“I think we need to know how far these Folk will go,” Redwing said. He kept his tone mild and his face blank.
“As for further measures, I have a brief from Karl”—giving him a nod—“and we will meet in the mess at eight hundred hours to discuss it.” A pause to let this sink in. Time to go public, he figured. “Dismissed.”
* * *
He started the meeting with news. Ayaan Ali delivered it, standing beside an image that flickered onto their wall screen. All exec crew were arrayed around the biggest table on the starship, coffees smartly set in front of them, uniforms fresh pressed from the steamer presser, everybody aware that this was not just another damn crew meet.
Grimly she said, “We launched our satellite toward the nearest Bowl rim. It is a microsat with ion drive, so it accelerated fast. I took it over a mountain range that neighbors the rim edge. See the picture sequence.”
A set of stills ran, in time jumps that made the craggy mountains below zoom past. Their peaks were in permanent snow despite the constant sunlight. Redwing supposed this meant that the atmosphere was thin there and the outer skin, which they now knew was quite cold, was only a short distance away. The chill of space kept water frozen out.
Now the scene stuttered forward to show the Bowl rim approaching. The sat probe scanned forward, aft, both sides. At the far left edge, the atmospheric film shimmered, keeping air confined. On the left a small bright light appeared.
“I stop it here,” Ayaan Ali said. “Note the near-UV burst on this view. It appeared within a microsecond frame, apparently a precursor.”
“To…?” Karl wondered.
“This. Next frame.” Ayaan Ali pointed to a bigger white blotch at the same location to the sat probe’s left. Her smile had a sardonic curve. “And that is it.”
Karl asked, “What happened? Where’s the next frame?”
Ayaan Ali gave them a cold smile. “There are no more. It stopped transmitting. Here is an X-ray image of that region. I had it running all during the fly-out, just in case.”
They could make out the dim X-ray images of mountains and Bowl rim. Apparently this came from minor particle impacts of the solar wind. At the very edge of the rim was a hard bright dot. “That’s our probe dying. From spectra and side-scatter analysis, I believe the killing pulse, which we saw the UV precursor of, was a gamma ray beam.”
“From where?” Redwing knew the answer, but he liked to let Ayaan Ali keep the stage.
“That big cannonlike thing farther along the Bowl rim, sir.”
“It’s an X-ray laser?”
Ayaan Ali shook her head. “This image comes from secondary emissions. I can tell by looking at the spectrum. Also, I had a gamma ray detector taking a broader picture. It gave this.”
Another bright dot. This time there was no background at all, just a point in a black field. “The power in this image is five orders of magnitude higher than the X-ray fluence.”
He said flatly. “So we were right. It’s a gamma ray laser.”
Redwing looked at Beth. Ever since she returned, he had asked her to attend tech meetings, reasoning that she might have insights called forth by new events. “As far as I know, we never found a way to go that high in photon energy. Did you see any signs the Folk had tech like that?”
Now Beth shook her head. “Weapons weren’t really around us. Or maybe we didn’t even recognize them as weapons. They didn’t need them, I guess. We were trapped.”
Ayaan Ali said, “Weapons of this class would be very dangerous on a rotating shell world. Blow a hole in the ground and you’re dead.”
Karl said, “There was an Earthside program to develop high-frequency lasers long ago—I mean even before we left—and it never got lasing to gamma energies. At those tiny wavelengths, a laser could focus to very small areas, so you wouldn’t need very much power to blow something to pieces.”
Fred said, “This is bad news. Now we can’t fly a probe over the rim. They can kill any sensors we send out. We’re bottled up.”
“No doubt they expect us to come back to them and ask for a negotiation,” Ayaan Ali said.
“Which we won’t do,” Redwing said. Nobody said anything. Time to change direction. Sometimes that jarred loose a fresh insight. He leaned forward, fingers knitted together. “Beth, do you think that the Folk would ever let us go forward to Glory?”
Beth sighed and looked at the screen, where the explosion of their probe was frozen in time. “They have a very hierarchical society. The big one who interrogated us, Memor, acted as if she owned the world. It’s hard to think they’ll let us go and reach Glory first.”
