FOUR

Beth watched the Bowl’s outer hull, a fast-forward world flittering by below the hard black of space. Even protrusions the size of skyscrapers were just passing gray blurs. In contrast, though the Bowl itself had a surface rotation speed in the range of many kilometers a second, the array of gas clouds and nearby suns hung still. Even high speeds on the interplanetary scale meant nothing to the solemn stars.

Their tubular craft traveled down the outside of the Bowl, hovering close on magnetically secured trap-rails. She watched enormous plains of gray steel and off-white ceramic flash by. Images jittered so fast, she could not tell what was important. A wall with crawling maggot robots, doing unknown labors. A sliding cascade of liquid metal fuming in high vacuum as it slid into jet-black chunks, then ivory cylinders, then shapely gray teardrops—all to descend into intricate new works, objects meant for mysterious use. All that went by in a stretched display she processed in a few seconds—an entire industrial process carried out in cold vacuum, far from the Bowl star’s intrusions. It seethed with robot motion. Fumes danced, billowed, and evaporated away in lacy blue streamers.

Now enormous tangled structures the size of mountains flowed by them. She could see lattice works and cup-shaped constructs but not what they did. It was difficult to keep perspective and their speed seemed to increase still, pressing her at an angle. She was sitting in a chair designed for some other being, one wider and taller. Windows on all sides showed landscapes flitting by, lit by starlight and occasional bright flares amid the odd buildings. From above her head came occasional clanking noises and whispery whistles—sounds of the mag-rail.

“All this industrial infrastructure,” Fred said quietly beside her. “Kept out of their living zone.”

“Ah, yes,” Beth said, not taking her eyes from the images flashing by in the big board window. “We hardly saw any cities before, either.”

“Sure, the Bowl’s land area is enormous, but then you realize that their whole mechanistic civilization is clinging to the outer skin. So they have twice the area we thought.”

Beth glanced upward into the “sky,” where the hull’s burnished metal gleamed beneath fitful lights. “And anyone who lives here, does so wrong way up. Centrifugal gravity pushes them away from the hull, so the Bowl is always over their heads. The stars are at their feet.” Beth laughed softly. “An upside-down world of its own.”

“Smart, really.” Fred was watching, too, his eyes darting at the spacious spectacle zooming past. “You can do your manufacturing and then throw your waste away in high vacuum.”

Beth shook herself; enough gawking. “Look, we’re in a cargo drone. We have to be ready in case we stop and get new passengers.”

“Relax. We’ll feel the deceleration, get ready.”

“At least we should search for food dispensers. This passenger compartment is for whoever’s accompanying the cargo—”

“Plants, yeah,” Fred said distantly, still distracted by the view. “Those finger snakes arranged to escort the plants, fit us in. Neat.”

Beth smiled. Fred had summed up days of negotiations. Their halting efforts had been beset by translation errors and mistakes. Even sharing a sort-of common language, a mix of Bird and Anglish, there were ambiguities that came from how different minds saw the universe. The snakes used wriggles and tiny movements of their outsized faces to convey meaning, and it took a while to even notice that. Words meant different things if a right-wriggle came with it, versus a left-wriggle. The snakes had similar troubles reading “primate face gestures” as they termed it.

Fred turned to her. “You’re worried about Tananareve.”

“I … yes.”

“You’re surprised I noticed.”

“Not really, I—”

“Look, I know what’s in my personnel file. I’m classic Asperger’s, yep. But I hope I make up for it by, well, my quirky ability to see how things work. Or that’s what the file says.”

To stall for time she asked, “How did you see your file?”

Fred was honestly surprised. She realized he did not actually know how to be dishonest, or at least without detection. “An easy hack.”

“Well … yes. I read everybody’s file before we left SunSeeker. Standard field-prep method.”

“So I should overlook how you fret about us, especially Tananareve.”

“She’s not really recovered, and I should’ve noticed she didn’t get in here with us.”

Fred gave her an awkward smile. “Look, the place was confusing and we didn’t have any time. She wandered off. There were the finger snakes making a racket and shooting questions at us.” A sigh. “Anyway, put it aside. We’ve got the boarding problem coming up.”

She sighed. “Right, of course.” So much for Asperger’s patients not picking up on social signals. What had that training program said? “Cognitive behavioral therapy can improve stress management relating to anxiety.” Yet Fred seems calmer than the rest of us.…

Fred pressed on. “The snakes say we’re due for a stop about where SunSeeker could rendezvous with us. But we have to come out at high speed, so they have to match us. But—”

“Nothing like pressure suits aboard,” Lau Pin said. “The snakes say they can’t make anything like that, not in time.”

He and Mayra had come up, carrying a bowl of what looked like gruel. Mayra scooped some out with a spoon, tasted it. “Bland, but no harm on my bioregister. This comes out of a dispenser in the next car.”

So they all fell to eating. Beth was hungry, so the lack of taste in the muddy mixture of carbs and sugars didn’t stop her. She was thinking, anyway. Silence, except when two snakes came by and chattered in their high, fluting voices. Beth ignored them while Mayra carried on a halting conversation with the aliens. Intelligent aliens, the goal of centuries of searching, and I don’t have time for them.…

Her hand stopped with her spoon in midair as she stared into the distance. Slowly she turned to Mayra. “Ask them if we can disconnect this car from the track,” she said.

