Their situation was then tragic. They had launched forth into the stars with brains evolved to deal with a world that bore only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in their present, awkward mind-machinery.

Perhaps, then, their deaths would be a proper release from such unnatural tortures.

TWENTY-FIVE

The message from Redwing had given them a lift. But the mood faded before a clear, quick question: So what?

Lau Pin’s beamer couldn’t rouse SunSeeker. It was a long shot, of course—Redwing could focus a megawatt of 14.4-gigahertz power on them, but Lau Pin’s beamer, even fully charged, delivered only a watt or two of unfocused signal.

So they were stuck. Beth watched them react to this. Then Abduss produced his own miracle, after a desultory day of chores.

“I have a bit of joy here!” he called to them all. In his hand was one of the useful flasks the Serfs had given them for their own housekeeping. Now that they had established their chore routines of getting and preparing food, the usual details of a stationary life, they had time to amuse themselves as they wanted. So they assembled, not expecting much. Abduss passed around the little cups the Serfs had made for them, ladling into them a murky fluid. “Toast!” he said loudly.

They drank. “Moonshine!” Fred called.

Abduss looked hurt. “Wine. It is a wine I made from the esters of the fruit they give us.”

Lau Pin and Mayra both said, “Rotgut!” Mayra even hugged her belly in comic relief.

But they liked it anyway. Beth waved away her second cup and watched the others. They grimaced when they drank but that didn’t stop them, or their increasingly high-pitched laughter, the rude stories, obvious lies, raucous laughter, bright eyes. They needed release, after all that had happened. Alcohol was the easy road to all of that. Let this pass, she thought. She watched Fred Ojama, but he only grew more torpid. Presently he said, “I shouldn’t,” and set the cup aside.

The next morning most of them were hungover, griping and shaking their heads. They got their housekeeping jobs done and sat around and then the lumbering, smooth-feathered Serfs brought in cylindrical canisters, laying them at the feet of Mayra. She opened them carefully. Sniffed. “It’s—it smells like alcohol.”

Beth grimaced. The aliens had caught on that fast. To keep the prisoners quiet, give them the ancient chemical that consoles without illuminating. Smart, in a worrisome way.

Lau Pin, to his credit in Beth’s view, said, “I don’t like that they watch us. This proves they’re trying to…” He didn’t complete the thought.

Beth said, “What? Keep us sedated?”

Mayra objected, waving her arms. “They’re just catering to us!”

Lau Pin twisted his mouth into a sardonic curve. “Worse. They’ve got organic chemists, sure. But we’re lab animals here, not guests. The alcohol is an experiment to see how we react.”

Beth agreed. They broke up, since it was time nearly for lunch—according to their suit clocks, not of course to the unending sunlight here. Lau Pin drew the job of expanding and deepening the latrine, while the others cooked the fish and vegetables they had learned to harvest from the ample surroundings. Even simple jobs here demanded some learning, since working in 0.1 g changed everything ingrained in them. They managed, though without spirit.

Beth worried. No new word from Redwing, and they were settling into a routine now. Jobs assigned, a routine set up.

Lau Pin shouted. He came running from where they’d dug the latrine. “Come see! This topsoil is only a meter deep.”

So it was—which made complete sense. The Bowl was a thin layer built to face the central star, capturing sunlight. But it couldn’t be very thick without imposing huge stresses on the tension that held the Bowl together, just from mass loading. Here they saw that the entire ecology was rooted in soil only as deep as needed. Lau Pin had uncovered metal sheets and pipes, the underpinning of this odd building bigger than any world.

At lunch they mused aloud at the possibilities. “How about tunneling through?” Mayra asked. “How could we use that?”

Fred smiled derisively. “And let the vacuum suck us away? These aliens have some way to patch really fast, I’d guess—but not before we die.”

They all nodded. Beth looked around at their faces going slack and thought, We need to have a goal. Otherwise, we’ll turn into passive prisoners. She had learned what to do from her training. Get them focused. Do the next right thing. Now.

She knew it was true. In a tough situation, don’t avoid acting just because it’s easier or comfortable. Don’t lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

Abduss mentioned something in passing that cut off Beth’s reflections. “I found these strands of spidow web, must’ve been tossed aside when a Spidow repaired the network. They spin this stuff out, just as Beth said they must. I saw one doing it. Creepy! Anyway, I got the strands to fuse—”

“Fuse how?” Beth pressed him.

“With a laser. Just warm the ends, stick them together.” Abduss smiled, obviously happy to have something to do. He produced from a sack he carried two meter-long pieces of the filmy white stuff that made the spidow web. “See? They can be retied, with heat. I suppose these pieces got cut off in some way—”

“Then they can be made into long ropes,” Lau Pin said, eyes on Beth. “So we can use them.”

Beth smiled. “To get out of here.”

TWENTY-SIX

Never before had Tananareve wished so fervently for blessed night.

They had all slowly adjusted to sleeping in the incessant daylight, wrapped away in the long, moist, flexible leaves of the giant bowers. With pieces of the stuff, Mayra made them masks that helped them all get some shut-eye. Still, sleep was always troubled, her alarm senses waking her often to the occasional scamper, rattle, or caw. So when they agreed to arise and move, she was thick-eyed and muzzy.

Now they had to sneak away without the Serfs catching on. That was hard. Lau Pin led them stealthily away along routes he had explored. Tananareve had insisted she go, too, even though she had trouble getting through the root-rich terrain. Thin soil meant that trees spread their roots along the surface, making for tricky footing.

Abduss had risked his life for the long, ropy strands they carried in teams. He had walked kilometers away along the flat, forested terrace that confined them, to separate his acts from the others. A simple precaution, in case the spidows discovered him at work. Then he cut long segments of the spidow fibers and carried them away from the thread-corridor before a spidow came to repair it. This meant only minutes. Slicing through a thread sent a signal along the webs, and the huge things raced to make repairs. They looked and moved like a nightmare on a caffeine high.

“Time to light out for the territories!” Tananareve said gladly, when they had it all assembled. She saw Fred’s grin; nobody else got the reference to Huck Finn. They were tense, ready.

Time to go, then. But the pace wore her down.

Tananareve struggled to keep up with Fred and Lau Pin as they hauled the coils along on their shoulders, with leaves to separate the fat threads so they did not stick together. Her arm was mostly healed, but it hurt now and sweat popped out on her brow, trickling into her eyes in big fat drops, and stinging. Sweaty work, silently done, as they crept away from their campground. Serfs did not all sleep at once, apparently, and Tananareve had monitored them to find the time when a minimum of them were awake. The Serf sleep cycle took about three Earth days, by her reckoning.

They quietly stole away, leaving behind dummies of wood wrapped in the leaves, looking somewhat like sleeping humans. No Serfs raised an alarm.