Shipstar

Thirty

Cliff watched the sleeting, tarnished-silver rain slam down from an angry, growling purple cloud. This was like a more ferocious form of the cool autumnal storms he had waited out while hiking in the high Sierra Nevada, with crackling platinum lightning electrifying half the sky’s dark pewter. Crack and boom, all louder and larger than in the Sierra, maybe because it came from an atmosphere deeper and more driven, sprawling across scales far larger than planets. This violence was casually enormous, with clouds stacked like purple sandwiches up the silvered sky until they faded in the haze. The stench of wet wood mingled with a zesty tang of ozone, sharp in his nose and sinuses. He tasted iron in the drops that splashed on his outstretched tongue, and salt in the rough leaves they’d just eaten, plus a citrus burn in the vegetables they’d managed to scrounge from some trees nearby, before the hammering rainstorm arrived. Tastes of the alien lands.

“Rain near done,” Quert said. “Need go. Soon.”

Cliff could scarcely believe this prediction. “Why?”

“Folk find us.”

“You’re sure?”

“They know much. Even stones—” A gesture to distant sharp peaks, emerging from cottony clouds as the storm ebbed. “—speak to them. Always know.” A grave nod of Quert’s bare head said much.

Cliff nodded. Rain pattered down and smoke stained the air and it was hard to think. Quert made sense. The whole Bowl was deeply wired in some way. Its lands were vast but not stupid; there had to be a smart network that wove all this together. Still, most of the Bowl had to run on its own. No one or no thing could manage so huge a space unless the default options were stable, ordinary, and would work without incessant managing. Still …

No security from prying eyes would last for long. Their only advantage was that the Bowl was, while well integrated, still so vast. Even light took a while to cross it—up to twelve minutes, from the edge of the rim to the other edge. The delays sending text or faint voices across it, to Redwing on SunSeeker, were irritating. Especially when you could lose contact at any second.

The sky roiled with restless smoldering energy. Sudden gusts of howling wind drove the cold hard rain into their rock shelter. The pewter sky slid endlessly across them. But Quert had made them stop here in a long shaped-stone space, angular and ancient seeming, cut back into a hillside. They got in just before the slamming storm descended. Then after hours of huddling, the sky calmed. By the time they ate some of their food, heating it with burning twigs, a black slate wedge had slid overhead and the first hard drops spattered down.

Now it suddenly ended. Cliff turned to the others and said, “Pack up, gang.”

Sil and humans, they all grunted a bit with the effort of getting moving and splashed water on their fire. Cliff could still taste the sweet meat they had roasted there. It had made him wish for a robust California zinfandel, though perhaps those didn’t even exist anymore now. Maybe there wasn’t a place called California anymore back Earthside, he mused.

The succulent aromatic filets came from a big fat meaty doglike creature that had rushed at them hours before. When it came fast out of some big-leafed rustling bushes, they first noticed the curved yellow horns it carried on a broad, bony head. Then the bared teeth. It snarled and leaped, with an expression Cliff thought looked as greedy as a weasel in a henhouse. Most of them froze, for it was a true surprise—not even Quert and the Sils had seen it coming. But Aybe had caught it in midair with a laser shot that drilled through its surprisingly large brain cage and the thing fell limp and sprawling at their feet. It died with a shudder and a long, gut-deep gasp.

They ate the dark rich meat eagerly. It had a strong muscular frame that gutted easily. The Sil cracked its bones and sucked out the marrow. Cliff considered doing it—fat hunger!—but the rank, oily smell put him off. So he offered his bone around.

“Sure,” Aybe said, taking it. He sliced a line in it with his serrated blade and snapped the bone open over his knee. “Yum.”

Irma and Terry shook their heads, no. “Ugh,” Terry said. “I grew up on a low-fat diet. That was gospel for a half century, before we had nano blood policing.”

“Me, too,” Irma added, wrinkling her nose. “Our generation hated that fat smell.”

“I like it plenty,” Aybe said. “Must be—hey, what generation are you?”

Terry, Cliff, and Irma looked at each other. “We’re in our seventies,” Irma said.

“Gee, I’m forty-four,” Aybe said.

“Just a kid,” Terry said. “Surprised you made the grade. The rumor around Fleet was, nobody has enough experience before they’re in their fifties.”

Aybe smirked. “You old guys always say that.”

Irma chuckled. “The first forty years are for sex and reproduction. You used yours amassing a lot of tech abilities?”

“Sure did.” Aybe shrugged. “I wanted more than anything to get on a starship. Reproduction is overrated.”

They all laughed. “Women routinely stored eggs and you guys are never quite out of business,” Irma said. “Childbirth’s just easier below sixty.”

“How old do you think Redwing is?” Terry asked, finishing a slab of meat he had traded with Aybe in return for another bone.

“Gotta be a hundred,” Terry said.

“Older, I’d say. Went through the tail end of the Age of Appetite, he told me once. Pretty nasty time.”

“He’s a pretty nasty guy,” Aybe said, and then sucked loudly on a long bone until they could hear him drawing air all the way through it, a hollow slurp.

“Look,” Cliff said mildly, “plenty of people live to well over a hundred and fifty now. Redwing’s not what I’d call old.”

“By ‘now’ you mean ‘when we were Earthside,’ right?” Terry said. “God knows how old people live there now.”

That made everyone think of the abyss of time separating them from everyone they knew, Cliff saw. He let that ride for a while. Quert nodded to him, seeming to understand. Then it was time to move on.

They hiked away from their latest rough stone shelter into a clearing sky. There were local horizons here, but now the stray clouds skated over those near horizons and the sweet blue air above cleared further. Cliff had not seen before this sharp, sure atmosphere that he knew was deeper than anything on Earth. Yet now few clouds intruded into a shimmering sharp air. The piercing point star of the Bowl’s governing sky still hung above them, of course. But he and his team had moved along the slope of the Bowl for many days at high speeds, one way or the other, and now the star—Cliff had named it Wickramsingh’s Star, he recalled—shone not at the absolute center of this sky, but at a slight angle. Its jet seemed now to plunge more deeply toward them. Its streamers turned with elegant grace, pale orange filaments laced across the gauzy firmament. He watched its slow swirls as they slogged across a broad hill. The humans hung back from the Sil advance point men—though some of their Sil party, he had finally realized, were women. He still could not tell their sexes apart with assurance. The Sil didn’t seem to have strong binary distinctions between sexes in looks, dress, or behavior. Their occasional puzzled glances at Irma might come from that. Maybe, Cliff realized, humans were just more sexually restless than these Sil.

Shapes darted around in the forest. Cliff had seen that with constant sunlight, creatures had to be on guard all the time. Prey had eyes that looked broadly, like rabbits’ bulging eyes, or insects’ compound eyes—all designed to see at wide angles. Predators, as on Earth, had good depth of field, with eyes looking mostly forward, and wide-spaced for maximal 3-D perception.

