EIGHTEEN

They went under the mountains, not up them.

Before entering the underground maze, Cliff looked down through a short pass at the lands beyond the lofty mountains. Beyond lay the first mirror zone he had ever seen. Big hexagonal patterns gave some sparkling side-scatter of sunlight. They filled a valley and dotted the hills above. Lush vegetation filled the spaces between, but clearly most of the sunlight reflected back at the star. This was how the Bowl fueled the jet that boiled up from the hot arc light inferno at the center of the stellar disk. Expanses of mirrors, incomprehensible in scale, focused on the central fury. Somehow, the SunSeeker engineers said, magnetic fields got drawn into the perpetual hellhole. These fed outward with the jet as it escaped the focal point. The brilliant plasma billowed out at its base, and then the magnetic fields gripping it in rubbery embrace disciplined the flow, narrowing it. By the time the luminous jet reached the Bowl’s Knothole, it passed through easily without brushing the heavily armored walls.

As he watched the enormous sheets of reflecting metal in the distance, Cliff mused that this was how the star provided its own thrust, from sunlight that first bounced off the hexagonal mirrors, returned to its parent source, and propelled the jet. Riding on light, he thought, and held his phone up to the star itself, letting the device consider it. In a moment, the back panel said

K2 STAR. SIMILAR TO EPSILON ERIDANI (K2 V). INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE BETWEEN RED M-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS AND YELLOW G-TYPE MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS.

Yet he recalled the watch officer who revived him had said it was an F star. It had turned out later that the spectrograph was saturated by the hot spot glare, and got its signatures wrong. Classic field error.

And indeed the star seen through the phone’s polarizer was a troubled disk, speckled by dark blots that circled the base where the jet blossomed. The whole star rotated around the jet base, which meant the builders had started their mammoth final touch there, perching the Bowl as a cup high above the original star’s pole. Fascinating to consider—

“Come!” Cliff noticed Quert glance back at him with irritation, eyes jouncing in the Sil way. He rushed to catch up with the others.

Their party neared the underground labyrinth and found they were not alone. There were zigzag trees in dense blue green forests near the entrance. Sil moved under the canopy, bands trotting with deft speed. They kept to well-defined bunches, entering the weaving corridors under the stony flanks. The corridor’s external locks yawned. Even in the rock hallways, yellow orange plants hung, emitting light to guide the constant line of Sils and humans. The Sil barely glanced at the humans. Quert and mate moved together in the swift shuffle Sil used, like loping in light gravity, as easy as swimming in air. All in silence.

Cliff saw as they fled that many Sils had small, betraying injuries. Parts missing—splayed knobby fingers with one gone, just a blank space of gnarled red skin. A conical Sil ear half sheared away. Marvelous purple-irised eyes clouded by some past collision with life. Mottled skin; scars adorning slim legs, feet, inflamed two-step joints that served as elbows in their arms; faces sporting red scars that wrapped around as though some enemy had used a curved blade. Cliff felt oddly embarrassed at the humans’ smooth clear skins, unmarked by a life of labor and hardship, or battle and disaster. Without even thinking about it, the humans paraded around with skins and sturdy limbs that spoke of city comforts, the easy life away from fear and pain, a softness not earned.

The unseen Sil damage was perhaps more lasting.

He watched Irma as they sped down internal corridors of the Bowl, following Quert and its team along the gradual downward slope. She was changed, subdued and reflective. Her eyes peered ahead but were focused on some internal scene. He recognized the symptoms because he had known them, back there amid the wholesale slaughter of the Sil. She had announced his own blunted responses to him, using her jargon—diminished affect, emotional isolation, a thousand-meter stare, a general emotional numbness, stress disorder.

Now it visited her. Maybe Howard’s death had done it, tipped her over the edge. Or the fast way Cliff had crushed the Sil who wanted to grab them.

He thought of this as they kept their steady pace, moving away from the big thick doors of what seemed to be the occasional air lock. Since he and Irma started having sex—neither of them called it lovemaking, and in a fundamental way, it wasn’t—they had drawn closer. The other team members had seen that, and aside from a few wry references, nobody said much about it, or seemed to let it irk them. They were a field team, not a social circle. Howard’s death had made that clear enough.

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.

Irma said as they moved along the transparent tube corridor, “Y’know, we’ve found piezophiles that thrive under extreme ocean pressure, and halophiles grow in high salt concentrations. This isn’t all that much stranger.”

Aybe said, “I wonder if they cover the whole outer surface. They could be the most common form of life in the Bowl.”

Terry pointed. “Maybe even more than we thought.”

They gaped. Terry said, “Like a … cobweb. Stretching up.” The thing hung on several stringy tendons that sprouted from an icefield in the distance. Their eyes had adjusted so even in starlight they could make out five sturdy arms of interlaced strands. It climbed away from the Bowl and into the inky sky, and all across it were more of the flowers, their heads slowly turning to track the brightest blue-white point of light above. It narrowed as it extended and cross struts met branches to frame the huge array of emerald flowers. These were larger than the ones on the ground. The colossal tree tapered as it reached out.

“A cold ecology,” Terry said. “The flip side of the Bowl’s constant sunlight. A steady night.”

Irma asked Quert, “Why do the Folk need this?”

“Soft fur, sharp claws. Same animal.”

This seemed enigmatic to Cliff, so he said, “They get something from it—what?”

“Their past.” Quert’s slim face struggled for the right translation. In the dim starlight, the alien face showed its seams, its lines drawn by tragedy. He reached for his mate, a willowy Sil who seldom uttered a word, but whose eyes slid and danced expressively. She clasped Quert to her, they embraced, and there was much eye movement between them. Apparently such signals were more intimate and effective among Sil—and certainly so, compared to the talky humans.

Cliff had learned to look away at such moments; Sil had a different code for privacy and display, and apparently did not mind expressing emotional intimacy in view of others. Cliff was not used to it, and wondered if he ever would be. Quert turned from its mate and nodded toward the cold fields of paraboloid flowers. “Soft fur of Folk.”

Quert turned back to the humans and visibly made itself stand firmly, looking at them all. Speaking slowly, to let its inboard translation training give it the human words, Quert said, “The plants are always here. Stars power them. They store. Always Bowl skin is cold. This be—” Quert gave a sweeping gesture, eye-moves, and said in a whispery tone, “sacred memory.”

Irma said, “You mean their … data store?”

“History,” Quert said. “Big history. Sil want to read it. You can help?”