Bowl of Heaven Read online

  Tananareve crept close against the glass, around the curve from the entrance. “Dancing,” she said. “It’s a dance hall.”

  Lau Pin was beside her now. He stared awhile, then said, “Mating ritual.”

  Beth said, “There’s a difference?”

  The chuckles that followed this weak joke told her how tense they were.

  Beth was up against the glass now. Slow, thumping music with skittering undertones. A simple song, cascading chords ornamented by lots of percussion. Lurching bodies, heads turned upward to the ceiling.

  With sun and flare behind her, she and Tananareve might look like ferns, if they held still. There were platforms throughout the interior, on narrow pedestals, some topped with … sofas … nests? Thousands of Bird Folk, including a few gigantic Astronomers, were paying no attention to anything but one another. Some were dancing, some fighting, some … head to tail … that must be mating. But the Astronomers weren’t doing any of that. Were they there to supervise? Or as voyeurs?

  “Nothing for us here,” Mayra said primly.

  “But, Mayra, it must be a map of Glory! It’s the last globe in this park.”

  “Get some photos, then.”

  They did that, then went on.

  The ridge continued toward the Bowl’s inner well. Vegetation was sparse here, offering less cover. There was nothing to eat.

  And the next dome was silver, as big as several football fields, with a tremendous square opening and tracks running into it. Floating railroad cars ran in and out. They were open cages, and inside —

  “Live animals,” Tananareve said.

  “Plants, too. Warehouse,” Lau Pin said. “Anyone hungry?”

  They crept in, hidden by the shadows beneath a slow-moving car, and rolled away before the cars reached the unloading dock.

  There were Bird Folk around, one of the big varieties. Some might be guards, but most were working, moving stuff on and off the cars. What went on the cars was recognizable: crates of melons and plants and creatures from the humans’ garden-prison. What came off were ferns and reeds and grass, tons and tons of it. It must all be food for Bird Folk of various types, Beth thought.

  She got the rest to hang back until they could see the patterns of movement. Once offloaded, the workers ignored the food. The humans waited, stomachs rumbling, and then approached a cage car. They kept to the shadows of squashes and melons as big as automobiles. They carved into the underside of one of these, juice gushing out, and began to feast.

  Fred pointed to a grid on the wall, with a wind blowing into it. “We should be there,” he said.

  “Why?” Beth asked.

  “We stink,” Fred said.

  They looked at one another … yeah. Nods. Bird Folk mostly had big nostrils. They would have a powerful sense of smell. Beth’s team moved under the air conditioner, taking melons and fruit and a dead mammal with them. The wind there was refreshing.

  * * *

  They feasted, and slept, and feasted some more. “The easiest way to carry food is in us,” Fred said, and was jeered for it, but they ate anyway.

  “I think I see…,” Fred said.

  Conversation had already stopped. Beth said, “What?”

  “It’s going to sound crazy.”

  Beth looked around her. “We’re living like mice in a gigantic alien supermarket,” she said, “inside a wok the size of the solar system. We’re all lunatics here, Fred.”

  He said, “A lot of stars come in pairs. Maybe most of them.”

  Heads nodded.

  “I think that sphere was a map of Earth. Earth before the continents split up.”

  Lau Pin asked, “Why would they build a globe of Earth?”

  “They’re dinosaurs.”

  Lau Pin laughed. “Yeah, right.” The others were grinning.

  “Some dinosaurs got smart. They developed space travel. They did some exploring. They visited Sol’s companion star. Anyone ever wonder how the dinosaurs stayed warm enough? Sol used to be cooler, remember.”

  Lau Pin was still grinning. “Come on.”

  “Companion star,” Tananareve said. “They stole it?”

  “It was theirs. Earth was theirs, too. Left the solar system as it was, but maybe they took the planets around Wickramsingh’s Star. Grist for the mill.”

  Beth noticed that Mayra had lost her smile, which meant she was thinking again of her lost husband. She put an arm around Mayra and listened as they talked Fred’s crazy idea around.

