Shipstar

Thirty-nine

Karl said, “It’s a standing kink.”

Beth looked at the screen showing the jet, its plasma and magnetic densities highlighted in color. “This is a snap of it?”

“No, it’s real-time. The sideways movement of the jet in the Knothole region is hung up, lashing against the mag bumpers meant to keep it away.” A side excursion had forked over against one of the life zones, penetrating the atmospheric envelope of a pie-shaped wedge.

“How in hell did that happen?” Redwing asked from over Beth’s shoulder.

Karl grimaced. “We’ve been driving our fusion burn pretty hard, trying to get some distance from the fliers that are coming up at us in the jet—”

“And failing,” Redwing added.

“—so that added our plume to the plasma already forcing the kink instability. Nonlinear mechanics at work. The kink has gotten into some mode where it snags against the mag defenses and just stays there.” Karl shrugged, as if to say, Don’t blame me, it’s nonlinear.

“So it’s getting worse down there,” Beth said. Her eyes were always on the shifting screens as they powered away from their pursuers. In the howling maelstrom of the jet, there were always vagrant pressures, sudden snarling knots of turbulence, shifts in SunSeeker’s magscoop configuration. Now SunSeeker had Mayra Wickramsingh and Ayaan Ali as backup navigator/pilot, since Clare Conway had died in an instant’s sudden lightning flash through the excited air above the bridge deck.

That had been only an hour ago, but the sharp terror of it was already fading in memory. There was too much to do now, to think of what had happened. Beth had helped carry away the charred corpse, holding Clare by the arms, seeing the face that was swollen and already darkening. Only hours ago, she had seen that mouth smiling, laughing.

Beth heard her own voice rattling out, “Those flitters, as you call ’em, Cap’n, are coming up fast.” Her eyes studied the slim, quick shapes, just barely defined in size by their microwave radars. They had spread into a triangle, centered on SunSeeker’s wake.

Redwing stood in the middle of the bridge and said to everyone, “We’re plainly about to go into battle. Those flitters are fast. We can’t outrun them. So we’ve got to engage them with a ship not designed to do battle at all.”

Silence. Jampudvipa usually said little, but now she said quietly, “Is there any advantage in leaving the jet?”

Beth knew Redwing should answer that, but she seethed with anger now and could not stop herself. “I don’t want to maneuver against craft that fast, with our only fuel the star’s solar wind. Or what’s left of it—the jet gets over ninety percent of the plasma that leaves the star. I can’t fly hard with no mass coming through the scoop.”

Karl Lebanon asked, head bowed, “What do the flitters fly on?”

“Not plasma, right?” Redwing turned to Beth.

“Their plume shows fusion burners, but they’re running on boron-proton. They carry their fuel and reaction mass.”

“They’re flying upstream, which costs them in momentum,” Karl said. “For us, it’s gain. We get more charged mass down the magscoop gullet. So—”

“What do we do when we get to gunplay?” Redwing asked. “We got no guns aboard, Dr. Lebanon.”

Beth said, “You’ve got the big gun, Cap’n—the torch.”

Redwing nodded somberly. “You think it can make that much difference?”

Karl said, “Whatever’s flying the flitters, Artilects or aliens, it has to be vulnerable to the jet. They have magnetic screens for sure. They must’ve been engineered to take care of problems in the jet.”

Beth turned her back on Karl, irritated that he had jumped in when Redwing clearly addressed his question to her. “So—if we push them harder, give ’em some twist, maybe we can keep them at a distance, dodge them. Not like there’s not room to play out here in the jet.”

Redwing scowled, his face more lined than she had ever seen. “It’s ten light-seconds across. Room to dodge, but—can we keep them far enough away?”

“Depends on what their weaponry is.” Karl wore a dispassionate expression, staring into space. “Nuclear, sure, we can see hardware coming and hit it with our scoop-policing lasers. But if they have gamma ray lasers, like those big domes on the Bowl rim, we’re done.”

Beth sat back and watched the flitters edge up from behind. She bit her lip, adjusted for a vortex plasma knot, felt it surge them to starboard, and said, even and controlled, “Cap’n, we don’t have much choice.”

Redwing was silent, pacing, frowning. More silence. And suddenly Beth found herself on her feet, speaking in a flat, hard voice. “You ordered us into the jet, you wanted to press the Folk, Clare got killed right here, and you now have no idea what to do?”

Redwing spun on his heel. “I have over a thousand souls aboard who signed on to go to Glory. I took an oath to deliver them. I didn’t agree to turn them over to aliens riding along in a big contraption.”

“I don’t think—”

“Point is, your job is to not think beyond your rank!”

“We all just saw Clare killed by something we don’t understand, that’s got us all terrified, and you—”

“Quiet!” Jam said, rising to her height on the deck, her dark face severe. “The captain commands. We do not question, especially under combat conditions.”

Beth stared at Jam, whom she recalled was a mere petty officer. But … she had to admit, Jam was right. “I…” Beth’s throat filled, choking off her words. “Clare…”

“Enough,” Redwing said, addressing all the bridge crew. “We’re all jumpy. Forget this happened. We are committed and we shall engage.” He turned to Beth. “But you’re lead pilot. You are carrying this ship into a battle we cannot master without you. Do it.”

So she did.

Forty

We have need of your skills with your own kind, the cool voice said inside her mind. Tananareve felt around her, but no one had entered the narrow, warm envelope that had closed in on her as soon as the Folk sealed up this device. It smelled of dense, fleshy tissues, and indeed, the walls were softly springy, like the skyfish.

“I am certainly willing,” Tananareve said, and waited. She could see nothing and heard no sounds. Yet the voice in her head seemed to be spoken.

We desire you to be quiet of soul.

“I don’t know what that means.”

We can see you churn with emotion. This is to be expected. But calm will come with concentration.

“Uh, who are you?”

The Folk term us Ice Minds. They see us, as shall you, as those of slow thoughts, as our barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times. We have of late examined your species and believe you can be of use to avert the gathering catastrophe that awaits in short time.

“You know us? From Cliff’s team, I suppose?”

Those who stand now outside this reading realm.

“Reading? You’re inside my mind somehow.”

From the Folk termed Memor, we inherited her inspections of your mind. From those primates outside, we learned, again with Memor’s excursions in your selfhood, to convey meaning in your Anglish. Now the Folk at our command immerse you in this fashion, so we can use you.

She didn’t like the sound of this. “To do what?”

To prevent damage to us all. Unite so that the destination we all share can be made coherent with the purposes of the Bowl. To let life call out to life in depths and ranges greater still.

Tananareve had never liked sermons, and this sounded like one. Or maybe sanctimony varied with species. “Why are you Ice Minds? I mean, what do you look like?”

There flashed before her images that somehow blended with knowing at the same instant—vision and insight coupled, so that in a few shifting seconds she felt herself understand in a way that simple explanations did not convey. It was less a sense of learning something than of understanding it, gaining an intuitive ground in the flicker of a moment, without apparent effort.

A rumpled night terrain under steady dim stars. Dirty gray ice pocked with a few craters, black teeth of black rock, grainy tan sandbars … and fluids moving in gliding grace across this.

“You’re the ivory stuff sliding on the rocks and ice?”

And you are death to us. We remain a mystery to you myriad warmlife races. To you bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and searing light. We are of the Deep and knew, shortly after the stars formed, of the beauty stark and subtle, and old to you beyond measure. Our kind came before you, in dark geometries beneath the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices. Metabolism brims in the thin fog breath of flowing helium, sliding in intricate, coded motion, far from the ravages of any sun.

