“The Gamma Lance is primed,” a senior female said. She gestured at the star bowl. The starship plainly intended to fly into their jet. Foolish! The senior female said.

Memor rose on unsteady legs to dispute. But what would we all lose? An interstellar ramjet of unusual design and audacity, at the very least. New modes of thought. Strangeness. Adventure! Memor sat, and others sang their vying songs. Discussion rolled on.

Memor tried to follow the discourse, while giving no sign that he wrestled with his inner self. Strange emotions flitted through his mind, mingling with the ancient records in strange symphonies of thought. The best stories were never of maintaining stasis. Change meant action meant zest. Watchers held the balance of the Bowl, but Dancers had all the best songs. Of course, there had been times when a visiting alien was simply destroyed, but where was the entertainment in that?

It might be that Memor, and Memor’s peers, would give too much weight to tales of change and advancement.

Time would tell. But for now, Memor was a Dancer. He had to be.

His inner struggles and outer sweats so preoccupied him that he very nearly failed to note that the Dancers carried the argument. Only when a friend pounded him with hearty congratulation did Memor discover that he had been made Master of the Task—and would have to deal with the approaching aliens, if they should dare land.

“Why?” he asked a friend Watcher.

“Because you are inventive. Also, you have enemies.”

“My enemies would—?”

“Hope you fail, yes.”

Memor paused, but decided to go with the tide. He strutted a bit and bellowed hearty masculine thanks to all. Let them come!

PART II

THE TOUGH GET GOING

Man is a small thing, and the night is large and full of wonder.

—L ORD D UNSANY

SEVEN

They left a skeleton crew of five aboard SunSeeker, with Redwing plainly sorry that proper ship command protocols demanded that he stay aboard. The crew left were enough to handle the hundreds in hibernation and maintain ship systems.

The descent team took ten down with them—Beth, Cliff, Fred, the Wickramsinghs, and five recently revived, who were still taking it all in. Cliff was nominally first officer, mostly because Redwing wanted to avoid the delay in reviving a ship crew officer. Cliff could barely keep the various ranks straight in his head and suspected they would quite soon matter very little.

Terry Gould and Tananareve started as per regulations by checking everyone’s gear and organizing it for rapid use if necessary. They had field packs, rations, water, lasers, and tech gear, all compact and rugged. The lower Bowl grav made it possible to carry more, so they had packed to do so. Cliff, Beth, and Fred spent most of the long flight checking and rechecking their gear, then reviewing the many multi-spectra maps they had made. On the flat regions there stood pillars, barely resolved—not pylons, but raised land formations.

“Buttes,” Beth said, sipping coffee. “Black-topped. Kinda like the American West but lots bigger. Looks like they rise all the way up to the sky roof. So the sealing barrier, that light blue stuff, ends at the rim of the butte.”

“Pretty high, too,” Fred added with a grin, plainly enjoying himself. “Nearly seven kilometers. Not as high as Everest, and certainly nothing compares to Olympus Mons, but worth climbing for fun. Always wanted to do Everest…”

Cliff kept his voice even and warm, and even managed a smile of sorts. “We’ll have to arrange it for you.” At times, Fred was touchy. As the ship rumbled, Cliff eyed Fred, who was lean and muscular and sported a permanent suntan. How had he gotten that in all their training time? Cliff had hardly been able to sleep. At least Fred didn’t talk much now as he concentrated on work.

*   *   *

The last long swoop of their descending orbit was tense. The cabins filled with a sour smell and everyone was on edge. It felt odd to be coasting down toward a huge landscape that stretched away to all sides, filling the sky—and yet still be in space. The Bowl wrapped around them.

No tug of deceleration or singing of thin air. Cliff looked at the wall screens. One showed SunSeeker above them, a pale blue thread of flame trailing. Another showed the top of the butte, nearly edge on and still a featureless black. Another, the “overhead” view toward the jet.

Cliff watched the ivory and orange streamers fight and roil along it. An idea struck him. “Abduss!”

The man was in the next acceleration couch, face pale, looking none too well.

“You studied the jet, right?”

“Uh, yes, Cliff…”

“What does it emit?”

“X-rays, microwaves, plenty of IR.”

“And?”

“Not much visible light. A lot of broadband radio and microwave noise,” the wiry man said, obviously glad to have something else to think about than their landing. “Very loud. Very beautiful.”

“I’ll bet that’s why we don’t pick up their transmissions—they avoid the visible region of the spectrum. Probably use direct laser feeds, instead—so no side lobes for us to pick up.”

“Ah, yes, they are clever,” Abduss said, and went back to looking fixedly at the land sliding below them. His mouth worked.

Lightning forked around the oval. Some kind of electrical process, like the big sheets of luminosity that came cascading down from Earth’s ionosphere? Cliff watched the quick, orange streamers. They slid around the butte, with glowing fingers probing at the lip.

The atmosphere’s membrane was a light blue shining sheet under them now. It was visible only at an angle. Sunlight glinted off long wave fronts that rippled in the sheet’s surface, making it look like a transparent ocean. Cliff marveled at the illusion, seeing beneath it craggy mountains and long, sloping green valleys as though they lay on an ocean floor. Somehow this made the whole construction both eerie and yet like a planet.

Now they tilted and their thrusters roared, rattling Cliff’s teeth. They skated along just above the membrane, and he saw that the waves were moving slowly, great undulating troughs driven by—what?

Like an ocean on Earth. Perhaps the rotation of this colossal artifact unleashed such waves, and they in turn affected the weather below. So did Earth’s atmosphere, after all; hurricanes came from the planet’s rotation about its poles. What oddities could they expect on this unimaginable scale?

He watched a long line of rain clouds caught in the crest of a wave. Angry blue gray clouds were corralled in the high peak, as if in rising they cooled and let go their moisture. His eye followed the cloud-racked crest to the far horizon. A marching regimental rainstorm. He felt a cold sensation of strangeness at this sight. The idea of a rainstorm that stretched long and slender over distances far greater than continents made him suck in his breath.

Now they were above the black pillar, descending. Cliff’s stomach fluttered up into his throat. He clenched his teeth as Eros rolled and dived, wrenching around as Beth slammed them hard into their couches.

“The butte!” she shouted. “Damn!”

Abduss shouted, “What? What is it?”

Pause. “It’ll be fine,” she said flatly with forced calm. “I can figure this. Keep your crash webs tight. Someone should have noticed.” Beth was talking through clenched teeth.

Abduss frowned. “What is—?”

“That’s no butte. We’re inside a hollow tube! The surface is—I don’t see a surface, it’s in shadow, seven kilometers down.” Thrust went away. “I don’t want to run out of fuel. I’m going to assume there’s a floor and it’s flush with the forest. Abduss, can you get me anything with radar?”

Cliff’s throat was dry and his voice cracked. “Floor as opposed to … what?”