  She tried to think about it without a snicker. They’d watched the building of the Bowl. If you weren’t here, on and in it, the Bowl itself would be … a laugh riot. Cupworld. The advanced version would have night and day, provided by orbiting tea bags. A spaceport in the handle. But Fred was so earnest.

  Intelligent dinosaurs. Evolving into Bird Folk. Must have had feathers already. “It could fit,” she said not quite seriously. “Dinosaurs think big.”

  Talk continued. It was good to distract them from their situation for at least a few moments. Beth began to think about how to get them moving. They weren’t hungry and they weren’t prisoners, but low gravity would still make them sick if they stayed here. Their bones would get brittle; neurological functions would steadily erode.

  Lau Pin and Fred were watching the distant workers while they nibbled at a great wedge of green melon. Now Fred said, “Those are the same variety that were guarding us.”

  “Feeding us, too,” Lau Pin said.

  “No. A little different. That star pattern on their flanks, see? They’re not moving stuff, they’re just … meandering?”

  “Hunting us.”

  “Yeah.” Fred swept his arm across an arc. “They’re moving in a wave. We stay here, they’ll have us.”

  “They’re not very good at searching or we’d be caught by now.”

  “Probably out of practice,” Beth said, and peered at Fred. “Have you got some idea? Because I don’t see any way past them.”

  “Hide in a melon,” Mayra suggested. “Or two or three. Wait while they go around us.”

  “I want a better look at that air outlet,” Fred said.

  They brought ferns with them, for cover. They lay beneath the grille in a howling wind, examining the grille and watching the searchers. The Bird Cops weren’t all that big … bigger than humans, though. Earthy smells brushed past them: manure, crushed grass, big animals.

  “There’s plenty of room for big birdy engineers to work in there. We can get around the fans,” Lau Pin said. “Carefully. We don’t want to turn them off. The cops would notice.”

  They took as much food with them as they could carry. They didn’t have any way to preserve it. Outside, maybe they could make a fire and smoke the animal they’d butchered. Then on to the spaceport ledge and try to find a ride. Or die trying.

  PART VII

  You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

  — MARK TWAIN

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Slow down!” Cliff called out.

  His stomach wobbled and lurched as the magnetics torqued them. The motors surged, growled, hummed. He held on as Aybe wrenched the magcar around, spinning it hard, testing its abilities. Up, down, around — surges faster than some damned amusement park twister, and not amusing.

  Terry stood up to restrain Aybe, and a swerve sent him halfway over the side. Irma grabbed his arm and hauled him back in. “Damn it, stop!” she shouted.

  Aybe brought the craft out of its spinning mode and the motors beneath their feet eased. “We gotta know what this baby can do!” Aybe laughed with glee. He took the magcar up and it slowed, stopped.

  “Careful,” Howard said. Terry and Irma did not look pleased.

  Aybe’s engineer eyes widened as he took the craft up. He pushed a simple control yoke forward to the max, and the magcar slowed against gravity, then stopped. “Looks like we can’t go above six meters.” He moved it forward, and the speed crept up.

  “Let’s get the he
ll out of here,” Terry said. Cliff nodded.

  Aybe took them down to near the ground and then away in a fast horizontal path. Cliff looked back at the bloody sprawl of bodies. Leaving these aliens was a dividing point, he felt. Once this incident became known, from here on the natives would probably give no quarter.

  Aybe experimented with altitude and speed, getting the feel of the magcar. They got ten kilometers away before they found a narrow gulch that concealed them among billowy trees, swaying in a steady, strangely musky wind.

  The others went through the dead aliens’ gear while Cliff stood watch. He scanned the sky for pursuit. Nearby, undisturbed by the magcar passage, birds in flight broke from their immense, triple-decked formation. They curled in banks, forming a sphere, cawing and yawing in squawking concert. The sound was a rolling skkkaaaaa! and distracted him so he did not see coming from above the cause of it all. A huge slender shape shot down from a cloud and dived into the bird ball. Its jaws opened and scooped up several birds at once. He lost it in the thickness of the swarming birds. It poked out the far side an instant later, jaws closed now and turning away. Like a shark, he thought. A sky shark.

