“How long?”

“I don’t know. But to make something like this—you have to have some large-scale ambition in mind.”

Redwing looked skeptical. “Touring the galaxy?”

“While you get a permanent suntan, yes.” Karl grinned. “And never get cold.”

Redwing nodded. “Never get cold—maybe a motive? Not just a small thing like going interstellar, but never leaving your home?”

Karl thought awhile and Redwing let him. When Karl spoke, it was a whisper. “Taking a whole culture, a world, so many species … on a ride that could last forever. Not just colonizing some planet. An eternal voyage. That’s got to be it.”

Redwing shrugged. “Over millions of years, your own species has got to change—maybe go extinct.”

“The whole thing will go unstable if you don’t have somebody to do the tweaks, keep watch, fix accidents.”

“For sure. Then there’s cultural change. But you can’t let the society decide the whole Bowl experiment is a bad idea. Then you die!”

Karl hadn’t thought this way. Engineers don’t, he mused, and then recalled that his three degrees were in electrical, mechanical, and astroengineering. Okay, usually. “Look, Karl. A few hundred years ago, we called people savages because they pierced their ears, ballooned their lips, wore trinkets in their nose, cut their hair so it looked wild or had no hair at all. They did weird stuff, had strange noisy dances and rites, and tattooed their bodies. Then, when I was growing up, everybody called that stuff hip and fashionable.”

“Uh, so?”

The lands below were back to mountains and seas—beautiful expanses, larger than the whole Earth–Moon system. Redwing never tired of it all.… “We can take cultural change, even stuff that comes back from our ancestors and looks odd. But we’re expanding, moving out into the stars.”

“Well, sure.”

“And so are the Folk. I guess they can take tattoos. It’s fashion, which means it’s over by the time people like us even hear about it. But I doubt they can take big new religions or political mobs that want to, say, take over piloting this contraption. They can’t allow that.”

Karl got it. He nodded eagerly. “And we thought we knew what conservative meant.”

“They can’t risk the wrong kind of change. And that’s exactly what we new-kid-on-the-block humans represent.”

PART V

MIRROR FLOWERS

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

—MARK TWAIN

SEVENTEEN

Cliff and his party followed Quert at an easy, loping pace. The lower gravity made long strides easy, but the humans could not match the ease of the Sil’s fluid grace. There was no ground transport except the Sil city subway, but that had been damaged, too. Quert said it was intermittent and unreliable, “Smoke go in there. And … some say … be worse things.”

They made their way beyond the ruined Sil city and broke into open woodlands. It was a relief to suck in soft, moist air and just move, escape. No one looked back.

They paused on a short hill and Cliff could not resist a last perspective on the blasted landscape. Its once-proud ramparts and arches, its residential precincts, its lofty spires of what might have been elegant churches—all burned or hammered down to rubble. The Folk had no mercy. Yet he could see rising from rubble the tan buildings they had watched self-forming with a quiet, eternal energy. Seen at a distance, the fresh shoots of new life moved like stop-motion videos, eager plants rising to begin anew a city that surely, in the immense history of the Bowl, had been rebuilt myriad times. Cliff sighed and clasped Irma to his side. “It’s coming back. Slow but steady.”

“This place was made to replace itself. A technology that counts on having to regenerate. I wonder what it runs on.”

“Solar energy, reprocessed waste—did you see that molecular printer Quert used to make us your new carry-pack?”

She nodded and shrugged the new pack, easing the straps. “Great, some kind of light composite stuff. Made a molecule at a time, Quert said. It’s built exactly like the old busted one. Minus the broken frame, from when I fell down.”

Cliff shrugged. “If you hadn’t been down, that flame beam would’ve burned you.”

“Yeah, lucky break.” She puffed her overhanging hair back from her eyes, a classic gesture of bemused frustration. “Dumb luck. Poor old Howard ran out of luck.”

“Damn shame. He was always getting hurt, breaking something, even getting lost to go pee.”

“Some people are like that. Crew selection was by Fleet merits, y’know—not backpack experience. Résumés don’t account for plain old bad luck that keeps coming back.”

“Sure ’nuff—a big mistake. Next starship I’m on, I’ll remember that.”

She laughed and punched him in the arm, which drew sidelong glances from Terry and Aybe. Even Quert noticed. Well, let ’em, Cliff thought. Not like it’s been a lot of fun lately.

Then they pressed on, turning their backs on the burgeoning city that would live again.

Quert led the way, with other Sil flanking them. They all carried weapons, long slim tube launchers. Their faces were grim, focused, and they did not seem to tire.

Relentless sunlight streamed down through the symphonic play of ivory clouds. Tall and cottony, they were so vast that parts of them were laced through with blue tinges of moist anvils. Clouds as anthologies: the anvils hanging in the soft mist of larger puffballs, lightning sheeting across denser, purple knots, all of it like separate cities of the sky, tapering away into the far heights. Here and there clots condensed out, their understories fading into rainfalls—sheets of pale blue falling great distances, then absorbed back into the air before ever striking the Bowl.

Cliff said to Irma and Aybe, “Relax into tourist mode,” and they all chuckled, not because it was funny but because everyone needed an excuse to smile. They came into a flash of green, almost pornographically abundant in the smoky, almost rotting aroma of turned black earth, rains sweating down from passing squalls, air thickened with rich purpose. A vehicle purred past and from its big tailpipe a lush pale blue cloud gushed. Irma drew in a breath of it and said, “You can almost smell dinosaurs in that. It smells like a fossil fuel.”

Aybe sniffed. “Probably ethanol, but it sure smells rich.”

None of them had actually ever smelled the exhaust of a true oil burner, on an Earthside that was scrupulous about emissions. Only jet airplanes using turbines rated fossil fuel use, back when SunSeeker left the solar system. Cliff wondered if by now Earthside biotech had engineered anything like the skyfish here, living beasts that could float and fight.

He doubted it. What biological substrate could they start with to develop such bizarre forms? That made him consider how the Folk had ever engineered their skyfish. From some airborne floaters, found on some planet where thick air and light gravity made that an optimal path? Big, slow, made invulnerable by its size, like elephants or whales or a brontosaurus? This place is like a museum of other life-forms, he thought, but one that keeps evolving. Maybe that was part of the point of building the Bowl itself? An ongoing, moving experiment with more room than a million planets?

They entered a broad plain of short grass, and there was a trampled, much-traveled track stretching into the hazy distance. Straight up in the air, though, momentary openings between the towering clouds gave a dim vision of the Bowl hanging in a pale eggshell blue sky. Cliff watched the watery vision of huge lands shimmer, a vision from all the way across this solar system. Only it’s not any solar system we ever envisioned, he thought. More like a huge contraption made of a system’s parts. Back on SunSeeker before they came down, Fred the engineer type had estimated the Bowl’s mass, and got more than Jupiter, more probably than there was in the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. Somebody had scavenged an entire expanse of space, maybe all the worlds that circled Wickramsingh’s Star, to make this thing.