Bowl of Heaven (39 page)

“I’m up,” Irma said unconvincingly. She got unsteadily to her feet, pulling on her gray underpants.

Cliff couldn’t help himself. He started laughing, quick bursts of it. He bent over, tried to stop, couldn’t. The laughs slowed, developed a hacking sound.

“What?” Irma said, struggling into her cargo pants.

He made himself stop. “I—I was thinking about … sex.”

Skeptical frown. “Uh, yeah?”

“No, not now. I mean—just that—I worried about us and them, Terry and Howard and Aybe. Last night. Never realized that sleep was the big thing we all wanted.”

She grimaced, yawned, stretched. “Well, yeah. This is a sleep high—feels
so good.
”

“Wow, yes. I musta slept—” He glanced at his phone. “—oog … fourteen hours.”

“And you thought about sex?” She tried to smile, failed, rubbed her eyes.

“Not really. Just thinking about the team, y’know—oh, hell. I’m not up to speed.”

“Speaking of—”

Yes.
The train was slowing.
They had been so joyful, they’d ignored it. He hastened into his own pants, boots, backpack, field gear. All he had, now. Into battle, maybe.

He went out into the corridor, pulling up his backpack harness. He had run away from enough threats to know that you never can count on going back for your gear. Terry and Aybe were already there, standing warily as they looked out the windows at the dark sliding by.

“Y’know,” Irma said, “we should’ve looked for underground places to sleep.”

“We did. We ran into nothing like this train station, but yeah, we shoulda looked harder.”

The phosphors were pulsing as the train passed by, their gray hoops fluttering so slow now, he could see the flicker. “I see a platform up ahead,” Aybe said.

Cliff went forward. Harder glows showed the prospect ahead. He close-upped it with his binocs. There were teams of robots, standing in gray files. Beyond them … figures on the platform.

“Back into our rooms,” Cliff said. Irma came up, still a little bleary eyed. “Seal the doors, too.”

“What if some Bird Folk are assigned to our room?” Terry asked.

“Then we deal with it as it comes,” Irma said, rolling her eyes.

The small surges of deceleration came slower now. Each segment of the rail line handed off to the next smoothly. Cliff went into the same compartment as Irma and they fell silent. This one had a window and they crouched down to be invisible from outside. The train slowed without any braking sound. Cliff felt hungry and fished out some of the salty food stock he had gotten from the machines. With plenty of water, it was bearable. They were long past the point of testing everything before eating now.

The train stopped. They waited. Distant clanks and rumbles. Irma and Cliff finally cast darting glances out the window. This went on and on. Robots trundled by, some as large as a car, their forward opticals never wavering. Irma put her hands on the floor, to feel any vibration from doors in their car.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like a snowball in hell.”

Footsteps outside, faint and hesitant. Stop, pause, then going on. Again. And again, closer.

The footsteps stopped outside. Cliff took out his laser and held his breath. The door had a mechanical lock that, despite their supposedly having secured it, now rotated. Cliff stepped forward and jerked it open.

A sleek, tawny creature held up its large, flat hands and said in slurred Anglish, “I share no harm.”

Cliff glanced along the corridor, saw no one, gestured inward, and stepped back. The alien moved with grace, shifting its body to wedge into a corner, leaving the most space for the humans.

Irma said, “You speak … our language.”

“Astronomers shared language with lessers, to make hunt easier. I loaded into my inwards. Please forgive my talk error. We were to seduce you into friendship giving out.”

Cliff said, “Is anyone else coming on this train?”

The slim alien paused and consulted some internal link, Cliff judged, by the way it cast its gaze to the side. Cliff realized by standing they were visible to the platform and quickly squatted down. The alien mimicked this, bending as though it had no joints, only supple muscle.

“No. Distribute was to be, but I erased the possibility.”

Its skull was highly domed, with high arches and a crest running along the top. Those and its short muzzle would give it strong jaw muscles, a classic predator feature. Yet it had no retractable claws, or maybe they were just relaxed. As he watched, the thick fingers extended sharp fingernails.
Ah!
Cliff thought. Binocular vision, too, with eyes that flicked restlessly from Irma to him.