Irma walked beside him, shouldering her pack where it wore on her, and said brightly, “Ever think, how come we’re seeing so many bipeds?”

Cliff tried to remember that he actually was a biologist. “Um. Hadn’t thought. But look, as I recall from lectures, anyway, Earthside bipedalism was really nothing more than an oddball vertebrate artifact.”

She adjusted her hat against the sunlight. “Those back there, the Kahalla, they couldn’t pass for us, not even in a dim room. Humanoids, though, for sure. Same basic design. But they’re from a tide-locked world, not like Earth at all. Odd.”

He kept watching the forest slipping by as they marched on. But theory was fun, too. He bit off a bit of a sweet root they’d pried up from the ground, under Quert’s instruction, and said, “Convergent evolution, must be. Those Kahalla prob’ly had four-limbed ancestors, just like us. Back Earthside, the arthropods always had limbs to spare, but not poor old mammals like us. We’re bipeds because we started with four limbs, and developed climbing skills, then tool use. That left two limbs for walking, so that pressure forced us to stand up.”

Irma took some of the sweet root, ate through all the rest of it, and smiled. She, too, endlessly scanned the passing trees and vines, and searched the skies. You learned to stay alert after so long in the field. “Yeah, Earthside, bipeds are really rare. Except for birds, who’ve got ’em because they invest so much in wings. For invertebrates, the closest thing to that vertical posture is something like a praying mantis.”

Cliff thought on that as he slapped a fat bug that wanted to use his hair for a nest. “A mantis has four legs.”

Irma’s voice always went up in pitch when she had an idea. “You’re skipping my point. We saw one biped far back, right? Big lumbering thing that ignored us, dunno why. Then the Sil. Now these Kahalla. All had heads with faces, two forward-looking eyes and jaws and a nose.”

Cliff saw her point. “Not a necessary arrangement, right. Just look at arthropod faces. Scary, because they’re just close enough to ours to look threatening, horrible.”

“Those Kahalla though, had pointy faces, eyes more on the side.”

“That’s a prey signature. I remember from high school, ‘Eyes front, likes to hunt; eyes on side, likes to hide.’ Seems to be a universal.”

“Plus they had fur,” Irma said. “We don’t, because we overheated when we ran long distances—so we lost the fur.”

Cliff nodded, recalling how lumbering those Kahalla figures had been. Bulky, ponderous, more like bears than people. And not a word had been spoken between them and the humans and Sil. Just glowers and postures, like the signals animals give. “Um, okay. So the Kahalla aren’t runners. Or talkers.”

Irma said, voice rising more, “The Bowl is telling us that smart aliens converge to a humanoid form.”

Cliff thought on that, never ceasing his scan of the forest around them. Or could be, somebody designed them.…

Quert was ahead of them and now turned. “Not the Folk. Not like, your word, humanoid. We say, Sil Shape. Same thing.”

“Um, yeah,” Irma said. “I wonder why?”

“Come from self design, for Folk,” Quert said. “Ancient.”

“So they have—what?—two arms and four legs?” Cliff asked.

“Some do. Many others, two legs. Still all Folk.”

Irma asked, “The Folk, do they really run things here?”

Quert gave a downward eye-gesture, which Cliff now knew expressed polite doubt. “Ice Minds, they above Folk.”

“How’s that work?” Cliff pressed.

“That changes now. Since you came. We Sil work for Ice Minds too, now.” Quert brandished his small communicator, a pyramidal solid that could deform into a flat screen. Cliff had yet to figure out how that worked.

Irma said, “What do you do for them?”

“Brought you to them.”

“That’s it?” Irma asked. “Why us?”

“You disturb. Folk call you ‘Late Invader’ because you new. Ice Minds want to see you. Know you. So we bring.”

“We’re just a small ship, passing by,” Irma said.

“Something about Glory, I hear from Ice Minds. They want to know what you are, going to Glory.” Quert gave a head-shrug. “Not sure what Glory be.”

“It’s a star right ahead of you,” Cliff said. “We can’t see it—your star’s too bright.”

“Star ahead?” Quert’s face went blank, which meant the alien was thinking, giving nothing away.

Irma said, “It’s a star a lot like yours, still so far away that it’s only a dot. Its planet has a biosphere with oxygen and nitrogen and the usual. We want to go there, live there.”

Quert kept the blank look, but the eyes jittered up, down, around. The alien was undergoing an entire conceptual shift.

Suddenly Cliff saw it. The Sil had been ushered into the view from the Bowl hull—the deep dark abyss of glinting stars—only lately. The Ice Minds had beckoned to them somehow, sent signals, and propelled forward the events Cliff’s team had then intersected. So Quert and the others had never seen the stars at all, until they brought Cliff’s team through the underground labyrinth and to where they could see the sliding panorama of the galaxy in full.

The Sil had been like people trapped in a cave, never shown the sky. Their world, the world of all who lived on the Bowl, was an endless warm paradise in steady daylight. Their sun and jet obliterated perspective. The ordinary denizens never saw the stars, or the great plane of the galaxy hanging in a black firmament, dark and strange and sprinkled with twinkling jewel stars.

That revelation had come to the Sil when they were restless and angry. The Folk had suppressed them for ageless times, but now they knew where they were, who they were. All that had exploded into their world only lately. Cliff’s team had confirmed new truths, and so had made many tragedies come to pass—the battle with the skyfish, the bombing and firestorms of the Sil cities, so much else.

Cliff started to say some of this to Quert. The alien still had the stiff fixed face, giving nothing away while it thought. But then movements caught their attention.

The point Sil stopped, gestured, and muttered something in a low whisper. Head and arm gestures: something ahead, spread out.

They all followed their standard tactic, moving off to both sides and seeking cover, then moving carefully forward. The humans had learned this in training, fire-and-maneuver. Each member of the Sil and human team moved only when others could cover with fire from lasers, arm-arrows.

Ahead, a faint repeating clatter came through the trees and vines.

Beyond, the land cleared. Cautiously they worked their way to a vantage point on a small hill. A strip of neatly arranged, emerald green agricultural fields stretched into the distance to their left and right. Simple farm machinery worked in them, making whack-whack-whack noises. Directly ahead, the forest resumed several kilometers away. The crop was yellow and purple shoots that seemed to spray out like arrows from a thick brown trunk. These were three or four meters tall, Cliff judged, like trees with spokes flying out. The spokes were fat and had wide, fanlike flowers along their lengths. The air carried a fine mist of—what? Pollen?

“We can cross that at a run,” Aybe said.

Quert pointed to figures working in the field. They had trucks and a robot harvester that worked away, chopping off the shoots and dropping them into the trucks. The machinery worked with a regular whump whump whump. A breeze brought a heady sweet scent like orange blossoms with a cutting undertang. Everything moved with a slow rhythm, and the scene reminded Cliff of a monotonous summer he had spent on a farm in California’s Central Valley. He close-upped them and said, “They’re the same kind we left behind, those humanoids mesmerized by that ancient rock life. Kahalla.”

