Shipstar (29 page)

“Quite. Note that seems, from your own work, to be a signature heritage of your Late Invaders.”

The implications of this struck Memor only now. But her Undermind quickly sent a link that showed she had been mulling over these Late Invader–Sil resonances. But only vaguely. Bemor, on the other hand, had seen it immediately.

Memor turned to Tananareve. “Your origins are how far back in your own measure?”

The primate took her time. Her eyes swept from Memor to her brother as she kept her mouth stiff. Then, “Several hundred thousand orbitals.”

Bemor had not ingested Memor’s concept-map of her studies of the Late Invaders, for he said, “She must not know the correct sum.”

“No, this fits with her supporting frame-referencing knowledge. I read it directly from her long-term memory.”

“Unreliable. We do not know the topology of her Undermind.”

“We will. But more important, I
asked her
. She gave a detailed history of their species traumas. Detailed and odd, but plausible. They were several times forced into small surviving parties, due to climate shifts. At one point they were barely above levels to avoid inbreeding in a cold place near an ocean. This built in a desire to expand—almost an assumption, I would say, that the lands far beyond the hills they saw could be better.”

Bemor huffed and shifted his bulk uneasily. In close quarters, his musk flavored the air and rankled her nose. She sniffed as a rebuke. “It is rare to proceed up through the stages of mental layering you describe. I cannot believe it would occur in so few orbitals of an ordinary star.”

“As I recall, the Sil also evolved high intelligence and tool use in a short while.” Memor fished up the details and sent them to Bemor.

A long moment of brooding inspection, a rumbling in his chest, wheeze of slowly expelled breath. “So they did. This explains their intuitive alliance with the Late Invaders.”

Memor said, “We have new data that the Sil have been privy to our general messages about the Late Invaders. They may have sensed this as their opportunity.”

Bemor turned to Tananareve. “You know of the Sil?” he asked in something resembling Anglish.

“Only what you have said of them,” she said.

“They are with the other escaped Late Invaders.”

“We were not invaders at all!” This animated the primate. “We came as peaceful explorers.”

He rumbled with mirth at this, but a quick startled expression on Tananareve’s face showed she thought it an aggressive sound. “Your peacefulness is surely moot, is it not? You of course we retained, but some others of you escaped.”

“We do not like being unfree.”

“And we—who of course did not fear any warlike abilities such as your kind might have—do not savor intrusion. We avoid having new influences introduced into our Bowl without adequate wise supervision.” Bemor said this slowly, as if speaking to a child, or to some of the slower Adopteds.

“I think by now all of ‘our kind’ would like to just get away from this place. We have another destination.”

“As well we know,” Memor said, flashing a
humor her
fan-signal to Bemor. “But that is also why we cannot allow you to arrive there first.”

A nod. “That’s how I figured it.”

“Can you also give an opinion of why your companions are allied with the Sil?”

Tananareve smiled. “They need help.”

“And why together a band of these is moving through the Bowl, using fast transport and undersurface methods?” Bemor huffed, drawing nearer the primate—who then shrank back, nose wrinkling.

“They’re on the run. Been running so long, maybe it’s a habit.”

Memor suspected this was a gibe but said nothing. Bemor persisted, his sour and salty male odor rising in their compartment. “Nothing more?”

She looked up at them both with a level, assessing gaze. “How about curiosity?”

“That is not a plausible motive,” Memor said, but saw that Bemor gave off flurry-fan-signals of disagreement.

“I fear it is,” Bemor said. “We try not to allow such facets of a species’ character to rule their behavior.”

Tananareve smiled again. “That’s what becoming Adopted means?

“In part,” Bemor conceded.

“Then you will savor our destination,” Memor said. “It will show you creatures you have never seen and quite probably cannot imagine.” No point in not using a touch of anticipation, was there? Some species appreciated that.

The primate said, “Try me.”

