Shipstar

Seventeen

Cliff and his party followed Quert at an easy, loping pace. The lower gravity made long strides easy, but the humans could not match the ease of the Sil’s fluid grace. There was no ground transport except the Sil city subway, but that had been damaged, too. Quert said it was intermittent and unreliable, “Smoke go in there. And … some say … be worse things.”

They made their way beyond the ruined Sil city and broke into open woodlands. It was a relief to suck in soft, moist air and just move, escape. No one looked back.

They paused on a short hill and Cliff could not resist a last perspective on the blasted landscape. Its once-proud ramparts and arches, its residential precincts, its lofty spires of what might have been elegant churches—all burned or hammered down to rubble. The Folk had no mercy. Yet he could see rising from rubble the tan buildings they had watched self-forming with a quiet, eternal energy. Seen at a distance, the fresh shoots of new life moved like stop-motion videos, eager plants rising to begin anew a city that surely, in the immense history of the Bowl, had been rebuilt myriad times. Cliff sighed and clasped Irma to his side. “It’s coming back. Slow but steady.”

“This place was made to replace itself. A technology that counts on having to regenerate. I wonder what it runs on.”

“Solar energy, reprocessed waste—did you see that molecular printer Quert used to make us your new carry-pack?”

She nodded and shrugged the new pack, easing the straps. “Great, some kind of light composite stuff. Made a molecule at a time, Quert said. It’s built exactly like the old busted one. Minus the broken frame, from when I fell down.”

Cliff shrugged. “If you hadn’t been down, that flame beam would’ve burned you.”

“Yeah, lucky break.” She puffed her overhanging hair back from her eyes, a classic gesture of bemused frustration. “Dumb luck. Poor old Howard ran out of luck.”

“Damn shame. He was always getting hurt, breaking something, even getting lost to go pee.”

“Some people are like that. Crew selection was by Fleet merits, y’know—not backpack experience. Résumés don’t account for plain old bad luck that keeps coming back.”

“Sure ’nuff—a big mistake. Next starship I’m on, I’ll remember that.”

She laughed and punched him in the arm, which drew sidelong glances from Terry and Aybe. Even Quert noticed. Well, let ’em, Cliff thought. Not like it’s been a lot of fun lately.

Then they pressed on, turning their backs on the burgeoning city that would live again.

Quert led the way, with other Sil flanking them. They all carried weapons, long slim tube launchers. Their faces were grim, focused, and they did not seem to tire.

Relentless sunlight streamed down through the symphonic play of ivory clouds. Tall and cottony, they were so vast that parts of them were laced through with blue tinges of moist anvils. Clouds as anthologies: the anvils hanging in the soft mist of larger puffballs, lightning sheeting across denser, purple knots, all of it like separate cities of the sky, tapering away into the far heights. Here and there clots condensed out, their understories fading into rainfalls—sheets of pale blue falling great distances, then absorbed back into the air before ever striking the Bowl.

Cliff said to Irma and Aybe, “Relax into tourist mode,” and they all chuckled, not because it was funny but because everyone needed an excuse to smile. They came into a flash of green, almost pornographically abundant in the smoky, almost rotting aroma of turned black earth, rains sweating down from passing squalls, air thickened with rich purpose. A vehicle purred past and from its big tailpipe a lush pale blue cloud gushed. Irma drew in a breath of it and said, “You can almost smell dinosaurs in that. It smells like a fossil fuel.”

Aybe sniffed. “Probably ethanol, but it sure smells rich.”

None of them had actually ever smelled the exhaust of a true oil burner, on an Earthside that was scrupulous about emissions. Only jet airplanes using turbines rated fossil fuel use, back when SunSeeker left the solar system. Cliff wondered if by now Earthside biotech had engineered anything like the skyfish here, living beasts that could float and fight.