“Erased?” Irma said cautiously.

It spoke with a low, silky growl that carefully enunciated vowels, as though they were strange. “Intersected controls so alone could greet you. And in keeping-with, deflected the pursuit team to the train orthogonal to this line.”

“So we are safe here?” Irma persisted, focused intently on the alien.

“For short times.”

“Why are you here?”

“To achieve consensus with you. We must bond to our joint cause.”

“Which is?” Cliff said, bouncing quickly up from his squat to see the platform. Robots moving, no life-forms.

The alien made a short, soft, snorting sound. “Return to full sharing life.”

To Irma’s puzzled look—had it learned how to read human faces?—it said, “For all the Adopted.”

“Which are—?” she asked.

“Many species, low and high. We are bonded here. We seek-wish to return-voyage our home worlds.”

“You are from—?”

It made a sound like a soft shriek. In its large round eyes Cliff saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality. The sensation of connection unsettled him. Why did he feel this way?

Then he had it—this was a smart cat.

“We will help you, if we can,” Irma said. He saw at a glance that she felt the same as he.

“But we are only a few,” Cliff hedged.

“You share-voyage with many in a ship that can damage-share the Astronomers.” This came out as a fast, hissing statement, eyes widened.

A forward lurch came then, rocking them all on their haunches. Cliff stood up with some relief. Nobody on the platform. The train surged into its heavy acceleration again, pressing at them.

“Oops! Let’s get into some chairs,” Irma said. “And tell Howard and Aybe and Terry. Breakfast!” She broke into a broad grin that cheered him up, out of his confusion.

FORTY-FOUR

Memor was glad she had not brought her friend, Sarko, for this
was a rude and joyless place.

From their vantage here, she could see the long flanks of composite rock, carved by ancient rivers. This was bare country, left behind when topsoil had fled downhill in the far past. Now its canyons had a certain majestic uselessness for habitation, which made it perfect for an assembly of search parties. They could survey the low gravity forests that began at the canyon mouths below—a blue green ocean. Long, undulant waves marched across that plain of treetops, stretching into the distant dim oblivion. Those lofty reaches ranked among her favorite natural wonders, the gift of low gravity. There, one could “swim” in the trees, buoyed up by their fragrant multitude. The vast trees stood impossibly tall, swaying in the warm breezes that prevailed here at high latitudes. And the aliens lurked among them, surely.

“Do you have any amenities?” Memor asked the attendant, one of the lesser forms known as the Qualk, who sported an absurd headdress. Perhaps it was meant to impress her? That seemed unlikely, but one never knew.

The Qualk fluttered in tribute for the attention paid to him and gestured with an obliging neck-twirl toward the refreshments. Memor moved forward with grave energy, aware that all those in this field station watched her.

A Savant approached. “Astronomer, we have heard stories, ones we cannot believe—”

“Inability to believe is no insurance,” Memor said, but laconic irony was lost on this small, squirming one with anxious eyes.

They were assembled for her. More fretful eyes, from a variety of the Bird Folk and some minor members of the Adopted. Memor allowed suspense to build as she quaffed a tangy drink and munched a crunchy thing.

“You are all here, leading your teams, to find the escaped aliens. How is that proceeding?”

Some restless shuffling, sidewise glances. The governing Savant moved to the fore. “The Packmistress sent us—”

“Never mind your prior instructions. What did you encounter?”

The Savant flicked looks around but could not avoid Memor’s gaze. “Of course, we have not found the aliens. By the time we hear of them, they are gone. We could follow—after all, we have mobile troops, total air cover, local sensors—but they elude us.”

“Why?”

“They seem able to move across terrain without regard for borders or the ancient constraints we all feel. They came over our regional boundaries, moving in natural terrain with concealment. We backtracked them and saw that they skirted our settlements and found ways around our checkpoints.”

“You are not alone. There are two of their parties, far across our lands, and they both seem better at this than we.”

The Savant nodded, said nothing.

They would come to her, this murderous band of Late Invaders, Memor thought. She had set upon the mirrors a portrait of the leader of the primary group, a face many worlds wide. “Come to me.” The leader would certainly know that she had not sent that message, but the others would not. They had every motive to link somehow, and then they could all be caught.

