Bowl of Heaven (16 page)

The big Third Variety who led them was a hunter. Was the alien a he—or she? Where were the genitalia? Anus under the tail, just like Earth’s birds. Call it he, then—he carried a long-tubed gun and gleaming, curved knives. He looked like an efficient killer.

They never went past the fence. The Porters did the carrying. In short order they came straggling back with small corpses and bigger slabs of meat—and roots and fruit and grain and twigs, all gathered at the Astronaut’s direction.

The Astronomer had big, nimble four-fingered hands, though she wasn’t doing much with them. Porters did most of the work, and their long hands were dextrous too. They laid their loot in a pattern, a long arc, plants to the left, meat to the right. Swallowing saliva, stomach rumbling, Beth waited for them to finish.

The Porters backed away. The Astronomer came ambling forward, and she was huge. It amazed Beth that she could pick up such little things with her long, jerky arms: bunches of grain, a ravaged muskratlike corpse, a small globe that looked like a striped melon. The moving mountain picked up something and grunted or trilled, raised it toward her huge, thick-lipped mouth and made a warbling, keening sound—the same sound each time for that gesture.

“Eat?” Beth wondered aloud. The Astronomer made a deep bass sound. Gestured with an arm.

They were being taught.

Until Lau Pin snarled a curse, stalked forward under the Astronomer, and reached up.

People froze. Beth waited for him to die.

The Astronomer dropped the little melon.

Lau Pin caught the melon. He held it up and brandished a knife big enough for killing. “Melon. Knife.” He cut the melon, “Cut,” and bit into the slice. “Good,” he called back. Buried his face in the orange flesh. “Eat.” Lau Pin jogged back, turning his back on the Astronomer, and cut a slice for Tananareve. “Give. Eat,” he said, and she did.

They all did. Eagerly.

Each time Lau Pin spoke, the huge feathered Astronomer replied with a bellow and a gesture, his long fingers tracing curves in the air. Those might be easier to repeat than the sounds, Beth thought. She noticed that Tananareve was awake and paying rigid attention. Her hands moved in response to the Astronomer’s Sign language.

*   *   *

The Astronomers also included some called Astronauts, who seemed to be those who could patrol the vicinity of this place. They were big, lumbering sorts who barely noticed the humans. They hooted at one another in long, rolling calls.

But more important, the principal Astronomer had buckled her knees in what seemed to be good-bye, and gestured: She had left them their tools.

That seemed amazing to Beth. Lau Pin had used a knife and he still had it. That was reassuring. Beth tried something else.

She chose a slab of red meat—“Steak,” she pronounced it, optimistically—and set it on a rock. “Beamer,” she said, and held up a microwave projector. They’d tried to use it to cut through the wall of the aliens’ air lock. She plugged it into her backpack power. Turned low, it cooked the meat in a few seconds. They set the beamer aside, cut up the meat, and ate. Beth carefully plugged the beamer into its solar panel charger. The meat tasted wonderful and in her hunger she forgot about the alien.

Mayra and Fred, of course, were photographing everything with their cell phones, and now so was Lau Pin. Good. The power wouldn’t run out for months.

When they were finished, they still had the beamer. And several knives, Abduss’s gun, and the pressure suit helmets.
We must look pretty harmless,
Beth thought wonderingly. A matter of size?

Abduss stretched, yawned, and said, “I’m wiped.”

With her belly full, Beth suddenly felt the wave of exhaustion. She thought,
Don’t be silly, it’s only … well, duh.
The sun was at sunset, vertical to the glassy wall and horizontal to wet soil embedded in a coarse mesh, and it wasn’t going to set. Ever.

She called to the Astronaut, “Sleep,” and to her companions, “Sleep.”

Memor spoke a word. She watched, and when she saw her captives turn unresponsive, she turned toward the air lock. Beth tried to watch her, but her legs dragged. She felt soooo very tired.…

So did the others, she could see. It was logical. They were trapped, depressed, so took refuge in sleep. It made sense. Let their unconscious selves sort out all the new, strange, and alarming. No reason to fight it.

