Shipstar

Thirty-six

The first sight of the Folk commanding the big skyfish was daunting. Cliff had seen these Folk aliens when his team came through the lock, in what seemed a very long time ago. Later he had heard fragments about the Folk from the scattered SunSeeker transmissions.

But now these before him seemed different—larger, with big heads on a leathery stalk neck. Their feathers made the body shape hard to make out. The Folk back at the air lock had feathers, but not nearly so large, colorful, and vibrant. As Cliff’s team and Quert’s Sil entered, the three big Folk rattled their displays, forking out neck arrays that flashed quick variations in magenta, rose, and ivory. Their lower bodies flourished downy wreaths of brown and contrasting violet.

“They’re … giant peacocks,” Irma whispered.

Cliff nodded. Back Earthside, peacocks used their outrageously large feathers to woo females. But these rustling, constantly shifting feather-shows had far more signaling capacity. Beneath the layers, he could glimpse ropy pelvic muscles. Loose-jointed shoulders gave intricate control to the feathers. “More like, those flaunt unspoken messages, I’d guess.”

Quert gestured and said, “Quill feather gives mood. Tail fan on neck cups sound to ears. Fan-signals are many. Rattle and flap for more signal. Color choice gives messages, too.”

Aybe said, “Structural coloration, I’d say. Microfibers, fine enough to interfere with the incoming light, reflect back the color the creature wants.”

Cliff watched the beautiful iridescent blue green or green-colored plumage shimmer and change with viewing angle. “Reflections from fibers, could be.”

They all stood bunched together, humans and Sil, as the Folk came slowly into the big room, passing nearby with a gliding walk before settling on a place. The big things loomed over them and rattled out a long, ordered set of clattering sounds. “What’s that sound say?” Terry whispered.

“Greet to visitor. But visitors inferior and should say so.”

“Say so?” Irma whispered. “How?”

Quert gave the other Sil quick sliding words, a question. They all responded with a few other short, soft words. Quert’s face took on a wrinkled, wry cast. “Sil not say, you not either.”

“Good,” Aybe said, and the others nodded. No tribute, no submission.

Cliff regarded the Folk’s unmistakable piercing eyes, big though now slitted and slanted beneath heavy, crusted eyelids. Their pupils were big and black, set in bright yellow irises. There was something going on behind those eyes. Cliff had an impression of a brooding intelligence measuring the small band of humans and Sil. The tall, feathered Folk held the gaze of humans and Sil as they settled back on their huge legs and tails and gestured, murmuring to each other while still peering down at the humans. Cliff felt a prickly, primitive sensation, an awareness of a special danger. His nostrils flared and he automatically spread his stance, fists on his hips, facing the three aliens fore square.

The three Folk settled into the high room bounded by pink, fleshy walls. Attendants flanked the three, and others scurried off to unknown tasks. There were small forms with six legs and plumed heads, carrying burdens and arranging the flesh-pink walls with quick energy. Constant motion surrounded the Folk, who went slowly, almost gliding. It was like watching an eerie parade with three big, frightening floats.

“Irma! Cliff!” Suddenly Tananareve Bailey appeared from behind one of the Folk. She ran toward them.

Meeting any friend in this bizarre place was wonderful. They all embraced Tananareve as she rushed into their arms. To Cliff, she was as lean and steely as a piece of gym equipment; you saw the skull beneath the skin. Irma said, laughing, “At last! Some woman company.” And they all laughed long and hard. Giddy jokes, ample smiles.

A long loud sentence from the largest of the Folk broke them out of their happy chatter. They looked up into big yellow eyes.

“They said they needed you,” Tananareve translated, “but I never know if they’re telling me true.”

“This skyfish just swallowed our tadfish,” Irma said. “I thought we were goners.”

“Better than a fight,” Terry said. “But … we’re captured.”

The enormity of this last hurried and harried hour came to Cliff. He had kept his team free for so long now, barely escaping in one scrape after another … only to fail so quickly, swallowed, a slap in the face with cold water. He opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say. The others were still happy just to have Tananareve, but the implications were stunning.

“Maybe they want to negotiate,” Cliff said, not really believing it.

Tananareve said, “They got orders from someone to grab you, pronto. They’ve been tracking you ever since you saw something called the Ice Minds. It took this long to catch up with you. They’re big and can’t crawl through the Bowl understructure. They kept complaining about having to take the other transports that can handle their size.”

“What’s up?” Aybe asked.

“They’re under pressure. I don’t know why.” Tananareve stood near the Folk and introduced Asenath, Memor, and Bemor. It took a while to explain that Memor and Bemor had nearly the same genetics, were something like fraternal twins of different sexes, but that Bemor was somehow enhanced and held a higher-status position. “He can speak to the Ice Minds. Whereas Asenath”—a nod to the tall, densely feathered creature, sharp-eyed and rustling with impatience—“is a Wisdom Chief.” A shrug. “As near as I can tell, that’s kind of like an operations officer.”

There followed some back and forth translating as Memor insisted on a full introduction using her complete title, Attendant Astute Astronomer. Bemor then managed to get his “Contriver and Intimate Emissary to the Ice Minds” into the discussion. Tananareve whispered, “Slip those titles into your remarks now and then; they like that.”

Cliff watched the huge aliens as the light of the jet and star, at these higher altitudes, poured down on the fleshy floor like glistening yellow-white oil. Asenath thundered, “We have you indeed, at last. The first issue is our need of you, to prepare a message for those whom you term the ‘Glorians’—to continue the artifice.”