“And you live here?” Still too much like a sermon, but it had an odd feeling of being true.

The Bowl rushed at her, sharp and clear, the rotating great bright wok beneath the hard little red star, its orange jet—and then the point of view swept around, to the hull. It plunged along the metalware—humps and rhomboids and spindly stretching tubes of the outer skin—until it swept still closer and she saw endless fields of parabolic plants, all swaying with the Bowl’s rotation, focused up at the passing stars … while among them flowed that pearly fluid, lapping against odd hemispheres that might—she knew, without thinking about it—be dwellings, of a sort.

“Never thought of that. Shielded from the star, it’s kind of like being on the far outside of our solar system, in what we call the cometary sphere.”

We exploit the heat engine of leaked warmth from the Bowl’s sunswept side to our realm, so we bask in beautiful cold-dark while harvesting waste energy from below. Our minds organize as complex interactive eddies of superconductive liquids.

The view skated across huge curved fields of icy hummocks and hills, with sliding strange rivers of ivory glowing beneath the dim stars. There came to her a creeping sensation of a vast crowd on this stretching plain, a landscape of minds that lived by flowing into each other, and somehow teasing out meaning, thought … more.

“Why do you care about us? We—”

Warmlife, you are. In our primordial form, we traded knowledge collected over vast eras, useful for chemicals, coldworld facilities, or astronomy. We were shrewd traders and negotiators, having lived through eons, and having dealt with the many faces intelligence can assume. Our cold realm has existed relatively unchanged since the galaxy was freshly forged in the fires of the strong nuclear force.

Tananareve was startled by the linguistic sophistication of their speech, resounding in her head exactly like real sounds, in a flat accent—no, wait, they were speaking to her with her accent. Even more impressive. Not many could ape her honey-toned Mississippi vowels.

“Against all that, why bother with me?” Maybe not a smart question, but she was wondering, and here were the minds that seemed to rule this place.

To us little is new. Even less is interesting. We have watched great clouds of dust and simple molecules as they were pruned away, collapsing into suns, and so left the interstellar reaches thinner, easier for our kind to negotiate, and for the ion churn of plasmas to form and self-organize. But these were slow shifts. We are as near to eternal as warmlife can imagine. But you are quite the opposite. You are swift and new.

Into her mind came an image of their bulblike bodies and weaving tentacles, all gracefully flowing, a sliding ivory cryogenic liquid. Something like an upturned cat-o’-nine-tails whip appearance.

We stand at an immense distance from such as you, yet at times arouse when the Bowl, our transport, is under threat. As it is now—from you.

“Look, I don’t know what Redwing is doing—”

Yet you are also vital to the Bowl’s survival when we arrive at the target star, one you term Glory. So you are both friend and foe.

“Why me? I—”

Memor integrated your neural levels to enough detail that we can access them. So we choose you to speak for us to your nominal leader, the Redwing, and to the Diaphanous.

“I don’t know what’s going on!”

Our long views are essential to the Bowl’s longevity. At this moment some 123,675 of us are engaged in this collective conversation with you. The number shifted even while the Ice Minds spoke.

We are individually slow, but together we can think far quicker than you. We are eternal and you are like the flickerings of a candle flame—that which combusts dies, as must all warmlife. When we evolved, the most advanced warmlife creatures on hotlife worlds were single-celled pond scum.

“Why are you on the Bowl at all, then?” She was getting irked with all this bragging. But trapped in a smelly box, probed by who-knows-what kinds of technologies, it seemed best not to be obnoxious. And she would hate to meet whatever these things needed help with. If these Ice Minds just wanted her to talk to Redwing, fine. But somehow she knew it couldn’t just be that.

We bring a wisdom of long memory. We alone speak with and for the Diaphanous. We wish to explore and to meet the Superiors who seem to be at Glory.

Then she felt a surge, as though the entire machine containing her was moving. It lurched a bit and she poked an elbow against a soft wall. Hoarse calls came from outside. What now?

Forty-one

Cliff looked down at what the Folk called their mooring mountain. They said it held a shelter for this skyfish, but it was far beneath them, barely visible through stacked gray cumulus clouds.

The ship crew had leaped into action after the big long boom pressed through the skyfish. They had all rushed to the big transparent wall, mouths gaping, not heeding the shouted orders of Bemor. The male Folk stamped his feet in an accelerating rhythm, big hard thuds. That snapped the crew out of their funk and they followed his barking orders.

The humans and Sil did not know what was going on, so they moved to the wall, now deserted, to look out. Cliff saw far overhead an upside-down tornado. In profile, it looked like a funnel. Within it, huge clouds churned in an ever-tightening upward spiral, turning somber purple as moisture condensed within them. The lower levels of the air were clear, so Cliff knew he was seeing far up into the atmosphere. The conical cloud was fat and white at the bottom and tapered upward into a narrow purple-dark neck. Even at this great distance, Cliff could see flashes of blue and orange lightning between immense clouds. Across the sky, other high decks of stratocumulus were edging toward the inverted hurricane. He was looking at a puncture in the high envelope.

“They’re trying to ground the skyfish in this storm,” Irma said.

The skyfish dove deeper and shuddered with the racking winds. Irma and the others watched the high vortex churn as if it could change, but Cliff knew with a wry sinking feeling that it could only worsen. A huge deep atmosphere would take a long time to empty out into space, but the pressure drop would drive weather hard. He wondered if the Folk could patch a big rip in the high shimmering envelope from the way Bemor was lumbering around and barking at the crew, he doubted it. He looked down and saw they were headed for the nearest clear ground they could find within quick reach, the mooring mountain.

Aybe pointed. “The crew—they’re taking that machine away, with Tananareve in it. Damn! We get her back, and then right away she’s goddamn gone.”

“We’re all gone, really,” Terry said. “No chance of getting out of this living blimp that I can see.”

Irma was talking to Quert and reported back. “That’s a kind of Folk redoubt we’re approaching. They can shelter there.”

Quert came over. “Wind hard. Anchor skyfish, it hard.”

As if to demonstrate, the skyfish lurched and they all fell to the deck. Cliff tucked in and rolled, coming up to look out the transparent wall just in time to see a brilliant yellow lightning strike descend from a high cloud. Unlike on Earth, this one snaked down, shooting side bolts as it kept going. The distance was so much, Cliff could see the entire brilliant streamer, the vibrant, bristling conducting path for electrons seeking the ground. Like a lazy snake, it slid sideways in a long twist. Then it hit the mountain below and snapped off, just vanished in an instant. The thunderclap shook the entire skyfish, and Terry, who had already gotten back up, came crashing down again.

Something rumbled in the pink walls nearby. The skyfish went into a steep descent. “It fears,” Quert said.

“Me, too,” Irma added. Everybody stayed down, hugging the deck that reeked with some slimy fluid. The skyfish tilted and turned violently. More lightning scratched across a lead sky.

The skyfish hit like a fat balloon. It squashed and flexed, the walls of their big chamber collapsing down, then wheezing with the effort to rebound. The walls thumped with the slow, massive heartbeat of the skyfish. Cliff heard bones snap and the soft rip of tissues deep in the walls. Blood ran across the deck.

“Let us go fast, my friends,” Quert said. They fled.

As Cliff followed the Sil down fleshy corridors that reeked of fluids he did not want to think about, sloshing boot-deep through it, he recalled something his army uncle had said once. Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.

Forty-two

With her fellows, Memor watched a high view of their Zone, sent from a craft dispatched to survey.