PART X

S
TONE
M
IND

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

—M
ARK
T
WAIN

THIRTY

Cliff watched the sleeting, tarnished-silver rain slam down from an angry, growling purple cloud. This was like a more ferocious form of the cool autumnal storms he had waited out while hiking in the high Sierra Nevada, with crackling platinum lightning electrifying half the sky’s dark pewter. Crack and boom, all louder and larger than in the Sierra, maybe because it came from an atmosphere deeper and more driven, sprawling across scales far larger than planets. This violence was casually enormous, with clouds stacked like purple sandwiches up the silvered sky until they faded in the haze. The stench of wet wood mingled with a zesty tang of ozone, sharp in his nose and sinuses. He tasted iron in the drops that splashed on his outstretched tongue, and salt in the rough leaves they’d just eaten, plus a citrus burn in the vegetables they’d managed to scrounge from some trees nearby, before the hammering rainstorm arrived. Tastes of the alien lands.

“Rain near done,” Quert said. “Need go. Soon.”

Cliff could scarcely believe this prediction. “Why?”

“Folk find us.”

“You’re sure?”

“They know much. Even stones—” A gesture to distant sharp peaks, emerging from cottony clouds as the storm ebbed. “—speak to them. Always know.” A grave nod of Quert’s bare head said much.

Cliff nodded. Rain pattered down and smoke stained the air and it was hard to think. Quert made sense. The whole Bowl was deeply wired in some way. Its lands were vast but not stupid; there had to be a smart network that wove all this together. Still, most of the Bowl had to run on its own. No one or no thing could manage so huge a space unless the default options were stable, ordinary, and would work without incessant managing. Still …

No security from prying eyes would last for long. Their only advantage was that the Bowl was, while well integrated, still so vast. Even light took a while to cross it—up to twelve minutes, from the edge of the rim to the other edge. The delays sending text or faint voices across it, to Redwing on
SunSeeker,
were irritating. Especially when you could lose contact at any second.

The sky roiled with restless smoldering energy. Sudden gusts of howling wind drove the cold hard rain into their rock shelter. The pewter sky slid endlessly across them. But Quert had made them stop here in a long shaped-stone space, angular and ancient seeming, cut back into a hillside. They got in just before the slamming storm descended. Then after hours of huddling, the sky calmed. By the time they ate some of their food, heating it with burning twigs, a black slate wedge had slid overhead and the first hard drops spattered down.

Now it suddenly ended. Cliff turned to the others and said, “Pack up, gang.”

Sil and humans, they all grunted a bit with the effort of getting moving and splashed water on their fire. Cliff could still taste the sweet meat they had roasted there. It had made him wish for a robust California zinfandel, though perhaps those didn’t even exist anymore now. Maybe there wasn’t a place called California anymore back Earthside, he mused.

The succulent aromatic filets came from a big fat meaty doglike creature that had rushed at them hours before. When it came fast out of some big-leafed rustling bushes, they first noticed the curved yellow horns it carried on a broad, bony head. Then the bared teeth. It snarled and leaped, with an expression Cliff thought looked as greedy as a weasel in a henhouse. Most of them froze, for it was a true surprise—not even Quert and the Sils had seen it coming. But Aybe had caught it in midair with a laser shot that drilled through its surprisingly large brain cage and the thing fell limp and sprawling at their feet. It died with a shudder and a long, gut-deep gasp.

They ate the dark rich meat eagerly. It had a strong muscular frame that gutted easily. The Sil cracked its bones and sucked out the marrow. Cliff considered doing it—
fat hunger!
—but the rank, oily smell put him off. So he offered his bone around.

“Sure,” Aybe said, taking it. He sliced a line in it with his serrated blade and snapped the bone open over his knee. “Yum.”

Irma and Terry shook their heads, no. “Ugh,” Terry said. “I grew up on a low-fat diet. That was gospel for a half century, before we had nano blood policing.”

“Me, too,” Irma added, wrinkling her nose. “Our generation hated that fat smell.”

“I like it plenty,” Aybe said. “Must be—hey, what generation are you?”

Terry, Cliff, and Irma looked at each other. “We’re in our seventies,” Irma said.

“Gee, I’m forty-four,” Aybe said.

“Just a kid,” Terry said. “Surprised you made the grade. The rumor around Fleet was, nobody has enough experience before they’re in their fifties.”

Aybe smirked. “You old guys always say that.”

Irma chuckled. “The first forty years are for sex and reproduction. You used yours amassing a lot of tech abilities?”

“Sure did.” Aybe shrugged. “I wanted more than anything to get on a starship. Reproduction is overrated.”