“These special Kahalla evolve for farm work,” Quert said. “They stay here always on farm. Birthing and dying, all done here.”

Irma asked, “They live in a village all their lives?”

“Content. In balance.” Quert conferred with the other Sil in quick, scattershot bursts of unintelligible talk. They all looked wary to Cliff, as nearly as he could judge. The Sil had complex suites of expressions that darted across their faces, mostly coded in their eye-moves and the light-browed ridgelines above. Quert turned to the humans. “This Aybe right. Run fast across. See there?”

Nearly directly across from them was a complex of low buildings the tan color of dried mud. “Their hatchery. Few Kahalla there most times. We cross, the Kahalla not see.”

Cliff tried to take this in. A special form of Kahalla just for the grunt labor of farming? Had the Folk specially bred for that? And … hatchery?

They moved through the cover of a long winding grove of zigzag trees. He and Irma thought the zigzag strategy was to get more sunlight under a constant sun, which meant more exposed foliage turned to the direction of the star, a reddish dot fixed firmly in the sky. The jet’s filmy light they ignored. Bristly branches and coiling vines sprawled along the thick zigzag trunks to harvest the constant sunlight. That made them useful cover, because the branches were thin at the top and thicker at the tree base. Easy to slip among and elude any watching eyes.

Warily they stopped within easy view of the tannin brick buildings. As a Californian, Cliff seldom saw ceramic slabs stacked to great heights; his instinct said they were earthquake vulnerable. But there were no quakes here at all. He saw through binocs furry figures moving with lumbering, swaying bodies on two legs, moving slowly among the brick walls. He pointed to them.

“Friends not,” Quert said with narrowed eyes and edgy eye-clicks.

“These Kahalla will turn us over to the Folk?” Terry asked.

Quert said, “Must,” and gave a downturned eye-move.

The other Sil shuffled and eye-clicked in what seemed agreement, their feet shuffling, impatient. They seemed to feel there was no time to waste in pondering this problem. No point in trying to go around the long farming strip that faded away into the light tan color of the distance, which came from simple dust haze. No telling how long this farm was. An odd way to cultivate; why not in squared-off plots so you minimized the travel distance?

“No time to think much,” Aybe said. “Ready to run?”

They set off at a good pace. The Sil got out in front right away with their long graceful strides, taking long slow deep breaths as their feet came down. They seemed to have evolved for running. Humans had, too, but not this well. Cliff wondered if their home world, with somewhat lower gravity, had better shaped them for this part of the Bowl. Again he wondered, as sweat collected in his eyebrows and trickled down, stinging his eyes, what the Sil’s agenda was. Getting out from under the Folk, yes. But those big birds ran this place, and a few puny humans surely could not make much difference. A puzzle. But without the Sil, they’d have been nabbed by the Folk long ago. He let it pass.

They made a good fast run across the fields, running close to the curious trees. The Kahalla were upwind of their crossing route, too, so that might be an advantage. Cliff was surprised at how easily he ran. He was in better physical condition now from so long on the run, and the local grav seemed lower here, too. But Quert’s head turned, surveying the whole area, as did all the Sil. They were worried.

The rough rectangular buildings Quert called a hatchery loomed up, two stories high and no windows. They entered the complex, panting and sweaty, and made their way down the main corridor between the buildings. There were no Kahalla around at all. A few zigzag trees lined this main street of the place, their wood worn and gray. The Sil went down side passages, doing reconn, and in a few moments came running back fast. They shouted a word in Sil language and formed a defensive arc facing two passageways. Automatically the humans gathered in behind them, drawing weapons, looking anxiously around.

Only when a Sil launched one of its arm-arrows did they look up.

Things like meter-wide spiders came over the lip of the roof. They were white and clacked as they moved, surging down the wall on flexing black palps. Their legs were bristly and black; big angry red eyes glared at the sides of a squashed face.

The first Sil arm-arrow lanced through one that was halfway over the edge of the roof. It scrabbled at the wall and fell with a smack at their feet. The Sil who had nailed it stepped forward, shot at another of the attackers, hit it at dead center of its circular body—then bent and plucked the arrow out, inserting it quickly back in the air sheath.

The Sil were shooting at the things now, and the humans used their lasers. But there were plenty of the things, and they kept coming.

They move more like crabs than like spiders, Cliff thought as the Sil fell back. He aimed at one of the things and hit it, but it just kept climbing down the wall toward them. His shot had gone through it near its edge, but that was not enough, apparently.

They made small, shrill chippering sounds. They moved sideways with quick sure moves.

Now Cliff recalled a relayed message from Beth when they had broken out of their captivity. “Spidows,” he said.

Irma got the reference. “Those were huge, they said. These aren’t.”

“Local adaptation,” Aybe said. “Our lasers blow through them but don’t kill, most of the time.”

Five of the things took on a Sil. They crawled up its legs and bit deep with claws. The Sil howled. It batted at them and lurched away. That unnerved the other Sil as rivers of the midget spidows rushed down from other roofs and through the lanes nearby. Their high, shrill cries became a shriek. The humans huddled behind a thin line of Sils who were running out of their arm-arrows.

Quert was driving arm-arrows into the spidows but then shouted in Sil and then in Anglish, “Back through!”

Cliff turned and saw a Sil had found, down a side corridor, a big frame door that opened. They all turned and rushed there. The spidows’ shrill cries rose as they came after the running Sil and humans. Several Sil tore branches off the zigzag trees along the way, snapping them off. They got through the doorway and into a big high room. The door slammed. Sil secured it.

Illumination streamed down from a ceiling that simmered with ivory light. The place reeked of some sullen odor. It was damp and warm here, and the humans looked at each other, eyes wide, still surprised by the sudden ferocity of the spidow attack. The Sil muttered to each other. They were all standing under the heat beating down from above, panting in moist air flavored with an odd stinging taste.

“Were … were those spiders?” Aybe asked.

“More like crabs,” Cliff said.

“They have a shell and move with a sideways crawl, lots of legs,” Irma said.

“If there weren’t so many, we could just tromp on them,” Terry said.

“But there are!” Aybe was scared and covered it with anger.

The Sil stirred and murmured and Quert listened to them intently. The humans talked but no ideas emerged. The high keening cries of the spidows came through the walls. They all knew they were trapped, and the shock of it was sinking in, Cliff saw.

“Let’s see what there is here. What this place is,” Cliff said. It was good to get them focused on something beyond their fears. They murmured, shuffled, and started to look around.

Around them stood cylindrical towers with big fat orange spheres arrayed in a matrix. There were some kind of ceramic tubes laced through the crude baked brick frame, and those felt warm to the touch.

“What are these things? A whole room full,” Irma said.

