Karl called to them, “Go left at the condenser bank. They’re cylindrical drums with oil valves on the upper side, colored yellow. Then spin open the double diode—they’re the blue plates.”

The Maintenance Artilect took this from Karl’s mike and translated it into the sliding vowels and clipped sharp notes that made up the finger snake language. On the screen they both watched the snakes make the right moves. They each had a tool harness that they plucked small instruments from. With these they deftly inserted, turned, levered, and adjusted their way through one task after another, with speeds almost impossible to follow. The interior cameras were tiny light pipes and gave barely enough definition to make this work. All the while, the ship hummed on and occasional thumps and surges hampered the work. SunSeeker’s magscoop was operating close to its shutdown threshold already, and repairs while operating were the bane of all ships—but it had to be done.

Beth was out of her depth here—hell, I’m a field biologist!—but regs said nobody worked alone on ship maintenance, ever. Flight deck officers were full up, conning SunSeeker as close in to the Bowl’s atmosphere levels as they could, while still grabbing enough plasma from the star as they could. Just maintaining flight trajectories while watching for bogies was burning up all their attention.

Beyond tending to the hydroponics, certifying the air content, and helping turn algae into edible insects and porridge, Beth had nothing more to do. She helped a little with the preliminary “fault tree” analysis of this maintenance run, but that meant mostly giving instructions to the Artilect, which plainly knew far more than she did about what she was supposed to be doing. So she used a wise saying she’d learned from Cliff: Never pass up a chance to shut up.

Which was harder to do than she had thought. “Uh, can I help?” she asked for maybe the eighteenth time.

“No, I got it.” Kurt never took his eyes from the screens, and his headphones whispered constantly with updates from the Artilect. “Going well.”

Man of few words, bless him. At least Karl didn’t ask her over and over about living on the Bowl, like the rest of the watch crew.

The snakes wriggled some more, did scrub procedures on some parts, and with surprising speed got a discharge capacitor line back up to specs—part of the booster system that allowed them to amp their magscoop when needed. “Okay,” Kurt said, “come on back out. You guys need a break.”

The snakes dutifully turned and started on their tortured way back out of the engine labyrinths. “Amazing what they can do,” Kurt said, nodding his head. “Makes me wonder how we got by without them.”

“Barely,” Beth said.

“You’re bio, how did smart snakes ever evolve? They sure didn’t Earthside.”

“Something about their home world, one of them said. It had plate tectonics gone wild, crazy surface weather, storms that would take the paint off metal. So smart life stayed underground.”

“How about earthquakes? Volcanoes?”

“Their world had ‘bands of furious turmoil,’ they said—their language has considerable poetic power. Their landmasses butt against each other, kind of like Earth, with its baseball seam wrapping around the globe. Stay away from those, and life underground is somewhat easier, they learned. Where are you from?”

“Gross Deutschland. You?”

“Everyplace, mostly away from California—after the Collapse, we had plenty of migrants from there.”

“Okay, snakes got smart, but mein Gott they are wonders at handling mechanics.”

Beth grinned. “Look, we don’t even know why we’re relatively hairless, compared with the other apes. Why we walk on two legs and can outrun anything over distance. Why we’re so damn good at mathematics, at music—you name it. So understanding where an alien species came from is hopeless.”

The finger snakes came wriggling out of the narrow cap passage into the drive’s innards. Ordinarily she and Kurt would’ve used smart cables to get in there, running them with a control panel. To her astonishment, the snakes broke into a high, wailing song—chip chip, duooo, rang rang, chip, duoo duoo. Not entirely unpleasant, either. At least it did not last long. Then they formed a “wriggle dance” as Redwing called it, arcing over each other and forming intricate curves that included bobbing in and out of the circle, rolling over and doubling up to make O’s, then back into the throng—still singing, though less shrill. They finally ended up standing halfway erect on their muscular tails, their fingers wriggling at the dumbstruck humans in comradeship—or so whispered the Artilect in Karl’s ear.

Then, with good-bye hails, they went off to eat in the algae pits, where a repast cooked up by Beth earlier awaited.

Karl said, “They’re so coordinated. As if it was completely natural for them.”

“You mean instead of how humans do it—drill, train, discipline, drill some more?”

“Pretty much. The snakes—look at them, off to their home in the biospace. All together, chattering … Some species are better at collaboration than we are. How come?”

“We’re pretty new at it. About two hundred fifty thousand years ago Earthside, group hunting became more successful than individual hunting. That started the logic of shared profits and risks. Penalties kept alpha males from dominating. There emerged a kind of inverted eugenics: elimination of the strong, if they abuse power. And the cooperators won out.”

“Wow, you know this stuff. It’ll be fun seeing you work out all the aliens on the Bowl.”

Beth opened her mouth to say something modest but … he’d brought up what she’d already missed. Back onboard, but dreaming at nights of the Bowl. “Uh, yes. Look, it’s time for that self-cook in the mess,” she said.

*   *   *

Fred was talking while he pounded a wad of bread dough. Physical work opened him as well as anyone could, so Beth tried to pay attention. “I kept wondering, y’know. The Bowl map shows Earth as of the Jurassic period, when all of the biggest dinosaurs emerged. Y’know, apatosaurs and so forth. I think I finally have the sequence right.”

Beth nodded while she did her own kitchen work. He slammed the dough down and punched it for punctuation. “A variety of intelligent dinosaurs emerged first. Oof! They must have been carnivores. They invented herding. Uh! For millions of years they must have been breeding meat animals for size. Ahh!”

He looked around and realized that nobody was listening except Beth. “You mean all those theories about dino evolution are wrong?” This was interesting to her but apparently not to the others. The crowded kitchen buzzed with low conversation as they worked on aspects of dinner. Fred’s jaw closed with a snap. She knew the pattern—if people didn’t listen, he didn’t talk.

Karl handed Beth a handful of roasted crickets that reeked of garlic. “Try these. Crunchy.” He had pitched in with the cooking before she even got to the ship’s mess.

“Yum,” she said. Next came a basket of aromatic wax worms ready to cook. She tossed aside black ones: that meant necrosis. “They go bad fast; hell, I harvested them two hours ago,” she apologized. “The rest are pupating—just right.” Deftly she peeled back their cocoons and tossed them into the electric wok.

Captain Redwing came in and watched, standing straight and tall, smacking his lips slightly. “Wax moth larvae, a gourmet favorite.” The crew laughed, because he always pretended to like the food in the mess, no matter how implausible that was. Or else he ate alone in his cabin. After their last culinary disaster, a motley mashed-up dish everyone disliked and called Stew in Hell, he went on dry rations alone.

Karl turned and swept brown roasted crickets up, salted them—salt was easy to extract from the recycler—and with head tilted back, trickled them into his mouth. “How come when you have less to eat, it tastes better?”