Shipstar

Nine

Cliff stood at the edge of the ruined city and tried to get his eyes to work right.

This world looked … strange. Shimmering green and blue halos hovered around the edges of every burned tree and smashed building. The jet scratched across the sky had its usual twisting helical strands around its hard, ivory-bright core … but there, too, an orange halo framed it, winking with vagrant lights.

Okay … shake the head, blink. Repeat. The colored halos dimmed. He made himself breathe long and slow and deep. Acrid smoke tainted the dry air.

In the second Folk attack, he had gotten hit again. Irma had stitched the wound in his right shoulder and then … he slept. It was strange to sleep for days and nights—though those words meant nothing here, where the ruddy star hung forever in the same spot in the sky. Yet he had slept long, his irked back and aching bones told him.

He had come out of it, stiff and dry and jerky. A bit foggy, he watched the Sil deal with their wounded and put out the widespread fires. He had just woken up and now, after a breakfast of odd foods and stale water, felt pretty well. The halos ebbed, faded. With Irma he stood watching the Sil work. Their lithe bodies slumped and sagged. They were naturally limber, dexterous creatures, but not now.

Irma said, “The skyfish came over this part while you and I were trying to help carry that heavy ammo the Sil use. Blasted everything.”

He nodded, dimly recalling the fevered hours of carrying heavy cargo on rolling flatcars. Their wooden frame carriers held long cylinders of shaped shells with elementary fuses on the underside. It paid to be careful with them. Hard, dumb, sweaty work it was, while they heard hollow hammer blows rain down like a distant drumming wrath of sky gods. The concussions rolled over them and he had learned pretty quickly not to look up or back too much, because the occasional orange-hot fragment or buzzing shrapnel came that way. Once he had seen a zigzag tree burst into flame after a sizzling meteor slammed into it. He had helped throw water on it, then dirt when they had to. The burning city took all the reservoir water, and then that ran out, too.

After they got it put out, the humans went back to hauling ammo. The Sil guns hammered hard, trying to take down the skyfish. The brown and green football blimps churned across the sky and aimed lasers, antennas, and some kind of fire weapon down on the city.

He distracted himself by thinking how the skyfish could work at all. Its elaborate fins could flare out, capturing wind like a sail, and driving the gasbag forward. He guessed the huge creature could trim on this by shifting mass inside itself, getting a torque about its center of mass to navigate. This can be somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking with its big side fan-fins spread out. It had big eyes and blister pods, maybe evolved from some balloonlike species. A bioengineered creature used to slowly patrol the air above the Bowl.

He had watched the battle and recalled how this place had been only a short while before. The Sil had their pride, of course. Their first full awake time in this large Sil city, the five visiting humans had to be led around, shown the town. They saw ancient majestic buildings of stacked stone, gleaming shiny statues to great dead savants, beautiful swooping curves and ramps and towers, then spindly ceramic bridges over moist green gardens and sprawled homes. They exhausted their reserves of oohs and ahhs. It was indeed a fine city of untold ancient origin.

Not now.

During the battle, at least five of the living skyfish had circled, covering each other against any Sil artillery. When the guns barked up at them, a shower of beams and missiles cascaded down, silencing the crews. The pain beam was terrifying. When it struck, Cliff could see the shocked fear come into the Sil faces. They turned and ran, some snatching at their skins as though they were on fire. At the sensory level, they were.

The pain gun was a microwave beam that excited Sil nerves with agonies that made them fall, writhe, scream. It deranged some, who howled and jerked and ran in chaotic bursts. Others had the sense to run steadily out of the beam, if they could. The effect was intense, immediate, and ended Sil resistance where the beams struck. The pain projectors were soundless, which made them even more horrifying. These were the standard Folk weapon to panic opponents, and they worked their silent terror well.

But humans did not feel it at all. Some difference in the neural wiring made them immune. So Cliff, Aybe, Terry, Howard, and Irma hauled ammo and tried to stay alive. The skyfish wallowed across the air above the Sil city and brought flame spouts to bear. Some forked down green rays that seared buildings and people alike. The enormous living sky creatures systematically burned along geometric paths, and whole blocks of homes and factories burst into yellow flame.

The Sil brought their archaic weaponry to bear and blew shredding blasts into the skyfish underbodies. Once Cliff heard an enormous hollow whoosh that thundered down like a bass note. He and Irma looked up and saw a skyfish belly explode. A huge yellow ball licked around the green skin and trailed up the sides.

“Hydrogen,” Irma said brightly. “That’s their buoyancy gas.”

Howard said, “Helium must not give them enough lift. Tricky.”

“Oh, come on, where would they get helium?”

Another skyfish was floundering now, spewing fluids from multiple wounds, losing altitude, veering erratically. The city below it boiled with flame. The great beast slid down the sky through realms of smoke. Its crash was like a green egg crumbling in slow motion as it burned.

The destruction lumbered on amid roars and bangs and the sour stench of flame. Not long after, a nearby explosion Cliff never saw caught him. He took hot fragments in his left side and arm and went down. Then it all got fuzzy, the licking flames filmed over by a gray screen of pain.

He recalled seeing the skyfish turn and begin their ascent. They rose quickly, buoyed by the spreading fires below. Someone said the huge blimps would mend and rearm at higher altitude and might come back … and then it all went vague and he fell away into troubled sleep.

So now, getting his eyes to see this place right again, it seemed odd to have the big world go rolling along without him. Sils labored nearby and gave the humans no notice whatever. There was a gray silence to their movements, but they kept on stolidly.

Just like it will keep on after you’re dead, Cliff thought. The wide busy world of muscle work, weather changing, window washing, future judging, fast joyous dancing, racing heart in great passion, nose picking, fun talking, and bug swatting—all that will go merrily yea merrily along. If these aliens were never aware of your presence, they won’t be overwhelmed by your absence. But the same is true of the people you know, too. The world picks up the pace and moves on. Eternally.

