Free Shipstar by Larry Niven, Gregory Benford

end mated. He had learned a basic lesson here: Expect the unexpected.
    More dozing. A lot later, it seemed, he asked vaguely, “We should go … somewhere.…”
    “The mass funeral festival of the Sil. We must go.”
    “When?”
    “Get dressed.”
    *   *   *
    She had gotten him into a halfway presentable mood with the most direct possible method. Smart, with talents he could not anticipate. He had always tried to work with people who were smarter, quicker, and more naturally adept than he was, plus those who had talents he could not even anticipate. Irma was all of that. In this incredible mess of an interstellar expedition, she kept her wits.
    He realized that he, on the other hand, had exceeded his limits. He had no combat experience and yet had somehow gotten through the first Folk assault with just a wound. That had nearly healed when the Folk came back with not one skyfish but six—to kill so many Sil that nobody could count them. No doubt the Folk hoped to catch the humans and burn them, too, but that could not have been the reason for the hours of unrelenting flame war.
    The Folk wanted discipline, and knew how to get it. Discipline meant punishment meant order meant stability meant this giant spinning contraption could go on its ancient trajectory, bound for Glory and stars beyond.
    Learn to think the way the Folk do, he thought. That was the only way to survive this bizarre, strange, and wonderful-but place.
    He slowly got from Quert a way to deal with all the violence. After all, loss was everywhere. Everyone on SunSeeker knew when they departed Earthside that they would never see family or friends again. Cliff tried to phrase what seemed to work. You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart, a wound that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

 
    ELEVEN
    Cliff listened to the deep rolling music of the Sil dirge. This was an honor, he realized—to witness the public mourning of these lithe aliens, their voices soaring in a long, rolling symphony he could understand, at least emotionally. It was truly so—music had fundamentals common here. Their flowing melodic line had tricky interior cadences, subthemes, and as it gathered force, these merged to become a high, howling remorse laced through with beautiful, somber notes. In the carved rock amphitheater, the Sil stood as they sang, sat when they did not, their angular heads lifted up to show faces twisted with grief.
    They had lost many in the assault by the remorseless, hydrogen-fueled sky beasts. Those vast creatures had killed so many Sil almost as an afterthought, punishment for hiding humans. Apparently firing into crowds was permissible, and the Sil seemed unsurprised by these events.
    Cliff sat and thought of that as the music wrapped around him. It immersed them all—he could see this strong music had its effects on those beside him. The Sil had many subtle eye-gestures and the odd elongation of the flesh around the eyes apparently meant mourning. All because of the humans …
    His small band had been on the run for a long time, and now had met the sobering fact that those Folk who ran this huge, spinning machine would kill others just to stop a few humans. But … why were they important? It puzzled him and gave the slow, solemn proceedings of public mourning a gravitas he respected.
    Their song rose and fell; their long bass notes reverberating from elaborately carved walls. The Sil leader Quert stood tall and splayed arms to the sky as the large wind instruments among them—not separated, as in a human orchestra—joined in the deep notes, pealing forth as the longer wavelengths resonated with those