She got the rest to hang back until they could see the patterns of movement. Once offloaded, the workers ignored the food. The humans waited, stomachs rumbling, and then approached a cage car. They kept to the shadows of squashes and melons as big as automobiles. They carved into the underside of one of these, juice gushing out, and began to feast.

Fred pointed to a grid on the wall, with a wind blowing into it. “We should be there,” he said.

“Why?” Beth asked.

“We stink,” Fred said.

They looked at one another … yeah. Nods. Bird Folk mostly had big nostrils. They would have a powerful sense of smell. Beth’s team moved under the air conditioner, taking melons and fruit and a dead mammal with them. The wind there was refreshing.

*   *   *

They feasted, and slept, and feasted some more. “The easiest way to carry food is in us,” Fred said, and was jeered for it, but they ate anyway.

“I think I see…,” Fred said.

Conversation had already stopped. Beth said, “What?”

“It’s going to sound crazy.”

Beth looked around her. “We’re living like mice in a gigantic alien supermarket,” she said, “inside a wok the size of the solar system. We’re all lunatics here, Fred.”

He said, “A lot of stars come in pairs. Maybe most of them.”

Heads nodded.

“I think that sphere was a map of Earth. Earth before the continents split up.”

Lau Pin asked, “Why would they build a globe of Earth?”

“They’re dinosaurs.”

Lau Pin laughed. “Yeah, right.” The others were grinning.

“Some dinosaurs got smart. They developed space travel. They did some exploring. They visited Sol’s companion star. Anyone ever wonder how the dinosaurs stayed warm enough? Sol used to be cooler, remember.”

Lau Pin was still grinning. “Come on.”

“Companion star,” Tananareve said. “They stole it?”

“It was theirs. Earth was theirs, too. Left the solar system as it was, but maybe they took the planets around Wickramsingh’s Star. Grist for the mill.”

Beth noticed that Mayra had lost her smile, which meant she was thinking again of her lost husband. She put an arm around Mayra and listened as they talked Fred’s crazy idea around.

She tried to think about it without a snicker. They’d watched the building of the Bowl. If you weren’t here, on and in it, the Bowl itself would be … a laugh riot. Cupworld. The advanced version would have night and day, provided by orbiting tea bags. A spaceport in the handle. But Fred was so earnest.

Intelligent dinosaurs. Evolving into Bird Folk. Must have had feathers already. “It could fit,” she said not quite seriously. “Dinosaurs think big.”

Talk continued. It was good to distract them from their situation for at least a few moments. Beth began to think about how to get them moving. They weren’t hungry and they weren’t prisoners, but low gravity would still make them sick if they stayed here. Their bones would get brittle; neurological functions would steadily erode.

Lau Pin and Fred were watching the distant workers while they nibbled at a great wedge of green melon. Now Fred said, “Those are the same variety that were guarding us.”

“Feeding us, too,” Lau Pin said.

“No. A little different. That star pattern on their flanks, see? They’re not moving stuff, they’re just … meandering?”

“Hunting us.”

“Yeah.” Fred swept his arm across an arc. “They’re moving in a wave. We stay here, they’ll have us.”

“They’re not very good at searching or we’d be caught by now.”

“Probably out of practice,” Beth said, and peered at Fred. “Have you got some idea? Because I don’t see any way past them.”

“Hide in a melon,” Mayra suggested. “Or two or three. Wait while they go around us.”

“I want a better look at that air outlet,” Fred said.

They brought ferns with them, for cover. They lay beneath the grille in a howling wind, examining the grille and watching the searchers. The Bird Cops weren’t all that big … bigger than humans, though. Earthy smells brushed past them: manure, crushed grass, big animals.

“There’s plenty of room for big birdy engineers to work in there. We can get around the fans,” Lau Pin said. “Carefully. We don’t want to turn them off. The cops would notice.”

They took as much food with them as they could carry. They didn’t have any way to preserve it. Outside, maybe they could make a fire and smoke the animal they’d butchered. Then on to the spaceport ledge and try to find a ride. Or die trying.

PART VII

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

—M ARK T WAIN

THIRTY-SIX

“Slow down!” Cliff called out.

His stomach wobbled and lurched as the magnetics torqued them. The motors surged, growled, hummed. He held on as Aybe wrenched the magcar around, spinning it hard, testing its abilities. Up, down, around—surges faster than some damned amusement park twister, and not amusing.

Terry stood up to restrain Aybe, and a swerve sent him halfway over the side. Irma grabbed his arm and hauled him back in. “Damn it, stop!” she shouted.

Aybe brought the craft out of its spinning mode and the motors beneath their feet eased. “We gotta know what this baby can do!” Aybe laughed with glee. He took the magcar up and it slowed, stopped.

“Careful,” Howard said. Terry and Irma did not look pleased.

Aybe’s engineer eyes widened as he took the craft up. He pushed a simple control yoke forward to the max, and the magcar slowed against gravity, then stopped. “Looks like we can’t go above six meters.” He moved it forward, and the speed crept up.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Terry said. Cliff nodded.

Aybe took them down to near the ground and then away in a fast horizontal path. Cliff looked back at the bloody sprawl of bodies. Leaving these aliens was a dividing point, he felt. Once this incident became known, from here on the natives would probably give no quarter.

Aybe experimented with altitude and speed, getting the feel of the magcar. They got ten kilometers away before they found a narrow gulch that concealed them among billowy trees, swaying in a steady, strangely musky wind.

The others went through the dead aliens’ gear while Cliff stood watch. He scanned the sky for pursuit. Nearby, undisturbed by the magcar passage, birds in flight broke from their immense, triple-decked formation. They curled in banks, forming a sphere, cawing and yawing in squawking concert. The sound was a rolling skkkaaaaa! and distracted him so he did not see coming from above the cause of it all. A huge slender shape shot down from a cloud and dived into the bird ball. Its jaws opened and scooped up several birds at once. He lost it in the thickness of the swarming birds. It poked out the far side an instant later, jaws closed now and turning away. Like a shark, he thought. A sky shark.

Irma sat beside Cliff and asked Aybe, “This wind is too much. Can’t we shield it?”

“Yeah,” Aybe said brightly, always happy to greet a new problem. “There must be…”

After a few minutes of his trying the oddly shaped controls, a narrow pole abruptly poked up from the magcar center, where the engine housing bulged, humming as Aybe drove them forward. It rose to three meters’ height, and suddenly the wind pressure and sound eased away. They were all impressed. Aybe figured it was some field effect, and when Howard poked a finger over the car lip he got a shock. “Defensive, too,” Howard said, nursing the finger.

Irma said, “We should decide where we’re going.”

“Shelter, I guess,” Terry said.

“We have to think long term,” Irma said. “What’s our goal?”

Howard said, “Learn and stay free.”

Aybe shrugged. “Learn what? How to find Beth’s group? Or get back to SunSeeker? Or—what?”