and today seemed more testy than usual. Some glowered at one another, while others passed in stiff silence, feathers turned to muted tones. Riffs and small songs danced among the bass notes of the many, a leitmotif. These came from the few young males, who walked quickly and greeted loudly, joyfully.

Memor had been male when young, of course — the great, vibrant stage of life. Then that Memor of vivid passions and great conquests had gone through the Revealing. It had been a passage of legendary ardor and travail. Mercifully, most such memories had been blotted away by the experience itself. Yet the lessons of being masculine lingered and blended with the feminine insights she was now acquiring. This merging led to the path of wisdom.

As with all mature Astronomers, Memor became a She of the Folk, after learning by direct experience the male view of the world. While a He, there came to the higher Folk the legendary great desires, an easy willingness to risk, to change and innovate. This phase of zest and emotion lasted nearly twelve-squared Annuals. Memor still recalled the He sadness when those vivid feelings fled, and the bodily shifts began. Memories remained, leaving their residue of longing for a He who could never be again.

In the Revealing’s changes, Memor had felt His/Her body shift with wrenching desires. The pains and startling fresh urges were also the focus of much Folk literature and dance, but few were nostalgic for that jittery chaos.

From the Revealing, Memor had acquired the long views of a She, while retaining the experience and fathoming of the He era. This conferred judgment and sympathy-from-experience on the Astronomers, a vital stabilizing element evolved by the Folk over many twelve-millennia in the truly ancient past.

This essential balance — more a dance, truly — between the He and She Memor now struggled to apply to the most unsettling event of her long life: the radical alien primates. Luckily, she had the Revealing when these aliens first appeared. That dual view of them should help her now.

“Memor! We have not greeted in longtimes,” came a solemn, deep voice.

Memor turned and saw the slim head of Asenath, the Chief of Wisdom. To be welcomed by such an august figure was surely a good sign — or was it? “I have longed to see you again,” Memor said. “I need your counsel.”

“And you shall have it,” Asenath said mildly. “I like your problems — they are more intriguing than our usual fare.”

Asenath turned to use her bulk as a sound screen, anticipating the arrival of someone out of Memor’s field of view. Memor did not have time to turn to see. Asenath said deftly, “Boredom need not come with every task, Memor, but it may seem so as you go forward.”

“I am honored,” Memor said with a suitable sub-murmur of respect. She filed the words pointedly with her inboards for later review. She was about to say more, but another voice intruded to her left, “I shall have much interest as well,” in tones more threatening.

Memor turned with a sense of dread to confront Kanamatha, the Council’s Biology Packmistress. “I hope to please you,” Memor said.

Kanamatha said, “I shall have many questions,” and in her quick-tongued way turned to Asenath and said, “Following yours, my dear.”

Memor knew she should say more, but the chimes sounded final call. Amid heady perfumes and sweet music, the cohort assembled beneath rippling lights. In their twelves they began entering the high chamber in all its splendor and beauty. In reverent silence they passed gleaming alabaster edifices, oversized onyx statues of the Builders lining the inward paths to the Citadel of the Council, small temples dotted with animal gods in ancient dress, grottoes for quiet negotiations — and perhaps for amorous assignations, when the time was ripe.

The following retinue included scribes, small musicians burdened with their instruments, waykeepers, lampists and mathists, stewards of the Savants, oil masseurs — and all trailing sycophants galore.

Formalities consumed some time, and then routine reports. Each bloc applied their own torque to the proceedings, peppering the reporters with questions.

The Council had three major factions — the Farmers who ruled the vital living self of the Bowl, the Governors and Bowlcrafters who integrated the Farmers’ intricate networks with the Bowl’s physical structure. Overseeing all this in the larger perspectives were, of course, the Astronomers.

All three sought more power, though of course none wished to be overtly seen as desiring it. Humble achievement was the goal. But having a particular goal could not be too obvious, or one would never attain it. Memor remained silent throughout this. The occasional reports came next, and Asenath declared a mealtime to separate the two. The twelve-squared all retreated to the banquet hall, nominally to feast but actually to make deals and sniff out new alliances.

Memor ate little, wanting to keep her wits sharp. When they returned to their seats, Asenath nodded to Memor.

“Please lead me,” Memor said to place the conversation in the right ranking order. She reported at length on the primates, their odd actions and even odder bodies. Full pictures of them floated in the chamber air, rotated to point out features. The genitalia were unexceptional but their carriage caused remarks. Memor skipped over the escape of some, stressing instead her studies of those captured. She showed the neural and brain interrogations and estimated their capacities — below the Folk, of course, but perhaps somewhat above others of the Adopted, those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl.

She bowed with regret to report the escape of the second party, as well, from the high latitudes. Her ending was of course humble. “Apologies to you all for my failure to retain or recapture these strange primates.”

A rustle of reaction, hard for her to judge. The Council had many questions. Obviously, some had not read or even prior-memoried Memor’s reports.

Why did they wear clothing here in the Bowl’s mild climate? Was their world colder or more hostile? These coverings over all but head and outer extremities — were these rank symbols? Could the clothing hide subtle weapons? Or could their bodies be perhaps recently reengineered, and still fragile, needing to be wrapped?

When Memor described how the primates remained clothed except when sleeping, others asked if they were competing with one another, making declarations of self with clothing?

The primate hindfeet had thick coverings. Had they evolved on a world where their every step was threatened? How to explain that curious gait — their continual, controlled toppling must be a transitory style, surely? Bowl creatures used more certain gaits, to avoid falling injuries. Two-legged forms were few.

A Crafter had a detailed set of questions, embedded in her description of inspecting the primates. The teeth appeared to be all-purpose, but did that mouth truly need an ugly protruding flap of muscle? A proper design would have sheltered the protruding eyes better, yes? Did the tiny knob nose mean they could not smell well through the tiny nostril bump-with-holes? How useful could those modified forefeet be, versus the obvious better choice to remain on four legs and have arms as well?

They seemed to use base ten, rather than the more efficient base twelve. Why?

“Their hands have ten digits.”

“Surely the obvious advantages of twelve — first three fractions are integers, many other easeful facets — would outweigh that, in an intelligent species.”

Memor could not contest this, and so moved on. “They display an odd adaptation — ”

She showed short clips of several humans talking, their odd mouths flapping rapidly. Across their narrow faces quick muscular changes flew, a darting sequence of eyebrow lifts, shaped lips, eye moves, nostril flarings, tilts and juts of chin and jaw.

“They have this much expression, yet never evolved feather flaunting?” Biology Savant Ramanuji asked.

“Apparently they use their heads alone. Plus hands.”

Sniffs and rumbles of disbelief chorused through the high vaulted room.

Omanah the Ecosystem Packmistress said slowly, “A collective good, I would predict.” This came in feather tones designed to convey her well-earned wisdom, and augmented by self-deprecating, somber themes in a three-layered suite of browns and grays.

“How so?” Memor said. “Lead us.”

“These facial moves are apparently signals from their Underminds. Thus the speakers do not know all that they convey.”

“Surely they must!” a young Astronomer spoke suddenly. All turned to gaze, and the young one realized she — or was this one in the neutral Revealing phase? — had overstepped.

Omanah twisted her crested head and rippled her ambers and grays subtly. “Memor’s points elude you. They do not know how to access their Underminds. So, in a kind of evolutionary retaliation, the Unders speak in ways the Overs cannot know.”

Another stir of respectful understanding worked through the gallery — huffs, sighs, soft flares of ruby tribute to Omanah.

“I kneel to your insight,” the young one said, eyes closed.

Omanah said, “Here is an example of group selection. The party speaking does not know fully what it says — but the listeners do. For they can see the Undermind voicing in swift flurries of expression, the signals flitting by, using little muscular movements in eyes, mouths, jaws. So the group learns the true thoughts and emotions, yet the speaker does not fully comprehend.”

Memor added, “Thus the species gains a collective good.”

Omanah bowed in agreement. “And so it was with our self-modifications. The Uncovering made the Bowl possible by revealing to us our Underminds.”

A large, thick-plumed Overseer Astronomer asked in slow-sliding words blended with singing, sharp chirp signatures and plume-shaking, “Do you imply, Flock Head and Packmistress, that these primates have deliberately engineered this face-flutter method?”

The Packmistress pondered this, and in the respectful silence Memor saw the assemblage’s feather tones shift from bright attentive colors of magenta and olive into hues tending toward grays and subdued deep blues — signs that they, too, contemplated, trying to anticipate what the Packmistress would say. Time crawled as each of the members consulted their Underminds, trawling deep, long, and slow for insight. This was how the joint Undermind of them all, in concert, learned — accumulating in linear additions, all cross-correlated to achieve greater force — the steeped wisdom of collective thought.

