Shipstar (25 page)

Redwing blinked. “One the size of a whole damn solar system?”

She laughed, gave him the high sign, and left.

PART IX

O
N
THE
R
UN

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.

—T
OBIAS
S
MOLLETT

TWENTY
-
SEVEN

Cliff was tired of traveling. The immense distances of the Bowl took a steady toll that could not be erased by dozing in uncomfortable seats designed for another species, or indifferent food gotten from dispensers along the way, or headphones that tuned out the drones and rattles of endless long transport. The Bowl was built on the scale of solar systems, but humans were built to smaller perspectives.

Quert and the other Sils had brought Cliff’s team through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels, moving away from the hull where the Ice Minds dwelled. Then a mag-train. More tunnels. Occasional glimpses of odd landscapes seen through huge quartz sheets that glided by as they took barely curved speed ramps at planetary velocities.

He had felt the surges and high speeds, but after a while they did not register as distinct events, just a long symphony of lurches. At times he felt he knew where they were in an astronomical sense—alignments of star and jet and horizon, glimpsed through flickering windows. But those got confused as soon as he looked again, hours later, after being pummeled and spun.

Now they ventured out, on foot, into a terrain that reminded him of California deserts—low scrub brush, gullied tan terrain, hazy sky, occasional zigzag trees. Those seemed to grow everywhere on the Bowl. Gravity was different here, a lot less. He felt a slight tilt to his weight, too. They were closer to the Knothole, had to be.

Curious blocky buildings visible through some dust haze in the distance, maybe ten kilometers away, a tapered tower at its center. Cliff drew in hot dry air with a crisp, nose-tingling flavor and basked in the raw sunlight. It was good to be still and on your feet in sunlight. Always sunlight.

Quert beckoned the others out of the well-disguised hatch that led into the hull system. For many hours they had crawled through some conduits and once had to wade through a sewer to get onto a fast-moving slideway. Then a train. The Bowl’s constant daylight threw off their sleep cycles. He’d measured this, and found that the team had shifted to a thirty-hour waking cycle. The welcome dark of the night-side hull had helped fix that. But they were worn down.

“Think we’re okay here?” Irma asked Quert.

“Need go farther,” Quert said, looking around. “Not safe here.” The other Sil shifted uneasily and looked at the zigzag trees.

“What’s the danger? At least it’s warm.” Irma had not liked the cold and had hugged one or the other of the men in the night, seeking warmth. Nobody thought anything of it; they were all in a pile most of the time, dead to the world.

“The Kahalla. In shape they are more like you than we. An old kind of Adopted. Loyal to Folk.”

Irma frowned. “So what do we do?”

“Find…” Quert paused, as if translating from his language. “Tadfish. You would say. Maybe.”

“There’s shelter over there.” Terry pointed at the low hills to their left. He seemed more alert and energetic now, Cliff noted.

“We go past that,” Quert said, but the other Sil around him rustled with unease. This was the first sign Cliff had seen that they all could understand Anglish. Plainly they were worried, their legs shifting and heads jerking around as if looking for threats.

“So let’s do this fast,” Aybe said. He, too, looked refreshed. They all had skins worn from constant sun but not deeply tanned. There wasn’t a lot of UV in this star’s spectrum.

They set off at a long lope made graceful by the lower gravity. Cliff got into his stride easily, enjoying the sensation of hanging a second or two longer at the apex while his legs stretched out. As much as he had liked the dark of the hull labyrinth, the sunlit open was more his style.

“Kahalla!” one of the Sil cried. Quert stopped and turned and so did they all. Some fast shapes flitted through a distant stand of zigzags and heavy brush.

At first Cliff thought these were four-legged creatures, but as one of them sped across a gap in the rust-colored brush, he saw they had two legs. Their gait leaned forward and hinged oddly. Big angular heads.

“Here Kahalla live,” Quert said.

“What should we do? Deal with them?”

“Do not know.” Quert and the other Sil looked carefully at the Kahalla. There were many of them.

