Bowl of Heaven

species, I guess.”

Cliff nodded. “The Bird Folk are big, sure, but some of the forms we saw from a distance were smaller. Interesting, to have intelligence in a range of body types.”

“But why is nobody here?” Terry insisted.

Aybe added, “And nobody at the station, ’cept robots.”

“Maybe they don’t travel much?” Irma wondered.

No answers, plenty of questions. The passenger car was over a hundred meters long and ended with a pressure door, where the car narrowed down. “Let’s not go further,” Irma said. “Great find, Howard, that light switch. Let’s use them, huh?”

Aybe found something that sounded like a grinder in the tiled floor of an otherwise bare room. “That’s gotta be the head,” Terry said. Starships used nautical terms, and soon they were calling the train’s nose the bow.

They ate before sleeping. All along, mealtimes had been important, just as they had been in their interplanetary training missions. On the Mars Cycler, Cliff had learned ship protocols and how to deal with short-arm centrifugal gravity (which made his head lurch the first week when he walked), but the most important lesson was the social congruence. Eating together promoted solidarity, teamwork, the crucial judgments of strengths and flaws they all needed to know. In a crisis, that knowledge let them respond intuitively. Here, where danger was never far away, those unspoken skills had quickly become crucial.

“What do we do when we pull into the next station?” Terry asked, munching one of the odd foods that he had squeezed out of a tube — which then evaporated into the air with a hiss, once emptied. How it knew to do this was a topic of puzzled discussion. Cliff watched them as they all pretty obviously — judging from expressions as they ate, each reflecting inwardly after the excitement of pursuit — wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

Too late, Cliff thought but did not say. He recalled another favorite phrase of his father’s: Life is just one damn thing after another.

The train ran on in its silky way, electromagnetics handing off without a whisper of trouble. Cliff lay back and relaxed into the moody afterglow of eating more than one needed. The low hum of the train lulled him but he summoned up resolve to say, “We need to stand watches, same as before. Terry, you’re up first.”

Groans, rolled eyes, then the slow acceptance he had come to expect. Cliff made the most of it, standing up and trying to look severe. “We don’t know anything here. We’re not camping out anymore. This is a train, and it stops somewhere. When it does, we’ve got to be able to hide or run.”

They nodded, logy with the meal, as he had planned.

Howard said, “We should break up, too. Don’t clump up, so they can bag us all at once.”

Cliff didn’t like the pessimism behind that, but he said, “Good idea. But not alone.”

Long silence. Terry glanced at Aybe, and Cliff suddenly remembered that one of them was gay. Which one? For the life of him, he could not remember. Damn! All this time —

Too late. Didn’t matter anyway: Howard, Terry, and Aybe would be sharing. Nobody alone. Cliff and Irma —

Terry and Aybe looked at him, long steady gazes, and he realized that they knew. He would be with Irma and the compartments sealed off very nicely, thank you. Never mind who was gay, the big issue here was about him and Irma. He had been ignoring it. So consumed with his own emotions, he had not thought through what happened to a small band with cross-currents working below the surface. Now that they were inside again, back in a moving machine, somehow everything suppressed in the pseudo-wilderness of the Bowl melted away. It was about the old elementals — survival, sex, the splendor of the deep sensual accents. Life.

Realizing that left him speechless, which he also saw was a good idea. Life is just one damn thing after another.

“So what happens,” Terry said evenly, “when we stop at a station?”

Irma said quickly, anxiously, “We need an exit.”

All agreed. They trooped to the back end, aft on the starboard side, to consider the pressure door. “We’ve got to try it,” Terry said.

The door opened with a shove. It led to a short lock chamber, and in the wall was a simple pressure gauge — long-lasting analog, of course — with release valves. Simple stuff, artifacts so clear they could serve generations without an instruction manual.

They factored through into a dark room that lit up slowly when they entered, phosphors brimming with sleepy glows.

“Freight,” Terry said.

Dark lumps of webbed coverings secured units the size of Earthside freight cars at multiple points. It all looked mechanically secure and professional, robot work of a high order by Earthside standards.

Aybe said, “We fall back to here?”

“We don’t have much choice,” Terry said.

“If we start to slow down, send an all-alert,” Irma said.

“Who’s up on watch?” Terry asked innocently.

“You,” Cliff said. He hadn’t much hope the thin, angular man would stay awake more than five minutes beyond the rest. But it was good to set some standard, even if it was obviously not going to work. In their tired eyes he saw that they knew this, too.

So they went back, chose compartments, and cut the phosphors. For the first time in their new, strange lives here, blessed night descended.

* * *

Cliff sat up. A subtle long slow bass rumbling came through the floor. He blinked, thinking fuzzily that maybe he was under a tree, maybe some animal was nearby — and suddenly knew that this was real, solid darkness. Not shade. It wasn’t going away.

He found the wall switch and powered up the phosphors. Irma jerked, shook her head, shot a palm up to block the light. “Uhh! Noooo…”

“Got to. We’re slowing down.”

Cliff clicked on his phone, sent an all-alert. Until this moment he hadn’t thought if the walls of this train would block the signal. Well, too late —

“I’m up,” Irma said unconvincingly. She got unsteadily to her feet, pulling on her gray underpants.

Cliff couldn’t help himself. He started laughing, quick bursts of it. He bent over, tried to stop, couldn’t. The laughs slowed, developed a hacking sound.

“What?” Irma said, struggling into her cargo pants.

He made himself stop. “I — I was thinking about … sex.”

Skeptical frown. “Uh, yeah?”

“No, not now. I mean — just that — I worried about us and them, Terry and Howard and Aybe. Last night. Never realized that sleep was the big thing we all wanted.”

She grimaced, yawned, stretched. “Well, yeah. This is a sleep high — feels so good.”

“Wow, yes. I musta slept — ” He glanced at his phone. “ — oog … fourteen hours.”

“And you thought about sex?” She tried to smile, failed, rubbed her eyes.

“Not really. Just thinking about the team, y’know — oh, hell. I’m not up to speed.”

“Speaking of — ”

Yes. The train was slowing. They had been so joyful, they’d ignored it. He hastened into his own pants, boots, backpack, field gear. All he had, now. Into battle, maybe.

He went out into the corridor, pulling up his backpack harness. He had run away from enough threats to know that you never can count on going back for your gear. Terry and Aybe were already there, standing warily as they looked out the windows at the dark sliding by.

“Y’know,” Irma said, “we should’ve looked for underground places to sleep.”

“We did. We ran into nothing like this train station, but yeah, we shoulda looked harder.”

The phosphors were pulsing as the train passed by, their gray hoops fluttering so slow now, he could see the flicker. “I see a platform up ahead,” Aybe said.

Cliff went forward. Harder glows showed the prospect ahead. He close-upped it with his binocs. There were