FORTY

We have need of your skills with your own kind, the cool voice said inside her mind. Tananareve felt around her, but no one had entered the narrow, warm envelope that had closed in on her as soon as the Folk sealed up this device. It smelled of dense, fleshy tissues, and indeed, the walls were softly springy, like the skyfish.

“I am certainly willing,” Tananareve said, and waited. She could see nothing and heard no sounds. Yet the voice in her head seemed to be spoken.

We desire you to be quiet of soul.

“I don’t know what that means.”

We can see you churn with emotion. This is to be expected. But calm will come with concentration.

“Uh, who are you?”

The Folk term us Ice Minds. They see us, as shall you, as those of slow thoughts, as our barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times. We have of late examined your species and believe you can be of use to avert the gathering catastrophe that awaits in short time.

“You know us? From Cliff’s team, I suppose?”

Those who stand now outside this reading realm.

“Reading? You’re inside my mind somehow.”

From the Folk termed Memor, we inherited her inspections of your mind. From those primates outside, we learned, again with Memor’s excursions in your selfhood, to convey meaning in your Anglish. Now the Folk at our command immerse you in this fashion, so we can use you.

She didn’t like the sound of this. “To do what?”

To prevent damage to us all. Unite so that the destination we all share can be made coherent with the purposes of the Bowl. To let life call out to life in depths and ranges greater still.

Tananareve had never liked sermons, and this sounded like one. Or maybe sanctimony varied with species. “Why are you Ice Minds? I mean, what do you look like?”

There flashed before her images that somehow blended with knowing at the same instant—vision and insight coupled, so that in a few shifting seconds she felt herself understand in a way that simple explanations did not convey. It was less a sense of learning something than of understanding it, gaining an intuitive ground in the flicker of a moment, without apparent effort.

A rumpled night terrain under steady dim stars. Dirty gray ice pocked with a few craters, black teeth of black rock, grainy tan sandbars … and fluids moving in gliding grace across this.

“You’re the ivory stuff sliding on the rocks and ice?”

And you are death to us. We remain a mystery to you myriad warmlife races. To you bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and searing light. We are of the Deep and knew, shortly after the stars formed, of the beauty stark and subtle, and old to you beyond measure. Our kind came before you, in dark geometries beneath the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices. Metabolism brims in the thin fog breath of flowing helium, sliding in intricate, coded motion, far from the ravages of any sun.

“And you live here?” Still too much like a sermon, but it had an odd feeling of being true.

The Bowl rushed at her, sharp and clear, the rotating great bright wok beneath the hard little red star, its orange jet—and then the point of view swept around, to the hull. It plunged along the metalware—humps and rhomboids and spindly stretching tubes of the outer skin—until it swept still closer and she saw endless fields of parabolic plants, all swaying with the Bowl’s rotation, focused up at the passing stars … while among them flowed that pearly fluid, lapping against odd hemispheres that might—she knew, without thinking about it—be dwellings, of a sort.

“Never thought of that. Shielded from the star, it’s kind of like being on the far outside of our solar system, in what we call the cometary sphere.”

We exploit the heat engine of leaked warmth from the Bowl’s sunswept side to our realm, so we bask in beautiful cold-dark while harvesting waste energy from below. Our minds organize as complex interactive eddies of superconductive liquids.

The view skated across huge curved fields of icy hummocks and hills, with sliding strange rivers of ivory glowing beneath the dim stars. There came to her a creeping sensation of a vast crowd on this stretching plain, a landscape of minds that lived by flowing into each other, and somehow teasing out meaning, thought … more.

“Why do you care about us? We—”

Warmlife, you are. In our primordial form, we traded knowledge collected over vast eras, useful for chemicals, coldworld facilities, or astronomy. We were shrewd traders and negotiators, having lived through eons, and having dealt with the many faces intelligence can assume. Our cold realm has existed relatively unchanged since the galaxy was freshly forged in the fires of the strong nuclear force.

Tananareve was startled by the linguistic sophistication of their speech, resounding in her head exactly like real sounds, in a flat accent—no, wait, they were speaking to her with her accent. Even more impressive. Not many could ape her honey-toned Mississippi vowels.

“Against all that, why bother with me?” Maybe not a smart question, but she was wondering, and here were the minds that seemed to rule this place.

To us little is new. Even less is interesting. We have watched great clouds of dust and simple molecules as they were pruned away, collapsing into suns, and so left the interstellar reaches thinner, easier for our kind to negotiate, and for the ion churn of plasmas to form and self-organize. But these were slow shifts. We are as near to eternal as warmlife can imagine. But you are quite the opposite. You are swift and new.

Into her mind came an image of their bulblike bodies and weaving tentacles, all gracefully flowing, a sliding ivory cryogenic liquid. Something like an upturned cat-o’-nine-tails whip appearance.

We stand at an immense distance from such as you, yet at times arouse when the Bowl, our transport, is under threat. As it is now—from you.

“Look, I don’t know what Redwing is doing—”

Yet you are also vital to the Bowl’s survival when we arrive at the target star, one you term Glory. So you are both friend and foe.

“Why me? I—”

Memor integrated your neural levels to enough detail that we can access them. So we choose you to speak for us to your nominal leader, the Redwing, and to the Diaphanous.

“I don’t know what’s going on!”

Our long views are essential to the Bowl’s longevity. At this moment some 123,675 of us are engaged in this collective conversation with you. The number shifted even while the Ice Minds spoke.

We are individually slow, but together we can think far quicker than you. We are eternal and you are like the flickerings of a candle flame—that which combusts dies, as must all warmlife. When we evolved, the most advanced warmlife creatures on hotlife worlds were single-celled pond scum.

“Why are you on the Bowl at all, then?” She was getting irked with all this bragging. But trapped in a smelly box, probed by who-knows-what kinds of technologies, it seemed best not to be obnoxious. And she would hate to meet whatever these things needed help with. If these Ice Minds just wanted her to talk to Redwing, fine. But somehow she knew it couldn’t just be that.

We bring a wisdom of long memory. We alone speak with and for the Diaphanous. We wish to explore and to meet the Superiors who seem to be at Glory.

Then she felt a surge, as though the entire machine containing her was moving. It lurched a bit and she poked an elbow against a soft wall. Hoarse calls came from outside. What now?