Asenath as Wisdom Chief called them back to Uppermind. “Of course, these creatures have features from which we can learn. At least we recovered the body of one dead primate — not killed by Memor’s efforts, I remark — and have learned much from it. Their DNA is like ours, as it is with several of the Adopted. This fits the accepted view that earlier life dispersed through our galaxy on wings of sunlight.”

Then she turned with dramatic effect and called, “Attendant Astute Astronomer Memor! How to deal with these escaped aliens — that is our issue. And you let them escape.”

So here it was. Memor dodged with, “Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens, Ecosystem Packmistress Asenath.”

“I expected more of you.”

“I can explain some features, Packmistress, and then describe — ”

“On with it.”

“These primates have to live with a spectrum of desires driven by natural selection, as do we all. Their starship is a simple design, as if from a society that has developed quickly. That surely means they now operate in a world much different from their primitive lives. Yet still driving them are their deep desires. These, as our own species long ago learned, are hard to govern with learned experience or even medication. Their morality, as did ours, often fights with their desires. So to understand themselves is impossible for them, unless they can see their inner, unconscious minds.”

“They are retarded, then,” put in an Ecosystem Savant. This provoked feather-ripples of amusement, but no one made noises of glee; the occasion did not invite such.

“Indeed,” Memor said. “We could help them with this — ”

“Help them?” Asenath showed vibrant oranges and reds in a dancing pattern, half in jesting colors, half in rebuke. “They got away from you!”

Memor stepped back, bowed, hooted in the notes of sorrow and beseeching. “They proved more clever than their ship implied.”

“Certainly more clever than their approach suggested,” Judge Savant Thaji injected. “They simply landed and came through our air lock. No caution! So young!”

“I can see that as misleading,” Asenath remarked without a single feather display. “Or subtle. They gained entrance, we thought we had them — then they got away.”

“And now they roam at will!” the Judge Savant said. “Doing damage! We have reports of several dead in 12-34-77 district — their doing, no doubt. They captured a car, as well.”

“Very grave,” a Biology Savant said. “Grounds for removal.”

“Or a more exacting measure,” the Judge Savant said with display of scorn and censure, gray and violet fans dancing in rebuke.

Memor stood and let the discussion run, for it would harm her cause to speak now. Instead she let her Undermind rule the moment. It conjured up for her a memory of a visit to the funeral pit, in all its elegant yet somber majesty. At its center was the Citadel of the Honored Dead, who would be churned into a matrix they shared with plants, animals, insects, and the depleted topsoil the honored would enhance. Subtly hidden machinery adjusted the slowly roiling mud-fluid for bacterial content, acidity, temperature, trace elements. First the Pit, then the Garden: the fate of all.

When the Undermind let go of the memory and was satisfied, Memor turned attention to the argument rustling all about her. Harsh things had passed her by in a flurry of hot words. She deliberately let these go, as was best in such heated moments. Insults are best not remembered. She let it all go, following the long-ranging talk but not engaging with it. Here, the Undermind helped.

The Judge Savant pressed her case for execution, calling it “a just recycling.” Others differed, calling for Memor’s replacement. Much talk. If Memor had followed it, laid it deep and solid in memory, she would then go through doubt and regret — which would in future impede her work. Better to let the moments glide by.

Yet questions about the primates called her out of her needful reverie. Refreshed, Memor pointed out that she had used classical methods of psychological control, since these primates were strongly social animals. She began by keeping them in comparatively small areas, and gave them just enough food to be sure they did not starve. “Still, hunger began to play a role in their behavior. Within ten of their sleep intervals — they seem to come from a planet with a fairly long day — they showed classic symptoms. Some began to communicate with us more often. This was obvious food-seeking. Slowly, I believe, they began to identify less with their fellows, and more with us — specifically, me.”

“Yes, very good,” a helpful underling allowed himself to say. All else ignored him, of course.

“Within five more sleep intervals, their mood shifted. Disputes began, often in their talk during meals. This, too, fits classical theory — eating brings food to the front of their minds, their hunger drives competition, then disagreement.”

“You broke down their social code? Their solidarity?”

“In part,” Memor said, hoping this would come over as modesty. In fact, though, she was unsure that she had. Hurrying on, she said, “They were obviously crew on a distant voyage, so we cannot expect to break them down quickly. Time is our friend here.”

“Any signs of the early stages of Adoption?”

“I believe so. They often brightened when one of my team gave them a bit of food, or allowed a small favor.”

“Your analysis of their minds suggests they can be Adopted?”

“In time, yes.”

This gained her shuffling fan-gestures of approval, and the air eased.

In the end it came down to a vote. Memor suffered through the moments as each voter consulted her Undermind and finally cast an electronic signal. Asenath displayed the results, and — a shocked hush.

“You have survived in your office,” Asenath said, letting a pitch of reluctance skate among her words. “But I shall monitor you, and report you to this assembly when needed.”

Memor allowed herself a relieved bow. There came hoots of derision, and a background soft melody of approval, expressed in sighs and foot-claps of applause.

In the great vault the gathered began a rhythmic chanting. The Protocols called for some group expression, and the momentum of the moment gave it forth. The chant called out an ancient rhythm. It spoke of what the Essence is not, instead of what it is. This set the Citadel into a great rolling call, amid hooting songs and vibrant bass notes. Joyful joined we are, eternal.…

This was clearly a rebuke of Memor, a reminder of what the Universe of Essences demanded of all the Folk.

She felt grateful to escape with a mere reproach. She even roared and stomped and joined in with the chorus. The humming calls grew and she began to enjoy it all. Release.

But the memory of the Pit, then the Garden — these remained long after.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cliff awoke to feel the ground trembling. Blinking, eyes gritty, he looked around at the small copse of ellipsoidal ferns they had sheltered under. Nothing visible in the shadows. No odd scuttlings.

But he could make out a faint, ominous rumble from below. There was no actual geology here, so it had to be machinery moving on the outer face of the Bowl. He got up and walked barefoot, feeling the vibration. It seemed louder in one direction and as he moved, the ground trembled a bit more. Birds rustled and chirruped in response to it.

Then it began to fade, though he kept walking, and by the time he reached a slab of fused rock, he could feel nothing. The source must have passed, so maybe it was a moving platform on the other side, an elevator or similar.

Then he noticed he was out of the trees. Feeling vulnerable alone, he glanced at the mercifully empty sky and quickly sought the canopy cover. Like a terrified rodent, he thought ruefully.

But he couldn’t get back to sleep. He had been deep in a softly erotic dream of Beth. Their biggest problem was the unending day. They all had trouble sleeping because there was always something up and active, rustling through foliage, setting off their apprehensions. Now, though, the others were snuffling and snoring and he envied them. At least he could use the time to think, to plan.

He lay back and looked through the canopy at the dim presence of the star. The jet was a scratch across the sky, flexing with whorls and tendrils. Near the star little flashes of brilliance lit the base. He was getting used to this sky, to this place — and that was dangerous.

So much here had a familiar feel — the sudden sizzle of lightning splintering a sky, a patter of rain, moaning breezes — but the tremor just now gave him an important warning. Here they all lived with a strangeness made all the more discomforting by its deceptive likeness to a world they all knew, and would never see again.

So they had to use everything, especially deception. They were torn between the need to stay out of sight and the drive to explore. They had disguised their craft, making it sand colored. From a distance, the sand ship made no impression, but close up it did move and attract the eye. The fixed wing aerial surveys they occasionally saw in the distance had missed them. Cliff hoped their pursuers were losing interest, because the fliers were getting spotty. Luckily, no intelligent aliens seemed to live in this vast desert.

But his gang of five was getting surly and hungry. They had learned to spot and shoot the large, savage lizards that lived in the rock outcroppings. The meat was nearly as leathery as the brown hide, but over a roaring fire of hardwood that did not give off smoke, it supplied protein they badly needed. No talk; they ate eagerly. Carbohydrates were harder to find, and water always an issue.

He had tried to forage for edibles, but the problem was tough. Not only was this an alien ecology, but it was also one that worked without night. What did that do to plant evolution? What kind of defenses did plants have here? On Earth, poisons were defenses against predators — tobacco was a particularly effective one in the tropics, where there was no winter to kill off the insects.

But in this Bowl, no winter saved plants or animals from constant predation. So Cliff expected to find plenty of poisons, deceptions, disguises. He had already seen plants that looked like rocks or even skeletons. The leathery lizards could bound sideways, because they had two forelegs and one hindleg designed to give them startling leaps. What hunted the lizards? He expected that the evolutionary arms race meant that a big predator was around, but he saw none. Maybe the lizards ruled this region, the top predators.

