“Y’know,” Aybe said, “it’s kind of reassuring that in this incredible place, they’re making flanges and hex joints, pressure sleeves and shafts with ball joints.”

“Engineering,” Terry said, “is a universal.”

Some of the snake teams were working now on a large, intricate wall. They worked with a fevered energy, clacking and hissing to each other and slithering adroitly over copper arrays. This wall lay behind where the humans watched the dim landscape of the hull. Hull ice was thick here, and vacuum flowers lapped against the transparent portal. Cliff touched the window and had to snatch his hand away at a sudden sharp pain. He feared it was so cold, his fingers would freeze to it. Quert had said there were multiple vacuum layers in these transparent walls, but the cutting cold came through.

“That’s it,” Aybe said, “these corridors are below the mirror zone. We’re at the edge of a big mirror area, too. This whole section of the Bowl must be chilly.”

It seemed so. So the land beyond was extremely cold, dotted with rock that formed roofs over areas of gray ice steeped in dark. Following Quert’s advice, Irma played her laser beam, set on dispersed mode, into those dark spaces. In this flashlight mode, they were surprised to see odd, ivory-colored things moving with agonizing slowness.

Aybe asked what these were. “On our way here we saw bizarre life-forms feeding on ice, but those—”

Irma said, “Those slow creatures with mandibles and eyestalks, yes—like lobsters, but living in high vacuum and low temperatures.”

Terry eyed the moving gray things. “These shapes are amorphous. More like moving fluids.”

“Ice life,” Quert said. “Kin to ice minds.”

Irma said, “So, ah … You brought us here to…”

Quert let the silence lengthen, then said, “Sil want speak.”

“To…?”

“Ice minds.”

“What can we do?” Irma asked.

“Ice minds speak to you.” Quert made eye-moves that might imply hope or expectation; it was still hard to tell.

“Won’t they speak to you?” Terry asked.

“Not speak Adopted.”

Irma said, “You mean, species brought onboard the Bowl? Why not?”

“Ice minds old. Want only new.”

“Y’know, those blobs in the shadows are moving, together. Toward us,” Aybe said.

“Watchers,” Quert said. “Allied with ice minds.”

Cliff said, “So you were ignored before—,” and saw that now the vacuum flowers were opening and turning. “Why … why are those doing—?”

Quert gestured at the vacuum flowers that abandoned their slow sweep of the sky, dutifully tracking nearby stars for their starlight. They rotated on their pivot roots toward this transparent wall.

The company fell silent as the flowers began to open fully, from their tight paraboloid shapes that focused sunlight on their inner chemistry. Slowly they nosed toward the wall where humans and Sil watched. As they did so, they blossomed into broad white expanses, each several meters across.

“They’re really large,” Irma said. “Still hard to imagine, plants that can live in vacuum, and bring in starlight from over a large area. To feed … Quert, did you mean these flowers provide energy for the whole biosphere living out there, on the hull?

Quert simply gave eye-signals, apparently a “yes.” Then the Sil said, “Commanded by cold minds,” and would say no more.

The thin glow of the jet brimmed above the horizon here, and some flowers seemed focused permanently on that. It seemed an unlikely source of much energy, for the plasma was recombining and emitting soft tones in blue and red. On the other hand, that was steady though weak and some flowers had perhaps evolved to harvest even such dim energies.

They were all transfixed as the radiators spread open and completed their pivot toward the humans. There was silence broken only by the faint sound of air circulating, as the field of flowers—Cliff swung his head around to count over a hundred within view—then began to pulse with a gray glow. Behind the flower field the stars still wheeled, cutting arcs in the black. The humans stood mutely watching, their heads tilted up to see the spreading flowers, who in turn clung to the rotating hull. The gray glow built slowly, the whole flower display assuming a shape like a giant circle flecked with light, staring at them. Cliff felt a chill wash over his skin that was not from the temperature. This is truly alien.…

A pattern began to emerge. In the dim light their eyes had adjusted, and so the brighter flower circles made blotchy spots while the darker flowers accented a contrast … and the entire array began to form a speckled image.…

A picture came into view. Irma gasped. “It’s Beth’s face—again!”

The picture was crude because there were fewer pixels to be had from the flowers, but still Cliff found it unsettling. He gazed at the cartoon of Beth Marble while others talked on. Finally he said, “Reasonably close, too. Whoever commands these vacuum flowers knows the method they used with the mirror zones. They’re using this to get our attention.”

Quert gave a rustle of agreement. “Ice minds.”

“At least her lips aren’t moving,” Terry said. “That gave me the creeps.”

“So … no message,” Aybe said. “Just a calling card.”

Quert looked around and pointed to the wall behind them. The snake team was still working, this time with some armatures like waldoes. They had somehow extruded a flat tank from the wall, and snakelike machine arms were completing it. This was not repair but construction. They worked by coaxing features from a substrate that simmered with flashes of orange light. The whole working team was laboring with new members. A big lizardlike thing of crusted hide had four tentacles, each of which alone was larger than a finger snake, fissioning into more small ones that snakes did not have. Cliff watched one use fingernails, too, that deformed into helical screwdrivers, snub pliers, a small hammer. It was trimming away and adjusting features freshly drawn from the wall. Cliff glanced back at the Beth portrait, still frozen in a smile. When he turned, the work team was slithering away across the wall, as the central oval they left brimmed with orange glows.

Letters and then words seemed to drift to the surface of the wall, as if bubbling up from deep ocean water.

“It’s Anglish,” Terry said. “How do they know?”

“Ice minds,” Quert said. Across the Sil’s face—and across those of the other Sil with them, who had been quiet all along—the skin stretched and warped, framing the eyes. Did this mean joy? Fear? Impossible to tell. But there were no other signs of concern in the body, which remained still.

The script ran slowly.

We have ranged the Deep and kept history near.

We are not of you carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and light.

We ride here to preserve the greatness you have found now.

Long ago we shaped this traveling structure, when the warm folk came to us from deep within the whirlpools that girdled our suns. The warm folk gave us tools to build large. Some of us stayed among the comets, but we here have clung to the Bowl. We live through eons of time, and so have seen the many thousands of faces intelligence can assume. We dealt with them in turn. We are the Bowl memory.

Irma said, “This looks like a prepared lecture.”

Aybe nodded. “Must be. They’ve used it before. I guess if there are thousands of years between passes nearby other stars, you work up an all-purpose greeting.”

Terry smiled. “Boilerplate, huh? This doesn’t look like a greeting, though. More of an announcement, I’d say.”

“Intended to awe, yep,” Cliff said.

“As if this place didn’t impress us enough? Their Anglish is good,” Irma said. “They must have access to the Folk’s experience. But are we missing a point? These—Ice Minds—claim they built the Bowl.”

“Shaped it. Designed it, maybe,” Terry corrected her. “After intelligent warm life found them. After they ranged through the solar system and then the planets of this other little companion sun, after they worked their way into … would you say a mutual Oort cloud? And found these forests of supercold life. And the Ice Minds used them for engineering.”