Bowl of Heaven (25 page)

“Married, I know. So am I.”

“I hope I didn’t—”

“Give some sign? No, damn it.” She took a deep breath and rapped out words in a rush. “We’re on the run across a goddamn artifact we don’t understand and could get caught any minute, or killed, maybe worse than killed—so, way I see it, the usual rules, they don’t matter.”

“I—”

“No real argument, Cliff. But you and I have got to keep this little bridge party going and, and, I’m feeling
so
lonely, so like I’m on the edge, have got to—hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

He smiled. “I don’t either, but I … liked it.”

They just sat and stared at each other for a while, letting the moment brew.

She raised an eyebrow, gave him a twisted grin. “Y’know, what anybody thinks of us means, to me, less than zero.”

“You make a good case.” Cliff wondered what he was doing, mind boiling. But something strong in him knew he needed this.

“I never liked sex in daylight, though.”

“I never was so picky.”

*   *   *

Terry said, “We’re getting nowhere.”

Irma sniffed and poked at their small, popping fire. It burned old wood, which did not give off smoke. “We’re alive, right? And I wouldn’t have given us good odds on that last week.”

Aybe sniffed, his wide mouth twisted skeptically. “Week? This damn place makes time meaningless.”

Irma lifted her phone. “Standard time.”

Techtypes all, they then ruminated on keeping a time standard here with their digital devices, which got updated aboard because
SunSeeker
had significant relativistic time effects versus Earth-normal time. Aybe cut this off as he leaned forward over the fire, where stick skewers turned and dark lizard meat sizzled. “This place was made to
erase
time, that’s my point. What kind of thing makes a big thing that hasn’t got seasons, change, variety?”

Cliff said mildly, “Something that likes life predictable.”

Terry pounced on that. “Yes! Something really strange. Those big, feathered things we saw—they run this place. We ran away from them!”

“They were taking us prisoners,” Howard said. His injuries made him wince as he adjusted his seating around the popping fire.

Terry said, “Maybe they just wanted to talk.”

Irma said, “It didn’t seem like an invitation.”

“Hey,” Terry said, “the thing about aliens is, they’re
alien.
We may have misunderstood them.”

Aybe shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. We can’t live out here forever. What’s our agenda?”

Cliff sighed, but put his hand over his mouth so they didn’t hear it. They all looked at him; Irma was right. He wished he were more certain, but said anyway, “Lie low. Work the sand sailer toward the mirror region. We’re making good time. We could get there in maybe a month.”

“Month means nothing here,” Aybe said.

Irma said, “Hey, we need to keep time straight. Call it a million seconds, okay?”

They managed a low chuckle, the most they could muster as a group identity. Cliff watched their faces and seized the moment. “I’m hoping to find some access at the mirror zone. We saw that there were big constructions up there, close to the Knothole. Whoever runs this place probably hangs out there.”

Terry furiously shook his head. “We need to talk to these aliens. Look at what they’ve built!”

Irma said, “So?”

Terry sat back, blinking. “Let’s get close to one of their living zones. Stop hanging out here in the desert.”

Howard said, “I agree.”

Irma said, “I don’t like going in under their terms. Maybe they think aliens like us should be eliminated—who knows?”

Aybe scowled and jutted out his chin. “We escaped, remember? They may not take that kindly.”

Terry shook his head once more. “All I know is, we’ll learn more observing them near here, instead of trying to move millions of kilometers up to the Knothole.”

Irma pressed, “How?”

Aybe pointed. “I climbed that big skeleton tree yesterday, got a look at a dark patch off that way. Green, must be a forest.”

Terry said, “Better game, better concealment. Let’s go there, see if we can find some natives. Watch them, learn.”

Cliff watched them as this got tossed around. He had realized that Terry was the sort of guy he had known in university. He liked to sit around and drink and philosophize, and if he got drunk, he would tell you what you could expect in life for the sort of person you were. That met the legal standard for an asshole, Cliff figured. When the crew was getting shaped up—centuries ago in real time, yes—he had barely met Terry. But now he knew what type Terry was and was thankful that there was no alcohol here. With a few drinks in him, the man could do real damage in a small group like this. Maybe without the drinks, too.