SEVENTEEN

They had a long slog through the rumpled hills. That took days.
Without more understanding, they had no plan, no destination. They needed to learn. But without a goal, Cliff knew, morale would evaporate. Even fear, which was driving them now, would ebb.

When they got tired, Cliff called a rest. Nobody argued. They soaked their hats with water and put them over their faces, falling asleep instantly. Gratefully.

*   *   *

They stirred themselves nine hours later, but without breakfast. Food was short.

Cliff led by example, roving through the nearby copse of trees and bushes in search of edibles. There were plenty of berries and some fat leaves, but testing by taste was dangerous even on Earth.

But what choice did he have? He smelled them for sourness, tried a tongue touch, and if all seemed unthreatening, would bite in. Sometimes this worked with berries and the fat-leaved plants and he got a sweet burst of juice. Other candidates stung like mad and he quickly washed them away with water. He did this several times, returning with a hatful of berries or flavorful leaves. He made them memorize the plant features before eating. The others welcomed fresh food and some caught on, following him in his prowling. Irma was best at this.

The guys seemed to think that they were cut out for hunting. Howard and Terry said they had some experience. Cliff half listened to their bragging amid a discussion of guns. He had glimpsed something large in the bushes—a quick flash of brown hide, then a soft flurry that sounded like hooves, fading. If this had been Earth, he would have guessed it was a deer.

Howard and Terry went out together, making a show of it. Surprisingly, within an hour, they brought back something that looked like a large rabbity grazer, furry and with ears that pitched upward from the flat, level skull. Cliff looked at the odd ears that cupped skyward, and realized that they must be for hearing birds—diving predators, probably. He had never seen such an adaptation on Earth. It was testimony to how important flying was here.

Skinned, the critters had interesting skeletal structure and internal organs. Cliff sectioned them out and tried to understand how they worked. Odd fans of bones, lumpy organs with no apparent function. Some made sense, most not. He needed a real lab.…

They cooked the pseudo-rabbits over a small fire, taking care to keep it hot and show no smoke. Under some spreading canopy trees, the little smoke that did rise got trapped and spread, so they hoped nobody could see it at a distance. Cliff thought they needed their spirits lifted a bit, and warm food again did the job. The meat was tasty, dark and gamy, and very welcome. “See anything that looked like a deer?” he asked them.

Terry nodded. “How’d you know? Four-footed, at least, and meaty—but it had teeth.”

Howard added, “And antlers. Looked pretty weird. Kept sniffing the wind, like a predator. Looked like more trouble than it was worth.”

Aybe said, “We should save our lasers for defense, anyway. I thought we should have tracked and cooked that badger thing we shot before.”

“It looked hard to kill,” Cliff said. “And we were in a hurry.”

Aybe shot back, “And now we’re not.”

Cliff took a long breath of musky air. Might as well bring up the tough issues while they were all relaxed, bellies full. “Look, we’re wandering. We need an agenda.”

That brought on plenty of discussion but few ideas. He had expected that—they needed to vent. Anxiety came out as talk, rambling and vexed. Danger and hardship made for bad reasoning, but if he could defuse their frustrations, they could all then work better together. So they talked for a while, mostly hashing over we-shouldas and we-couldas, and finally Cliff said, “The past is prologue. What do we do next?”

“Find the others,” Howard shot back.

“How?” Cliff asked.

“Maybe make a link to
SunSeeker.
” Howard paused, obviously not having thought very far ahead. “They can maybe link to Beth.”

Cliff did not want to step all over anyone’s ideas; give and take was how you worked forward. He said carefully, “We don’t have anything that can reach
SunSeeker.
”

“How about our lasers?” Irma said. “If we could send a simple Morse message…” Her voice trailed off, seeing the difficulty of even locating the ship in a sky that never darkened.

Aybe saw how this was going, his eyes moving swiftly around their little circle, and said briskly, “First, figure out how this crazy place works. That will tell us how to get on top of our situation.”

Cliff agreed, but it was best to let the ideas come from others. As they tossed thoughts around, he wondered at his own developing social skills. His career had focused on technical abilities—mostly useless here—not management ones. Here he would have to get this little band through unknowable threats—much harder than just keeping employees happy, a task that had always bored him. But this was lots more interesting, and nobody else seemed to want to lead. None of the expedition’s actual, official leaders were here. Though as someone had remarked in Leadership Training, the important skills can’t be taught.

