Tananareve asked, “So this one—their home planet maybe?”

“Or one they passed by, explored.”

“They’re headed the same way we are, so maybe it’s Glory? At this range, their telescopes could pick out continent-sized features. And look, there’s another big one at the far end of the chain.”

Beth saw it: barely more than a dot. “One is their home world, and the other’s maybe their ultimate target—yes, it could be. You’d think the home world would be treated specially.” The Astronomers might actually know the shapes of Glory’s continents, or this could be some planet they just mapped with big lenses as they passed by its system. If a world wasn’t interesting, they might not land on it at all.

Lau Pin whispered, “What’s up?” so they shared the idea. Beth stared at the nearer sphere, then began circling anticlockwise. The rest came with her, moving in irregular jumps, staying hidden.

It mapped a planet, all right. There were no ice caps; where were the poles? The thing wasn’t rotating fast enough to tell. It might not be rotating at all, though it stood on a single axial pole. Oceans were a mottled blue; land was red and brown. The land masses were all clumped, and white streaks showed chains of snowcapped mountains. It was somewhat stylized, the continent and islands colored more like gems than landscapes, and the blue oceans—three-fourths of the globe’s surface—were translucent, the deep sea floors showing through, subduction zones and midocean ridges clearly defined. Look hard enough, and you saw shadows moving in there. Life-forms the size of mountains? By now they knew that it was indeed rotating, but very slowly.

Tananareve whispered, “Somebody coming.”

Fred sprang up on a strut and surveyed. “Yep.” A handful of bird shapes were moving toward them. Lau Pin said, “We need to hide.”

Fred jerked his head again—“Inside.”

“The only way in is that post holding up the sphere,” Lau Pin said. He loped away.

Beth said uneasily, “I saw motion in there. We don’t want to have to fight anyone.”

“I looked,” Mayra said. “Holograms. Something’s making pictures.”

“Audience?”

“Nothing I could see.”

Lau Pin waved an arm, and they followed silently, swiftly.

The spindly metal pillar that held the ten-story globe would have collapsed in normal gravity. The interior was a spiral stair, steps narrow near the axis, several feet wide near the walls. Lots of room. Accommodation for various species, maybe not just Bird Folk.

They were hidden as soon as they entered the giant stairwell. Tananareve suggested staying in the stairwell, but even she wasn’t pushing it. Wonders waited above.

They entered armed, as best they could.

The inside was even roomier, with a ceiling ten meters high above a single gigantic space. It looked like a museum: items standing free or floating on thin wires Beth couldn’t quite see, all squashed into whatever space would fit. A vast ceramic green ramp ran round the spherical wall.

“Watch for anything moving,” Lau Pin said. “Fred, Mayra, Tananareve, you in the middle. I’ll take point. Beth?”

“Rear guard.”

Here on the floor was a shifting mound, almost flat but with ridges and pools. Patches of ocher and pale green writhed and then spread out. After a minute, it repeated. It made no sense at all until Tananareve said, “Continental drift.”

Beth said, “We still don’t know—”

“Which planet. True.”

They walked among what must be model spaceships, and with a flicker were suddenly in a three-dimensional movie. As they crossed some unseen threshold, it rose abruptly all around them, a starscape riddled with swarming dark dots.

Beth stepped back quickly. The dots vanished. That much furious motion, anything could be hidden … but there wasn’t anything alive here except her own people, visible as long as she wasn’t in the hologram. They had spread out a little, looking for enemies—barring Fred, who stood stock-still, caught by the dancing dots.

She stepped back in. Chaos danced in flickering light around her. Anything could sneak up on them under these conditions, but she couldn’t look away. Fred sighed beside her, mesmerized.

THIRTY-FOUR

The sensaround opened in deep space.

A tiny knot of yellow white sat at the exact center of the display. The field of view was a hemisphere so big, she could not grasp it without turning her head. Stars sprinkled the sky, but she could recognize no constellations.

Slowly the point of view rotated. Maybe that was the nearest star? But, no—a ruddy yellow disk swam into view at her far left. The disk fumed with small storms, and she could see magnetic arches soaring above the brimming bright churn. Clearly this star was smaller and redder than Sol and pocked with dense black spots. The vision slid farther, the star moved right, and tiny ships came in view. They had blue bubbles midship, probably fuel blisters. They tugged huge hexagonal containers, hundreds of ships all heading toward …

A vast pale crescent swam into view. She watched the framework of long, spiky girders that curved around complex guts. Between these were long loops like wedding bands, glowing. The thing was so large, it cast deep shadows over a bee swarm of ships, all tending to the large structure like worker insects.

Farther away orbited tumbling rocks, mostly tinged with white. Flames shot along their faces, and fumes billowed out in spheres. Those must be immense smelting systems laboring in the high vacuum. Big clouds of white and amber gas rose from them, expanding until they dimmed to transparency and faded. The view crossed a smaller star, glare white, brighter than the rest of the sky.

Still smaller ships flitted among the mining operations. Some hauled massive girders through cylindrical arrays. Out the far end emerged long struts with a glaze on them, shimmering in the orange red starlight. Some kind of hardening process?

Dirty gray blobs hovered in the distance. Beth realized these were iceteroids, like those humanity exploited in the Oort cloud of Earth—condensed out when the sun was born, rich in volatiles. Beside them flitting ships shepherded enormous orange balloons. These filled with gas that was born in the tiny orange fires at their base. Mass and elements for the construction, she guessed.

Then the milling swarm of mote-sized ships became a blur. Time speeded up. The huge thing they were building took shape. Girders aligned and layered. Scaffolds unfolded and crossbars buttressed those. Joists and brackets the size of planets formed in the haze of buzzing motion. An enormous geometry emerged. It was the Bowl.

Flitting shapes, too small to see clearly, wove a tapestry of black lace around the budding hemisphere. This array glowed suddenly, a flash of white light. Gas blew away from the structure like a fading fog.

This is a history lesson, Beth thought. The natives here must want to keep aware of how they came to be … and so leave places like this so the message is not lost, a tradition sent down through deep time.

The camera eye view closed in. Beth could see intricate maneuvers of silvery ships as they worked their way across the surface of the Bowl in the making. They laid down layers and pillars that lapped around the hemisphere, and the camera eye followed them, sliding over the lip of the Bowl into … a thick flock of ships, all ferrying volatile bags, the orange balloons she had seen before. Flashes like lightning arced through the bags of gas. Above the bottom of the Bowl, these came free. They slipped through holes in a nearly invisible upper layer, gliding downward toward the floor of the Bowl.

The field of view closed in on the shimmering layer. It was the atmosphere’s boundary shield. This billowed out as it held in the pressure of gases emptying forth. On the Bowl floor, gushing geysers spouted thick ivory clouds. Other ships skimmed along the ribbed understory of the floor, spewing masses of brown and black—the topsoil, falling into place.