Humans were new here, so creatures mostly took no notice of them. But big birds smacked them in the head, or dived for their eyes, apparently mistaking them for some easier game — but what creature was that?

They had all lost weight. Howard, who was always recovering from some accident or injury, was now downright pallid and scrawny. They all leaned on Cliff to find more edible foods, and he had some successes — but was running out of ideas.

He heard some movement nearby and turned, automatically reaching for his laser. “You woke me up,” Irma said, sitting down beside him.

“Spotty sleep is better than none,” Cliff said, holding out a piece of the odd fruit they’d found. It looked like a puffer fish with spokes of purple hair, but tasted sweet and dark.

“Good call on this one. Better than mangoes, even.”

“Sliced it, smelled it, tip of the tongue — that’s all we’ve got to go by. I wish I had some testing gear to use on candidate food.”

Irma nodded. “Those woodlands we first went into, the soil was more acidic and moist. The soil here, though, seems alkaline and dry.”

“Like most Earthside deserts.”

“Right, so we can use our intuition from what works there. Look there — ”

Within a few meters were fernlike plants, thorny bushes, prickly globes dangling temptingly from enormous trees. “Okay.”

They climbed partway up the crusty bark of the tree and brought down two of the large oval fruit. “Funny,” Irma said. “They trail these coarse leafy strands, look more like tendrils.”

He cut into one. “There’s this fuzzy red tinge to the skin, like blister rust on Earth. But what’s that mean here?”

He sniffed the rosy skin and found no stink of decay, but again, what would rot smell like here? So he sliced off a chunk, bit in — and found a gusher of warm soft sweet succulence burst in his mouth. “Maybe poison, sure, but soooo good…”

She grinned. “I’ll wait, see if you topple over.”

He waited to see if his stomach rejected it, but nothing happened. Irma said, “I think we should sleep in shifts. Keep two guards up, spell each other every four hours.”

“Let’s try it. But it’s hard to sleep on the sand ship.”

“We have to keep moving if we’re going to learn much.”

“Yeah, sure — but I’m wondering what we’re doing, running around. We sure as hell aren’t getting closer to understanding this place.”

She patted him on his shoulder. “Don’t get down about it. The guys take their cues from you.”

“Huh? I’m not in charge.”

She grinned. “Like it or not, you are.”

“Who said?”

“Primate politics. Ever notice? They say their piece, argue, then look at you.”

He sniffed. “No, I hadn’t noticed. Aybe and Terry give me plenty of grief.”

“They’re scared. We’re all scared. Sometimes that comes out as anger.”

“Uh, glad you brought that up.” The scent of her, after yesterday’s swim in a pond, was messing with his concentration. He felt uncomfortable somehow, so resorted to safer generalities. “I see some old patterns emerging under the stress. The guys are summoning up their inner macho, like putting on armor. Not that I’m immune, either.”

“You don’t flex it like they do.”

He chuckled ruefully. “Look, as a teenager I practiced cool smoking in the mirror — ” She laughed and he blushed. “No, I really did. Cancer sticks! I also impressed dates by revving the engine at stoplights.”

She laughed. “No! You had a combustion car?”

“An heirloom, the license cost a fortune. Once I tried on thirty sunglasses to get the right ominous look. With guys like Aybe and Terry, I talked tech and .45 automatics, usually while holding a beer bulb. And — ” He glanced at her. “ — I wore jeans so tight, I got sore balls and a red rash.”

She cackled, slapped her knee. “That’s so bad, it must be true.”

“Sure, it was ridiculous then, it’s ridiculous now — but Aybe and Terry are faking a calm they don’t have.”

She nodded. “Sometimes it’s so thick, you could cut it with a knife. I see them eyeing us, hiding their fears. Good deduction, Cliff-o.”

He turned to her. “We’ve gotten used to being scared, maybe. But I don’t — ”

Without warning, she reached over, hands on his shoulders, and kissed him. Held it, long and hard. Let go, sat back, looked at him levelly. “Had to say that.”

Say what? he thought. “I, look, I’m — ”

“Married, I know. So am I.”

“I hope I didn’t — ”

“Give some sign? No, damn it.” She took a deep breath and rapped out words in a rush. “We’re on the run across a goddamn artifact we don’t understand and could get caught any minute, or killed, maybe worse than killed — so, way I see it, the usual rules, they don’t matter.”

“I — ”

“No real argument, Cliff. But you and I have got to keep this little bridge party going and, and, I’m feeling so lonely, so like I’m on the edge, have got to — hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

He smiled. “I don’t either, but I … liked it.”

They just sat and stared at each other for a while, letting the moment brew.

She raised an eyebrow, gave him a twisted grin. “Y’know, what anybody thinks of us means, to me, less than zero.”

“You make a good case.” Cliff wondered what he was doing, mind boiling. But something strong in him knew he needed this.

“I never liked sex in daylight, though.”

“I never was so picky.”

Terry said, “We’re getting nowhere.”

Irma sniffed and poked at their small, popping fire. It burned old wood, which did not give off smoke. “We’re alive, right? And I wouldn’t have given us good odds on that last week.”

Aybe sniffed, his wide mouth twisted skeptically. “Week? This damn place makes time meaningless.”

Irma lifted her phone. “Standard time.”

Techtypes all, they then ruminated on keeping a time standard here with their digital devices, which got updated aboard because SunSeeker had significant relativistic time effects versus Earth-normal time. Aybe cut this off as he leaned forward over the fire, where stick skewers turned and dark lizard meat sizzled. “This place was made to erase time, that’s my point. What kind of thing makes a big thing that hasn’t got seasons, change, variety?”

Cliff said mildly, “Something that likes life predictable.”

Terry pounced on that. “Yes! Something really strange. Those big, feathered things we saw — they run this place. We ran away from them!”

“They were taking us prisoners,” Howard said. His injuries made him wince as he adjusted his seating around the popping fire.

Terry said, “Maybe they just wanted to talk.”

Irma said, “It didn’t seem like an invitation.”

“Hey,” Terry said, “the thing about aliens is, they’re alien. We may have misunderstood them.”

Aybe shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. We can’t live out here forever. What’s our agenda?”

Cliff sighed, but put his hand over his mouth so they didn’t hear it. They all looked at him; Irma was right. He wished he were more certain, but said anyway, “Lie low. Work the sand sailer toward the mirror region. We’re making good time. We could get there in maybe a month.”

“Month means nothing here,” Aybe said.

Irma said, “Hey, we need to keep time straight. Call it a million seconds, okay?”

They managed a low chuckle, the most they could muster as a group identity. Cliff watched their faces and seized the moment. “I’m hoping to find some access at the mirror zone. We saw that there were big constructions up there, close to the Knothole. Whoever runs this place probably hangs out there.”

Terry furiously shook his head. “We need to talk to these aliens. Look at what they’ve built!”

Irma said, “So?”

Terry sat back, blinking. “Let’s get close to one of their living zones. Stop hanging out here in the desert.”

Howard said, “I agree.”

Irma said, “I don’t like going in under their terms. Maybe they think aliens like us should be eliminated — who knows?”

Aybe scowled and jutted out his chin. “We escaped, remember? They may not take that kindly.”

Terry shook his head once more. “All I know is, we’ll learn more observing them near here, instead of trying to move millions of kilometers up to the Knothole.”

Irma pressed, “How?”

Aybe pointed. “I climbed that big skeleton tree yesterday, got a look at a dark patch off that way. Green, must be a forest.”

Terry said, “Better game, better concealment. Let’s go there, see if we can find some natives. Watch them, learn.”

Cliff watched them as this got tossed around. He had realized that Terry was the sort of guy he had known in university. He liked to sit around and drink and philosophize, and if he got drunk, he would tell you what you could expect in life for the sort of person you were. That met the legal standard for an asshole, Cliff figured. When the crew was getting shaped up — centuries ago in real time, yes — he had barely met Terry. But now he knew what type Terry was and was thankful that there was no alcohol here. With a few drinks in him, the man could do real damage in a small group like this. Maybe without the drinks, too.

So now Terry was far from what his skill set could deal with. Fleeing across a huge contraption nobody had ever imagined, Terry kept himself oriented, Cliff could see, by staying sharp of chin, assured, with eyebrows clenched behind aviator glasses. Sure of himself. Dangerous.

Assurance in the face of uncertainty was a good pose for a leader, sure. But not without plenty of thought to back it up.

“I say let’s vote,” Aybe said.

“Sure,” Howard said, his only remark in a while. He kept picking at a nasty scratch he had scabbing over on his calf.

Cliff said, “All in favor of following Terry’s idea.”

