“What’ll we do with it?” Irma asked, beaming.

“Leave it,” Aybe said.

“This body will float away pretty quick if we toss it in,” Howard said.

They looked at one another and without a word lifted the body at several points. Getting it over the stony parapet was not as difficult as Cliff had expected. It was a bird, after all, something like a monster ostrich. They flung it over.

Irma said, “Its blood—I don’t think we can mop it up easily. There’s a lot.”

“Let’s get moving,” Aybe insisted.

“Which way?” Cliff asked mildly, scanning the far riverbank for movement.

Terry said, “Across—oh, I see.”

Cliff said, “They left this guy here to block our return. They’re probably trying to cut us off from those hills beyond and drive us back to the bridge. Pin us against the water.”

“So we stay on this side?” Irma asked. “Move downriver, say? At least it’s downhill.”

They looked at one another edgily and then all nodded. Collective decisions, Cliff realized, made it much easier to take if things went wrong later. Otherwise, they’d blame it all on him. They ran.

EIGHTEEN

Lau Pin hefted an eighteen-pound fish, turning it this way and that, inspecting it. A row of fins ran down each side, eleven on a side, diminishing toward the tail. Yet the fish looked odd, with ventral fins, long and wispy, narrow eyes, mottled green skin. “I’ll have to be careful,” he said. “Parasites.”

The Astronomer had left Lau Pin a ten-inch knife. He gutted and filleted the creature and cut it in slices. The flesh was pale, like a red snapper, Beth thought. There were angry red spots Lau Pin cut out. “I think I got them all,” he said. “Sushi? Or shall we start a fire?”

“Fire. Cook it,” Mayra said. “I do not feel lucky. It’s ugly.”

They broiled the meat on twigs. It was delicious, rich in oils and savory with a strange, tangy flavor. Spirits lifted and there were jokes about finding the right white wine to go with the fish. Or maybe margaritas all round? Beth was glad to get them in a good mood. The meetings with Memor had fascinated them all, but the brute fact was that they were prisoners listening to lectures. The thrill of contact with a real alien, telling them strange new views—even that had to fade. They were not idle scientists or philosophers. They had signed on to explore a new world, make a fresh home for humanity, to sail the stars. Their patience was limited.

Lau Pin rummaged through his tool belt and then gave a startled cry. “My beamer is live. It’s got signal.”

They gaped. He showed them that the signal light gleamed on his handheld communicator. “It’s tuned to the Eros systems. I’m picking up data from its onboards.”

“Any internals?” Tananareve asked wanly.

“Just status reports. Everything looks normal. It’s on auto-standby.”

“We must be somehow in line of sight,” Tananareve said.

Lau Pin scowled skeptically. “We’re an astronomical unit away from it, easily. This Bowl is huge. How could we hear from it?”

Beth felt a surge of hope. “It’s a smart system. If Eros doesn’t get pinged for a while, it must amp its transmission power to get a response. Maybe Cliff’s group can get it, too.”

“If we can negotiate our way out of here, we can use homing to find Eros,” Tananareve said.

“Yes, great.” Beth made herself sound more optimistic than she felt. They had last seen Eros crushed into a bin in a Bird Folk spacecraft. “Lau Pin, can we use your beamer to send signals from Eros to SunSeeker?”

Lau Pin worked on it for moments, staring intently at the small solar-powered beamer that was barely larger than his thumb. “I’m trying the 14.4 gigahertz band, then the subs.… No, I can’t do over-commands from outside. Some kind of safety precaution.”

Abduss growled with frustration. They all looked crestfallen.

Beth couldn’t let that continue. Best to distract them. “Let’s review what we’ve learned, class,” she said with a smile. “Mayra?”

The normally quiet woman blinked and nodded. “When Memor brought those visuals—big constructs, dazzling perspectives—I got a feeling that she did that partly to impress us. You know, show the visitors some flashy capabilities.”

Lau Pin said, “I like that it—okay, she—uses voice and gestures. Easier to remember that way.”

Mayra said, “I liked those visuals it gave us on that screen. One was some kind of macroengineering in a planetary belt. I’ll bet that was their history. How they built this place.”

“She’s using those as attention getters,” Beth said. “Then she showed us those 3-D keyboards. I think she wants us to manipulate display machines. Only—she just spoke to them.”

Mayra asked, “So you think she wants us to learn their language, by picking up how to instruct those 3Ds?”

Lau Pin waved this away. “Maybe. Those images it showed us could be fauxtography, too. A phony story. Distractions, anyway. We’ve got to escape, not just sit and learn language.”

Beth nodded. She liked the wildlife around them, wanted to learn about it—and Cliff would love it, might be loving it now—but—“Right. Our bones are getting worse as we speak. We’ve got to get back to gravity.”

*   *   *

Cliff’s troop were doing badly on the basics: sleep and food. After crossing broad grasslands with clumps of trees for shade, they had seen no game worth pursuing for the better part of an Earth day. Some berries helped, and they found fresh water, a tinkling clear stream without signs of fish.

Following protocols, Irma went upstream and provided cover guard. The four men slipped into the cool waters gratefully. For several days they had all had intermittent dysentery and all needed to soak, a morale booster. In the first days, they had added a chloride pill to the drinking water but now used a solar-powered UV source in the caps of their water bottles to sterilize it.

Something broad, ribbed, and horned scuttled into a burrow at the shore. It looked to Cliff like an oval-shaped turtle with a razor-sharp crest. The burrow reeked, repulsive and rank, so they let it go.

Howard floated in a small muddy pool. He lay slack, grinning widely. “Y’know, I’ve been thinking. I figure our getting the runs is from chirality.”

Aybe asked, “Chirality? Spin?”

Aybe was an engineer, right. “Direction of rotation of molecules. Handedness. When a molecule isn’t identical to its mirror image.” Howard didn’t talk much and kept getting hurt, which made him even more closemouthed, so Cliff listened carefully. “Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed and our amino acids are left-handed. I think some of the life here has molecules opposite-handed, versus what we know.”

“How?” Terry asked.

“Remember how, two sleeps back, you were all raving about how great that purple fruit tasted?”

Aybe grunted at the memory. “And got ravenously hungry again in an hour. Pretty much like Chinese food, as the cliché goes—then we all got diarrhea.”

“That’s why I’m always hungry?” Cliff asked. He wished they had the chirality gear in the SunSeeker landing supplies. They couldn’t bring everything on the first lander.

“We all are,” Howard said. “We’re moving cross-country, burning calories, but some of our food is going straight through us—and burning our guts some, too.”

“We cook the meat,” Terry said.

“Sure, but all the prior biochem work we had, back Earthside, can’t offset microbes no human ever met. Montezuma’s revenge, y’know.”

Cliff said, “That comes from microbial pathogens, different problem. I ran the DNA checks. This ecology uses the same basic double helix structure in everything I checked.”

“Sure, but on other planets, the accidents of evolution could make the proteins and sugars different. If this Bowl has been cruising along, sampling ecologies, then there may be whole ecologies here based on L-glucose rather than our D-glucose, and D-amino acids rather than our L-amino acids.”