They were standing apart from the men—Terry, Aybe, Howard—at the city’s edge. The humans had all slept in a makeshift cave in the surrounding hills, to avoid the constant light. Here there were scraps of the lush greenery on the slopes amid the rocky landscape, with some odd trees and big-leafed plants rich in fruit. They were eating some of these, rather bland with lots of pale blue juice. Irma said, “Quert looks worn down.”

Cliff turned to see the slim alien approach, its usually light-footed stride slow and lame. Quert’s voice was grainy, flat. “Onto here I-we came to speak”—a jerky hand gesture—“and wish share help.”

Quert’s Anglish was still improving, and quite a few of the other Sil had managed to share the language upload and integrator AI. Cliff still found it striking that the Astronomer Folk had widely distributed—“among the hunters,” Quert had said—a software that taught Anglish with a few immersion sleeps. He had seen the squat little machine that “learn us” as Quert said, but had no idea how it really worked.

Irma said, “We can labor beside you.”

Quert’s large yellow eyes studied them all in turn. “Medical we are now at. The dead rot.”

“They be many,” Irma said. The Sil had the most trouble with the irregular forms of to be, so they tried to use simple forms.

“I sad be for our acts.”

“You could not know the Folk would exact such a price,” Terry said, coming up to the group.

“Many dead. Have not known before, fire on our city.”

“You have lost the city, too,” Terry said.

“No. Do not hurt for the city. We build again fast.” Quert paused for a moment, eyes distant, then said, “The city speaks what has happened to us. Everywhere on the Bowl, the wounds, they show.”

“Sure,” Irma said.

“When we have more to say, we rebuild, the city speaks again,” Quert said. Irma didn’t understand, then.

The Astronomer Folk had apparently hoped the varying species of this area would rally to the Folk cause, and use the Anglish to somehow ensnare Cliff and the others. For the Sil it had worked in reverse. The Sil had been festering under Folk rule for a long time, and had seized the opportunity of uniting with their small human band. Now they suffered for it repeatedly, as the Folk tried to find the humans.

How long will they bear up? Cliff wondered. We’ve caused them huge losses …

“How we help?” Aybe asked.

Quert stood silent as its large eyes elongated up and down, rhythmically. The yellow eyes closed and the eyelids vibrated, as if shaken from behind. These expressions had no human parallel. Cliff had thought before that this must mean surprise or puzzlement, but now the alien made a curious squatting motion, its sinewy arms knotted in front of it. With the large Sil pancake hands and thick fingers it shaped a twisting architecture in the air.

Then its eyes jerked open and it stood. Cliff was cautious in inferring emotions from facial signatures in the Sil, but this case at least seemed clear. The constricted face oozed sad resolve.

“Dead are many. Have time now little.”

Irma said softly, “You wish help with the dead?”

“We may share violence. Share our ends also.”

The finely tended Sil city was now a chaos of jagged building shells, of splintered statues to great Sils now shattered into lumpy gray shards, of cratered streets, of angular trees sheared off at their roots or burned to cinders, of vehicles sitting gnarled and toasted, and the only sounds those of stones falling from half-crumpled walls. No groans, anymore. A city of dead.

A grim procession clogged the few cleared routes. Sil shuffled along with blackened faces and torn skins, mournful angular faces with eyes that saw little before them. Some of them bore wounded; others bore their dead. None spoke. None needed to.

The stench came to Cliff as they strode down from the surrounding hills. It rose as they entered the ruined precincts. Terry made masks for them all that proved essential as they labored through the endless day.

There was a code for burying the dead, something to do with recycling their substance into the Bowl’s sealed ecology. Especially here, water seemed scarce and the bodies went into a kind of pit that had a flexible blue cover and drains at the bottom.

Cliff hated going into the buildings and avoided them. He came upon a big Sil body that had a family gathered around it. They were rolling it in a pale green sheet. They stepped back and looked at Cliff. They were short, thin, and probably could not easily carry the body. He nodded and squatted to pick up the stiff fragrant mass. He got it standing on the rigid legs, then tipped the body onto his shoulder. As he stood up, the pressure forced gas through the voice box and a ragged croak rattled out. It sent shivers down his back. For a long second he wondered if the alien was protesting. He made himself look into the contorted Sil face, gone rigid. A purple tongue stuck out between the small knobby Sil teeth. The eyes had burst and goo ran down the angular cheeks.

Cliff looked away, stopped breathing. He took short jolting steps and the family followed him silently, all the way to the pit. He was sweating when he edged the body gently into the opening flap. The family just stared at the green sheet as it slid in, murmured to each other, then turned and walked slowly away. No sayings over the body, no ceremony. There was something dignified in the utter lack of ritual.

None of the Sil had looked him in the eye. He wondered what that meant.

The first day was hardest. After that, a numb resignation set in. The bodies got loaded on wagons and taken to parks—the only large, open areas in the city not filled with rubble. Some places the Sil got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. “Dirt takes not all,” Quert said. Cliff supposed that meant the soil processors were overloaded by such massive numbers.

Many corpses were underground. The job became an elaborate Easter egg hunt, Irma remarked sourly. They would bust into a shelter where often Sil had taken refuge, sitting in orderly rows. The humans were just helpers beside the Sil who would gather up valuables from the Sil laps, where often the dead had held what they felt was most dear. The Sil did not attempt identification anymore. They just turned the valuables over to an escort team. Then Sil would come in with a tubular flamethrower and stand in the door and cremate those sitting rigid inside. Get the precious metals and jewelry out, Cliff supposed, and then burn everybody inside. An alien Belsen, he thought, and in the end, our fault.