The others looked to Cliff. He faced the big skull Asenath lowered, as if to listen more closely. Cliff suspected this was just intimidation—and decided to ignore it, the only strategy that might work. “Artifice?”

“Glorians believe you primates are the rulers and pilots of our Bowl,” Asenath thundered. “They confuse our mutual trajectories as meaning that the Bowl comes from your world.”

“Weird. So?” It seemed to Cliff better to play dumb for a while. There was too much going on to make sense of this. He needed time to talk to Tananareve and get his bearings. These Folk had talked to Redwing, using Tananareve, but what were the nuances of that?

Asenath gave a purple and rose display and her head descended still closer. Her Anglish was clipped and brusque, perhaps because she had only recently imbibed the language, or because she meant it that way. “Of course we converge on Glory. Over time scales of many thousands of orbitals, similar goals emerge. The only puzzle to us is why you, with your simple though ingenious and craftily made ship, desire to attain the status the Glorian technologies imply.”

Cliff shrugged, glanced at Tananareve—who shrugged. “Imply?”

“The gravitational signals. Surely this lures you.”

“Not really. We’re bound for Glory because it’s a biosphere a lot like our own. The right oxygen levels, water vapor, a hydrogen cycle with oceans. Plus no signs of technology. No signatures of odd elements in its air. No electromagnetic emissions. No signals at all. Kind of like our world thousands of years—I guess you call them orbitals—ago.” Cliff spread his hands, hoping this was a signal of admitting the obvious.

Asenath gave a rustling flurry of feather displays, crimson and violet. “Your ship has received the Glorian signals, yet you do not know?”

“Know what?”

“The Glorians, as you term them, are of the August.”

“Meaning…?”

“They do not deign, over many megaorbitals, to answer our electromagnetic signals. No matter of what frequencies. The Aloof and August.”

“The same might be said of any rock.”

“The advanced societies of this galaxy deliver their August messages only by means that young societies, such as yours, cannot detect.” Asenath gave a rattling side-display in eggshell blue. “Most important, signals of great information density, to which young worlds cannot reply.”

“We picked up the gravity waves, around the time our ship left Earthside,” Cliff said. “There didn’t seem to be a signal, just noise.”

“So young societies would think,” Bemor said from beside Asenath. “We do—”

Suddenly something made the three Folk pause, Bemor with his mouth partly open. Silence. Their yellow eyes were distant.

Quert appeared at Cliff’s side and whispered, “They hear other voices.”

“They’ve done this before, getting signals somehow,” Tananareve said. “Let’s use the time. What’s our strategy here?”

“These Folk have something in mind, using us somehow, I’ll bet,” Aybe said. “Wish I knew what they’re hearing right now.”

Quert said, “They now listen to what we Sil brought forth. Told to. We showed old truth.”

“How?” Tananareve asked.

“Folk control electromagnetic pathways in Bowl. So Sil make signs buildings.” The swift slippery slide of Quert’s words belied the content.

Cliff said, “Those deforming houses we saw you building?” He recalled how the Sil had deftly rebuilt their ruined city. He had seen a growing arch inching out into a parabolic curve, the scaffolding of tan walls rising from what seemed to be a sticky, plastic dirt. Wrinkled bulks had surged up as oblong windows popped into shape from a crude substrate, all driven by electrical panels. The Sil were working their entire city into fresh structures like spun glass, growing them into artful loops and bridges and elegant spires.

“You make signals with your cities?” Irma asked. “How?”

“City, all can see all across Bowl. Others know to look to us. To get message.” Quert had now a calm the feline alien wore like a cloak.

“What was the message?”

Quert looked at them all slowly, as if unburdening at last. He wagged his head and said, “Bowl pass by your sun. Go too close. Shower down mass. Damage world biosphere.”

Irma said, “What? When?”

“Long ago. Folk call it Great Shame.”

Terry said, “You got this how?”

Quert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. “Your ship told you. You told us.”

“What?” Terry turned to Cliff. “You got this from Redwing?”

“Yup. I tried it out on Quert. I didn’t believe it, really.”

“You didn’t tell us!” Aybe said.

“Saw no need to.” Cliff’s face stiffened. “I still don’t know if it’s true.”

“We got more from … others,” Quert said. “Come.”

Quert led them to a small room that puckered into the ribbed, pink slabs that formed the great hall. Cliff looked back. The Folk were still rigid, eyes focused on infinity, taking in some transmission from … where? Their bodies were clenched, feet grasping at the floor. He turned and went into a narrow chamber where a bright screen fluoresced into pale blue light. “We have map sent. History.”

It was a 3-D starscape. Across it scratched a ruby line. “Bowl went there. Time go backward.”

A dot started at the Bowl, shown as a small cup embracing a red star. The ruby line stretched as it moved backwards, away, into the reaches of stars. Cliff and the others muttered to each other, watching the constellations slip by as time ran in reverse, accelerating. The line looped near many dots that were stars—yellow, red, some bright blue—and went on, faster, until the perspective became confusing. It wound along the Orion arm of the slowly churning galaxy. They could see the stars moving now in their gyres. The ruby line ventured out toward the Perseus arm, which was festering with light, then looped near some to pick off glimmering sites apparently of interest. The Bowl’s method, Cliff could see, was to dive into the distant, shallow slope of the grav well of a star, slowing somehow, and skate by. A close-up view near a yellow dot showed bright sparks departing the Bowl, to descend deeper into the gravity potential well of the destination star. These soon returned, apparently bearing whatever they found on the circling worlds down in the grav well. This happened several times as they watched.