But there was no certainty in this, and a worse danger loomed. So Memor persisted, “Is it the Adopted?”

“What—what do you imply?”

“Do they speedily report?”

“Well—” More furtive glances. No escape.

“I take it your reply is no?”

“Ah. Yes.”

“You mean no?”

“Yes.”

“And why is that?”

“The Adopted somehow—I have no idea why!—do not obey. They have heard of these aliens.”

“And so?”

“They somehow…” The local Savant cast more anxious eyes. “These primates are unAdopted. Many ages have passed since the last invasive intelligences gained a foothold on the Bowl. This I truly do not understand—but many of the Adopted see them as … admirable.”

A voice nearby said, “Improper genetic engineering, then. Or else there has been a slide in the Adopted’s conditioning, occasioned by genetic drift.”

An image from their Underminds, more likely,
Memor thought.
An ancient archetype running free
,
from the times when the Adopted were on their own.
She huffed, worried, but gave no other sign of her true reaction. She had read and seen images of alien invasions, far back—many twelve-cubed Eras ago. No Astronomers now living were alive then. Though Astronomers were the longest-lived of all the Folk, even they faced a hard fact: The Bowl swam by life-rich worlds seldom. Still rarer were those planets inhabited by sentients—those who could perceive and know—which were of use to the Folk. Still more rare were aliens of sapience—entities who could act with appropriate judgment. The universe gave forth life reluctantly, and wisdom, far more so.

These alien primates, alas, had both—in quantities they surely did not deserve, given their primitive levels of development. Plainly some harsh world had shaped them, and cast them out into the vacuum, untutored.

But she was forgetting her role here. She snorted out anger, spat rebuke, and gave a reproaching feather display of brown and amber. “Admirable!”

“I regret to deliver such news.”

“I had no such reports before.”

“This was a regional problem, noble Astronomer.”

“It is now a global one. These are dangerous aliens, afoot in our lands.”

Murmurs of agreement erupted. But Memor did not want agreement; she wanted action. “We do not know what they want. We cannot allow them to remain loose.”

The Savant caught her tone and lifted her head. “We shall redouble our efforts.”

Memor supposed that was the best she could expect of these rural provinces. They slumbered, while mastering the Bowl fell to their betters. She sniffed, gave a flutter display, and was turning away when the Savant asked quietly, “We hear tales of the alien’s excursions.…”

Obviously a leading question. How much did this minor Savant know? “You refer to—?”

“One of the alien bands, these tales say, discovered a Field of History.”

“I believe the primary group stumbled upon one, yes. So?”

“Then they know our past. And can use it against us.”

“I scarcely think they are so intelligent.”

“They have eluded us.” Short, to the point. This Savant was brighter than she looked.

“You worry that they will know we once passed by their world? These primates were not even
evolved
when we were nearby.”

“We gather from the History that these invaders came from a world whose ancestors we once extracted.”

Memor trembled but did not show it. These unsuspecting types were lurching toward a truth they should never glimpse. She stretched elaborately, looking a bit bored, and said carefully, “Yes. I researched that. They were without speech, had minimal culture, few tool-using skills. Scavengers, mostly, though they could hunt smaller animals in groups, and defend against other scavengers. Those primates, once Adopted, further evolved into game animals. Not particularly good ones, either.”

This at least provoked a rippling laughter. Beneath it ran skittering anxiety in high notes. The Savant persisted, “They do not seem easy to Adopt. They may be angered to see what has become of their ancestors.”

Memor did not let her feathers betray her true reaction. The Savant was right, but for reasons Savants were not privileged to know. Rely on cliché, then. No one remembered them even a moment later. “The essence of Adoption is self-knowledge.”

The Savant nodded slightly, letting the matter pass when an Astronomer so indicated. Clichés, Memor reflected, were the most useful lubricant in conversation. Thus she missed the Savant’s next statement, which was a question—and so soon had to give a summary of what she knew of the aliens. How this could help, she had no idea, but it deflected attention from the real, alarming issue.