Quert said, “Kahalla eggs. Hatch here,” and took two other Sil to prowl the room. Cliff followed down the line of Kahalla egg cylinder holders. The warm damp air was cloying. Heads jerked toward a scraping noise. They all saw a white carapace of a spidow scuttling away. It left behind a ripped-open Kahalla egg that dripped brown fluids on the red clay floor. The spidow had been eating it. A Sil stabbed it with a shaft of wood it had yanked off a zigzag tree outside. The spidow writhed, worked its claws against the shaft, and died with a faint squealing gasp.

They found another a few moments later. Some had gotten in here, Cliff supposed, and were eating Kahalla eggs. “Food source,” Irma said.

Several of the big orange spheres were already spattered over the ceramic floor, their insides gone. Cliff followed, still dazed by the speed of events. He shook his head, rattled. As the Sil searched the aisles of egg-holding cylinders Cliff kept up, feeling pretty useless, and then asked Quert, “The Kahalla look kind of like us—two legs, same body shape. But they lay eggs?”

“Kahalla way,” Quert said. Its eyes were wary, searching the whole room. “Stack their eggs here. Let hatch. Safe so they can work their fields.”

“Uh, but the spidows—that’s what we call them—they come and eat?”

An eye-click of agreement. “Been so, long time. We call those things upanafiki. Pests, are.”

“They’re smart enough to get into these hatcheries.”

Quert sniffed and gave soft barking sounds with a head-jerk, which seemed to be the Sil equivalent of laughter. All the Sil joined in. Some alien inside joke, Cliff suspected. Or was Sil humor a category outside human comprehension? Quert stopped the quiet barking laugh and said, “Kahalla not smart.”

“Egg layers…” Cliff tried to get his head around all this.

Irma said, “Earthside we have monotremes, mammal egg-layers. They’re very old, Triassic maybe.”

Cliff shook his head. “Forget about parallels to Earth. So: smart egg-layers who are humanoid tool-users. What the hell, with evolution on the Bowl, all bets are off.”

Quert said, “Upanafiki many. Kahalla crave land. Upanafiki keep Kahalla numbers down. Kahalla and upanafiki—” Quert thrust its bony hands together. “Always. Fight. Dance.”

Aybe said, “Where did these Kahalla come from? What world?”

Quert said, “Kahalla means in your tongue One Face Folk.”

Terry got it. “So they come from a planet tidally locked to its star? On their side it was always sunny. They had an adaptation advantage when they arrived at the Bowl, over people like us who need night. Makes sense.”

Quert gave an eye-click of agreement. “Spread widely. They are conservative. Folk use them. Not good allies for us.”

Cliff frowned. Evolutionary theory in the middle of a fight …

“Come see this,” Irma called. She was at the other end of the room. They followed her up some crudely fashioned stairs of gray clay ceramic. The dusty second floor was like the first but Irma pointed to a hole in its ceiling. “Looks like they dug down through.”

Cliff crouched, jumped, and caught the edge of the hole. Some of it crumbled away, but he held on and pulled his head through the meter-wide opening. This might be risky, but he was curious—and hanging there, he saw the roof now deserted. A nearby piece of wood caught his eye. He held on with one hand and shuffled a slim shaft nearby into the hole, letting it drop. Then he followed it, landing neatly. Low grav had its uses.

Irma picked up the slender piece of wood. “It has a tip like flint. Those small spidows—they’re tool-users.”

“Keep Kahalla stable,” Quert said, glancing upward. “They outside on ground. We go this way.”

Cliff and Irma looked askance at the alien. Quert went to the stairwell and shouted orders in the slippery Sil speech. Terry and Aybe came up with them. “Those spidows,” Terry said, “they’re chipping at the door with something.”

Irma needed help, but in surprisingly short order their entire team, humans and Sil alike, made the leap to the ceiling hole. Those already on the roof grabbed their hands and hauled them out, onto the flat roof. It was made of tan triangular bricks. Now Cliff could see Quert’s plan. The hatchery buildings were close together, and the Sil could leap from one roof to the next. So could the humans. The Sil were remarkably calm; they had met this foe before. They started leaping across. Cliff looked down as he took a running jump across. The spidows were clustered around the door to the building they had just left. Several of them held bigger wood shafts, also with blackened hard tips that seemed to have been turned on a fire.

Irma came next. She landed with one foot halfway onto the next roof lip. Cliff grabbed her and tugged her in. Terry and Aybe followed. By that time, most of the Sil were across to the next building, looking unhurried but quick.

They all ran and leaped, ran and leaped, and soon were at the far end of the hatchery buildings. There the Sil slung a thin wire around nearby trees, throwing it with a kind of boomerang hook that wrapped around a tree trunk. Then a Sil attached the wire to its backpack solar panel source, made some adjustments, hit a command switch—and the wire expanded, puffing up into a thick rope that hands could grab. Cliff blinked; a useful trick he had never seen.

They descended on that rope, belaying a bit to break their sliding descent. Cliff and Irma leaned over the side of the building to glimpse the spidows while others took the rope down. Spidows were still working on the door, chipping with crude spikes. But then some Kahalla came in from a side corridor, shouting. The spidows turned, and a battle began.

The spidow’s bristly palps moved in a jerky blur. The Kahalla had simple hoes or similar farm tools. They struck down hard on the spidows and pinned them. But there were a lot, and some Kahalla got overwhelmed.

This was nature red in tooth and claw in a way he’d never seen. There were over a hundred spidows and maybe a dozen Kahalla—a melee. As they watched, Irma said, “A fight over reproduction? Nasty.”

Quert had come over to them and looked down, unsurprised. “Folk set rules. Keep Kahalla from farming more and more. Use upanafiki to keep not many Kahalla eggs to hatch. These upanafiki pests for us. Their war with Kahalla never end.”

“The Folk don’t stop this?” Irma asked.

“Folk want this.” Quert paused, searching for the right Anglish words. “Equilibrium. Stasis.”

As Cliff watched five spidows swarm fast over a struggling Kahalla humanoid, he thought, Nightmare spiders on a caffeine high. The Kahalla toppled and vanished beneath the swarming spidows. He recalled a remark heard long ago, Flattery isn’t the highest compliment—parasitism is.

“Damn!” Irma’s shrill shout jerked him out of his thoughts.

He saw several spidows, their legs grappling for purchase over the lip of the roof, twenty meters away. They had come up the wall. They made a sharp hissing, their legs clicking with darting moves.

He and Irma had been distracted and now with Quert were the only ones left on the roof. Quert was already ahead of them and took the rope with an easy grace. Down Quert slid, shouting back “Come fast!” Irma went next, and Cliff turned to take a laser shot at the mass of spidows surging across the tan brick roof. The bolts punched holes easily enough, but the spidows did not stop. A bolt to the center did work, and one of the things flopped down. But now they were five meters away. Cliff leaned down and plucked the securing anchor of the rope. No time to slide down it now. He couldn’t be sure the spidows couldn’t use it. The black rope was firmly fixed in the trees thirty meters away, so he just grabbed it and ran off the edge of the roof. He dropped, then swung.

