Bowl of Heaven (11 page)

First contact was turning out to be entirely a spectator event.

They stopped using their beamers on the wall for fear that the Bird Folk would take it as an attack. So everybody stood there and looked.

Beth chuckled. They had come light-years, met an obviously intelligent species—and neither could do much but gawk.

The tension of it finally got to Cliff. “Let’s all go back inside. Maybe that’ll provoke them to do something.”

Beth thought this was a good idea; their suits were running low on reserves of air and power, anyway.

Nothing happened the next day, either. Some Bird Folk came and went, but came no closer to the lock.

The humans made a more elaborate camp: pressure tents, stores of water, microwave stoves. Maybe that would give the aliens some idea of how they lived, Beth thought. With guard duties assigned, someone was always watching the Bird Folk, capturing every move on video.

They all invented theories about why the Bird Folk did nothing—Captain Redwing had half a dozen—but without any way to check them, it seemed futile. So they had meetings and talked to
Seeker
and tried ideas.

More Bird Folk appeared. They formed loose ranks and stretched beyond view. Over a thousand of them, by Abduss’s camera-count. Irma wondered, “Maybe they don’t have much technology anymore? Or are they just the local animals?”

“They’re carrying things,” Abduss pointed out. “Not just the neck sacks. Those three Bigs are towing … what? Something big, five meters long. Made of metal, looks like.”

More waiting. More Bird Folk.

Cliff, mostly just to break the impasse, suggested they cut through the wall. Even diamond wouldn’t stand up to what they had for tools. Go straight through the outer door of the air lock. Maybe they could find and work interior controls.

There were objections, of course. This was a crucial moment; don’t make any moves that might be taken as aggressive. This view held sway for a full day, until Irma asked just how long they would wait, doing nothing. Until
SunSeeker
ran out of air? That would be centuries.

Biggest of all, there was the problem of cutting their way in. Nothing had worked before. So a team tried high-intensity gas lasers, tuned to an ultraviolet frequency that the air lock wall totally absorbed. It worked in trial runs, cutting in quickly, blowing off a carbon vapor.

They set up the laser outside the air lock. By now they had an extensive audience of Bird Folk. Beth felt uneasy working under their gaze. They just watched. Were they waiting for something? Certainly their steady stares implied a remarkable calm. Or, she reminded herself, a remarkably alien consciousness.

Redwing wondered on comm if this was some sort of test. Maybe the Bird Folk weren’t interested in strangers who couldn’t figure out how to get in?

They started in the middle of the outer lock door. As they worked, their acoustic detectors on the lock picked up a hissing sound. The Bird Folk were filling it with air! Celebration!

… but the lock did not open. What did this mean? The Bird Folk just looked at them, eyes glittering. Beak-mouths working. Even some odd moves, like dancing.

Pressure in the lock, with vacuum outside, made the job more difficult. Nobody wanted the atmosphere jetting out suddenly. For safety, they built a chamber around where they wanted to cut, to hold the pressure. Then the laser punched all the way through.

Through their first cut they slid a small pipe, just to sample air. Breathable, barely—high in CO
2
, warm, a bit lower in oxygen, humid and with minor differences from Earth’s. Had the aliens figured out human tolerances? That seemed unlikely. But the molecular ratios fit the measurements
SunSeeker
had made in its first studies.

“Earth’s oxygen level is as high as it can be without igniting spontaneous fires in summers,” Howard said. “Maybe biospheres generally run up to that limit, then stop—or else they burn themselves back to our levels.”

“Never thought of it that way,” Beth said, her voice hushed. “This place stays warm all the time. Maybe that draws down the optimum oxy level a little.”

They were all in awe of this place, moving quietly, trying to take it all in.

Howard said, “The more I see, the less I know. Some of these plants and animals are clearly evolved from Earth. Some clearly aren’t. Cliff, I think this thing—Bowl—went to Earth and picked up some life-forms. The birds are a maybe. I’d need to see a skeleton. Cliff? Anyone? What do we do next?”

