Irma looked around at them. “Once I was supposed to meet a friend in Old New York. The whole comm grid was down, so I couldn’t reach her—and she was a Primitivist anyway, so usually didn’t carry tech or have any embedded. So how was I to find her?”
“Go to obvious places,” Howard said.
Irma brightened. “Exactly!”
Howard nodded. “So you went to the Empire State Building museum, and there she was.”
“No, Times Square, but—yes. Let’s do the same.”
“So what’s obvious here?” Aybe barked as he steered, never taking his narrowed eyes from the landscape.
Everyone thought, looking at the alien landscape whipping by. They were going up a slight slope, and low hills framed the steel blue horizon. Green and brown vegetation clumped at the bases of hills and in the erosion gullies where Cliff knew predators would be waiting.
Terry said, “The Jet. It’s the engine moving this system, and it passes closest to the Bowl at that opening, the Knothole.”
“Ah!” Irma nodded. “So maybe whoever runs this place lives near there?”
Shrugs answered. “Seems dangerous,” Howard said. “If that Jet breaks free—and why is it so straight?—I wouldn’t want to be near it.”
“Okay, but look.” Irma called up on her phone a picture taken from SunSeeker. The big band of mirror territory gave way near the Knothole to a green zone. In a close-up view they could see complicated constructions nearer still to the Knothole. “Somewhere in there.”
Aybe shook his head. “That’s maybe a million klicks from us!”
“I’m not saying we fly there in this little car,” Irma said. “But look, we’re living in a building. There must be some big, long-distance transport around this place.”
“Where would it be?” Cliff said, face blank. He had no idea, but ideas came out in talk like this and Irma was right to kick it off.
“Something obvious,” Howard said. “This place is so big, there’s got to be some structure that contains transport. To be large range, it’s got to be large. Irma’s right, it’s a building.”
“Okay, let’s look for structures.” Irma held up more views from SunSeeker.
Looking at them, the angled views of the Bowl, Cliff recalled what was now a distant life. He had lived for only weeks after revival on SunSeeker and now—he checked his inboard timer—months here, on the run. Somewhere up there, SunSeeker soared serene and secure. If we could get more than spotty contact …
All this experience was new, while decades of growing up and getting educated in California were the true frame of his life. Yet that world was gone forever from him. In a moment, the entire prospect of his life—finding Beth, setting sail to Glory on SunSeeker to explore a world and make a whole new life for humanity—all collapsed around him. Beth. God, I miss her.
All his past life was a dream, one that had to be tossed aside now for a frank reality on an enormous construct. He sat, speechless.
“What’s that grid?” Terry pointed at Irma’s small flat display.
Cliff looked, trying to yank himself out of his reverie. Redwing had talked of “morale problems,” but this was more like a moral problem. What did any of their grand plans matter, against this brute reality?
Irma was responding to Terry by refitting her map with keystrokes and voice commands, using elevations gotten from SunSeeker. As SunSeeker approached the Bowl, they had made a clear mapping of the near-hemispherical crisscross weave on the Bowl’s outer skin. Those features stood out, a knitted basket that supported the enormous centrifugal forces caused by the Bowl’s spin. A miracle of mechanical engineering carried out on the scale of a solar system.
She flipped the display over to view the living zone of the Bowl’s interior. These maps were much more complicated, since huge continents, seas, and deserts overlaid everything. But clearly, as Irma worked the analysis, a cross-mapping of the outer grids had their parallels on the inward face.
“Ridgelines, that’s it,” she said. “There’s a consistent matching of the support structures. The Bowl’s ribs are big curved tubes. We find them on both sides—the mechanical basis of ridges here in the life zone.”
Howard said, “Where’s the nearest?”
“Ummm, hard to tell.” This went back to the whole problem of conformal mapping of the Bowl’s curves and slants that had bored Cliff on SunSeeker and did now, too. When he came back to the Irma–Aybe–Howard conversation, they seemed to have resolved the issue and Irma said adamantly, “I’m sure it’s at least a thousand klicks, that way—” and pointed.
Aybe had another objection and Cliff went back to watching the terrain. Aybe could fly the magcar around obstacles with the surprisingly simple controls, and still keep up a steady stream of disputation with Irma. Cliff got bored and rode shotgun in the sense of watching for trouble to their flanks. They were gently rising over terrain that got more bare and stony.
While the three argued, they came upon some hills of actual rock—cross sections of layers, some showing rippled marks that bespoke the eddies of an ancient sea. There were hollowed-out openings, some big enough to walk into. Parts of the walls had the curved sheets that meant sand dunes, each seam of differently colored red and tan grains sloping smoothly, an echo of where ancient winds blew them. These rocks had to come from some planet’s surface.
“Hey, I’d like to look at those,” Cliff said. “Let’s take a break.”
The tech types broke off and Irma surged up. “Yes! Need to pee anyway.”
They came behind as he scrambled up the slopes. Puffing, he scaled a climb into one of the caves. So the Bowl builders had kept some of their home world? Intriguing—
He blinked. Pink paintings marked the cave roof and walls. Simple line drawings showed lumpy animals. One was clearly a running stick figure like the Bird Folk, a slender long neck and arms carried forward. Before it ran smaller animals. The Bird carried a … spear? Hard to tell.
Something told him these were truly ancient. They reminded him of the aboriginal paintings he had seen in Australia. Those showed kangaroos and fish and human figures. Not as sophisticated as the French cave paintings, but very much older, dating back to fifty thousand years.
But these—these were alien artworks of … how long ago? Impossible to tell. The Bowl builders had brought this here, perhaps—these hills stuck out above the bland rolling terrain below. Probably this was an honored remnant of whatever world the Bird Folk came from. Their planetary origin, lost in time.
The others came up and all stood, silent before the strange artwork. There was a dry smell here, like a desiccated museum.
They left it silently, as if afraid to disturb the ghosts from far away in the abyss of time.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Memor made her clattering ritual steps and buzzing feather-rush display, bowing as she took her seat. Warm waters played down the walls of the huge chamber, tinkling and splattering on rocks, which calmed her for the duel to come. Though this was to be a small meeting—the better to get things done—the Minister had chosen to use this largely ceremonial hall, perhaps to stress the gravity of Memor’s errors.
Her only friend here, Sarko, hurried forward, hips swaying. “Welcome, one-under-scrutiny. Let me help you.”
Sarko was tall and elegant compared to the more pyramidally shaped Folk. Theirs was an unlikely friendship, since Memor was more the grave, solemn type. Yet both realized that the other had needed social skills. Sarko’s willowy manner made her an excellent social guide. She made a point of knowing everyone and let Memor know just what intrigues were afoot. In return, Memor shielded Sarko from complaints that she seldom really contributed ideas to the general purpose. Social gadflies were useful, after all, to lubricate the grinding machinery of Folk hierarchy. Sarko’s friendship with Memor went back to the ancient times when they had both been male. Such scandals they had narrowly averted! Gossip they had barely survived! The rich old days.