Ayaan Ali said, “Which we certainly could do, since we won’t be facing their jet backwash.”
Redwing remembered a lecture on alien biospheres during flight training in which someone said, “Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.” Yet here he was trying to figure out the negotiating strategy of an alien mind, immersed in a civilization uncountably old. He let them toss ideas around for a while to get them used to their situation. Sending the probe out to get destroyed had given the right edge to this, he decided. And it had laid to rest any notion that the Folk were bluffing.
“So…” He let the pause grow; they were so quiet, he could hear the whisper of the air circulation. “Let’s send a reply.”
Karl got up to speak and flicked on the wall display. It showed the jet in an extreme view—magnetic field lines in ruby, the tubes of bright plasma they contained glowing orange, the Bowl itself sketched in nearby as abstract lines. “We can fire a shot across their bow. The jet is pretty narrow as it approaches the Knothole. Notice the helical mag fields that funnel and contain the plasma. Very neat.”
Beth said, “So the idea is…?”
“Fly into it. Disturb the jet. Let it flicker around in the Knothole.”
They just gaped at Karl. He had a chance to check their teeth and noted that Beth had an incisor with some ragged damage and stains. Beth let out a breath. “I flew us up the jet, remember? Remember? It was like taking a sailing ship through a hurricane. Do that again?”
For a long moment Redwing watched the naked fear play across her face. He recalled the long hours of strain and sweat as the ship popped and creaked, the racking uncertainty Beth had showed as she stayed with it through surges and awful wrenching turns. All the crew had worked to the limits of their endurance. That had been their only real choice. Through it all he showed no uncertainty. That was his job. And in the end he did not regret it.
But this was not a necessity. They could coast here and play for time. But they could not leave. And they were eating their provisions while Cliff’s team was in constant danger.
He said slowly, “I think we need to show them that we are not going along with their agenda. That we will not be docile members of their big club.”
A long silence. Their faces tightened and mouths compressed to thin white lines: startled fright, worry, puzzlement. Karl then said, “I wasn’t thawed when you danced through the Knothole, Beth, but I checked this out with Fred. The physics is fairly straightforward. It won’t last long, maybe ten hours.”
Redwing could see they were too stunned to take it in.
“We’ll leave the technical aspects for later. There will be three crew rated to pilot on the bridge at all times. In fact, all crew present. Warn the finger snakes to anchor themselves.”
Karl said formally, “I want you all to know I have done calculations and simulations. There is a broad parameter range of what we might face. The Navigation Artilects have been working full bore to study trajectories, the back-reaction of the jet plasma flow on our mag throat. It compresses our prow fields and alters our uptake—but that’s mostly good news, because we get more thrust from the plasma. There’ll be plenty of ions to fuel our fusion burn. I think—”
“Yes, technical aspects come later.” Redwing smiled and tried to look confident. “Thanks, Karl.”<
br />
Beth looked him straight in the eye. “We don’t understand the Folk worth a damn, sir.”
“Indeed.”
“I have no idea how they’ll respond.” Beth looked worried, and her eyes jerked around the table, looking for support.
“They understand negotiation, that’s clear from our conversation through Tananareve. They’ve killed our coins and now our probe. Let’s show them we know tit for tat, too.”
They looked hard at him. Ayaan Ali still had her slightly wide-eyed, shocked gaze. Fred wore his usual expectant fixed stare. Karl was trying to look confident. Beth’s face was pale and strained, eyes fixed on him.
He stood. “I want you all to know we’ll reply to the Folk. But while doing so, we’ll navigate toward the jet and make preparations.”
They left quietly. None of them looked back at him except Beth. She waited until the others were gone and closed the door. “I have to admit it feels good to be doing something. I didn’t like being in their prison. Even when we got out, it was into a bigger prison.”
Redwing blinked. “One the size of a whole damn solar system?”
She laughed, gave him the high sign, and left.
