Redwing said quietly, “So the smart coins tell us we have some room to maneuver. Good indeed.”

Smiles all round. Fred nodded enthusiastically.

A new flight deck officer Beth didn’t know well, one of the recent revivals, came into the mess. “Captain, we’re getting a tightbeam laser signal from the Bowl. Did a translation in digital format. It’s in Anglish. Visual’s cutting in and out. But we can tell who it is—it’s Tananareve.”

TWENTY-THREE

As he sat waiting for the signal to stabilize, Redwing recalled the hammering noise that worked through the ship’s plates in the trial run, as acoustics bled from the ramscoop magnetic fields into the marrow of their bones. At the departure reception, a president of one of the major ship builders said lightly of the din, “To me, it’s the sound of the cash register.” It had been a major achievement not to deck him right there.

And even better later, when the medical teams were putting him under, to reflect that when he next opened his eyes, the ship builder would be dust.

Now the background rattles and pops and long rolling strums were second nature. He listened all the same, as a captain should. Now he heard a crackling and a carrier hum. Then “—hope this gets through.”

To Redwing, Tananareve’s smoke-and-whiskey voice said she had been through a lot, but the timbre of it spoke of her resolution. The screen was blank, but audio came with little pips and murmurs in the background, perhaps static, perhaps the background noise of some alien place.

“How goes it?” he said.

After a delay of only five or six seconds, her shaky voice answered carefully, “It goes.”

Then she coughed. “They … they here want me to talk to you about cooperating on a message. You’ve seen the feed from Glory, right?”

He saw a bottom-screen crawl line from the bridge comm system say they had picked up the full feed. The screen flickered, and then suddenly an image of Tananareve snapped into full color view. Against a black rock background, she looked haggard and pale but her eyes flashed with flinty energy. Nothing more in view. Her clothes were the field-issue pants, shirt, and jacket she had gone down in, looking beat up and patched. She also wore an odd gray shawl around neck and shoulders. There was dirt on the left side of her jaw and scratches along the neck. Overall she looked worn down.

“Yes, we have. Very odd,” Redwing said. Best to be guarded. He knew her captors were listening and wished one would step into view. He hungered for a feel of what these aliens were like.

“The Folk, these aliens call themselves, they want to work, to, uh, collaborate with us—with you, Captain—on making a message. Something to send to Glory.” Her eyebrows rose on you, and Redwing wondered what that meant.

Something in her voice had roughened, maybe from being in the field so long. It was Anglish with the corners knocked off. She laughed suddenly. “The civilization at Glory, they seem to think we’re running the Bowl. My, um, mentors, they want to leave it that way. Keep themselves in the shadows, at least until they know something about Glory. But they need our help for that.”

“Outstanding. What do they want to say to the Glory Hounds?”

“Captain, they’re still fighting about that. They’ll have to talk to us first.”

“That’s it? What about Cliff’s team?”

He could see conflict flicker in her face. So could Beth and Karl, sitting behind him, judging from the way they stirred in their seats. They were in Redwing’s cabin because he wanted to keep this first transmission from the aliens, after months of silence, from the rest of the crew. It was always a bad idea to let crew see policy being made, especially if it was on the fly, as this might have to be. “I … don’t know anything … about that.”

Her hesitations told more than the words. She was probably trying not to let the Folk know how much she knew. Then, to confirm his hunch, she very carefully gave him a wink with her left eye. Left: something wrong. A common code in visual reporting, all across the Fleet. Right meant things were right but more was to be said.

“So why don’t they let Cliff’s team go? And you?”

Hesitation, a side glance at whatever was directing her. “They need me as translator.…”

“And Cliff’s team?”

“And as for Cliff, they don’t know where he is.” A right-eye wink this time. What could that mean? That the Folk knew something but not enough to use?

“So if we work with them on a Glory message, what do we get?” It was time, he judged, to put something on the table. Let them go first.

“You are all welcome down here. There is plenty for us.” She said this straight, no inflection, staring straight at the camera as if this were a rehearsed line.

“Thanks, but mostly we want supplies for the ship. And information.”

“I believe they want to help with ship repairs.” Again the straight stare, no eye movement.

“We don’t need repair. We figured out that we’d been fighting their jet backwash for a century. Once we’re full up on ship stores, we’ll be on our way.”

For the first time, she showed a darting, skeptical squint of the eyes. “That isn’t what they have in mind.”

“Tell them we will exchange delegates, perhaps. We can’t house more than one or two—”

“They want you, Captain, for negotiations in person.”

“Not until they release you and Cliff’s people. They’ve been in the field a long time, need medical and some R and R. You, too, Tananareve.”

“I believe they have something more … lasting … in mind.”

“Such as?”

“They mentioned a generation or two. Enough time. They say, for species to get to know each other.”

“I’m a ship officer with orders to carry out. I’m conveying colonists to Glory and cannot change mission.”

Hesitation, side look, pursed lips. “I … gather they like to sort of collect species, to live here, to work with them.”

“I can’t spare people. Colonizing a whole planet takes teams, and they’re barely big enough as it is. Cut our numbers and then downstream both halves—those we left with you, and those we took—would get inbred.”

A pause, her eyes dancing, looking off to the side. “They … they say they find us very interesting.” The flat way she said it told him that she was also not saying a lot, and he would have to guess it. But what?

There came a sudden voice, swift chippering sounds underlaid by deep notes, as if someone was speaking in two tones at once. Redwing thought it was the first truly alien thing in this transmission—speech built like a symphony, with several elements rendering part of the message in different sliding tones, sometimes highs and lows scampering over each other. Some notes rang hollow, others full. Yet all this was also oddly resonant, as if the play of words—if the screeches, grunts, trills, and mutters were that at all—made a larger work of greater scale.

He really wanted to see who made that voice. The six-second delay was driving him nuts.

She considered for a moment, looking off camera, and then said slowly, “They welcome us with … total hospitality. We can live here. They will assign a huge territory to us and help us set up a civilization comparable to—” She paused. “—well, what we had Earthside.”

“Um,” Redwing said, keeping his face blank.

“And … from what I’ve seen, there are rules to keep this whole big habitat working. They impose … order. They’re very, uh, firm about that. Make a mistake here, and you could endanger the whole place.”

“Like any spaceship,” Redwing said. “Open a hatch the wrong way, and you die. Maybe everybody in crew dies.”

She nodded and her eyes slid briefly to her left, then back. “I think so. They do say we should know for the long run that there are generous upper limits on population. We could have territory bigger than Earth itself. Really, we could choose what part of this whole huge thing we wanted. I’d guess we’d probably want to be on the Great Plain, where it’s point eight gravs and pretty calm, I gather.”