They reached a dock suddenly. But this was a vertical one with no-door elevators, chugging along at a speed that made it easy to step onto a descending plate. Quert showed them how and Howard jumped too heavily onto it, lost his balance, and fell to the floor. That made Terry laugh in a high-pitched way, while the others piled on.

Howard got his breath and they all looked at one another, aliens and humans alike. There was some odd commonality here he was too distracted to think about right now. Just assume it and see if it worked. Not a theory, but a plan.

Cliff staggered. His right leg went from a dull ache to a steadily building throb. Adrenaline high is fading. He felt the warmth from it flowing down into his boot. He sat down sloppily and breathed deep, sucking in air to calm his racing heart. Gingerly he felt the wound.

Irma said, “You’re bleeding.”

Cliff nodded, panting. “Flesh wound.”

Howard said, “We’re short of bandages.”

“I’m not as badly hurt as we’ve seen,” Cliff said. He tried a shrug. “I’ll get by.”

Irma had thought to take some of the clothing off the dead aliens. She handed him something shirtlike, cottony. With Irma’s help, he tore it into lengths and folded one to make a pad. He tied that over the wound, pulling to get it tight, and the compress seemed to stop the bleeding. He did this automatically, recalling practice they had all gone through. Centuries ago.

They went on, Cliff limping.

They came down steadily in darkness and stepped off onto a metal frame in the rock. Beyond the elevator was no rock at all, just ceramics and fiber beams and even burnished metal. There were struts and the usual squared-off construction in a gravity well, but also curved arches and round hatches. Quert led them through support structures, and suddenly one wall was transparent and Cliff was looking into blackness pocked by tiny colored lights. Stars.

“It’s … the backside of the Bowl,” Aybe whispered.

Somehow the view was at an angle to vertical, not straight down through the floor. Local gravity was different here. Cliff watched a distant craft swim across this night sky, lit only by starlight. Then a nearer sphere came into view, with three small ships nosed against it. A fueling station? It slid by fast and Cliff realized they were the ones moving, spinning to maintain centrifugal grav at half a thousand kilometers per second. All you had to do to launch a ship was let go of it.

He pressed his face against the cold transparent window, just as the others did, and looked at long lanes of structures stretching away in all directions. Endless detail into the distance, with gray robot forms working over some towers nearby.

Quert’s long vowels intruded on his thoughts. “Can see later. Now go.”

It was hard to leave the view. The perspectives reminded him that they were never far from the vacuum of space, no matter how familiar some of the Bowl could seem.

“Come!” Quert took them onto another dock and then very fast into a narrow capsule. They fitted into horizontal slots with support straps, and as Cliff got his into place they took off to a swift sucking sound.

Cliff unwrapped the bulky bandage he had made, and the sight was not good. A dark stain had pasted his pants leg to the wound. It smelled bad and was suddenly popular with nasty little flies that came swirling out of nowhere. With Howard’s help, Cliff shed the lower half of his peel-out trousers, unzipping to reveal the damage. There was an entrance wound on the right side of his calf and a matching, larger wound on the left. Water brought by the Sil washed off the crusted dark blood. The puckered openings were red and swollen.

Irma brought her first aid kit and pooled its resources with the kits of the others, each kit somewhat specialized. “Looks like some shrapnel went right through your calf muscle,” she said calmly. “The leg’s going to purple up.”

“It’s hard to walk on.”

“Then don’t.”

She and Howard worked for a while, injecting him and putting clean compresses on the leg. Cliff watched the sky where puffy gray clouds raced one another.

Irma patted him. “You’re not going to die.”

“That’s a relief. Don’t have to call my insurance guy.”

“You won’t lose the leg.”

“Even better. Hurts though. Got some fun drugs?”

That brought chuckles. “Ran out,” Howard said. “My fault.”

Irma said, “And your next question would be, ‘Where are we?’”

“And the answer…”

“Going to a Sil refuge. Their casualties are in the cars ahead. They lost a lot of dead.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. And his head was feeling like a balloon that wanted to soar into the sky.

The trip lasted a long time amid bare dim lighting. He thought of talking to the others, but now he knew it was smarter to just rest when you could do nothing. He fell asleep, dreamed of discordant sights and sounds and colors, and just as on the train, came awake only to the tug of deceleration.

PART IX

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

—S TEVEN W RIGHT

FORTY-SIX

Beth stood in the entrance of the cave and listened as thunder forked down through immense, sullen cloud banks. They were stacked like a pyramid of anvils with purple bases. Down through them, leaping from anvil to anvil, came bright, sudden shafts of orange lightning. Fat raindrops smacked down, lit up by the flashes. Some of the glaring lances raced from one shadowy cloud to another and came down near them, exploding like bombs as they splintered trees.

“Majestic,” Fred said at her side.

“Terrifying,” she countered, but then admitted, “Beautiful, too.”

“Look at those.” Mayra pointed. In the milky daylight that filtered through the pyramid clouds, they watched moist plants move with a languid, articulating grace. Slowly they converged on the lightning damage. They came forth to extinguish the fires from those strikes.

“Protection, genetically ordained,” Tananareve said.

“Sure they’re not animals?” Fred asked.

“Do they look like animals?” Tananareve countered. “I checked, went out and lifted one. Roots on the end of those stalks. Roots that slip out easily from the soil when it rains.”

“But the rain will put out the fires.”

“Maybe they’re healing something else. We really don’t know how this ecology works, y’know,” Tananareve said.

“And the ecology’s only skin deep,” Fred said. “Ten meters or so down, there’s raw open space. Maybe the lightning can screw up subsurface tech.”

Beth listened to the full range of sounds rain makes in a high, dense forest. Pattering smacks at the top, gurgling rivulets lower, as the drops danced down the long columns of the immense canopy. The orchestrated sounds somehow encased her, lifted her up into a world utterly unnatural but somehow completely secure, while seeming still so strange.

Somewhere in this immense mechanism Cliff was … what? Still free? Captured and interrogated? Her skimpy communication with SunSeeker confirmed that he got through to them intermittently and was moving cross-country. That was all she knew, yet it would have to be enough.

The rain, wind, and lightning daggers swept her along in a sudden tide of emotions she had kept submerged. She longed for him, his touch, the low bass notes as he whispered in her ear of matters loving, delightful, often naughty. Lord, how she missed that. They liked making love while rain spattered on the windows, back there centuries ago. It gave them a warm, secure place to be themselves, while the world toiled on with its unending business. They had ignored the world for a while, and it ignored them.

Fair enough. But this whirling contrivance could not be ignored. It could kill you if you did not pay attention, and very probably would, she imagined. They would probably die here, and no one—Cliff, Redwing, Earth—would ever know, much less know why. Beth’s small band certainly did not remotely understand this thing. Why was it cruising between the stars at all—driven forward by engineering that eclipsed into nothingness all that humanity had achieved? Why?…