The first bodies the human team had carried out, they treated with care and respect, loading them onto stretchers provided to give some semblance of funeral dignity. But after the first day of working on the piles and acres of wrecked bodies, humans and Sil alike became more casual. Bodies got stacked and carried for convenience. After that, a rank callousness descended and they used racks to group the bodies, then drag them with electrical haulers like sleds of dead.

The Sil called this entire bleak spectacle, the elegant stonework buildings smashed and seared brown and hard black, something that sounded like scleelachrhoft. But they all spoke little. In answer to questions, Quert mostly had an eye-move that meant “yes” or a side-nod that meant “no.”

Then came the patient patrols through the gray stone rubble. Here a leg, there an arm. Just pickings at first, parts to bag, but then they hit a treasure vault of tragedy. A reeking hash of a hundred had assembled in a basement. Cliff stepped in and found the tiled floor was awash in a still-warm broth of rank water and viscera. When the burst water mains had erupted, Cliff deduced, some of them had tried to escape through a narrow exit in the back. Their bodies were packed in a tight passageway. The dead did not bear burns. From their stiff, bloated condition, he gathered they had died of the smoke or oxygen loss as the firestorm sucked it all away.

Their leader had made it halfway up a ramp, only to be buried halfway up to her neck in a plaster goo and stone chips. She looked delicately young, smooth of skin still, though it was swollen and had begun to pucker with brown and blue welts. He carried her out himself.

Humans were bigger and stronger and came from a higher-grav world, so they got assigned the harder jobs. When they went into a typical shelter, usually an ordinary basement, it looked to Cliff like a streetcar full of Sil who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm may occur naturally in forests, but in cities becomes a conflagration attaining such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. Cliff had watched the first stages of it from a distance, as wind whirls darted among buildings like dust devils of pure yellow and burnt orange flame. Those danced among tall apartment buildings like eerie flame children having fun.

Cliff became used to the hovering ruddy heat that seeped through the clouds still overhead. Smells came rising from the dead and made all the work gangs speed up their work. The bodies were not alike but strangely specific. Some clutched purses, others wore jewelry, and a few who had prepared for what they thought the worst wore rucksacks full of food. Some of the Sil work teams took these, and Cliff just looked away, not knowing what to say or do or whether to care at all. A young boy Sil had a pet, a four-legged furry thing Cliff had never seen the likes of—still leashed to the boy, eyes still gleaming.

They were at their work, doggedly going from apartment to apartment, when a Sil woman suddenly appeared and hurled herself at Cliff. She shouted incoherent abuse and battered at him with tight fists. Another Sil rushed over and pulled her off him. She broke down sobbing, chanting, and was led away. He stood stolidly for a long while, emotions churning.

Once some Sil work partners found a small cellar of what seemed to be a winelike drink. When Cliff passed by them a while later, carrying a Sil body, they seemed to be roaring drunk. He saw them later, too, and unlike those teams nearby were working energetically and maybe even enjoying it. So whatever they drank, it seemed a blessing.

It went on and Cliff stopped even estimating the dead. The number was beyond thousands and probably in the tens of thousands and he did not want to think about it anymore. The fiery death penalty applied to all who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals.…

The teams talked less and less and the work days seemed to go on infinitely, down a dwindling pipe. A day toward the end, when they could see there were few streets left to cover, they were combing the shattered shells of the last buildings. With scarcely a whisper, a flittering craft came over and dropped filmy oval leaflets that drifted down from the sky. The curious script meant nothing to the humans, of course, but a Sil read it in broken Anglish:

We destroyed you because you harbored the Late Invaders. They will damage our fragile eternal paradise and bring disease, unease, and horror to your lot, and to all who dwell beneath the Perpetual Sun in warm mutual company. We struck at the known location of Late Invaders and those helping them to elude our capture. Destruction of other than targets of high security value was unintended and an unavoidable consequence of the fortunes of safekeeping of our eternal Bowl.

The Sil became angry when reading these notes. They hurled them to the ground, stomped on them. Then others gathered them up and marched off with piles of the filmy sheets. Cliff wondered at this and so followed. The Sil went to their collective lavatory. Since he was in need, he went in and found the propaganda stacked for use in wiping asses.

He understood all this emotionally. Gathering up body parts in bushel baskets, helping a sorrowed male Sil dig with hands and shovels where he thought his wife might be … the events blended, endlessly.

Ten

Irma said, “You have a flat affect.”

“Um, what’s that?” Cliff had just awakened from another long sleep. He looked out the narrow opening of the cave they called home. Beyond lay the same stark sunlit landscape of despair he had become accustomed to. He yawned. At least the halo effect in his vision had gone away. Not much else had.

“It’s a failure to express feelings either verbally or nonverbally—that would be, just using your usual grunts and shrugs.”

He kept watching the view out the cave opening and shifted uneasily on the inflatable bedding the Sil had given them. It was a bit small. “Can’t say much after what we’ve been through.”

“I learned this in crew training. They gave it to us because we could go through traumas if we get to Glory—”

“When we get there. This Bowl, this is an … interlude.”

“Okay, when. There might be pretty heavy events to get through on Glory, our trainers said. So we trained to deal with shock, combat fatigue, stress disorders. Recognize the symptoms, apply a range of therapies. You’ve had low affect for days now.”

He could not claim he didn’t feel differently, so he said nothing. That was always easier.

“Look me in the eye.”

Reluctantly, he did. Somehow it was easier to peer out at the blasted and sunny landscape … though now that he thought of that, it made no real sense. Still—

Irma leaned forward, took his head in both hands, and looked fiercely into his eyes, shaking his head to get him to focus on her. “Good! Trust me, this is a problem and we both need to work on it. They told us to expect it especially when a subject—”

“Now I’m a subject?”

“Okay, a fellow crew member. It’s when people talk about issues without engaging their emotions.”

