Terry got it. “So they come from a planet tidally locked to its star? On their side it was always sunny. They had an adaptation advantage when they arrived at the Bowl, over people like us who need night. Makes sense.”

Quert gave an eye-click of agreement. “Spread widely. They are conservative. Folk use them. Not good allies for us.”

Cliff frowned. Evolutionary theory in the middle of a fight …

“Come see this,” Irma called. She was at the other end of the room. They followed her up some crudely fashioned stairs of gray clay ceramic. The dusty second floor was like the first but Irma pointed to a hole in its ceiling. “Looks like they dug down through.”

Cliff crouched, jumped, and caught the edge of the hole. Some of it crumbled away, but he held on and pulled his head through the meter-wide opening. This might be risky, but he was curious—and hanging there, he saw the roof now deserted. A nearby piece of wood caught his eye. He held on with one hand and shuffled a slim shaft nearby into the hole, letting it drop. Then he followed it, landing neatly. Low grav had its uses.

Irma picked up the slender piece of wood. “It has a tip like flint. Those small spidows—they’re tool-users.”

“Keep Kahalla stable,” Quert said, glancing upward. “They outside on ground. We go this way.”

Cliff and Irma looked askance at the alien. Quert went to the stairwell and shouted orders in the slippery Sil speech. Terry and Aybe came up with them. “Those spidows,” Terry said, “they’re chipping at the door with something.”

Irma needed help, but in surprisingly short order their entire team, humans and Sil alike, made the leap to the ceiling hole. Those already on the roof grabbed their hands and hauled them out, onto the flat roof. It was made of tan triangular bricks. Now Cliff could see Quert’s plan. The hatchery buildings were close together, and the Sil could leap from one roof to the next. So could the humans. The Sil were remarkably calm; they had met this foe before. They started leaping across. Cliff looked down as he took a running jump across. The spidows were clustered around the door to the building they had just left. Several of them held bigger wood shafts, also with blackened hard tips that seemed to have been turned on a fire.

Irma came next. She landed with one foot halfway onto the next roof lip. Cliff grabbed her and tugged her in. Terry and Aybe followed. By that time, most of the Sil were across to the next building, looking unhurried but quick.

They all ran and leaped, ran and leaped, and soon were at the far end of the hatchery buildings. There the Sil slung a thin wire around nearby trees, throwing it with a kind of boomerang hook that wrapped around a tree trunk. Then a Sil attached the wire to its backpack solar panel source, made some adjustments, hit a command switch—and the wire expanded, puffing up into a thick rope that hands could grab. Cliff blinked; a useful trick he had never seen.

They descended on that rope, belaying a bit to break their sliding descent. Cliff and Irma leaned over the side of the building to glimpse the spidows while others took the rope down. Spidows were still working on the door, chipping with crude spikes. But then some Kahalla came in from a side corridor, shouting. The spidows turned, and a battle began.

The spidow’s bristly palps moved in a jerky blur. The Kahalla had simple hoes or similar farm tools. They struck down hard on the spidows and pinned them. But there were a lot, and some Kahalla got overwhelmed.

This was nature red in tooth and claw in a way he’d never seen. There were over a hundred spidows and maybe a dozen Kahalla—a melee. As they watched, Irma said, “A fight over reproduction? Nasty.”

Quert had come over to them and looked down, unsurprised. “Folk set rules. Keep Kahalla from farming more and more. Use upanafiki to keep not many Kahalla eggs to hatch. These upanafiki pests for us. Their war with Kahalla never end.”

“The Folk don’t stop this?” Irma asked.

“Folk want this.” Quert paused, searching for the right Anglish words. “Equilibrium. Stasis.”

As Cliff watched five spidows swarm fast over a struggling Kahalla humanoid, he thought, Nightmare spiders on a caffeine high. The Kahalla toppled and vanished beneath the swarming spidows. He recalled a remark heard long ago, Flattery isn’t the highest compliment—parasitism is.

“Damn!” Irma’s shrill shout jerked him out of his thoughts.

He saw several spidows, their legs grappling for purchase over the lip of the roof, twenty meters away. They had come up the wall. They made a sharp hissing, their legs clicking with darting moves.

He and Irma had been distracted and now with Quert were the only ones left on the roof. Quert was already ahead of them and took the rope with an easy grace. Down Quert slid, shouting back “Come fast!” Irma went next, and Cliff turned to take a laser shot at the mass of spidows surging across the tan brick roof. The bolts punched holes easily enough, but the spidows did not stop. A bolt to the center did work, and one of the things flopped down. But now they were five meters away. Cliff leaned down and plucked the securing anchor of the rope. No time to slide down it now. He couldn’t be sure the spidows couldn’t use it. The black rope was firmly fixed in the trees thirty meters away, so he just grabbed it and ran off the edge of the roof. He dropped, then swung.

His breath rasped and he ignored a snap in his shoulder. He tumbled on the descent and tried to pull himself up the rope as it carried him toward the trees. His swing brought him boot-forward, so when he hit the branches of a zigzag tree the leaves lashed him. One limb caught him smack in the face. He hit another, and a sharp pain lanced into his ribs. He gasped and slid down the rope, a nearly vertical drop now. The zigzag tree trunk smacked his thigh, but he managed to get his boots under him. He sprawled when he hit.

As he was rolling away, his ribs sent him a lance of pain and his vision blurred for a moment. He lay there gasping and hands grabbed him. They heaved him up and Terry shouted, “Gotta run!” So he did. Not very well.

The spidows were running through the trees already, lots of them. Their chippering calls were loud now. But the spidows were small and if humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.

For a while, though, until they no longer saw the spidows behind them, it was more like limping for him. He was worn out.

THIRTY-ONE

Redwing watched the Bowl landscape slide by below, distracting himself for a moment of relaxation with the splendid view. Getting back to work, he switched to interior ship views. In the garden, on screens left and right, two finger snakes were slithering through plants, picking here, planting seeds there, while the third—the male, Thisther, darker and a bit bigger than the others—was playing with two pigs, all three having hissing and oinking fun. A laugh bubbled in Redwing’s throat—and still the big first question was there. What could I be missing?

Beth was due in a moment and he let the Bowl feed play on his display wall. He took out a tattered, yellowing paper. As part of his several-kilogram weight allowance it was nothing, but in his memories it was everything. His father had written it to him when in the Huntsville hospital from which he would not return. When he was ten, it had meant a great deal and now it meant more.

LIVE FULLY. TAKE RISKS. THINK CAREFULLY BUT ACT, TOO. SPEAK UP. KEEP MIND OPEN AND HEART WARM. DON’T JUST PASS THE TIME. LIVE LIVE LIVE!—FOR SOMEDAY YOU WILL NOT.

He recalled the man at his best: sawdust sprinkled in black hair, deftly pushing a Douglas fir two-by-four through the buzzing blade of a circular saw, then trimming it and taking a quick measure of the work by holding it against the studs, nodding in the damp fragrant sawdust air, plucking a nail from where he stored it in his front teeth, fetching a ball-peen hammer from its loop on his belt, two quick whaps and a finishing tap, a bright grin, then on to the next.