He doubted it. What biological substrate could they start with to develop such bizarre forms? That made him consider how the Folk had ever engineered their skyfish. From some airborne floaters, found on some planet where thick air and light gravity made that an optimal path? Big, slow, made invulnerable by its size, like elephants or whales or a brontosaurus? This place is like a museum of other life-forms, he thought, but one that keeps evolving. Maybe that was part of the point of building the Bowl itself? An ongoing, moving experiment with more room than a million planets?

They entered a broad plain of short grass, and there was a trampled, much-traveled track stretching into the hazy distance. Straight up in the air, though, momentary openings between the towering clouds gave a dim vision of the Bowl hanging in a pale eggshell blue sky. Cliff watched the watery vision of huge lands shimmer, a vision from all the way across this solar system. Only it’s not any solar system we ever envisioned, he thought. More like a huge contraption made of a system’s parts. Back on SunSeeker before they came down, Fred the engineer type had estimated the Bowl’s mass, and got more than Jupiter, more probably than there was in the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. Somebody had scavenged an entire expanse of space, maybe all the worlds that circled Wickramsingh’s Star, to make this thing.

Along the trampled path, occasional Sil held out strings of fish, stringy rootlike vegetables, a gauzy plant like a haze of wire. He realized these were for sale, but of course, the humans had nothing like Sil cash. Passing these hawkers, making poor imitations of the Sil no no no eye-gestures, they went by. Here and there a Sil stepped forward, lowered its head, and held goods up, waving them toward the humans—an offering. This struck Irma as an eye-widening surprise. Cliff knew enough to take some food, with eye-moves of thanks, and then wondered how to cook the food that began accumulating. All this occurred silently, for the Sil seemed to relish a gentle, still presence. It was usually hard to get them to talk at all, and when they did, they were terse.

Across the plain came small, darting vehicles sheathed in shiny silver metal. Some moved toward the humans, though most went their own way. A knot of about a dozen Sil cars eased up in the purring machines and shut them down. With proper greetings they got out to address Quert. They had a conversation taking at least twenty minutes.

That was long enough for the humans to sit near the cars and find out which of the gift foods they could eat raw. “Hand meal” the Sil called this. Sil talked while they ate. When Irma asked about that, Quert had consulted an electronic aid he sometimes used to translate, and said, “Sportive verse.” This apparently meant creating poetry, a ritual perhaps parallel to humans drinking alcohol and singing together.

They were hungry. There was a pleasant nutty spiral fruit that left a peppery taste. They ate it all and had moved on to a nearly rhomboid-shaped bittersweet fruit. Quert and three other Sil came over to the humans, doing the head-moves and eye-signals that always came before an important discussion. Cliff reflected on how much they had learned about Sil culture by simply watching their social cadences. Humans talked all the time, Quert had noted with genuine wonder, as though that were uncommon on the Bowl.

Quert said, “They gift movers to us.”

“We are gift happy,” Irma said, smiling and nodding. She was better at ferreting out the meanings of the clipped Sil sentences and echoing their manner. She kept track of the myriad eye- and head-gestures and tried to imitate them, though not always with much success. There had been some amusing errors, such as when she had inadvertently asked Quert if sex was part of their diet, or where the beds were to be, and then walked into the rather primitive male toilets. She could not then tell male from female Sil and had to be told, with furious elbow signals.

The small, squat vehicles were actually simple to drive. They used hands and feet, just as Earthside cars did, and ran on an auto-gear system with adjustable constraints, mostly apparently magnetic. Indeed, its propulsion seemed magnetic, but it never rose more than a meter above the broad plain. Everything here, even the homes, seemed powered by electromagnetic induction, through the Bowl’s substructure. There were solar collectors everywhere, befitting a land where the sun always shone, and the self-shaping buildings were driven that way, too. Cliff could tell by the occasional tingling of electrical discharge that ran over his skin when he stood near the walls, as they surged up and formed elegant cusps and arches.

Quert showed Cliff how to drive the magcar, seeming to insist it was a guest’s privilege. That let him take the little thing out onto the broad plain, Quert in the copilot seat, and Irma and Aybe in the rather cramped rear seats. Their backpacks and gear went in racks on the roof, secured by a curious self-wrapping lattice that figured out its own way to secure the arrangement, tripped by a tiny tapping from Quert.

