One. It slid down the slow slope of gravity and arced on its long hyperbola toward a pale blue dot. And hit.

“They brushed along in our Oort cloud,” Aybe said. “That’s it. They, they tipped that rock into—”

“An accident. Killed the dinosaurs,” Terry said, “who were descendants of their own kind. Can’t check the time axis on this thing—what the hell would the units be anyway?—but there’s a reason it shows this way. Somebody’s making a point. The Bird Folk were clumsy, careless.”

“Yeah…” Irma stared at the screen. “Who?”

Cliff said nothing, just tried to take it all in. He felt Quert’s presence strongly as a kind of intense energy, as though this were the crucial moment in some plan the alien had. Yet there was no overt sign of it he could detect.

He said, “Terry, I think the Glorians’ point is, ‘See, we know all about you.’”

Quert seemed unperturbed, his face calm. The other Sil had not come into this room, but they clustered at the entrance, watching silently. “Folk go to other stars after yours. But yours special for other reason.”

“Why’s that?” Irma asked.

“They come from your sun.”

“Who?” Irma’s mouth gave a skeptical twist. “The Folk?”

“See.” Quert moved his hand near the screen and the ruby line seemed to accelerate, slipping smoothly from star to star in the Orion Arm. The speed now barely showed a slowing as the Bowl dived near a star, sent expeditions down, then moved on. Cliff lost count of how many the Bowl visited. Then the trajectory took a long swooping arc, still sampling stars and worlds. The curve turned back along the sprinkle of slowly moving stars.

“These are the even earlier eras for the Bowl?” Irma said. “Must be a really long time ago.”

“Notice how the Bowl is going now from one star to the next, pausing near each one,” Aybe said. “That fits—they were exploring for the first time. Sizing up what solar systems around other stars are like.”

“Then we’re headed back to—look, there’s the Local Bubble,” Terry said. In an overlay, a thin ivory blob approached probably an image of the low-density shell that surrounded Sol. “But … Sol’s not there.”

“Stars move,” Irma said. “See, the Bowl is moving on past that, not stopping.”

Aybe said, “It’s slowing down a lot, seems to be approaching this yellow star—hey, is that us?”

They watched, stunned, as the Bowl and its reddish star slowed more and more, edging up to the yellow star.

“Can’t be, see?” Terry pointed. “The Bowl’s going into orbit, making—”

The image froze.

Irma whispered, “The Bowl came from … a binary.”

“They built it around a binary star,” Cliff said, “and one of those stars was Sol.”

“Didn’t we hear a little from Redwing about Beth’s team, pretty far back?” Terry said. “They went to some kind of museum and saw a show about how the Bowl got built.”

Aybe said, “After all, they had to start with a smaller star than Sol. They grabbed big masses from the swarm around that star, and—who knows?—maybe some of Sol’s Oort cloud.”

Irma snorted. “Are you saying they came from Earth?”

Aybe shrugged. “Looks like it. I mean, Mars had an early warm era, so maybe—”

“That was in the first billion years or so after Sol formed,” Terry said. “The end of this Bowl voyage show we just saw, it can’t be that far back. Makes no sense! You’d have to get an intelligent species up to full industrial ability in just a billion years.”

“Okay, then whoever built the Bowl had to come from Earth,” Irma said, hands on hips. “I’m discounting smart creatures from the Jovian moons or Venus or someplace.”

“Fair enough,” Aybe said. “So, Earth. These Folk out there, you’re saying they had to come from some time—”

“We’re all thinking the same thing? They were dinosaurs,” Cliff said. “The feathers make it hard to see, though. Asenath looks more like a monster Easter chick than a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Damn!” Aybe said. “Remember when we were on the run, when we hid under a bridge? We saw—”

“Right,” Terry burst in. “Big plant-eater reptile. We ran away, pretty damn scared.”

“So…” Cliff’s training as a biologist was taking a beating. “That thing comes from maybe the Jurassic, one hundred and forty-five million years ago. Maybe the Bowl builders took along the current flora and fauna?”

“Because they came from then?” Irma scoffed. “We would’ve seen their ruins. A whole industrial civilization, and we missed it? This whole idea is impossible!”

“Maybe it was very short-lived, lasted say about ten thousand years,” Terry said. “Just a tiny sliver of the geological record.”

Aybe said, “Consider what alien explorers might discover if they arrived on Earth one hundred million years from now. Their scientists would find evidence of vast tectonic movements, ice ages, and the movement of oceans, a geological history sprinkled with life. Maybe an occasional catastrophic collapse.”

“Exactly,” Terry talked right over Aybe. “They might also find, in a single layer of rock, signs of cities and the creatures who built them. But that layer had been crushed, subducted, oxidized. Hell, tens of thousands of years—that’ll be smashed flat, only a centimeter thick when it comes out from the subduction. In dozens of million years, there’s nothing.”

Cliff was warming to the idea. “Easy to miss, especially if you aren’t looking for it.”

“Explains why the Folk are interested in us,” Irma said. “We’re relatives!”

Cliff saw Quert give the eye-moves of disagreement. “Not so?”

“Folk want to know of ship you ride. Plants you carry. Bodies you have, songs, lore.”

“Then they don’t know where we’re from?” Aybe demanded.

“They know. Do not care.” Quert looked uneasy, a change from the pensive calm of only minutes before. Cliff wondered if the alien and other Sil knew all the implications of this backward history of the Bowl. Had they recognized the home star as Sol?

A loud, rolling boom came from the large area outside. At first Cliff thought it was an explosion, but then it took on other notes and held, lingering with a mournful long strumming cadence. Like someone crying, he thought. Or some thing.

“It’s the Folk,” Aybe said. Quert gave an agreeing eye-click. “They … something’s wrong.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Redwing stepped into the garden and inhaled through his nose. Good moist green smells. Take a moment, just a breather. The animals—

The animals had been tied down, netted, and they were not happy. He hadn’t ordered that. He should have, of course, the way SunSeeker was lurching about. Had the finger snakes done that?

The finger snakes. Redwing tended to forget that they were part of what he was trying to save. Were they in their tunnel? No, he could see all three of them wrapped around three thick-bole apple trees.

A smartbot prowled the rows of plants, testing soil and injecting fluids where needed. Just growing plants hydroponically wasn’t enough. Humans needed micronutrients, vitamins, minerals—but so did the plants and animals they ate. So all organisms in the looping food chains had to provide the right micronutrients needed by others, without them getting locked up in insoluble forms or running out. Selenium had gone missing a century back, he had learned from the log. Only with sophisticated biochem types woken up for the task did they get the food chain running right again.

Redwing savored the leafy comfort lacing the air and staggered as SunSeeker surged. Redwing caught himself on a stanchion. The snakes didn’t seem to notice. Phoshtha and Shtirk were watching a screen, a view of lands showing murkily through the jet, while they worked on small things with their darting, intricate hands. Thisther was watching the captain.

Redwing asked, “Thisther, did you secure the pigs and sheep and such?”