Memor bristled and gave quick fan-signals of rebuke and mild anger. “The crisis faded away, yes? And we surely played a role.”

“Of a kind.” Bemor gave a feathered signature of drab purple resignation, and wheezed a bit. “Come. And bring your primates. The Ice Minds wish them to see this.”

“They have rested and eaten,” Memor said. “Perhaps they will profit from witnessing.”

They entered the Citadel of the Dishonored to see Asenath’s end. She would be churned into the great matrix of dead plants and animals, so the dishonored could enhance topsoil. Memor and Bemor plodded into the high, arched atrium, where subtly hidden machinery murmured, managing the bacterial content, acidity, and trace elements of the slowly roiling mud-fluid below the Pit. First the Pit, then the Garden: the fate of all.

“I disliked Asenath,” Memor whispered. “But she did have talent.”

Bemor said, “Insults are best not remembered. She was sure of herself and had no thought of consequence.”

Still, Memor needed to consult her Undermind to help her get through this. Calling the extinction of one she had worked with “a just recycling” did little good.

The primates followed, and the Sil. Bemor remarked, “They show few signs of the early stages of Adoption. Perhaps we’d best be rid of them.”

“I believe the Ice Minds will not allow any executions or harm to them,” Memor said. “Or the Sil, though we could build a case against them.”

Bemor flashed vigorous objection. “The Ice Minds were behind the Sil actions. They wished the humans brought to them, without our knowing such intent.”

“Ah, so the Sil are invulnerable, as are the primates. I dislike profoundly having our command of these creatures revoked for the sake of a passing problem—”

“It is not passing. Asenath’s Lambda Gun pulse passed along the jet for a considerable distance. It intersected portions of several of the Diaphanous. One was killed, the others injured. These could self-repair, with help of others who could lend portions of their own anatomy. To damage the Diaphanous is to endanger the jet and thus the Bowl.” Bemor’s grave voice boomed. “An example must be made.”

Memor saw Asenath being led to the Pit and recalled when she herself had faced the prospect of oblivion. Asenath had been disappointed at Memor’s being spared, and had allowed a pitch of reluctance into her later comments. Now Asenath faced the yawning black Pit at the center of the Vault. The sentence was read and Asenath gave no reply, or any mournful yips and drones. Her feathers were a muted gray and hung lifeless. Her fate spread before her in the green slime before the final descent. Deep long chords sounded.

Various religious figures were there, clad in ancient Folk grandcloth. They urged Asenath to convert to their faiths, here in her last moments. Memor recalled that through its history the Bowl had passed by worlds where creatures shaped like ribbons or pancakes held sway. These the ancients had termed Philosophers, for they had little tool-using ability. Such fauna were deeply social and spun great theories of their world, verging into the theological. To Memor philosophy was like a blind being searching a dark room for an unknown, black beast. When philosophy verged into theology, it was like that same predicament, but the black beast did not even exist, yet the search went on. Asenath waved the religious Folk away, giving a fan-flutter of rejection.

Asenath declined a final statement; then her feather-crown altered to deep gray. She raised her head and said, “We die containing a richness of lovers, and characters we have climbed into, as if trees. I have marked these on my body for my death. Then I go into the Great Soil.”

Memor wondered at this. No one would see such inscriptions. Perhaps it was a declaration Asenath hoped would somehow make its way into Folk-lore?

Head held high, with a resigned shrug, she simply stepped off the edge and slid down into the disposal hole. She had never looked at the crowd of witnesses.

Memor could smell a fear among the primates; she had nearly forgotten them. She reassured them that this was to educate them in the ways of the Bowl and the Great Soil to which all must return.

A primate vomited at the sight and smell of the execution, spattering vile acid. Memor saw it was Tananareve, who she recalled had learned some of Folk speech. These creatures were smarter than she had supposed, as recent events revealed.

There was a long silence after the ceremony. Bemor said to the primates, “We have strict justice for all here.”

Tananareve said, “It looks like you’re ruled by those Ice Minds. They can order executions?”

Bemor said, “The Bowl would fail if there were not an authority who could override the passing opinions of individuals. Or of species. Your own ship has a Captain.”

“I never thought it would be a pleasure to see Redwing again,” Tananareve said. “But life is full of surprises.”

They all—Cliff, Irma, Terry, Aybe—laughed hard and long at this. Memor saw that this eruption came from great internal pressures, now released.

“We shall have to be careful with these primates,” Bemor whispered in Folk speech. “They are few and we are merely many trillions.”

He and Memor laughed with deep, rolling tones of relieving tensions. In not too long a time, they would remember Bemor’s joke with little humor.

PART XIV

MEMORY’S FLICKERING LIGHT

The natural world does not optimize, it merely exists.

—KEN CALDEIRA

FIFTY

Beth yawned and stretched and looked at the big foaming breakers curling onto a beach, splashing with a churning roar out to the edge of her wall. Relaxing lapping ocean sounds were a pleasant wake-up call. She had surfed there once a century or so ago and very nearly drowned. Her wrenched back had taken a while to stop complaining.

Now her muscles ached and spoke to her of her many hours in the lead pilot’s chair on the flight deck. They hadn’t enjoyed it, and neither had she. More fun to get worked over in a wave, she thought fuzzily. I wonder if there are surf-worthy waves somewhere on the Bowl? Maybe when a hurricane’s running somewhere, safely far away …

She got up and trooped down to the head and spent three days’ allotment of water on a hot shower. It helped ease her back muscles, and she could think again, too. About how to deal with Redwing and Cliff and all the open doors she was about to slam shut.

She slumped through the mess in her bathrobe, ignoring Fred, who was reading his tablet anyway, and scored a big coffee hit in her extra-size cup. Then back in bed and the wall now running a restful English village, with enough background sounds of breeze and birds to let her forget the ghastly silence aboard SunSeeker.

It wasn’t easy for SunSeeker’s chief pilot to ignore the quiet. SunSeeker was at rest, motors down, shields down. Only a pattern in the Bowl’s magnetic fields protected her from a flood of interstellar radiation. And an alien magnetic pattern, the Diaphanous, was shaping that.

The silence was eerie, after she had spent so long under its background working rumble. Now came a massive, heavy thump. A tanker, she thought. Tankers and cargo craft were a cloud around SunSeeker, and there were thumps and scraping as one or another mated to the ship and masses moved through air locks. Some robots dispatched by the Folk clumped and clanked across the hull on magnetic graspers.

She took a sip and shut out the fevered world.

E-mail first, to get up to speed after ten hours in the sack. She plunged in. The very first was a slab of homework from Tananareve. She had craftily recorded nearly all her interactions with the Ice Minds, at least those rendered in speech within the machine they had her trapped in. She had asked them to use audio rather than somehow making a voice resound in her mind. In the middle of the transcript, captured on her phone and patched up by a shipboard Artilect, was a nugget.