Bowl of Heaven

Aybe experimented with altitude and speed, getting the feel of the magcar. They got ten kilometers away before they found a narrow gulch that concealed them among billowy trees, swaying in a steady, strangely musky wind.

The others went through the dead aliens’ gear while Cliff stood watch. He scanned the sky for pursuit. Nearby, undisturbed by the magcar passage, birds in flight broke from their immense, triple-decked formation. They curled in banks, forming a sphere, cawing and yawing in squawking concert. The sound was a rolling skkkaaaaa! and distracted him so he did not see coming from above the cause of it all. A huge slender shape shot down from a cloud and dived into the bird ball. Its jaws opened and scooped up several birds at once. He lost it in the thickness of the swarming birds. It poked out the far side an instant later, jaws closed now and turning away. Like a shark, he thought. A sky shark.

Irma sat beside Cliff and asked Aybe, “This wind is too much. Can’t we shield it?”

“Yeah,” Aybe said brightly, always happy to greet a new problem. “There must be…”

After a few minutes of his trying the oddly shaped controls, a narrow pole abruptly poked up from the magcar center, where the engine housing bulged, humming as Aybe drove them forward. It rose to three meters’ height, and suddenly the wind pressure and sound eased away. They were all impressed. Aybe figured it was some field effect, and when Howard poked a finger over the car lip he got a shock. “Defensive, too,” Howard said, nursing the finger.

Irma said, “We should decide where we’re going.”

“Shelter, I guess,” Terry said.

“We have to think long term,” Irma said. “What’s our goal?”

Howard said, “Learn and stay free.”

Aybe shrugged. “Learn what? How to find Beth’s group? Or get back to SunSeeker? Or — what?”

Irma looked around at them. “Once I was supposed to meet a friend in Old New York. The whole comm grid was down, so I couldn’t reach her — and she was a Primitivist anyway, so usually didn’t carry tech or have any embedded. So how was I to find her?”

“Go to obvious places,” Howard said.

Irma brightened. “Exactly!”

Howard nodded. “So you went to the Empire State Building museum, and there she was.”

“No, Times Square, but — yes. Let’s do the same.”

“So what’s obvious here?” Aybe barked as he steered, never taking his narrowed eyes from the landscape.

Everyone thought, looking at the alien landscape whipping by. They were going up a slight slope, and low hills framed the steel blue horizon. Green and brown vegetation clumped at the bases of hills and in the erosion gullies where Cliff knew predators would be waiting.

Terry said, “The Jet. It’s the engine moving this system, and it passes closest to the Bowl at that opening, the Knothole.”

“Ah!” Irma nodded. “So maybe whoever runs this place lives near there?”

Shrugs answered. “Seems dangerous,” Howard said. “If that Jet breaks free — and why is it so straight? — I wouldn’t want to be near it.”

“Okay, but look.” Irma called up on her phone a picture taken from SunSeeker. The big band of mirror territory gave way near the Knothole to a green zone. In a close-up view they could see complicated constructions nearer still to the Knothole. “Somewhere in there.”

Aybe shook his head. “That’s maybe a million klicks from us!”

“I’m not saying we fly there in this little car,” Irma said. “But look, we’re living in a building. There must be some big, long-distance transport around this place.”

“Where would it be?” Cliff said, face blank. He had no idea, but ideas came out in talk like this and Irma was right to kick it off.

“Something obvious,” Howard said. “This place is so big, there’s got to be some structure that contains transport. To be large range, it’s got to be large. Irma’s right, it’s a building.”

“Okay, let’s look for structures.” Irma held up more views from SunSeeker.

Looking at them, the angled views of the Bowl, Cliff recalled what was now a distant life. He had lived for only weeks after revival on SunSeeker and now — he checked his inboard timer — months here, on the run. Somewhere up there, SunSeeker soared serene and secure. If we could get more than spotty contact …

All this experience was new, while decades of growing up and getting educated in California were the true frame of his life. Yet that world was gone forever from him. In a moment, the entire prospect of his life — finding Beth, setting sail to Glory on SunSeeker to explore a world and make a whole new life for humanity — all collapsed around him. Beth. God, I miss her.

All his past life was a dream, one that had to be tossed aside now for a frank reality on an enormous construct. He sat, speechless.

“What’s that grid?” Terry pointed at Irma’s small flat display.

Cliff looked, trying to yank himself out of his reverie. Redwing had talked of “morale problems,” but this was more like a moral problem. What did any of their grand plans matter, against this brute reality?

Irma was responding to Terry by refitting her map with keystrokes and voice commands, using elevations gotten from SunSeeker. As SunSeeker approached the Bowl, they had made a clear mapping of the near-hemispherical crisscross weave on the Bowl’s outer skin. Those features stood out, a knitted basket that supported the enormous centrifugal forces caused by the Bowl’s spin. A miracle of mechanical engineering carried out on the scale of a solar system.

She flipped the display over to view the living zone of the Bowl’s interior. These maps were much more complicated, since huge continents, seas, and deserts overlaid everything. But clearly, as Irma worked the analysis, a cross-mapping of the outer grids had their parallels on the inward face.

“Ridgelines, that’s it,” she said. “There’s a consistent matching of the support structures. The Bowl’s ribs are big curved tubes. We find them on both sides — the mechanical basis of ridges here in the life zone.”

Howard said, “Where’s the nearest?”

“Ummm, hard to tell.” This went back to the whole problem of conformal mapping of the Bowl’s curves and slants that had bored Cliff on SunSeeker and did now, too. When he came back to the Irma–Aybe–Howard conversation, they seemed to have resolved the issue and Irma said adamantly, “I’m sure it’s at least a thousand klicks, that way — ” and pointed.

Aybe had another objection and Cliff went back to watching the terrain. Aybe could fly the magcar around obstacles with the surprisingly simple controls, and still keep up a steady stream of disputation with Irma. Cliff got bored and rode shotgun in the sense of watching for trouble to their flanks. They were gently rising over terrain that got more bare and stony.

While the three argued, they came upon some hills of actual rock — cross sections of layers, some showing rippled marks that bespoke the eddies of an ancient sea. There were hollowed-out openings, some big enough to walk into. Parts of the walls had the curved sheets that meant sand dunes, each seam of differently colored red and tan grains sloping smoothly, an echo of where ancient winds blew them. These rocks had to come from some planet’s surface.

“Hey, I’d like to look at those,” Cliff said. “Let’s take a break.”

The tech types broke off and Irma surged up. “Yes! Need to pee anyway.”

They came behind as he scrambled up the slopes. Puffing, he scaled a climb into one of the caves. So the Bowl builders had kept some of their home world? Intriguing —

He blinked. Pink paintings marked the cave roof and walls. Simple line drawings showed lumpy animals. One was clearly a running stick figure like the Bird Folk, a slender long neck and arms carried forward. Before it ran smaller animals. The Bird carried a … spear? Hard to tell.

Something told him these were truly ancient. They reminded him of the aboriginal paintings he had seen in Australia. Those showed kangaroos and fish and human figures. Not as sophisticated as the French cave paintings, but very much older, dating back to fifty thousand years.

But these — these were alien artworks of … how long ago? Impossible to tell. The Bowl builders had brought