“As opposed to a hole that goes right through the Cupworld and out into space!”

Abduss said, “What?” His eyes showed a lot of white.

“Suppose it’s a through-out tube, to save the trouble of going around the whole Bowl. That’s what it looks like in a full-spectrum picture.” Beth gestured at a stack set of views. In some, stars hung in the opening.

“Uh, so?”

“We could go right through. What’s radar say? You can get an angle on the floor now, right?”

Abduss nodded and worked his board. He was sweating.

Cliff ventured, “We’d be picked up with SunSeeker, no problem.”

“Maybe,” Beth said tensely. “Unless somebody slams the door.”

“There’s a bottom down there,” Abduss said. “Watch yourself, radar says it’s not flat.”

The motor thrummed again. High thrust. Pings and pops in the ship.

Cliff didn’t try to speak. Beth was talking her way through it, and that was nerve racking. “It’s flat, Abduss. There’s a hole in it, a pit with stars at the bottom. We want to land, right? Not go through to the outside. Hey, there’s light at the bottom! And here we go—”

Eros surged, then danced sideways under Coriolis force.

EIGHT

She set them down less than two kilometers from the butte wall, on a cluttered ledge that was perhaps four kilometers across. There was a wall along the inner rim. Beyond that, the universe peeked through a hole ten kilometers across. She made the ship linger on its jets, finding a bare spot. They thunked down and felt the tug of centrifugal gravity.

She looked toward the butte face. Pale ivory light spilled out along the bottom of the wall, from a row of windows running from tiny to huge.

They all felt the significance of the moment, but there was no time for reflection. They didn’t know what waited outside, but talking wasn’t going to tell them anything.

They emerged from the scout ship in full space gear. Cliff listened with half his attention to Fred reporting to Redwing. The lightspeed time gap was seventeen seconds and rising. They stood at the foot of Eros, looking into the light. Into a row of glass boxes of increasing size, with forest on the far side.

“Air locks,” Fred said, and laughed happily. “With transparent walls.” He stopped laughing when nobody joined him. “That one at the far end is fifty or sixty times as big as Eros. I guess they have to pass big machinery, given the scale of this, well—” He groped for a word, then laughed again. “Describing all this isn’t easy. Captain Redwing, are the helmet cameras working?”

“We want one of the little locks,” Cliff said.

These gigantic structures weren’t funny; they were daunting. The one ahead would easily pass Eros, and it wasn’t the largest.

Redwing, lightspeed delayed, barked on comm, “Cameras are working. Definition isn’t good. Keep talking, Fred. We’re lonely up here.”

Beth added, “And nobody’s coming out to greet us, either.”

*   *   *

The smallest hatch that seemed to be an air lock wasn’t a good choice. It was no bigger than a child. Cliff had picked one big enough to pass a couple of elephants, Beth judged. They brought the cart rovers down the ramp from Eros and lined up their cargo in front of the air lock. Their suits weighed lighter on them in the lesser grav.

Beth felt odd indeed, looking through two walls of faintly blue cliff to see … trees. Spindly black trunks, soft pink fronds, carrot-topped—but trees. They set to work opening the air lock.

Only they couldn’t.

*   *   *

For three days, they tried to find a way into the air lock. The task took all the gear they had in the lander. Beth got tired from lugging apparatus out to the working area, setting it up, trial testing, integrating, then listening to the arguments about the results.

People under stress, she observed, need to argue. It lets off steam.

The team looked for obvious controls in the window/walls, but the surfaces were translucent, smooth, unmarked. They were synthetic diamond, at a guess. Carbon, anyway. Mounted on a blue interior wall were odd protrusions that might be controls—“For something with big fingers, or clumsy,” Fred reported to SunSeeker, now half a lightspeed minute away. But on the outside there were no manual assists, nothing like a computer interface they could recognize, not a lever or a valve. In a way it made sense: defensive architecture.

They tested the cliff wall—a hard shell, rising straight up with a vacuum on one side and on the other an atmosphere. They could see the weather was heavy with sleeting rain the second day, and cloudy the next. Looking up the height of the transparent inner wall was like taking a cross section of the sky, with clouds sometimes stacked against it. Slowly winds blew the clouds around the enormous boundary of the butte. While the others labored, Beth and Cliff took time to watch the trees and soil and small darting things that flitted among the swaying trees. Something foxlike almost escaped a pouncing bird.…

An alien world. It was like standing on one side of a museum diorama, only they were in skin suits and packs. And the other side was a living world just doing its business.

Quick flitting birds like swallows, but much bigger. They were fast and sometimes flew in formations. Bright splashes of color amid snarled undergrowth looked like flowers with petals, but threw tendrils through the underbrush. Why? Trees of curious zigzag trunks and branches. Scampering slick-skinned blue gray things—like squirrels? same niche?—leaping on the ground and into trees. Odd angles in the tree limbs, gnarled things like nests or goiters, a broad-winged thing flapping through …

Howard kept making analogies to Earth life. Sometimes they worked, but other features made no immediate sense. Strange and wondrous. Gradually Howard stopped talking to Cliff and just made notes.

Redwing got irritated that they could not find a way in. He started giving orders in a stern tone. Eros’s crew stopped answering. People got prickly, Beth noticed without surprise.

Beth figured there was some signal they were supposed to give, but the blank, smooth, slick face of the air lock wall gave no clue about what to try. Here was the abstract problem of communicating with aliens, brought down to a concrete level.

Beams of particles, laser pulses, microwave antennas brought to within a meter—none made any difference, or provoked so much as a change of color in the eggshell blue wall.

The third day they were standing around the big microwave beamer they had hauled out, Beth with her gloved hands on her hips, gazing down in frustration at the rig, which had done nothing to the barrier. Fred said very calmly, “Something moving in there.”

They all turned and saw a big colorful creature walking out of the trees. Swaths of blue, yellow, and magenta seemed splashed over it in elaborate designs. A big narrow head, with a long nose between two large eyes, swiveled and watched with stately elegance. The native looked to be at least three meters tall and strode forward on legs that articulated gracefully, taking great long strides. Mouth like a stubby beak. Spindly long arms ending in complicated hands. It came forward quickly, carrying something tubular, and then three more like it appeared from the trees. They seemed to stroll, taking their time but covering ground quickly.

Beth stood absolutely still, but part of her realized that this would be the first remark at the sighting of intelligent aliens. She said quickly, “They’re … beautiful.”

“Birds,” Cliff said. “Those colors—they’re feathers.”

“Smart birds?” Fred asked.

“Hey, crows are smart,” Irma said. Then shrugged. “Somewhat.”

Howard Blaire just gaped at the Bird Folk, his gloved hands flat against the glassy surface. He’d run a semi-private zoo in Maryland on Earth. He’d collected animals too. He’d been something of a star, bringing weird animals onto television shows. Cliff had asked Redwing to revive him because he was familiar with varied environments and animal behavior.