Three hands: Aybe, Howard, and Terry. Cliff shrugged. “Okay, after breakfast we set sail.”

Irma said wistfully, “I wish I was back on SunSeeker, not hiding and running.”

They all nodded.

Irma had a point, Cliff realized a bit later, but there were compensations. Here they got to deal with the crux of the problem, understanding this place, not just watching it from the orbiting ship. Plus, no boredom. An adventure is someone else risking their life far away.…

And he had just dried off from a great swim in a warm desert pond. He felt great. He drank a cup of water, and snapped open one of the pods that held tangy little silky strands, like eating sweet cobwebs. The water was far better than SunSeeker’s recycled, bland water, and the air here had a fresh zest. Also, their chem tests showed it had no gut-buster microbes they could not nullify. Redwing certainly wasn’t breathing anything so good.

It took two days to sail to the distant forest, over crusted sand that sang beneath them. The surface was glazed, and when they stopped he took small samples to study under his field microscope. The stuff was hard yet living — bacteria, lichens, and mosses mixed into sand. Maybe all these were waiting for the next rain to flourish. They learned the hard way that their sail ship had to skirt the darker patches, which were rough and once poked a hole in the bow. Sticking to the tan-colored zones gave them better speed. Somehow the place seemed ancient, even the occasional sand dune firm and polished. There were parabolic dunes, star dunes, straight dunes with radial crests. The emptier the land, Cliff realized, the more luminous and precise the names for its features.

They passed by a raised bluff, tan and barren, and suddenly saw a canyon open in the steep stone walls. “There’s green in there,” Irma pointed out.

Their sails flapped in the lee of the cliff when they lost the wind. Howard said, “Let’s have a look, take a break.”

All heads nodded; they were getting stiff, sitting in the craft and managing the ropes to steer.

They left Howard with the sailer, since he still had a gimpy leg from a fall. Marching two kilometers up the dry canyon was hard, working against the drifts of dun-colored sand in a broad streambed. A soft breeze swept their sweat away.

The side channels looked ancient, and Cliff kept a wary eye on their shadows. Ruins of stone and twisted metal stuck out of the erosion plain. Terry tried to make sense of them, prying fragments from the soil, but most of it was rusted away. Breezes sighed around them as they came upon a larger wreck, a tumbled-down building of curiously long rock slivers, pale along their lengths and burnt at their edges. “Fire?” Aybe asked.

“Looks abandoned,” Irma said, pulling a slab free of the rest. The whole stack of stone gave way, sliding down and tumbling so they had to lurch out of the way.

“What’s that?” Aybe asked about a buried structure, and they spent fifteen minutes uncovering a hard metal carapace. The building’s collapse had dented but not breached the boxy thing.

Aybe used up a lot of his laser charge cutting in. He used razor mode and the highest frequency, but the stuff was much tougher than any steel alloy. They levered the metal open to the music of wrenching screeches. Inside, wrapped in polycarbon, were fine metal grids and some mysterious black boxes with ports and plies in their sides.

“Hard to figure this out,” Terry said, fingering the stuff, “but must be electrical.”

“To do what?” Cliff asked. Not his area of techspeak.

Aybe spread the metal grids across a slab of the pale, hard stone. “Doesn’t matter what it was for. Point is, what can it do for us?”

“Like what?”

Aybe grinned. He had been moody the last few days, but now a tech challenge animated him. “Amp up our antenna function. For our beamers.”

“That’ll be tough, getting an impedance match to a beamer.”

“I like problems.”

They found little else but buildings that had collapsed a long time ago. No obvious resources, no primitives among the ruins as in a bad movie; nothing.

The electrical stuff was too heavy to carry, except Aybe wanted the grids. Howard said, “Fine, so long as you carry them from here on out.” On the move, everything was about mass.

As Cliff marched back to the sailer, he wondered how this huge desert zone had formed and whether the climate here needed vast, largely inert areas to function. There must be large-scale atmospheric movement of water, like the Hadley cells of Earth, but even with the occasional patterns of passing clouds, he could not figure out how things worked here. Earthly air moved in several circulating patterns, and the poles were the final place where matters got resolved. But on this Bowl, the only pole was the Knothole region. What did that do?

The Bowl and Earth both rotated, so both felt the Coriolis force — which brought all its complications, like hurricanes. But the sheer scale of the Bowl made him wonder if the same rules of thumb about weather could possibly apply. Matters of heating and atmosphere, not just the planet’s rotation, set the scale lengths of Earth’s circulations. Here, those scales were immensely larger, about a thousand times!

Then there were the oddities and intuitions that were wrong even on Earth, but might not be here. People thought whirlpools in baths circled differently in Earth’s north and south hemispheres, but that was an illusion. It might be fun to see if that was true here, though.

All that seemed a long way off, slogging beneath the constant sun. They traded occasional comments, but it was a good idea to shut up and watch their surroundings. Except for the birds, who were conspicuously larger than Earthside ones, Cliff noticed that few animals advertised themselves. Caution seemed the universal policy.

So he mused as he helped with the steering, pulling ropes to adjust their sail, listening to the buzz as their bow rasped over the stiff sand. He watched his sweaty team and wondered how long they would hold up. Nobody in SunSeeker’s crew was given to big shows of emotion, shouting, brags, insults, tears and drama, big proclamations of love or hate, stomping out of meetings. No bipolars, no geniuses. Rather, they were members of the sober, hardheaded, but soft-spoken race. Educated to a fault, practical as a paper clip. Considered, deliberate, oatmeal steady, skeptical and sharp-eyed when they met new ideas, unflappable, but — and this was what cut down through the applicant list like a hot knife through ripe butter — with an appetite for adventure. An odd assortment of those realists nonetheless willing to dive down the funnel of time and come out centuries later in a strange new place, ready for the dangerous and eager for the grand. This made them short on hugs and compliments, quick with the narrowed eye, short on the soft warm armloads of comfort.

Their spirits rose as the forest grew from a distant line on the horizon to a dense stand of trees, even though their food and water were running out. They hid the sailship, ventured in with lasers drawn, and soon found a stream. Yellow big-finned fish lurked in the darker pools and Howard managed to catch five with a simple line and hook, no bait needed. A feast! And the water was as sweet as champagne.

A kilometer farther on, there were dense stands of fragrant bushes that, when they crawled into it, gave them something like a day/night ecology. They fell asleep immediately.

Over breakfast of more fish, Terry said, “Time to set up a base, drop some of our body gear. I’m tired of backpacking everything we’ve got.”

Aybe nodded. “And reconn.”

Cliff didn’t like leaving anything behind, but they had a point. Even in the lower gravity, the straps cut into their shoulders by the end of a day’s march.

They hid their heavier gear in a stand of angular, skeletal trees, marked it with subtle signs, and moved out, using their practiced methods. Aybe and Terry took point to left and right. Cliff and Howard brought up the rear to the sides, with Irma in the middle. No talking, hand signals only, stay out of clearings.

The foliage here was strange. Vines made convoluted turns, as if trying to find a way out of their thick mats. Small, unseen animals clattered and called in the canopy. Birds gave fluttery songs, not like Earthly chirps. Then they heard ahead a low, ominous hum and circled it. A dense clump of webbed brown plants teemed with brightly turning leaves that sounded like bees. Cliff could see no role for this in plant dynamics, unless — “Maybe they’re windmills generating power,” he whispered to Irma.

“For what?”

“Dunno.”

They skirted the humming network, which was a hundred meters wide. He wondered if this artificial ecology used directly generated electrical power somehow, reactors and plants, and not just solar energy. The whole structure could be a giant electrical grid. Only a few meters away lay the high vacuum of space, and the understructure of metal could conduct electricity to distant points. For the usual question — why? — he had no answer.

“There’s some odd noise that way,” Terry said, pointing left. A clatter, some yips and snorts. They followed his lead.

After a few minutes Irma said, “Over there, a hill. Let’s get up in those trees to survey.”

They found a slight rise of a few meters and shimmied up the zigzag trees at the top. Howard stopped halfway up and whispered, “The birds.”

Cliff worked his way out on a limb that kept jabbing him with tiny spikes, the big tree’s defense against some sort of predator. He got a view of a distant meadow where odd things hovered. Four aircars, holding a meter or two above the emerald green. Inside their open tops were two or three of the Bird Folk. The aircars moved in a circling path, and Cliff saw their prey — a large thing that dodged across the meadow, hemmed in by the aircars. It had three legs and danced away from the encircling hunters, its big hairy head jerking around, seeking an escape.

A lance arced out from one of the aircars and hit the big animal in the haunch. It yipped, a high insulted cry, and dashed away. A big Bird stood up in its aircar and threw another lance at it, missed. The aircars rushed around in some kind of pattern, weaving in and out as if this was a game, or some ritual. The animal yipped again and screamed when a lance caught it in the middle.