Then the Bowl cruised through what Cliff recognized as the Local Fluff inside the Local Bubble, terms he recalled from some distant lecture for the spaces around Sol. Then the Bowl surged a bit, building speed, bound for the next target brimming ahead.

Cliff and the Sil had to interpret in this way the backward-running line, for what they saw was the reverse. Then the Bowl-star pair descended on a yellow star.

They watched the entire encounter and talked about it, piecing the story together in backward fashion. After the encounter, the Bowl came soaring out of a system racked and ruined. Comets flared in the yellow star glow, and it was clear why. The Bowl had swept through the prickly small motes of light that swarmed far from the star. It had left a roiling path through those tiny lights, giving them small nudges, and so some had plunged inward. Only one was needed.

One. It slid down the slow slope of gravity and arced on its long hyperbola toward a pale blue dot. And hit.

“They brushed along in our Oort cloud,” Aybe said. “That’s it. They, they tipped that rock into—”

“An accident. Killed the dinosaurs,” Terry said, “who were descendants of their own kind. Can’t check the time axis on this thing—what the hell would the units be anyway?—but there’s a reason it shows this way. Somebody’s making a point. The Bird Folk were clumsy, careless.”

“Yeah…” Irma stared at the screen. “Who?”

Cliff said nothing, just tried to take it all in. He felt Quert’s presence strongly as a kind of intense energy, as though this were the crucial moment in some plan the alien had. Yet there was no overt sign of it he could detect.

He said, “Terry, I think the Glorians’ point is, ‘See, we know all about you.’”

Quert seemed unperturbed, his face calm. The other Sil had not come into this room, but they clustered at the entrance, watching silently. “Folk go to other stars after yours. But yours special for other reason.”

“Why’s that?” Irma asked.

“They come from your sun.”

“Who?” Irma’s mouth gave a skeptical twist. “The Folk?”

“See.” Quert moved his hand near the screen and the ruby line seemed to accelerate, slipping smoothly from star to star in the Orion Arm. The speed now barely showed a slowing as the Bowl dived near a star, sent expeditions down, then moved on. Cliff lost count of how many the Bowl visited. Then the trajectory took a long swooping arc, still sampling stars and worlds. The curve turned back along the sprinkle of slowly moving stars.

“These are the even earlier eras for the Bowl?” Irma said. “Must be a really long time ago.”

“Notice how the Bowl is going now from one star to the next, pausing near each one,” Aybe said. “That fits—they were exploring for the first time. Sizing up what solar systems around other stars are like.”

“Then we’re headed back to—look, there’s the Local Bubble,” Terry said. In an overlay, a thin ivory blob approached probably an image of the low-density shell that surrounded Sol. “But … Sol’s not there.”

“Stars move,” Irma said. “See, the Bowl is moving on past that, not stopping.”

Aybe said, “It’s slowing down a lot, seems to be approaching this yellow star—hey, is that us?”

They watched, stunned, as the Bowl and its reddish star slowed more and more, edging up to the yellow star.

“Can’t be, see?” Terry pointed. “The Bowl’s going into orbit, making—”

The image froze.

Irma whispered, “The Bowl came from … a binary.”

“They built it around a binary star,” Cliff said, “and one of those stars was Sol.”

“Didn’t we hear a little from Redwing about Beth’s team, pretty far back?” Terry said. “They went to some kind of museum and saw a show about how the Bowl got built.”

Aybe said, “After all, they had to start with a smaller star than Sol. They grabbed big masses from the swarm around that star, and—who knows?—maybe some of Sol’s Oort cloud.”

Irma snorted. “Are you saying they came from Earth?”

Aybe shrugged. “Looks like it. I mean, Mars had an early warm era, so maybe—”

“That was in the first billion years or so after Sol formed,” Terry said. “The end of this Bowl voyage show we just saw, it can’t be that far back. Makes no sense! You’d have to get an intelligent species up to full industrial ability in just a billion years.”

“Okay, then whoever built the Bowl had to come from Earth,” Irma said, hands on hips. “I’m discounting smart creatures from the Jovian moons or Venus or someplace.”

“Fair enough,” Aybe said. “So, Earth. These Folk out there, you’re saying they had to come from some time—”

“We’re all thinking the same thing? They were dinosaurs,” Cliff said. “The feathers make it hard to see, though. Asenath looks more like a monster Easter chick than a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Damn!” Aybe said. “Remember when we were on the run, when we hid under a bridge? We saw—”

“Right,” Terry burst in. “Big plant-eater reptile. We ran away, pretty damn scared.”

“So…” Cliff’s training as a biologist was taking a beating. “That thing comes from maybe the Jurassic, one hundred and forty-five million years ago. Maybe the Bowl builders took along the current flora and fauna?”

“Because they came from then?” Irma scoffed. “We would’ve seen their ruins. A whole industrial civilization, and we missed it? This whole idea is impossible!”

“Maybe it was very short-lived, lasted say about ten thousand years,” Terry said. “Just a tiny sliver of the geological record.”

Aybe said, “Consider what alien explorers might discover if they arrived on Earth one hundred million years from now. Their scientists would find evidence of vast tectonic movements, ice ages, and the movement of oceans, a geological history sprinkled with life. Maybe an occasional catastrophic collapse.”