“I’m … sorting things out.”

“Another symptom is lack of expressive gestures, little animation in the face, not much vocal inflection.”

“Um. Ah. So?”

“Do you split your feelings away from events?”

“Not … by design. I’m just trying to hold it together here.”

“Taking pleasure in real things can help that.”

“Um.”

Pleasure. Good idea, quite distant from here …

He looked out at the ever-bright sunshine that was beginning to weigh on him. The stellar jet cut across the sky, adding its neon glow to the hammering sunlight. They had experienced some darkness here and there on this long “expedition” through the strange, incomprehensibly large Bowl … and in his dreams now, he longed for more darkness. He dreamed of diving into deep waters, where a murky cool leafy world wrapped itself around him. He was always sorry to wake up.

He was thinking of this when he realized she was deftly pushing his buttons. Her voice turned furry, intimate. Hands stroked, caressed. Pretty clearly she wasn’t being made wanton and reckless by his fabulous magnetism.

This was therapy. Not that the fact mattered.

It became a matter of silky moments and building readiness. Then a gliding delight, sweetly enclasped, and a long exultant shudder for both of them. The artful ease lasted him into a sliding sleep.…

When he woke she took him through some softly worded moments he only later saw were exercises. Irma asked him in her soft, insistent voice to report the lurid dark nightmares he had. She walked him through those, tracing out moments like the rattling wheeze of corpses, the leaden weight of stiff bodies, the sharp acrid stench of rot … and then she asked him to watch her hand weave, left to right to left … a sway of motion that somehow called up calming spirits in him, let him lapse into a silent, quiet place where he could rest and feel and not swirl back down into those tormented whirlpools. She sighed and stayed with him while he sobbed silently, yet at least not alone. And slept again.

He woke while Irma slept and reflected on good ol’ plain human sex among all this strangeness. Making love worked just fine here. He knew that aliens would have other such modes and they would be odd indeed. Earthside, male honeybee genitals exploded after sex; wasps turned cockroaches into zombie incubators; male scorpion flies produced wads of saliva to feed their mates—a nuptial gift that distracted her front end while her hind end mated. He had learned a basic lesson here: Expect the unexpected.

More dozing. A lot later, it seemed, he asked vaguely, “We should go … somewhere.…”

“The mass funeral festival of the Sil. We must go.”

“When?”

“Get dressed.”

She had gotten him into a halfway presentable mood with the most direct possible method. Smart, with talents he could not anticipate. He had always tried to work with people who were smarter, quicker, and more naturally adept than he was, plus those who had talents he could not even anticipate. Irma was all of that. In this incredible mess of an interstellar expedition, she kept her wits.

He realized that he, on the other hand, had exceeded his limits. He had no combat experience and yet had somehow gotten through the first Folk assault with just a wound. That had nearly healed when the Folk came back with not one skyfish but six—to kill so many Sil that nobody could count them. No doubt the Folk hoped to catch the humans and burn them, too, but that could not have been the reason for the hours of unrelenting flame war.

The Folk wanted discipline, and knew how to get it. Discipline meant punishment meant order meant stability meant this giant spinning contraption could go on its ancient trajectory, bound for Glory and stars beyond.

Learn to think the way the Folk do, he thought. That was the only way to survive this bizarre, strange, and wonderful-but place.

He slowly got from Quert a way to deal with all the violence. After all, loss was everywhere. Everyone on SunSeeker knew when they departed Earthside that they would never see family or friends again. Cliff tried to phrase what seemed to work. You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart, a wound that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

Eleven

Cliff listened to the deep rolling music of the Sil dirge. This was an honor, he realized—to witness the public mourning of these lithe aliens, their voices soaring in a long, rolling symphony he could understand, at least emotionally. It was truly so—music had fundamentals common here. Their flowing melodic line had tricky interior cadences, subthemes, and as it gathered force, these merged to become a high, howling remorse laced through with beautiful, somber notes. In the carved rock amphitheater, the Sil stood as they sang, sat when they did not, their angular heads lifted up to show faces twisted with grief.

They had lost many in the assault by the remorseless, hydrogen-fueled sky beasts. Those vast creatures had killed so many Sil almost as an afterthought, punishment for hiding humans. Apparently firing into crowds was permissible, and the Sil seemed unsurprised by these events.

Cliff sat and thought of that as the music wrapped around him. It immersed them all—he could see this strong music had its effects on those beside him. The Sil had many subtle eye-gestures and the odd elongation of the flesh around the eyes apparently meant mourning. All because of the humans …

His small band had been on the run for a long time, and now had met the sobering fact that those Folk who ran this huge, spinning machine would kill others just to stop a few humans. But … why were they important? It puzzled him and gave the slow, solemn proceedings of public mourning a gravitas he respected.

Their song rose and fell; their long bass notes reverberating from elaborately carved walls. The Sil leader Quert stood tall and splayed arms to the sky as the large wind instruments among them—not separated, as in a human orchestra—joined in the deep notes, pealing forth as the longer wavelengths resonated with those reflecting from the walled basin. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it. Grief made its same choices for the Sil as among humans—gliding, graceful themes, deepening as the growing amplitude plowed into more somber courses. Then, suddenly, that ended in a stunning trill the voices held for a long while, as their instruments boomed forth.

The silence. No applause. Just grief.

They all—Howard, Irma, Terry, and Aybe—sat respectfully until told to move, as they had learned was considered polite here. Howard was nursing a bad cut and a bum knee, Terry and Aybe had burns and bound-up wounds, but altogether the humans had minimal damage. They kept their heads down, perhaps from politeness, but Cliff lowered his eyes because he did not want to look into the eyes of the Sil more than he had to. The Sil filed out, their slanted faces seeming even longer now, no one speaking. Their instruments caught Cliff’s eye. The laws of physics set design constraints for woodwinds and stringed players—long tubes, resonant cavities, holes for tuning—but the music that bloomed from these oddly shaped chambers and strings was both eerie and yet familiar. It had an artful use of counterpoint, moments of harmonic convergence, repeating details of melodic lines. There were side commentaries in other keys, too. Was music somehow universal?