His breath rasped and he ignored a snap in his shoulder. He tumbled on the descent and tried to pull himself up the rope as it carried him toward the trees. His swing brought him boot-forward, so when he hit the branches of a zigzag tree the leaves lashed him. One limb caught him smack in the face. He hit another, and a sharp pain lanced into his ribs. He gasped and slid down the rope, a nearly vertical drop now. The zigzag tree trunk smacked his thigh, but he managed to get his boots under him. He sprawled when he hit.

As he was rolling away, his ribs sent him a lance of pain and his vision blurred for a moment. He lay there gasping and hands grabbed him. They heaved him up and Terry shouted, “Gotta run!” So he did. Not very well.

The spidows were running through the trees already, lots of them. Their chippering calls were loud now. But the spidows were small and if humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.

For a while, though, until they no longer saw the spidows behind them, it was more like limping for him. He was worn out.

Thirty-one

Redwing watched the Bowl landscape slide by below, distracting himself for a moment of relaxation with the splendid view. Getting back to work, he switched to interior ship views. In the garden, on screens left and right, two finger snakes were slithering through plants, picking here, planting seeds there, while the third—the male, Thisther, darker and a bit bigger than the others—was playing with two pigs, all three having hissing and oinking fun. A laugh bubbled in Redwing’s throat—and still the big first question was there. What could I be missing?

Beth was due in a moment and he let the Bowl feed play on his display wall. He took out a tattered, yellowing paper. As part of his several-kilogram weight allowance it was nothing, but in his memories it was everything. His father had written it to him when in the Huntsville hospital from which he would not return. When he was ten, it had meant a great deal and now it meant more.

LIVE FULLY. TAKE RISKS. THINK CAREFULLY BUT ACT, TOO. SPEAK UP. KEEP MIND OPEN AND HEART WARM. DON’T JUST PASS THE TIME. LIVE LIVE LIVE!—FOR SOMEDAY YOU WILL NOT.

He recalled the man at his best: sawdust sprinkled in black hair, deftly pushing a Douglas fir two-by-four through the buzzing blade of a circular saw, then trimming it and taking a quick measure of the work by holding it against the studs, nodding in the damp fragrant sawdust air, plucking a nail from where he stored it in his front teeth, fetching a ball-peen hammer from its loop on his belt, two quick whaps and a finishing tap, a bright grin, then on to the next.

He stared at the paper scrap and then put it away, for perhaps the thousandth time. It was centuries old but still true.

Beth tapped on his door. He stood to slide the door aside and nodded with a greeting. They got right to it.

She sat across from him in his narrow cabin and he made a show of finishing a log entry. It was not entirely show. He had to keep on top of how SunSeeker sailed on the vagrant winds of plasma and magnetic fields. Plus preparations for the jet interception. And an anxious, overworked crew.

But Beth was the hardest. She had been down there for long months and managed to get back aboard, a striking feat. She had prestige with the rest of the crew. She regaled them with stories of aliens and exploits and weird doings down on the Bowl. She’d taken casualties and escaped from a prison. Figured out the alien landscape and made her team get across it. And fly back home in an alien craft. So he had promoted her two grades in the science officer ladder. When she got to Glory—and we will do that, by damn!—she would command the first landing. Still, her tight face promised trouble.

“We’re in an existential position here, sir,” she began.

“Right. We don’t have enough supplies to get to Glory. Our logistics were marginal when we sighted the Bowl. Now it’s hopeless. We’ve burned food and essentials hovering over this enormous thing. Plus time.”

Beth said with deliberation, “I mean, if we commit an overt hostile act, that sure does change the game.”

He nodded. Always concede the rhetorical stuff. “We have to start a clock running. Otherwise they’ll wait us out.”

“But their jet is the key to their Bowl. Damaging it is a mortal threat.”

“Sure it is. We don’t mean to shove a dagger in. We want to show that we can.”

Beth twisted her mouth into a wry grimace. “A pinprick, then?”

“That’s all.”

“These are aliens, Cap’n. Their civilization is older than anything we know. Hell, maybe than we can know. This maneuver, this provocation, is a huge gamble.”

“That it is.” He sat back and folded his hands on his desk. “One we’ve got to take.”

“Look, we don’t know how that damn jet operates. How the Folk run it. How unstable it is.”

“Right. Isn’t that how science works?” Redwing grinned. “If you don’t understand, do an experiment.”

Beth shook her head. “Plus we don’t understand the Glory message, or how the Folk really feel about it. I just … I worry.”

“So do I.” What could I be missing?

“There are risks to every choice. Maybe the right question is, do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?”

She sighed and got up. She was a bit wobbly. He wondered if she was truly fit for service as their backup pilot. On impulse, he got up and gave her a firm warm hug. With a sigh, too.

Karl showed him the external views of SunSeeker, freshly gathered by their small auto-cam bots that had flown around the entire ship. “She’s centuries old now, but holding up,” he said with a hint of pride. Karl was a bit stiff and formal, but he could not conceal his feelings completely.

The ship’s sleek after section hid behind the torus of the life zone. The shuttle cradles along the central boom were yawning yellow and orange cups for craft docking and vacuum maintenance bots. Micrometeorites had pitted the hull, and radiation burns splashed black filigrees along the flanks. The entire sleek design focused on the demands of starflight. Now their planetary-scale orbits made it hard to get adequate plasma into the magnetic funnel, and the ship barely ran. Fitful spasms sometimes passed through her, the coughs and sputters of a system hovering on the brink of shutting down entirely. The fusion fires in her belly ran soft, then hard, then not at all—until Karl and the crew could get them burning full and furious again. It reminded him of a fine ship built for the high seas, rotting beside a wharf.

Redwing nodded. “Fair enough. The mag systems, they can handle the jet?”

Ayaan Ali said, with a tired and exasperated sigh, “Our upgrades are basically fine-tuning. They seem to work. I’m pretty sure, from records and Artilect memories of Beth’s flight up the jet, that we can deal with the turbulence levels.”

“And if we can’t?” Redwing persisted.

Karl said, “The more plasma we get into our magscoop, the better. So we steer for the density ridges, held in by the helical mag field.”

Ayaan Ali pursed her full lips, and her long eyelashes flickered. Redwing recalled this was the closest she came to showing that she was irked. “The jet’s mag pressure is high. It and those fast-changing plasma pressures can punch our scoop around, too. They’re two orders of magnitude beyond our optimal design.”

Redwing saw himself as referee when crew disagreed on the tech issues, but in the end he knew he had to decide who was right. “How bad can it be if we lose our magscoop shape?”

“We’ll tumble,” Ayaan Ali said.

“And we can recover,” Karl said evenly.

They had the reliable Bear Down leptonic drive, the first to use the dark energy substrate as an energy stabilizer. Redwing did not pretend to understand its complex mechanisms that somehow drew power from the substrate of the very universe. Fundamentals were not his concern; its operation was. Karl pointed out endless details but in the end they had to play the hand they were dealt—a drive running on empty, unless they could grab enough plasma.