They headed on toward distant mountains, cloud-shrouded and mysterious. Quert then went into comm mode, using the inbuilt dash system to get in touch with other Sil, using a system Quert said the Folk could not intercept. Quert apparently had embedded acoustic receivers, for it peered ahead intently and subvocalized, face giving nothing away. Irma sat in the back, and the others were in another car, following close on the right side. Cliff took the odd magcar up to its highest speed as other car traffic thinned out. They were moving away from the Sil concentrations, but Cliff had no idea of their destination.

He did not notice nearby cars or anyone following until abruptly one drew up alongside them. It deftly came in and blocked them from the other human car. The two Sil inside did not look at him, but they matched exactly his velocity. Then the magcar started coming in closer. He thought nothing of it until they were only a car-length away. He slowed. They slowed. He sped up. So did they. Another magcar came in from his left, moving fast. Its driver also didn’t even seem to notice the three cars moving now together. They all peered straight ahead. Maybe they’re a guard party? he wondered.

Closer, closer … Cliff had time to say, “Quert—Quert?” interrupting the alien’s concentration, its eyes slowly coming fully open, as if it had been in a trance. “I think something’s—”

A third car came over fast from the left, slightly ahead. It slewed hard and set itself up exactly in front of their car.

Irma said, “Are these—?”

The lead car slowed, its big tail signal sliding in ruby red pulses across the back. Cliff had to step on the mag brakes, and the car hummed loudly. He tried to maneuver to the left, then right, but there was no room now, and then the car ahead braked harder.

Cliff slammed on the brakes. The three that had boxed him in hit theirs a few seconds later. The brake howl was a high skkkrrreeeee, all of them losing speed as fast as they could. The cars were identical, so they hardly separated at all as the howling deceleration threw Cliff forward. They all wore odd net belts that stopped Cliff from being heaved onto the windshield. His few seconds’ lead in decelerating meant he was now about ten meters behind them all as they slid to a stop, throwing gray dust and the humming loud and shrill.

Irma was saying something and Quert, too, but Cliff focused on the six Sil who jumped out of the magcars. They called short crisp orders to each other and reached into their workbelts. Going for weapons, Cliff thought. Not guards.

The Sil ran around their cars and formed an orderly bunch, intent on Cliff’s car, shouting now. Quert gave its gravel growl and took off its web-belt. Irma gave an alarmed cry.

The only weapon we have, we’re inside.

Cliff saw what he must do. He slammed on the acceleration and shot forward. The car shook as he hit the Sil. Impact scattered them across the blunt shiny hood. Bodies struck their windshield and rolled up it, tumbling over the roof—dull thumps—and Cliff kept his foot on the accelerator until just before they hit the forward car.

They slammed in hard and the magnetic bumper pushed them back, lessening the impact. Their magcar’s hood crumpled. Alarms blared an odd hooting call in Cliff’s ears. Quert cried out in surprise and Irma went silent.

“Okay?” Cliff said, surprised at how mildly he said it. “Irma? Quert?”

“O-okay,” Irma said. Coughed, gasped. Aybe said, “What the—?”

Quert caught Cliff’s eye and gave the assent signal. Its mouth sagged open.

He had scooped up all the Sil. Some had rolled off to the side and others over the cabin. They had all absorbed the full hard impact of the car, giving off sharp, surprised cries. He watched where they had hit the plain. None bounced back up.

They wanted to grab us, maybe kill us. No negotiation. Went for their weapons.

Some of them had gotten their odd little guns free and lay stretched out, guns in hand but arms not moving.

Cliff backed out, turning to his left so the car glided over the bodies on that side. They crunched beneath the magcar. He got ten meters behind the bodies and shifted. He moved forward very deliberately and ran over the ones sprawled on the right. Moving fast, he slewed to ride over the two in front. Each body nudged the car up, no more, but that brought the full pressure of the magcar down on them.

