He watched Irma’s concentrated expression, ever alert to what lay ahead, but clearly introspective. He cared about her now and had to understand what she was going through. They had lost Howard in a way nobody saw coming, and for Cliff there were no afterthoughts, because he knew he could have done nothing different. In the sudden deadly moments, everyone was truly on their own.
Maybe Irma didn’t see that yet. Something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against some hammering event that changed how she saw the world. If she had stayed Earthside, she might have gone into late old age before it happened. The ones with no give, the ones with the carefully guarded, clear-skinned little porcelain selves, shatter in the end. Some chips and splinters get lost, so that when mended, little fracture lines show. Nobody gets through life immune to the hard collisions. The blackness always follows a step or two behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. That tap, when it comes, shakes you and hastens your step. When the indifferent world breaks your illusions, that shattering takes something out of your own inner cosmos. Something dies within. Irma will never fit together quite so well again. Neither will I, of course.
They came through another of the bulky air locks, and when the intermediate chamber closed, Cliff saw that their escort Sil were the only ones left with the four humans. The fleeing Sil had gone elsewhere.
At the other side, the cool, clammy corridor sloped steeper still, and now they passed into a different kind of passageway. The flooring became transparent and then the walls. The orange glow of luminous plants dimmed because there were few of them on the ceiling. Through the floor he could see nothing but black and then abruptly, as they passed a ribbed steel seam—stars. Wheeling slowly across their view through walls and floor, red and blue and yellow.
“Ah!” Aybe said. Irma sighed. Quert made the gesture of approval and eye-bulge.
“We’re on the outside of the Bowl,” Cliff said needlessly, hearing the joy in his voice at the same moment he noticed the air before him fog with his breath.
The wheeling sky lit a twilight world.
They all stood and took it in. The whispering drone of the airflow masked any sounds that might come from the outside world. They stood on a pathway looking up at the Bowl skin, visible in starlight through cylindrical walls transparent in all directions. Their passage stretched into the distance, below a flat plane above them that even looked cold, a land showing silver ice and black ribbed lines that marched away like longitudes and latitudes.
“Ice and iron,” Irma said.
Between the black support struts was a rumpled terrain of dirty ice. The stars moved in lazy arcs above. A few craters pocked the ice, broken by strands of black rock and—
Glimmers on the plain. Cliff turned and looked behind them, where the long shadows of a quick dawn stretched. And sharp diamonds sparkled white and hard.
“Reading 152 K in starlight from that surface,” Aybe said, peering at his all-purpose detector/phone/computer.
“Nearly as cold as the Oort cloud,” Terry said. “But why is there a tube to take people—well, Sil—up above the Bowl skin?”
Quert said nothing.
Irma pointed to bright points of light winking on and, after a few seconds, off. “It’s always dark here, just starlight. Maybe that’s mica reflecting from rock?”
“Too bright,” Terry said.
A flash came from nearby. They turned and looked at a pinnacle that forked up from the silvery plain below. “A … flower,” Terry whispered.
Fronds spread up from a gnarled base, which itself sat firmly on the icy crust. Light green leaves speared up, tilted toward them. “A paraboloid plant,” Aybe said.
The thing was at least five meters long and curved upward to shape a graceful cup made of glossy, polished segments. The plant turned steadily as they watched, and as the direct focus of it swept over them, the reflected beam was like a blue-tinged spotlight.
Irma looked over her shoulder and said, “It’s tracking that big blue star.”
The plant turned steadily away and Aybe said, “Look down at the focus point.” Where the glassy frond skins narrowed down, they became translucent, tight, and stretched. The starlight collected all along the parabolic curve, about a meter on a side.
Cliff close-upped it in his binocs and made out an intricate tan-colored pattern of lacy veins. “Chloroplasts working in this cold? Impossible.”
“It’s not so cold at the focus, I bet. That’s the point of concentrating starlight,” Irma said. She gestured at the horizon, which seemed sharp even though it must have been thousands of kilometers away. “A whole damn biosphere in vacuum.”
“Running on just starshine?” Terry asked. “Not much energy there.”
“So this plant evolved to work like an antenna,” Aybe said. “They live here, hanging upside down on the outer edge of the Bowl.”
“Where did a star flower evolve?” Irma asked wistfully. They saw now the thick dark stalk that supported and held the flower, swiveling it as the Bowl’s fast rotation swept stars across the sky. “To track starlight and digest it.”
Aybe snorted. “Life evolving in vacuum?”
Cliff noticed that Quert was letting them work through this.
“Doing its chemistry by … starlight?” Disbelief made Aybe grimace. “How’s that happen?”
“Folk bring,” Quert said.
“From were?” Terry asked. “Why?”
Quert paused and struggled with the language problem, eyes jittery and trying to convey nuances, Cliff thought, that were simply beyond human capacities. “Light life we term them. Here when we came. Learned to get out … live from ice … find star.”
Irma said, “Maybe they started in a warm core of an asteroid? Or iceteriod? Got to the surface and used sunlight? Far out from its star, maybe no star at all nearby. Survived. Made leaves to be sunlight concentrators. So then parabola flowers just evolved, out in the dark.”
“Long time,” Quert said.
Irma shrugged. “Maybe a long way from a star, too. So the Bowl comes by, grabs some? But … why?”
Cliff watched across the flat plain and, yes, glimmers came from everywhere as—he glanced back—stars rose and the light-seeking flowers tracked them. Or one of them. The slow steady sway of the focusing plants swept the sky, selected the brightest, fixed on it. The big flowers locked on a bright blue-white star. Light vampires, Cliff thought.
He judged the humans and Sil stood perhaps a kilometer or two above the Bowl’s outer shell, looking down at a wonderland of deep cold night. Yet it lived. He watched a forest of strange, attentive life-forms that tracked across the moving sky, clinging to the outer skin of this whirling top. All this cold empire—stretching far away, perhaps around the entire Bowl—worked on, as it moved through starfields and brought heat to kindle their own chemistry. An entire vast ecology lurked here. SunSeeker had flown by it and seen none of this, Cliff recalled. The whole Bowl was so striking, nobody registered details. They had taken the huge ribbed outer structures to be the mechanical substructure it seemed. Nobody noticed icefields or plants; they were on too small a scale.
He close-upped some of the points of light and saw shiny emerald sheets moving all together, following the brightest star visible. They never saw the star that drove the Bowl, of course, only the eternal spinning night. There were translucent football cores at their central focus. In a nearby parabolic flower, he could make out how the filmy football frothed with activity at the focus—bubbles streaming, glinting flashes tracing out veins of flowing fluids. Momentary Earthly levels of warmth and chemistry, from hard bright dots that crept across a cold black sky. Flowers rooted in ice, hanging under the centrifugal grav. Driven by evolution that didn’t mind operating without an atmosphere, in deep cold and somber dark. Always, everywhere, evolution never slept.