Bowl of Heaven (14 page)

But at first it was not Memor’s, for it had not been Memor’s watch for many, many Turns. Plus, she had been
he
in those times, and thus had less judgment. Yet she, in the racked torture of the Change, had seized the moment, banding with others of the Dancers, and so now could show her newfound abilities in judgment. This would surely help her career. The prospect warmed her, beyond the pleasure of anticipation. She was on the cusp of a great era; of that, she was sure.

Memor had been trained long and diligently in TransLanguage, because one of every generation must be educated, to pass on the skills. She’d never hoped to use those elaborate methods of transcending ordinary language, designed in antiquity for speaking with these Target species, these candidate Target Folk. The Bowl’s beamed transmissions at the approaching ship and at the Target had never been answered, but that did not reflect a failing of TransLanguage. There could be many reasons why the Target Folk did not reply.

Or … Were these aliens Target Folk at all? The thought struck her, apparently from her Undermind. She would have to trace its origin.

No doubt they might be from the Target sun, still scores of light-years ahead. Memor’s great heart thumped agreeably at the very idea—but their big ramship had come from
behind
the World. Unless, of course, they thought to conceal their origins. But Memor was sure routine Astronomer observations would have picked up their fusion plume, had they approached from the Target direction.

Call these chattering things something else for the moment, then. Call them Late Invaders.

There were feeds from cameras in Sector 1126. Memor watched in hope of learning more. A second group of Late Invaders was running loose there … but for five wakes they never came near a camera. Perhaps they were more clever than they seemed at first?

There must be living invaders in the big ramship, too. Memor watched it on her input screen as it now arced around the sun, shedding momentum, grasping its way forward with magnetic claws. She had wondered if it would come back, if it would attempt rescue of its small invaders. But in over five wakes, it did nothing but maintain its almost-orbit, thrusting a little against the pressure of stellar gas. Perhaps they were benign. For now.

Memor bristled her feathers, air humming richly through them in a darting pride-song, to match her thumping heart.
Joy of life, that brings such opportunities.

She opened her Undermind, a narrow window for now. This could refresh her thinking. It was like a sudden shaft of crimson light, startling to her Overmind. She could feel thoughts and emotions wrestling endlessly there, combining and mating. A rich bed of vibrant murk. She thought of these roiling notions as a sort of food for her Overmind, endlessly wriggling.
So different, so oceanic, as female …

Deftly she dipped in. Notions purred. Slick sounds keened at moist harmonies.
Richness!
She might need some new combination of previous ideas, properly cast in a pale glow of fresh scrutiny, to deal with this emerging situation. Perhaps she would even have to let the Undermind churn until it produced something fresh. That had happened seldom, but the possibility was exciting. Memor would come into her own then, her talents in demand. She could ride her Undermind to become perhaps even Overlord. Thus did Astronomers rise in the pyramid of status.

Moving the invaders was going to be tricky. She needed ideas there, yes. Memor wondered how long they could go without food. They couldn’t eat anything through those pressure shells, could they? Better to get them out of the vacuum.

And now the Serf-Ones were docking the Maintenance Craft. Carefully they worked, with much worried chatter, afraid of giving the slightest offense to their superiors. As was proper.

The invaders offered no resistance. There would have been no point, and this behavior showed some modicum of intelligence, plus that rarer quality, judgment. Compared to those who escaped, these might be a superior type of primate. If there were such among such a ragged, hairy species lacking any of the lushness that came from alluring feather discourse.

Three huge Astronomers surrounded them and urged them forward with stamping feet. That signal transcended language. The invaders moved, half carrying, half towing the injured one of their kind. They huddled close together, puny things overawed by the size of the Astronomers. Their anxious primate gestures gave them away.

Seven much smaller Serf-Ones went ahead of them through the air lock, carrying gear.

The invaders stopped moving on the other side, eyes agog—an expression of wonder common among many species. Perhaps they were startled by the contrast: grass and huge trees and vast flocks of wide-winged birds, all in microgravity. Memor saw that teams of Serf-Ones had set up a force-fence. Excellent. The invaders were properly imprisoned.

