Bowl of Heaven Read online

They hesitated. He had once been the kid who stood at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. Finally he had learned to do, not think, and navigate the chute as it came at you. A big moment, back when he was six years old. Now here it was again. Same answer: down the chute.

  “Go!” He picked up Quert — surprisingly light, as if it had no bones — and sprinted forward. Where? With no guide, he just ran across the canyon. There was a tunnel in the canyon wall and the humans fled to it. Shrieks of terrifying pain came all around them. It was a long run through chaos, three hundred meters as fast as they could go. They made it, to the tunnel, leaping over writhing alien bodies, driven to hammer forward by barely controlled panic. He put the alien down.

  Panting in the shadows, Irma gasped, “I couldn’t see who was shooting.”

  “Up in the sky,” Aybe said in a hoarse voice, winded. “A smaller version. Of that living blimp. We saw before.”

  Cliff looked down at Quert, who was sprawling, dazed. He edged out and looked up. A scaly brown football with fins was waltzing lazily across the sky. Big flat antennas hung down from it, probably the source of the pain ray. It moved like a fat, preying insect. The green beams cast down their burning lances.

  He remembered feeling a pain flash once. His flesh had cried out, I’m on fire! He had looked down at his arm where the invisible beam was landing, and tried to say, This is just my nerves getting jangled, I can take this, but that didn’t work. The body ignored his mind, which knew the 95-gigahertz radiation was stimulating the nerves in his skin. His skin just kept screaming, I’m on fire!

  Same effect here, different frequency. The aliens had different wiring. If you wanted to hurt them, you tuned for the wavelengths that forked into the nervous system and didn’t let go. Electromagnetics were the same everywhere; you just had to know the right frequency. Pain flowed into you on invisible wings.

  The other aliens were running away. No, herded away.

  The brown football was churning across the sky, angling its antennas toward the crowd it swept before it. He watched the hundreds of fleeing figures rush down the canyon. A rabble.

  “Maybe they’re rounding these up,” Irma said at his side.

  “Nope,” Aybe said beside her. “Getting them out of the way, yes. They’re after us. That was our reception committee, Quert’s people. The ones up there are running them off. I think — ”

  Then there was no more thinking as the brown football forked down more of the green rays. This time the enormous hollow whoosh thundered on for endless moments. They ducked. Debris blew by them. Pebbles rattled against rock, and big orange, broad-winged birds fell from the sky, squawking as they died.

  They stood and watched as the dust cleared. Cliff didn’t want to acknowledge what had happened, resisting what his eyes told him, until at his elbow Quert said in its slow, sliding sibilants, “Know we share with you. They kill us.”

  “Where can we go?” Terry asked in a dry croak, eyes jittery.

  Cliff felt the same — dozens of Quert’s folk had died a few hundred meters away. Thin screams came from there. And the football was moving this way.

  Quert, too, seemed shaken, its face a frozen stare. Slowly the alien drew its eyes away from infinity and said softly, slowly, “We share under ways. Must cross open spaces now.”

  “Why is that — ” Terry groped for a word, failed. “ — that thing in the sky shooting at you?”

  “You they seek,” Quert said simply, eyes still dazed.

  “So they’re after us?” Aybe asked, eyes wide.

  “We heard you come. They know also.”

  Aybe eyed the living dirigible. “So they’ll come after us.”

  “And we. Oppose Astronomers now.”

  “Then we have to nail them,” Aybe said firmly.

  Cliff saw the logic. Their pursuers knew the terrain; they didn’t. “But we have no — ”

  “Use their guns. Can’t be that hard.”

  The cries outside diminished. They looked out carefully and saw the big balloon was dealing with their victims, slamming down shots at them. “Distracted,” Terry said. “Let’s blow a hole in them. They’re in range.”

  If the enemy’s in range, so are you, Cliff thought but did not say.

  * * *

  Of course, the brown football turned and started beaming their pain gun again. The burst caught Quert while it was showing them how to aim and fire the auto-fed gun. Quert doubled up with the pain and went into thrashing jerks, head lolling back, eyes popping out as though pressure built inside its head. An awful sight.