  Irma sat beside Cliff and asked Aybe, “This wind is too much. Can’t we shield it?”

  “Yeah,” Aybe said brightly, always happy to greet a new problem. “There must be…”

  After a few minutes of his trying the oddly shaped controls, a narrow pole abruptly poked up from the magcar center, where the engine housing bulged, humming as Aybe drove them forward. It rose to three meters’ height, and suddenly the wind pressure and sound eased away. They were all impressed. Aybe figured it was some field effect, and when Howard poked a finger over the car lip he got a shock. “Defensive, too,” Howard said, nursing the finger.

  Irma said, “We should decide where we’re going.”

  “Shelter, I guess,” Terry said.

  “We have to think long term,” Irma said. “What’s our goal?”

  Howard said, “Learn and stay free.”

  Aybe shrugged. “Learn what? How to find Beth’s group? Or get back to SunSeeker? Or — what?”

  Irma looked around at them. “Once I was supposed to meet a friend in Old New York. The whole comm grid was down, so I couldn’t reach her — and she was a Primitivist anyway, so usually didn’t carry tech or have any embedded. So how was I to find her?”

  “Go to obvious places,” Howard said.

  Irma brightened. “Exactly!”

  Howard nodded. “So you went to the Empire State Building museum, and there she was.”

  “No, Times Square, but — yes. Let’s do the same.”

  “So what’s obvious here?” Aybe barked as he steered, never taking his narrowed eyes from the landscape.

  Everyone thought, looking at the alien landscape whipping by. They were going up a slight slope, and low hills framed the steel blue horizon. Green and brown vegetation clumped at the bases of hills and in the erosion gullies where Cliff knew predators would be waiting.

  Terry said, “The Jet. It’s the engine moving this system, and it passes closest to the Bowl at that opening, the Knothole.”

  “Ah!” Irma nodded. “So maybe whoever runs this place lives near there?”

  Shrugs answered. “Seems dangerous,” Howard said. “If that Jet breaks free — and why is it so straight? — I wouldn’t want to be near it.”

  “Okay, but look.” Irma called up on her phone a picture taken from SunSeeker. The big band of mirror territory gave way near the Knothole to a green zone. In a close-up view they could see complicated constructions nearer still to the Knothole. “Somewhere in there.”

  Aybe shook his head. “That’s maybe a million klicks from us!”

  “I’m not saying we fly there in this little car,” Irma said. “But look, we’re living in a building. There must be some big, long-distance transport around this place.”

  “Where would it be?” Cliff said, face blank. He had no idea, but ideas came out in talk like this and Irma was right to kick it off.

  “Something obvious,” Howard said. “This place is so big, there’s got to be some structure that contains transport. To be large range, it’s got to be large. Irma’s right, it’s a building.”

  “Okay, let’s look for structures.” Irma held up more views from SunSeeker.

  Looking at them, the angled views of the Bowl, Cliff recalled what was now a distant life. He had lived for only weeks after revival on SunSeeker and now — he checked his inboard timer — months here, on the run. Somewhere up there, SunSeeker soared serene and secure. If we could get more than spotty contact …

  All this experience was new, while decades of growing up and getting educated in California were the true frame of his life. Yet that world was gone forever from him. In a moment, the entire prospect of his life — finding Beth, setting sail to Glory on SunSeeker to explore a world and make a whole new life for humanity — all collapsed around him. Beth. God, I miss her.

  All his past life was a dream, one that had to be tossed aside now for a frank reality on an enormous construct. He sat, speechless.

  “What’s that grid?” Terry pointed at Irma’s small flat display.

  Cliff looked, trying to yank himself out of his reverie. Redwing had talked of “morale problems,” but this was more like a moral problem. What did any of their grand plans matter, against this brute reality?

  Irma was responding to Terry by refitting her map with keystrokes and voice commands, using elevations gotten from SunSeeker. As SunSeeker approached the Bowl, they had made a clear mapping of the near-hemispherical crisscross weave on the Bowl’s outer skin. Those features stood out, a knitted basket that supported the enormous centrifugal forces caused by the Bowl’s spin. A miracle of mechanical engineering carried out on the scale of a solar system.