As they emerged from the stone bowl, he looked back at the now-empty crescents where the seats each had a slight rounded depression for sitting. Once in Sicily he had seen an ancient open theater that looked much like this. But here the stones were pale conglomerate, not limestone, and far older. Yet the same design emerged.

Still obeying the code of silence, they walked into the sprawling community. This part of the Sil cityscape had escaped the fire bombing. It was a vast relief to be away from the charred precincts where he and the others had worked for … he could not even recall the count. At least a week, though now it seemed a boundary between a past where he had felt in control of his world, and now … this.…

He pulled his mind away from the memories. Focus. His crew training made this possible, but not easy.

The Sil chose habitats, he noticed, the way a seasoned soldier instinctively chooses cover. Here a wall gave an angled exposure to the star. Another wall stood oblique to that, to allow the jet’s glow to have its say with redder luminosities, so each shadow had different colors at play. One wall gave protection from the prevailing wind, with an apartment perched to take advantage of the cooler prospect, big open windows facing away from the field of bright, fine sands that bounded the Sil town. There was a lake nearby, not deep but enough to fetch a tranquil blue from the hovering sky. Sils lounged in shadows for delicious rest, on a spongy plane, their bodies prone on the soft jade green. Sil crowds gathered there, their trilling speech low and reflective. A moist breeze blew through the crowd, and streamers of fog danced among the zigzag trees.

All eyes followed the humans. They had all agreed to affect a casual disregard of this. “Think of it as like being a movie star,” Irma had said.

And it was. The Sil at least hid their sliding gaze by turning heads a bit away, but Cliff felt the pressure of their regard.

“They wonder what to make of us,” Howard whispered.

Aybe said, “We’re enough like them—two arms, two legs, one head. Maybe that’s an optimal smart alien design? Makes us sorta simpatico. Better than the Bird Folk, anyway.”

“And the Sil know to keep a distance, give us some room to take them in, too,” Terry added. “It’s kinda fun. Here are real, smart aliens who aren’t chasing us.”

“Or killing us,” Irma said sardonically. “Beth’s team wasn’t so lucky.”

This memory sobered them as they passed by a truly ancient-looking stone edifice, erect on its bare site, the huge blocks sweating with every gush of mists from the lowlands. Cliff savored the moist breath. The winds here stirred with minds of their own, sinewy and musical as they hummed through the Sil streets. The homes somehow generated music from the wind, hollow woodwind notes in lilting harmonies that seemed to spill from the shifting air.

The sky was clear, a flight of huge lenticular clouds sliding past like a parade of ivory spaceships. The sky creature had been of that size, moving with ponderous poise. Beautiful in its way, and lethal. These clouds poured rain onto distant hills, and the fragrant breeze brought the flavor to them.

As they often did, the humans watched the strange landscapes around them and tried to figure out how it all worked. Aybe and Terry maintained that there had to be tubes moving water around the Bowl, since otherwise all fluids would end up in the low-grav regions near the poles. Irma pointed out that some photos of the Bowl, taken when SunSeeker was approaching, showed just what Aybe and Terry thought—huge pipes running along the outside of the Bowl. Cliff listened to all this and sorted through his photographs. He had nearly filled his comm-camera’s digital storage with photos of plants and animals and had to edit out some to free up space. Already he had decided to ignore algae, bacteria, Protoctista, fungi, and much else. He kept snaps of purple-skinned animals loping on stick legs across a sandy plain. He had captured flapping, flying carpets with big yellow eyes, massive ruddy blobs moving like boulders on tracks of slime, spindly trees that walked, birds like big-eyed blue fish. A library of alien life.

Cliff knew he had missed a lot of creatures because they had quick and good camouflage to conceal themselves. They discovered this by stepping on what looked like limbs or lichen or dirt and turned out to be small animals that knew the arts of disguise. He sucked in the moist air and recalled that on Earth, desert plants defended against losing moisture by keeping their stomata closed in the day. They opened at night to take in carbon dioxide without evaporating too much water away. On the Bowl, though, without night, the air had to hold enough moisture to let plants respire, venting oxygen. That meant a lot of water. It explained the heavy rainstorms and thick, flavored air, the sprawling rivers they had to work around, the mists that shrouded even small depressions in the land.

Yet some aspects here were like an Earth that had vanished long ago. Standing nearby was an enormous version of something he had seen Earthside, embedded in coal beds: horsetails. These resembled a first draft of bamboo—thick walled, segmented grass, tan and tall. The trunks popped as they swayed in the wind, eternally fighting for space and sun and soil just as did all the others. He had seen creatures that excreted through pores in their feet—surely not from Earth. Their speech sounded like whistling and farting at the same time. Both used flowing gases through a pinched exit, but …

Quert broke off from a murmuring crowd. Moving with efficient grace, it came up to them, its big yellow eyes heavily lidded, and said, “Thank delivered in kind. We now speak, want.”

Its language ability came in simple stutters of words. Cliff could usually guess the content. Quert moved with rippling muscles. Like brilliant gazelles, Cliff thought. The Sil were limber, dexterous creatures that worked on the Bowl’s understructure. They lived in small towns, mostly, so this now-ruined city was unusual. Quert said Sil were peppered through the immense lands of the Bowl. They seldom met other Sil groups larger than the few thousand here, since distance isolated them. They received instructions from the Folk and carried out their labors. Otherwise, they governed themselves. Populations were stable, by social conventions handed down for countless generations. This was a standard Folk method, apparently. Divide and rule, Cliff thought.