PART IX
ON THE RUN
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
—TOBIAS SMOLLETT
TWENTY-SEVEN
Cliff was tired of traveling. The immense distances of the Bowl took a steady toll that could not be erased by dozing in uncomfortable seats designed for another species, or indifferent food gotten from dispensers along the way, or headphones that tuned out the drones and rattles of endless long transport. The Bowl was built on the scale of solar systems, but humans were built to smaller perspectives.
Quert and the other Sils had brought Cliff’s team through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels, moving away from the hull where the Ice Minds dwelled. Then a mag-train. More tunnels. Occasional glimpses of odd landscapes seen through huge quartz sheets that glided by as they took barely curved speed ramps at planetary velocities.
He had felt the surges and high speeds, but after a while they did not register as distinct events, just a long symphony of lurches. At times he felt he knew where they were in an astronomical sense—alignments of star and jet and horizon, glimpsed through flickering windows. But those got confused as soon as he looked again, hours later, after being pummeled and spun.
Now they ventured out, on foot, into a terrain that reminded him of California deserts—low scrub brush, gullied tan terrain, hazy sky, occasional zigzag trees. Those seemed to grow everywhere on the Bowl. Gravity was different here, a lot less. He felt a slight tilt to his weight, too. They were closer to the Knothole, had to be.
Curious blocky buildings visible through some dust haze in the distance, maybe ten kilometers away, a tapered tower at its center. Cliff drew in hot dry air with a crisp, nose-tingling flavor and basked in the raw sunlight. It was good to be still and on your feet in sunlight. Always sunlight.
Quert beckoned the others out of the well-disguised hatch that led into the hull system. For many hours they had crawled through some conduits and once had to wade through a sewer to get onto a fast-moving slideway. Then a train. The Bowl’s constant daylight threw off their sleep cycles. He’d measured this, and found that the team had shifted to a thirty-hour waking cycle. The welcome dark of the night-side hull had helped fix that. But they were worn down.
“Think we’re okay here?” Irma asked Quert.
“Need go farther,” Quert said, looking around. “Not safe here.” The other Sil shifted uneasily and looked at the zigzag trees.
“What’s the danger? At least it’s warm.” Irma had not liked the cold and had hugged one or the other of the men in the night, seeking warmth. Nobody thought anything of it; they were all in a pile most of the time, dead to the world.
“The Kahalla. In shape they are more like you than we. An old kind of Adopted. Loyal to Folk.”
Irma frowned. “So what do we do?”
“Find…” Quert paused, as if translating from his language. “Tadfish. You would say. Maybe.”
“There’s shelter over there.” Terry pointed at the low hills to their left. He seemed more alert and energetic now, Cliff noted.
“We go past that,” Quert said, but the other Sil around him rustled with unease. This was the first sign Cliff had seen that they all could understand Anglish. Plainly they were worried, their legs shifting and heads jerking around as if looking for threats.
“So let’s do this fast,” Aybe said. He, too, looked refreshed. They all had skins worn from constant sun but not deeply tanned. There wasn’t a lot of UV in this star’s spectrum.
They set off at a long lope made graceful by the lower gravity. Cliff got into his stride easily, enjoying the sensation of hanging a second or two longer at the apex while his legs stretched out. As much as he had liked the dark of the hull labyrinth, the sunlit open was more his style.
“Kahalla!” one of the Sil cried. Quert stopped and turned and so did they all. Some fast shapes flitted through a distant stand of zigzags and heavy brush.
At first Cliff thought these were four-legged creatures, but as one of them sped across a gap in the rust-colored brush, he saw they had two legs. Their gait leaned forward and hinged oddly. Big angular heads.
“Here Kahalla live,” Quert said.
“What should we do? Deal with them?”
“Do not know.” Quert and the other Sil looked carefully at the Kahalla. There were many of them.
