Bowl of Heaven

seats were two meters apart. A two-seater for giants, no bodies, one wing smashed to fragments. The engine had plunged out of the body and jammed into the sandy soil. Most of the fuselage was smooth, though, undamaged. Some sort of carbon composite, he judged.

Cliff again wondered why they had seen no aircraft. This wreck looked recent. Then it struck him — if a big aircraft fell, it might punch a hole through the entire structure, venting the life zone to vacuum. So only small aircraft were allowed. And not many of those.

Only a few hundred meters farther on, they stepped from the wispy forest onto a flat plain of sand. There were no hills visible in the distance through a shimmer of heat haze warping the perspectives. Warm tan sand simmering beneath the eternal sun. A steady breeze at their backs seemed to urge them into this desert.

“We sure can’t go slogging across that,” Terry said, his face sagging.

“But those nasties behind us…” Irma’s voice trailed away.

“We need to get some distance between them and us,” Howard said.

Cliff let them toss it around and then said, “I don’t like the idea of standing out nice and clear against a desert.” Not an idea, but true.

“We’re trapped!” Irma said angrily. She looked wan, worn.

Aybe kicked at the sand and knelt down and used his magnifying scoper on grains in his palm. “I thought this stuff felt odd. Look.”

They took turns peering at the grains. Cliff was surprised. “They’re all round,” he said.

“Manufactured,” Terry said. “Maybe condensed out of a hot silicon and oxygen mix in zero grav?”

“Could be,” Aybe said. “If you’re building this place in high vacuum, starting from scratch, you don’t have rivers and beaches to make sand.”

Cliff looked at the stretching expanses, as flat as the lake had been. What moved well on — ? And it came to him.

“Sand without edges has got to have less friction,” he said.

Irma looked at him. “Uh, so?”

“Less resistance to a sliding surface. Let’s make a … sail craft. Let the wind blow us across this desert.”

“What?” Aybe was aghast.

Irma snapped her fingers. “Remember that downed plane? We could use the airfoils, cobble something together.”

At first they were puzzled, then disbelieving, then — remembering their pursuers — grudgingly, they tried it.

They had to drag the cut-down body of it for hundreds of meters. Terry pried the damaged wing away, and they used the wheels to keep the thing rolling. Cliff had time to look through the tool belt he had taken off the alien body. That seemed now like many days ago. He knew this meant he was getting near his limits. That was now a bigger problem for them all — telling when an Earth day had gone by.

In his stupefied fumbling, he finally saw that most of the tools were alien wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers for pentagonal heads — and huge. Hard to use, but not impossible. One he couldn’t understand turned out to be a laser. He spotted it because it had leads to attach to a solar panel that unfolded. The gear was quite well designed.

It flared on with a virulent pop. Everybody cheered. They cut through the unneeded metal with its actinic beam, slicing elegantly thin lines. It took care and contortions to shape the body into something clean and usable.

They reconfigured it into a sand-sailboat, making the usable wing of the plane into a sail. They screwed that in place with their new tools.

Luck was with them: the wind was picking up, still howling at their backs.

They set off by pushing the fat-tire wheels into the sand and then letting the wing turn into the full wind. Cliff held his breath. If it failed, they were stuck, backs against the desert.

It failed. The wheels got stuck in grit and they had to lever them out of the sand, digging with their hands. Then, with them all crowded into the long passenger compartment, they got stuck again. Sighs, drawn faces.

Terry had another idea. Cut off the wheels. Let it be a true sailboat, running on its skin. Cliff was so tired by now, he really had no faith in anything but sleep. But he let Terry shear off the wheels and struts with the alien laser.

They got out of the boat’s body and pushed. Sand ground beneath it, the wind blew — and it started to gain speed. Cliff ran alongside, pushing with raw hands until it had some momentum. Only then did he call, “Pile in!”

They yelled and shouted and got inside with weary last energy. In a few minutes, Cliff looked back and could no longer see the tree line. The wind purred around their sail as it picked up. They were skating across a great sand lake with no idea of what lay ahead. Into the unknown.

So what else is new? Cliff asked himself, and fell fast asleep.

PART IV

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

— MARCEL PROUST

TWENTY

Tananareve stared at the shambling beast looming over her and made herself not cringe.

Keep your head held high, her mother’s spirit reminded her. She had to, anyway, because the alien towered over her like a mobile mountain.

This thing smelled, too. Its thick musk made her eyes water and she sneezed.

Memor had brought yet again an odd thing made of plasticlike, squeezable stuff. The vast beast set the thing before her and stepped on it. It squawked, hissed, then got up and walked around on stubby legs. A life-form? Now it ran off in a panicked, lurching gait, as if afraid.

Just the way I feel, she thought. Each time, Memor brought a little thing that surprised her a bit. But what did they mean? A calling card?

Memor made a resounding speech of woofs, yips, and growls. Plus the seemingly mandatory feather-fluffs, fan displays with suites of multicolored synchronization, and ruffles that sounded like whispery drumrolls. Tananareve got the drift — was she awake?

“Of course I am,” she said back, in words that sounded more like growls. This seemed to please it. Every meeting began this way, and Tananareve still hadn’t figured out why. Or the calling cards.

Haltingly, Tananareve asked Memor for help in finding food they could eat. She felt somewhat comic, mimicking the alien’s huffing, bass word-structures in her high, lilting notes. But her meaning got through somehow.

Memor bowed, a gravid gesture of understanding. The huge thing lumbered around, trumpeting orders to its lessers, trying to find leafy boughs that the human could try. She caught a combination of rough consonants that seemed to mean, “fodder for eaters of meat and grasses.” At least it apparently knew some organic chemistry.

She kept to the ropy vines Beth had settled her into for comfort. Tananareve felt safer here, too, lounging back among this aromatic wealth. Her dark skin blended into the shadows.

Anything was better than the awful rattling box they’d had to endure coming here. She had felt better from the moment they were shooed out of that by Godzilla-like birds.