Now Memor sent an Astronomer off with a flock of Serf-Ones to fetch food. She instructed the crewperson carefully: They must find something of every kind. Skreekors, hairies, bugs, fruit, bark, grasses. No telling what these things might eat, though their amino acid composition was common in Bowl experience. Memor was aware that most life-forms were restricted in their diet, their environment, cycles of sleep and mating and feeding, heat and cold … a thousand things, but particularly diet. These creatures might starve to death no matter what she could do.

So Memor was eager to feed them, but also to teach them. She let her Undermind purr forward on ideas of how to do so. These poor creatures must learn something of her, and she of them, before they died in microgravity.

*   *   *

“Mayra,” Fred said, “did you get pictures of that chain of bubbles?”

Mayra looked at him. She said, “Buildings. Domes, but not just half spheres. We build that way too in lunar gravity. I snapped some pictures on my phone, but I thought you might have seen something.…”

Fred said, “I was too sick, and hungry. Didn’t notice.”

“Well, we followed a ridge after we passed the bubbles. You saw the ridge? It ran right here.”

Beth said, “It’s not going to matter. We’re fenced in. Do you suppose they’ll let us starve?”

“We’re in a garden. There must be something to eat. Rabbits?”

FOURTEEN

When Cliff awoke, Irma was sitting next to him, hat tilted,
standing watch with concentration. She winked and said nothing.

It still felt funny waking up in this perpetual daylight. Humans had evolved in a daily rhythm, and the strangest thing about this place was its constancy. No sway of day and night, no dance of the hours. The sun stood still, a permanent glare in the sky. He could read nothing from the slant of sunshine, since it never varied, and he missed the sunsets of the California coast. Living in perpetual day was the ultimate jet lag; it never went away. He knew from Earthside experiments, done in preparation for starship building, that people in constant illumination tended to develop longer sleep cycles.

Above, the scratch across the sky that was the jet bristled with festering luminosities. He could see tiny hairlike threads slowly flex and turn amid the tossing motes that burned with furious energy. Was this what a galactic jet looked like up close? It was brightest near the star, cooling as it coasted outward toward the Knothole. The nearer jet reddened so it sent diffuse, pink shadows rippling among the leaves. Nothing as spectacular as a sunset, but intriguing and unsettling.

The badger had wandered off, Irma told him. They gave it an hour, though, in case it was lying in wait.

They set off again, more cranky than before, from the odd sleep they had managed to get. Like a clotted rain forest, the dense copse of slender trees enveloped them in moments, fronds and puffball clumps blotting out the sky. The soil was a soft loam, with little bushy understory. This reminded him of dry eucalyptus groves in California, still and aromatic and whispery. The smells were tangy, odd, not at all like the medicinal eucalypt aroma. Game paths laced through it, hard packed dirt with some brown droppings. He sniffed some; turds appeared to have a universal pungency. The same basic chemistry, he surmised.

And more than game could use these bare throughways. Or stalk parallel to them. He waved to the others and they angled away from the easy game paths, not without some grousing.

“Carnivores lie in wait along these,” he explained in a whisper. “We might look like tempting game.”

“We’re primates,” Howard shot back.

“And nothing ate monkeys in Africa?” he retorted.

When he started his fieldwork in grad school, he could barely tell raccoon tracks from bobcat. Now he knew earthly tracks and scat and had been automatically cataloging what he saw underfoot here. Alien tracks fell into the same general categories, hooved and padded and birdlike, but some had spindly hexagonals, which he could not fathom. Scat looked pretty much the same.

They saw some game, too. These were flickers of tawny flanks among the trees, glimpses of hides with natural camouflage that faded away into the hushed silence. Howard whispered that maybe they should shoot one.

“And carry it along?” Cliff answered. “We can hunt when we set up camp.”

“Near water,” Irma said. Cliff nodded.

They passed under a chattering locus in the high branches and stopped to gaze upward through binocs. “Monkeys,” Howard said. “Swinging around, with big tails.”

“Really?” Cliff recalled the barking bands at the San Diego Zoo and used his binocs to bring one of the quick shapes into focus. A rude purple throat display, huge yellowed teeth, darting small red eyes, but—“Yeah, kinda like monkeys, anyway. But not mammals, I’d say. No obvious genitalia. Can’t see teats, either.”

“So primates evolved here, too?” Howard let it trail off into a question.

“Maybe they’re just getting started,” Cliff said softly. He wondered if, given a few millions of years, these protomonkeys could overcome the aliens they had seen. Not likely. As soon as the primates became noticeable as competition, the smart aliens would prevail. Established forms usually had the advantage, and there was nothing automatically better about primates.

