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.