“Exactly,” Terry talked right over Aybe. “They might also find, in a single layer of rock, signs of cities and the creatures who built them. But that layer had been crushed, subducted, oxidized. Hell, tens of thousands of years—that’ll be smashed flat, only a centimeter thick when it comes out from the subduction. In dozens of million years, there’s nothing.”

Cliff was warming to the idea. “Easy to miss, especially if you aren’t looking for it.”

“Explains why the Folk are interested in us,” Irma said. “We’re relatives!”

Cliff saw Quert give the eye-moves of disagreement. “Not so?”

“Folk want to know of ship you ride. Plants you carry. Bodies you have, songs, lore.”

“Then they don’t know where we’re from?” Aybe demanded.

“They know. Do not care.” Quert looked uneasy, a change from the pensive calm of only minutes before. Cliff wondered if the alien and other Sil knew all the implications of this backward history of the Bowl. Had they recognized the home star as Sol?

A loud, rolling boom came from the large area outside. At first Cliff thought it was an explosion, but then it took on other notes and held, lingering with a mournful long strumming cadence. Like someone crying, he thought. Or some thing.

“It’s the Folk,” Aybe said. Quert gave an agreeing eye-click. “They … something’s wrong.”

Thirty-seven

Redwing stepped into the garden and inhaled through his nose. Good moist green smells. Take a moment, just a breather. The animals—

The animals had been tied down, netted, and they were not happy. He hadn’t ordered that. He should have, of course, the way SunSeeker was lurching about. Had the finger snakes done that?

The finger snakes. Redwing tended to forget that they were part of what he was trying to save. Were they in their tunnel? No, he could see all three of them wrapped around three thick-bole apple trees.

A smartbot prowled the rows of plants, testing soil and injecting fluids where needed. Just growing plants hydroponically wasn’t enough. Humans needed micronutrients, vitamins, minerals—but so did the plants and animals they ate. So all organisms in the looping food chains had to provide the right micronutrients needed by others, without them getting locked up in insoluble forms or running out. Selenium had gone missing a century back, he had learned from the log. Only with sophisticated biochem types woken up for the task did they get the food chain running right again.

Redwing savored the leafy comfort lacing the air and staggered as SunSeeker surged. Redwing caught himself on a stanchion. The snakes didn’t seem to notice. Phoshtha and Shtirk were watching a screen, a view of lands showing murkily through the jet, while they worked on small things with their darting, intricate hands. Thisther was watching the captain.

Redwing asked, “Thisther, did you secure the pigs and sheep and such?”

“Yes. Was well done?” A thin, reedy command of Anglish.

“Yes, thank you. Are you comfortable?”

“Better. What a ride!”

Redwing left the garden feeling better. Now what? There was nothing like cramped quarters to concentrate the mind. So he went to his cabin as the deck creaked and rolled with the jet storms that whipped by it. He watched the Bowl view crawl past on his wall and did a few standing exercises, adjusted against the tilt local grav had, due to the helix SunSeeker was following. He had learned to disappear within himself, walling out a ship’s routine humming and stale smells and dead air, to create a still, silent space where he could live, rest, think. In the continual noise of the ship he had learned to hear well, picking telltale murmurs out of SunSeeker’s constant vibrations.

A call buzzed in his ear. “Cap’n, got something to see on the bridge. The jet’s really snaking now. Flares like sausages running down it, too.”

He started back, still listening to the pops and creaks of his ship. With his crew he also knew how to listen carefully, or to deliberately not hear. An essential skill, taking only a lifetime of daily practice to master.

Beth’s voice had been strained, and she had just replaced Ayaan Ali in the lead pilot’s chair, with Clare Conway in the second chair. They all looked pale, their eyes never leaving the wall screens and operations boards. SunSeeker’s long helix within the jet had worn them all down, and now the pace was picking up. He hadn’t been resting well, and neither had the others. Coffee could only do so much.

As he entered the bridge, he noted that everyone had coffee ready at the elbow. Should he tell them to switch to decaf? No, too much meddling.

Karl said as Redwing came onto the bridge, “It’s whipping around in the Knothole, just as the simulation said.”

On the biggest screen, the jet was now lit up in yellow. They were looking straight down it and could see the flexed jet now bulging very close to the Knothole edge. “See, the Knothole has big mag fields to stop it.”

“Are we driving the jet just enough to give them a scare?” Redwing leaned over the panel and switched to a flank camera view. “And what’s that secondary bump?”

Karl studied it. Redwing noted that Beth was working a different telescoping camera, focused far away from the jet, on the mirror zone. Karl said, “That’s a nonlinear effect—a backflow.”

“You mean there’s a shock wave working back toward us?” Redwing watched the small sideways oscillation evolve, working around the rim of the jet. “It’s from the big kink?”

SunSeeker could run for weeks in the jet without climbing into view of the gamma ray lasers on the Bowl rim. They were already fairly deep in the Bowl and getting a closer view of the zones near the Knothole, where centrifugal gravity was less. The mirror zone, a vast annulus, was behind their forward-looking views, and ahead loomed the forested regions just in from the Knothole. Beth had been kept somewhere in all that.

“Looks like the kink went nonlinear and launched this shock back at us,” Karl said. “I don’t understand—”

“Here’s a better view,” Beth said. “I asked the Bridge Artilect to find any part of the mirror zone that could give us an angled reflection, and it found this.”