“Look down there,” Aybe whispered, pointing. A creek glinted green among the shade trees below.

They approached too fast, in Cliff’s opinion—he called out to them to hold back. Predators liked watering sites. This wasn’t Earth, where dawn and dusk were the natural hunting times, as herbivores came for a drink. Carnivores could be hunting any time at all.

But there was nothing waiting near the creek, so they all had a good long drink. It tasted cool and fine, and on impulse Cliff plunged his whole head in, glad to be free of the grit and sweat of the last few—days? There were no days here, he reminded himself. He would have to think of a new word.

He recalled a calculation Wickramsingh had done back on
Seeker.
Take the Earth and spread it into a bowl the size of this Cupworld and it would be maybe a centimeter thick. Here in the stream-cut hills, he could see cross sections of the land. The soil was a conglomerate, like coffee grounds peppered with chunky gray rock. No strata, of course. There had been no real geology here.

To get hills hundreds of meters tall, the Builders (he thought of them as deserving the capital) must have chewed up Jovian-size masses. They had transformed a whole solar system. That explained the absence of asteroids and other debris around the star. They’d had to be removed; otherwise they could’ve smacked into Cupworld later, punching an unfixable hole, draining the atmosphere. He had to stop thinking of their surroundings as being just a planet. It was … well, a vast contrivance. With all kinds of weirdness living in it. On it.

After resting above the creek, they followed it downhill. The creek bank revealed more conglomerate rocks, round yellowish balls fixed in grainy sand. Cliff wondered how the designers of this place had laid soil and water down on a huge, spinning carousel.

Plainly they had to put down some mass, a meter or two of rock or water, to keep out cosmic rays. But the scale … again and again he came back to the vastness of this place. The whole idea seemed both gargantuan and surrealistic—mute testimony to the deeply alien nature of its builders. Who—what—would do such a thing? Those birds? Somehow, he couldn’t see it. They didn’t seem that smart.

In a while they came to a dense spread of trees and within it found a lake. Flies buzzed around a thick margin of reeds, and they found no easy way to get to the water. Cliff wondered if he could take a swim in it. His skin itched. Maybe later.

A thing buzzed by his head. It had six wings, about the size of a sparrow. Maybe it played the role of dragonflies in freshwater wetlands, he guessed. Convergent adaptation. Willowlike trees hugged the shore, but taller and with twisted, helical trunks. Convergent evolution seemed to have led to pollinator plants, too—bigger stamens and longer, twisted pistils, but the same strategy. Shrubs somewhat like laurel sumac mingled with tall trees vaguely like closed cone pines. Still, some of the plants were bizarre, with canopies permanently pitched toward the star, and bunched leaves like parabolas. There were mosses, too, bryophytes, ferns.

Howard was whispering into his phone. He was loving this.

*   *   *

They camped, but still Cliff thought it a bad idea to light a fire. They slept again, badly, with Howard and Irma taking watch. Voices called in the woods—chirps, snorts, ominous grunts, buzzes and bellows, oddly pleasant trilling songs. Alien melodies.

They circled around the lake, keeping to bristly brush and trees. They were getting better at keeping a clear field of fire; the badger had taught them well. Three people covered while two moved, then the reverse. This meant eyes caught any reaction among the nearby foliage. They startled game but did not fire.

Sharp odors welled up from everywhere and peculiar fowl flitted noisily. They honked and sang and sometimes sounded like fire alarms. Cliff noted that there seemed to be plenty of small birds darting in and out of the bush branches, slipping their pointed snouts into the many long-tubed, sweet flowering plants. Never was there a species he could recognize, yet the patterns were recognizable.
Sunbirds, hummingbirds, same strategy.
When threatened, some fluffed up their feathers to make themselves look larger and barked odd calls—territorial defense as in most nectar-eaters, like orioles. Others had the sharp beaks of those who preyed on insects, like wrens or the short, triangular beaks of seed eaters like finches and sparrows. Evolution here had produced skills similar to those on Earth; he found this reassuring. In the lesser gravity, birds had apparently beaten out many land animals. They were bigger, too—fat and confident. Apparently a 10 percent or so difference in local g made a big change in the balance of living types.