It collapsed, gasping so loud, Cliff could hear the plaintive cries. Another lance ended that. The thing slumped.

The Bird Folk landed and Cliff wondered at the vehicles’ soundless grace. Were they magnetically suspended? That made sense if they carried powerful electromagnets in their thick undercarriage. The Bowl’s conducting frame a few meters below the meadow would provide the surface that opposed the magnetic fields, allowing the aircars to ride on the magnetic pressure.

“That thing’s a carnivore,” Irma whispered. “Mostly bone and muscle. The birdies are hunting for sport.”

She was right, Cliff saw. Nine of the Birds had formed a circle around the dead creature and did an odd dance, strutting in, whirling, dancing out with spindly arms raised, making quick leg movements. Then came a honking shout. They circled the beast, raised the lances they had pulled out of the carcass, and hooted again.

It looked primitive and yet understandable. Terry said, “They’re like primordial hunters!”

Howard said, “They’re not using impact weapons, like high-caliber guns. I saw some with long spears, arrows, a flung garrote.”

Irma said, “Maybe low impact because they don’t want to damage the underpinning of the Bowl? It’s only a few meters down in spots.”

They nodded and climbed down, moving away from the Bird Folk. Cliff realized that this immense world was a park, in a way. For the Bird Folk.

They spent hours working through the dense vegetation, returning to pick up their gear, then moving on to explore further. It was too risky to leave anything behind — except for the sailcraft, their escape route into the desert lands.

Cliff and Irma took note of the many life-forms they saw, including a long thing like an armadillo. It crawled without legs, using its sliding plates of armor to inch forward. “An armored snake,” Irma said. Terry wanted to kill it for meat, but Cliff was unsure it would be edible. And he hated to kill creatures on spec, even when they were hungry.

They found enough of the nasty lizards lurking near streams and shot them. They were aggressive but stupid; it was simple to kill them. Aybe gathered dry wood to keep their smoke down. As they ate the greasy lizard meat over a low fire, they tossed around ideas about the Bird Folk, and what they had seen. Not reassuring, no.

They napped, got up with the usual aches from sleeping in the open, and after a breakfast of more lizard, moved on into denser woods. This was a search-and-understand mission, and Cliff moved carefully, not letting the uncertainties get to him.

A distant high noise came rolling through the tall trees as they moved forward. A skreee came from their left and they cautiously moved that way, faces puzzled. Some bass rumblings, then more skreee. They saw a broad clear area and circled it, Terry gesturing to keep low.

A chattering alarm burst out in the branches high above them. Cliff felt his pulse rate rise as he duck-walked forward through low brush. The whole forest was alive with excitement and arcing above the din came the shattering calls he recognized as those of primates they had seen before. Monkeys, though larger and stranger. But the skreee sounds had structure, chopped notes floating on the underlying base line, like sung words. These were different primates, riffing up in the high canopy.

He peered through the ropy strands of a vine plant. Much movement. He brought up his binoculars and studied the moving figures.

The Bird Folk. On foot this time.

About two hundred meters away, moving right to left across a broad, rocky plain. They ran in long loping strides, eight of them, carrying instruments in their long arms. Their feathers rippled with flowing patterns of yellow and magenta. Their heads were tilted back, which pointed their long, broad noses forward, their two large eyes glittering. Knobbed legs articulated gracefully, eating up the ground between them and their prey.

Bunches of running figures were nearer to Cliff. Primates, running with their own loping grace. The primates were tall with long arms and even longer legs, running it seemed from a stand of zigzag trees several hundred meters to his right. Their angular heads jerked around, looking back at the birds, who were angling toward them from farther away. Cries spilled from the primates — harsh, barked shrieks. They ran faster and broke into groups of threes.

At first Cliff had thought the ragged, fleeing band were, somehow, humans. But these were primates nearly as tall as the Bird Folk, and had four arms. They ran in clumps of three, the one behind turning to fire something that looked like a crossbow at the Bird Folk. The shots were inaccurate and the Bird Folk dodged them anyway. The primate that fired then ran ahead while a companion in the group of three stopped, aimed, fired. The one in the middle was reloading.

Arrows flew everywhere. Primates and Birds shrieked and howled and chattered — a din.

An arrow hit one of the birds, but it simply lodged in the thick feathers. The Bird plucked it out and tossed it away. Then the primate ran on and the next one stopped to fire, a classic delaying tactic. This shot hit home. A Bird went down in a tangle of legs.

A long, hooting cry came from the Bird Folk. Angry rumbles came from the surging Birds. They sped up, long legs taking great bounds. They closed in on the primates and swept to both sides, a flanking pincer movement.

Something bright flashed from the huge running Birds, and a loud boom rolled across the open plain. Several fired at the same time, and primates burst into flame. Shrieks, bodies falling, limbs jerking.

Cliff smelled an acrid tinge and watched the remaining primates panic. They scattered, bunches breaking up. Some fired arrows but most fled.

The Birds ran them down. Some they did not shoot with the quick, darting beams, but instead ran up behind them and leaped high in the air, coming down on a primate in a crushing fall. Cliff could hear bones snap.

The last primate turned and howled at the Birds and they simply ran it down, trampling the body again and again.

The Birds danced on the bodies. Their mouths opened wide and they emitted sharp, harsh calls, like trilling fire alarms. With their stubby beaks they stabbed the primate bodies. Some danced on the dead. Spindly long arms shot toward the sky, jerking with joyous energy, and they circled, making a quick-footed dance, shrieking in a melodious chant.

Cliff backed away from the spectacle, shaken. He straightened up a bit and retreated, duck-walking backwards. Terry came alongside him and whispered, “My God.”

“Yah. Yah.” Cliff could barely absorb what they had seen.

The party came together, united in a single purpose — move fast, get away.

Cliff remembered thinking that this place was a park, in a way.

Certainly not for mere primates.

TWENTY-NINE

Redwing dipped into Meal 47, a pomegranate-rich sauce and artificial meat mix with long grain brown rice, green vegetables on the side. It tasted the same as always, of course — pungent, hearty. And since he’d had it more times than he could count, boring. Still, its savory tang was somewhat enjoyable because it appealed to the dimmed senses he had developed in the austere, rumbling caves of SunSeeker. And every meal reminded him of their dwindling supplies.

Any semblance of a sensory life was heartening in the ceramic claustrophobia here. At least when the ship was driving through interstellar plasma, noise-canceling headphones could subtract most of the sound. Not here, now, when SunSeeker was laboring hard, its Reynolds bosonic drive coughing in electromagnetic stutters. Some crew said they just forgot about the engines’ steady din, but Redwing could not — though he hid this, of course. He had to seem calm, steady, oblivious of their desperate uncertainties.

Getting contact with the Beth group had been their sole breakthrough. Before that, Redwing found himself commanding a ship that had constant navigation problems and no contact with the ground. He had nearly written off the whole landing party.

Redwing raised an eyebrow at Ayaan Ali, who came and sat at the mess table, waiting respectfully. Ayaan was an Arab woman who dressed in deck uniform like everyone else, but occasionally at dinner wore a stylish veil and glinting emerald earrings. “Ah, good,” Redwing said formally. “Report?”

“We’ve got the high-gain antennas ganged together.”

“How’s Beth’s signal?”

“Strong and — ”

“Can you get me visual?”

“Hell, Cap’n, we’re working with a damn field phone signal here!”

“Answering my question comes first, then the complaining.”

Ayaan’s face stiffened and there was a three-beat silence. Then Ayaan said slowly, “No, sir, don’t really know yet about visuals. Doubt we have the bandwidth.”

“It’s a bandwidth problem, or a signal to noise and coherence mapping?”

“At this stage, that’s rather a moot point.”

“Ah.” He looked at the slabs of illos she showed him in a long silence. “Good, then. No complaint?”

Ayaan blinked and her mouth firmed up. “No, sir, and no excuses.”

“Excellent.” Redwing permitted himself a slight smile.

Ayaan laid out a diagram on his slate, pointing to the array she had mounted outside, jury-rigged from interior structural beams. “As soon as we work the kinks out of ganging the dishes, and optimize Beth’s incoming, we’ll have a coherent, linked system.”

“Which means you can go after Cliff?”

“Yes, but remember, we don’t even know what gear they have.”

“Field phones, too, as I recall.”

“But have they hung on to them? I’m getting no pings back at all.”

