You must realize that Glory is not a true planet but rather a shell world. Many different species of intelligent Glorians live on concentric spheres, with considerable atmosphere spaces between them. Many pillars support this system, and powerful energy sources provide light and heat. Entirely different life-forms inhabit the differing spheres. The innermost shells support life without oxygen. These kinds come from deep within ordinary worlds, creatures of darkness and great heat. Some species have made their spheres into imitations of whatever their best-loved environments are. At the very top is a re-creation of a primitive oxygen world, flush with forests and seas. This outer shell your astronomers have studied. You conclude that Glory is a succulent target for a colony. That upper layer is deceiving, perhaps deliberately so—we do not know. Certainly Glory is not a simple prospect for your kind.

The Glorians who constructed this shell paradise of theirs also communicate on scales of the galaxy itself. They do not use simple electromagnetics, as you do. There are many worlds, many of them ruled by machine intelligences, who use electromagnetics over stellar scales. Emitting in these ways reveals an emergent society capable of beginner technologies. Most keep silent, their radiated power low, fearing unknown perils. We often found such silent planets. We were drawn to worlds we knew by distant examination were life-bearing, yet electromagnetically quiet.

The Glorians disdain such societies. They wish to speak, over many long eras, with greater minds—those who can blare forth using gravitational waves. Those waves are far harder to detect and stupendously more difficult to emit in coherent fashion, to carry messages. Here again, to radiate at all is a show of power.

These signals you primates have detected but cannot translate. That is unsurprising. So thus have many minds discovered, over many millions of your years. Some of these who hear but cannot understand gravitational waves, the Bowl encountered long ago. The gravitational message landscape is an intricate puzzle few solve.

We Ice Minds have unraveled the Glorian waves, with the help of the Diaphanous. It was a lengthy labor. They are strange, intriguing, and imply much more than they say. We now wish to know the Glorian Masters ourselves, to join in their company. That is why the Bowl now feels itself ready to approach. Before, we did not dare.

For you primates to dare is surely folly.

Beth took a deep breath and watched people from another century—when she grew up, of course—walk down the streets of the English village, the sea breeze sighing, birds all atwitter. So the Ice Minds were making their case for some of SunSeeker’s passengers to stay. Fair enough. The problem was going to be Redwing.

Next came data and text from Tananareve and ship Artilects, dissecting the events with the Diaphanous.

Karl and the Theory Artilect had worked out some ideas about what the hell the Diaphanous beings who had killed Clare could be. Self-organizing magnetic fields, smart bellies full of plasma, harvesting energy from the jet? And bigger than planets? Well, the jet was a puzzle, and managing it seemed beyond the Folk. She and the others had ignored that problem, now pretty obvious once you thought of it. Who mustered solar storms to the jet base? Who got the mag fields aligned so the jet was under steady control?

Something big. Beth tried to envision what would radiate waves kilometers long. That could induce enormous electric fields inside SunSeeker, and sound waves, too. To such creatures, humans might be as inconsequential as the lice that pestered the skin of a blue whale.

Without the Diaphanous, the whole Bowl system was impossible. Want someone to manage a star? Take the children born in stellar magnetic arches, evolved there. Hire the locals.

Enough. She left off the reading to get ready for her appointment with Redwing. Time to don the battle uniform, gal.

FIFTY-ONE

The worst part about the free-bounding exercise he did in zero grav was the sweat. Sweat didn’t run. Redwing clung to a stanchion and mopped some from his eyes, but it was hard to get it all. Some covered his eyes in lenses. Blinking only made his image of the big craft bay wobble. Then his belt rang, reminding him of his appointments with Karl and then Beth.

Karl was waiting. Redwing hated showing up late for a crew appointment, but he had needed the exercise to clear his mind. As they went into his cabin, he saw his wall was running their real-time view. He was glad to see they had rounded the Bowl lip and so could see the Knothole region again. Radiation remained near zero as the Diaphanous sun dwellers’ mag shield followed their orbit. Redwing could not imagine magnetic stresses that could grasp and guide a starship of a thousand tons, but he was getting used to the apparently impossible.

Karl grinned. “It’s been a hell of ride. The way Beth drove us down into the cinch point of the Knothole, and then stood us here, blasting plasma out the back and pushing the standing kink over toward center, into a straight line—wow. Just, wow.”

Redwing nodded. “The finger snakes loved it, too. They’re bright, seemed to know a lot about how the jet works. I’ve seen piloting but never like that. We owe her one.”

“Maybe more than one,” Karl said, but Redwing let it pass.

Karl studied the hurricanes visible on long-range scopes. They were beyond spectacular, when you adjusted for scale. In the fractured zones near the knothole, the seas were giving up their moisture to the lowered atmospheric pressure. An enormous hurricane fed on the air pressure drop, a quickening drift toward the ruptured atmospheric envelope.

“Maybe we need a new term,” Karl said. He stood and pointed on the wall. “See, those eddies form in the big churning spiral, then spin off into hurricanes. It’s a fractal fluid turbulence.” He increased screen resolution. “So those too fling out smaller hurricanes, and so on down to some scale more like Earth’s puny varieties.”

“So more and more of them dance out their fury on the life below,” Redwing said, musing.

“They’ll take a while to patch the tears.” Karl turned away, shaking his head. “We really went too far.”

There was business to do, but he asked instead, “A celebration seems in order—the old eat, drink, and be merry. Plus we’re all tired. Let’s let the Artilects take over, say two hours from now, and muster the crew.”

Karl nodded, distracted. Redwing reflected that at tonight’s party, the entrée steak would not be meat, the wine would be water plus a grape extract and alcohol, and the water was fashioned from their collective piss. After all the deaths, maybe being merry was the hard part.

“Cap’n, this blizzard of info we’re getting from Tananareve and the Folk—it’s hard to digest. We’re getting their point of view, and I try to cock it around to our line of sight.”

“They’re old, we’re young. To be expected.”

Karl gave a wry smile. “Some of these messages, I sort of feel that they should have a space for ‘fill in name, address, and solar system’—it’s hard to grasp their assumptions.”

“And so, hard to know how to negotiate with them?”

“Damn right. Look, the Bowl is on a journey that takes it all over a chunk of the available galaxy. They should’ve settled most of the local arm by now. But these Bird Folk, they’re deeply conservative. They don’t seem to leave colonies.”

Redwing pursed his lips, sat back, and watched the super-hurricane grinding on. He tried not to think about what was happening below them. His work …

“Um. They say that’s because the Bowl is perfect, suited for the smart dinosaurs that built it. Warm, stable, predictable weather. They don’t want to leave it. So?”