She smiled, and Redwing saw she was enjoying this. She always seized fresh opportunity with relish, one of her best qualities. The wobbly, somewhat blurred image gave them a view from far away to the side. He watched the kink bulge warping as it met the higher mag fields at the Knothole rim, and a countershock race away up the jet. That played among the boundary mag fields of the jet, pushing out farther to the side—

“It’s going to hit the atmospheric membrane in the closest-in zone,” Beth said. “Moving at high speed—over a hundred klicks a second in sideways motion.”

“This wasn’t in the simulation, as I recall.” Redwing let his statement hang there, without a tone of sarcasm. Flat facts spoke for themselves.

Karl nodded, said nothing. Beth watched the fast-moving side shock as it plowed toward the atmosphere’s envelope, a layer sketched in by a graphic; it wasn’t truly visible in these narrow line widths. “Is there enough mass in that to do damage?”

“Plenty,” Karl said, “and the magnetic energy density, too, can hammer the envelope.” He looked worried and said no more.

“What about the structure itself?” Redwing said. He knew this huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship’s axial core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar.

Karl said in a distant tone, almost automatically, “I scanned the Bowl wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes. Had the Artilects do a spectral study. It was only a few tens of meters thick, mostly carbon composite looks like, at least on the outside. That’s pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Calculated the stress.”

“Which means…?” Redwing persisted.

“The Bowl stress-support material has to be better than SunSeeker’s. Maybe lots better.”

“Should we alter our planned trajectory?” Beth asked, eyes moving among the screens.

“Not yet.” He was thinking fast but getting nothing. So many factors at play … “That display we got before, the lightning here on the bridge, it must be some kind of message.”

“I noticed something here before,” Karl said. “Look.” He thumped his command pad and brought up a recorded scene on a side screen. “See that?”

The vector locator was focused on the zone nearest the Knothole. They could see the massive mag field coils at the rim, then the boundary of the atmospheric envelope, shiny in orange, reflected jet light. There were verdant forests sprawling away from the bulky Knothole structures.

“That’s the same sort of area we were in,” Beth said. “Low gravs, huge tall trees, big spider things. And I saw some of that orange light shimmering up high, from far off, bounced off the upper boundary layer, I guess. Jet light.”

Partway into the large band of forest was a burnt brown and black slash among the lush greens, now mostly faded. Something had left a fresher black burn on the metal and ceramic portion near the Knothole, where the jet passed through.

Karl said slowly, “So instability was a major problem here. It’s damaged the Bowl before.”

“But shouldn’t forest have covered over damage pretty quickly?” Beth asked.

“Maybe it was damage to the understructure,” Karl said. “It broke systems that deliver water and nutrients. Not repaired yet.”

“That means they’re neglecting upkeep,” Redwing said. “The usual first sign of a system sliding downhill.”

“So why don’t they have defenses against the occasional jet malf?” Beth asked.

A long silence. They recalled the crackling image of the Bowl dancing in air above the bridge, sent by some mysterious agency. Karl had explained it in terms of some inductive electromagnetic fields, playing along the outside of the ceramic walls nearby. Redwing was skeptical of that mechanism but certain that the event had been a crude attempt at getting their attention. Then nothing more happened. “A trial run, maybe,” Karl had said. Redwing decided to keep to their planned helical trajectory.

Clare Conway said, rising from the copilot chair, “Cap’n, I see three small ships coming up behind us. They popped into view of long-range microwave radar minutes ago.”

Redwing flicked the radar display on the biggest screen. “Where’d they come from?”

“From the Knothole rim, looks like,” Clare said.

Karl said, “Maybe this answers Beth’s question. They’re sending out something to attack us.”

“What’s their ETA on current trajectory?” Redwing asked, keeping his voice calm.

“Two hours, approx,” Clare said.

“Get me an image.” Redwing considered what they could do. SunSeeker had no substantial defenses against projectile or high-intensity laser weapons. He had learned a simple rule back in the brief, enormously destructive Asteroid War: that any mass hitting at three kilometers per second delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT. And SunSeeker was moving well above 100 km/sec now. Add to that any incoming kinetic energy of an attacker. Square it. Any interesting space drive was a weapon of mass destruction, even to itself.

That was why the ship had auto-laser batteries run by the Artilects, designed for interstellar travel. They could hammer a rock the size of your fist or smaller into ionized atoms in a microsecond. But above that mass level, not much. They might deflect it a bit, which could be useful. That’s all. Throw a living room couch at SunSeeker at these speeds and they would suffer a hull breach.

“They’re small, can maneuver faster than we can,” Clare said. “Accelerating at three gravs, too.”

“So maybe robotic,” Redwing said. This was not looking good. “How do they navigate in the jet? Can we tell?”

“Looks like magscoops, same as us. Smaller, of course.”

Clare brought up the same telescope Beth had used and sought out the small moving dots. “Less than a hundred meters across,” she said. “Cylindrical, with an ionized propulsion signature.”

Redwing said, “Maybe they didn’t take us seriously before. Slow reflexes.”

“No,” Karl said flatly. “We’re missing something here.”

The ship strummed with long rolling waves and sharp pops and snaps. No one spoke, and Redwing listened to his ship while all around him his crew worked to find out more about the roiling jet that streamed by, into the magscoop and their fusion chambers. The shipboard Artilects were working as well, but seldom spoke or called attention to themselves. They were built and trained for their talents to sustain, not for imagination and quick responses to the wholly new.

Into the long uncomfortable silence Beth said quietly, watching the screens, “That shock wave pushing out the jet in the Knothole—it’s hit the membrane. At high velocity.”