Something had hit the great sea at the center of the Zone, not far from where their skyfish labored. An enormous tsunami rushed across the dappled gray surface. The sea was shallow, so the wave was already at great height and as they watched, it broke, white foam curling forward. This towering monster broke across the land. Forests and towns disappeared.

The skyfish rolled to port and then back, with an alarming twist running down the great beast’s spine as well. Their compartment twisted as the skyfish fought to right itself. In this very low gravity zone, the air density fell off slowly and there was less acceleration to gain from venting hydrogen. The floor tilted as they accelerated downward at a steep angle. Memor staggered, then abruptly sat. The capsule where Tananareve was in immersion with someone—could it be Bemor was right, and she spoke now with the Ice Minds? Surely that was impossible. The mismatch of mind states was surely too much for that. Memor herself had encountered difficulties with the primate. The Ice Minds were scarcely reachable without considerable training, such as Bemor had endured.

The deck heaved sickeningly, but Memor forced herself to her feet. Bemor was gone on a task he said came from the Ice Minds, and Asenath lay whimpering in a slung rack. It was one of the water-clasping type, so she now floated in a sleeve, only her head visible. Her eyes wandered, and Memor judged Asenath would be paying no attention to Memor. Good.

Each step she took came freighted with fear. The deck rolled with flesh waves. The body around them groaned and sloshed. The hydrogen exhaust was roaring and she felt its dull tone through her legs. Memor had made herself put away the terrifying—and, she now realized, quite embarrassing—storm within her. Suppressed truths had overwhelmed her. She realized that her Undermind had sheltered much of the Bowl’s long history from her and she had never suspected. The Undermind somehow knew she could not bear facts that clashed with her deepest beliefs in the role, status, and glory of the Folk.

Then, in shocking moments that she never wanted to relive, all the tensions and layered lies of her entire lifetime came welling up. Spewing as from a volcano, it burst through her.

Now she made herself put all that aside. She sealed layers over her Undermind. She confronted a problem demanding all her ability now. Put a foot forward. Brace against the rumbling, twisted flooring. Take another step. Each demanded labor and focus, and it seemed to take a long while to reach the external panel of the capsule.

The harness fit her head, and the connections self-aligned. She sank into the inner discourse, but only as an observer. She could affect nothing inside.

She felt Tananareve’s mind as a skittering, quick bright thing. Few images, but thoughts of the Ice Minds played through the strata of the primate mind. They seemed to fragment and go into separate channels, streams fracturing as they flowed.

Memor struggled to make sense of the hot-eyed fervor of these flows. Revelation dawned along axes of the primate Undermind. New data flowed into Memor and she could flick back and forth between her own mental understory and the primate’s. These laced with the shadowy strangeness of linear minds. Hereditary neural equipment governed these divided minds—straight down the middle, a clear cleft. Such was common in the Bowl’s explored region of the galaxy.

She saw Tananareve’s mind taking in the Ice Minds’ conversation and hammering that on the twin forges of reason and intuition, with great speed. So the Ice Minds wished to enlist her! Astounding, but perhaps it was only to speak to that Captain Redwing. Still, Bemor was the proper pathway for such diplomacy.

The deck lurched. Memor barely kept her purchase. Shouts and cries echoed.

The conversations and images seemed to condense in Memor’s mind like a vapor forming a shape. The precise words shifted and changed as the translations moved restlessly. Memor had to cling to nuance, not precision. Something about Redwing the Captain and the jet, yes, and how much humans could help in dealing with the Glorians. A need to intervene between Redwing and—

A hard jerk knocked her over. Memor struggled up to her feet and grasped for the harness, which had come unfastened. She just got it positioned when another twisting roll came through the ship and Asenath collided with her. “We are down!” she cried. “Get out!”

“But the primate—”

“Bemor is in charge, and he says we should go out and seek the central shelter. Come!” Asenath turned and fled.

Memor hesitated. She wanted to know what the Ice Minds said. She started to settle in, restarting the harness configuration, when a voice bellowed at her, “Go! I will care for this.”

She turned, and joy flooded through her at the sight of Bemor. The ship trembled, and a great wheezing came rattling down through the corridor outside. She hurried away.

Within a few moments, Memor lost her footing in the dim light outside. She curled up and slammed to ground. Screams, shouts, crashes. The mountain’s firm rock snapped and cracked, heaved and buckled. The path to the shelter now had a great pit crossing it. Sound came from everywhere, and the ground seemed to be grinding against itself, sending gray dust plumes shooting up.

A black curtain boiled across the sky. Within its churn, flashes snapped like eyes in a great beast. Ozone stung the howling breeze. With it came rain.

Not rain—mud. Pellets of it, hard and dry on their skins, soft at their centers. They splatted down, rapping Memor’s skull. “From some body of water,” she said wonderingly, “thrown up by something hitting—”

She extended her long tongue and tasted the warm rain, like water from a bath, and—salt. The great sea was pelting even this high fortress mountain. Memor folded her feathers close and tight, a raincoat of sorts.

A pool of ink poured across the sky, layers of cloud sliding over each other as if liquid. The reassuring steady day had now turned to a dim night, one filled with sky fireworks far brighter now than the star and jet. Her view flashed in blue-white light and then vanished into the murk. “Bemor!” No answer. She got up and walked on legs like pillows through strobes of lightning.

The flashes showed ahead a new problem—a crevasse yawned. It was a split in the crowning rock slab itself, showing fresh sharp edges. She could barely glimpse the far side in the lightning flashes. Far away. Even in this low gravity, nothing could leap it, certainly none of the bulky Folk. It blocked their way to the station.

Memor looked around in anxious despair. Various staff and crew milled at the edge of this gap, looking desperate. She sniffed their acrid fears. Asenath was nowhere among them. Another blue-white flash allowed her to survey the gathering jam all along the broken path, jostling and shouting strident calls.

Memor saw a new problem. Where were the Sil? And the primates?

Forty-three

Redwing paced the bridge and watched the approaching shapes, flitting close now among the roiling turbulent knots. Moments ticked by, and the bridge was silent. Beth was ready to focus their exhaust as much as the tunable scoop mag fields allowed. And now there was something new and strange as well.

Their hull resounded with a strange strumming symphony. The long notes were just at the edge of hearing but clear and distinct. Haunting low notes came like the beating of a giant heart, or of grand booming waves crashing with slow majesty upon a crystal beach, ceramic resonating instrument. Redwing felt the notes with his whole body, recalling a time when as a boy he stood in a cathedral and heard Bach on a massive pipe organ. The pipes sent resounding wavelengths longer than the human body. He did not so much hear notes as feel them as his body vibrated in sympathy. A feeling like being shaken by something invisible conveyed grandeur in a way beyond words.

Beth said, “Whatever’s outside—and I can’t see a thing on these screens, just plasma and magnetic signatures—is trying to say something.”

Karl said, “Their last attempt killed Clare.”

“Yes, a horrible way to die. I … I wonder how whatever is outside makes sounds?” Beth said. “Oh—Cap’n, there’s a dense plasma knot headed for us.”

“Focus it in on the prow fields,” Redwing said. “Can we snag it and narrow the exhaust, then aim at the first of those fliers?”

“I … think … so.” Beth and the entire bridge crew were concentrated on their work, belted in tight, eyes following screens, hands hitting key commands. “The workaround on that digital algorithm block is coming up, running right. The Artilects are all over this problem, but they don’t like it.”

“They don’t have to,” Redwing said.

The strange deep notes running through the ship’s hull ceased. “They’re leaving us alone, maybe,” Beth muttered.

