Bowl of Heaven

With Terry, Cliff carried Quert into shelter. The pain gun cleared the area swiftly. Howard got a gun going and showed Terry how to manage another. They fired them intermittently as the brown football slowly made its way toward them. “Must be done killing the others,” Terry said laconically. “We got maybe ten minutes before they can do that to us.”

Cliff looked at the big lumbering thing in the sky, working its fins and — were those fans running under it? Yes, pushing the strange hybrid of life-form and engineering across the distance, maybe ten kilometers. Worse, the wind was with the thing.

They poured on the fire. The smart rounds burst into fragments as they neared the target, tearing into the wrinkled hide. Primitive weaponry, Cliff thought, and suddenly saw why. Quert’s kind were unused to warfare, he gathered. No steady gun crew discipline, a lot of strange shouting. They had not done it before, and these guns were their first real try. Battlefields, Cliff reflected, are not the best place to learn your lessons.

Abruptly came the counterfire. He saw green stabs for an instant and then the cliff wall nearby shattered. He knew this only as he shook his head, on the ground. It had slammed him down and now he saw everything through a spatter of fractured light and clapping, hollow explosions. Shock, he thought. He drew in a big lungful of air, flavored with the tang of dirt. He got to his feet and helped Irma up. Dust clouds blew away in the wind and he saw that their artillery piece was shattered where a large rock had hit it. A few meters to the side, and it would have killed them all.

“Other … other guns still work,” he croaked.

They limped to one nearby and Aybe jerked open the breech. “It’s loaded. Let’s give ’em hell.”

They got it to firing, following shouted instructions from Quert. Cliff knew he was still dazed and stood aside as Aybe and Terry aimed it. There were systems that did sighting mounted on the gun deck, pictures that homed in and locked. Quert told them again how to work it, speaking patiently and slowly from shelter. The pain gun was still going, he could tell — the Sil who darted out to help others jerked and cried with the sheeting pain.

The gun slammed out shots at the approaching target. “Aim for the underside.” Irma pointed. “There are portals there.”

Aim changed. Shots exploded into shrapnel just short of the yellow ports lining the bottom seam of the big balloon creature. They could see the impact, kilometers away.

“That’s a living thing,” Aybe said. “It’s gotta hurt.”

The creature was unused to this. It flinched when the rounds struck — long waves broke across its skin, like slow-motion impacts of a huge fist on flesh. It began to turn.

At its side, a smaller craft burst from a green pod. It was a slim airplane and fell away in graceful arcs. All the action was smooth, slow. Then their guns ran dry and a silence fell on the canyon.

“Astronomer goes,” Quert called weakly.

The huge creature hung in the air and small things began emerging from it. They crawled like spiders across the skin and covered the gaping red wounds with white layers.

“Fire some more?” Aybe asked. He had used up the ammo store.

“Don’t think we have to,” Irma said. She was getting her composure back, patting the dust from her pants and blouse, and even brushing her hair into place.

Everyone quieted down. Faces human and alien alike were drawn, tired.

Apparently that meant the battle was over. Soon the pain gun antennas were out of view and the effect ended. The Sil who had stayed came out of shelter, and a great mournful dirge sounded. Their voices merged in a long, rolling chant. They moved among the fractured bodies, turning them to the perpetual sun. The song rose up and reverberated from canyon walls. Quert splayed arms to the sky and joined in the deep long notes. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it for a long while, despite his pounding heart.

But at last the feeling ebbed. The flapping balloon creature was moving languidly away across an empty sky as teams crawled over it, mending. Quietly the humans left their post and Quert seemed to revive, shaking itself in quick vibrations of arms and legs, as if shaking off a mood. Quert led them away and into a long, narrow passageway through the far side of the ruddy canyon.

They walked in silence, absorbing what had happened.

“May return,” Quert warned. “Go.”

They hurried through an underground passage. They spent five minutes of running, pounding down channels as the chants behind faded away. Quert showed them what looked like an air lock and they went through it fast. Beyond was a dimly lit tunnel. In this they ran for at least half an hour, just Quert and five other of the aliens — who ran with unhurried grace, their paces light, long, and quick — and following them came the humans, slogging on with thumping feet.

Like gazelles, Cliff thought, and then went back to pondering what might lie ahead. He had led them into this and for quite a while now he had not known where it was going. Wandering and staying out of the hands of the Bird Folk had seemed obvious. Plus trying to learn — and those were the last things he had been certain of for a long time.

They reached a dock suddenly. But this was a vertical one with no-door elevators, chugging along at a speed that made it easy to step onto a descending plate. Quert showed them how and Howard jumped too heavily onto it, lost his balance, and fell to the floor. That made Terry laugh in a high-pitched way, while the others piled on.

Howard got his breath and they all looked at one another, aliens and humans alike. There was some odd commonality here he was too distracted to think about right now. Just assume it and see if it worked. Not a theory, but a plan.

Cliff staggered. His right leg went from a dull ache to a steadily building throb. Adrenaline high is fading. He felt the warmth from it flowing down into his boot. He sat down sloppily and breathed deep, sucking in air to calm his racing heart. Gingerly he felt the wound.

Irma said, “You’re bleeding.”

Cliff nodded, panting. “Flesh wound.”

Howard said, “We’re short of bandages.”

“I’m not as badly hurt as we’ve seen,” Cliff said. He tried a shrug. “I’ll get by.”

Irma had thought to take some of the clothing off the dead aliens. She handed him something shirtlike, cottony. With Irma’s help, he tore it into lengths and folded one to make a pad. He tied that over the wound, pulling to get it tight, and the compress seemed to stop the bleeding. He did this automatically, recalling practice they had all gone through. Centuries ago.

They went on, Cliff limping.

They came down steadily in darkness and stepped off onto a metal frame in the rock. Beyond the elevator was no rock at all, just ceramics and fiber beams and even burnished metal. There were struts and the usual squared-off construction in a gravity well, but also curved arches and round hatches. Quert led them through support structures, and suddenly one wall was transparent and Cliff was looking into blackness pocked by tiny colored lights. Stars.

“It’s … the backside of the Bowl,” Aybe whispered.

Somehow the view was at an angle to vertical, not straight down through the floor. Local gravity was different here. Cliff watched a distant craft swim across this night sky, lit only by starlight. Then a nearer sphere came into view, with three small ships nosed against it. A fueling station? It slid by fast and Cliff realized they were the ones moving, spinning to maintain centrifugal grav at half a thousand kilometers per second. All you had to do to launch a ship was let go of it.

He pressed his face against the cold transparent window, just as the others did, and looked at long lanes of structures stretching away in all directions. Endless detail into the distance, with gray robot forms working over some towers nearby.

Quert’s long vowels intruded on his thoughts. “Can see later. Now go.”

It was hard to leave the view. The perspectives reminded him that they were never far from the vacuum of space, no matter how familiar some of the Bowl could seem.

“Come!” Quert took them onto another dock and then very fast into a narrow capsule. They fitted into horizontal slots with support straps, and as Cliff got his into place they took off to a swift sucking sound.

Cliff unwrapped the bulky bandage he had made, and the sight was not good. A dark stain had pasted his pants leg to the wound. It smelled bad and was suddenly popular with nasty little flies that came swirling out of nowhere. With Howard’s help, Cliff shed the lower half of his peel-out trousers, unzipping to reveal the damage.