They all turned and saw it on max amplification. Beth had used the overlay yellow and orange to signify plasma and lag fields, and strands of these showed the jet striking the boundary of the Bowl biosphere. Filmy gases escaped into space, pearly strands they saw in the visible. Redwing knew what this meant. The plasma’s high-energy particles, encased in the sheath of magnetic fields, would deliver prickly energies. This would fry away the long-chain organic molecules that made the gossamer boundaries. Those separated the Bowl’s many compartments, holding the great vaults of air above the living zones. So it would all go to smash and scatteration in a blizzard of unleashed furies.

He tried to imagine what that meant to those living there. Then he made himself stop.

A booming roll came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.

“Plasma densities nearby are rising. Our exhaust is getting blocked again,” Beth said.

“This is how it started before,” Karl said. “To break down air, the voltage is—”

“Megavolts,” Clare snapped. “Got it. If that happens, stay flat. Stick your head up, it’ll draw current, fry you.”

“You think they—it—is trying to kill us?” Beth said. “This could be communication.”

“Strange way to do it,” Redwing said.

“Retaliation for thrashing the jet, I’d think,” Fred said. He had come onto the board so quietly no one noticed him.

“I’m getting rising inductive effects close to our skin,” Beth said. “Must be Alfvén waves rippling in on the scoop fields. Higher electric fields—”

Redwing felt his hair stand on end. He hit the deck.

Sparks snapped. Everyone flopped onto the deck and lay flat. A bright yellow-white line scratched across the air. More lines sputtered. They arched and twisted. Some split, and yellow green strands shaped a tight shape—

“Human form!” Fred said from the deck. “They’re making our image. They know what we are.”

The shape wobbled and throbbed in the fevered air. Carved in shifting, crackling yellow lines, it was like a bad cartoon. Stretched legs, arms flapping, wobbly head, hands first spread then balled into fists, the whole body flailing. Then it was gone in a sizzle and a flicker.

Beth said, “Can they see us?”

“Who’s ‘they’ anyway?” Clare said. Her face was flushed, lips compressed. “They’re trying to jam our fusion burn, get us to stop, I suppose. So they’re sending us an echo, an image of us to—make some kind of communication?”

The shape popped up again. Outlined in crackling yellow and orange, the figure wriggled and sputtered.

“Let me try…” Clare raised a hand slightly into the singed air. A long moment. Then slowly, twisting and shuddering, losing definition in the legs, the figure moved, too. It raised its left hand, mirror image to Clare’s right. Air snapped around the dancing yellow image. The hand flexed, worked, wriggled itself into … fingers. A thumb grew, extended, turned red, and contracted. Now the crackling image filled itself in, a skin spreading yellow-bright and warped and seething. The body grew a head, and it struggled to make a mouth and eyes of pale ivory. The electrical fog flickered, as if barely able to sustain the sizzling voltage.

Clare slowly flexed her fingers. The fingers twitched, too, suffused in a waxy, saffron glow. The body hovered in the air unsteadily, holding pattern, all the defining bright yellow lines focused on the shimmering, burnt-yellow hand.

“Let’s try to signal—,” Redwing began.

The arc snapped off with a pop. There was nothing in the air but a harsh, nose-stinging stench.

Clare sobbed softly. Fred jumped up and turned in all directions, but could see nothing to do. The only sound was the rumbling fusion engines.

“Let’s get back to stations,” Redwing said.

Clare laughed with a high, nervous edge. She got up and resumed the copilot chair. Everyone got back into bridge position, unsteady and pensive.

Fred said, “The low-frequency spectrum has changed.”

“Which means?” Redwing asked.

“It’s got a lot more signal strength. Let me run the Fourier—” His fingers and hands gave the board complex signals through its optical viewers. “Yep, got some FM modulation, pretty coherent.”

“Someone sending? Now?” Beth said. “Maybe they want to talk?”

“This is really low-frequency stuff,” Fred said. “The antennas we use to monitor interstellar Alfvén waves, to keep watch on perturbations in the magscoop. Never thought we’d get a coherent message on those!” Fred brightened, always happy to see a new unknown.

Karl had gotten up and now stood behind Fred’s chair. He said, “That fifteen kilohertz upper frequency—look at the spike. Amazing. Antennas radiate best if they’re at least as large as a wavelength, so … that means that the radiator is at least thirty kilometers across!”

Redwing tried to imagine what big structure could send such signals. “Is there anything on radar of that size in the jet?”

The answer came quickly: no.

“How can we decode it?” Clare asked. She stood and walked over to see Fred’s Fourier display.

Fred said, “I can look for correlates, but—hell!—we’re starting from knowing nothing about who the hell is—”

This time Redwing barely had time to register the prickly feeling on his hands and head before a crackling burnt-yellow discharge surged all along the bridge, snarling. The air snapped as they again dived for the deck. Redwing hit and flattened and saw Clare choose to stand against the nearest wall. A tendril shot forth and caught her. She twitched and crackled as the ampere violence surged through her. Her mouth opened impossibly wide, and a guttural gasp escaped—and then the mouth locked open, frozen. Smoke fumed from her hair. Her legs jumped and her arms jerked and she fell.

Her red coverall sparked at the belt. Tiny fires forked from her fingers as she struck the deck. Her hair seethed with smoke. She shuddered, twitched—was still.

Redwing did not move, but he noticed the tension had left the air. A seared silence came as acrid air stung the nostrils.