The roiling knot of hot ions clamped within a nest of rubbery magnetic fields came slamming at them at over seven hundred kilometers a second. “Added to our speed, the impact will be well over a thousand kilometers a second,” Karl said. “Is the magscoop cinched in?”

“As much as we can,” Beth said, voice high and lips tight.

They watched the large blob come straight at them. It was far bigger than SunSeeker’s scoop, and they felt the surge, their heads snug against their chair braces. The ship groaned.

Their internal diagnostics tracked the flow of dense plasma through the magnetic funnel out front, through the tapered neck that flushed it into the reaction chambers. There lived the steadily maintained, self-shaping field geometries that further compressed the plasma, added catalysts, and—the screens showed the pulsing glow in coiled doughnuts of prickly yellow—burned with fusion fire. This got expelled at the max temperature, into an opening throat that sent this starfire into the classic magnetic nozzle facing aft.

But not exactly dead aft. Beth’s fingers flew over the complex command web. The fields slanted slightly, clamping down on the flow, shunting it sideways. The bridge surged again under this momentum change. The Ship Stability Artilect kept them from tumbling with extruded counterfields. Virulent plasma jetted out in a starboard cant. Beth altered the fusion geometry’s exit profile to include more shaping magnetic fields in the exhaust. The emerging bolt of hot plasma was like a finger scratching across the wave behind them.

“With a little bit of windage…,” Beth mused, intent on the screens.

A flier lay dead at the center of the bolt. When the exhaust struck it, the image wobbled, refracted by the complex play of forces, then sharpened. Fragments swirled where the flier had been.

“Got it,” Beth said quietly.

“Brilliant,” Redwing said. “The others—”

“The second one is taking an evasive trajectory,” Karl said. “Moving away laterally.”

Beth angled their exhaust and caught it before the flier could get away. Nobody cheered.

“The third is dropping back,” Karl said.

“We can’t fly much farther up the jet,” Redwing said. “They know that. We’ll reverse, make our turn.”

“And that third one will be waiting for us,” Beth finished for him. “And it’ll be ahead of us.”

Forty-four

Tananareve was grateful the walls of her confinement were soft but firm. Whatever was carrying her along did not trouble to make the trip pleasant. Jerks and jostles made it hard to keep focused on the sliding, cool voice of the Ice Minds in her mind, overlayered with their images of the lands where they lived.

Starlight cast stretched pale fingers across the plain of rock and ice, where vacuum flowers dutifully pointed their parabolic eyes at the slow sweep of target suns. Around the base of the light-harvesters flowed the pearly fluids that were the commingled selves of the Ice Minds. How these blended thought and became coherent, she could not imagine.

The moment hastens. We decided to revive ourselves wholly, to deal with this pressing problem.

“What problem?”

Your species. The Folk believed they could deal with you as a young and largely incompetent species, but we came to see this is not so.

She thought of saying, Gee, thanks! but sarcasm might not translate in dealing with aliens. “Look, we have been imprisoned or chased ever since we got here.”

The Folk are our— A pause. —our police. They also maintain at equilibrium. We are not at equilibrium now. They have failed to understand your kind. Now disruption proceeds.

“What? Why? How?”

Your ship has disturbed our jet. The Folk have ordered attacks on your ship. This is against our wishes. We cannot well communicate with your kind in your ship, as some of the Folk have prevented that. We wish you to speak directly to your ship through channels we shall soon open.

“That’s a lot to take in. SunSeeker is in your jet? Wow.”

Into her mind came an image of a small dark mote plowing upstream against a torrent of coiling plasma. The view backed away and she could see the jet slide sideways as it approached the Knothole. It surged over the Knothole restraining fields and into several life zones. Atmosphere belched out. Some thin girders holding the atmosphere zones apart fractured and fell. She was startled.

Your mind we can approach. The Folk Attendant Astute Astronomer Memor made deep soundings of your neural labyrinths. These we use now. We wish you to speak with your own kind and then to serve to reassure the Diaphanous.

Another alien? “Who are—?”

Into her mind came images of fluid fluxes merging in eddies and turning in fat toroids, all in intricate yellow lines against a pale blue background. Somehow she knew these were larger than continents and fuzzy at their edges, where flow was more important than barriers. Intricate coils bigger than worlds, shattering explosions—all testified to the recombining energy of the fields.

“These … live in the jet?” She could not imagine this, but lack of imagination had ceased to be a good argument here.

They evolved in the magnetic structures that dot the skin of stars. These could knot off, twist, and so make a new coil of field. Embedding information in those fields led to reproduction of traits. From that sprang intelligence, or at least awareness.

“But they don’t have bodies. How can they—?” Her grasp faltered.

You and we do not witness the chaotic tumble of great plasma clouds between the stars. We all see nothing hanging between the hard points of incandescent light, and so falsely assume that space is somehow nothing. But evolution works there against the constant forces of dissolution.

Tananareve knew a bit of general life theory. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably, to yield forth systems that evolution drove to construct some awareness of their surroundings. It took billions of years to construct such mind-views. Those models of the external world could become more complex. Some models worked better if they had a model of … well, models. Of themselves. So came the sense of self in advanced animals. But in plasma and magnetic fields?

The Diaphanous migrated on solar storms into the greater voids where we evolved. When the building of the Bowl began, it became essential to include them, as managers of the jet and of the star itself. Only by shaping the magnetic fields of star and jet can we move the Bowl, with constant attention to momentum and stability. Who else to govern magnetic machinery than magnetic beings?

The Ice Minds sounded so reasonable, their conclusions seemed obvious. Before her inner eye played scenes of magnetic arches rising from stars, twisting and kinking to cut off and therefore give birth to new self-stabilized beings. She could sense, not merely see, waves lashing among the complex magnetic nets that surged in her mind—speech of a sort, maybe. Now the view in her mind shifted to the jet and the plight of SunSeeker, pursued by small ships of destructive intent.

“You want to—what? Broker a deal? After hounding us across—”

The Folk have failed us. Their defenses of the jet are ancient and many failed. Your ship did not even notice these, we are certain. The loosened jet now lashes across Life Zones and wreaks much ill. Yet those who bear down upon that ship now may well have to resort to a weapon we have vowed never to use. It could bring far more evil.

That, at least, was a familiar concept. Calamity stacking up. “Okay, what do I do?”

Let us override the Folk pathways. We shall connect you to your Captain Redwing.

A ripple ran through her mind, a floating airy sensation that somehow mixed with colors flashing in what she felt as her eyes. Yet at the same time, she knew her eyes were open in the complete blackness of the cramped machine. Her eyes saw black, but her mind saw shifting bands of orange and purple, and on top of that—bursting yellow foam ran over an eggshell blue plain. Speckled green things moved on it in staccato rhythm. Twisting lines meshed there and wove into triangles where frantic energy pulsed. A shrill grating sound came with flashes of crimson.

Then she saw Redwing. His image wobbled and she wondered how they could put that into her mind. “What are you?” His voice echoed as though he were in a chamber.

“Captain, this is Tananareve. I’m in some device that, well, wants to speak with you. They are—let’s skip that, okay? The Bowl has a lot stranger aliens than we thought.”

“How do I know you’re really Tananareve at all?”

This question hadn’t occurred to her. “Recall that party we had before we went down to land? Feels like a long time ago.”

“Yes, I suppose I do.” He was standing on the bridge, and she could see Beth and others in the background, all looking at what had to be a—what? She tried to remember the bridge but failed. Maybe a camera? How did these aliens tap into internal ship systems?