They all laughed. “Women routinely stored eggs and you guys are never quite out of business,” Irma said. “Childbirth’s just easier below sixty.”

“How old do you think Redwing is?” Terry asked, finishing a slab of meat he had traded with Aybe in return for another bone.

“Gotta be a hundred,” Terry said.

“Older, I’d say. Went through the tail end of the Age of Appetite, he told me once. Pretty nasty time.”

“He’s a pretty nasty guy,” Aybe said, and then sucked loudly on a long bone until they could hear him drawing air all the way through it, a hollow slurp.

“Look,” Cliff said mildly, “plenty of people live to well over a hundred and fifty now. Redwing’s not what I’d call
old.
”

“By ‘now’ you mean ‘when we were Earthside,’ right?” Terry said. “God knows how old people live there now.”

That made everyone think of the abyss of time separating them from everyone they knew, Cliff saw. He let that ride for a while. Quert nodded to him, seeming to understand. Then it was time to move on.

They hiked away from their latest rough stone shelter into a clearing sky. There were local horizons here, but now the stray clouds skated over those near horizons and the sweet blue air above cleared further. Cliff had not seen before this sharp, sure atmosphere that he knew was deeper than anything on Earth. Yet now few clouds intruded into a shimmering sharp air. The piercing point star of the Bowl’s governing sky still hung above them, of course. But he and his team had moved along the slope of the Bowl for many days at high speeds, one way or the other, and now the star—Cliff had named it Wickramsingh’s Star, he recalled—shone not at the absolute center of this sky, but at a slight angle. Its jet seemed now to plunge more deeply toward them. Its streamers turned with elegant grace, pale orange filaments laced across the gauzy firmament. He watched its slow swirls as they slogged across a broad hill. The humans hung back from the Sil advance point men—though some of their Sil party, he had finally realized, were women. He still could not tell their sexes apart with assurance. The Sil didn’t seem to have strong binary distinctions between sexes in looks, dress, or behavior. Their occasional puzzled glances at Irma might come from that. Maybe, Cliff realized, humans were just more sexually restless than these Sil.

Shapes darted around in the forest. Cliff had seen that with constant sunlight, creatures had to be on guard all the time. Prey had eyes that looked broadly, like rabbits’ bulging eyes, or insects’ compound eyes—all designed to see at wide angles. Predators, as on Earth, had good depth of field, with eyes looking mostly forward, and wide-spaced for maximal 3-D perception.

Irma walked beside him, shouldering her pack where it wore on her, and said brightly, “Ever think, how come we’re seeing so many bipeds?”

Cliff tried to remember that he actually was a biologist. “Um. Hadn’t thought. But look, as I recall from lectures, anyway, Earthside bipedalism was really nothing more than an oddball vertebrate artifact.”

She adjusted her hat against the sunlight. “Those back there, the Kahalla, they couldn’t pass for us, not even in a dim room. Humanoids, though, for sure. Same basic design. But they’re from a tide-locked world, not like Earth at all. Odd.”

He kept watching the forest slipping by as they marched on. But theory was fun, too. He bit off a bit of a sweet root they’d pried up from the ground, under Quert’s instruction, and said, “Convergent evolution, must be. Those Kahalla prob’ly had four-limbed ancestors, just like us. Back Earthside, the arthropods always had limbs to spare, but not poor old mammals like us. We’re bipeds because we started with four limbs, and developed climbing skills, then tool use. That left two limbs for walking, so that pressure forced us to stand up.”

Irma took some of the sweet root, ate through all the rest of it, and smiled. She, too, endlessly scanned the passing trees and vines, and searched the skies. You learned to stay alert after so long in the field. “Yeah, Earthside, bipeds are really rare. Except for birds, who’ve got ’em because they invest so much in wings. For invertebrates, the closest thing to that vertical posture is something like a praying mantis.”

Cliff thought on that as he slapped a fat bug that wanted to use his hair for a nest. “A mantis has four legs.”

Irma’s voice always went up in pitch when she had an idea. “You’re skipping my point. We saw one biped far back, right? Big lumbering thing that ignored us, dunno why. Then the Sil. Now these Kahalla. All had heads with faces, two forward-looking eyes and jaws and a nose.”