Redwing understood the tech enough to know that grouping all their microwave range antennas together outside was a hell of a tough problem. Software and hardware together had to gang the antennas so they were coherent in phase, like making them into one big eardrum. Doing that on a constantly moving platform swooping above the Bowl, and focusing them on spots in the moving landscape — he couldn’t even begin to imagine the problems. “You’re doing a great job, Ayaan. I know the problems. Just keep trying for a ping.”

Ayaan blinked rapidly at the notoriously rare Redwing praise. “Yes, sir.”

Redwing nodded and strode with visible energy — more performance for the crew — the five meters to the bridge viewscreen. The whole hemisphere had been converted into a complex display that could flit from real images to overlay dynamics charts. Look too long at them, flip back and forth, and you had to sit down and let it seep in. He had ordered that their interior centrifugal grav be Bowl normal, 0.8 g. They would all be ready to go down and help, if that was necessary. But he wasn’t going to put another boot on the ground until he knew more.

He felt a sudden surge, twist, and correction strum through the deck and walked over to the operations chair.

“How’s the induction coil?” Redwing asked the pilot, a short man named Jampudvipa, always shortened to Jam.

“Sputtering. I got it back right, using the three-zone thrusters. We’re getting barely enough plasma to keep the system from going into parasitic oscillations.”

“Damn. Can we make the delta?”

Jam wrenched his face around and shrugged. “Perhaps.”

The Bowl image spread across most of the glowing hemisphere. It always made him stop and stare.

The landscape unfolded at speeds hallucinatingly fast, because they were moving at about ten kilometers a second over it, orbital speed. So much wealth: forests brimming with green promise, clouds towering a hundred kilometers high over shallow seas, spare bare deserts of golden sand, crawling muddy rivers snaking through valleys rimmed by low hills. Hurricanes roaring and churning across continents larger than Earth itself. An immense, impossible geography. A contraption devoutly to be wished, yes. But, by whom? By … what?

He watched the comm bands. Beth’s signal was down to zero, but her party had gotten through earlier for a few minutes. To keep Beth within range, Redwing and Jam had to maneuver the ship constantly, spelling the watch with Clare Conway, the willowy blond copilot. But the solar wind here was a puny wisp, barely enough to keep the induction chambers from shutting down. Space was everywhere a very good vacuum, but the red star’s wind was even thinner than Sol’s. Plasma blew off stars, but this smaller sun’s somehow got swept up into the jet. Magnetic focusing, apparently, though how it was done seemed a mystery to the engineers. Indeed, Redwing thought, this whole weird place was an implied slap in the face to human endeavors. Even SunSeeker was a mere bauble compared with it. A huge bowl whirling around so fast, it covered a perimeter about the size of Earth’s orbit, every nine days.

Jam’s job in all this was to keep them close enough to the Bowl’s atmosphere to let Beth’s weak phone signal get through to them. He steered them so close, the land seemed like a flat plane below them, an infinite wall of blue green dotted with clouds hundreds of kilometers high, of seas bigger than any planet. All of it hung under the constant glare of star and jet, which cast different glows across the deep atmosphere, in long blades of shadow and radiance.

Redwing could see the strain in Jam’s face, but the man would never mention it, of course. “How long can we keep doing this waltz?”

“A day, perhaps two.”

“Then what?”

“We must use the reaction motors.”

“We can’t afford to burn real fuel.”

“I know.” Jam’s watery eyes studied Redwing’s face. “But I cannot alter the laws of mechanics.”

“To me, Jam, that means something between diddly and squat. Time to do some hard thinking, or we’re going to lose touch with our people.”

Redwing had almost said my people, but thought better of it. Too possessive, even for a captain. He had to seem sober, focused, yet somehow above the fray, thinking about the larger prospects.

To give Jam some time, he walked the length of the full deck, eyeing the display boards for signs of trouble. They had few crew up, to conserve on supplies, but heads looked up as he passed, his face observing yet detached.

He passed by the Bio Preserve and on impulse cycled through the lock. A strong stink of dank animal sweat wrinkled his nose. One of the pigs had gotten out of its enclosure. It ran up to him, squealing, sniffing, and farted. This turned out to be an overture. It crapped on the deck, turned, and dashed away.

Damned if he would clean it up. He called out to Condit, the field biologist, and pointed to the mess when the woman appeared. She shrugged. “Sorry, Cap’n. It got around me while I was recharging their food.”

“What do they eat?”

“Anything. Table scraps, human dander from the air filters. Even their own dung if you let them.”

“Maybe you should. Serve ’em right.”

She nodded, taking him seriously. “It might help in the nutrient recycling, yes. We trap eighty percent of nitrogen value in our urine, but getting much out of solid waste is hard. Maybe we should feed our wastes to the pigs.”

Something in Redwing liked that idea. Let them eat shit! Marie Antoinette had it right. But he kept his face blank and said, “Look into it.”

Back in the central corridor, he sucked in the dry, stale ship air with relief. He had to carefully avoid letting his sense of humor off its leash.

He hoped nobody here had access to records of his older self. Decades before SunSeeker was building, he had scorned the whole idea of interstellar arc-ships, and written a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the program. He proposed that they simply send out robot ships with a single message that read, Make ten exact copies of this plaque with your name at the bottom of the list and send them to ten intelligent races of your acquaintance. At the end of four billion years, your name will reach the top of the list and you will rule the galaxy.

A joke, quickly forgotten. The Review Board that passed on starship command hadn’t seemed to turn it up, anyway. Or they overlooked it. But now he couldn’t be that jokester.

As Redwing returned, Jam looked up. “Cap’n, I think we could — ” He paused, as if this might be too much of a leap. “We could, ah, perhaps gather some reserve plasma by, by approaching the jet again.”

“Too dangerous. We nearly lost it all, flying up that thing.”

“We can come close to it, without entering the turbulent heart.”

Redwing smiled. Turbulent heart wasn’t a bad description of how he felt. “Scoop up plasma, store it?”

“I believe we can, using the capture cross section of the magscoop, when we extend it again.”

“That’ll take us away from the Bowl, though. A big delta-V.”

“We can make it up, I calculate, with the reserve plasma gathered by an approach.”

Jam’s steady eyes said, Your call.

“We’ll lose touch with Beth, right? No hope of reaching Cliff’s party with Ayaan’s jury-rigged antenna, either.”

Jam nodded. “Surely true, yes. But we can make a strong boost when we arc down along the Bowl, and return within perhaps ten days.”

“Plan it out,” Redwing said slowly. “I want to give Ayaan a crack at reaching Cliff, then we’ll see.”

“Yes, sir.”

Redwing paced again, wishing he had more options. Regret that he had not gone down in the landing party surfaced again — a gnawing black dog, but he submerged it. His judgment had been right, even if it did mean he spent his time bottled up here.

In some of the preflight training, to help them deal with the media, he had attended a showing of older ideas about interstellar travel. It was both funny and appalling. One of the earliest, from the Age of Appetite, had featured a dashing starship captain who always went down to planetary surfaces to investigate. Nobody questioned the practice! Of course, they had lots of other wish fulfillment trash ideas — faster-than-light travel (and this was after Einstein!), aliens who spoke English of course, teleportation for quick jaunts wherever they wanted. Nobody explained why that didn’t yield an economy with infinite resources. After all, the transporter could just as easily make extra food or devices or money; anything at all, even people.

Yet those Age of Appetite people had the dream, too. They just didn’t think much about how it would take hardship and death in the teeth of the unknown.

He made himself smile and say encouraging things as he paced the deck, and kept his musings to himself, as always.

THIRTY

They were rattled. Cliff could see it in their faces.

“I wonder,” Irma said as they ate cold meat beside their sailcraft, “if the Birds planned to hunt us, back when we came through the lock?”

Aybe snorted. “Of course not! They were treating us as equals — ”

“ — and they tried to capture us,” Terry finished for him.

“We didn’t give them much chance to negotiate,” Aybe insisted.

“They grabbed Beth’s party,” Irma said. “And look at what they did to those odd primates. They were tool users, too!”

Howard said mildly, “We can’t gamble that they’ll treat us differently.”

“I agree,” Cliff said. “Focus on what we do next.”

Terry said, “I still think we should see what their society looks like, but at a distance maybe, see — ”

“Too dangerous,” Cliff said.

Howard nodded. “But sailing along in the desert zone, that’s dangerous, too — and doesn’t teach us much.”

They all agreed. Terry said, “I’m getting tired of sitting in that rig, boosting it over outcroppings when we hit a snag, searching for water. And the dust storms! We’ve got to get some better transport, or we’ll be hunted down.”

More agreement. Cliff began to see an upside to the horrifying kills they had witnessed. Fear concentrated attention. “Let’s hunt up meat, grab some sleep, move away in the morning.”