  With Terry, Cliff carried Quert into shelter. The pain gun cleared the area swiftly. Howard got a gun going and showed Terry how to manage another. They fired them intermittently as the brown football slowly made its way toward them. “Must be done killing the others,” Terry said laconically. “We got maybe ten minutes before they can do that to us.”

  Cliff looked at the big lumbering thing in the sky, working its fins and — were those fans running under it? Yes, pushing the strange hybrid of life-form and engineering across the distance, maybe ten kilometers. Worse, the wind was with the thing.

  They poured on the fire. The smart rounds burst into fragments as they neared the target, tearing into the wrinkled hide. Primitive weaponry, Cliff thought, and suddenly saw why. Quert’s kind were unused to warfare, he gathered. No steady gun crew discipline, a lot of strange shouting. They had not done it before, and these guns were their first real try. Battlefields, Cliff reflected, are not the best place to learn your lessons.

  Abruptly came the counterfire. He saw green stabs for an instant and then the cliff wall nearby shattered. He knew this only as he shook his head, on the ground. It had slammed him down and now he saw everything through a spatter of fractured light and clapping, hollow explosions. Shock, he thought. He drew in a big lungful of air, flavored with the tang of dirt. He got to his feet and helped Irma up. Dust clouds blew away in the wind and he saw that their artillery piece was shattered where a large rock had hit it. A few meters to the side, and it would have killed them all.

  “Other … other guns still work,” he croaked.

  They limped to one nearby and Aybe jerked open the breech. “It’s loaded. Let’s give ’em hell.”

  They got it to firing, following shouted instructions from Quert. Cliff knew he was still dazed and stood aside as Aybe and Terry aimed it. There were systems that did sighting mounted on the gun deck, pictures that homed in and locked. Quert told them again how to work it, speaking patiently and slowly from shelter. The pain gun was still going, he could tell — the Sil who darted out to help others jerked and cried with the sheeting pain.

  The gun slammed out shots at the approaching target. “Aim for the underside.” Irma pointed. “There are portals there.”

  Aim changed. Shots exploded into shrapnel just short of the yellow ports lining the bottom seam of the big balloon creature. They could see the impact, kilometers away.

  “That’s a living thing,” Aybe said. “It’s gotta hurt.”

  The creature was unused to this. It flinched when the rounds struck — long waves broke across its skin, like slow-motion impacts of a huge fist on flesh. It began to turn.

  At its side, a smaller craft burst from a green pod. It was a slim airplane and fell away in graceful arcs. All the action was smooth, slow. Then their guns ran dry and a silence fell on the canyon.

  “Astronomer goes,” Quert called weakly.

  The huge creature hung in the air and small things began emerging from it. They crawled like spiders across the skin and covered the gaping red wounds with white layers.

  “Fire some more?” Aybe asked. He had used up the ammo store.

  “Don’t think we have to,” Irma said. She was getting her composure back, patting the dust from her pants and blouse, and even brushing her hair into place.

  Everyone quieted down. Faces human and alien alike were drawn, tired.

  Apparently that meant the battle was over. Soon
the pain gun antennas were out of view and the effect ended. The Sil who had stayed came out of shelter, and a great mournful dirge sounded. Their voices merged in a long, rolling chant. They moved among the fractured bodies, turning them to the perpetual sun. The song rose up and reverberated from canyon walls. Quert splayed arms to the sky and joined in the deep long notes. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it for a long while, despite his pounding heart.

  But at last the feeling ebbed. The flapping balloon creature was moving languidly away across an empty sky as teams crawled over it, mending. Quietly the humans left their post and Quert seemed to revive, shaking itself in quick vibrations of arms and legs, as if shaking off a mood. Quert led them away and into a long, narrow passageway through the far side of the ruddy canyon.

  They walked in silence, absorbing what had happened.

  “May return,” Quert warned. “Go.”