Into her head came the Ice Minds’ sliding, calm voice. We have dealt with what you term your Artilects. They are most agreeable.

“You brought out a bottle of champagne, remember? You said it was for our first landfall at Glory, but what the hell, this was a landfall and so here it was.”

“Damn!” Redwing’s face broadened into a grin. “It really is you. No video, but—welcome aboard, sort of.”

“Captain, I’m conveying messages from, well, some aliens we didn’t know were here. They want you to stop fooling with the jet.”

That comes later. For now tell your commander that they are in grave danger.

She said that, but Redwing’s face turned away to look at a screen she could partially see. On it some flecks moved against a yellow weave of lines that she knew represented magnetic field contours.

“You mean these guys coming up on us?”

Your ship has permission to destroy them. But a weapon aboard one of them can erase your ship.

“Captain, try to kill them right away. They have something—” She paused, not knowing what to say.

It is the Lambda Gun, and will disrupt space-time near them.

“It’s some sort of ultimate weapon,” she said.

Redwing looked tired. He nodded. “Okay, stay on the line. We’ll try that—”

The connection broke. His image dwindled and she was in darkness. Somebody was still carrying her around, and she felt a sudden drop. Thump. She heard distant shouts in a language she did not know and felt all at once very tired.

Forty-five

Cliff crouched with the others and watched the big blimp skyfish wallow on the mountaintop. Scampering crews had secured the huge thing at both ends and now were lashing the sides down with big cables. A heavy rain ate most of the light from the skyfish itself, dim glows of ivory that got drowned in the brilliant lightning flashes. Hammering raindrops scattered even the crashes of lightning into a blurred white murk.

“Where’d the Folk go?” Irma shouted against the wind.

“Into that big entrance!” Aybe pointed. “They had that thing they put Tananareve into with them.”

Terry said, “Remember what threw us around, back in the skyfish? To make a shock like that, and blow sheets of rock off this mountain—that takes a lot of quake energy. But there aren’t quakes here—no plate tectonics.”

Aybe swept rain from his eyes and jutted his chin out. “Look, the Bowl has a light, elastic underpinning, with not much simple mass loading. So an impact, from something thrown down here, that has a lot of energy. Real quick it moves through the support structure. It came here, to this big slab of rock, a whole mountain—and knocked the bejeezus out of it.”

“Just as we landed. What luck.” Irma huddled down. Cliff read her body language: the rain was warm, at least. It smacked down hard.

Terry sniffed and said, “I’d like to get out of this damned rain.”

As if on cue, white specks began smacking down on the flat rock plain around them. “Hail!” Aybe said.

A dirty white ball the size of his fist hit Cliff in the side. He thought he felt a rib crack. The weather here was bigger and harder than he could deal with. Plus the darkness of the storm kept making him feel like sleeping.

“Let’s get inside, out of this storm,” Cliff said. “Not the skyfish—who knows what’ll happen in there?”

To his surprise, the others just nodded. They looked tired, and that made them compliant. He turned to Quert. “How can we get into their station?”

Quert had been dealing with his Sil, who were doing what they usually did at a delay—resting. They were squatting and eating something they had gotten on the skyfish. The more anxious humans just milled around. “Let us lead,” Quert said.

The Sil set off at an angle to the crack that had formed in the slab rock. In the confusion of abandoning the skyfish, they had all managed to slip away from the Folk and their many, panicked attendants. The darkness from huge black clouds that slid endlessly across their sky had sent the crew into jittery, nervous states, their legs jerking as they moved, eyes cast fearfully skyward. They had never known night, and this vast storm could not be common here.

The crack finally ended several hundred meters away from the skyfish. The Sil simply walked around the end of it with complete confidence, and headed back toward a raised bump near the larger mound of the Folk station. As they all cautiously approached, the lightning came less often. Cliff looked back in the darkness and saw the skyfish dimly lit from inside, like some enormous orange Halloween lantern on its side. There was no one in the tube passageway that led downward. “Why?” Cliff asked Quert.

“All fear,” Quert said. “Folk, others, all hide inside.”

And so it was. They padded carefully down corridors and across large rooms bristling with gear whose function Cliff could not even guess. It seemed to be working, there were some small lights on the faces, but no clue as to what they did.

“Folk not know how to work when big change comes,” Quert said laconically. He relayed this to the Sil and they all made the yawning, hacking sound of Sil laughter.

They came into a large room that looked down on an even larger area. Quietly they crept up to the edge of a parapet and saw below a milling crowd. The attendants and servants, a throng including alien shapes Cliff had never seen before, and robotic ones as well, held back toward the walls. At the center were the three large Folk and the machine holding Tananareve. The far walls were large oval screens showing views of the Knothole region. One smaller screen was a view from far above, where a long tear in the atmospheric envelope had drawn clouds streaming in, moisture condensing and lightning forking along the flanks of immense purple storms.

“That’s the top of the typhoon we’re under,” Terry said. “Judging the scale, I’d say those cloud banks are the size of Earthside continents—and look at that lightning flash! You can see it coiling around. As big as the Mississippi, easy.”

“Look,” Irma said, pointing at the shifting view as it tilted toward the Knothole. “There’s the jet—and my God!—SunSeeker.”

The screens showed swift small motes dodging and banking in the center of the luminous swirling plasma jet. A quick close-up of their own starship showed it plowing through knots of turbulence and making a tight helix, aiming its pencil exhaust in a tight hot luminous finger at the—

“Damn, they hit it!” Aybe said, eyes jumping. “Blew that flier to pieces.”

“Damn right!” Terry said, pumping his fist.

They didn’t know what was going on, but excitement rippled through humans and Sil alike as they watched something like a dogfight going on. Cliff watched the ballet of ships moving at many hundreds of kilometers a second, seen on scales that had to be zoomed six or seven orders of magnitudes. Nothing but machines could handle this, and even they seemed strained from the sudden turns and swerves they saw.

The crowd below gazed upward at the screens, and the Folk were at the center, managing machines. The odd curved box that held Tananareve was with them. He wondered what they were making of this confusing mess. He grasped Irma and held her close. They kissed, not caring if anyone saw. Then the guards arrived.

Forty-six

They were drenched and cold, Folk and Serfs alike, but the hour demanded attention. Memor slumped down to rest, sitting back a bit on her haunches.

Their flight from the poor agonized and wounded skyfish had been rowdy, noisy, swept by rain beneath inky clouds flashing with electrical anger. Their ragged party had slipped and stumbled their way across great slabs of rock, with Memor trying to keep order in their flight. A team from the station had come out to erect, with swift competence, a bridge over the jagged chasm that had split open. The station’s deputy commander said a flying hard-carbon flange had fallen on the mountain, apparently freed of its support structure high up in the envelope’s stanchions, and plunged deep into the mountain’s firm mass. The shock wave had rocked the skyfish sideways and blown several of its compartments, spilling crew onto the rock. That knife-sharp girder had also split a crevasse at the worst possible moment, spraying fragments into the skyfish and killing some local staff. The great skyfish bellowed and writhed against the crews attempting to moor it, killing several. Its flailing fins were sharp and deadly.

Considering this, it was a wonder anything worked.

Memor sagged with exhaustion. She watched Asenath stand proudly at the prow of the command center in their mountain shelter, in full authority. She listened to the panicked signals from the fliers, displayed on screens and sounding shrill even in this large command room. The fliers were guided by robot minds, high level and capable of what seemed like emotions. The voices were brittle, sharp, edged with urgency. The swift ships tumbled and gyred, blown about by the ramscoop thrust. That made evasive navigation and aiming nearly impossible.

