Tananareve was healing quickly from the speed-heal salve Abduss had in his med store pack. But they were all getting restless, now that they had food and the basics. Mayra deftly climbed to the top of a particularly tall frond tree, lashing herself in with ply ropes when she got above a hundred meters’ height. She found feathered lizards that sported gorgeous fan plumage and could fly among trees, apparently evolved toward a monkey lifestyle. One variety she called mammoth monkeys. Like many things here, they were huge but not gorilla-like. They were shy, with attenuated, long arms and long torso, just built big and limber as a snake. They liked to swing on vines, apparently for amusement.
She could see farther from there, she reported, above most of the tree canopy.
Lau Pin and Mayra spent their time with heads together, inventing one scheme after another to escape. They even got Fred involved. His notions were crazier than theirs, but nothing stood up under examination.
Find if there’s some key to their enclosure, steal it. Only there didn’t seem to be anything obvious the serf breeds used to seal and unseal the boundary.
Find a way to fly away; in low gravity that should be pretty easy. But that wouldn’t get them out of their warm prison. It just meant they would be on their own, without the serf breeds to help them find food.
Surrender. Somehow. Already they were talking, sort of.
Lau Pin hotly objected to this view. “Should we sit here, as prisoners? We can explore a whole huge world out there!”
Tananareve said mildly, “How about those spidows?”
That sobered them all. Beth let their discussion run; it kept them busy and they might find a good idea. She got up to get some water from the daisy-cup cistern Lau Pin had made. Far up among the bowers, orange flashes arced and snapped from treetops into the gray, clouded sky. Only moments before, those clouds had been cheery, popcorn-white puffballs. Now they slid aside to reveal angry purple towers that tapered to infinity. Her hair stood up on her neck, and a warm wind tickled her hair, sure sign of air freighted with electricity. She turned to say something—
—and got knocked off her feet by percussive force. It felt like getting hit with a baseball bat and blinded by a virulent yellow flash. The others were sitting in the giant leaves and nearly got walloped by a felled tree that crashed through nearby. The air reeked of ozone. Small creatures lay around, some twisting and the others clearly dead.
None of Beth’s people was hurt, but they were certainly shaken. There had been no warning except the instant when she felt her neck hairs rising. She had always thought lightning struck golfers out on fairways swinging 4 irons to the sky, or farmers sitting on tractors in flat fields. Earthly lightning descended on anything taller than the rest of the landscape, like a sailboat on open water. But here she had been among trees and massive foliage.
Abduss said, “You were the only one of us standing.”
Beth frowned. “So?”
“Lau Pin measured a strong magnetic field here. We are on a spinning conductor that carries a strong field.”
Lau Pin snapped his fingers. “The same as a generator—a rotating magnetic field drives current. Charges move around on Earth because of that, so it’s the same for the Bowl.”
Abduss grinned. He always seemed happiest, Beth knew, when he was solving a puzzle. “Lightning is the celestial housekeeper, balancing out the overcharged land with the ionized top layer of the atmosphere.”
Beth said. “This came up through the ground, though.”
“Upside-down lightning, yes,” Abduss said thoughtfully. “Somehow opposite from our experience on Earth.”
“Upside down can still kill you,” Tananareve said. Goes with the territory.
They returned to the discussion. Tananareve repeated her remark about the spidows, and Beth said, “They get into this enclosure anyway. If we escape, we can just stay away from tunnels in the foliage. Back off if we see the spidow strands.”
They all nodded, but she could see they were grudging nods. Abduss made the point that they had now set up “housekeeping” here, had food and water and help from Memor’s servants. “Meanwhile, we know nothing whatever of Cliff’s group and of SunSeeker. They could be negotiating with the locals right now. Let’s wait. Give them a chance to make some progress.”
More talk as they ate some of a spongy, spherical fruit, and Abduss’s view emerged as the consensus. Beth had to admit there was some logic to it. “But we can negotiate, too.”
Tananareve said, “I’m getting better at translating. I’ll approach Memor about a deal. But what’s on our want list?”
In the way group decisions often occur, this was the signal to abandon escape plans. More talking to Memor got everyone off the hook. Their faces said they were glad to play for time. Escaping would be scary, and they had been scared plenty already.
TWENTY-TWO
The tiny primate learned quickly. Memor had the Serfs bring in a mindscan. This was an oddly compact version of the ancient devices. At her order, the techserfs had been working on it diligently since Memor summoned forth the customary device used by scholars, but scaled down to these small bipeds.
Here in the Greenhouse Terraces—a privileged verdant garden of vast natural wealth the size of the Old Continents—dwelled many vibrant, quite different creatures. The Astronomers had studied them since ancient long-gone eras of the Voyage. Their mental processes, as viewed in mindscans, told of the slow press of evolution even under the constant condition of the World. But now such crafts could aid in dealing with the Late Invaders—an idea that had come to Memor while letting her Undermind gush up into full view.
Memor persuaded the translator primate to enter the machine. Indeed, it—yes, she—seemed to like the prospect of leaving the corral. Serfs had erected the scan tunnel near the corral entrance, and the primate gazed about with quick interest at the technologies assembled.
Memor spoke warmly, using soothing tones and feather-fans of quiet resolve. Serfs attended the cautious Invader, chattering in their simple tongues, and soon all was ready.
The device worked surprisingly well. The Serfs had tested it against the arboreal simians, simple forms that were the nearest approximation to these Late Invader aliens. The primate female submitted to the device after being told that it would help the translations. False, of course. But useful, as so many passing illusions are when dealing with those less adroit. Memor sighed, a long, slow, and satisfying vibration it used to let its mind process data.
The scan revealed a brain startlingly different. Strange, yes—but Memor’s Undermind could see structural connections, similarities (primitive, to be sure) to the Astronomer-class minds honed by more Cycles than time could count.
The female disliked the incisive, magnetic lacing of the scan. Clearly so. She became uneasy, and with the Serfs attending to the process, Memor could see her anxieties forking like dendritic lightning fingers through a mind cloudy, veiled, mysterious. And … divided.
Memor experienced the exquisite tremor of an insight. An idea emerged fresh and flowering from her Undermind.
These awkward, tenuous aliens lived in a sort of middle scale. Their senses had evolved to perceive things on their own puny scale. Of course, they could not see bacteria, but they could sense minor dimensions. The larger scales of a world were beyond them, though—no doubt because they evolved on some gravitational mass, as Memor’s own ancestors had. They had a perceptual horizon limited by the curve of primitive worlds, seen at heights no more than their own stature. They must feel trapped here.
Still more shrunken was their sense of time. Typically they sensed the grind of orbital cycles, seasons, incessant day-night, the brute revolutions of planets. They lived in the mire of cyclic mechanics, sleeping and mating to the tick of some planetary clock. Slaves to time.