This was clearly the captain’s call, despite a lightspeed gap of four minutes. Redwing dithered; this was far outside his leadership skill set. They all finally got him to realize that they needed an exploratory plan. Some wanted to explore the Cupworld, at least enough to restore
Seeker
’s depleted stores. But they needed crew with the lander, too. The Bird Folk wouldn’t wait forever … would they?

Cliff won the draw to lead an exploring party through the door they would cut. As pilot, Beth stayed with the shuttle party. The two of them didn’t like this, but they were short of crew, and nobody else had the right mix of skills. Beth grimaced at Cliff, and they made it up to each other that night.

Or at least that was their excuse. Nobody wanted to admit being afraid.

NINE

They started the next morning—not that there were any sun
rises here.

Cliff’s team were four men and Irma, all muscular and tall and athletic. Beth and Cliff did not like being more than a few meters from each other, but they overcame that.

They followed Greenwich Meridian morn, of course, because the sun never set on the British Empire and certainly not here; the reddish star always hung in the sky at midafternoon. The star’s jet was a furious neon line scratched across the sky, adding diffuse shadows. The eerie landscape confused their eyes and unsettled the mind.

They could not be sure if the Bird Folk slept, though Irma had compared camera runs and found that each did take a few hours of closed-eye time, still standing up. They never seemed to sit; maybe their knees locked. Nor did they fly.

Cliff had come to think of them as like ostriches. Far prettier and more graceful, but there was a similarity. Could such birds have built the Bowl?

The gas laser took three hours to eat through the outer lock door. On broad-beam, it then cut an arc big enough for humans to squeeze through. Cliff went first. He felt very vulnerable, hurried and impeded by his pressure suit, crawling through a hole not much bigger than his torso.

By then the laser was short on charge and overheating. The operators—two engineers, Lau Pin and Aybe—shut it down and worked over the gas chamber fittings, which were looking the worse for wear.

Irma passed him some gear, then wriggled through. Cliff watched the Bird Folk for reactions. The big ones nearby fluttered a little, stamping their big feet, then went back to their steady stares. Much rippling of feathers, glorious runs of color.

Irma was through, and Terry Gould was having some trouble. “Let’s move!”

Cliff felt alien eyes on his back as he got his five through the hole. Aybe came through, and Howard Blaire. Hustle, hustle, hustle. They had planned to put a plate over the round bore hole and let one of the party partake of the lock air. Getting set up for this, Cliff happened to look behind them.

The hole had changed. It was lopsided … and smaller.

He blinked some sweat from his eyes, smelled the sour flavor of the helmet. He had spent too much time inside. The hole still looked lopsided. As he watched, the rim of it wrinkled, changed color, crinkled at the edges and … grew. Inward.

Not diamond after all.

“Block it!” he cried, lunging at the hole.

They wedged some fittings into the gap. Abduss had a hand laser on his tool belt and he cut some more metal bars to jam the hole from the butte side. These stuck … then bent … and snapped in two and flew away with lethal force, bouncing like shrapnel around the air lock as the hole tightened further.

Howard cried,
“Ow!”

“It’s self-repairing,” Beth called over the comm. “Get out—now!”

“Can’t—it’s already too small.” Cliff eyed the rate of closing. “It regrows just about as fast as we can cut it.”

They stood helplessly watching the wall ooze into place, like a liquid. The laser team struggled to get it back in operation, but—

“Too late.” Cliff stepped away from the narrowing hole. He scowled at the Bird Folk. “Why do I think they saw this coming? No wonder they didn’t look bothered.”

“They knew something else, too,” Beth said. He followed her pointing finger.

He hadn’t noticed the dust motes rising behind
Eros.
Cascades of white light came from everywhere.

“That dust. It’s been there, ticking at the corners of my eye,” Beth said. “More every minute.”

Until suddenly they were all glowing, as if bright sunlight were falling into the butte. Cliff heard shocked voices in his earphone, and Beth shouting, “Into the ship! Tananareve, you at least, get into
Eros
!”

Four of Beth’s team were still in the pressure box they’d built around the air lock’s wall. The fifth must be Tananareve, and she was running for
Eros.
She stopped when a hexagonal thing covered with lumpy protrusions rose through the Star Pit behind
Eros.

Jets of ice white lowered the hexagon toward the floor of the butte.