In the silence he could hear a last long sigh ease out of Clare, whistling between broken teeth.

Beth sobbed as they gingerly gathered around the singed body. Redwing wondered what he could do in the short time before the cylindrical alien ships arrived, climbing up the jet toward them.

Thirty-eight

Memor was roaring out of control. The two other Folk restrained her as she twisted and clawed at them. Their howls and wails blended together, even to Tananareve Bailey’s ears as she ran toward the enormous, thrashing things.

Her Folk attendants had scattered, not knowing what to do. They were backed against the walls, stunned into silence by Memor’s deep growls. Tananareve could tell they were too afraid to leave and too afraid to do anything. She saw that a figure among them lurked under a cowl, a humanoid with a gray metallic head, carrying three ruby red eyes that peered out from the cowl’s shadows. A cyborg, she guessed—mind downloaded into a metal body. Such things had begun to manifest Earthside in the era when they had departed, so perhaps it was natural that an alien form of embodied Artilects should have manifested here in a Bowl that was millions of years old. The cyborg had a crystal silicon carbide assembly, four arms, and sturdy legs. She had seen no artificial bodies in the Bowl but now here was one, an attendant to the Folk, cowering like the rest, against the pink living wall.

Tananareve glanced at all those pressed against the walls and now could tell they were all far too afraid, too devoted to the entire Bowl system, ever to see any other future. A stasis state where nothing changed.

Then there came a move, from the Folk.

Bemor acted. He held his genetic sister in a firm embrace while Asenath did something at the back of Memor’s head. Her great shape stopped writhing and shuddering and then slowly eased, her arms going slack. Memor’s eyes were distant, her face blank, breath long and heavy, a whuff whuff Tananareve had not heard before. Her big, nimble four-fingered hands twitched but did nothing.

Bemor turned from Memor, chuffing and labored, his face troubled. Blinking, he saw the humans and Sil. “We now know what you Sil have been spreading.” His voice came from the barrel chest, low and threatening.

Quert stepped forward, mild and calm, seeming utterly unafraid. Tananareve had met the alien Sil only moments before and was still trying to understand them. They were humanoid and walked with a fluid grace, their tan clothing adjusting itself to their movements. Quert said, “Glorian message came to human ship, the SunSeeker.”

Bemor huffed, stamped around, clearly calling on outside Artilects, and thinking on what they said, and finally himself said, “I am, yes, aware that our forward stations, orbiting from ahead of us, did not register the Glorian signals well and bring them to the proper level of attention. A bureaucratic error, alas. These stations have had no true news for many kilo-orbitals. They suffer from a sclerotic inability to adapt, to remain fresh.”

Quert said softly, “We know so. Sire.”

Bemor ignored this status salute. “These humans managed to get the Glorian mischief to you, the vagrant and difficult Sil.”

“It was important, surely you can see so, Sire. We spread such message through city-speak.” Quert spoke mildly but with eyes steady. “Then came more. Diagram of Bowl’s path. Much long history, strange tales the Glorians know.”

Bemor said, “Annoying! You had no need to be familiar with such.”

Quert did not blink. “Sil think opposite.”

Then they got into a hot discussion Tananareve could not follow, so she stepped back a few paces, into the comforting circle of humans. She had not realized, living so long among aliens whose social signals were strange and hard to register, what a simple warmth came from her own kind. After so long, it felt like a profound blessing. As the Folk chatter waxed on around them—Bemor booming, Quert’s small voice in sliding syllables—she considered her fellow humans. This was so strange in itself that the mere phrase fellow humans said it all as she thought of it. She had competed for, and then signed on to SunSeeker, all for one solid purpose—to go to a distant star and begin a new civilization. Straight out, true enough—a species imperative, some had said, and so she had supposed. She did feel that, then. She had stored her eggs and planned to find a man who deserved them, and to do what she could, in some distant land among the stars, to bring humanity to a greater destiny.

Yet … now these fellow humans in their nervous chatting selves looked … strange to her. Their rambling, whispered words, their ill-concealed yet clearly frightened eyeball-jittering glances … all these seemed both familiar and yet edged in strangeness.

Cliff, for example, looked worn down. Skinny. Standard uniform but patched here and there, knees and elbows replaced, and tattered beyond easy recognition. Rough-cut beard, hair chopped into blunt wedges, a true wild man from many wearing days. Yet his eyes were watchful and quick, listening to his team and also sizing up the alien discussion going on a few paces away. He seemed somehow telescoped down a long range, so she could see him in a perspective she had never known. As a member of his species, he talked less than others and never stopped studying his surroundings. Watching him was to her now refreshment, consolation, peace.

Best to leave that for later, though. You met the alien on your own terms and what you took away might be unexpected. She had to use whatever perspective worked.

So Tananareve turned to Irma, smiled, and did the ritual girl thing, and got the whole story in a few minutes.

The Glorians had sent their own history of the Bowl’s long trajectory, plus some cartoon threats to stay away from Glory. Apparently they had been surveying all their galactic neighborhood for a great long time, while keeping electromagnetic silence. But now that the Bowl was steadily approaching, they resorted to a simple microwave signal train. And it told a truly ancient tale.

An event the Folk called the Great Shame was marked in the Bowl’s path. The Sil wrote it in their architectural messages. Their new city rapidly rebuilt after the Bird Folk smashed it. The new Sil array of parks, plazas, streets, and structures held an agreed code. This conveyed a message other societies ringed around the great expanses of the Bowl could see and use. Now everyone knew of the Great Shame.