He knew the bumps meant smashed bones, organs, spurting gouts of fluids lost into the soil. Agony, screams, the light fading behind terrified eyes.

None of them moved as Cliff then backed all the way out and drove around the whole mess. No point in checking to see if anyone survived.

Irma said, “The other car’s gotten free, too. Looks like they have a Sil driving.”

“My mate,” Quert said quietly. “She fine. Drive hard.” Cliff glanced at the alien, who seemed as quiet and calm as ever.

Terry was in the other car and waved at them, holding thumbs-up. “They must’ve done something similar,” Aybe said quietly. “Wasn’t watching…”

Cliff amped the acceleration and had them up to max speed by the time the cars and bodies were just a dot in his side rearview screen. He was surprised that he did not need to think much at all about what had happened. The three-car team had tried to grab those he cared about and were willing to use force to do it. That meant they had crossed a line.

Cliff had spent endless days stacking and processing bodies, and now knew he was not the same man. He had done what he had to and had not taken any time to think it through. Before he came down to the Bowl, he had been another sort of man entirely. This place had taught him a lot, and most of it he could not say but perhaps comprehended it better that way. It was in his nervous system now, experience digested and made part of himself.

Maybe that was what Quert had. Indeed, maybe the Sil had it without having to learn. In the silence of the magcar he felt himself relax. The mountains ahead loomed large now beneath their mantle of anvil clouds, bellies ripe with purple richness, ready to rain as they climbed the slopes. Already he looked forward to that. He would get out of the car and let the falling big drops hammer him with their wealth and feel each moment for what it was, for the joy of it entire.

“Those wanted capture,” Quert said.

“I figured that,” Irma said. “Killing us is easier.”

“Our chances would be not good in their tender care,” Cliff said.

“Give us to the Folk, show loyalty.” Quert made a head-shrug.

“So … you killed them,” Irma said.

Cliff nodded. “Probably so.”

Irma let that ride and then said, “They would have gotten in their cars and come after us.”

Cliff thought that was obvious and kept his attention on their rearviews and the mountains ahead. No visible pursuit. He reminded himself that attack could easily come from above. A skyfish could be hovering a kilometer up and—he glanced out the window—not obvious until it was too late. Worrying isn’t thinking, he thought, using a saying he had honed in the long, unending days of pursuit when they were first on the run across the Bowl. Perpetual alert could degenerate into a floating anxiety that robbed the mind of concentration, sent it skittering into pointless knots. Not returning to the same damn subject was a learned skill, he saw.

“Where do we go now?” he said directly to Quert.

“Into cold.”

Eighteen

They went under the mountains, not up them.

Before entering the underground maze, Cliff looked down through a short pass at the lands beyond the lofty mountains. Beyond lay the first mirror zone he had ever seen. Big hexagonal patterns gave some sparkling side-scatter of sunlight. They filled a valley and dotted the hills above. Lush vegetation filled the spaces between, but clearly most of the sunlight reflected back at the star. This was how the Bowl fueled the jet that boiled up from the hot arc light inferno at the center of the stellar disk. Expanses of mirrors, incomprehensible in scale, focused on the central fury. Somehow, the SunSeeker engineers said, magnetic fields got drawn into the perpetual hellhole. These fed outward with the jet as it escaped the focal point. The brilliant plasma billowed out at its base, and then the magnetic fields gripping it in rubbery embrace disciplined the flow, narrowing it. By the time the luminous jet reached the Bowl’s Knothole, it passed through easily without brushing the heavily armored walls.

As he watched the enormous sheets of reflecting metal in the distance, Cliff mused that this was how the star provided its own thrust, from sunlight that first bounced off the hexagonal mirrors, returned to its parent source, and propelled the jet. Riding on light, he thought, and held his phone up to the star itself, letting the device consider it. In a moment, the back panel said

Yet he recalled the watch officer who revived him had said it was an F star. It had turned out later that the spectrograph was saturated by the hot spot glare, and got its signatures wrong. Classic field error.

