Bowl of Heaven

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(The Adopted, those aliens already encountered and integrated into the Bowl, will have further names used in Volume 2.)

THE LAST PARTY

Cliff turned from the people he was saying good-bye to and looked out at the world he would never see again.

The party roared on behind him. Laughter, shouts, hammering hard music. The laughter was a touch ragged, the music too loud, a forced edge to it all, and an electric zest fueled a murmur of anticipating talk. They had said good-bye already to relatives on Earth. Now, SunSeeker’s crew and passengers had to say farewell forever to the starship construction teams, the training echelons, the embodied political and economic forces that were about to launch them out into a vastness beyond experience.

The view was razor sharp, but it was of course a screen, adjusted to subtract the station’s centrifugal gyre. So Earth held steady and he could see the tiny silver motes of flung packages headed toward the SunSeeker complex. They trailed back toward the flingers on Luna, and another line of specks pointed toward the fatter dots of manufacturing complexes in higher orbits. A dingy new asteroid was gliding in on its decade-long journey. Already, silvery bee swarms of robo-factories accompanied it, hollowing out its stony core for a smelter colony. Glass-skinned biofactories waited for the work crews that would pounce on the asteroid prey, their liquid riches hiding behind fogged domes for sunlight to awaken them.

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