“Why do you care about us? We—”

Warmlife, you are. In our primordial form, we traded knowledge collected over vast eras, useful for chemicals, coldworld facilities, or astronomy. We were shrewd traders and negotiators, having lived through eons, and having dealt with the many faces intelligence can assume. Our cold realm has existed relatively unchanged since the galaxy was freshly forged in the fires of the strong nuclear force.

Tananareve was startled by the linguistic sophistication of their speech, resounding in her head exactly like real sounds, in a flat accent—no, wait, they were speaking to her with her accent. Even more impressive. Not many could ape her honey-toned Mississippi vowels.

“Against all that, why bother with me?” Maybe not a smart question, but she was wondering, and here were the minds that seemed to rule this place.

To us little is new. Even less is interesting. We have watched great clouds of dust and simple molecules as they were pruned away, collapsing into suns, and so left the interstellar reaches thinner, easier for our kind to negotiate, and for the ion churn of plasmas to form and self-organize. But these were slow shifts. We are as near to eternal as warmlife can imagine. But you are quite the opposite. You are swift and new.

Into her mind came an image of their bulblike bodies and weaving tentacles, all gracefully flowing, a sliding ivory cryogenic liquid. Something like an upturned cat-o’-nine-tails whip appearance.

We stand at an immense distance from such as you, yet at times arouse when the Bowl, our transport, is under threat. As it is now—from you.

“Look, I don’t know what Redwing is doing—”

Yet you are also vital to the Bowl’s survival when we arrive at the target star, one you term Glory. So you are both friend and foe.

“Why me? I—”

Memor integrated your neural levels to enough detail that we can access them. So we choose you to speak for us to your nominal leader, the Redwing, and to the Diaphanous.

“I don’t know what’s going on!”

Our long views are essential to the Bowl’s longevity. At this moment some 123,675 of us are engaged in this collective conversation with you. The number shifted even while the Ice Minds spoke.

We are individually slow, but together we can think far quicker than you. We are eternal and you are like the flickerings of a candle flame—that which combusts dies, as must all warmlife. When we evolved, the most advanced warmlife creatures on hotlife worlds were single-celled pond scum.

“Why are you on the Bowl at all, then?” She was getting irked with all this bragging. But trapped in a smelly box, probed by who-knows-what kinds of technologies, it seemed best not to be obnoxious. And she would hate to meet whatever these things needed help with. If these Ice Minds just wanted her to talk to Redwing, fine. But somehow she knew it couldn’t just be that.

We bring a wisdom of long memory. We alone speak with and for the Diaphanous. We wish to explore and to meet the Superiors who seem to be at Glory.

Then she felt a surge, as though the entire machine containing her was moving. It lurched a bit and she poked an elbow against a soft wall. Hoarse calls came from outside. What now?

FORTY-ONE

Cliff looked down at what the Folk called their mooring mountain. They said it held a shelter for this skyfish, but it was far beneath them, barely visible through stacked gray cumulus clouds.

The ship crew had leaped into action after the big long boom pressed through the skyfish. They had all rushed to the big transparent wall, mouths gaping, not heeding the shouted orders of Bemor. The male Folk stamped his feet in an accelerating rhythm, big hard thuds. That snapped the crew out of their funk and they followed his barking orders.

The humans and Sil did not know what was going on, so they moved to the wall, now deserted, to look out. Cliff saw far overhead an upside-down tornado. In profile, it looked like a funnel. Within it, huge clouds churned in an ever-tightening upward spiral, turning somber purple as moisture condensed within them. The lower levels of the air were clear, so Cliff knew he was seeing far up into the atmosphere. The conical cloud was fat and white at the bottom and tapered upward into a narrow purple-dark neck. Even at this great distance, Cliff could see flashes of blue and orange lightning between immense clouds. Across the sky, other high decks of stratocumulus were edging toward the inverted hurricane. He was looking at a puncture in the high envelope.

“They’re trying to ground the skyfish in this storm,” Irma said.

The skyfish dove deeper and shuddered with the racking winds. Irma and the others watched the high vortex churn as if it could change, but Cliff knew with a wry sinking feeling that it could only worsen. A huge deep atmosphere would take a long time to empty out into space, but the pressure drop would drive weather hard. He wondered if the Folk could patch a big rip in the high shimmering envelope from the way Bemor was lumbering around and barking at the crew, he doubted it. He looked down and saw they were headed for the nearest clear ground they could find within quick reach, the mooring mountain.

Aybe pointed. “The crew—they’re taking that machine away, with Tananareve in it. Damn! We get her back, and then right away she’s goddamn gone.”

“We’re all gone, really,” Terry said. “No chance of getting out of this living blimp that I can see.”

Irma was talking to Quert and reported back. “That’s a kind of Folk redoubt we’re approaching. They can shelter there.”

Quert came over. “Wind hard. Anchor skyfish, it hard.”

As if to demonstrate, the skyfish lurched and they all fell to the deck. Cliff tucked in and rolled, coming up to look out the transparent wall just in time to see a brilliant yellow lightning strike descend from a high cloud. Unlike on Earth, this one snaked down, shooting side bolts as it kept going. The distance was so much, Cliff could see the entire brilliant streamer, the vibrant, bristling conducting path for electrons seeking the ground. Like a lazy snake, it slid sideways in a long twist. Then it hit the mountain below and snapped off, just vanished in an instant. The thunderclap shook the entire skyfish, and Terry, who had already gotten back up, came crashing down again.

Something rumbled in the pink walls nearby. The skyfish went into a steep descent. “It fears,” Quert said.

“Me, too,” Irma added. Everybody stayed down, hugging the deck that reeked with some slimy fluid. The skyfish tilted and turned violently. More lightning scratched across a lead sky.

The skyfish hit like a fat balloon. It squashed and flexed, the walls of their big chamber collapsing down, then wheezing with the effort to rebound. The walls thumped with the slow, massive heartbeat of the skyfish. Cliff heard bones snap and the soft rip of tissues deep in the walls. Blood ran across the deck.

“Let us go fast, my friends,” Quert said. They fled.

As Cliff followed the Sil down fleshy corridors that reeked of fluids he did not want to think about, sloshing boot-deep through it, he recalled something his army uncle had said once. Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.

FORTY-TWO

With her fellows, Memor watched a high view of their Zone, sent from a craft dispatched to survey.

Something had hit the great sea at the center of the Zone, not far from where their skyfish labored. An enormous tsunami rushed across the dappled gray surface. The sea was shallow, so the wave was already at great height and as they watched, it broke, white foam curling forward. This towering monster broke across the land. Forests and towns disappeared.