And indeed the star seen through the phone’s polarizer was a troubled disk, speckled by dark blots that circled the base where the jet blossomed. The whole star rotated around the jet base, which meant the builders had started their mammoth final touch there, perching the Bowl as a cup high above the original star’s pole. Fascinating to consider—

“Come!” Cliff noticed Quert glance back at him with irritation, eyes jouncing in the Sil way. He rushed to catch up with the others.

Their party neared the underground labyrinth and found they were not alone. There were zigzag trees in dense blue green forests near the entrance. Sil moved under the canopy, bands trotting with deft speed. They kept to well-defined bunches, entering the weaving corridors under the stony flanks. The corridor’s external locks yawned. Even in the rock hallways, yellow orange plants hung, emitting light to guide the constant line of Sils and humans. The Sil barely glanced at the humans. Quert and mate moved together in the swift shuffle Sil used, like loping in light gravity, as easy as swimming in air. All in silence.

Cliff saw as they fled that many Sils had small, betraying injuries. Parts missing—splayed knobby fingers with one gone, just a blank space of gnarled red skin. A conical Sil ear half sheared away. Marvelous purple-irised eyes clouded by some past collision with life. Mottled skin; scars adorning slim legs, feet, inflamed two-step joints that served as elbows in their arms; faces sporting red scars that wrapped around as though some enemy had used a curved blade. Cliff felt oddly embarrassed at the humans’ smooth clear skins, unmarked by a life of labor and hardship, or battle and disaster. Without even thinking about it, the humans paraded around with skins and sturdy limbs that spoke of city comforts, the easy life away from fear and pain, a softness not earned.

The unseen Sil damage was perhaps more lasting.

He watched Irma as they sped down internal corridors of the Bowl, following Quert and its team along the gradual downward slope. She was changed, subdued and reflective. Her eyes peered ahead but were focused on some internal scene. He recognized the symptoms because he had known them, back there amid the wholesale slaughter of the Sil. She had announced his own blunted responses to him, using her jargon—diminished affect, emotional isolation, a thousand-meter stare, a general emotional numbness, stress disorder.

Now it visited her. Maybe Howard’s death had done it, tipped her over the edge. Or the fast way Cliff had crushed the Sil who wanted to grab them.

He thought of this as they kept their steady pace, moving away from the big thick doors of what seemed to be the occasional air lock. Since he and Irma started having sex—neither of them called it lovemaking, and in a fundamental way, it wasn’t—they had drawn closer. The other team members had seen that, and aside from a few wry references, nobody said much about it, or seemed to let it irk them. They were a field team, not a social circle. Howard’s death had made that clear enough.

He watched Irma’s concentrated expression, ever alert to what lay ahead, but clearly introspective. He cared about her now and had to understand what she was going through. They had lost Howard in a way nobody saw coming, and for Cliff there were no afterthoughts, because he knew he could have done nothing different. In the sudden deadly moments, everyone was truly on their own.

Maybe Irma didn’t see that yet. Something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against some hammering event that changed how she saw the world. If she had stayed Earthside, she might have gone into late old age before it happened. The ones with no give, the ones with the carefully guarded, clear-skinned little porcelain selves, shatter in the end. Some chips and splinters get lost, so that when mended, little fracture lines show. Nobody gets through life immune to the hard collisions. The blackness always follows a step or two behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. That tap, when it comes, shakes you and hastens your step. When the indifferent world breaks your illusions, that shattering takes something out of your own inner cosmos. Something dies within. Irma will never fit together quite so well again. Neither will I, of course.

They came through another of the bulky air locks, and when the intermediate chamber closed, Cliff saw that their escort Sil were the only ones left with the four humans. The fleeing Sil had gone elsewhere.

