“Then who’s doing the exploring? The Folk don’t want to advertise this, but it’s pretty clear. They tried colonies and failed. After millions of years in this nice, steady place—heaven, right?—they don’t work out well on planets.”

“But they say they keep track of every star they’ve visited. That’s how they knew what was going on, the Great Shame, all that.”

Karl leaned forward with a thin smile. “It’s the Ice Minds. They think slow, they live slow, but there’s still room for boredom. They’ve left some of themselves in the local Oort clouds, all over this galactic arm. Plus Earth’s. They like it, there’s no weather there. Stable, gives them lots of data, propagates the species, too.”

“And the Folk?”

“They’re the caretakers. They pick up some new species every million years or so, but mostly they just lord it over all the other species on the Bowl—the Adopted, they call them.”

“And we’re the new kids on the block?”

“Wait’ll you see this.” Karl clicked his tablet and flashed a picture on the opposite wall. A view of two spheres orbiting each other, black and white. A simulation, too clean to be real.

“The Ice Minds think the Glorians have a binary-charged black hole system, Tananareve says. It looks like this, they say. Since the black holes are basically very large charged particles, you could control their orbits with very large electromagnetic containment fields. That avoids collision of the black holes. But then they swerve them a little, so the near misses generate intense gravitational waves. That’s the Glorians’ communication link with other big-time civilizations in the galaxy.”

“And the Ice Minds want in on the conversation?” This was getting stranger than he liked.

“Social climbers, yes. They want to meet the adults, looks like.”

Redwing frowned. “But they can’t have black holes around the Bowl. Too dangerous.”

“Maybe so, but—these black holes are small, maybe a few meters across.”

“That small? It’s still massive.”

“Right, around a hundred times more massive than Earth. Oh, and—the Glorians made the holes, too.”

“What!”

“The Ice Minds want to find out how.”

“And we’re headed there.…” Redwing wanted to think this through, but a polite knock told him it was time for Beth.

Karl said, “I was talking to Fred just now and he made an interesting point. Remember when we all were approaching the Bowl? Flabbergasted, sure. But now, Fred says to him it’s been like a twisted encounter with the eventual human future.”

“That makes no sense.”

“In a tilted way—in Fred’s style of thinking, anyway—SunSeeker left an Earth already pretty well worked over by the human hand. Remember? Sunlight reflected by sulfur dioxide particles shimmering in its stratosphere, so at the right angle we could see it from space. Clouds of seawater mist billowing up from those small sail ships, to shield oceans from sunlight. Big carbon collector towers, stretching out across continents. Farm waste rounded up and consigned to the deep ocean, where it’ll keep for a thousand years. Throwing fine-ground chalk into those oceans every year, remember that?—in masses equal to the white cliffs of Dover.”

Redwing nodded, recalling the furiously working fretwork of corrections. “Right, to offset the acid from absorbed CO2. I was in deep space for decades, running hot nukes. Made no difference to us.”

“Me, too, mostly. Somebody else’s problem, and we had plenty of our own, running closed biospheres.” Karl gave a wry shrug.

“That was pretty much taking on an infinite career, endlessly shaping habitat. So I see Fred’s point—why didn’t he come with you to lay it out?”

Karl gave Redwing a skeptical arched eyebrow. “You don’t know he’s scared of you?”

“He does seem a bit quiet.”

“He’s not when you’re absent. His point is, someone or some thing faced those same problems long ago. They built the Bowl to be a better place. Got tired of planets, probably. Wanted to venture into the night sky, but in no hurry. So they took a big fraction of the species with them. Left behind the stay-at-homes.”

Redwing liked this. “You and Fred are saying they wanted managed landscapes that seemed natural. All nice and dinosaur-friendly warm, under a constant reddish sun. Plus its amigo, the jolly jet.”

Karl chuckled. “God knows what Earth looks like now, centuries into running its biosphere.”

“Is this a way of saying you and Fred want to stay on the Bowl?”

“Not at all!”

“Um. So what do I do with this new input?” He disliked asking advice from crew, but at least they were alone. “How does it affect going to Glory?”

“I thought you should hear what the crew thinks. Time’s up, I know.” Karl stood and saluted. “I want to go see the show at Glory, sir. Sail on.” He left.

When Beth came in, he could see her jaw set at a determined angle. She had looked that way through the long hard hours straightening the standing knot. When it was done, she had barely made it to her quarters.

“Captain, I formally request transfer to the colony on the Bowl.”

“Colony?” Things were moving too damn fast.

“The Folk—okay, they’re just speaking for the Ice Minds now—they say Cliff’s team all want to stay. I want to join them.”

“Look, I can’t have crew leaving. We need a sharp pilot—”

“Warm one up. I’m a biologist first, just a backup pilot, really.”

“You’re our best! The way you flew us—”

“Then it’s payback time, Captain. You made the deal with the Folk, right?”

“Not the Folk, no. The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous, actually, seems like.”

“You have to leave some of us on the Bowl, then. So leave enough to reproduce without inbreeding.”

“The genetic stores—”

“Need enough founding population to reduce risk, even with the genetic augmentations from the database. That’s at least a hundred people, no, several hundred. Defrost them while we’re resupplying.”

“You want a—”

“Colony. That’s what we were sent for.”

Redwing told himself to stay steady, calm, but his heart thumped harder. “I’ll have to do that anyway, Beth. The finger snakes want to ride with us. Just the three, a male and two females; they don’t seem to have an inbreeding problem. But fifty Sil have already been picked. There are other species who might want to board. The Artilects say they can rework the freezer capsules, but some of our passengers will have to stay awake longer than optimal.”

“You’ve got room for a bigger live crew, don’t you? You’re launching fully provisioned, yes? We’re already near relativistic speed.”

“Faster than that. We’ll fly up the Jet and get a boost from rounding the sun. Sure you want to miss that?”

“I’m sure. I’m the one who wants to stay, Captain. Cliff is going along with that.”

Redwing sighed. “Then there’s no room for Bird Folk, of course, except as fertilized eggs and an artificial womb—but they want that, and it’s a big volume.”

Beth’s mouth twisted. “After all they did to us?”

“It’s part of our deal. Those Folk don’t run the Bowl, they’re more like the cop on the beat—”

“Corrupt cops. They kill other species to keep some equilibrium of theirs running. It’s a murderous regime. They chased us, imprisoned us—”

“We’ll be carrying them because we could hardly carry Ice Minds. Though we will have a Diaphanous—more on that later, when it’s worked out.”

“But your charge Earthside wasn’t to pick up aliens and carry them—”

“You have to adjust your initial launch orders to the situation. Beth, I’ll have to download nearly half our passengers, and how do I pick them? It isn’t as if I could thaw them and let them choose. They get no more vote than the unborn.”

Beth said, “Pick mated couples. Pick the ones who wanted to colonize rather than explore. We were tested for attitudes.”

“We were all picked for adaptability. Even so…”