Bowl of Heaven (22 page)

In their curious vessel, they voyaged amid a ship environment surely unlike their natural world. Perhaps they had not considered building a Ship Star for proper exploration of the galaxy. Or more likely, they could not attempt it, and so set forth in simple machines. They were young and raw, willing to suffer.

Their situation was then tragic. They had launched forth into the stars with brains evolved to deal with a world that bore only slight resemblance to the vast, messy crowds of information in their present, awkward mind-machinery.

Perhaps, then, their deaths would be a proper release from such unnatural tortures.

TWENTY-FIVE

The message from Redwing had given them a lift. But the mood
faded before a clear, quick question:
So what?

Lau Pin’s beamer couldn’t rouse
SunSeeker.
It was a long shot, of course—Redwing could focus a megawatt of 14.4-gigahertz power on them, but Lau Pin’s beamer, even fully charged, delivered only a watt or two of unfocused signal.

So they were stuck. Beth watched them react to this. Then Abduss produced his own miracle, after a desultory day of chores.

“I have a bit of joy here!” he called to them all. In his hand was one of the useful flasks the Serfs had given them for their own housekeeping. Now that they had established their chore routines of getting and preparing food, the usual details of a stationary life, they had time to amuse themselves as they wanted. So they assembled, not expecting much. Abduss passed around the little cups the Serfs had made for them, ladling into them a murky fluid. “Toast!” he said loudly.

They drank. “Moonshine!” Fred called.

Abduss looked hurt. “Wine. It is a wine I made from the esters of the fruit they give us.”

Lau Pin and Mayra both said, “Rotgut!” Mayra even hugged her belly in comic relief.

But they liked it anyway. Beth waved away her second cup and watched the others. They grimaced when they drank but that didn’t stop them, or their increasingly high-pitched laughter, the rude stories, obvious lies, raucous laughter, bright eyes. They needed release, after all that had happened. Alcohol was the easy road to all of that.
Let this pass,
she thought. She watched Fred Ojama, but he only grew more torpid. Presently he said, “I shouldn’t,” and set the cup aside.

The next morning most of them were hungover, griping and shaking their heads. They got their housekeeping jobs done and sat around and then the lumbering, smooth-feathered Serfs brought in cylindrical canisters, laying them at the feet of Mayra. She opened them carefully. Sniffed. “It’s—it smells like alcohol.”

Beth grimaced. The aliens had caught on that fast. To keep the prisoners quiet, give them the ancient chemical that consoles without illuminating. Smart, in a worrisome way.

Lau Pin, to his credit in Beth’s view, said, “I don’t like that they watch us. This proves they’re trying to…” He didn’t complete the thought.

Beth said, “What? Keep us sedated?”

Mayra objected, waving her arms. “They’re just catering to us!”

Lau Pin twisted his mouth into a sardonic curve. “Worse. They’ve got organic chemists, sure. But we’re lab animals here, not guests. The alcohol is an experiment to see how we react.”

Beth agreed. They broke up, since it was time nearly for lunch—according to their suit clocks, not of course to the unending sunlight here. Lau Pin drew the job of expanding and deepening the latrine, while the others cooked the fish and vegetables they had learned to harvest from the ample surroundings. Even simple jobs here demanded some learning, since working in 0.1 g changed everything ingrained in them. They managed, though without spirit.

Beth worried. No new word from Redwing, and they were settling into a routine now. Jobs assigned, a routine set up.

Lau Pin shouted. He came running from where they’d dug the latrine. “Come see! This topsoil is only a meter deep.”

So it was—which made complete sense. The Bowl was a thin layer built to face the central star, capturing sunlight. But it couldn’t be very thick without imposing huge stresses on the tension that held the Bowl together, just from mass loading. Here they saw that the entire ecology was rooted in soil only as deep as needed. Lau Pin had uncovered metal sheets and pipes, the underpinning of this odd building bigger than any world.

At lunch they mused aloud at the possibilities. “How about tunneling through?” Mayra asked. “How could we use that?”

Fred smiled derisively. “And let the vacuum suck us away? These aliens have some way to patch really fast, I’d guess—but not before we die.”

