Bowl of Heaven (26 page)

“There’s some odd noise that way,” Terry said, pointing left. A clatter, some yips and snorts. They followed his lead.

After a few minutes Irma said, “Over there, a hill. Let’s get up in those trees to survey.”

They found a slight rise of a few meters and shimmied up the zigzag trees at the top. Howard stopped halfway up and whispered, “The birds.”

Cliff worked his way out on a limb that kept jabbing him with tiny spikes, the big tree’s defense against some sort of predator. He got a view of a distant meadow where odd things hovered. Four aircars, holding a meter or two above the emerald green. Inside their open tops were two or three of the Bird Folk. The aircars moved in a circling path, and Cliff saw their prey—a large thing that dodged across the meadow, hemmed in by the aircars. It had three legs and danced away from the encircling hunters, its big hairy head jerking around, seeking an escape.

A lance arced out from one of the aircars and hit the big animal in the haunch. It yipped, a high insulted cry, and dashed away. A big Bird stood up in its aircar and threw another lance at it, missed. The aircars rushed around in some kind of pattern, weaving in and out as if this was a game, or some ritual. The animal yipped again and screamed when a lance caught it in the middle.

It collapsed, gasping so loud, Cliff could hear the plaintive cries. Another lance ended that. The thing slumped.

The Bird Folk landed and Cliff wondered at the vehicles’ soundless grace. Were they magnetically suspended? That made sense if they carried powerful electromagnets in their thick undercarriage. The Bowl’s conducting frame a few meters below the meadow would provide the surface that opposed the magnetic fields, allowing the aircars to ride on the magnetic pressure.

“That thing’s a carnivore,” Irma whispered. “Mostly bone and muscle. The birdies are hunting for
sport.
”

She was right, Cliff saw. Nine of the Birds had formed a circle around the dead creature and did an odd dance, strutting in, whirling, dancing out with spindly arms raised, making quick leg movements. Then came a honking shout. They circled the beast, raised the lances they had pulled out of the carcass, and hooted again.

It looked primitive and yet understandable. Terry said, “They’re like primordial hunters!”

Howard said, “They’re not using impact weapons, like high-caliber guns. I saw some with long spears, arrows, a flung garrote.”

Irma said, “Maybe low impact because they don’t want to damage the underpinning of the Bowl? It’s only a few meters down in spots.”

They nodded and climbed down, moving away from the Bird Folk. Cliff realized that this immense world was a park, in a way. For the Bird Folk.

They spent hours working through the dense vegetation, returning to pick up their gear, then moving on to explore further. It was too risky to leave anything behind—except for the sailcraft, their escape route into the desert lands.

Cliff and Irma took note of the many life-forms they saw, including a long thing like an armadillo. It crawled without legs, using its sliding plates of armor to inch forward. “An armored snake,” Irma said. Terry wanted to kill it for meat, but Cliff was unsure it would be edible. And he hated to kill creatures on spec, even when they were hungry.

They found enough of the nasty lizards lurking near streams and shot them. They were aggressive but stupid; it was simple to kill them. Aybe gathered dry wood to keep their smoke down. As they ate the greasy lizard meat over a low fire, they tossed around ideas about the Bird Folk, and what they had seen. Not reassuring, no.

They napped, got up with the usual aches from sleeping in the open, and after a breakfast of more lizard, moved on into denser woods. This was a search-and-understand mission, and Cliff moved carefully, not letting the uncertainties get to him.

A distant high noise came rolling through the tall trees as they moved forward. A
skreee
came from their left and they cautiously moved that way, faces puzzled. Some bass rumblings, then more
skreee.
They saw a broad clear area and circled it, Terry gesturing to keep low.

A chattering alarm burst out in the branches high above them. Cliff felt his pulse rate rise as he duck-walked forward through low brush. The whole forest was alive with excitement and arcing above the din came the shattering calls he recognized as those of primates they had seen before. Monkeys, though larger and stranger. But the
skreee
sounds had structure, chopped notes floating on the underlying base line, like sung words. These were different primates, riffing up in the high canopy.

He peered through the ropy strands of a vine plant. Much movement. He brought up his binoculars and studied the moving figures.

The Bird Folk. On foot this time.