They all began to run again. Quert waved them away from the zigzag trees where the moving figures were and toward the buildings several kilometers away across a dusty plain. It seemed to Cliff they were needlessly exposed there but then Quert, who was in the lead, took them behind a rise and into a slight gully that was enough to shield them from direct fire. Dust from their running stung his nose. They were all running flat out. His team had their lasers and Quert their own weaponry, but they were vastly outnumbered. Until now he had not thought much about how lightly armed Bowl natives were. That seemed to imply little overt conflict despite the vast and horrible damage the Folk had dealt out to the Sil. There was an odd Zen-like grace to them in the face of horror.

As if sensing that something was up, big birds flapped suddenly from the surrounding brush and zigzags. They swarmed and turned together and made off with loud keening squawks. In the lower grav, the big wings could use the slight wind to escape. Obviously to these odd four-winged birds, the running figures meant trouble.

The dust swarmed up into his nostrils and stung. The acrid nip also snapped him into focus. He looked up at the big birds stroking themselves up into the air and he recalled his sense of relish when he saw his first Baltimore oriole. They were nearly extinct then. The Great Crash had passed but many birds were teetering on the edge, and the sight of the deep flaming orange against the rest of its black plumage thrilled him. He knew the Baltimore oriole’s name came from some ancient coat of arms royalty, but that mattered nothing compared with the small fragile beauty of it. These alien birds sweeping and cawing above had none of that, yet they still stirred him. So why had this structure, vast in size and time, kept so much rich wildlife when Earth had not? Humanity had overrun itself in vast sullen cities long ago. Its soiled vapors ruled the sky, still, despite earnest geoengineering.

That question swarmed up, awakened by this wealth of life flapping around him. Stinging sweat trickled into his eyes and he was glad of it.

He remembered the bleak gray landscapes he had seen across the American West following the Great Dry. The denuded skeleton forests of the High Sierras, where fires consumed the last needles of the demolished pine forests and layered the Owens Valley with black shrouds for weeks. The dead dry prospects of deserted suburban streets lined by abandoned cars already stripped of their paint by the hissing sands borne on constant hot winds.

His legs burned with fatigue. Cliff shook his head to throw the sweat aside. He checked that his team was staying together, and panted, and felt the ache slicing in his lungs, and ran on.

Sometimes he could abstract himself out of the moment with thoughts, memories, dreams, anything. Anything but the terrible fear that once again they were the prey. His team. Being run down again. His responsibility.

So … how did this enormous artifact preserve such diversity of life? It was like some goddamned Central Park in Old Manhattan, before the rising seas washed all that away. A natural place that life sought refuge in, yet it was an artifact, a managed simulacrum of the natural world. A jewel in a concrete setting.

But this place was not a dead park. It lived and maintained itself and went on. He had to concede that to the Folk who ran this place. They had evaded the excess that had nearly ruined Earth.

He ran on. The others panted and strained around him. The Sil took their long strides with easy grace and were always ahead. The humans labored in sweat and stink and gathering sour fatigue as the building complex loomed.

In the zigzag trees around them, Cliff felt the presence of the running humanoids though he could not see them. It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like
Homo sapiens sapiens
of a hundred thousand years before. Here amid a fantastic construction they were reduced to—

Then he saw it. The Bowl, a huge facsimile of a real planet, kept itself running and stable by being larger than worlds could be. Giving life enough room to find its own way.

But how did they stop the myriad intelligent species here from expanding beyond their province? A puzzle.

And now there was no more time for idle thought. The distant buildings were close. And his legs were made of lead.

Quick is the word and sharp’s the action.
Where had he heard that?

They came upon the towering great gray slabs through an outer maze of silvery metal sculptures. These depicted heavyset humanoids in various poses, mostly in combat with assorted knives, shields, lances, and the like. The nude bodies were squat and sturdy, big muscled chunks above short legs and fat feet. Their ribs seemed to wrap around the whole body and their arms turned both ways, double-jointed and elbowed. Some statues were of standing figures and in the air around these gleamed some unintelligible script that flashed brighter as Cliff looked at them. A smart system that registered his gaze and amped the label? They reached a large bladelike tower that seemed solid, standing at the center of a hexagonal open spot. Flagstones of intricate angular designs led toward this tower and up its flanks in elongated perspectives. There was a solemn air to the place as its design soared up the flat tower face, ornamented with bumps and knobs that tapered away into the sky.