Throngs of Sil followed their mourning with festival. The humans stood aside as the lithe forms began to move, sway, sing. All around them spontaneous movement broke out. The warm sun and lancing jet stung their skins and they danced until a kind of glow spread on their skins. “Maybe the exercise changes their surface circulation?” Irma wondered as the pumping music swelled, bodies glided and kicked, and the golden richness of Sil skins seemed to give off its own moist radiance.

Quert led them to a low building, its walls slanted sheets of ivory rock. Beneath their feet was blond gravel that as they entered a small room turned green, each pebble wrapped in a translucent skin of slime. Quert bent and carefully unhinged from some sculpted seats small blobs that seemed to be slugs that had adhered. They sat and the seats adjusted to their bodies with a slithery grace.

There was a long wait, but as protocol required, the alien spoke first. “We need know goal Astronomers.”

“They want to catch us,” Terry said. “Or kill us.”

“Whichever is easier,” Aybe added.

“Capture best for them. Folk want know what you know.” Quert said this flatly.

“About what?” Irma asked.

“Ship you ride, plants you carry, bodies you have, songs. Possible is.” The swift slippery slide of Quert’s words belied a calm the feline alien wore like a mantle. Plainly Quert was a leader.

The talk went on, speculating on why the Folk had fired into a Sil crowd. Yes, humans were among them, but why did that matter? Cliff watched the alien and reflected on what could come next. In his experience people centered their lives around money or status or community or service to some cause, but the Sil seemed to live learning-centered lives. Here little bits of practical knowledge were the daily currency—Howard had given them a Möbius strip to amuse the children—and their main vocation was to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen. As one Sil had told him, it was quicker to list the jobs he didn’t hold than the ones he did.

There were teams completing a pit to turn manure into electricity, plans to build a micro-hydroelectric generator in a local stream. They devised and built their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard wood of the big trees that ringed their sprawling village. The Sil seemed shaped by what Cliff saw as a frontierlike culture. Here they drilled into trees to make body lotion or designed cement hives for swarming insects, as if to foil a creature that sounded to Cliff like honey badgers. They’re isolated, Cliff thought, no other Sil for great distances, or other intelligent species … out here in the bush, lost in their experiments.

His attention had wandered. Aybe had been peppering Quert with questions, and nobody understood its answers. Then the alien leaned back, yawned to show big teeth, and held up its hands. “Not right thing, you speak for. Folk want all Adopted to obey. I-we, you—” A liquid pointing gesture. “—not made in Bowl. Danger badness comes from us, say Folk.”

This came out as hard, clipped words, not the sliding sibilants Quert usually used. It was tricky inferring emotions from alien facial signatures, Cliff’s judgment warned him, but the narrowing eyes and tensed lips made a constricted face that oozed resentment. Cliff said, “You came before us.”

A quick blinking, which seemed to convey agreement among the Sil. “Not Adopted over long time. We move, live, work. Folk give us things. We do their commands.”

Irma said, “You said earlier that you move often?”

Quert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. “Our kind rove.”

“But you have buildings.”

“Young must learn by doing. This I-we know. Costs to know. Must pay. No such thing as free education. And buildings, cities used to talk.”

“Talk?”

“Adopted can see our work from everywhere in the Bowl. We shape our cities to make messages. Small messages. Big shapes for streets, parks, buildings. When we know, they know, too. What Folk want from you.”

The Sil had a way of leading you toward what they meant, then letting you go the rest of the way. Maddening, at times. Asking them again, or in a different way, got nowhere, banging on a door that wouldn’t open.

The Sil preferred to show them. Quert took them to a site where the ground seethed with a tan, stretching substance. It came out of the Bowl when the Sil triggered it, Quert said. Then they tuned it somehow. Cliff inspected one of their handheld devices but could make nothing of the ribbed and fissured face of it. The Sil apparently took in information and gave instructions by feel, not visually. This seemed odd for ones who had so many eye-moves to express themselves. Cliff was still wondering at this when the slick tan surface began to ease upward. It became grainy as it rose, wedges emerging from the big bubble that blossomed above them. It firmed up into walls and crossbeams as windows opened like sleepy eyes along the edge. A thick cloying scent like drying cement filled the air and Cliff stepped back with the others, not able to follow the complex moves the “constructors,” as Quert termed them, made to shape the thing, through signals he could not fathom.

After an hour or two, a fresh building stood two stories tall. The floors were rough and there was no clue how the inhabitants could get water or electricity, but the oval curves of its walls and sloping floors of the interior were elegantly simple. The roof sported an odd array of sculptures that imitated Sil body shapes and cups pointed at the horizon.

In the entire growth of the home, Cliff felt a tension between order, as seen in the room gridiron pattern, and a spontaneous, discontinuous rhythm to the wrinkled walls and oblong windows. It had just enough strangeness to be expressive, though he did not know what the Sil made of it. They seemed to think it played a role in reconciling them to their lost friends and shattered city.

Nomadic, Cliff guessed. Each generation set up shop in a new area, hunted and gathered, devised their own kind of town. A species with a wandering curiosity, alighting on interesting parts of their environment. The Bowl was big enough to accommodate that style. But buildings as messages? “Do the Bird Folk read your building messages?”

“Think not.” Quert made a rustling sound in its big chest and said quietly, “I-we lost many. Sil like you, many parts, all lost.”

There was a sadness in the long, sliding words. The self-forming building seemed to play a role in their reconciling what had happened. Yet none cast glares or stares at the humans. He could imagine no reason why the Sil should forgive the humans for bringing all this upon them. But then he was yet again seeing them as thinking like humans, and they did not.