About two hundred meters away, moving right to left across a broad, rocky plain. They ran in long loping strides, eight of them, carrying instruments in their long arms. Their feathers rippled with flowing patterns of yellow and magenta. Their heads were tilted back, which pointed their long, broad noses forward, their two large eyes glittering. Knobbed legs articulated gracefully, eating up the ground between them and their prey.

Bunches of running figures were nearer to Cliff. Primates, running with their own loping grace. The primates were tall with long arms and even longer legs, running it seemed from a stand of zigzag trees several hundred meters to his right. Their angular heads jerked around, looking back at the birds, who were angling toward them from farther away. Cries spilled from the primates—harsh, barked shrieks. They ran faster and broke into groups of threes.

At first Cliff had thought the ragged, fleeing band were, somehow, humans. But these were primates nearly as tall as the Bird Folk, and had four arms. They ran in clumps of three, the one behind turning to fire something that looked like a crossbow at the Bird Folk. The shots were inaccurate and the Bird Folk dodged them anyway. The primate that fired then ran ahead while a companion in the group of three stopped, aimed, fired. The one in the middle was reloading.

Arrows flew everywhere. Primates and Birds shrieked and howled and chattered—a din.

An arrow hit one of the birds, but it simply lodged in the thick feathers. The Bird plucked it out and tossed it away. Then the primate ran on and the next one stopped to fire, a classic delaying tactic. This shot hit home. A Bird went down in a tangle of legs.

A long, hooting cry came from the Bird Folk. Angry rumbles came from the surging Birds. They sped up, long legs taking great bounds. They closed in on the primates and swept to both sides, a flanking pincer movement.

Something bright flashed from the huge running Birds, and a loud boom rolled across the open plain. Several fired at the same time, and primates burst into flame. Shrieks, bodies falling, limbs jerking.

Cliff smelled an acrid tinge and watched the remaining primates panic. They scattered, bunches breaking up. Some fired arrows but most fled.

The Birds ran them down. Some they did not shoot with the quick, darting beams, but instead ran up behind them and leaped high in the air, coming down on a primate in a crushing fall. Cliff could hear bones snap.

The last primate turned and howled at the Birds and they simply ran it down, trampling the body again and again.

The Birds danced on the bodies. Their mouths opened wide and they emitted sharp, harsh calls, like trilling fire alarms. With their stubby beaks they stabbed the primate bodies. Some danced on the dead. Spindly long arms shot toward the sky, jerking with joyous energy, and they circled, making a quick-footed dance, shrieking in a melodious chant.

Cliff backed away from the spectacle, shaken. He straightened up a bit and retreated, duck-walking backwards. Terry came alongside him and whispered, “My God.”

“Yah. Yah.” Cliff could barely absorb what they had seen.

The party came together, united in a single purpose—move fast, get away.

Cliff remembered thinking that this place was a park, in a way.

Certainly not for mere primates.

TWENTY-NINE

Redwing dipped into Meal 47, a pomegranate-rich sauce and
artificial meat mix with long grain brown rice, green vegetables on the side. It tasted the same as always, of course—pungent, hearty. And since he’d had it more times than he could count, boring. Still, its savory tang was somewhat enjoyable because it appealed to the dimmed senses he had developed in the austere, rumbling caves of
SunSeeker
. And every meal reminded him of their dwindling supplies.

Any semblance of a sensory life was heartening in the ceramic claustrophobia here. At least when the ship was driving through interstellar plasma, noise-canceling headphones could subtract most of the sound. Not here, now, when
SunSeeker
was laboring hard, its Reynolds bosonic drive coughing in electromagnetic stutters. Some crew said they just forgot about the engines’ steady din, but Redwing could not—though he hid this, of course. He had to seem calm, steady, oblivious of their desperate uncertainties.

Getting contact with the Beth group had been their sole breakthrough. Before that, Redwing found himself commanding a ship that had constant navigation problems and no contact with the ground. He had nearly written off the whole landing party.

Redwing raised an eyebrow at Ayaan Ali, who came and sat at the mess table, waiting respectfully. Ayaan was an Arab woman who dressed in deck uniform like everyone else, but occasionally at dinner wore a stylish veil and glinting emerald earrings. “Ah, good,” Redwing said formally. “Report?”

“We’ve got the high-gain antennas ganged together.”

“How’s Beth’s signal?”