Tananareve asked, “And why’s that important?”

“Because the Folk destroyed their own home world,” Cliff said. “As we saw. Earth. It looks like they blundered into the Oort cloud, and their gravitational impulse nudged the Dinosaur Killer comet, sixty-five million years ago.”

“So life changed directions,” Tananareve said, eyes distant. “Doomed the dinosaurs, but made us possible.”

“Must be more,” Irma said. “Must be.”

Memor thrashed and called in long strident shrieks. She raised her huge, thick-lipped mouth and made a warbling, keening sound. Bemor sheltered his sister twin through this and gathered himself, a big hulking presence, and said to them all, “The Sil did not truly know what they were doing. This is the Great Shame, yes. Now that it is known, the task of us all is to make clear that it came from an earlier species, and so does not imply that the Folk are responsible.”

Tananareve’s eyes flared, eyebrows arched. “Huh? C’mon—this ‘does not imply that the Folk are responsible’—but you caused it! And why’s Memor so distressed?”

Bemor shuddered a bit and in low bass tones said, “She is in conversation with her … Undermind. The Great Shame was merely a phrase to her. Now she has discovered that her Undermind concealed its meaning, to preserve her balance.”

“I thought you Folk could view all your unconscious,” Tananareve said.

“Not always.” Bemor hesitated, then with a rustle of feathers that she now knew meant he had made a decision, went on. “The proto-Folk of that ancient era, who committed the Great Shame, were unwise. They returned to their home system, flush with triumphant contacts with scores of nearby worlds. The dynamics of their parent system were well known to them, but wrong. Their data was gathered when the second sun—our star, now—was still in place. And perhaps they ventured too deeply into the large cloud of iceteroids.”

Tananareve was digesting this when Cliff frowned and said, “The Bowl has one great commandment—stability is all. Right? Having this Great Shame is a contradiction you don’t want to face—is that what’s making that one”—a nod to Memor—“so crazy?”

An awkward silence. Then Asenath said, “We Folk differ from those who built the Bowl. Those could not view their Underminds. The vagrant forces that arise in Underminds can be managed, if the sunshine of the Overmind shines upon them.”

Tananareve said, “You think of your unconscious as like, say, bacteria? Sanitize it, problem solved?”

Bemor and Asenath looked at each other and exchanged fast, complex fan-signals with clacking and rustling. Bemor had Memor in a restraining hold and the big creature was slowly becoming less restive.

“Not knowing your desires renders them more potent,” Bemor said. “They then emerge in strange ways, at unexpected moments. Your greatest drives lie concealed from your fore-minds. So the running agents and subsystems of your immediate, thinking persona can be invaded, without knowing it, by your Underminds. Quite primitive.”

“Which defeats control, right?” Cliff said.

“And so stability,” Tananareve added.

Asenath said, “You mean, Late Invaders, that notions simply appear in your Overminds?”

“You mean do we have ideas?” Tananareve considered. “Sure.”

“But you have no clue where the ideas came from,” Asenath said.

Bemor added, “Worse, they cannot go find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds is barred to them.”

“Astounding!” Asenath said. “Yet … it works in a way. They did get here on their own starship.”

“There are many subtle aspects,” Bemor began, and then paused. “We must keep to task.” He turned and gestured. Attendants rolled forward a large machine.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Tananareve said. “Is this the same machine you put me in before? That Memor used to study my mind?”

“No,” Bemor said. “This enables you to communicate with other minds, specifically those who need you to serve as an intermediary.”

“Who?” Tananareve turned to Irma and Cliff. “I hated that suffocating box with its foul smell. And the feeling—like snakes swarming over my skull. Then fingers in my head. I’d think something, then it slipped away, as if something was … running greasy hands over it.”

“We require you to enter this device,” Asenath said. She turned to Bemor and said in Folk—but not so fast that Tananareve could not translate it—“Do we need the others? They are trouble.”

Bemor rattled suppressing signals with his hind feathers. Not now.

Cliff and Irma had caught none of this. She said, “Look, I can’t square that Great Shame history of yours. You came back from star-voyaging to see the old place, Earth. So why haven’t we found Folk artifacts on other planets in the solar system?”

“There were stages. There was the era, after the Great Shame, that earlier Folk forms called the Dusting. It was a rain of small fragments into the solar system. An aftereffect of the Shame, in ways known to orbital specialists, arising from multiple iceteroid collisions far out from Sol. A sad era. Mere high-velocity dust destroyed much space-based technology. It etched whole cities out of existence on worlds not protected by atmospheres.

“But enough of this!” Bemor said. “Into this device you go now, Late Invader. We are ordered to send you thus, for reasons opaque to me. The Ice Minds would have it so. Welcome to this”—a broad sweeping gesture with a final feathered flourish—“a singular machine which we term a Reader.”

She had no choice. The assistants looked nasty and they moved swiftly, closing in on her. She turned and embraced the people near her. “Damn, we’ve just reunited and, and—”

“We’ll still be here when you come out.”

The others gave murmuring reassurances. She turned to follow the assistant, some nervous little form of robot, and suddenly a loud thunderclap hammered through the room. The fleshy walls of the skyfish rippled with it, and the floor lurched beneath her. She staggered, caught herself on Irma’s shoulder, stayed standing. “Damn!”

“A shock wave,” Cliff said. He turned to the Folk. “From what?”

Bemor looked out the transparent wall. “Disaster.”