The first sentient Kahallans used their world’s temperature and metallic difference between the core and the upper mantle as their thermodynamic driver. Along slithering seams of flowing lava, moving with aching slowness, they learned to track the shifting heat patterns. Predicting these was even better. Among the metal ions in their crystalline rhomboids, variations made their own order. Slow, slow and strange, reproduction of patterns followed. Some worked and so persisted. When shifting crystalline lattices held the basic data of early sentience, evolution’s hammer could find its anvil—much like bits encoded in silicon by humans’ computing chips, fresh intelligences arose without benefit of the bio world.

Size conferred advantages in energy harvesting, so the Kahalla grew ever larger, over working agonies of billions of years. They learned to communicate through acoustic waves amid the strata. Social evolution drove the geological, just as they had driven the biological.

Time stretched on. There was plenty of it.

As their world’s core cooled, the Kahalla migrated from near the core and toward the surface, for their planet was slowly spiraling toward its sun, its barren rocky surface cracking with the warming—a new source of nourishment. Geological energy was like the biological—diffuse, persistent. Driven by gradients, not logic. Yet it sifted through patterns and choices.

Ages passed. Finally the early Kahalla extruded themselves onto the plains festering with swarming heat, simmering beneath a glowering orange sky that was mostly now the skin of their star. Bio life had never arisen here, but now persistently the Kahalla colonized the stark black fields graced by rivers of smoldering lava. Great strange sagas of conquest and failure played out across smoldering landscapes. Songs worthy of immortality sang across blistered lands and blighted great monuments.

Civilizations faded as tidal forces forced the planet nearer its star, ever nearer beneath a flowering culture—and soon the Kahalla saw their fatal trap.

With their gravid slow slides of silicate, they could not migrate away from the surface fast enough to evade the heat. It lanced down from a star that swept the Kahalla with furious particle storms and bristling plasma. They retreated. Not fast enough. And ahead, their silicate minds knew, lay a great brutal force. They would soon enough reach the limit where tidal stretching could wrench and wrest apart their entire world.

Their society, ponderous and unimaginative, began to disintegrate. Their muted culture was largely a society of songs—purling out through the stacked geological layers, soaring operas of driven love and inevitable death. Like all life in its long run, it strove to understand itself and so perhaps its universe.

Yet some had fashioned instruments to survey their lands, their swarming sultry skies—and caught a glimmer of the Bowl in a momentarily clear sky. The Bowl had ventured in without fear of disrupting life-bearing worlds, for there were none—it thought. It coasted clear and sure in a long hyperbolic orbit. The Bowl was a sudden beckoning promise to those slow and solid and doomed.

Somehow the Kahalla sent a signal to the Bowl. It was of long wavelength and thus carried low meaning, A slow song. Yet over time their signal persisted, and was heard.

An expedition of robots answered—the spawn of a crafter species that stubbornly managed the near-Bowl transport and mass harvesting. Much conversation came and went and came again. It became with gravid grace a slow sliding talk across barriers of time and mind and much else.

Yet still. These robots retrieved the essence of the Kahalla intelligence—slabs of silicate, laced with evolved strands of impurities, all serving as a computational matrix.

So the robots brought the Kahalla mind to the Bowl in crystalline crucibles. It was a great act of graceful tribute, ordered by the least likely magistrates of all—the Ice Minds. So did the very cold save the very hot from utter extinction.

“And this is the only one?” Cliff asked Quert. The droning long chant was still pealing on. And on. Bass thuds and hollow tones spoke wruuunggg laddduuutt eeeillooonnnggghh.

“It alone stands for all the Kahalla now.”

Cliff could sense the majesty of it as he watched the great vibrating rock, framed against cottony clouds that rushed across the sky. “How does it live?”

“The sun lights those”—an eye-shrug toward the hills—“and tech condenses the heat, feeds the Kahalla crystals.”

“So it’s like an enormous, living museum exhibit,” Irma said.

“Bowl preserves. Without, life-forms die.”

“All life-forms?” she asked.

“Must be.”

Cliff turned to watch the humanoids who had taken the name of this mournful singing stone and saw that the Kahalla’s long hours of chant had done its work. The humanoids lay sprawled in deep slumber.

“Song goes to their souls,” Quert said.

“You knew it would?” Aybe whispered.

“Heard it did. Only chance.” Quert turned and gave them a comical eye-shrug. Then Quert bowed and gestured to them all. “Silent go.”

The long aaahhhhmmmm loohgeree oojahhaaa habbbiiitaaa pealed on. It was great and strange and still impossible to fathom.

They left quietly. They were tired, but the long notes drove them forward. Somehow the place now smelled ancient and timeworn without question. The very scented air told them this without instruction.

Cliff and Irma and Aybe and Terry—they were all that was left now, and they had to move. The constant sun slanted pale yellow through high sheets as they trundled on with the Sil forming a crescent escort around them. He saw rainbow clouds hovering in the vapor over their laboring heads. Their crescents spoke bold colors shimmering through the sky’s firm radiance.

His team was shambling on now, sweaty and confused, truly tired in the way he had learned to recognize. Heads sagged, feet dragged, words slurred. The alien song droning on from far behind them would never end, he saw, down through however many corridors of ruin and turbulence that song needed. They were beautiful stretched songs telling of sad histories that no one would ever quite know. There would be scholars of it somehow in the long run, but they would carve off only a sheet of it and not know it entire. Cliff looked back once as they neared a stand of zigzag trees, a whole sweeping forest waving in the moment’s breeze, and saw that the round eye was still watching them.

It never blinked. They went on.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Captain Redwing started crisp and sharp, fresh from coffee, with the same questions he always used when taking staff through the planning stages of a new, untried operation. Standard questions, but always able to surprise.

They had walked through Karl’s simulations and Ayaan Ali’s trajectory analysis. The Specialty Artilects had put their own stamp upon the general plan, though as always they did not make judgments beyond a probability analysis. Their deep problem, Redwing thought, was that they were so much like human reason with far better data—and yet so forever uncertain.

The worst way of reviewing options was to let people make speeches. Questions shook them up, made them come forth.

He looked at the entire assembled crew around the main deck table. “First question: What could we be missing?”

Karl Lebanon answered. “Their defenses.”

Fred Ojama said, “Ayaan Ali and I did a depth scan for those. Nothing obvious, like the gamma ray laser.”

Beth Marble set her mouth at a skeptical slant. “They could launch craft against you from anywhere.”

Petty Officer Jam scowled. “I’ve seen curiously few flights above their atmosphere envelope. They don’t seem to launch into space often.”

Clare Conway said, “Speaking as copilot, the obvious way to launch is to just pop a craft out on the hull side. It’s moving at hundreds of klicks a second right away, so you zoom around the rim. Come at us from that angle.”