Bowl of Heaven

“That’s it?” Lau Pin snorted dismissively.

Another shrug. “Started me thinking.”

“They were really smart, built this — and got wiped out by a rock even we could deflect away centuries ago?” Mayra said. “Come on.”

Fred shrugged yet again. “No answer. Maybe they got caught in a cultural phase where they stopped watching the skies. Look, it’s an idea, not a complete theory.”

As Mayra argued with Fred, Beth watched her. The deep furrows on Mayra’s brow had gone away and the worry lines at the eyes, too. She seemed better about the death of her husband, and had even laughed a bit. But Beth was sure that Abduss was never far from her mind. Nor was Cliff from hers, of course. She would never forget the squashed Abduss she had seen, still breathing for a short while in milky spurts, frothy saliva dripping like cream down to his ears while his cracked skull leaked brown blood into his eyes.

Beth shook her head to sweep away the image. She left them to their discussion and sat down near the cave entrance to savor the scent of the rain. As a little girl, she had loved that smell — freshness enveloping her, fragrances boiling into the air. They weren’t on Earth, but it felt the same. “This Bowl has a lot of similarities to Earth, yes? Maybe the really strange stuff, like those walking plants, are from other worlds.”

Fred nodded eagerly. “Or tens of millions of years of directed evolution.”

“Point is,” Beth said, “even if Fred’s right, how do we use the theory? How can it help us?”

Lau Pin stretched, drew in a clean lungful of moist air. “Sleep on it, I say. Fred, you get your ideas how? Dreaming?”

“No, but I have them when I wake up. I go to sleep thinking about things, problems — and when I wake up, there’s an idea there. Maybe wrong, but … it’s like getting a note from another part of myself.”

Beth got up and patted Fred on the shoulder. “I suspect that’s why you made SunSeeker crew, too. Didn’t you figure out the high-voltage capacitors in the ramscoop?”

He smiled. “Yeah. That was fun. That was a neat puzzle.”

“Sleep again, after you take the first watch. Maybe the part of you that never sleeps will come up with more ideas.”

Beth unfolded her cushion from her backpack and inflated it with long, deep breaths. A part of her eyed Fred’s lean stance framed by the cave’s mouth. Wait a bit, get it on with him? You’re horny, alone — do something. But she brushed the impulse away. Don’t complicate a team that’s barely getting by.

By the time she was ready to sleep, the rest were distributed back through the small cave, grateful for some shade and the storm’s muting of the constant sunlight. She squinted through the clouds and could barely see the star’s disk.

As she dropped off to sleep, she thought of Cliff again. He had always been better at fieldwork than she was, and she hoped maybe he understood this weird place better. Would she ever find him in this huge world-machine? “G’night, Cliffy. Wherever you are.”

She hugged her blow-up pillow and smelled the rain and thought of places secure and warm and far away.

FORTY-SEVEN

Memor had always enjoyed the serene voyaging these living craft afforded. She looked down on the slow passage of rugged terrain and breathed in a luxurious sweet aroma. The mucus of this great beast had been engineered to carry a delicate fragrance unlike anything else. Its scent was a luxury and settled the mind, though chaos raged all about them. She allowed herself another lingering taste, then turned with an appropriately severe expression.

“This is truly absurd,” Memor said. “We have dozens of airfish aloft and much airplane coverage. Yet the prey keeps ducking belowground, eluding us.”

The Captain of this armed airfish gestured with indifference. “We will turn them up. They exited the Longline transport at the station below. They can surely not go far — Wait, see those Sils?”

The reed-thin male peered at a large wall display. Small life-forms filled narrow canyons of tan rock. More of the Adopted species, one Memor had not seen before, were coming into the crowds, arriving apparently by foot. Good — an agricultural culture, with low technologies and simple ways.

The Captain drawled thoughtfully, “They cluster in several canyons. No dancing, no parades or ceremony. This is not their usual communal gathering.”

“You know well these…?”

“Sils, we term them. Always an unruly lot. Not the first time, my dear Astronomer, that I have taken to air to discipline these.”

“The problem persists?”

“Yes, has worsened steadily. The Sils are among the worst of the Adopted. They are not much evolved beyond carnivores, so I suppose we should not be surprised. Herbivores — why did we not bring more of those aboard?” The Captain blinked, taken aback by his own outburst.

“Because herbivores are seldom intelligent,” Memor said dryly. “Good eating, though — we do have some of those.”

“Of course, of course.” The Captain turned and barked out quick orders to his staff officers. They were taking more rattling fire. The great beast that carried them protested in long grumbling notes that rolled through the walls that ran with juice.

Memor watched the living opalescent walls run with anxiety dewdrops, shimmering moist jewels hanging and spattering with an acid odor. Skyfish expressed their deep selves through chemistry, an unreliable, or at least largely unreadable, medium. They were perhaps the most successful of the Adopted. Taken from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant world long ago, they found the deep atmosphere of the Bowl a similar paradise to cruise and mate and turn water into their life fluid, hydrogen. Somehow the great ones of the early Bowl had managed to make these living skyships merge into the blossoming Bowl ecosphere. To cruise the skies in them was a voyage into history.

She turned when the Captain, now quite distressed, was done. “Can we disperse this crowd? They hamper our finding these primates.”

The Captain gave an efficient flutter of feather-arcs: agreement. “I can use standard suffering methods.”

“Do so.”

The Captain gave orders and the great belly of the skyfish began its laborious turn. Memor circled the observation deck, scattering small crew before her, to see how the Sils were moving. Streams of them came from all directions. Such crowds! Many walked, some ran with a dogged pace, others rode animals. They looked up at the skyfish. Some stopped and shook themselves, their rage evident. At what? Their target was the Longline station.

“Captain! When might the primates arrive here?”

“They could get here soon, Astronomer. It is possible. But we do not expect them to follow a simple route, staying on the same line. That would be too obvious.” This last sentence provoked an involuntary submission-flutter of amber and brown as the Captain saw the implications.

“They may realize we expect evasion.”

“Our strategy command thinks that unlikely — ”

“Humor me.”

“These Sil have no way of knowing — ”

“There are always betrayers, Captain. Information crosses patchwork boundaries, though we try to stop it.”