“Beth and me, we hadn’t gotten that specific. In all the training, there wasn’t time to…”

“To really think it through? Actually, it’s feeling it through that does the trick.”

“Um. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ I suppose.”

“What? Oh, Shakespeare. Well, this is alteration”—she waved a hand at the Bowl, which hung like a shimmering haze across the sky—“beyond anything I imagined.”

“So…” He savored finally getting some use from his high school English, then sobered. He wanted to get something settled but didn’t know how. “We keep up with the … utility?”

She shrugged. “It helps.” Then she gave him a wicked grin. “That’s my story for now.”

“Might be trouble when we meet our mates.”

“Face that when it comes.”

He stood, stretching. He watched in the distance dust devils climb toward the roof of the sky, in an atmosphere so deep, he could see huge dark clouds that hung like mountains in the high, fuzzy distance. How were they ever going to figure out this place?

Aybe, Howard, and Terry arrived, carrying some plants they had harvested with the Sil. “Shoulda had you along, Cliff, so’s you’d know what these things are, if we can eat ’em. Howard spotted a lot of this.”

“My God, Terry, you’re drunk!” Cliff took the plants and checked them; they looked reasonable. But he couldn’t take his eyes from Terry and—yes, Aybe also had a bleary look.

“They gave us a drink, said it was refreshin’,” Terry said.

Howard said, “Tastes a little like pineapple wine. Bland. I was not tricked, boss.” He thumped his chest. “Alcohol.”

“I’ll say. The chemistry here really is similar.” Cliff waved them to the riverside. Might as well relieve the pressure when they can.…

Was ethanol a universal? It appeared in low densities in star and planetary system forming regions: simple organic chemistry. It was just sugars turning bad, so they formed a hydroxyl with carbon. Chimpanzees used it, too. Maybe all higher intelligences sometimes needed to escape from the prison of reason?

“So,” Aybe plopped down and said with the owlish manner of a drunk trying to pretend he’s sober, “where do we go from here?”

“There’s a price on our heads, boys,” Irma said. “I say stay here, rest up, learn from these Sil.”

“We can eat,” Howard said. “Nev-ever a given.”

“We need a plan,” Aybe said.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish,” Irma said. “But what’s our goal?”

“There’s enough room here,” Terry said with leaden profundity, “for everybody cold sleepin’ on SunSeeker to live.”

“But this isn’t a planet, it’s a park!” Irma shot back.

“Seems big enough for a million planets. Strange aliens. Room to make somethin’ new.” Terry nodded to himself.

Irma’s eyes and nostrils flared. “We didn’t cast off everybody we knew to come to this place!”

“Well, we’re here anyway,” Aybe said solemnly. “We don’t even know if we can get SunSeeker started up right again.”

“There’s damn plenty we don’t know, right,” Terry agreed.

Cliff eyed them and saw this was an idea brewing for some time among them. Carefully he said, “Look, we’re in a crazy place. But don’t let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination. We’re bound for Glory.”

In their pealing laughter he heard joy.

FORTY-NINE

The inhabited section of the Bowl, its vast ring-shaped rim, was what Redwing had come to call the Great Plain. Now SunSeeker crossed softly over the rim of the Bowl, and the Great Plain fell behind. Far below, the cellophane sky dropped to touch a rise in the Bowl’s understructure, bulging outward by a few kilometers, as they crossed the Bowl rim. “Stay well clear,” Redwing told Jam again. “We don’t want to burn holes in their sky with our magnetics.”

Jam grinned as if at a joke. “Yes, sir. Do your enemy no small injury.” He added, “Machiavelli.”

So the great ship floated past the rim with 100,000 kilometers to spare. Redwing watched, mesmerized, until Ayaan whacked his back with her fist. “Captain! I’ve got Fred Oyama!”

“Hot damn! Patch me through. Fred, need update on your condition.”

Ayaan said, “Talk past him. You’re twenty-three minutes apart at lightspeed, and all they can send us is text. Talk and I’ll text-connect it.”

“Yah. Fred, we’re cruising around back of the Bowl to see what we can see. Our last contact with Beth’s team had her in a cluster of caves. She’s worried about what low gravity is doing to their bones and such. Otherwise they’re safe. She should have at least a couple of months, but then they’ll all need SunSeeker’s hospital section.

“We’ve solved the problem with SunSeeker’s motors,” he said, and decided not to give details. The ship had been delayed by the Bowl’s head wind, just enough to matter. Maybe SunSeeker could have veered around the Bowl’s wake and kept on to Glory, stretching their supplies to the max. But the Bowl was a bigger game, really, he decided. An unimaginable jackpot—if they survived it. Glory could wait.

Redwing watched Ayaan working their antenna system to keep him on target. Their technology was at its very limits, communicating over such vast, constantly moving ranges.

“We’ve fiddled some with the menu, including some biochem information, so I’ll beam you an update, now.” Ayaan nodded and pressed a key to send the prepared squirt.

“I’d like to pick you all up. We should at least plan to meet. It would be great if we could find a meet place. The trouble as I see it is that any site big enough to see from here would be like arranging to meet in Australia.” Redwing laughed, then remembered that he wouldn’t hear a response. “Too big. But if we could find something like a radio station, we could find each other there. We’ll look for antennas of any kind while we’re here.”

He paced the deck, trying to wedge in every thought before they lost the connection. “Of course, there’s no docking or refueling arrangements for us that we understand on the outer skin. Of course, we’ve lost one of our landers. Never mind, we still have the Hawking and Chang and Dyson. Your team has been without medical treatment for four months now. We need to debrief you.”

Not the best time, a link just when they were coasting out over the rim. “I’m looking at the back of the Bowl, seeing quite a lot of structure. Blems, bubbles, angular structures, crisscrossed lines … I’m zooming on an intersection … those are tubes networking … maybe a transport system. Looks like spiderwebbing.

“Bigger, shorter tubes right at the rim. Knobby gray structures big as … well, little moons. Like Ceres. Several of ’em. I can see the nearest one in motion. Really big. Too big to be a weapon. Helical lines running round the inside—”

Redwing’s internal alarm bells went off. “Karl, what do you think?”

Karl was standing alert, almost crouching. He said crisply, “Looks like they’re encased in magnetic field coils. Maybe some sort of offensive weapon.”

“Or telescope,” Clare said.

Karl shook his head. “Astronomy? Nah. No need for that long cylinder. Could be a laser of a kind we don’t know? Huge, in any case.”

“Looks like old-style cannon,” Redwing said. “Except bigger than makes any sense.”

Clare Conway said, “Maybe they fight planets. Big cannon. Captain, we’ll be looking right into that tube in maybe twenty minutes.”

Karl said, “The nearest of them is swiveling to engage us, sir.”

Redwing frowned. “Okay. Jam, start us turning. Stay away from the focus of that thing. Ayaan, do you still have Fred? Fred, give me some good news, will you?”

Jam said quickly, “With your permission, Captain, I’ll bring us back above the Great Plain.”

“Do that. Fred, we’ll be out of touch in a few minutes. We have a message from Earth. I’ll squirt it now.”