They paused to drink water and Cliff stood looking at the big stonework. Slowly, about fifty meters up, an eye opened.

He knew it was an eye though it was of the same burnished tan as the rest of the tower. It had a green center like an iris. Slowly the entire oval, several meters across, turned downward to look at them. One eye.

“What…” Cliff could not take his eyes off the single enormous pupil at the thing’s center. It seemed to be looking straight at him. A pupil in rock? An eye with lens and retinas?

“Stone mind,” Quert said simply. Then he turned quickly and peered into the distance.

Cliff looked to his left and saw several of the stumpy humanoids flitting among the sculptures. There were a lot of them, moving with surprising speed. They huffed and squatted and made ready. Their brown clothes seemed to have endless pockets and they fished among those to bring out things, affixing them to the long tubes.

“Chem guns,” Aybe said. “In all this high tech, the old stuff still makes sense.”

“Or maybe they haven’t been allowed any more advanced tech?” Terry wondered.

“We saw a humanoid like this, remember?” Irma said. “It opened a door leading down into some entrance, back there on an open plain. When it saw us, it just walked away.”

Aybe said, “Yeah, maybe we should’ve looked into that entrance. We were getting pretty ragged, maybe it would’ve been good shelter.”

Cliff knew this was a way of calling up an unspoken grudge. He had argued to push on and they had. “That means these humanoids are maybe maintenance workers,” he said mildly. “They’re working for the Folk, keeping the Bowl fit.”

They broke off talk as the creatures moved. Without a word the entire party of Sil and humans turned and watched the humanoids go to each flank, surrounding them. Nobody spoke.

“Kahalla,” Quert said. “They hold us for Folk. Send message.”

Terry whispered, “How can we get away?”

Before Quert could speak, a long droning note washed over the area. It seemed to come from everywhere and was more like a sensation in Cliff’s body than a sound. The tone shifted and a long rolling vowel played out,
aaahhhhmmmm.

Quert said, “Sit. Listen. The stone mind wakes.”

Cliff sized up their situation. There were at least a few hundred of the humanoids around them. They didn’t look friendly. Many wore jackets and carried long tubes that looked like some sort of launch weapon. They were swarthy and their heads never turned away from watching the humans near the tower. They bristled with suppressed energy. Cliff wondered how he knew this and saw it was something about reading body postures. Maybe that was a universal, across species? Or else the whole primate suite of abilities converged—driven by the urgent need to communicate, no matter what world your abilities came from—on myriad subtle signs that told stories from a mere glance.

Irma said quietly, “They’re dangerous. We can’t fight them. Are we waiting for this song to end or what?”

“They hear the long voice,” Quert said.

Aybe said, “So? How long does this last?”

“The rock being speaks of its many deaths,” Quert said, its head dipping low and eye darting up and down, a gesture Cliff did not know.

Tones now shifted higher, into
shree
s,
kinnne
s,
awiiih
s, and
oooeeeiiinneee
s. The pressing power in it seemed to hammer the air around them. Cliff felt these as warring long-wavelength notes that made his muscles dance, his body arch and flex and stretch in resonance with the powerful sounds rolling through the dry air around them.

“It’s … it’s playing us,” he managed to get out. “This sound…”

“It tells of its great death,” Quert said. “Takes far time.”

The Sil had formed a crescent facing outward against the solemn threatening silence of the humanoids. Together with Quert, the Sil flexed their arms, turning their inner elbows up to the sun. Cliff saw slender black fibers extend in the pits of their elbows. Their tips gleamed in the hard sunlight. He had never been able to tell males from females in the Sil, but it did not matter. They all had done some physiological magic and made these black lances poke out of their inner elbows. One of them abruptly jerked an arm down and the lance arced fast and sure out in a long parabola. The elegance of it struck Cliff as it watched it skewer a small wood emblem atop a hunkering stone sculpture of a big-chested humanoid. It hit the dry dark wood exactly in its center, and the black arrow flapped with energy not yet dissipated. As sure a challenge as he could imagine.