Ayaan Ali laid out the geometry on the big display screen that dominated the bridge. SunSeeker had to stay below the Bowl rim, or else come within the sighting angle of the domed gamma ray lasers sited there. Their “experiment” with flying a small package over the rim—and watching it disappear in a furious instant—proved that the Folk sense of diplomacy did not include letting them get out of the narrow cage SunSeeker now occupied. They could navigate in the space below the rim, down to the upper reaches of the Bowl’s air zones. Spread out as the Bowl was over hundreds of millions of kilometers, it exerted a small but steady grav pull on them. Thrusting with the thin plasma here offset that. And through the center of that volume the jet spiked like a living, writhing yellow lance.

Ayaan Ali’s 3-D display showed in detail the atmosphere’s partitions far below them. It was not continuous, or else pressure differences between the low-grav sections would cause the air to gather there to a stifling degree. Instead, firm walls isolated wedges of the Bowl, cutting off circulations to high latitudes. Yet the air zones allowed gas to flow throughout the entire circumference of the annular regions. This meant that the air could flow over zones covering the size of the entire solar system, creating weather patterns unknown on mere planets. But the air could not ascend to the higher latitudes—the “bottom” of the Bowl, toward the Knothole.

“Those partitions are a wonder,” Ayaan Ali said. “Made of some layered stuff that is flexible enough to have some give to it. But it’s hundreds of kilometers on a side!”

Redwing nodded, thinking again, What could I be missing? This thing was built by engineers who thought like gods. They must have methods we can’t see, can’t yet imagine.

Yet the Folk who ran this place had let Beth’s team escape. First from their low-grav Garden prison, then from the Bowl itself. Beth is quick, ingenious, a real leader, but still … They’re not all that smarter than we are. Bigger, though, Beth says. So how do they run this contraption?

Ayaan Ali pointed to the roughly conical section, shaded blue, that was their allowed flight volume. She said, “So we can cruise around in here, and zip across the jet when we want to. So far we’ve just circled it, mostly.”

Karl pointed at her simulation, which showed the bright jet purling down from the star, tightening as it neared the Knothole, then—as the display moved down, its smart eyes following his finger-point—beyond, where it expanded again, losing luminosity. That made the fast wind that SunSeeker had been swimming upriver against for a century, slowing them, costing them time and supplies. Coasting on the vagrant tendrils of plasma fraying off the jet had been a constant piloting problem, running Ayaan Ali ragged. Beth’s return had taken some of the burden from her, and together they would take on the reverse problem—flying into the jet’s thick, turbulent, moving cauldron of ionized particles and mag fields.

“I’ve calculated how to tip in near the top—that’s our sign convention, right? Top is as high as we dare get, just below the deflection ability of the gamma ray lasers. We turn and plunge down, toward the Knothole. We sway back and forth across the jet while we drive down. Thrust hard in a helix winding path.”

He had painted a red line in her simulation, standing for SunSeeker’s calculated path. Its helix widened as it got nearer the Knothole and the magnetic field lines—blue swirls embedded in the yellow and orange showing plasma—bulged outward in response. “See? We make the jet sway a little. A kink in the flow.”

Redwing thought he followed this, but decided to play dumb. “Which are?”

“I’m sure you went through the basic plasma-instabilities material, Cap’n. It was in your briefing run-up.”

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. He let it simmer a bit. “Karl, you will always answer a direct technical question and skip your idea of what I know. Assume I know nothing.”

“Sorry, um, Cap’n. Of course. Certainly. I meant that…” His voice trailed off, uncertain of anything.

Redwing bailed him out. “Like a fire hose?”

“Right! Fast water going through a fire hose, if it swerves a little, the centrifugal force of it forces the hose even more to the side. It corkscrews, makes a kink.”

“So it will lash the side of the Knothole? You’re sure?”

Karl paused, nodded. “More of a brush, I’d say.”

Redwing nodded. Ayaan Ali said, “I have some good news. We got a short signal from Cliff’s team—from Aybe.”

Redwing brightened. “Where are they? What—?”

“Here. They passed under the edge of the mirror zone and got out onto the hull. Found ice there. Then they had to take off. They got led to a place where there were something like, well, talking stones.”

Redwing leaned forward. “And those said…?”

A shrug. “We got cut off. See down there? They were in lands between that zone of hexagonal mirrors. The icelands, with some life in them, those are on the outer hull under the mirrors, which keep it cold. Then Cliff’s team and those Sil got to the drylands between the mirrors and this huge ocean.”

Redwing stared at the view. Even when Ayaan Ali brought up a max resolution image, there was nothing to show more than occasional towns and roads. Again it struck him how much of this place was endless forests and seas and ranges of tan hills. Very few large cities and plenty of room for wildlife. Why? Hard to evaluate a thing as big as this Bowl. Earth alone had plenty of habitats that a few thousand years back were places where the crown of creation would be a tasty breakfast.

Karl asked, “Those are—what, hurricanes on that ocean?”

“Seems so.” Ayaan Ali pointed to a few. “The big winds have lots more room to play out, too. Huge storms. Cyclones the size of planets.”

Redwing stood to end the meeting. “We’ll hit the jet in a few days, right? Keep doing your simulations and drills. Get some rest, too,” with a nod to Ayaan Ali.

Now that the die was cast, he needed some alone time. SunSeeker’s steady rumble always told you that you were in a big metal tube, only meters away from other people. And meters away from both a furious fusion burn and, not far from that, high vacuum. First he quietly made his way through the biozones, sniffing and savoring air that came fresh from the oxy-making plants, and avoiding the finger snakes in their happy labors. They were fun, but he was not in a fun mood.

Gecko slippers let him walk the far reaches of the ship, out of the centri-grav torus. They were like weak glue on your soles, following the sticky patches on the walls. The zero-grav plants were matted tangles of beans and peas, with carrots that grew like twisted orange baseballs and green bananas that made weird toroids. A finger snake tunnel ran underneath. The snakes weren’t showing.

He went on into the hibernation modules, where what he thought of as the biostasis crew lay. Just sleeping, sort of, though hard to wake up. His footsteps rang as he walked the aluminum web corridor beside the solemn gray capsules. He didn’t want to call out of cold sleep enough people to crew a big landing expedition, not for the Bowl anyway. In the defrosting and training they would all have to triple up on a hot hammock, and shower once a week. As it was now, even the small present crew—nine plus Redwing plus three finger snakes—got two showers a week and didn’t like it.

Now that they were headed for a battle, of sorts, he realized how far from its expected role this expedition had come. This was not a craft built for war and neither were the crew. They had been carefully tuned for exploration and centuries of confinement. They were living in a constantly running machine where opening a hatch without proper precautions could kill you dead in seconds flat.

With that happy thought, he turned back. You’re worrying, not thinking. He could use some time with the finger snakes.