“We could use the Lambda Gun, as you said before, Wisdom Chief,” a small lieutenant said softly. “One of the fliers bears only the gun. It is bulky and makes maneuver difficult in the jet. That flier hangs back, away from the pencil exhaust the primates are using against us.”

“Under whose orders was this done?” Memor said.

“Mine,” Asenath said firmly.

“Have the Ice Minds agreed? They have—”

“Bemor is not here, so we cannot readily consult with the Ice Minds. He is off managing their discourse, if that is the proper word, with your talking primate. So I shall have to assume command.”

Memor felt compelled to say, “Separated command? This is not proper use of the hierarchy—”

“Ah, but then, this is a clear emergency. Communications are fragmented and time ticks on. I order the Lambda Gun unfolded.”

Memor felt a sudden spike of fear. “That, that will take time—”

“Get to it,” Asenath ordered the lieutenant. Various officers, gathered around the two Folk in a crescent, rustled with unease. Nobody moved. The silence stretched.

Memor said, “You had the Lambda Gun prepared before, didn’t you?”

Asenath gave an irritated fan-rebuke to her underlings. “Now!” They scurried off to their many tasks.

Almost casually, in a way that told Memor this had been long planned, Asenath turned and gave a gray green feather rush of haughty disregard. “I felt it necessary. Events now prove me correct.”

Memor felt icy fatigue run through her but summoned up reserves, rustled her feathers, and turned inward. She had heard of the Lambda Gun long ago as a historical curiosity, and now had to call up its history to have any hope of dealing with Asenath. Her Undermind held this lore, and was sore abused. She felt this as she unveiled portions, stripping back layers of youthful memory, gazing inward past the trauma suffered after the revelation of the Great Shame. She felt it now in its full ghastly panorama—the images of a long cometary tail, pointing directly at Earth in the final moments, like an accusatory finger, and the spreading circle of destruction that annihilated the ancient civilization of smart, warm-blooded reptiles. Their majesty lay not in vast edifices, culminating in the Bowl. Instead, they were heirs to the fraction of that great species which relished their natural planet and did not want to take part in the Bowl, or its technical prowess, or the alliance with strange minds in the cometary halo. They had kept Earth green and fertile, restricting their own numbers so the natural luxuriant world was not paved over with artifice. In a way, Memor recalled, the Bowl became a tribute to their deep instincts. Its huge expanses enabled many species to live intelligently in Zones dominated by leafy wealth, though built upon a substrate of spinning metal and carbon fiber intricacies. A natural world built upon a machine …

She had become lost in her introspection, a common liability of voyages into the Undermind’s shadowy labyrinths. Memor revived an old image of the Lambda Gun, a fearsome projector of gray spherical bulk, tapering into a belligerent snout. It could project a disturbance in the vacuum energy of space-time, throwing this knot of chaos out in a beam. Suitably tuned, it would cause, when it struck solid matter, a catastrophic expansion of a small volume of space. The inflation field increased the cosmological constant in a very restricted region for a brief snap of time. Whatever contained this howling monstrosity, reborn from the first instant of this universe, would be ripped into particles far smaller than nuclei.

Memor recoiled from this appalling vision. With a hasty withdrawal salute, she slammed her Undermind shut. “This is grisly! This is a planet buster, capable of delivering enormous energies—”

“So well I do know,” Asenath replied. “I have studied this ancient device and its history. The true Ancients invented it as a last resort against balky species. Some hurled relativistic masses at the Bowl to drive it away. The Lambda Gun put a quick end to their mischief.”

“Surely we have shields that would be useful—”

“Not against a vagrant craft with powerful magnetic scoops. We enjoyed great magnetic craftsmanship in Ancient ages, but our Bowl does not muster such intensities. Nor do the Diaphanous have ready responses. Meanwhile, the jet stands in a nonlinear kink mode and deals us terrible destruction.”

Asenath said this with a reasonable air and somber fan-display. Memor knew she could not deflect Asenath in an area where her expertise and rank prevailed. She gave it one last try. “The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous are in charge of jet dynamics!”

“And they have failed. Prepare to fire,” Asenath said to a lieutenant, and turned her back on Memor.

Forty-seven

Beth felt the hairs on her neck rise, prickly and trembling as the electrical charge built again. But this time she was getting irked and instead of flattening herself yet again on the deck, she hit a hard thruster in the magscoop. Fields vented plasma and the ship lurched. The others were hitting the deck but Beth discharged a brace of capacitors in the magscoop’s leading magnetic fields. This gave a powerful burst of electrons at the far end of the scoop, moving at the speed of light. Instantly her neck hairs stopped tingling.

“Cap’n, looks like I’ve found a way to offset the charge buildup these things are using against us,” she said with a deliberately casual air.

Redwing looked up from the deck, where he had sprawled. “Brilliant!”

“And she nailed that flier flat on, too,” Karl said with one of his seldom-seen grins. “There’s only one flier left, and it’s hanging back pretty far.”

“Good,” Redwing said, getting up and straightening his uniform. He was always meticulous when on the bridge. “But we’re near the top of our mission profile, right?”

Beth checked. “Yes, sir, got to turn around soon and head back down, run with the jet.”

“That will lower our plasma influx pretty far,” Karl said. “We’ll have a reduced exhaust.”

“So the exhaust will be less useful as a weapon, certainly,” Redwing said. “Let’s try to hover near our top limit, then. Can you do that, Officer Marble?”

Redwing also liked to get formal in tight situations. She had often wondered if in such moments he saw himself as fearless admiral at the helm of a battleship on tossing gray seas. Well, this was about as close to that as he was going to get, and as close as she ever wanted to be.

“Keep an eye on that flier as we make our turn.” Redwing settled into his deck chair. He looked tired and gray to Beth, but so did they all now. Hours of dodging among the jet knots, harvesting them with split-second timing and then blowing the excess post-fusion plasma out the flexing nozzle as a weapon—well, it added up fast.

The ship rumbled as she took it on a slow tipping angle. She was concentrating so didn’t notice the beeping of the comm.

Karl picked it up for her. His body went rigid and he glanced at his shocked face. “It’s … Tananareve, Cap’n. For you.”

He grabbed it. “Redwing here. How in—?” Redwing’s face showed nothing as he listened. Then his mouth slowly opened and he stared into space. “How did—?” More silence. “So they’ll let us go?”

Beth suddenly realized that this was a negotiation that could end all this madness. She kept SunSeeker in a tight helical turn, with a wary eye on the flier below, now approaching. Something told her that she should make some quick dodgy movements to make them a less predictable target. While hanging on Redwing’s every word, of course.

“Okay, details later. Right.” Redwing’s entire body was tense now, on his feet, spine ramrod straight. He gripped his chair so hard, she saw his hand turn pale. “What?” The silence seemed long and unbearable, but she noticed the seconds on her situation screen were going by slowly. “Roger. More later.”

Redwing turned to her and said, “That flier behind us, take all the evasion you can. They’re trying to shut down a weapon that’s in armed and aiming mode right now.”

She slammed the helm over hard and teased the fusion burn to its max. Then she released the bolus of searing plasma and wrenched the helm again, putting them into a flat spin, then a dive. Pops and creaks came echoing down the bridge from the connecting corridors. Karl’s tablet escaped from the ridged worktable and smacked into the bulkhead.

