Bowl of Heaven

nitrogen value in our urine, but getting much out of solid waste is hard. Maybe we should feed our wastes to the pigs.”

Something in Redwing liked that idea. Let them eat shit! Marie Antoinette had it right. But he kept his face blank and said, “Look into it.”

Back in the central corridor, he sucked in the dry, stale ship air with relief. He had to carefully avoid letting his sense of humor off its leash.

He hoped nobody here had access to records of his older self. Decades before SunSeeker was building, he had scorned the whole idea of interstellar arc-ships, and written a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the program. He proposed that they simply send out robot ships with a single message that read, Make ten exact copies of this plaque with your name at the bottom of the list and send them to ten intelligent races of your acquaintance. At the end of four billion years, your name will reach the top of the list and you will rule the galaxy.

A joke, quickly forgotten. The Review Board that passed on starship command hadn’t seemed to turn it up, anyway. Or they overlooked it. But now he couldn’t be that jokester.

As Redwing returned, Jam looked up. “Cap’n, I think we could — ” He paused, as if this might be too much of a leap. “We could, ah, perhaps gather some reserve plasma by, by approaching the jet again.”

“Too dangerous. We nearly lost it all, flying up that thing.”

“We can come close to it, without entering the turbulent heart.”

Redwing smiled. Turbulent heart wasn’t a bad description of how he felt. “Scoop up plasma, store it?”

“I believe we can, using the capture cross section of the magscoop, when we extend it again.”

“That’ll take us away from the Bowl, though. A big delta-V.”

“We can make it up, I calculate, with the reserve plasma gathered by an approach.”

Jam’s steady eyes said, Your call.

“We’ll lose touch with Beth, right? No hope of reaching Cliff’s party with Ayaan’s jury-rigged antenna, either.”

Jam nodded. “Surely true, yes. But we can make a strong boost when we arc down along the Bowl, and return within perhaps ten days.”

“Plan it out,” Redwing said slowly. “I want to give Ayaan a crack at reaching Cliff, then we’ll see.”

“Yes, sir.”

Redwing paced again, wishing he had more options. Regret that he had not gone down in the landing party surfaced again — a gnawing black dog, but he submerged it. His judgment had been right, even if it did mean he spent his time bottled up here.

In some of the preflight training, to help them deal with the media, he had attended a showing of older ideas about interstellar travel. It was both funny and appalling. One of the earliest, from the Age of Appetite, had featured a dashing starship captain who always went down to planetary surfaces to investigate. Nobody questioned the practice! Of course, they had lots of other wish fulfillment trash ideas — faster-than-light travel (and this was after Einstein!), aliens who spoke English of course, teleportation for quick jaunts wherever they wanted. Nobody explained why that didn’t yield an economy with infinite resources. After all, the transporter could just as easily make extra food or devices or money; anything at all, even people.

Yet those Age of Appetite people had the dream, too. They just didn’t think much about how it would take hardship and death in the teeth of the unknown.

He made himself smile and say encouraging things as he paced the deck, and kept his musings to himself, as always.

THIRTY

They were rattled. Cliff could see it in their faces.

“I wonder,” Irma said as they ate cold meat beside their sailcraft, “if the Birds planned to hunt us, back when we came through the lock?”

Aybe snorted. “Of course not! They were treating us as equals — ”

“ — and they tried to capture us,” Terry finished for him.

“We didn’t give them much chance to negotiate,” Aybe insisted.

“They grabbed Beth’s party,” Irma said. “And look at what they did to those odd primates. They were tool users, too!”

Howard said mildly, “We can’t gamble that they’ll treat us differently.”

“I agree,” Cliff said. “Focus on what we do next.”

Terry said, “I still think we should see what their society looks like, but at a distance maybe, see — ”

“Too dangerous,” Cliff said.

Howard nodded. “But sailing along in the desert zone, that’s dangerous, too — and doesn’t teach us much.”

They all agreed. Terry said, “I’m getting tired of sitting in that rig, boosting it over outcroppings when we hit a snag, searching for water. And the dust storms! We’ve got to get some better transport, or we’ll be hunted down.”

More agreement. Cliff began to see an upside to the horrifying kills they had witnessed. Fear concentrated attention. “Let’s hunt up meat, grab some sleep, move away in the morning.”

Howard and Terry brightened. They actually enjoyed hunting the nasty lizards, so they set out toward the nearest dry area. The black and brown things usually lived under cairns of rock they had shouldered into place. The trick was to catch them outside, and Terry had shown a talent for luring the quick-footed, hissing beasts with the old game meat left over from previous kills. They didn’t seem to mind eating their own kind. “Maybe they’re alien lawyers,” Irma had said, and got a laugh.

Aybe fished out the mesh he had found before, unfolded it, and began tinkering with it, using his tool kit. Irma went looking for likely edible plants, but as their discipline demanded, always stayed within earshot. Cliff tried to relax. He had not been sleeping well. This ever-warm, sunlit prospect was as good as he was going to get, the new norm in his life — so he dozed.

Only to be awakened by a shout from Aybe.

“Uh, whazzit?” Cliff said, coming out of his sleep. He had been dreaming of Beth and didn’t want to leave the warm comfort of the illusion.

“I got it!” Aybe had arrayed the mesh in a tree for support. His beamer was patched into it and he excitedly waved the phone at Cliff. “I got SunSeeker’s carrier indices.”

Cliff snapped awake. “What? You can talk to them?”

“Damn low power, audio might not work — but I’ll send them a text message.”

Cliff watched and Aybe’s face danced. “They answer! It’s Redwing.”

Aybe stared at the phone and called, “Sending a file!”

Long minutes dragged by while Cliff and Aybe stared at the phone display screen. Finally it chimed and a picture appeared — a big purple globe. A green upright finger symbol stood at the bottom right of the screen. “I’ve seen that thing,” Aybe said. “The finger, green — maybe that means it’s okay to eat?”

“Hit the next page,” Cliff said.

A dozen pages confirmed several plants they had eaten. Cliff said, “How’d Redwing get this?”

“Must be from Beth’s group,” Aybe said, “relayed through SunSeeker.”

“Just what we need,” Cliff said. “I saw one of those. That other one, too. Wait — I got it. This is a menu!” The next pages gave plant and animal pictures with two red fingers crossed, clearly warnings. “And an anti-menu. The red ones are dangerous to eat. The blue, okay.” He looked up, grinning madly. “Boy, that Lau Pin is sharp.”

Looking through the menu, Cliff thought about the colors of edible food here. Evolution geared animals and people alike to like the colors of things that were good or benign — blue for skies and clear water, white for snow. People disliked browns and dark colors linked to feces and rotten food, and reds that might mean spices or poisons.