Howard and Terry brightened. They actually enjoyed hunting the nasty lizards, so they set out toward the nearest dry area. The black and brown things usually lived under cairns of rock they had shouldered into place. The trick was to catch them outside, and Terry had shown a talent for luring the quick-footed, hissing beasts with the old game meat left over from previous kills. They didn’t seem to mind eating their own kind. “Maybe they’re alien lawyers,” Irma had said, and got a laugh.

Aybe fished out the mesh he had found before, unfolded it, and began tinkering with it, using his tool kit. Irma went looking for likely edible plants, but as their discipline demanded, always stayed within earshot. Cliff tried to relax. He had not been sleeping well. This ever-warm, sunlit prospect was as good as he was going to get, the new norm in his life — so he dozed.

Only to be awakened by a shout from Aybe.

“Uh, whazzit?” Cliff said, coming out of his sleep. He had been dreaming of Beth and didn’t want to leave the warm comfort of the illusion.

“I got it!” Aybe had arrayed the mesh in a tree for support. His beamer was patched into it and he excitedly waved the phone at Cliff. “I got SunSeeker’s carrier indices.”

Cliff snapped awake. “What? You can talk to them?”

“Damn low power, audio might not work — but I’ll send them a text message.”

Cliff watched and Aybe’s face danced. “They answer! It’s Redwing.”

Aybe stared at the phone and called, “Sending a file!”

Long minutes dragged by while Cliff and Aybe stared at the phone display screen. Finally it chimed and a picture appeared — a big purple globe. A green upright finger symbol stood at the bottom right of the screen. “I’ve seen that thing,” Aybe said. “The finger, green — maybe that means it’s okay to eat?”

“Hit the next page,” Cliff said.

A dozen pages confirmed several plants they had eaten. Cliff said, “How’d Redwing get this?”

“Must be from Beth’s group,” Aybe said, “relayed through SunSeeker.”

“Just what we need,” Cliff said. “I saw one of those. That other one, too. Wait — I got it. This is a menu!” The next pages gave plant and animal pictures with two red fingers crossed, clearly warnings. “And an anti-menu. The red ones are dangerous to eat. The blue, okay.” He looked up, grinning madly. “Boy, that Lau Pin is sharp.”

Looking through the menu, Cliff thought about the colors of edible food here. Evolution geared animals and people alike to like the colors of things that were good or benign — blue for skies and clear water, white for snow. People disliked browns and dark colors linked to feces and rotten food, and reds that might mean spices or poisons. Plants had evolved those as warding-off signals. He hoped Beth hadn’t taken risks to discover all the menu’s contents. Then —

“Wait,” he said to Aybe. “I’ll bet they got that data straight from the aliens.”

“So they’re still in captivity. Um.”

“Maybe. The important thing is, we’re back in contact.”

“Sort of.” He sighed. “I lost SunSeeker’s signal again.”

“They’re moving, in orbit. Not easy to stay within range, even with these narrowband phones.”

“Good thing they were designed to work at long range.” Aybe chuckled ruefully. “Nobody thought they’d have to work over interplanetary distance, though.”

Hearing from Beth brought up a subject he hadn’t wanted to confront: that one quick moment of passion with Irma.

Sadly he remembered an old joke: A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

By the time Irma returned, Aybe could tell her which of the plants she had gathered she could toss and which to keep. Howard and Terry brought in an odd-looking two-legged thing like a badger, which was edible. They skinned and roasted it and felt joyous.

Then they sailed away into the desert, to get space between them and the magcar Birds. Half an hour of skimming slowly over the fine-grained sand got them into a region of rocky ridges. None they couldn’t avoid, but it slowed them considerably. Howard was scanning the horizon for a better route when he called, “Something big coming.”

It was a dot in the distance that steadily swelled. “We’re more exposed out here,” Aybe said. “If that’s — ”

“A magcar,” Irma said. She had binocs and counted out, “Two, no, three Birds in it.”

“No point in trying to run,” Terry said. “Those are fast.”

“But do we fight?” Howard asked.

Irma said slowly, “We don’t know for sure they’re hostile.”

Aybe said slowly, “Angling for a mangling, we are.”

Cliff silently cursed himself for not thinking how exposed they would be. “We can’t run or hide, so let’s do a reverse. Wave, hail them if they get close.”

They all looked at him as if he were crazy. “Keep your weapons concealed. If things turn sour, we shoot. But first I’d like to get up into that magcar.”

Howard said, “It’ll all be in the timing. If we have to shoot, I’ll take the one on the right. Terry, you get the left one. Irma, the third, wherever it’ll be.”

Irma followed the growing dot with her binocs and called, “Still coming, going left — ah! — they just turned toward us. We’re spotted.”

“Okay, now we look as though we want to be found,” Cliff said.

“And keep our lasers out of sight,” Howard added.

They spread out around the sailer as the dot grew rapidly. They started whooping and waving arms, dancing around. The magcar slowed, lowered until it was two meters off the ground. Three heads bobbed in the passenger area, and they still reminded Cliff of ostriches. As the magcar neared with a thin whining sound, he could see they wore harnesses that held odd-shaped tools. One was piloting, and all wore helmets.

The car stopped above the sailcraft, and he could hear a steady thrumming from it. He wondered how magnetic pressure could support such a mass so far from the conducting surface, which had to be meters below the soil. The Birds spoke to one another in high, chittering voices. Their heads jerked around, feathers danced in complex patterns. Is that part of their speech? The magcar rose to three meters.

This seemed ominous to Cliff. He backed away from the car and said to Irma, “If they produce weapons, we’d better shoot first.”

“Yes,” she said, “you call it.”

He called to the others, “If I say ‘start,’ then shoot them.”

Terry said, “I don’t think that’s necessary — ”

“Let’s show them we’re peaceful,” Howard said, spreading his arms with hands held open.

Seconds crawled by. Cliff’s hand poised, tense, ready to go for his laser.

Two of the Birds stood up, and the magcar shifted a bit. It tracked a bit to the left, so the humans were bunched on one side now.

“Let’s try harder,” Aybe said, and called up to them, “We are peaceful.” He spread his hands.

Terry echoed him, showing bare hands. “Speak mildly,” he said. “Let them know — ”

A net flew out of the magcar so fast, Cliff could not tell how it was flung. Quickly it wrapped across both Terry and Aybe — ssssssp. Somehow the net’s perimeter slithered around them and jerked hard — ssssip-klick — closing them in.

There was a snaky, thick ropy line at its peak, leading back into the magcar. It snapped taut. The net swept them off their feet. The line began hoisting them up.

Cliff was so shocked, it took him several seconds to realize that he was supposed to be in charge. “I — Start!”

He looked up. Three laser shots hit the Birds. One was hit in the head and toppled back. The other two shrieked and reached for something in their harnesses. Four shots threw them back and down, out of sight.

Cliff had fired one shot — and missed. He stuffed his laser away and sprang at the net. He snagged hands in the webbing and went up it fast. His boots hit Terry, who cried “Ow!” Cliff surged using Terry’s back. He grabbed the line and hauled himself up. The Birds were milling around on the magcar floor, shrieking.

Over the lip of the magcar, tumbling, he fell on a Bird body. Feathers made it soft; then he struck the hard body beneath. He struggled up, breathing in the thick, sultry smell of the aliens.

The bodies were bleeding red. Two didn’t move. One was twitching, but its eyes were closed. As he stood, he slipped on the blood, recovered, shook his head in the adrenaline haze — and looked down at a surprisingly simple control board.

Terry and Aybe were shouting, but he ignored them as he studied the board. To the right was what seemed to be a simple lever and release. Everything else looked like press plates and displays. The lever, then.

He tried it, and the line started to draw up into a receiver with a rasping noise. Cliff reversed the lever, and the line played out. He tried the release, thumbed it hard looking over the side, and the net dumped the men.

“Ow!” Terry hit the ground with Aybe on top of him.

“Wow,” Aybe said, standing up. They all gaped at one another, amazed at what they had done.

Irma said, “That was so fast.…”

“Good shooting!” Terry said.

Cliff called down, “Let’s grab this. Shinny up here, bring all our gear.”

Terry said, “Think it’s safe?”

Cliff considered for several seconds. “I can’t tell if they sent any alarm. Seems unlikely, though.”

Aybe said, “I never thought we could — it was so fast!”

Irma said, “That magcar is better than this damn sailer. Let’s go.”

Terry started, “I wonder — ”

“Think later,” Cliff said. “Act now.”

They all looked up at him from below, faces scared and joyous at the same time. Seconds passed. Then, as if some unspoken agreement had been reached, they scattered to their tasks.