  She flipped the display over to view the living zone of the Bowl’s interior. These maps were much more complicated, since huge continents, seas, and deserts overlaid everything. But clearly, as Irma worked the analysis, a cross-mapping of the outer grids had their parallels on the inward face.

  “Ridgelines, that’s it,” she said. “There’s a consistent matching of the support structures. The Bowl’s ribs are big curved tubes. We find them on both sides — the mechanical basis of ridges here in the life zone.”

  Howard said, “Where’s the nearest?”

  “Ummm, hard to tell.” This went back to the whole problem of conformal mapping of the Bowl’s curves and slants that had bored Cliff on SunSeeker and did now, too. When he came back to the Irma–Aybe–Howard conversation, they seemed to have resolved the issue and Irma said adamantly, “I’m sure it’s at least a thousand klicks, that way — ” and pointed.

  Aybe had another objection and Cliff went back to watching the terrain. Aybe could fly the magcar around obstacles with the surprisingly simple controls, and still keep up a steady stream of disputation with Irma. Cliff got bored and rode shotgun in the sense of watching for trouble to their flanks. They were gently rising over terrain that got more bare and stony.

  While the three argued, they came upon some hills of actual rock — cross sections of layers, some showing rippled marks that bespoke the eddies of an ancient sea. There were hollowed-out openings, some big enough to walk into. Parts of the walls had the curved sheets that meant sand dunes, each seam of differently colored red and tan grains sloping smoothly, an echo of where ancient winds blew them. These rocks had to come from some planet’s surface.

  “Hey, I’d like to look at those,” Cliff said. “Let’s take a break.”

  The tech types broke off and Irma surged up. “Yes! Need to pee anyway.”

  They came behind as he scrambled up the slopes. Puffing, he scaled a climb into one of the caves. So the Bowl builders had kept some of their home world? Intriguing —

  He blinked. Pink paintings marked the cave roof and walls. Simple line drawings showed lumpy animals. One was clearly a running stick figure like the Bird Folk, a slender l
ong neck and arms carried forward. Before it ran smaller animals. The Bird carried a … spear? Hard to tell.

  Something told him these were truly ancient. They reminded him of the aboriginal paintings he had seen in Australia. Those showed kangaroos and fish and human figures. Not as sophisticated as the French cave paintings, but very much older, dating back to fifty thousand years.

  But these — these were alien artworks of … how long ago? Impossible to tell. The Bowl builders had brought this here, perhaps — these hills stuck out above the bland rolling terrain below. Probably this was an honored remnant of whatever world the Bird Folk came from. Their planetary origin, lost in time.

  The others came up and all stood, silent before the strange artwork. There was a dry smell here, like a desiccated museum.

  They left it silently, as if afraid to disturb the ghosts from far away in the abyss of time.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Memor made her clattering ritual steps and buzzing feather-rush display, bowing as she took her seat. Warm waters played down the walls of the huge chamber, tinkling and splattering on rocks, which calmed her for the duel to come. Though this was to be a small meeting — the better to get things done — the Minister had chosen to use this largely ceremonial hall, perhaps to stress the gravity of Memor’s errors.

  Her only friend here, Sarko, hurried forward, hips swaying. “Welcome, one-under-scrutiny. Let me help you.”

  Sarko was tall and elegant compared to the more pyramidally shaped Folk. Theirs was an unlikely friendship, since Memor was more the grave, solemn type. Yet both realized that the other had needed social skills. Sarko’s willowy manner made her an excellent social guide. She made a point of knowing everyone and let Memor know just what intrigues were afoot. In return, Memor shielded Sarko from complaints that she seldom really contributed ideas to the general purpose. Social gadflies were useful, after all, to lubricate the grinding machinery of Folk hierarchy. Sarko’s friendship with Memor went back to the ancient times when they had both been male. Such scandals they had narrowly averted! Gossip they had barely survived! The rich old days.