They all began to run again. Quert waved them away from the zigzag trees where the moving figures were and toward the buildings several kilometers away across a dusty plain. It seemed to Cliff they were needlessly exposed there but then Quert, who was in the lead, took them behind a rise and into a slight gully that was enough to shield them from direct fire. Dust from their running stung his nose. They were all running flat out. His team had their lasers and Quert their own weaponry, but they were vastly outnumbered. Until now he had not thought much about how lightly armed Bowl natives were. That seemed to imply little overt conflict despite the vast and horrible damage the Folk had dealt out to the Sil. There was an odd Zen-like grace to them in the face of horror.
As if sensing that something was up, big birds flapped suddenly from the surrounding brush and zigzags. They swarmed and turned together and made off with loud keening squawks. In the lower grav, the big wings could use the slight wind to escape. Obviously to these odd four-winged birds, the running figures meant trouble.
The dust swarmed up into his nostrils and stung. The acrid nip also snapped him into focus. He looked up at the big birds stroking themselves up into the air and he recalled his sense of relish when he saw his first Baltimore oriole. They were nearly extinct then. The Great Crash had passed but many birds were teetering on the edge, and the sight of the deep flaming orange against the rest of its black plumage thrilled him. He knew the Baltimore oriole’s name came from some ancient coat of arms royalty, but that mattered nothing compared with the small fragile beauty of it. These alien birds sweeping and cawing above had none of that, yet they still stirred him. So why had this structure, vast in size and time, kept so much rich wildlife when Earth had not? Humanity had overrun itself in vast sullen cities long ago. Its soiled vapors ruled the sky, still, despite earnest geoengineering.
That question swarmed up, awakened by this wealth of life flapping around him. Stinging sweat trickled into his eyes and he was glad of it.
He remembered the bleak gray landscapes he had seen across the American West following the Great Dry. The denuded skeleton forests of the High Sierras, where fires consumed the last needles of the demolished pine forests and layered the Owens Valley with black shrouds for weeks. The dead dry prospects of deserted suburban streets lined by abandoned cars already stripped of their paint by the hissing sands borne on constant hot winds.
His legs burned with fatigue. Cliff shook his head to throw the sweat aside. He checked that his
team was staying together, and panted, and felt the ache slicing in his lungs, and ran on.
Sometimes he could abstract himself out of the moment with thoughts, memories, dreams, anything. Anything but the terrible fear that once again they were the prey. His team. Being run down again. His responsibility.
So … how did this enormous artifact preserve such diversity of life? It was like some goddamned Central Park in Old Manhattan, before the rising seas washed all that away. A natural place that life sought refuge in, yet it was an artifact, a managed simulacrum of the natural world. A jewel in a concrete setting.
But this place was not a dead park. It lived and maintained itself and went on. He had to concede that to the Folk who ran this place. They had evaded the excess that had nearly ruined Earth.
He ran on. The others panted and strained around him. The Sil took their long strides with easy grace and were always ahead. The humans labored in sweat and stink and gathering sour fatigue as the building complex loomed.
In the zigzag trees around them, Cliff felt the presence of the running humanoids though he could not see them. It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before. Here amid a fantastic construction they were reduced to—
Then he saw it. The Bowl, a huge facsimile of a real planet, kept itself running and stable by being larger than worlds could be. Giving life enough room to find its own way.
But how did they stop the myriad intelligent species here from expanding beyond their province? A puzzle.
And now there was no more time for idle thought. The distant buildings were close. And his legs were made of lead.
Quick is the word and sharp’s the action. Where had he heard that?
They came upon the towering great gray slabs through an outer maze of silvery metal sculptures. These depicted heavyset humanoids in various poses, mostly in combat with assorted knives, shields, lances, and the like. The nude bodies were squat and sturdy, big muscled chunks above short legs and fat feet. Their ribs seemed to wrap around the whole body and their arms turned both ways, double-jointed and elbowed. Some statues were of standing figures and in the air around these gleamed some unintelligible script that flashed brighter as Cliff looked at them. A smart system that registered his gaze and amped the label? They reached a large bladelike tower that seemed solid, standing at the center of a hexagonal open spot. Flagstones of intricate angular designs led toward this tower and up its flanks in elongated perspectives. There was a solemn air to the place as its design soared up the flat tower face, ornamented with bumps and knobs that tapered away into the sky.
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