Everybody was talking over comm—panic and anger and shouted orders that made no sense. Cliff watched the thing descend in the vacuum outside, tremendous compared to
Eros.
All happening only hundreds of meters away.

It might as well have been a light-year. The hole in the air lock kept narrowing, and the ship that looked like an assembly of boxes and rhomboids and coiled tubes settled down nearby. Out of it came a lumbering machine on wheels.

Soundless, the horror unfolded. The machine had a transparent cowling that looked like the atmospheric membrane, a shimmering pale blue balloon. Inside that sat three Bird Folk, working controls, staring at consoles that flitted across the walls in splashes of vibrant color. They moved with jittery intensity. Cliff made himself study the three and saw that they had different feather markings, and looked larger than the bigger variety on his side of the air lock. They moved with a lumbering, muscular purpose.

Three more of Beth’s team were free of the pressure box. Coiled tubes unwound on the wheeled tank. These reached Tananareve, caught her. They plucked her up none too gently and dropped her into a cargo hold behind the cabin. Arms reached for the other crew, yanked them up one by one, added them to the hold.

Then the tank rolled back toward its ship, up a ramp, and was gone. Just like that, Beth disappeared. Just like that.

Horror paralyzed him while his own crew still fought the hole’s steady closing. Nothing worked. Cliff watched but could think of nothing to do. Their shouts came through on comm. But he heard it all through a cottony buffer, the words hollow and refracting. Meaningless. He dimly realized that he was in a state of shock, numb, unable to process the events. Part of him had shut down.

The hole sealed itself up—a neat engineering trick, Cliff admitted distantly. He did not see the flicker of motion outside. Three tall Bird Folk were standing beside the air lock. They were of the third variety. They had the same markings as the ones in the crawler outside, and with a level, steely concentration they gazed impassively in at the humans.

Something thrummed up through his feet. He turned and on one of the lock walls a set of symbols flashed, rippled, changed in a cadence. He sensed a change in the pressure. Behind the three taller Bird Folk the crowd backed away, their leathery mouths working. The three were somebody important. Maybe a funeral guard …

“They’re going to open the inner lock door,” Irma said with an odd, flat calm.

Cliff said, “Aybe!” The man’s head jerked around, wide-eyed. “We’re going out the instant there’s room. Here, give me that hand laser.”

Someone called, “We shouldn’t make any fast moves. Just be—”

“We’ll make a run for it,” Cliff said loudly. “Everybody, get all the gear you can into your packs.”

He had to try the laser himself. It worked, a brief flash. He watched the aliens. This was dangerous and he was in charge. But he was damned if he’d let his crew get scooped up like Beth.

What to do? He looked up into the bowers of the forest. Some looked dry. Last night’s rain was long gone.

“Burn the trees,” Cliff called. “No shots toward the birds.” The lock door somehow slid aside, though Cliff could see no housing it fed into. The door just shortened along one side. A puff of ivory fog swirled around it, humidity freezing out as it expanded. Cliff shouted “Stay together!” and was first through the opening.

The big Bird Folk, third variety, were twenty meters away. The Mediums and Bigs were edging back, giving them plenty of room. Cliff aimed the laser at the trees nearby and blew hot spots in them. They burst into licking, hungry flame.

The Bird Folk backed away, all of them, arms up in defensive gestures, legs stuttering in fast, short paces. Aybe helped the fire along with dried brush he snatched up. The rest of the crew copied him, moving to their left, behind Cliff. Irma was pulling Howard along.

The trees crackled and gave off plumes of oily smoke. Cliff heard high-pitched calls that he guessed came from the Bird Folk, but there was no time to think, only to run and shoot at the trees, keeping as many burning trunks between them and the Bird Folk as he could. Bowers in the trees exploded with muffled bangs, showering the air with sparks.

The aliens did not move fast. A breeze whipped down from the muggy sky and slid down the butte wall. It gushed out at the base, pushing the flames toward the Bird Folk. Cliff and Aybe formed a team, Cliff watching to be sure they did not get flanked, Aybe shooting at more trees, the others staying close. Inside their suits, they did not have to fight the smoke. Cliff could see legions of the Bird Folk staggering away from them, into the safety of the forest.