Mayra asked, “Do we land on the inside of the bowl? Or the outside?”

Redwing frowned. “Inside, of course. That’s where they live.”

Mayra pursed her lips and said evenly, “They surely launch their own spacecraft from the outer surface. They could simply put their ships in elevators, lower them through an outer air lock, and let them go. Immediately the ships would have a thirty-four-kilometer-per-second velocity. All with no need to fly through an atmosphere, or out through the film that covers their atmosphere.”

Cliff grinned. Mayra had been thinking as he did, asking how the hell this enormous contraption worked. “You think we could go in through their outer air locks? From underneath? Maybe to reenter, they have magnetic clamps or something to catch incoming craft. Maybe we could use those.”

Mayra shrugged. “Suppose we do. How do we knock on the door?”

Redwing mused, “They must have safeguards.…”

“Even if we get in the door, they control the locks,” Cliff added. “We’d be caught.”

Redwing liked that. He sat back and gave them all a glassy grin. “Makes it easy to choose, doesn’t it? We must retain our freedom of maneuver until we know what—whom—we’re dealing with. We go down through the atmosphere, then.”

“We’ll have to bust through that film they have,” Cliff observed.

Abduss added, “They might see that as aggressive. I would.”

Redwing nodded. “But it’s the only way not to be cornered from the start.”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Cliff said casually. “They must have seen us. How come they haven’t come out to pay a call?”

Abduss said, “Good, yes. I have received no electromagnetic transmissions, either.”

“Funny,” Redwing said. “You’d expect at least broadcast radio.”

“Perhaps they use point-to-point comm, laser links,” Mayra said. “Just as we do.”

Redwing sat up straight, switching to his command voice. “Abduss, would we have time to hover? Pick a landing spot?”

“Not much.”

“We’ll take Eros,” Captain Redwing decided. “Get it ready as quick as we can. Now, do we need to thaw anyone else?”

Maybe this was Redwing’s way of “building consensus,” as the leadership classes taught. Cliff said the obvious: “We’ll need twenty minimum to do anything on the ground.”

“Let’s get started, then.”

FIVE

They kept wary eyes and instruments on Cupworld while they tended to the auxiliary ships. Beth brought SunSeeker into a useful orbit for making the Eros drop. They maneuvered carefully, but though they could see landscapes far below, the distances were vast. Even orbital rendezvous took weeks. This was not a planet.

That gave them time to revive a selection they would need—engineers, maintenance people, “groundpounder” types who expected to wake up on a planetary surface. Redwing kept the numbers revived as low as plausible for the exploring party. They needed replacements for the current crew, who were all going down to the bowl, since the revived wouldn’t be physically able in time.

Unsurprisingly, those woken up were quite surprised.

Just looking at the external feeds could cause these newbies to freak out. Redwing quickly learned that it was best to have the recently revived brief the next batch. Cliff got tired of explaining their incredible situation.

He spent his days surveying the lakes, rivers, and oceans of Cupworld—or as some called it, the Bowl; Cliff had tried to think of something descriptive yet high-minded, and failed. The dotted blue expanses had been well planned, apparently—no huge deserts or wastelands, good circulation of air currents and moisture.

They awoke Fred Ojama first, so Cliff could work with a geologist while making the survey. “This isn’t geology,” Fred pointed out immediately. “It’s a, well, a building.”

“A building the size of the inner solar system, yep,” Cliff answered. “But somebody thought it through. Look at how the lakes, rivers, and seas follow a fractal distribution.”

Fred thought that through. “Best way to distribute water. Avoids deserts, maybe … but that patch looks like desert. And that patch of forest might be … No, never mind.”

“Like symbols,” Cliff agreed. “Looks like writing. A super landscaper leaving messages. Like in Hitchhiker’s Guide, the guy who designed the fjords.”

Fred looked blank.

Redwing had hesitated to wake Fred Ojama. Fred’s bio listed him as borderline autistic. He’d barely made the height requirement. Nobody actually knew him very well. Not all the crew were social mavens, for psycher reasons. Redwing remarked that a cocktail party with no listeners was a noise fest, and there was an analogy there about teamwork. The list claimed Fred was a near genius, too, with a history of original ideas, and Cliff had wanted that.

Cliff pointed to the boundary where the cylindrical part curved smoothly into the vast mirror dome. “I’m trying to figure out how it would be to live on the surface, when it starts to slant. The whole thing is rotating together, so as soon as the slope changes, centrifugal grav will be at an angle to the ground.”

Fred zoomed on that area. “The rivers go away there. Just vanish into the sands.” He snapped his fingers. “I got it. The centrifugal grav works against the inward-sloping curve of the high Bowl. So water can’t flow up into the mirror area. That means the gravity alone can keep that big zone clear of life, I guess. Maybe even air.”

Fred was smart. There weren’t dumb people on Seeker, just people with other tales or people you disagreed with. An important point to remember in arguments. “Sounds right. The mirrors are important. The builders don’t want them growing lichen or anything.”

“So the whole structure has a clean division. The cylinder’s for living, the mirror for propulsion.” Fred shook his head. “What an idea.”

“What kind of mind would even think of it?”

“Something with a long time horizon. This whole construct accelerates very slowly.” Fred looked at the jet in the distance, a brilliant ivory pillar of ever-shifting tendrils. “That plasma’s pushing a star.”

“Odd minds, gotta be. But engineering’s a universal. Things work or you change them.”

“You want to reverse engineer this place?” Fred grinned, nodding his bald head so it caught the gleam of the lights. “Good. Good.”

Cliff had close-upped the region where sunlight reflected off the atmosphere membrane. He and Fred kept up their banter while he tried to see deeper. The shiny surface was probably some tough but thin layer to keep their air in—19 percent oxygen, 72 percent nitrogen, and traces of carbon dioxide and noble gases. Then he saw it. A patch that didn’t reflect.

They used the maximum magnification of the scopes and then called Redwing. “I think we’ve found an area sealed off from the membrane,” Cliff said, showing him the barren circle. “It’s about a hundred kilometers across.”

“How can they tolerate it? Won’t their air leak out?”

Fred said, “Maybe they opened it for us, just recently. A thing this big can take a little loss.”

Redwing looked at every view, across the spectrum, before finally saying, “Open areas, yeah. Makes sense. Apparently for landings from space?”

“That’s what we figured,” Fred said.

“Solves our landing problem, then,” Redwing said with a thin smile of satisfaction. “Let’s go in.”

SIX

If your heart is large, Memor thought, and contains volume enough to envelop your adversaries, then wisdom can come into play. One can then see their transparency, and so then diffuse or avoid their attacks. And once you envelop them, you will be able to guide them along the path indicated to you by your own hard-won wisdoms.

He shook himself. This insight came from some new part of him … the restless part of his mind that would soon be her mind. For Memor was now amid the fevered straits of the Change.