Rich garden smells slapped him in the face. He looked around him, seeing miniature sheep and full-sized pigs and chickens, clucking and grunting—and no finger snakes. Their tunnel was big enough, he could peer into it … but he went to the screens. If they weren’t in the tunnel, he’d still find them easily enough.

Now, what had the finger snakes left on-screen? They’d been watching the Bowl slide past, even as he had. No, they hadn’t: this view was following a cityscape as it rolled below SunSeeker. If Redwing understood rightly, that was a Sil city, newly rebuilt after an attack from the Folk. It looked quite strange. Streets and peaks like hieroglyphs, or wispy Arab writing.

He jumped when a flat head poked his elbow. “This they did hide,” said—Shtirk? Marked near the tail with a bent black hourglass. “Hide no more. A great shame.”

“Wait. Is this writing? So big?”

Its voice had a sliding, flat tone, faint. “Can see such writing from everywhere on the Bowl. This says the Bird Folk stamped their own world flat. A mistake in steering ended their bloodline. This was in a message … a message from the stars. Captain, yes please, how does a star send a message?”

Redwing dithered for a moment about how much to reveal; but he wanted to know what Shtirk knew. “You know what a star is? It’s like your sun, that sun, but much farther away. Stars have worlds, not Bowls but spinning balls. We have a message from one of those, from Glory. We haven’t been able to read it all, and it’s still coming in.”

“The Sil read,” Shtirk said. “Your bandits learn find the message from you, the Sil from them, then the Sil read. Now they tell us. Thisther goes to tell you all in command deck. Is it true? Bird Folk did smash their own world?”

Redwing laughed. “And they think they’re the Lords of Creation! Yeah, I believe it. I’ll put it to the others, and we’ll look through the message from Glory. But I believe it.”

Fred Ojama and a giant snake were hard at work at the control screens when Redwing found them. Thisther’s head and the fingernails on its tiny quick tail were close up against the controls, typing. Fred was saying, “Yup, yup, yup…”

“Fred?”

“Sir.” Fred didn’t turn. “If you’ll look past me … see the starscape? And the blue dot? The dot is the Bowl. The stars move, too. I’ve run this twice already. The Bowl left Sol system in Jurassic times, then tootled around to several other stars—not moving as fast as it does now. Then they came back between the Cretaceous and Tertiary. If the times hold, then the mass of the Bowl ruined some comet orbits that second time, and that was it.”

“It?”

“The timeline checks. They caused the Dinosaur Killer impact.”

Thisther said, “Great shame. They hid this for lifetimes of worlds.”

“My God,” Redwing said.

Thisther said in his quiet way, “But no more. All will know. They killed their own genetic line. Sil will tell all.”

Thirty-two

Tananareve realized she should agree with the big, ponderous beast that was Memor. She had come to think of the alien as a kind of smart elephant, with a sense of humor equally heavy. “Yes, that was a clever saying,” Tananareve made herself say.

“I am happy you have discovered the nuances of our nature,” Memor said. Apparently sarcasm is unknown here, never mind irony, Tananareve thought. She knew Memor thought what she’d said was amusing, from the way her body shook, but it went right by human ears.

“The wonder of all this is what impresses me most,” Tananareve said to move on to better things. Memor and Bemor were huge and strange, but they liked her to play the awed-primate role. The hard case was Asenath, who mostly ignored Tananareve except for the occasional glower. Plus deliberately aimed stale exhaled breaths and well-timed, acid farts.

They stood among a crowd of hundreds of squat, humanoid creatures who formed neat, obedient circles around the Folk party. She watched these, the first human-shaped aliens she had seen, trying to understand the blank expressions on their hairy faces, to figure out what was going on. Beyond the crowd was a tall pinnacle with a single round thing in it that she had just now realized was an eye or camera, watching all this.

Asenath was holding forth to the rapt assembly in a booming voice that had made Tananareve flinch when she first heard it. Study of the Folk conversations had given her some hints of meaning, but the long phrases Asenath used seemed more like chanting. Tananareve asked Memor, “Is this some kind of ritual?”

“Quite observant of you. She is reassuring the Kahalla that the Sil and humans who escaped their capture will be taken in hand soon. No damage shall follow from this Kahalla failure.”

“What’s that about their … children?”

“Nothing important. The Kahalla are losing many eggs to the appetites of scavengers. They seek us to somehow ward off their predators.”

“Will you?”

“We do not intervene in natural matters. Nature runs itself well.”

“You told me earlier that you Folk ran Nature.”

Memor gave a fan-flutter of amber and blue, which seemed to mean pleasant amusement. “And so we do. At a remove, of course. Long ago the Folk set up this dynamic equilibrium, a predator–prey oscillation that will not go too far.”

“So these … Kahalla?… won’t get wiped out?”

“No, they are sufficiently intelligent and wary to deal with their predators—a nasty little vermin species. Both predator and prey have a low mental level and can adapt to changes in the other species, as they occur over long times. Evolution is thus contained. Populations do not sprawl out, consuming natural lands. There are several such interlacing balances in this zone.”

Tananareve pondered this as Asenath’s long bellow went on.

Then a new droning cry came—shree, kinnne, warrickk, awiiiha …

Memor said, “Ah, they have awakened the memory box.”

Asenath paused, then went on, trying to boom over these new deep tones with their extended cadences. Tananareve saw that the laboring sounds came from the tower with the eye. “What is it?”

“A form of consciousness prison. From a hotworld it came and we are its stewards. Or rather these Kahalla are its attendants.”

“A … rock mind?”

“We have several strewn about the Bowl. They are slow but sure and alert us to long-term trends that otherwise might elude our quick eyes. You are, for example, a somewhat old-fashioned individual intelligence, organic. This is an inorganic one, and the Kahalla are a sort of hybrid mind who attend the stone lattice mind. They are nothing like the vast collective intelligences—but never mind, we have had enough of this slow-thought place. And our escape approaches.”

awrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrraff kinnne yuuf …

Tananareve had not noticed the huge wall of scaly flesh settling down from the sky, beyond the talking tower. Across its rough brown skin silvery fins fanned as the bulk waltzed lazily into place. It spread slender tentacles grasping for ground. They played across the land. Kahalla ran to secure these to boulders, looking in perspective like ants bringing down a sea fish. The tentacles wrapped around catch points and pulled the great thing snug to ground.

Asenath finished and the Kahalla bowed deeply, on their knees with a low, sonorous moan that grew in volume until it washed over Tananareve. Asenath returned the bow, gave a vibrant trill salute and a four-color fan-flurry of farewell. Memor scooped up Tananareve and made short work of the journey to the immense thing—a bag inflated to fly, she guessed. But alive.

By now she knew that Memor enjoyed the open land, and spoke, too, of “the serene voyaging our living craft affords.” They entered by a flap that opened like a mouth. A huge tongue unfurled and Memor walked up it, carrying the primate on her shoulder. It felt to Tananareve unpleasantly like being eaten. Memor said in her booming Anglish, “The mucus of this great beast had been engineered to carry a delicate fragrance unlike anything else. Its scent is a luxury and settles the mind, a necessary aid in air travel. Chaos may come to rage all about us, but we shall be mild.”

