As they often did, the humans watched the strange landscapes around them and tried to figure out how it all worked. Aybe and Terry maintained that there had to be tubes moving water around the Bowl, since otherwise all fluids would end up in the low-grav regions near the poles. Irma pointed out that some photos of the Bowl, taken when SunSeeker was approaching, showed just what Aybe and Terry thought—huge pipes running along the outside of the Bowl. Cliff listened to all this and sorted through his photographs. He had nearly filled his comm-camera’s digital storage with photos of plants and animals and had to edit out some to free up space. Already he had decided to ignore algae, bacteria, Protoctista, fungi, and much else. He kept snaps of purple-skinned animals loping on stick legs across a sandy plain. He had captured flapping, flying carpets with big yellow eyes, massive ruddy blobs moving like boulders on tracks of slime, spindly trees that walked, birds like big-eyed blue fish. A library of alien life.

Cliff knew he had missed a lot of creatures because they had quick and good camouflage to conceal themselves. They discovered this by stepping on what looked like limbs or lichen or dirt and turned out to be small animals that knew the arts of disguise. He sucked in the moist air and recalled that on Earth, desert plants defended against losing moisture by keeping their stomata closed in the day. They opened at night to take in carbon dioxide without evaporating too much water away. On the Bowl, though, without night, the air had to hold enough moisture to let plants respire, venting oxygen. That meant a lot of water. It explained the heavy rainstorms and thick, flavored air, the sprawling rivers they had to work around, the mists that shrouded even small depressions in the land.

Yet some aspects here were like an Earth that had vanished long ago. Standing nearby was an enormous version of something he had seen Earthside, embedded in coal beds: horsetails. These resembled a first draft of bamboo—thick walled, segmented grass, tan and tall. The trunks popped as they swayed in the wind, eternally fighting for space and sun and soil just as did all the others. He had seen creatures that excreted through pores in their feet—surely not from Earth. Their speech sounded like whistling and farting at the same time. Both used flowing gases through a pinched exit, but …

Quert broke off from a murmuring crowd. Moving with efficient grace, it came up to them, its big yellow eyes heavily lidded, and said, “Thank delivered in kind. We now speak, want.”

Its language ability came in simple stutters of words. Cliff could usually guess the content. Quert moved with rippling muscles. Like brilliant gazelles, Cliff thought. The Sil were limber, dexterous creatures that worked on the Bowl’s understructure. They lived in small towns, mostly, so this now-ruined city was unusual. Quert said Sil were peppered through the immense lands of the Bowl. They seldom met other Sil groups larger than the few thousand here, since distance isolated them. They received instructions from the Folk and carried out their labors. Otherwise, they governed themselves. Populations were stable, by social conventions handed down for countless generations. This was a standard Folk method, apparently. Divide and rule, Cliff thought.

Throngs of Sil followed their mourning with festival. The humans stood aside as the lithe forms began to move, sway, sing. All around them spontaneous movement broke out. The warm sun and lancing jet stung their skins and they danced until a kind of glow spread on their skins. “Maybe the exercise changes their surface circulation?” Irma wondered as the pumping music swelled, bodies glided and kicked, and the golden richness of Sil skins seemed to give off its own moist radiance.

Quert led them to a low building, its walls slanted sheets of ivory rock. Beneath their feet was blond gravel that as they entered a small room turned green, each pebble wrapped in a translucent skin of slime. Quert bent and carefully unhinged from some sculpted seats small blobs that seemed to be slugs that had adhered. They sat and the seats adjusted to their bodies with a slithery grace.

There was a long wait, but as protocol required, the alien spoke first. “We need know goal Astronomers.”

“They want to catch us,” Terry said. “Or kill us.”

“Whichever is easier,” Aybe added.

“Capture best for them. Folk want know what you know.” Quert said this flatly.

“About what?” Irma asked.

“Ship you ride, plants you carry, bodies you have, songs. Possible is.” The swift slippery slide of Quert’s words belied a calm the feline alien wore like a mantle. Plainly Quert was a leader.

The talk went on, speculating on why the Folk had fired into a Sil crowd. Yes, humans were among them, but why did that matter? Cliff watched the alien and reflected on what could come next. In his experience people centered their lives around money or status or community or service to some cause, but the Sil seemed to live learning-centered lives. Here little bits of practical knowledge were the daily currency—Howard had given them a Möbius strip to amuse the children—and their main vocation was to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen. As one Sil had told him, it was quicker to list the jobs he didn’t hold than the ones he did.

There were teams completing a pit to turn manure into electricity, plans to build a micro-hydroelectric generator in a local stream. They devised and built their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard wood of the big trees that ringed their sprawling village. The Sil seemed shaped by what Cliff saw as a frontierlike culture. Here they drilled into trees to make body lotion or designed cement hives for swarming insects, as if to foil a creature that sounded to Cliff like honey badgers. They’re isolated, Cliff thought, no other Sil for great distances, or other intelligent species … out here in the bush, lost in their experiments.

His attention had wandered. Aybe had been peppering Quert with questions, and nobody understood its answers. Then the alien leaned back, yawned to show big teeth, and held up its hands. “Not right thing, you speak for. Folk want all Adopted to obey. I-we, you—” A liquid pointing gesture. “—not made in Bowl. Danger badness comes from us, say Folk.”

This came out as hard, clipped words, not the sliding sibilants Quert usually used. It was tricky inferring emotions from alien facial signatures, Cliff’s judgment warned him, but the narrowing eyes and tensed lips made a constricted face that oozed resentment. Cliff said, “You came before us.”

A quick blinking, which seemed to convey agreement among the Sil. “Not Adopted over long time. We move, live, work. Folk give us things. We do their commands.”

Irma said, “You said earlier that you move often?”

Quert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. “Our kind rove.”

“But you have buildings.”

“Young must learn by doing. This I-we know. Costs to know. Must pay. No such thing as free education. And buildings, cities used to talk.”

“Talk?”

“Adopted can see our work from everywhere in the Bowl. We shape our cities to make messages. Small messages. Big shapes for streets, parks, buildings. When we know, they know, too. What Folk want from you.”

The Sil had a way of leading you toward what they meant, then letting you go the rest of the way. Maddening, at times. Asking them again, or in a different way, got nowhere, banging on a door that wouldn’t open.

The Sil preferred to show them. Quert took them to a site where the ground seethed with a tan, stretching substance. It came out of the Bowl when the Sil triggered it, Quert said. Then they tuned it somehow. Cliff inspected one of their handheld devices but could make nothing of the ribbed and fissured face of it. The Sil apparently took in information and gave instructions by feel, not visually. This seemed odd for ones who had so many eye-moves to express themselves. Cliff was still wondering at this when the slick tan surface began to ease upward. It became grainy as it rose, wedges emerging from the big bubble that blossomed above them. It firmed up into walls and crossbeams as windows opened like sleepy eyes along the edge. A thick cloying scent like drying cement filled the air and Cliff stepped back with the others, not able to follow the complex moves the “constructors,” as Quert termed them, made to shape the thing, through signals he could not fathom.