So now Terry was far from what his skill set could deal with. Fleeing across a huge contraption nobody had ever imagined, Terry kept himself oriented, Cliff could see, by staying sharp of chin, assured, with eyebrows clenched behind aviator glasses. Sure of himself. Dangerous.

Assurance in the face of uncertainty was a good pose for a leader, sure. But not without plenty of thought to back it up.

“I say let’s vote,” Aybe said.

“Sure,” Howard said, his only remark in a while. He kept picking at a nasty scratch he had scabbing over on his calf.

Cliff said, “All in favor of following Terry’s idea.”

Three hands: Aybe, Howard, and Terry. Cliff shrugged. “Okay, after breakfast we set sail.”

Irma said wistfully, “I wish I was back on
SunSeeker,
not hiding and running.”

They all nodded.

Irma had a point, Cliff realized a bit later, but there were compensations. Here they got to deal with the crux of the problem, understanding this place, not just watching it from the orbiting ship. Plus, no boredom.
An adventure is someone else risking their life far away.…

And he had just dried off from a great swim in a warm desert pond. He felt great. He drank a cup of water, and snapped open one of the pods that held tangy little silky strands, like eating sweet cobwebs. The water was far better than
SunSeeker
’s recycled, bland water, and the air here had a fresh zest. Also, their chem tests showed it had no gut-buster microbes they could not nullify. Redwing certainly wasn’t breathing anything so good.

It took two days to sail to the distant forest, over crusted sand that sang beneath them. The surface was glazed, and when they stopped he took small samples to study under his field microscope. The stuff was hard yet living—bacteria, lichens, and mosses mixed into sand. Maybe all these were waiting for the next rain to flourish. They learned the hard way that their sail ship had to skirt the darker patches, which were rough and once poked a hole in the bow. Sticking to the tan-colored zones gave them better speed. Somehow the place seemed ancient, even the occasional sand dune firm and polished. There were parabolic dunes, star dunes, straight dunes with radial crests. The emptier the land, Cliff realized, the more luminous and precise the names for its features.

They passed by a raised bluff, tan and barren, and suddenly saw a canyon open in the steep stone walls. “There’s green in there,” Irma pointed out.

Their sails flapped in the lee of the cliff when they lost the wind. Howard said, “Let’s have a look, take a break.”

All heads nodded; they were getting stiff, sitting in the craft and managing the ropes to steer.

They left Howard with the sailer, since he still had a gimpy leg from a fall. Marching two kilometers up the dry canyon was hard, working against the drifts of dun-colored sand in a broad streambed. A soft breeze swept their sweat away.

The side channels looked ancient, and Cliff kept a wary eye on their shadows. Ruins of stone and twisted metal stuck out of the erosion plain. Terry tried to make sense of them, prying fragments from the soil, but most of it was rusted away. Breezes sighed around them as they came upon a larger wreck, a tumbled-down building of curiously long rock slivers, pale along their lengths and burnt at their edges. “Fire?” Aybe asked.

“Looks abandoned,” Irma said, pulling a slab free of the rest. The whole stack of stone gave way, sliding down and tumbling so they had to lurch out of the way.

“What’s that?” Aybe asked about a buried structure, and they spent fifteen minutes uncovering a hard metal carapace. The building’s collapse had dented but not breached the boxy thing.

Aybe used up a lot of his laser charge cutting in. He used razor mode and the highest frequency, but the stuff was much tougher than any steel alloy. They levered the metal open to the music of wrenching screeches. Inside, wrapped in polycarbon, were fine metal grids and some mysterious black boxes with ports and plies in their sides.

“Hard to figure this out,” Terry said, fingering the stuff, “but must be electrical.”

“To do what?” Cliff asked. Not his area of techspeak.

Aybe spread the metal grids across a slab of the pale, hard stone. “Doesn’t matter what it was for. Point is, what can it do for us?”

“Like what?”

Aybe grinned. He had been moody the last few days, but now a tech challenge animated him. “Amp up our antenna function. For our beamers.”

“That’ll be tough, getting an impedance match to a beamer.”

“I like problems.”

They found little else but buildings that had collapsed a long time ago. No obvious resources, no primitives among the ruins as in a bad movie; nothing.

