“So I wondered—what kind of weaponry can they have down there? Gray goo bombs? Nerve flatteners? Old-style shaped charge with spinning flechettes?”

“I didn’t really see weapons.”

“Um. Cliff did—I’ll get to that in a moment.”

Cliff! The crew had been evasive about him and his team, but they did say the “Cliff team” seemed healthy and still free—quite a tribute, they said, considering. She had thought to shooting back, Considering how we got snapped up right away?—but didn’t.

“Point is, what can we expect from them?”

“I think they want to control this, keep us around—preferably, in a nice, spacious prison like the low-grav one we were stuck in—while they figure out who we are, and if they can use us.”

“Use us? For what?

“Maybe make their big whirling machine work better? New tech?—though it’s hard to believe we could tell them anything. They built this—”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, they run it, anyway. It must be really old. Maybe somebody else built it? The big one who interrogated us, Memor, was evasive on that.”

He frowned. “Hiding something they don’t want outsiders to know?”

“Yes, it’s a puzzle. Or maybe a really ancient mystery. I wonder if even the Folk don’t know where the Bowl really comes from. They do know the terrain, though. There are life-forms that dazzle any biologist, some I couldn’t figure out at all. Cliff must be in heaven—he likes taxonomy. I filled up my digital photo files keeping track of the plants and weird animals. Some are bizarre, and others are kind of like Earthside, but changed. Larger, for one thing.”

“Because the grav is less, point eight?”

She nodded. “That, yes. Could also be the island effect.”

“Which is?…”

“We see it Earthside. Small islands have smaller animals. The last mammoths lived on Siberian islands, the smallest of their kind because the resource base is less.”

“So … continents here are sure bigger. Some are larger than Earth. So are oceans—seas, I guess we should call them, they’re shallow. I’ve studied them in close-up scan while you were down there.” Redwing brightened. Here was something he knew and Beth didn’t. He flashed pictures on the wall and she realized he had cooked up a slide show. He went through it eagerly, describing how and where he had found the images. He and Karl had worked up a Bowl version of longitude and latitude. Numbers marked each slide.

“So much open territory! Forests as big as North America, not a town anywhere. But cities the size of countries back home—hell, bigger than our continents. I’d sure as hell like to know who made it, and how.”

Beth nodded. It had been an impressive show. “The Folk may have built it, or know who did. They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen—think of elephant-sized, two feet and a heavy tail, big eyes and mouths—and feathers they flutter around all the time, like it’s some kind of coded fan dance.”

He grunted and frowned, which she took as encouragement. She knew she had to write a report, but telling it helped shape the story. Enthusiasm began to steal into her voice. “They examined Tananareve for long times in a big machine that seemed, she said, to read everything in her body. Plus her mind, somehow. She could feel tingling all over her, sensations like quiet little sparks, she said. There were plenty of other smart aliens around, most with handlike things that Earth never evolved—a sort of wriggly tentacle that split out into feelers, like you might see on an octopus that could make tools. They worked for the honcho—the big Folk creature in charge, named Memor. Terrifying thing, when it loomed over you, huffing hot smelly air in your face. Memor was in charge, all right. Once I saw it—her, whatever—eat something that was still alive, a kind of crunchy armadillo the size of a pony. It bellowed as she chewed it up. Disgusting! But sights like that were just getting started—”

Redwing gave her a concerned look. “Um, if you could…”

“Sorry, once I get started—okay. It’ll be in my report.”

“Everything you recall. Anything could be vital; we just don’t know enough.”

Beth nodded. It had all come rushing out, the pent-up emotions and thoughts of months on the ground, every day tense and wearing.… She took a deep breath. “Anyway. This Memor seemed to read Tananareve and ask questions about how her mind worked, what she thought of, how it felt to think—odd stuff.”

Redwing pursed his lips and looked down at the vast clouds coasting by far below. His wall screen amped the image to the max, so they both watched huge purple cloud-anvils towering over a seemingly endless sea. There were sand bars the size of the Rockies lounging in the sea’s green shallows, like tan punctuation marks. Vegetation dotted them, and one dot she judged to be the size of Texas.

She had learned to let him have his silences, as he let her experience settle in with all the rest of what he knew. Beth sucked in the dry ship air and tried to recall the cloying thick, aromatic atmosphere they had wondered about, alien air they called it because of the syrupy way it filled your lungs with a heavy, cloying sweetness unlike any flower she had ever known. The smell was still on some of her carry-gear. Up here, in dry antiseptic rooms, she sniffed it and liked the aroma and body. Breathing it in, she felt something like nostalgia.

Redwing nodded as if making a decision. “You can review Cliff’s messages—some text, some voice. Short, to the point. Don’t be alarmed by them. He had not much time to report in. Reception is bad, we should have sent you down with more robust comm.”

“Our good comm gear was in the landers.”

“Of course. That’s how the Folk found out our operating frequencies, broadband patterns, encryption. For the landers and for the hand comms, too, damn it. So he and you could get through only a short while, then the Folk autoscreens went up and it was all fuzz.”

“Look, Cap’n, we had no way of knowing—”

“I should’ve been more cautious.” He shook his head abruptly, face pinched. “I used the landing protocols we rehearsed Earthside—simple stuff for an uninhabited planet. No defensive measures. I went by rote, when I should have been wary of anything like this—an impossible machine churning through space, managing its own star to—”

He broke off, she saw, knowing he shouldn’t vent his inner doubts to officers or crew. Yet it helped him, she was sure, and he needed it. A man like Redwing had spent his life wanting authority, getting some, then some more, all the time finding out how to make it work, how to move up a ladder everybody wanted to climb. Nobody had a captaincy forced on them. Nobody told them it meant keeping yourself to yourself for long years and decades and, for starships, the rest of your life.

He swiveled his chair away from the constant landscape sliding by and looked at her with an expression made rigid by force of will. “Cliff described a mass slaughter. He was hurt—not too bad, but he took days to even be able to call in. Wounds, fever, the cruds.”

“We had the cruds a lot of the time,” she said to be saying something, keep him from lapsing into a monologue again. This captain needs help. But then we all do.

“I got reports just this watch. From Cliff, pretty noisy. The Folk killed a whole damn city. Some kind of living blimp—he sent two pictures, hard to believe even then. And Howard … died.”

“Oh no. He was—”

“Always thought he was a little too inquisitive, couldn’t move fast—I down-wrote him in an operations report during crew training, but Command ignored me. He didn’t come into a shelter fast enough, Cliff said. Got burned with a weapon tuned to our nervous system. Heats up the skin some, overloads the neurological system—fries it, really. Pain like he’d never felt before, Cliff said.”

It was Beth’s turn to look away. “We had it easy.”