“Which is?” Beth was still softly defiant. Her eyes glowed.

“Getting to Glory. Those are our mission orders. We’re carrying humanity to the stars. Beginning a process that ensures our species immortality.” They had all heard these terms, but maybe they needed to be reminded.

“We haven’t discussed other options,” Fred said, his eyes still holding firm on Redwing.

“I haven’t heard any proposed,” Redwing said, deliberately settling his cheek on his right palm, as if settling in to listen.

“We could—should—continue our conversation with the Folk. Edge them toward our point of view.” Beth said this stiffly, eyes on Redwing. “They have Tananareve and Cliff’s team, yes. But we have so many sleeping souls with us—”

“We have given them days already,” Clare Conway said. “And they attacked our coins. In a few more days, what else might they do?”

Redwing was happy with this support and decided to let them talk awhile, let the idea sink in.

Fred said, “Think about us as orphans. This thing, the Bowl, is so old—they must be used to expeditions from some nearby star coming out to look. So whatever alien species arrived, they were on a one-way trip. Just like us. That’s the Folk history. So they think of us the same way.”

“Makes sense,” Karl said. “They think the Bowl is so wonderful, of course smart species want to come and see it. Tourists who came and stayed.”

Fred grinned, a rare event. “Not like us, passersby.”

Redwing did not like the way this was going. He kept his tone measured and precise. “In the end, a ship is not a democracy. It’s a ship and there’s only one captain. I’m it. I have to decide.” This came out of him as a formula, but he had to say it.

“The Bowl teaches us a lot, Captain.” Beth spoke quietly, slowly, but firm and steady. “We should study it awhile before we just go on. Before we leave it behind. There’s so much to learn!”

“They could be just waiting us out,” Clare said. “They know our general flight plan. It demands that we have only a few crew up and consuming food while we’re on full-bore flight. Here, we’re in a solar system, of sorts. We’re catching their solar wind, what there is of it, and barely maintaining good sailing conditions. They know us. We don’t know them.”

Fred said, “They must have seen our magscoop flexing, struggling, trying out new patterns.” He nodded to Clare. “And we kept running, but barely.”

“It’s pretty obvious, now that I think about it, from their point of view,” Karl said. “They know this system intimately—hell, we don’t even know how they manage to run it!”

“So it’s likely they want to wait us out. Run low on supplies.” Clare looked around at the whole table. “Gives them more time to hunt down Cliff’s team, too.”

Redwing was glad to get some support without saying a word. “Y’know,” he said casually, “Magellan lost most of his crew when he sailed around the world.”

“Magellan didn’t make it home either,” Fred said. “And we have over a thousand souls sleeping aboard who count on us.”

Well, that backfired. “They’re always in my calculations, Fred,” he said as warmly as he could.

“I still think—,” Beth began.

“That’s not a crew officer issue,” Redwing said firmly. “Not at all.”

Silence as it sank in. To his surprise, Karl said with a deliberate mild voice, “We do not know what we face.”

Redwing felt the tension rising in the room. At least the Artilects don’t argue.… “The human race has never known what it faced. We came out of Africa not knowing that deserts and glaciers lay ahead. Same here. If we have no respect from these Folk, we will be captives. Humanity will become zoo animals.”

This shocked them. Their eyes widened, blinked, mouths opened and closed with a snap. Maybe they’ll remember their obligations. Where they came from.

They all looked at him long and hard. But Beth looked away—and in that moment he knew that he had them.

TWENTY-NINE

Tananareve was a useful test subject. Memor enjoyed experimenting with the primate.

Memor listened to the rumble of the fast train and ignored Bemor, who was working on his portable communicator. The primate was irked, eyes narrowed, after she heard some of Memor’s remarks about the difficulty of negotiating with their Captain. Tananareve did not know she carried embedded sensors that reported regularly to Memor’s diagnostic systems. When she got angry, her heart rate, arterial tension, and testosterone production increased. Quite interestingly, her stress hormones decreased.

Memor turned out of the line of sight and flourished a flat display of the primate response.

“Bemor, note this, please.”

Bemor idly cast a distracted glance. Memor sent the data set to him and he glanced at the curves on his comm. “How odd, that anger relieves stress in these primates.”

He sniffed. “With bad social effects, I would wager.”

“Why? It must have evolved in the wild—”

“Exactly. They feel the stress-lowering as a kind of pleasure. So to relieve anxieties, they fight. This is not good for a peaceful society. It may explain why they are out here, far from home, exploring.”

Memor paused. She differed with her brother over this area, which was, after all, her own realm of research. But … “You could be right. It seems an unlikely feature in a species we would make docile.”

“I note her left brain hemisphere becomes more stimulated as well. This may confer some aggressive abilities.”

Memor let this ride. The strumming metallic rhythms of the fast train were comforting, considering that they were moving with truly astronomical speeds down magnetically pulsing tubes, over elegant curve trajectories, arcing across and within the Bowl’s long slopes. They had voyaged now for several slumbers. The fast tubes were cramped, and their outer metal skins at times heated to smarting temperatures through inductive losses. Tight, unamusing quarters even for Folk. Uninspired edibles, with little live game at all. Memor passed the last wriggling forkfish to Bemor; it flapped weakly and gave a soft cry of despair. He took it with relish and crunched happily, snapping the bones. The heady, acid flavor of the forkfish filled the cabin. Tananareve made a clenched face and covered her mouth and nose with a cloth.

All this travel to rendezvous with the proximate locus the autoprobes had found—among the icefields of the hull, in ready range of the Ice Minds—for the vagrant primates.

The renegade primates had tripped detectors among the renegade Sil first. Now this. Memor’s attempts to keep a distant trace on the primates was well enough, Bemor thought, but “Given to excess,” he had remarked, “when not well policed.”

Several ready examples had happened a short while ago.

First came the incident in which Sil hirelings had patrolled the precincts outside the recently bombed Sil city. There were minor traces of the primates in the area, but the bombardment had eliminated most of the sites where identification would have been simple. Instead there were vague sightings and some detector probables. Bemor had disliked Memor’s delegation of patrolling to a band of Sil unloyal to the central Sil hierarchy. They attempted a poorly thought-through maneuver to block the primates’ movements across a plain. The Sil accompanying the Late Invaders managed to kill and badly injure several of their blockers. There was one report that a car of Late Invaders had taken part in the action. Since Memor knew this same party had killed a local party in a magcar before, and taken part in an insurrection from which Memor herself narrowly escaped, this latest incident was no surprise.

The second incident was more troubling. The same Sil and Late Invaders party had been glimpsed by a routine patrol skirting the hull territories. Only one clear identification, but enough. Yet by the time automatic patrols had arrived, the party was gone.