Redwing said, “There’s an electromagnetic precursor maybe two seconds before discharge. Look for that. Say again, Tananareve—”

Karl flicked their EM antennas into one overlay, frequencies color-coded. Beth could see the flier as a dark point among hills and valleys of Technicolor richness. “It’s buried in all this plasma emission,” Karl said.

“Integrate the whole spectral emission,” Beth said. “I don’t know what frequency it will come out in, but if we—”

“Got it.” A smooth topological surface appeared now in auburn colors, brown for valleys and nearly yellow at the peaks. The sky flexed like an ocean rolling with colliding wave fronts.

She fought the helm around again and let their speed drop a bit. This let her fill reserve chambers with incoming plasma and build to the max density they could carry. The jet wind was coming in at velocities over a thousand kilometers a second, and she could vary the inflow rate simply by moving the magscoop to angle it more fully into the stream. SunSeeker was working far from its optimal performance peak, which had been designed to run steady and smooth on interstellar plasma, orders of magnitude below the sleeting hail of knotty ionized matter rushing at them. Now she used, without thinking about it, the skills she had won from their flight up the jet when they arrived here. Through long hours she had fought violent currents, swimming upstream against conditions SunSeeker had never seen.

Now she just let her instincts rule. Her hands and eyes moved restlessly, shaping plasma and bunching it. When she saw the holding chambers were full, she began to trickle more into the fusion chambers. The boost took them up jetward and to starboard as she waited for something strange to come at them.

It wasn’t subtle. The maroon tones around the flier profile suddenly blossomed with a hard bright yellow peak. She fed the stored plasma into the chambers and goosed the drive. The helm slammed over, and she had time to shout “Incoming!”

The bridge shuddered and then wrinkled. She looked down the deck line and saw the bulwark ripple and flex. Pops and groans rose. Karl dove for the deck. She felt a tight pressure run through her like a slow, sinuous wave. Her stomach lurched. A deep bass tone rolled along the ship axis and—

—it was gone. The bridge snapped back into straight lines and firm walls. The hail of small stressed sounds fell away.

“They missed us,” Karl said.

Redwing nodded. “But what missed us? The deck got rubbery—”

“A space-time wrinkle, maybe,” Karl said. “I dunno how in hell anybody could make one, but—”

“Let me concentrate,” Beth said. “They could shoot at us again.”

She dodged and swerved and dove and soared and plunged, and time stretched the way space had moments before. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the feeds that told her what the flier was doing. It cut her off on a side curve and flared more exhaust to draw closer. She countered with her own moves. All this she did with hands incessantly moving as her eyes looked for another of the hard bright yellow peaks. But it didn’t come.

The comm beeped. Redwing answered. “Oh. Good. What? Say again. Good. Great. You’re sure. Okay. Terms come later, sure. Soon, yes.”

He hung up and turned to Beth. She allowed her eyes to stray to him and she was shocked at how old he looked.

“They’re standing down. No more pulses like that. Something called the Lambda Gun.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and the comm beeped again.

Redwing answered. “What? Look at the star?”

“Got it,” Karl said. He and Fred, who had come onto the bridge, peered at the big screen.

Geysers. The curve of the red star worked with furious energies. Flares and huge arches broke into space. Currents swept across the troubled crescent. Beth saw there was a dent in the perfect circle. Something had chewed it.

Karl said, “Look at these vectors.” He had told the Kinematic Artilect to project an acceptance cone on the thing that had missed them. He had set the basic width to be a few times the jittering pattern Beth had followed to evade whatever the flier threw at them. Within the error bars, the cone snipped a bit off the star.

Redwing frowned. “Tananareve says the Folk call it a Lambda Gun. It does something with space-time, so if it just projected on—” He stopped. Facts trump words.

They watched the star adjust gravity against its internal pressures. Huge fissures opened and closed like snapping mouths. Fountains of restless plasma worked up in slender, vibrant yellow tendrils before curving and dying. The star flooded simmering masses into the gap, and waves spread from that. Fluids shaped by strong magnetic fields moved in complex eddies. Storms peeled off this and spread, tornadoes the size of planets.

Beth let out a long slow breath, trying to get herself back into somewhat normal condition. She was tired and worn and completely confused. Coffee no longer helped. She needed a bath, too.

She stood, wobbling a little. “Tananareve said more, Cap’n. I could tell. What?”

“We’ve got a deal. They’ll resupply us.”

Gasps. Redwing shrugged and smiled, bobbing his head when the entire bridge burst into applause. “Uh, yes. There’s more. They want some of us, maybe enough to avoid inbreeding, to stay on the Bowl. The ones who actually run this place aren’t those Folk at all. Those are like the local police on the beat, or middle managers in a bureaucracy. This thing is so old, something needs to live long enough to run it.”

“Some aliens we didn’t see down there?” Beth asked, her vision bleary, bones aching now. “Some kind of—”

Redwing shrugged, as though he should have known all along. “Ice Minds move slowly because they’re cold. They keep the memories and experience, Tananareve said. They work with something called the Diaphanous, who manage the jet and the star.”

“Plasma stuff?” Karl said. “Those were what made those sounds, that created those discharge arcs, that—”

“Killed Clare,” Beth said. “Trying to stop us from kinking the jet.”

“The cold works with the hot, then,” Karl said. “The Folk are just local managers.”

“They sure don’t think so. They imagine they’re the whole show,” Beth said. “Funny, really.”

“So why did the Ice Minds, or whatever, let us live at all?” Fred said. He had been silent the whole time but now seemed happy, smiling, eyes dancing.

“They need help with Glory,” Redwing said. “We can get there first, going full blast. We can reconnoiter. And talk to the Glorians, who think we humans are running the Bowl. They got our radio and TV, and since they were along the same line of sight, thought the Bowl was ours.”

Beth frowned. “We have to?”

“Part of the deal.” Redwing smiled. “Tananareve said it’s pretty much take it or leave it.”

Karl laughed. “No question, I’d say. We take it.”

“They do want us to straighten out that standing kink. It’s rubbing against the Knothole and it’s gonna stay that way. But if we fly through it the right way, maybe we can bust it loose.”

Karl said dryly, “There are better ways to put that, more precise. But I think with the fluences we have, and Beth as pilot, we can.”

Beth laughed, a bit dry. “Beth the perfect pilot thinks she needs sleep. Lots of it. Then more coffee.”

Redwing smiled and finally sat down in his deck chair, more relaxed than she had seen him in a long while. He looked at the walls showing their situation and said, “If we run down the jet, fix the Knothole plasma stall, then out—well, we can loop around and come back into simple orbit.”

Beth scowled. “Back into the cold sleep vaults?”

“Some stay here,” Redwing said. “The Ice Minds want some new species to give the Bowl some stability. The Folk couldn’t handle us, so they’re out of the policing business. We get that.”

Beth nodded, knowing her piloting days were very nearly over.

Forty-eight

Tananareve was tired when the incessant images and thoughts finally started to taper away. The Ice Minds had much to convey in their cool, gliding manner, but it was all so big and strange, she could not really think what to say. Mostly she just digested. Which was exhausting in itself. But one thing did puzzle her, and she asked about it.

“Why was your jet open to attack? I mean, it and the star and the Bowl—it’s an unstable system, has to be adjusted all the time or it falls apart. Anybody wants to do you harm, the jet is an open target, the heart of the system.”

Some confusion and delay. Soft pictures floated into her mind. The jet’s filmy twisting strands working out from the star. Sometimes it snarled a bit, but the plasma clots called the Diaphanous adjusted that. They made the jet smooth out and glide tight and sure through the Knothole. All was well. Nominally.