  They hurried through an underground passage. They spent five minutes of running, pounding down channels as the chants behind faded away. Quert showed them what looked like an air lock and they went through it fast. Beyond was a dimly lit tunnel. In this they ran for at least half an hour, just Quert and five other of the aliens — who ran with unhurried grace, their paces light, long, and quick — and following them came the humans, slogging on with thumping feet.

  Like gazelles, Cliff thought, and then went back to pondering what might lie ahead. He had led them into this and for quite a while now he had not known where it was going. Wandering and staying out of the hands of the Bird Folk had seemed obvious. Plus trying to learn — and those were the last things he had been certain of for a long time.

  They reached a dock suddenly. But this was a vertical one with no-door elevators, chugging along at a speed that made it easy to step onto a descending plate. Quert showed them how and Howard jumped too heavily onto it, lost his balance, and fell to the floor. That made Terry laugh in a high-pitched way, while the others piled on.

  Howard got his breath and they all looked at one another, aliens and humans alike. There was some odd commonality here he was too distracted to think about right now. Just assume it and see if it worked. Not a theory, but a plan.

  Cliff staggered. His right leg went from a dull ache to a steadily building throb. Adrenaline high is fading. He felt the warmth from it flowing down into his boot. He sat down sloppily and breathed deep, sucking in air to calm his racing heart. Gingerly he felt the wound.

  Irma said, “You’re bleeding.”

  Cliff nodded, panting. “Flesh wound.”

  Howard said, “We’re short of bandages.”

  “I’m not as badly hurt as we’ve seen,” Cliff said. He tried a shrug. “I’ll get by.”

  Irma had thought to take some of the clothing off the dead aliens. She handed him something shirtlike, cottony. With Irma’s help, he tore it into lengths and folded one to make a pad. He tied that over the wound, pulling to get it tight, and the compress seemed to stop the bleeding. He did this automatically, recalling practice they had all gone through. Centuries ago.

  They went on, Cliff limping.

  They came down steadily in darkness and stepped off onto a metal frame in the rock. Beyond the elevator was no rock at all, just ceramics and fiber beams and even burnished metal. There were struts and the usual squared-off construction in a gravity well, but also curved arches and round hatches. Quert led them through support structures, and suddenly one wall was transparent and Cliff was looking into blackness pocked by tiny colored lights. Stars.

  “It’s … the backside of the Bowl,” Aybe whispered.

  Somehow the view was at an angle to vertical, not straight down through the floor. Local gravity was different here. Cliff watched a distant craft swim across this night sky, lit only by starlight. Then a nearer sphere came into view, with three small ships nosed against it. A fueling station? It slid by fast and Cliff realized they were the ones moving, spinning to maintain centrifugal grav at half a thousand kilometers per second. All you had to do to launch a ship was let go of it.

  He pressed his face against the cold transparent window, just as the others did, and looked at long lanes of structures stretching away in all directions. Endless detail into the distance, with gray robot forms working over some towers nearby.

  Quert’s long vowels intruded on his thoughts. “Can see later. Now go.”

  It was hard to leave the view. The perspectives reminded him that they were never far from the vacuum of space, no matter how familiar some of the Bowl could seem.

  “Come!” Quert took them onto another dock and then very fast into a narrow capsule. They fitted into horizontal slots with support straps, and as Cliff got his into place they took off to a swift sucking sound.

  Cliff unwrapped the bulky bandage he had made, and the sight was not good. A dark stain had pasted his pants leg to the wound. It smelled bad and was suddenly popular with nasty little flies that came swirling out of nowhere. With Howard’s help, Cliff shed the lower half of his peel-out trousers, unzipping to reveal the damage. There was an entrance wound on the right side of his calf and a matching, larger wound on the left. Water brought by the Sil washed off the crusted dark blood. The puckered openings were red and swollen.

  Irma brought her first aid kit and pooled its resources with the kits of the others, each kit somewhat specialized. “Looks like some shrapnel went right through your calf muscle,” she said calmly. “The leg’s going to purple up.”

  “It’s hard to walk on.”

  “Then don’t.”