They all nodded. Beth looked around at their faces going slack and thought,
We need to have a goal. Otherwise, we’ll turn into passive prisoners.
She had learned what to do from her training. Get them focused.
Do the next right thing. Now.

She knew it was true. In a tough situation, don’t avoid acting just because it’s easier or comfortable. Don’t lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

Abduss mentioned something in passing that cut off Beth’s reflections. “I found these strands of spidow web, must’ve been tossed aside when a Spidow repaired the network. They spin this stuff out, just as Beth said they must. I saw one doing it. Creepy! Anyway, I got the strands to fuse—”

“Fuse how?” Beth pressed him.

“With a laser. Just warm the ends, stick them together.” Abduss smiled, obviously happy to have something to do. He produced from a sack he carried two meter-long pieces of the filmy white stuff that made the spidow web. “See? They can be retied, with heat. I suppose these pieces got cut off in some way—”

“Then they can be made into long ropes,” Lau Pin said, eyes on Beth. “So we can use them.”

Beth smiled. “To get out of here.”

TWENTY-SIX

Never before had Tananareve wished so fervently for blessed
night.

They had all slowly adjusted to sleeping in the incessant daylight, wrapped away in the long, moist, flexible leaves of the giant bowers. With pieces of the stuff, Mayra made them masks that helped them all get some shut-eye. Still, sleep was always troubled, her alarm senses waking her often to the occasional scamper, rattle, or caw. So when they agreed to arise and move, she was thick-eyed and muzzy.

Now they had to sneak away without the Serfs catching on. That was hard. Lau Pin led them stealthily away along routes he had explored. Tananareve had insisted she go, too, even though she had trouble getting through the root-rich terrain. Thin soil meant that trees spread their roots along the surface, making for tricky footing.

Abduss had risked his life for the long, ropy strands they carried in teams. He had walked kilometers away along the flat, forested terrace that confined them, to separate his acts from the others. A simple precaution, in case the spidows discovered him at work. Then he cut long segments of the spidow fibers and carried them away from the thread-corridor before a spidow came to repair it. This meant only minutes. Slicing through a thread sent a signal along the webs, and the huge things raced to make repairs. They looked and moved like a nightmare on a caffeine high.

“Time to light out for the territories!” Tananareve said gladly, when they had it all assembled. She saw Fred’s grin; nobody else got the reference to
Huck Finn.
They were tense, ready.

Time to go, then. But the pace wore her down.

Tananareve struggled to keep up with Fred and Lau Pin as they hauled the coils along on their shoulders, with leaves to separate the fat threads so they did not stick together. Her arm was mostly healed, but it hurt now and sweat popped out on her brow, trickling into her eyes in big fat drops, and stinging. Sweaty work, silently done, as they crept away from their campground. Serfs did not all sleep at once, apparently, and Tananareve had monitored them to find the time when a minimum of them were awake. The Serf sleep cycle took about three Earth days, by her reckoning.

They quietly stole away, leaving behind dummies of wood wrapped in the leaves, looking somewhat like sleeping humans. No Serfs raised an alarm.

Moving silently took concentration. The air seemed to coil up into her nose, filling her lungs with thick musk. They reached the barrier just as Tananareve was starting to feel woozy. Her arm ached. Lau Pin thought the tall, slick wall was slightly lower here, due to some sagging. A huge tree had fallen into it from the other side, pulling it down somewhat. It was uncomfortably close to a spidow corridor, too.

Quickly they deployed their loops of spidow string. Lau Pin and Abduss began linking the coils, fusing them together with quick bursts of laser light, raising a stench like burnt milk. They had practiced this craft and now could seal the ends within seconds, playing the beams along the ends until they bubbled.

Tananareve took her position along the barrier, as they had drilled. The wall was transparent and slick, probably to keep animals from climbing it. Easily a hundred meters high, too. She looked through the wall at the jungle beyond. The wall was like ancient glass, with whorls and ripples that toyed with the view. She realized that that must be exactly what it was—glass so old, it had warped through its slow slide downward, for glass was a fluid. These must be some sort of standard wall, used for keeping animals within their range. But not, apparently, smart animals.

