“So it gets fat and can—”

“Scorch the territories near the Knothole, where the Jet passes closest to the Bowl. Knock out their control installations there, I bet.” The words came flooding out of the man. “I’ve studied them through our scopes, and they’re huge coils all around the Knothole mouth. I bet they’re magnets that keep the Jet away. Magnetic repulsion, gotta be.”

Redwing was aghast, but he couldn’t let Karl see that. “We do this by flying into the Jet?”

“More like tickling it. I can work out how we can zig across it, then zag back at the right time and place to drive an instability.”

“Near the Jet base, by the star?”

“Okay, so it’ll get a little hot in here, I grant you that.”

Good to know he would grant something, at least. For a man proposing to kill the largest imaginable construct, he seemed unfazed.

“At no danger to SunSeeker?”

“I can tune the funnel parameters, do some robo work on the capacitor sheets. Fix ’em up.” Karl smiled proudly. “I ran a simulation of running SunSeeker across the Jet already. There’s a problem slicing through the hoops of magnetic stresses at the Jet boundary, sure. We cut through that and it’s smooth sailing, looks like. Statistically, a Monte Carlo code shows we don’t get bumped hard—”

“I recall a statistician who drowned in a lake that was on average fifty centimeters deep.” Redwing smiled dryly.

Karl hastily retreated. “Well, we can just skim the Jet first, try it out.”

“I’d like to see the detailed analysis, of course.” He narrowed his eyes deliberately. “Written up in full.”

If this crazy idea ever got anywhere, he wanted it documented to the hilt. Not that there would be any kind of superior review in his lifetime, Redwing mused, but it was good to leave a record, no matter what happened. Karl nodded and they went on to discuss some lesser tech issues.

After he left, Redwing stood and watched his wall screen show the unending slide of topography he still thought of as below, though of course SunSeeker was orbiting the star, not the Bowl. The hurricane was biting into the shoreline now, sowing havoc. Somebody was suffering.

He had seen that this Bowl, like a real planet, still had tropical wetlands, bleak deserts, thick green forests, and mellow, beautiful valleys. No mountain ranges worthy of the name, apparently because the mass loading would have thrown something out of kilter. But terrain and oceans galore, yes, of sizes no human had ever seen. But some minds had imagined, far back in ageless time.

The truly shocking aspect of Karl was not his idea, but the eager way he described ripping open the atmosphere cap. That would kill uncountable beings and might even destroy the Bowl itself. Redwing watched the Coriolis forces do their work. He tried to see how the global hydrologic cycle here could work—and then realized that this wasn’t a globe, but a big dish, and all his education told him nearly nothing he could use.

Still, there were beings down there of unimaginable abilities. How could they survive a storm that lasted for weeks or months? That was the crucial difference here—scale. Everything was bigger and lasted longer. How long had the Bowl itself lasted? Somehow it had the look of antiquity about it.

And the creatures who made and ran it—they had both great experience and long history to guide them. Surely they would know what had just occurred to Karl.

Just as surely, they would have defenses against visitors such as Karl.

FORTY-THREE

The e-train zoomed on, at speeds Cliff estimated to be at least ten kilometers per second. Astronomical velocities, indeed. Maybe Aybe was right, arguing that to get around the Bowl in reasonable times demanded speeds of 100 km/s. The blur beyond their windows showed only the fast flickering of phosphor rings as they shot through them, until even those blended together to become a dim flickering glow.

They broke up to explore the long passenger car. There were roomy compartments with simple platforms for sitting and sleeping, and rough bedding supplied in slide shelving. Howard discovered the switches after the first hour aboard, while searching for more food. Cliff heard his shouts and came running.

“Look!” Howard said proudly when all five were there. He slid to the side a hinge switch near a compartment door. He slid a switch on the wall, and the compartment ceiling phosphors dimmed to utter dark.

They hooted, clapped, and Irma did a dance with Aybe. It was as though they had gained their freedom—freedom from sunlight.

Irma favored exploring the rest of the car, and they did. Compartments varied in size and style, mostly in the arrangement of platforms. Irma remarked, “These can accommodate passengers of varying sizes and needs. Fit to species, I guess.”

Cliff nodded. “The Bird Folk are big, sure, but some of the forms we saw from a distance were smaller. Interesting, to have intelligence in a range of body types.”

“But why is nobody here?” Terry insisted.

Aybe added, “And nobody at the station, ’cept robots.”

“Maybe they don’t travel much?” Irma wondered.

No answers, plenty of questions. The passenger car was over a hundred meters long and ended with a pressure door, where the car narrowed down. “Let’s not go further,” Irma said. “Great find, Howard, that light switch. Let’s use them, huh?”

Aybe found something that sounded like a grinder in the tiled floor of an otherwise bare room. “That’s gotta be the head,” Terry said. Starships used nautical terms, and soon they were calling the train’s nose the bow.

They ate before sleeping. All along, mealtimes had been important, just as they had been in their interplanetary training missions. On the Mars Cycler, Cliff had learned ship protocols and how to deal with short-arm centrifugal gravity (which made his head lurch the first week when he walked), but the most important lesson was the social congruence. Eating together promoted solidarity, teamwork, the crucial judgments of strengths and flaws they all needed to know. In a crisis, that knowledge let them respond intuitively. Here, where danger was never far away, those unspoken skills had quickly become crucial.

“What do we do when we pull into the next station?” Terry asked, munching one of the odd foods that he had squeezed out of a tube—which then evaporated into the air with a hiss, once emptied. How it knew to do this was a topic of puzzled discussion. Cliff watched them as they all pretty obviously—judging from expressions as they ate, each reflecting inwardly after the excitement of pursuit—wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

Too late, Cliff thought but did not say. He recalled another favorite phrase of his father’s: Life is just one damn thing after another.

The train ran on in its silky way, electromagnetics handing off without a whisper of trouble. Cliff lay back and relaxed into the moody afterglow of eating more than one needed. The low hum of the train lulled him but he summoned up resolve to say, “We need to stand watches, same as before. Terry, you’re up first.”

Groans, rolled eyes, then the slow acceptance he had come to expect. Cliff made the most of it, standing up and trying to look severe. “We don’t know anything here. We’re not camping out anymore. This is a train, and it stops somewhere. When it does, we’ve got to be able to hide or run.”

They nodded, logy with the meal, as he had planned.

Howard said, “We should break up, too. Don’t clump up, so they can bag us all at once.”

Cliff didn’t like the pessimism behind that, but he said, “Good idea. But not alone.”

Long silence. Terry glanced at Aybe, and Cliff suddenly remembered that one of them was gay. Which one? For the life of him, he could not remember. Damn! All this time—