The talk continued for a while as Cliff listened intently, trying to judge how Quert saw the world. Having an alien who had already learned Anglish was an immense advantage, but Quert’s short, punchy sentences gave only a surface view of the mind beneath.

“If I were a lizard, I’d be a belt by now,” Irma said at one point, and for the first time they saw Quert laugh. Or something like it—barks that could just as well have been a summons, but accompanied by eye-blinks and sideways jerks of the head. As Quert did this, the eyes watched the humans, and there came a moment of—Cliff grasped for the right word—yes, communion. A meeting of minds. This cheered him up a great deal.

Then Quert said there were meetings to go to, clearly meaning to end on a high, light note. They broke up and returned to the cavelike place the Sil had given over to the humans. It was a rude warren built of rocks rolled together to form corridors and rooms. A thick tentlike sheet drawn over the top of the whole sprawl of rock made a roof. At certain places detachable patches let in sun for the rooms, and were easily pegged back in place for sleep. Utilitarian and, Cliff realized, quite portable—just roll up the sheet and find another field of boulders. The Sil apparently used whole gangs to move the rocks, a communal effort.

The whole team was tired and somehow the Sil dirge had quieted them. They went to their rooms. Cliff took a side corridor to his own small cubbyhole; Irma gave him a smile he could feel in his hip pocket.

Cliff had never fancied himself much of a lover, but since they had been taken under the protection of the Sil, they were at it every sleep period. This was no exception. They slept awhile then, and when he woke up she was looking at him. With a lazy smile she said, “When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.”

“I’m more of a biology type.”

“That, too. Y’know, you’ve learned how to keep this pack of people together, too. I watch you do it. You’ve learned how to pull their strings.”

“Um—yours, too?”

“Not so much. Learning to pull men’s strings is one of a woman’s major skills, of course. I can see you do it in your own guy way.” She softened this, though, with a grin.

He felt uneasy thinking about being manipulative, but— “I learned on the job.”

“You let everybody have their say, then let them do the calculation. Who’s with them, who’s not. Most of the time that solves the problem.”

“Well, they think I have your vote already.”

She laughed. “Touché! But not because of fun in the sack.”

They were indeed in a sack, of sorts. The open, braced hammock fiber somehow stayed flat though it hung from straps, a smart carbon sheet. He didn’t like discussing how to manage their little team, though. He now trusted his intuition and was relieved not to think about it. He leaned over, kissed her. “What do you think we should do next?”

“If you keep caressing my leg, I’ll tell you.”

Cliff laughed and kept up a smooth, steady stroking of her tawny leg. He hadn’t noticed he was doing it. “I don’t see how we can find Beth or stay away from the Folk, much less figure out this place.”

Irma shrugged. “I don’t either. Yet.”

“What makes you think we can?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s us. And we have smarts.”

“Smarter than what built this contraption?”

“Well, there’s street smarts on Earth—remember that phrase? Means you can get around on your own. Maybe here we have planet smarts.”

“Which means?” A pretty obvious way not to give away what he thought, but people didn’t seem to notice it.

“This place seems to be deeply conservative. You have to be, to keep a contrivance like this running. Hell, even at first glance, I knew it wasn’t stable. If the Bowl gets closer to the star, the biosphere heats up and starts to fall toward the star. To correct that, I’d guess the locals have to fire up the jet stronger, propel the star away, and get back to the right distance for heating. Then there’s the problem of what to do if I stamp my foot and the Bowl starts to wobble. It must be they have correction mechanisms in place. On a planet, inertia alone, and Newton’s laws, keep you going if you do nothing. Not here.”

“Ah, the spirit of an engineer. You didn’t answer my question.”

She chuckled. “You noticed! I’d say stay here, try to get back in touch with SunSeeker. Let Redwing figure a way to help us.”

“He doesn’t seem to have a clue. Unless you’re down here, it’s hard to get a grip on the quiet, odd ways this place is so different from a planet.”

“Such as?”

“It’s impossibly big, but it’s mostly vacant. Why?”

“It suits the Folk mentality, must be. Lots of natural landscape—okay, not natural, but it’s shaped to feel natural. It’s a park, really. The Sil fit in here, too.”

“Nomad habits of mind, right. And the Bowl is a nomad, too. Wanderers living on a wandering artifact. A big, smart object.”

She pursed her lips. “Smart? Because it has to be managed all the time, kept from falling into its star?”

“It moves forward in a dangerous way, just like us. Any two-legged creature has to fall forward and catch itself. Aside from birds, there aren’t many Earthside animals that do that. The most common two-legged one is us.”

She considered this. “The Bird Folk are two-legged, in a way. Though I saw them move on all fours, too, since the forearms can help them for stability. Maybe they’re concerned about not falling, because they’re massive.”

“So they have the same gut instinct—move forward, even if it’s tricky. I—”

Shouting in the distance. Irma got up and pulled on her rather tattered uniform, stuck a head out through the curtain of her chamber. “Quert? What’s—?”

The alien came into the room in the quick, sliding way the Sil made look so liquidly graceful.

“Come … they.”

Cliff hauled out of the hammock, feeling his joints ache and eyes sticky. His fingers fumbled as he got dressed. Irma went with Quert. By the time he got to the entrance, they were all staring up at something humming in the sky. Not the balloon creature that had fired on them all, something smaller, faster. It skimmed low, wings purring. A slim, winged thing of feathers and a big crusty head that scanned the land below systematically. Its big glittering eyes saw the Sil settlement and turned toward them.

“Like a huge dragonfly,” Irma whispered.

Quert said, “Scout. Smart one. High value, so Folk must—”

The thing surged as it turned toward them. Cliff said, “Inside!”

The nearest building was ceramic coated with crusty, bronzed metal. He ran toward it as he looked back. Howard was watching with binoculars the slim body as it canted in the air, wings furious. “Howard!”