“Strong and—”

“Can you get me visual?”

“Hell, Cap’n, we’re working with a damn field phone signal here!”

“Answering my question comes first, then the complaining.”

Ayaan’s face stiffened and there was a three-beat silence. Then Ayaan said slowly, “No, sir, don’t really know yet about visuals. Doubt we have the bandwidth.”

“It’s a bandwidth problem, or a signal to noise and coherence mapping?”

“At this stage, that’s rather a moot point.”

“Ah.” He looked at the slabs of illos she showed him in a long silence. “Good, then. No complaint?”

Ayaan blinked and her mouth firmed up. “No, sir, and no excuses.”

“Excellent.” Redwing permitted himself a slight smile.

Ayaan laid out a diagram on his slate, pointing to the array she had mounted outside, jury-rigged from interior structural beams. “As soon as we work the kinks out of ganging the dishes, and optimize Beth’s incoming, we’ll have a coherent, linked system.”

“Which means you can go after Cliff?”

“Yes, but remember, we don’t even know what gear they have.”

“Field phones, too, as I recall.”

“But have they hung on to them? I’m getting no pings back at all.”

Redwing understood the tech enough to know that grouping all their microwave range antennas together outside was a hell of a tough problem. Software and hardware together had to gang the antennas so they were coherent in phase, like making them into one big eardrum. Doing that on a constantly moving platform swooping above the Bowl, and focusing them on spots in the moving landscape—he couldn’t even begin to imagine the problems. “You’re doing a great job, Ayaan. I know the problems. Just keep trying for a ping.”

Ayaan blinked rapidly at the notoriously rare Redwing praise. “Yes, sir.”

Redwing nodded and strode with visible energy—more performance for the crew—the five meters to the bridge viewscreen. The whole hemisphere had been converted into a complex display that could flit from real images to overlay dynamics charts. Look too long at them, flip back and forth, and you had to sit down and let it seep in. He had ordered that their interior centrifugal grav be Bowl normal, 0.8 g. They would all be ready to go down and help, if that was necessary. But he wasn’t going to put another boot on the ground until he knew more.

He felt a sudden surge, twist, and correction strum through the deck and walked over to the operations chair.

“How’s the induction coil?” Redwing asked the pilot, a short man named Jampudvipa, always shortened to Jam.

“Sputtering. I got it back right, using the three-zone thrusters. We’re getting barely enough plasma to keep the system from going into parasitic oscillations.”

“Damn. Can we make the delta?”

Jam wrenched his face around and shrugged. “Perhaps.”

The Bowl image spread across most of the glowing hemisphere. It always made him stop and stare.

The landscape unfolded at speeds hallucinatingly fast, because they were moving at about ten kilometers a second over it, orbital speed. So much wealth: forests brimming with green promise, clouds towering a hundred kilometers high over shallow seas, spare bare deserts of golden sand, crawling muddy rivers snaking through valleys rimmed by low hills. Hurricanes roaring and churning across continents larger than Earth itself. An immense, impossible geography. A contraption devoutly to be wished, yes. But, by whom? By … what?

He watched the comm bands. Beth’s signal was down to zero, but her party had gotten through earlier for a few minutes. To keep Beth within range, Redwing and Jam had to maneuver the ship constantly, spelling the watch with Clare Conway, the willowy blond copilot. But the solar wind here was a puny wisp, barely enough to keep the induction chambers from shutting down. Space was everywhere a very good vacuum, but the red star’s wind was even thinner than Sol’s. Plasma blew off stars, but this smaller sun’s somehow got swept up into the jet. Magnetic focusing, apparently, though how it was done seemed a mystery to the engineers. Indeed, Redwing thought, this whole weird place was an implied slap in the face to human endeavors. Even
SunSeeker
was a mere bauble compared with it. A huge bowl whirling around so fast, it covered a perimeter about the size of Earth’s orbit, every nine days.

Jam’s job in all this was to keep them close enough to the Bowl’s atmosphere to let Beth’s weak phone signal get through to them. He steered them so close, the land seemed like a flat plane below them, an infinite wall of blue green dotted with clouds hundreds of kilometers high, of seas bigger than any planet. All of it hung under the constant glare of star and jet, which cast different glows across the deep atmosphere, in long blades of shadow and radiance.