Working quickly, Lau Pin and Abduss fused the end of the coiled filaments to a chunk of wood. Lau Pin had cut and sized these days before. He had proved handy at woodcraft and more. The ropy, rubbery vines nearby he had built into a curious kind of slingshot—taut vines, a cantilevered flinging pouch, artfully angled struts. He and the others cocked his array back, grunting. The men had practiced this and seemed confident it would work. A tanned and stretched leaf held the wood block payload, the ropes straining at it. They all took their positions as Lau Pin counted down.

Tananareve had to admire how Lau Pin had made this with Abduss. The entire taut machine was like something from the Middle Ages—and they had built it from scratch.

“Fire!” Lau Pin couldn’t resist whispering.

The energy stored in the stretched vines sent Abduss’s payload shooting upward, arcing high. It cleared the barrier lip and started down on the other side. In 0.1 g, a slingshot had ten times the range it would have on Earth. That simple physics had led to many comic miscalculations as they learned to walk and work here on the terrace, but now the difference paid off. The soaring block pulled the spidow thread smoothly out of the coils. The block struck the ground with a thump she could barely hear.

“Over!” Lau Pin called.

Beth scrambled up the threads, hand over hand. The pale fibrous stuff was strong and slightly sticky, just enough to get a hold. She went up fast in the low g.

But something moved behind them.

Tananareve turned and saw two spidows moving off the threads about a hundred meters away, in the channel of their threads.
How did they know?
she had enough time to think.
Vibrations? The stench?

Then the spidows came at them.

Abduss turned and fired his laser at both the approaching shapes. The spidows kept coming. He hit one in the four eyestalks and it bucked back, showing a mouth of converging black teeth like pincers. They made not a sound, but the wounded one reared up, as if to frighten them with its size. At that moment, Tananareve fired her laser into its belly. The thing came down with a crash. It didn’t move.

But its partner did not slow. It brushed aside big trees as if they were saplings, ripping some out by their roots. Abduss held his ground and Tananareve saw the others were going up the thread, hand over hand. She fired again but the second spidow seemed invulnerable. It took the bolts without a pause. She heard from it a high, thin shrill.

“Go!” Abduss called to her. “Up!”

She fired one last time at the spidow. It was moving slower but was only twenty meters away. Tananareve tucked her laser into her belt and leaped for the thread. Her arm gave a sharp spike of pain. She favored that arm and went up, hand over hand, kicking off against the wall to try to get more momentum.

The spidows could climb the thread, of course. She had not thought of that before. They had worried about the Serfs and Memor, but the spidows were the present threat.

She was halfway up when she heard a scream. She could not help looking down.

Abduss was under the spidow, and with a gurgle the screaming stopped. But the spidow did not linger. It tilted up and with its arms it grabbed at the thread. The arms were long and sinewy and moving so fast, they were a blur.

It launched itself upward. Behind it, Abduss looked like a tissue someone had crumpled up after a nosebleed.

It was coming for her. The thin, cutting shrill was loud now.

She pulled furiously at the thread, kicked with her toes. She could hear the huge thing sucking air in and out now with long, windy breaths.

The thread jerked with the weight behind her. She looked up and there was Lau Pin, aiming down from the top of the wall. A crisp sizzle raked the air near her head. Dazzles flashed in her eyes, evaporated away. Another sizzle. Her breath rasped and she ignored the snap in her shoulder.

Lau Pin held out a hand and when she took it he lifted her bodily free of the thread. With one hand he brought her to the lip and she angled herself over, rolling to stay out of his way.

He said, “No way I—” Another sharp sizzle near her hand. The thread went limp in her hand.

She canted over the lip, gasping. Her hands grabbed it and she tumbled over, facing the wall. The brown and gray spidow mass was just below her. She thumped against the wall, mashing her nose. Blood drooled down her face.

She looked around. Lau Pin was falling away below her. He had laser-cut the thread and—the spidow was falling. It went straight down, getting smaller in slow motion. No sound now.

She hung there, holding on, watching it thud below. And flatten down, graceful and quick as a cat. Scrabbling legs, a long low mournful sound. It got larger then. It had absorbed the fall in its legs and now—it leaped for her.