“What’s the idea of letting it be so vulnerable? I mean, we just came alongside you and slipped in, rode up the jet. We could’ve damaged it then, even by accident. But other kinds, other aliens, they might want to bring you down.”

Some did.

“What was your strategy then?” She was tired, but what she learned could be useful. Redwing would want to know every damn detail.

Imagine a simple army’s task, under imminent attack. They must find the part of their landscape best suited to strengthen their position when fighting in open battle. The answer is to fight on the edge of a sharp cliff. This gives their soldiers just two choices—to fight or retreat, and in retreating to go over the cliff and die. Their enemy has different options—to fight or flee. That option to flee makes the enemy’s attack less likely to persevere. Placing yourself in peril makes you appear fearless. It gives your opponent cause to consider breaking off the battle.

She found this strange. “So you put your backs to the wall and that’s a defense?”

We prefer to dissuade. We regret that the Folk, or rather one of them, used our final defense. Our Lambda Gun is immensely powerful. Luckily it was ineptly used. We have stopped its use and will punish those who erred so grievously.

Tananareve said nothing. She felt a rising, apprehensive note strike through her mind, and realized it was coming from the Ice Minds. They said, The Diaphanous now speak to those who caused this deep error. You should hear as well. A somber, rolling voice came then, not so much spoken as unfurled.

Who is this that wrecks our province without knowledge?

Do you know the sliding laws of blithe fluids?

Were you here when the great curve of the Bowl shaped true?

Can you raise your voice to the clouds of stars?

Do fields unseen report to you?

Can your bodies shape the fires of thrusting suns?

Have you ever given orders to the passing stars or shown the dawn its place?

Can you seize the Bowl by the edges to shake the wicked out of it?

Have you journeyed to the springs of fusion or walked in the recesses of the brittle night?

Have you entered the storehouses of the Ice Minds and found there tales of your long past?

Can you father events in times beyond all seeing?

Your answer to all these cannot justify your brute hands upon machines of black wonder.

Nor shall you ever chance to be so able again, for you shall be no more.

The space and time you sought to dissolve shall reckon without you hence.

Tananareve knew somehow this came from the invisible ones who dwelled in the jet. She did not understand any of this. She just sighed and put such troubles away as she gratefully slipped into sleep.

Forty-nine

Memor watched the great floods sweep across lands that had held towns and forests and would now be swamps. Great constructions from far antiquity were undermined and slumped. Under great magnification, from this satellite view, she studied the rooftops of homes and city centers. There were no survivors awaiting rescue. A few boats bobbed here and there, but not many.

“It is a tragedy, indeed,” Bemor said. He looked tired, surely from the work of keeping the Ice Minds in touch with the primates, funneled through the mind of the poor Tananareve. “But we are demanded at the leaving ceremony. Come.”

“Who demands this? I do not wish to witness such.”

“The Ice Minds command. Their attitude has changed substantially. I do not sense their goodwill toward us any longer.”

Memor bristled and gave quick fan-signals of rebuke and mild anger. “The crisis faded away, yes? And we surely played a role.”

“Of a kind.” Bemor gave a feathered signature of drab purple resignation, and wheezed a bit. “Come. And bring your primates. The Ice Minds wish them to see this.”

“They have rested and eaten,” Memor said. “Perhaps they will profit from witnessing.”

They entered the Citadel of the Dishonored to see Asenath’s end. She would be churned into the great matrix of dead plants and animals, so the dishonored could enhance topsoil. Memor and Bemor plodded into the high, arched atrium, where subtly hidden machinery murmured, managing the bacterial content, acidity, and trace elements of the slowly roiling mud-fluid below the Pit. First the Pit, then the Garden: the fate of all.

“I disliked Asenath,” Memor whispered. “But she did have talent.”

Bemor said, “Insults are best not remembered. She was sure of herself and had no thought of consequence.”

Still, Memor needed to consult her Undermind to help her get through this. Calling the extinction of one she had worked with “a just recycling” did little good.

The primates followed, and the Sil. Bemor remarked, “They show few signs of the early stages of Adoption. Perhaps we’d best be rid of them.”

“I believe the Ice Minds will not allow any executions or harm to them,” Memor said. “Or the Sil, though we could build a case against them.”

Bemor flashed vigorous objection. “The Ice Minds were behind the Sil actions. They wished the humans brought to them, without our knowing such intent.”

“Ah, so the Sil are invulnerable, as are the primates. I dislike profoundly having our command of these creatures revoked for the sake of a passing problem—”

“It is not passing. Asenath’s Lambda Gun pulse passed along the jet for a considerable distance. It intersected portions of several of the Diaphanous. One was killed, the others injured. These could self-repair, with help of others who could lend portions of their own anatomy. To damage the Diaphanous is to endanger the jet and thus the Bowl.” Bemor’s grave voice boomed. “An example must be made.”

Memor saw Asenath being led to the Pit and recalled when she herself had faced the prospect of oblivion. Asenath had been disappointed at Memor’s being spared, and had allowed a pitch of reluctance into her later comments. Now Asenath faced the yawning black Pit at the center of the Vault. The sentence was read and Asenath gave no reply, or any mournful yips and drones. Her feathers were a muted gray and hung lifeless. Her fate spread before her in the green slime before the final descent. Deep long chords sounded.

Various religious figures were there, clad in ancient Folk grandcloth. They urged Asenath to convert to their faiths, here in her last moments. Memor recalled that through its history the Bowl had passed by worlds where creatures shaped like ribbons or pancakes held sway. These the ancients had termed Philosophers, for they had little tool-using ability. Such fauna were deeply social and spun great theories of their world, verging into the theological. To Memor philosophy was like a blind being searching a dark room for an unknown, black beast. When philosophy verged into theology, it was like that same predicament, but the black beast did not even exist, yet the search went on. Asenath waved the religious Folk away, giving a fan-flutter of rejection.

Asenath declined a final statement; then her feather-crown altered to deep gray. She raised her head and said, “We die containing a richness of lovers, and characters we have climbed into, as if trees. I have marked these on my body for my death. Then I go into the Great Soil.”

Memor wondered at this. No one would see such inscriptions. Perhaps it was a declaration Asenath hoped would somehow make its way into Folk-lore?

Head held high, with a resigned shrug, she simply stepped off the edge and slid down into the disposal hole. She had never looked at the crowd of witnesses.

Memor could smell a fear among the primates; she had nearly forgotten them. She reassured them that this was to educate them in the ways of the Bowl and the Great Soil to which all must return.

A primate vomited at the sight and smell of the execution, spattering vile acid. Memor saw it was Tananareve, who she recalled had learned some of Folk speech. These creatures were smarter than she had supposed, as recent events revealed.

There was a long silence after the ceremony. Bemor said to the primates, “We have strict justice for all here.”

Tananareve said, “It looks like you’re ruled by those Ice Minds. They can order executions?”

Bemor said, “The Bowl would fail if there were not an authority who could override the passing opinions of individuals. Or of species. Your own ship has a Captain.”

“I never thought it would be a pleasure to see Redwing again,” Tananareve said. “But life is full of surprises.”

They all—Cliff, Irma, Terry, Aybe—laughed hard and long at this. Memor saw that this eruption came from great internal pressures, now released.

“We shall have to be careful with these primates,” Bemor whispered in Folk speech. “They are few and we are merely many trillions.”

He and Memor laughed with deep, rolling tones of relieving tensions. In not too long a time, they would remember Bemor’s joke with little humor.