  She and Howard worked for a while, injecting him and putting clean compresses on the leg. Cliff watched the sky where puffy gray clouds raced one another.

  Irma patted him. “You’re not going to die.”

  “That’s a relief. Don’t have to call my insurance guy.”

  “You won’t lose the leg.”

  “Even better. Hurts though. Got some fun drugs?”

  That brought chuckles. “Ran out,” Howard said. “My fault.”

  Irma said, “And your next question would be, ‘Where are we?’”

  “And the answer…”

  “Going to a Sil refuge. Their casualties are in the cars ahead. They lost a lot of dead.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. And his head was feeling like a balloon that wanted to soar into the sky.

  The trip lasted a long time amid bare dim lighting. He thought of talking to the others, but now he knew it was smarter to just rest when you could do nothing. He fell asleep, dreamed of discordant sights and sounds and colors, and just as on the train, came awake only to the tug of deceleration.

  PART IX

  I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

  — STEVEN WRIGHT

  FORTY-SIX

  Beth stood in the entrance of the cave and listened as thunder forked down through immense, sullen cloud banks. They were stacked like a pyramid of anvils with purple bases. Down through them, leaping from anvil to anvil, came bright, sudden shafts of orange lightning. Fat raindrops smacked down, lit up by the flashes. Some of the glaring lances raced from one shadowy cloud to another and came down near them, exploding like bombs as they splintered trees.

  “Majestic,” Fred said at her side.

  “Terrifying,” she countered, but then admitted, “Beautiful, too.”

  “Look at those.” Mayra pointed. In the milky daylight that filtered through the pyramid clouds, they watched moist plants move with a languid, articulating grace. Slowly they converged on the lightning damage. They came forth to extinguish the fires from those strikes.

  “Protection, genetically ordained,” Tananareve said.

  “Sure they’re not animals?” Fred asked.

  “Do they look like animals?” Tananareve countered. “I checked, went out and lifted one. Roots on the end of those stalks. Roots that slip out easily from the soil when it rains.”

  “But the rain will put out the fires.”

  “Maybe they’re h
ealing something else. We really don’t know how this ecology works, y’know,” Tananareve said.

  “And the ecology’s only skin deep,” Fred said. “Ten meters or so down, there’s raw open space. Maybe the lightning can screw up subsurface tech.”

  Beth listened to the full range of sounds rain makes in a high, dense forest. Pattering smacks at the top, gurgling rivulets lower, as the drops danced down the long columns of the immense canopy. The orchestrated sounds somehow encased her, lifted her up into a world utterly unnatural but somehow completely secure, while seeming still so strange.

  Somewhere in this immense mechanism Cliff was … what? Still free? Captured and interrogated? Her skimpy communication with SunSeeker confirmed that he got through to them intermittently and was moving cross-country. That was all she knew, yet it would have to be enough.

  The rain, wind, and lightning daggers swept her along in a sudden tide of emotions she had kept submerged. She longed for him, his touch, the low bass notes as he whispered in her ear of matters loving, delightful, often naughty. Lord, how she missed that. They liked making love while rain spattered on the windows, back there centuries ago. It gave them a warm, secure place to be themselves, while the world toiled on with its unending business. They had ignored the world for a while, and it ignored them.

  Fair enough. But this whirling contrivance could not be ignored. It could kill you if you did not pay attention, and very probably would, she imagined. They would probably die here, and no one — Cliff, Redwing, Earth — would ever know, much less know why. Beth’s small band certainly did not remotely understand this thing. Why was it cruising between the stars at all — driven forward by engineering that eclipsed into nothingness all that humanity had achieved? Why?…

  “Fred, that idea of yours, where’d you get it?”

  He shook himself from his reverie. “Just came to me.”

  “Straight out of your imagination?” Tananareve scowled at him. “Some imagination you got, to think dinosaurs — ”

  “I didn’t imagine it, if you mean I concocted the idea. It just … came to me. Pieces all fit together. In a flash.” As if in agreement, a big yellow bolt knifed down through the shimmering sky and slammed into the rock of the hill above them. Stones clattered down.