Howard came climbing up, and the two of them inspected the bodies. Their lasers had punched holes in vital organs, bringing shock, and then the aliens had bled out. Together they tried to detect signs of life. No pulse, and certainly there would have to be a heart. No reactions, no breathing, eyes blank and staring.

“Turd-ugly, aren’t they?” Terry said, and kicked a body. “Solid, too.”

There were many facets of these aliens Cliff wanted to explore, but there wasn’t time. They got the harnesses off the bulky bodies before he and Howard pitched two Birds overboard. Cliff kept the one less damaged. Aybe started to argue with him and then shrugged.

By this time the rest were passing up gear. Howard said, “If they did set off some alarm, we’d better get away.”

Everybody agreed, and voted Aybe into the pilot’s chair, since he had flying experience. The chair was too big for humans, but the seat wrapped anyone who sat in it with a gauzy strap restrainer, and Aybe managed to settle into it. He set to work systematically learning the control panel.

Cliff climbed down to check the bodies he had tossed out. Autopsies are best done fresh, and he learned a good deal in half an hour of cutting. Aybe shouted, “Hey, look!” and made the magcar perform some maneuvers. To their applause he announced in a stentorian voice, “Flight is leaving, folks.”

They all laughed hard, letting the tensions out.

He helped Irma carry some gear from the sailer. She whispered, “Great attack! I knew you could do it.”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

THIRTY-ONE

The hell of it was, Redwing thought, that SunSeeker’s magscoop seemed to act better as a brake than as an accelerator.

The deck veered and flexed under his feet, seams groaned, a low rumble echoed. The magscoop expanded, breathing like a lung, and SunSeeker slowed. Contract, and the ship accelerated.

Redwing hated the rumbles and surges, maybe because they echoed his own anxieties. To maintain flight control and keep their magnetic fields up and running, SunSeeker had to feed its engines with plasma. But the plasma density here was low and the ship had to keep flexing its magnetic screens to stay in burn equilibrium. So the whole ship followed a troubled orbit, skimming along above the Bowl and trying to pick up weak signals from their teams.

“Jam, can’t we smooth this out?” he asked.

The slender man stared intently at the control boards and just shook his head. “I am trying, sir. Ayaan’s array is slewing as we change velocity.”

Ayaan herself called from a nearby control pod, “I can’t get coherence! My antennas cannot focus.”

Redwing felt frustrated, out of his depth technically. A ramscoop of SunSeeker class was an intricate self-regulating system, and no one could master even a fraction of its labyrinthian technology. It was not so much a ship as a self-tech entity, with artificial intelligences embedded in every subsystem. It behaved less as a ship than as an electromagnetically structured metallic can run by a dispersed mind, itself electromagnetic.

Beside it, an ancient automobile was an idiot savant, working because analog feedbacks and what the techs called “self-regulating networks” operated well enough, arrived at by incessant trials and some considerable deaths. Autos arose through a form of driven evolution. SunSeeker came from a two-century-long evolution of directed intelligences, none individually of great capability. Indeed, the subminds embedded in SunSeeker were no better than ordinary human intelligence, and some much lesser. But the sum of these subminds, as with whole human cultures, was greater than linear. Modern human civilization was surely of lesser station than its greatest intelligences, such as Gödel and Heinschlicht. So was SunSeeker an anthology of self-critical and disciplined minds. Each mind lived its life with a reward system and constraints, dwelling in a community of diverse talents. All that properly propelled SunSeeker into a social intelligence, one that ran beyond what the ship could entirely comprehend. In this it was much like human societies. While it nominally served Earthly society, the ship also had evolved over the centuries of its flight into its own, original society. Smart networks had to.

It could innovate, too.

“Cap’n! Our subsystems found a way to amp the coherence,” Ayaan called out. “I’ve never seen it do that before.”

Redwing walked behind her acceleration couch and watched the screens display a dazzling graphic. It showed linked armories of smart systems, adjusting in milliseconds to the fits and snarls of SunSeeker’s trajectory. The hundreds of elements in Ayaan’s array glided to compensate, like a retina that caressed the light falling on it.

The signal grid shifted, its colors cohering. Suddenly, a strong pulse came through. “It’s from Aybe’s phone,” Ayaan said, excited.

“Send Beth’s bio data as soon as you can.”

“Got it inserted already, right behind the carrier signature,” Ayaan said crisply.

“What’s their situation?”

“Here’s their text.”

GOT FREE OF ALIENS. MAKING OUR WAY ACROSS THICKLY WOODED TERRAIN. HEADED OUT OF DESERT ZONE.

“That’s it?”

“I had to synthesize their signal three times to get even that.”

“Can’t they send up some detail?”

“I’ll ask them to use store and transmit. That lets them set the phone so when it acquires us, it sends a squirt at optimal rates.”

“No audio?”

“Too noisy for that. I squeezed this out of repeated text messages. Lucky it got through, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“How weak their signal is, how fast we’re moving, the whole problem of using a dispersed antenna — ”

“I get it,” Redwing said. “Outstanding work, Lieutenant.”

She smiled and added, “I’ll send what text I get to your address.”

“I wish we had more people to analyze this,” Redwing said suddenly, feeling his isolation.

Again, Ayaan smiled kindly. “Our experts are on the ground, gathering information.”

He nodded, then lifted his head a bit. He shouldn’t let the crew see his uncertainty. An old rule: If people can see up your nostrils, you’re keeping your chin at the appropriate alpha angle.

“Has Aybe got the food stuff?”

“Just did. Sent back an acknowledgment — whoops, there goes the connection. Damn.”

Redwing paced and turned back to her. “Y’know, just before they went down, Cliff was afraid they wouldn’t be able to digest any of the food down there. Kind of funny. Now we’re sending him menus.”

Ayaan chuckled. “It’s a major discovery, I should think.”

“Really? Still seems like common sense to me. Food is food.”

“Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed, while our amino acids are left-handed. It could easily have been the other way round.”

Redwing blinked. He kept forgetting that crew were multiskilled, so the loss of one specialist couldn’t crimp them a lot.

“Well, turns out otherwise,” he said. “Beth’s team said they had some dysentery at first, but some of their med supplies put them right. Prob’ly Cliff’s did, too.”

“Beth’s text messages said she got most of her lore from the aliens.”

Redwing nodded once more. “They knew the poisons, and maybe those are pretty near universal? Interesting idea.”

Ayaan was observing him closely, he noted. “Sir, I understood Cliff’s point, and indeed, I agreed with it. Particularly his suggestion that they do thorough sampling of the alien air, to see if it would be dangerous to us.”

“Which they did. And it wasn’t.”

“Beth reported some flulike symptoms, dysentery, too — but, yes, nothing fatal.”

“They caught a break, maybe.”

She shook her head. “What interests me is that these ideas of Cliff’s, and mine, they were quite plausible. Yet you ignored them.”

“Not exactly. I said be careful but keep going. We had to go down there, had to take our chances.”

“Yes, and that is what I find admirable. You made the decision, despite our worries.”

He wondered briefly if she was just sucking up to him. But no — she wasn’t that kind of woman, a brownnose climber. “That’s my job.”

She beamed. “And I am glad it is not mine.”

“You’re going to have to make decisions, too, as this whole thing plays out. Here’s a tip: The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.”

They both laughed together and it felt good.

That evening he lay in his bunk thinking about the day and what Ayaan had said.

All the media back Earthside had played the whole ocean/space analogy to the hilt, making Redwing’s job sound like that of Captain Cook or Magellan. But those sailors had plenty of experience, had worked their way up the naval ladder by sailing to nearby ports, learning command, getting navigation right, and gradually making longer voyages. The first generation starship commanders had to make a huge leap, from piloting craft around the solar system, then the Kuiper belt and fringes of the Oort cloud, then to interstellar distances. That was a giant jump of 100,000 — like sailing around the world after a trial jaunt of about three football fields.

He had piloted a ramscoop on one of the first runs into the Oort cloud, and done well. But in all the trials, SunSeeker hadn’t topped a tenth of light speed more than once, and they had run at that for only a week. Five ships had gone out before SunSeeker. In the first decade, none reported ramscoop troubles like theirs. That didn’t mean much now, though. Communications from Earth had stopped more than a century back, for reasons unexplained. Silence says nothing.

They were sailing uncharted waters here, Redwing thought, to use a nautical phrase. Magellan, he now recalled, had gone ashore and gotten tangled up in conflicts in the Philippine Islands, and died in a battle he chose to start. He had been convinced that the angel of Virgin Mary was on his side, so he couldn’t lose, even though he was outnumbered by a thousand to thirty. Later generations named a small galaxy after him, but he had made plenty of dumb decisions, especially that fatal one, out of emotion.

So maybe analogies could be useful, after all.