He realized that he, on the other hand, had exceeded his limits. He had no combat experience and yet had somehow gotten through the first Folk assault with just a wound. That had nearly healed when the Folk came back with not one skyfish but six—to kill so many Sil that nobody could count them. No doubt the Folk hoped to catch the humans and burn them, too, but that could not have been the reason for the hours of unrelenting flame war.

The Folk wanted discipline, and knew how to get it. Discipline meant punishment meant order meant stability meant this giant spinning contraption could go on its ancient trajectory, bound for Glory and stars beyond.

Learn to think the way the Folk do, he thought. That was the only way to survive this bizarre, strange, and wonderful-but place.

He slowly got from Quert a way to deal with all the violence. After all, loss was everywhere. Everyone on SunSeeker knew when they departed Earthside that they would never see family or friends again. Cliff tried to phrase what seemed to work. You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart, a wound that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

ELEVEN

Cliff listened to the deep rolling music of the Sil dirge. This was an honor, he realized—to witness the public mourning of these lithe aliens, their voices soaring in a long, rolling symphony he could understand, at least emotionally. It was truly so—music had fundamentals common here. Their flowing melodic line had tricky interior cadences, subthemes, and as it gathered force, these merged to become a high, howling remorse laced through with beautiful, somber notes. In the carved rock amphitheater, the Sil stood as they sang, sat when they did not, their angular heads lifted up to show faces twisted with grief.

They had lost many in the assault by the remorseless, hydrogen-fueled sky beasts. Those vast creatures had killed so many Sil almost as an afterthought, punishment for hiding humans. Apparently firing into crowds was permissible, and the Sil seemed unsurprised by these events.

Cliff sat and thought of that as the music wrapped around him. It immersed them all—he could see this strong music had its effects on those beside him. The Sil had many subtle eye-gestures and the odd elongation of the flesh around the eyes apparently meant mourning. All because of the humans …

His small band had been on the run for a long time, and now had met the sobering fact that those Folk who ran this huge, spinning machine would kill others just to stop a few humans. But … why were they important? It puzzled him and gave the slow, solemn proceedings of public mourning a gravitas he respected.

Their song rose and fell; their long bass notes reverberating from elaborately carved walls. The Sil leader Quert stood tall and splayed arms to the sky as the large wind instruments among them—not separated, as in a human orchestra—joined in the deep notes, pealing forth as the longer wavelengths resonated with those reflecting from the walled basin. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it. Grief made its same choices for the Sil as among humans—gliding, graceful themes, deepening as the growing amplitude plowed into more somber courses. Then, suddenly, that ended in a stunning trill the voices held for a long while, as their instruments boomed forth.

The silence. No applause. Just grief.

They all—Howard, Irma, Terry, and Aybe—sat respectfully until told to move, as they had learned was considered polite here. Howard was nursing a bad cut and a bum knee, Terry and Aybe had burns and bound-up wounds, but altogether the humans had minimal damage. They kept their heads down, perhaps from politeness, but Cliff lowered his eyes because he did not want to look into the eyes of the Sil more than he had to. The Sil filed out, their slanted faces seeming even longer now, no one speaking. Their instruments caught Cliff’s eye. The laws of physics set design constraints for woodwinds and stringed players—long tubes, resonant cavities, holes for tuning—but the music that bloomed from these oddly shaped chambers and strings was both eerie and yet familiar. It had an artful use of counterpoint, moments of harmonic convergence, repeating details of melodic lines. There were side commentaries in other keys, too. Was music somehow universal?

As they emerged from the stone bowl, he looked back at the now-empty crescents where the seats each had a slight rounded depression for sitting. Once in Sicily he had seen an ancient open theater that looked much like this. But here the stones were pale conglomerate, not limestone, and far older. Yet the same design emerged.

Still obeying the code of silence, they walked into the sprawling community. This part of the Sil cityscape had escaped the fire bombing. It was a vast relief to be away from the charred precincts where he and the others had worked for … he could not even recall the count. At least a week, though now it seemed a boundary between a past where he had felt in control of his world, and now … this.…

He pulled his mind away from the memories. Focus. His crew training made this possible, but not easy.

The Sil chose habitats, he noticed, the way a seasoned soldier instinctively chooses cover. Here a wall gave an angled exposure to the star. Another wall stood oblique to that, to allow the jet’s glow to have its say with redder luminosities, so each shadow had different colors at play. One wall gave protection from the prevailing wind, with an apartment perched to take advantage of the cooler prospect, big open windows facing away from the field of bright, fine sands that bounded the Sil town. There was a lake nearby, not deep but enough to fetch a tranquil blue from the hovering sky. Sils lounged in shadows for delicious rest, on a spongy plane, their bodies prone on the soft jade green. Sil crowds gathered there, their trilling speech low and reflective. A moist breeze blew through the crowd, and streamers of fog danced among the zigzag trees.

All eyes followed the humans. They had all agreed to affect a casual disregard of this. “Think of it as like being a movie star,” Irma had said.

And it was. The Sil at least hid their sliding gaze by turning heads a bit away, but Cliff felt the pressure of their regard.

“They wonder what to make of us,” Howard whispered.

Aybe said, “We’re enough like them—two arms, two legs, one head. Maybe that’s an optimal smart alien design? Makes us sorta simpatico. Better than the Bird Folk, anyway.”

“And the Sil know to keep a distance, give us some room to take them in, too,” Terry added. “It’s kinda fun. Here are real, smart aliens who aren’t chasing us.”

“Or killing us,” Irma said sardonically. “Beth’s team wasn’t so lucky.”

This memory sobered them as they passed by a truly ancient-looking stone edifice, erect on its bare site, the huge blocks sweating with every gush of mists from the lowlands. Cliff savored the moist breath. The winds here stirred with minds of their own, sinewy and musical as they hummed through the Sil streets. The homes somehow generated music from the wind, hollow woodwind notes in lilting harmonies that seemed to spill from the shifting air.

The sky was clear, a flight of huge lenticular clouds sliding past like a parade of ivory spaceships. The sky creature had been of that size, moving with ponderous poise. Beautiful in its way, and lethal. These clouds poured rain onto distant hills, and the fragrant breeze brought the flavor to them.