Bowl of Heaven

There was an entrance wound on the right side of his calf and a matching, larger wound on the left. Water brought by the Sil washed off the crusted dark blood. The puckered openings were red and swollen.

Irma brought her first aid kit and pooled its resources with the kits of the others, each kit somewhat specialized. “Looks like some shrapnel went right through your calf muscle,” she said calmly. “The leg’s going to purple up.”

“It’s hard to walk on.”

“Then don’t.”

She and Howard worked for a while, injecting him and putting clean compresses on the leg. Cliff watched the sky where puffy gray clouds raced one another.

Irma patted him. “You’re not going to die.”

“That’s a relief. Don’t have to call my insurance guy.”

“You won’t lose the leg.”

“Even better. Hurts though. Got some fun drugs?”

That brought chuckles. “Ran out,” Howard said. “My fault.”

Irma said, “And your next question would be, ‘Where are we?’”

“And the answer…”

“Going to a Sil refuge. Their casualties are in the cars ahead. They lost a lot of dead.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. And his head was feeling like a balloon that wanted to soar into the sky.

The trip lasted a long time amid bare dim lighting. He thought of talking to the others, but now he knew it was smarter to just rest when you could do nothing. He fell asleep, dreamed of discordant sights and sounds and colors, and just as on the train, came awake only to the tug of deceleration.

PART IX

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

— STEVEN WRIGHT

FORTY-SIX

Beth stood in the entrance of the cave and listened as thunder forked down through immense, sullen cloud banks. They were stacked like a pyramid of anvils with purple bases. Down through them, leaping from anvil to anvil, came bright, sudden shafts of orange lightning. Fat raindrops smacked down, lit up by the flashes. Some of the glaring lances raced from one shadowy cloud to another and came down near them, exploding like bombs as they splintered trees.

“Majestic,” Fred said at her side.

“Terrifying,” she countered, but then admitted, “Beautiful, too.”

“Look at those.” Mayra pointed. In the milky daylight that filtered through the pyramid clouds, they watched moist plants move with a languid, articulating grace. Slowly they converged on the lightning damage. They came forth to extinguish the fires from those strikes.

“Protection, genetically ordained,” Tananareve said.

“Sure they’re not animals?” Fred asked.

“Do they look like animals?” Tananareve countered. “I checked, went out and lifted one. Roots on the end of those stalks. Roots that slip out easily from the soil when it rains.”

“But the rain will put out the fires.”

“Maybe they’re healing something else. We really don’t know how this ecology works, y’know,” Tananareve said.

“And the ecology’s only skin deep,” Fred said. “Ten meters or so down, there’s raw open space. Maybe the lightning can screw up subsurface tech.”

Beth listened to the full range of sounds rain makes in a high, dense forest. Pattering smacks at the top, gurgling rivulets lower, as the drops danced down the long columns of the immense canopy. The orchestrated sounds somehow encased her, lifted her up into a world utterly unnatural but somehow completely secure, while seeming still so strange.

Somewhere in this immense mechanism Cliff was … what? Still free? Captured and interrogated? Her skimpy communication with SunSeeker confirmed that he got through to them intermittently and was moving cross-country. That was all she knew, yet it would have to be enough.

The rain, wind, and lightning daggers swept her along in a sudden tide of emotions she had kept submerged. She longed for him, his touch, the low bass notes as he whispered in her ear of matters loving, delightful, often naughty. Lord, how she missed that. They liked making love while rain spattered on the windows, back there centuries ago. It gave them a warm, secure place to be themselves, while the world toiled on with its unending business. They had ignored the world for a while, and it ignored them.

Fair enough. But this whirling contrivance could not be ignored. It could kill you if you did not pay attention, and very probably would, she imagined. They would probably die here, and no one — Cliff, Redwing, Earth — would ever know, much less know why. Beth’s small band certainly did not remotely understand this thing. Why was it cruising between the stars at all — driven forward by engineering that eclipsed into nothingness all that humanity had achieved? Why?…

“Fred, that idea of yours, where’d you get it?”

He shook himself from his reverie. “Just came to me.”

“Straight out of your imagination?” Tananareve scowled at him. “Some imagination you got, to think dinosaurs — ”

“I didn’t imagine it, if you mean I concocted the idea. It just … came to me. Pieces all fit together. In a flash.” As if in agreement, a big yellow bolt knifed down through the shimmering sky and slammed into the rock of the hill above them. Stones clattered down.

“There’s no evidence for it,” Lau Pin said.

“That globe we saw,” Fred said. “It’s like Earth, but the continents are wrong. All mushed together.”

“Maybe the geologists got the continent details wrong,” Beth said. “It’s a long chain of reasoning, back seventy or so million years.”

“Never mind that!” Mayra suddenly said. “What fossil evidence is there for any early civilization? Where are the ruins?”

“That much time?” Tananareve scoffed. “Nothing left. Subducted, rusted away, destroyed in a dinosaur war, maybe. Look, guys, the Cretaceous–Tertiary Boundary shows where the asteroid hit. It shows through in only a dozen places around the Earth. Why would you expect anything to be left at all?”

Lau Pin swept an arm out at the churning trees, the walking plants, lightning slicing down from towers of dark clouds. “What’s the leap from some smart dinosaurs to this?”

“I don’t know.” Fred shrugged. “Depends on what the smart ones thought, how they saw their world.”

“There’s no fossil evidence for smart dinosaurs,” Lau Pin said. He went back in the cave to turn their fire. It was cooking the last of the big carcass they had brought from the warehouse, and the yamlike roots. It had started smoking again, probably from rain blowing in, and they all had a coughing fit.

“You can’t judge intelligence from the size of skulls,” Beth said, “and anyway, dino skulls are plenty large. Look, they had grappler claws, a start toward hands. Later on, some dinosaurs had feathers — that’s where birds came from. There’s plenty we don’t know about that era.”

Fred nodded and then said quietly, “There was one clue. When I saw that great holo of how they built this Bowl, I looked at the star in the distance. It looked a lot like the sun.”