The electrical stuff was too heavy to carry, except Aybe wanted the grids. Howard said, “Fine, so long as you carry them from here on out.” On the move, everything was about mass.

As Cliff marched back to the sailer, he wondered how this huge desert zone had formed and whether the climate here needed vast, largely inert areas to function. There must be large-scale atmospheric movement of water, like the Hadley cells of Earth, but even with the occasional patterns of passing clouds, he could not figure out how things worked here. Earthly air moved in several circulating patterns, and the poles were the final place where matters got resolved. But on this Bowl, the only pole was the Knothole region. What did that do?

The Bowl and Earth both rotated, so both felt the Coriolis force—which brought all its complications, like hurricanes. But the sheer scale of the Bowl made him wonder if the same rules of thumb about weather could possibly apply. Matters of heating and atmosphere, not just the planet’s rotation, set the scale lengths of Earth’s circulations. Here, those scales were immensely larger, about a thousand times!

Then there were the oddities and intuitions that were wrong even on Earth, but might not be here. People thought whirlpools in baths circled differently in Earth’s north and south hemispheres, but that was an illusion. It might be fun to see if that was true here, though.

All that seemed a long way off, slogging beneath the constant sun. They traded occasional comments, but it was a good idea to shut up and watch their surroundings. Except for the birds, who were conspicuously larger than Earthside ones, Cliff noticed that few animals advertised themselves. Caution seemed the universal policy.

So he mused as he helped with the steering, pulling ropes to adjust their sail, listening to the buzz as their bow rasped over the stiff sand. He watched his sweaty team and wondered how long they would hold up. Nobody in
SunSeeker
’s crew was given to big shows of emotion, shouting, brags, insults, tears and drama, big proclamations of love or hate, stomping out of meetings. No bipolars, no geniuses. Rather, they were members of the sober, hardheaded, but soft-spoken race. Educated to a fault, practical as a paper clip. Considered, deliberate, oatmeal steady, skeptical and sharp-eyed when they met new ideas, unflappable, but—and this was what cut down through the applicant list like a hot knife through ripe butter—with an appetite for adventure. An odd assortment of those realists nonetheless willing to dive down the funnel of time and come out centuries later in a strange new place, ready for the dangerous and eager for the grand. This made them short on hugs and compliments, quick with the narrowed eye, short on the soft warm armloads of comfort.

Their spirits rose as the forest grew from a distant line on the horizon to a dense stand of trees, even though their food and water were running out. They hid the sailship, ventured in with lasers drawn, and soon found a stream. Yellow big-finned fish lurked in the darker pools and Howard managed to catch five with a simple line and hook, no bait needed. A feast! And the water was as sweet as champagne.

A kilometer farther on, there were dense stands of fragrant bushes that, when they crawled into it, gave them something like a day/night ecology. They fell asleep immediately.

Over breakfast of more fish, Terry said, “Time to set up a base, drop some of our body gear. I’m tired of backpacking everything we’ve got.”

Aybe nodded. “And reconn.”

Cliff didn’t like leaving anything behind, but they had a point. Even in the lower gravity, the straps cut into their shoulders by the end of a day’s march.

They hid their heavier gear in a stand of angular, skeletal trees, marked it with subtle signs, and moved out, using their practiced methods. Aybe and Terry took point to left and right. Cliff and Howard brought up the rear to the sides, with Irma in the middle. No talking, hand signals only, stay out of clearings.

The foliage here was strange. Vines made convoluted turns, as if trying to find a way out of their thick mats. Small, unseen animals clattered and called in the canopy. Birds gave fluttery songs, not like Earthly chirps. Then they heard ahead a low, ominous hum and circled it. A dense clump of webbed brown plants teemed with brightly turning leaves that sounded like bees. Cliff could see no role for this in plant dynamics, unless—“Maybe they’re windmills generating power,” he whispered to Irma.

“For what?”

“Dunno.”

They skirted the humming network, which was a hundred meters wide. He wondered if this artificial ecology used directly generated electrical power somehow, reactors and plants, and not just solar energy. The whole structure could be a giant electrical grid. Only a few meters away lay the high vacuum of space, and the understructure of metal could conduct electricity to distant points. For the usual question—
why?
—he had no answer.