They kicked this around for a while and finally agreed to what Cliff thought was obvious, without his having to say a word. Good—but talk took time, and he doubted they had a lot of time to spare.

The next two Earth days, they spent moving warily across the strange yet oddly familiar landscape. Trees with limb decks, zigzag trunks, spirals—on low hills with running streams and shallow arroyos. Cliff kept track of how long they all slept and found it was steadily increasing.

Irma commented on this. “Y’know, they did Earthside experiments while preparing for starship life. People under constant illumination had sleep–wake cycles that got longer and longer. Without the sun, they lost track of time.”

Terry said, “So that’s why shipboard lighting follows the sun cycle.”

Aybe asked Cliff, “How does anything get regulated here, then?”

“I don’t know. Biology without outside timing, no day or night—we have no experience with that.”

They hunted small game, using spears they made—and got nothing bigger than the pseudo-rabbits. Still, it was fun and they celebrated their rare victories with ragged cheers. They were urban types, and the skills of stalking came hard. Maybe it helped that the rabbity grazers were used to attacks from the sky, so were less adapted to ground predators.

But there had to be intelligent life somewhere here. They could see fields in the distance—great plains of crops stretching between the forks of two converging river valleys. Grass crops, Cliff guessed. They worked their way closer, staying in the hills and staying within the trees. Still, Cliff was startled when they came up behind a few silent, trudging figures. Not human.

“Careful,” Cliff whispered. They crouched down.

The shapes were crossing a foggy slope ripe with thick aromas. Out of the mist came shambling shadows, slow and silent. Cliff switched his distance specs to infrared to isolate movements against the pale background and found the figures too cool to be visible. In the mist they were ghostly, slim shapes. Legs, but no arms.

“The farmers?” Howard whispered.

“No.” Aybe peered closely at the ponderous, spindly forms. “Plants.”

“What?” Now Cliff heard the
squish squish
as limbs labored.

In the murky light, they watched as crusty pods popped from the trunks of great trees. Stubby limbs peeled away from their parents and found unsteady purchase on the ground. They were about two hands high and a mottled green. The slow, deliberate birth came moist and eerie in the quiet.

Cliff watched in awe. Working their stubby legs forward with grave slowness, the roots freshly pulled from soil and then moved onto wetter ground that enjoyed better sunlight. The air brought the scent of their sharp thorns to him, a tinge of acrid poison. The young needed defenses here.

They watched the animated seeds find new spots and with great, slow care settle down to take root again. To Cliff, this method extended animal mobility to plants, perhaps made easier in lower gravity. The others looked incredulous and uneasy, though Irma nodded when he advanced his idea. Certainly these plants were not dangerous, but their strangeness unsettled. Cliff realized that they had all been thinking of this place as mildly different, just the sort of world you would see in a movie, complete with dinosaurs. Reassuringly ordinary in just the right way. He had to guard against such comfy illusions.

They moved on warily. Soon they saw spreading below their hill a vast plain of green grain. A heady aroma blew up from the crops on winds that wrote sweeping patterns across the valley.

Irma pointed. “Look—those farmer folk we saw back at the lock.”

With time to observe, they could see the farmers were leathery at some joints but otherwise sported plumage that rippled with colors in intricate designs. Clad in loose-fitting coveralls, they formed teams that worked on snaking tubular watering systems, focusing the misty, arcing plumes over great distances. They worked hard in their fields, using four-footed animals to draw and plow.

“It’s like farming centuries ago,” Terry observed. “Hard work, very little powered machinery.”

“It’s not as though they can drill for oil, is it?” Aybe said.

“Plenty of solar power available,” Terry said. “And this has gotta be the most high-tech place in the universe.”

“Maybe they
like
manual work,” Howard said. He looked at their skeptical faces and shrugged. “Just because we’ve been living the rugged life for a while and find the idea unappealing doesn’t mean
these
things do.”

Irma raised skeptical eyebrows. “Could be, I suppose. But—” She zoomed her vision and stared at the field below. “—they’re coming.”