He said nothing about the name, just concentrated. A small tremor came from branches above, then stopped. Wind whistled, wood creaked. “Lift up a little.”

“That?” he gasped out.

Then it got fast and intense and he lost all sense of place. When he came, it was hard and the scents of the woodland swarmed up into his nostrils.

“Ah … Okay.” She exhaled a long, fluttery sigh and something fell on them.

“Snake!” she cried, and rolled away. So did the snake. It was long and fat and slithered away.

Cliff stood and snatched up his pants, which were caught in his boots. Not smart, he thought just before the second snake appeared. It paused, rearing up to a meter height on a fidgeting stand of short tails. The beady eyes jerked around, studying them. It’s smart, he thought, and saw two more snakes come weaving out of the leafy background. They smelled like grease and ginger. Their eyes yawned wide in surprise.

Then they all paused. Cliff could now see all four snakes, taking their time as they studied Irma. He plucked his laser from his belt and said, “Just stay still. Don’t look threatening.”

“Me don’t look threatening?”

This provoked some signals between the snakes, their slim heads jutting as they rasped out soft sounds. Do they recognize that we’re using a language? Their sibilants also seemed like words, modulated with clicks and head-juts. He noticed suddenly that two snakes had a belt tightened near their heads, and small slim things like tools tucked into loops.

The moment hung in the soft air. The snakes eyed one another, heads jerked back to regard the humans, they rapped out a few more short bursts—and then darted away.

Cliff started after them and Irma called, “Let them go!”

He didn’t fear them somehow. They hadn’t bitten. Maybe this was just an accident.

They were just strange enough to make him follow the wiggling shapes through the understory of thrashing green limbs, long stems with leaves, and flowering plants. After thirty meters he was going to give up, but the snakes, moving in parallel now and weaving in sequence like a wave, turned toward an out-jut of dirt. They went into a hole about twenty centimeters across, each taking a turn while the others turned to confront Cliff. The last one hissed something loudly, turned, and slipped quickly inside.

Irma came up beside him. “What the—?”

“I want to know more about those.”

“Hell, they made me wet myself.”

“They’re tool users. I—”

“Snakes? Come on.”

“And they’re smart.”

“Snakes!”

“They got away from us, didn’t they?”

FORTY

They came down the spire easily, cushioned on magnetic fluxes that Aybe treated like a rubbery ski slope.

They got him to slow down, but he always took a slide when there was a catch basin below. Then he would fetch them up against the opposing slope, braking with the magnetic fields that were surprisingly strong within one meter of the rock.

Most of the catch basins held deep blue water. The look of mountain lakes rimmed by trees reminded Cliff of hiking in the Sierras, which were much the same as centuries ago, judging from the Ansel Adams photos he had studied.

After all, humans had restored the ancient world they destroyed in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the Great Rewilding. In Siberia, people had even carried out a Pleistocene rewilding, bringing back wolves, lynx, cougars, wolverines, grizzlies, and sea otters—top carnivores driven nearly to extinction. Once the human population fell back to two billion, there was room.

Cliff had helped in that when a boy. Nothing biotech or major, just clearance of invasive species. He left near dawn in summers, wearing oiled pants to fend off chaparral scratches, carrying a big knife, a pick mattock, and binocs. Who meets the dawn owns the day, his father always said—and remembering this, he felt a pang that the father who had said good-bye to him with a firm handshake at their parting was now dead over a century.

In those bright summer days, he had killed invasive pampas grass, flamboyant blond plumes that sucked nutrients from the California soil and fed nothing. He cut and gouged down stands as big as his house. He was a bio-bigot supreme, angry at tough, foreign plants that took all and gave nothing. Far better than going after trout or deer, and better, rougher exercise. It felt good to yank pampas grass up. Then the chem death—spray the roots and dug-out ground with an herbicide sting.

The memory made him think of how any mind could build this Bowl and make it work. It was millions of times larger in area than the whole Earth. How did they deal with species and change?

Even California was hard to manage, demanding lots of gut labor. The golden hills where he grew up were in fact an outcome of invasive Spanish grasses. Those outcompeted the native bunchgrasses, whose deeper roots kept them green through the year. But the climate warming of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries favored the feisty, talented travelers people called weeds—which just meant a plant someone didn’t like—that were more robust compared to the local Spanish grasses. So change came again, and the Bowl would face such sweeping alterations, too.

Moodily mulling this over, he hardly noticed when Terry nudged him. “Something big.”

Aybe saw it, too, and angled them over into shelter below a ledge. A long blue green tube was drifting high up across the sky. It was partway through a turn, coming around so the nose pointed their way.

“It’s seen us,” Terry said. “And coming down. Speeding up.”

Aybe said, “Same old deal—you trade altitude for velocity.”

“So they’ve got blimps,” Terry said. “Makes sense, with this deep an atmosphere.”

“Yeah,” Aybe said. “Got no fossil fuels, hard to run a plane without ’em. Might as well float.”

Irma pointed. “Not a blimp. Fins moving. Rowing in the sky? Look—” She close-upped with her binocs. “—it’s got eyes.”

“A living blimp,” Cliff said. “That’s one adaptation I didn’t think of.”

Through his binocs he close-upped the warty hide of the thing. Bumps and gouges expanded into turrets and sealed locks. Yet the thing had big eyes and ample fins like the sails of a fat ship. They canted to catch the wind and he saw other eyes toward the stern of it.

How could such a thing evolve? He had seen floating birdlike things with big, orange throats they could expand. But he’d guessed that was just a sexual display, not a navigational trick. There were odd slits in its side. At extreme magnification he saw things moving along there and abruptly knew he was seeing through a transparent window. The tiny shapes visible there looked like the Bird Folk. “Living, sure. With passengers.”

Irma said, “I can see the tail as it comes around. Big! It’s sure hard to judge distance here. From the detail, I can see it’s a long way off, ten klicks at least.”

Terry said, “So it’s really large.…”

“We’d better run,” Aybe said, and took the magcar whooshing down the slope. He popped up the field screen to deflect the wind.

Terry said, “Circle round, block their view so they can’t see us as they approach.”

“Right,” Cliff said, thinking. “Run into those canyons and stay low. We’ll be hidden then.”

They continued down, Aybe deftly buffeting them against the magnetic fields. This took them frighteningly close to the sheets of rock that made up the spire. “Stay near the trees, at least!” shouted Terry. “If we smack those rocks at these speeds—”

“Don’t bother me!” Aybe shouted, and narrowed his eyes, gripping the yoke tightly. Sweat ran down his brow and dripped off his chin.

They got into a narrow canyon just as something came arcing through the sky. It was a slim airplane with visible pilots. “Should’ve known they’d send something faster. Think they saw us?”