*   *   *

The big problem was hard to sense when you were blithely standing in fractional gravity and not paying attention to the sky. Here on the mag-train, that sky was filled with stars, and it took an hour or two to notice that they were moving. As she thought, Beth watched a bright star move off the window where she sat. The Bowl rotated in thirty-two hours, so the night sky seemed to move a bit slower than it did on Earth. She recalled how, in elementary school, she had been amazed that while sitting at her desk she was really whizzing around at well over a thousand kilometers an hour. The Earth’s rotation did that, and its orbit moved her at thirty kilometers a second, too. Now she was sitting in a fast train car and also moving with the Bowl’s rotation, hundreds of kilometers a second. Leaving the Bowl meant launching into space at that huge velocity.

Mayra said, “They’re scared. Why would you want to—?”

“Can they do it?”

“Yes, at the next stop. There’s a launch facility they use for traveling off the Bowl, but—”

“How do we shed the velocity?” Fred said.

Beth said, “Carefully, I bet. If they can launch, they must fire us off against the Bowl’s rotation, to bring the exit speed down to a manageable level.”

“SunSeeker must be moving at a few tens of klicks a second,” Fred said. “To lose half a thousand klicks a second…” His voice trailed off into a croak, apparently at the magnitude of it. “… that’s not the way to do it, though.”

Beth watched the landscape zoom by outside. Were they slowing?

Mayra said, “They call it the Jumper.”

“A launch facility?” Beth asked. “Fred, what did you mean?”

“The obvious way to get off the Bowl is to go near the axis, where there’s nearly no centrifugal grav, so not a high speed. Then leap off into vacuum.”

“We’re headed that way, but—” Beth stopped. “Where is this Jumper?”

Mayra chattered to the snakes, and then said, “The next stop, if we take the right shunt. They say.” She looked doubtful, as if this was all moving too fast. Which it is, Beth thought, in more ways than one.

The finger snakes rattled their “shells,” which seemed to work like fingernails. She had seen them use those with lightning-quick skill, to manipulate the intricate tools carried in their side pouches. Now they made a noise like castanets—or, she noticed, like a rattlesnake about to strike. Each snake had four of them on their four fingers. Beth saw Mayra drawing back, her face a mask of alarm. “What’s—?”

“They sense great risk,” Mayra said slowly, “in taking a Jump in this hauler.”

“Not space rated?”

“No, a lack of ‘life caring’—habitat gear, I think. That noise, though … Ewww.”

“Yeah, kinda hard to take,” Beth said. The snakes were weaving now, standing on leathery, strong “arms” and straining up into the air. Their bodies seemed all ribbed muscle, eyes glittering as they glanced at each other.

Fred said, “Maybe they’re deciding whether the risk is worth it.”

“Worth what?” Mayra asked, her face still tight with alarm.

“Worth going with us,” Fred said. “That’s what you meant, right, Beth?”

“I figured there had to be a way to launch into raw space without going to the pole, the Knothole, to get the speed down. I guess there is.”

Mayra said, “That’s what the finger snakes imply. They’re working out whether to help us do that … I think.” A wry shrug. “Not really sure.”

Beth leaned forward, eyes still on the scenery flashing by above the perpetual night sky below. Yes, they were moving slower. Definitely. And was the grav here lighter? So they were moving toward the Knothole? “They can handle the tech for a Jump?”

“Yes, they say. But … they say it will be hard on us. A lot of acceleration, and—”

The snakes chattered and rattled and Mayra bowed her head, listening. “The seats will self-contour, so we will … survive.”

“It’s that hard?” Fred asked.

“High. We don’t have suits that baffle us against sudden surges.” Mayra shrugged. “It is not as though we could have carried them with us, all these months.” A slow sad smile.

Beth saw she was recalling her husband, who had died when they broke out of confinement, crushed by a hideous spiderlike thing. “What else?”

“They say there is little time to do it. As soon as we reach the next station stop, they must gain control of the shunting system. They say they can, the attendants there—mostly finger snakes—are old friends. Then they must move us into a cache that will ratchet us into a ‘departure slot’ as they call it. Then we move into line and get dispatched by an electromagnetic system. It seizes us, in a manner independent of the precise shape of this hauler … and flings us into space, along a vector counter to the Bowl’s spin.”

Mayra had not spoken so much in a long while. Beth chose to take that as a positive sign. She was right about gear; they had little and would be forced to use whatever came to hand. The seats here were oddly shaped and not designed for humans. The finger snakes had couches to strap into. Not so the bare benches she was sitting on. Still less so for the latrine, which turned out to be a narrow cabin with holes in the floor, some of them small, others disturbingly large.

She signed. “I know it may be uncomfortable. But it’s the only way.”

Silence. Even the snakes had gone quiet.

Lau Pin said, “We’re dead if we stay down here. They’ll catch us again. We escaped once; that trick won’t work again.”

Mayra and Fred nodded. Collective decision, great.

Beth noted the snakes watching her. They had somehow deduced that she was the nominal leader of these odd primates who strode into their lives. Maybe all smart species had some hierarchy?

“Okay, we do it. Notice we’re slowing down?”

Fred nodded. “Yeah, felt it.”

Lau Pin said, “We don’t have much time. Got to hit the ground and move fast. The snakes will tell us what to do.”

“Right, good,” Beth said. She glanced at Mayra. “And … what else?”

“Well…” Mayra hesitated. “It’s the finger snakes. They want to come with us.”