Tananareve sucked in a lingering taste. Like flowers, though with an oily undertaste. Bemor, too, sighed, though he said, “We must make haste,” and bellowed an order to small scampering things that had come to greet them.

They were in a wet cavern. This “skyfish” as Memor called it was like a cave of moist membranes lit by phosphorescent swirls embedded behind translucent tissues. They reminded Tananareve of illuminated art back Earthside.

A deep bass note rang, ending in a whoosh that made it seem like an immense sigh. Grav momentarily rose, and Tananareve knew they had lifted off. Ruddy wall membranes fluttered. Warm air eased by them as they entered a large bowl-shaped area. Sunshine lanced through membranes so clear, Tananareve thought at first they were open to the air. But the sweet breeze swept first one way, then reversed, and she realized that it was the breathing of this great beast. The tower that had seemed so tall outside now dwindled away and the skyfish turned, so the sweep of a plain came into view. Clouds stacked like fat blue plates loomed on the shimmering distance. She could see the long arc of Bowl curving up into a pale sky; she was looking across a distance the size of planetary orbits. The eggshell blue of seas dominated the somewhat washed-out greens and browns of landmasses, and made pale the sheet grays of mirror zones. Across that flapped big-winged angular birds with long snouts and crests atop their bony heads.

Memor met the captain of this gasbag being. The whole idea of a captain was odd until Tananareve realized they were like people riding a larger animal, as she had ridden horses. Memor spoke quickly, with booming comments from Bemor, all too fast for her to fathom.

The captain listened for a while, big eyes watery and anxious. This creature was somewhat like some of the Folk—a big thing, four-legged and solemn and slow, mouth wide and salmon-pink and lipless. Bursts of words rattled from the mouth. Its narrow nostrils were veined pink, with fleshy flaps beneath. Large round black eyes watched them, yellow irises flashing in the slanting sunlight. From the top of the captain’s head sprouted a vibrant blue crest, serrated and trimmed with yellow fat, reminding Tananareve of a cock’s comb.

The captain took them on a walk through the ramparts, view balconies, and residential segments of the great living volume. A narrow hissing hydrogen arc heated its eating levels and lit the translucent furniture in blue light, where workers of four and six and even eight legs labored to bring forth live dishes for Folk delight. Pressed, Tananareve cracked a carapace and slurped out the warm white flesh of some sea creature. The next dish was a kicking big insect basted in creamy sauce. Memor said something about how keeping it alive through the cooking added savor to the proteins, but Tananareve decided that it was best to know less about Folk gustatory tastes. She tried to break the thick legs with her hands and snap off the tasty eyestalks. Crunchy but with a peppery flavor that stung her lips and sent a scent like stale meat into her sinuses. A green pudding turned out to be a slime mold that thrust probes out into her mouth as she tried to chew it. The flavor wasn’t nearly worth it.

Still, it was useful food. Folk ate meats and veggies she found mostly dull or repulsive, with little in between. She sat in the steady warm breeze of the skyfish’s sweet internal breath—were they essentially sitting in its trachea?—and listened as Memor rattled on to other Folk sitting nearby about matters political and somehow always urgent. Or so her limited translation abilities told her. Finally Memor turned and said to her—whom she described to the other Folk as “the small Invader primate”—“You must surely admire our craft. We took the early forms of this creature from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant world, long ago. Their ancestors found our deep atmosphere a similar paradise, to cruise on soft moist winds, and mate in their battering fashion, and wallow in our air, to turn falling water into their life fluid, hydrogen.”

“I doubt the primate can follow your description,” Asenath said, coming into view.

Tananareve warily backed away from the lumbering thing. She could smell the malice oozing from Asenath. “Still, she could be of some use in capturing the renegades of her kind, whom we shall soon intersect.”

Asenath ushered them all over to the broad window in the skyfish’s side. Elaborate orange-colored fins flexed near the back of the beast. They flared out, capturing winds like a sail, driving the bag forward. Tananareve felt a lurch and a dull thump. She had the sense of rumbling movement under her feet and in the living walls. Memor explained that the bag was “trimming” in flight by shifting weight inside itself. Asenath said, “Our admirable skyfish can torque about its center of mass, and thus navigate.” Tananareve watched the flexible yet controlled fan-fins spread out, at least a hundred meters long. Its gravid majesty seemed somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking above the lush forest below.

Asenath said, “We are precisely on course to intersect the renegades. They are sailing on this same gathering wind.”

Tananareve watched the opalescent walls shimmer with hot perspiration. Memor remarked that these were “anxiety dewdrops,” brought out by the laboring muscles of the great fish. The shimmering moist jewels hung like gaudy chandeliers, lit by the blue glow of hydrogen flares and phosphorescent yellow bands that ran across the high ceiling. One of the drops, bigger than Tananareve’s head, fell from high up and spattered at her feet with cutting acid odor.

Bemor shifted his bulk and remarked, “The new signal from Glory is coded in a different manner. We are having difficulties decoding it, except for a few images.”

Memor shifted into Folkspeech. “Best not to let the primate know. Show what images you have.”

Tananareve felt her pulse speed up but kept her face blank and made a show of turning to gaze out at the view. A huge bird was flapping by below, eyeing the skyfish. Casually she stepped away to the spot where, leaning forward, she could see reflected in the transparent window the projection Bemor was showing Memor. It was an animated series of images. A man in a white robe advanced into view and something leaped at him. It was an alien with ruddy skin and three arms. It jumped at the man, and huge feet kicked him to the ground. The alien wore tight blue clothes that showed muscles bulging as the view drew closer. The alien head was like a pyramid with sharp chin and bones like ribs under tight, ruddy skin. Two large black eyes glinted at the man, who was getting up, his smiling face mild and his long blond hair flowing. He was holding forward an object—a wooden cross—to the alien. Tananareve saw suddenly that the man was Jesus. The alien leaped on the man, hammering him with feet and two fists. Its third arm was bony and sharp, with nasty nails tapering to points. The alien slammed this into the head of Jesus, shattering the skull into pieces. Blood flew into the air and Jesus collapsed. His body lay still. The black alien eyes looked straight out from the screen Bemor held and thick lips pulsed, swelling and narrowing in what must have been some kind of victory gesture.

The sudden raw images startled her. A surge of anger tightened her throat. She made herself keep still and watched the bird flap out of view on its four wings.

“Ah,” Memor said, “similar to the earlier one. But look—we are intersecting the tadfish, as we had hoped to. Now we can deal with these primates, brought together.”

Tananareve saw swimming in the filmy air below them a gossamer tube shape. Fins stroked all along the barrel body as it rose from the forest below. Somehow, she realized, the Folk had found Cliff’s team, and now had them cornered.