At the other side, the cool, clammy corridor sloped steeper still, and now they passed into a different kind of passageway. The flooring became transparent and then the walls. The orange glow of luminous plants dimmed because there were few of them on the ceiling. Through the floor he could see nothing but black and then abruptly, as they passed a ribbed steel seam—stars. Wheeling slowly across their view through walls and floor, red and blue and yellow.

“Ah!” Aybe said. Irma sighed. Quert made the gesture of approval and eye-bulge.

“We’re on the outside of the Bowl,” Cliff said needlessly, hearing the joy in his voice at the same moment he noticed the air before him fog with his breath.

The wheeling sky lit a twilight world.

They all stood and took it in. The whispering drone of the airflow masked any sounds that might come from the outside world. They stood on a pathway looking up at the Bowl skin, visible in starlight through cylindrical walls transparent in all directions. Their passage stretched into the distance, below a flat plane above them that even looked cold, a land showing silver ice and black ribbed lines that marched away like longitudes and latitudes.

“Ice and iron,” Irma said.

Between the black support struts was a rumpled terrain of dirty ice. The stars moved in lazy arcs above. A few craters pocked the ice, broken by strands of black rock and—

Glimmers on the plain. Cliff turned and looked behind them, where the long shadows of a quick dawn stretched. And sharp diamonds sparkled white and hard.

“Reading 152 K in starlight from that surface,” Aybe said, peering at his all-purpose detector/phone/computer.

“Nearly as cold as the Oort cloud,” Terry said. “But why is there a tube to take people—well, Sil—up above the Bowl skin?”

Quert said nothing.

Irma pointed to bright points of light winking on and, after a few seconds, off. “It’s always dark here, just starlight. Maybe that’s mica reflecting from rock?”

“Too bright,” Terry said.

A flash came from nearby. They turned and looked at a pinnacle that forked up from the silvery plain below. “A … flower,” Terry whispered.

Fronds spread up from a gnarled base, which itself sat firmly on the icy crust. Light green leaves speared up, tilted toward them. “A paraboloid plant,” Aybe said.

The thing was at least five meters long and curved upward to shape a graceful cup made of glossy, polished segments. The plant turned steadily as they watched, and as the direct focus of it swept over them, the reflected beam was like a blue-tinged spotlight.

Irma looked over her shoulder and said, “It’s tracking that big blue star.”

The plant turned steadily away and Aybe said, “Look down at the focus point.” Where the glassy frond skins narrowed down, they became translucent, tight, and stretched. The starlight collected all along the parabolic curve, about a meter on a side.

Cliff close-upped it in his binocs and made out an intricate tan-colored pattern of lacy veins. “Chloroplasts working in this cold? Impossible.”

“It’s not so cold at the focus, I bet. That’s the point of concentrating starlight,” Irma said. She gestured at the horizon, which seemed sharp even though it must have been thousands of kilometers away. “A whole damn biosphere in vacuum.”

“Running on just starshine?” Terry asked. “Not much energy there.”

“So this plant evolved to work like an antenna,” Aybe said. “They live here, hanging upside down on the outer edge of the Bowl.”

“Where did a star flower evolve?” Irma asked wistfully. They saw now the thick dark stalk that supported and held the flower, swiveling it as the Bowl’s fast rotation swept stars across the sky. “To track starlight and digest it.”

Aybe snorted. “Life evolving in vacuum?”

Cliff noticed that Quert was letting them work through this.

“Doing its chemistry by … starlight?” Disbelief made Aybe grimace. “How’s that happen?”

“Folk bring,” Quert said.

“From were?” Terry asked. “Why?”

Quert paused and struggled with the language problem, eyes jittery and trying to convey nuances, Cliff thought, that were simply beyond human capacities. “Light life we term them. Here when we came. Learned to get out … live from ice … find star.”

Irma said, “Maybe they started in a warm core of an asteroid? Or iceteriod? Got to the surface and used sunlight? Far out from its star, maybe no star at all nearby. Survived. Made leaves to be sunlight concentrators. So then parabola flowers just evolved, out in the dark.”

“Long time,” Quert said.

