Beth came to watch with her and change the dressings on her broken arm. “That bush over there smells like cooked meat,” Beth said. “Strange…”

They watched it uneasily. A ratlike thing as big as a dog but sporting an enlarged head came foraging by. Humans bothered it not at all. Beth pointed out that the animals here had no fear of humans because they had no experience. The rat-thing caught the meaty smell and slowed, tantalized. It lingered—and the bush popped. Spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away.

“A victory for the plants,” Beth said. “That rat will carry the seed, I’ll bet, until it dies.”

Tananareve said, “So then a fresh bush grows from the rat’s body. Smart.”

Memor approached, huffing and rumbling, and they both tried not to shrink from its size. It spoke and Tananareve translated to, “I, like you, have a meat tooth.”

Beth said, “Uh, charmed, I’m sure.”

“We try for you to find the eatables,” Tananareve translated again. She thanked Memor, and the mountain of flesh and rippling feathers seemed to bow at a sideways angle, lowering its arms and head.

Memor took them for a stroll in the awkward low g, explaining, gesturing with head and hands. It felt good to walk. All this helped improve Tananareve’s translating abilities. They passed by colonies of plants that clearly had a social life, communicating through pollen-sprays their needs and distresses.

Tananareve bit her lip and summoned up the courage to ask, “How do you … manage all this? Your … world-ship?”

Memor stopped and regarded them with big, solemn eyes. She spoke in long, rolling cadences and Tananareve struggled to translate. Her voice came in bursts as she got the meaning. “Fast learns, slow remembers. The quick and small instruct the slow and big by bringing change. The big and slow urges—dammit—call it constraint and constancy. Fast gets attention; slow has power. A robust system needs twice—I mean both. There is one great commandment: Stability is all.”

The sound of her voice was like stones rattling in a jug. Very large stones, boulders, in an immense jug.

Beth asked, “How old is this … world?”

After translations, Tananareve shrugged. “We don’t have the same time measures, but it’s old. I get the feeling Memor doesn’t want to say.”

“What’s it—okay, she—doing now?”

Tananareve looked up as Memor tilted her head back and went into the long trancelike state she had seen before. “I don’t know. She says it’s like talking to another part of her mind—that is, if I’m really getting the gist of her meaning.”

Memor wandered away, still in a daze.

Beth smiled and sat back into a conical bower of fleshy plants. “I’m amazed, just like all of us, at how fast you’ve learned.”

She gave Beth a quick, flinty look. Tananareve knew that her honey-toned Mississippi vowels made most crew members discount her. Talk that way, and people will knock twenty points off your apparent IQ, her mother had said. But she liked the soft, supple play of her accent, the stretched vowels and rounded consonants. “I’m even more so. Who would’ve thought that an alien language would have sentences at all? Much less, relating in a linear configuration with structures, a system?”

“And they’re not even mammals,” Beth mused. “I think.”

“I suppose, but we don’t really know. Kinda a hard subject to just bring up.” Tananareve frowned. “It was so easy to learn from Memor, just from pointing and acting out. Maybe the underlying chemistry and stuff doesn’t matter so much. I guess there are essentials in language after all. Not just in vocabulary and grammatical rules, but in their semantic swamps. Gad!”

“But you did it,” Beth said simply.

Tananareve shrugged. “Memor says she’s using ‘artful intelligences’ to help her. I suppose that means she’s computer linked.”

“Well, we don’t have that,” Beth said. “Maybe that’s necessary, to run a thing like this huge thing.”

“Could even our most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number-crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta stone? I doubt it.”

“Maybe they’ve met other aliens, learned something of how the whole galaxy talks.”

Sobering indeed, Tananareve thought.

“Still, it means we’re dealing with beings who have unseen resources,” Beth said.

“Hey, just the visible resources are incredible! Yeah, that may explain why Memor can teach me so well. She’s flexible. Nearly all human languages use either subject-object-verb order, or else subject-verb-object. Memor says she uses both, plus object-verb-subject, so she can adapt to us easily.”

Beth sat up quickly. “Something’s happening.”

Animals came fast, yelping, flitting through the nearby foliage. An insectlike thing fluttered by them. It was like a dragonfly whose wing sets moved at right angles to each other. A long-limbed jumping rat streaked by, using Beth’s head as a touchpoint, then gone. She flinched but managed not to cry out.

Then they both heard a long bass note sound through the bowers. Nearby, some of the long, thick white strands trembled. Something was tugging on them, sending low frequency waves ahead.

“Get down, cover up,” Tananareve whispered.

The deep note was louder. Or maybe it just sounded that way since everything else got suddenly quiet.

She looked down the long strands. They laced through the foliage with a clear path around them, almost like a tunnel in the air. Every hundred meters or so, they had an anchor on one of the thick, rough trunks.

A big hairy thing came into view from the distance. Fast. Spherical and ruddy, with six long legs or arms that moved with liquid grace. It flowed as if it were swimming, flicking long, thin legs out to pluck momentum from the white cables. Soundless. Tananareve judged it was ten meters across at least. A flying house.

She and Beth wrapped themselves away, but Tananareve left a slit open to watch the enormous creature pull and fly, pull and fly—zooming on by them with quick, nimble movements of the legs. It swept by, leaving a slight breeze with a prickly, acid aroma.

Then another. It looked the same, maybe slightly smaller, but even faster. Its legs sang with humming as they plucked, all a blur.

It followed the first around a far curve maybe a kilometer away. The sharp odor lingered.

The area around them was dead silent. Nothing moved. Slowly, slowly small rustlings started. The forest went back to business throughout the three-dimensional volume.

Beth whispered, “What was that?”

“A spider designed by an art deco mind.”

“I thought Memor was the top predator of this biosphere.”

“Me, too. But even we have bears and sharks.”

“What’ll we do?”

Tananareve thought to herself, Send not therefore asking for whom the bells toll. And if it starts ringing, start moving. “We’d better be getting on.”

Beth nodded, eyes big, face pale, and lips drawn. Tananareve was startled to see that Beth, who had always seemed to have rock-hard confidence, was scared.

TWENTY-ONE

The moist heat here felt like it could be cut into cubes and used to build a wall. Beth was glad to feel it. It wouldn’t be long before their clothes would get worn. At least there was a nearby stream running through so they could bathe and drink. Plus, the Astronomers let them make fire. She had wondered if Memor would intervene when they used the tools they wore around their waists, too, but apparently the immense aliens thought puny humans could do no real damage.

Damage, no. But maybe they could escape.

It had been several days since the huge spiderlike things came zooming through. Beth hadn’t been able to sleep well after that. Others remarked that the huge beasts—Abduss called them spidows—had ignored the humans. Maybe they weren’t predators at all, just large herbivores. But Beth had seen their bristly palps moving in a blur as they clutched the thick strands. It called up a fearful image of spiders that still made her shake.