Quert was faster than the humans and got into the building entrance. It caught the big hinged door and swung it nearly closed as people ran under its arch. “Howard!” Cliff called, and then went in.

“We must be inside,” Quert said. “Scout smart with—”

A humming in the air washed over them. Cliff saw Howard jerk and grab with frenzied fingers at his head. A startled yelp from him turned to a high, shrill scream. Howard fell and was snatching at his legs, head, chest. His jaw yawned wide with a colossal cry. His eyes bulged white.

Quert slammed the heavy metal door closed and drove a latch into place, cutting off Howard’s shriek like a knife.

Cliff stood blinking at the big door, unable to push away the sharp image of Howard frantically slapping at invisible demons.

The humans looked around at the crowds, dazed. There were many Sil already inside, providing a chorus of their sliding speech, feet shuffling, eyes shifting uneasily at this latest attack. Others, though, slumped against walls and let their heads rest back, eyes closed, as if resigned to absorbing yet one more disaster.

“They get to shelter fast,” Irma noted. “Seem to be riding it out, pacing themselves.”

There were no windows in this place. Phosphors lit the narrow rooms. Cliff went through the Sil crowds, their eyes tracking him, and down a corridor, searching for a way to see out. The air hung thick and carried an odd, sour flavor.

He turned back and found Quert following him, who said, “Hurt come through glass.”

“You come here to get away from the Folk microwave weapon?”

Quert made the odd, waggling sign of assent. “They Folk change to do your kind.”

Irma had followed Quert through the claustro-corridors. “This time it hit Howard. The Folk must’ve found the right frequency or power levels.”

“Folk know technologies well. Adjust fast. Always have.”

“And sent it on that scout?” Cliff wanted to see how Howard was doing. “If I could get a look—”

“No window this place.” Quert made a hand gesture that they had learned, during the long days of burying the Sil dead, meant “rest peacefully, no cares.”

The Sil would not let Cliff find a way to look out. One of them came down a chute and, speaking quickly in the sibilant squirts the Sil used, through Quert reported that the fast-flying scout with the big gleaming eyes had circled until it tired, fired down randomly at some Sil, then flew away.

Irma said, “It’s come before?”

“Only metal stops hurt.” Quert looked weary, long lines running down its pale face and leathery neck. “Keep tight.”

Cliff knew that microwaves in the spectral region that plucked at the human nervous system were about three millimeters in wavelength. The Sil must be vulnerable to a different wavelength, since humans had not felt the pain gun used in earlier assaults. So the Folk must have developed something that hurt Howard a great deal, and done it within a short while. Something around a hundred gigahertz. Impressive.

Irma said, “So they must know you Sil very well—”

“The aquladatorpa knows us. It look for you.”

“You’ve been living a long time with the Folk. Under them, I should say. How do you bear it?”

Quert thought awhile and Cliff let him, not interrupting. Humans had a nervous, intrusive way of interrupting each other, a social gaffe of some consequence among the Sil. Then Quert sighed and said slowly, “You have word, ‘enchant,’ means our ochig. Or like it. Enchant comes from light, from sun and jet. Living essence, is enchant. Ochig comes down streaming. Plants, animals, Sil, and now human grow and learn and think from ochig. Bowl turns to keep us here so ochig can bring enchant passing through us. Sil in world, human in world, Folk more in the ochig, thick in ochig. Moving through world, ochig makes pattern. Folk see pattern. Get pattern wrong and Folk do wrong.”

“They don’t seem any better than you Sil.”

“Not better. But in right place.”

“They’re in the right place when they slaughter you?”

“Right will come. Ochig endures.”

This was the longest Quert had ever talked about anything, indeed the longest speech he had ever overheard among any of the Sil. They had an air of paying attention to the passing moment. He envied that.

Cliff wandered aimlessly, still seeing in his mind’s eye Howard slapping at himself and shrieking. He came upon Irma, who had found a little cranny and was sitting on the bare cold stone floor, sobbing. He sat beside her and took her shoulders in his hands and drew her close. Soon enough he was murmuring and clutching her, letting out emotions he did not wish to name. Just holding her helped. He kneaded the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders. She did the same for him and in the long dim time between them some comfort stole over their bodies and then deeper. He could not cry but she could, letting the soft sobs out one at a time. Time eased around them.

They spent more hours inside before the Sil unwrapped the shelter. They coiled up shiny sheets that they had triggered to cover all the door hinges. Intense electromagnetic waves with millimeter wavelengths can leak around slim edges, even those less than a millimeter wide.

Cliff looked out a small window and saw Howard curled up on the ground with no Sil within view. They came out a side door and surveyed the empty sky. Aybe rushed forward, unhooking the first-aid kit … and they all stopped where Howard sprawled.

Howard did not resemble a man now nearly so much as a twisted, red, roasted chicken. Lips blue and bloodless, arms a blotchy purple. His eyes peered up at them as though asking what had happened.

Cliff stared at the face a long time. This man had been under his leadership since they left the ship, since they went through the lock at their landing, and then across long weary paths and through sudden panics. Howard had a habit of getting hurt, missing jumps and landing wrong, some scrapes and sprains, despite his physical stats. The ground truth, as their training had told them, was the final fact, and no tests or training could tell you what happened when plans met reality in a usually brutal collision. Swift came reality, and it took no prisoners. Cliff had not seen this coming and Howard had lagged a step or two behind and so was now forever gone. On his watch.

Quert said quietly, “Is quick. Hurt is where beam hits.”

They buried Howard with the other Sil in the collective grave site. Cliff said little and they were walking back from the site when a faint hum filled the air. Heads turned. Sil nearby rustled with alarm.

The slim shape skimmed low, wings whirring in the sky. Sil began running. Their yellow eyes raced with jittery panic.

“Go time,” Quert said. They went.