Irma shrugged. “Maybe a long way from a star, too. So the Bowl comes by, grabs some? But … why?”

Cliff watched across the flat plain and, yes, glimmers came from everywhere as—he glanced back—stars rose and the light-seeking flowers tracked them. Or one of them. The slow steady sway of the focusing plants swept the sky, selected the brightest, fixed on it. The big flowers locked on a bright blue-white star. Light vampires, Cliff thought.

He judged the humans and Sil stood perhaps a kilometer or two above the Bowl’s outer shell, looking down at a wonderland of deep cold night. Yet it lived. He watched a forest of strange, attentive life-forms that tracked across the moving sky, clinging to the outer skin of this whirling top. All this cold empire—stretching far away, perhaps around the entire Bowl—worked on, as it moved through starfields and brought heat to kindle their own chemistry. An entire vast ecology lurked here. SunSeeker had flown by it and seen none of this, Cliff recalled. The whole Bowl was so striking, nobody registered details. They had taken the huge ribbed outer structures to be the mechanical substructure it seemed. Nobody noticed icefields or plants; they were on too small a scale.

He close-upped some of the points of light and saw shiny emerald sheets moving all together, following the brightest star visible. They never saw the star that drove the Bowl, of course, only the eternal spinning night. There were translucent football cores at their central focus. In a nearby parabolic flower, he could make out how the filmy football frothed with activity at the focus—bubbles streaming, glinting flashes tracing out veins of flowing fluids. Momentary Earthly levels of warmth and chemistry, from hard bright dots that crept across a cold black sky. Flowers rooted in ice, hanging under the centrifugal grav. Driven by evolution that didn’t mind operating without an atmosphere, in deep cold and somber dark. Always, everywhere, evolution never slept.

Irma said as they moved along the transparent tube corridor, “Y’know, we’ve found piezophiles that thrive under extreme ocean pressure, and halophiles grow in high salt concentrations. This isn’t all that much stranger.”

Aybe said, “I wonder if they cover the whole outer surface. They could be the most common form of life in the Bowl.”

Terry pointed. “Maybe even more than we thought.”

They gaped. Terry said, “Like a … cobweb. Stretching up.” The thing hung on several stringy tendons that sprouted from an icefield in the distance. Their eyes had adjusted so even in starlight they could make out five sturdy arms of interlaced strands. It climbed away from the Bowl and into the inky sky, and all across it were more of the flowers, their heads slowly turning to track the brightest blue-white point of light above. It narrowed as it extended and cross struts met branches to frame the huge array of emerald flowers. These were larger than the ones on the ground. The colossal tree tapered as it reached out.

“A cold ecology,” Terry said. “The flip side of the Bowl’s constant sunlight. A steady night.”

Irma asked Quert, “Why do the Folk need this?”

“Soft fur, sharp claws. Same animal.”

This seemed enigmatic to Cliff, so he said, “They get something from it—what?”

“Their past.” Quert’s slim face struggled for the right translation. In the dim starlight, the alien face showed its seams, its lines drawn by tragedy. He reached for his mate, a willowy Sil who seldom uttered a word, but whose eyes slid and danced expressively. She clasped Quert to her, they embraced, and there was much eye movement between them. Apparently such signals were more intimate and effective among Sil—and certainly so, compared to the talky humans.

Cliff had learned to look away at such moments; Sil had a different code for privacy and display, and apparently did not mind expressing emotional intimacy in view of others. Cliff was not used to it, and wondered if he ever would be. Quert turned from its mate and nodded toward the cold fields of paraboloid flowers. “Soft fur of Folk.”

Quert turned back to the humans and visibly made itself stand firmly, looking at them all. Speaking slowly, to let its inboard translation training give it the human words, Quert said, “The plants are always here. Stars power them. They store. Always Bowl skin is cold. This be—” Quert gave a sweeping gesture, eye-moves, and said in a whispery tone, “sacred memory.”

Irma said, “You mean their … data store?”

“History,” Quert said. “Big history. Sil want to read it. You can help?”