The Eighth Room

A.D. 4,101,266

Teal slept through dawn.

He woke with a jolt. There was the faintest crack of red around the teepee's leather flap.

After all his planning... it would be broad daylight by the time he reached the bridge anchor.

But, he reflected ruefully, there was a certain irony. The dawn had been too feeble to wake him—and that was the heart of the problem.

The Sun was going out. And today Teal was going to try to fix it.

With a fluid movement he slid off the pallet and stood in the darkness.

Erwal's breathing was even and undisturbed. Teal hesitated; then he bent and touched his wife's belly, his fingertips exploring the mummy-cow skin blanket to find the second heartbeat beneath.

Then he pulled on his clothes and slipped out of the teepee.

His breath steamed. Dawn was an icy glow; a roof of snow-laden cloud hid all sight of Home, the world in the sky.

He walked softly through the heart of the little village. The ground was corrugated by mummy-cow hooves. He stepped around piles of bone needles and broken stone tools, past heaps of lichen and moss gathered to feed the cows.

Frost crackled.

He glanced about uneasily. Nobody knew what he was planning today, and he didn't want to be spotted by any early risers...

But all the dozen teepees were silent. Even the one belonging to Damen, Teal's elder brother. If Damen knew what he was up to, he'd knock Teal senseless.

He found himself tip-toeing away like a naughty child.

He reached the border of the village and began to lope across the tundra, his breathing easier. His even pace ate up the silent miles and the sky was barely brighter when he came to the bridge anchor.

The anchor itself was an arch about the height of a man, made of something smooth and milky-white. The structure's original purpose was long forgotten, dating from before the ice. It was unimaginably old.

Now, though, there was a rope tied to the crosspiece. The rope rose from the arch and pierced the clouds, as if it were tethering the sky... but, Teal knew, the rope looped on past the clouds and crossed space to another world.

He approached the anchor past tarpaulined bundles of balloon equipment. Huddled around the arch were five mummy-cows. Humming simple songs they picked at the rope's knots with their articulated trunks.

"Get away from that rope."

The great soft beasts cowered at his voice. In their agitation they bumped together, trembling. Their ears flapped and their food teats wobbled comically.

Finally one of the cows broke out of the group and approached nervously. "Pardon, ssir..."

The cow was a broad fur-covered cylinder supported on stumplike legs. Her rectangular head rotated mournfully around a single ball joint, and plate-sized eyes looked down at Teal. From the center of the blocky face sprouted a bifurcated trunk, and humanlike hands at the ends of the trunk's forks pulled at each other nervously.

The other mummy-cows giggled and whispered.

"Well?"

"Pardon, ssir, but it iss... needed to move the rope today. It is the Su-Sun, ssir..."

"I know about the Sun. Listen to me: I need your help. What's your name?"

"Orange, ssir..."

"Well, Orange, I intend to take up a balloon. Go and fetch the envelope and tackle. You know what that means, don't you?"

"Yess. I often help with flightss. But the Su-Sun will come t-too close today..." The great floppy mouth worked in agitation.

"That's the idea," he snapped. "I don't want to avoid the Sun. I'm going up to it. All right?"

The other mummy-cows, startled, whispered together. He silenced them with a glare, his breath quickening. If they suspected he was here without the knowledge of the rest of the village they wouldn't help him.

But Orange was looking at him steadily. "The Su-Sun is going out, isn't it, s-ssir?"

"You know about that?" Teal asked, surprised.

"We live a long time," said Orange. "Longer than people. Some of us notice things... Today the Su... the Sun is orange. But once it was yellow... in the da-dayss when Allel arrived in the f-first balloon from Home."

The other mummy-cows nodded hugely, pounds of flesh rippling in their cheeks.

Teal felt obscurely sorry for the mummy-cows, moved to speak to them, to explain. "Even then the world was growing cold," he said. "My grandmother crossed the Gap to find the answer. After that people were excited enough to build this bridge, so now we can travel between the worlds whenever we like.

"But in the end Allel failed. The Sun's still cooling, and she found no answer."

"But you will... fix-x it, ssir?"

Teal laughed. If only he could find a human with such imagination—"Maybe."

The dawn stained the sky a little brighter. Soon the village would be stirring; he had to be aloft quickly—

There was an odd shrewdness in Orange's brown eyes. "I... w-will help you." She turned and made her way to one of the piles of balloon equipment. With her articulated trunk she pulled at a bark tarpaulin.

His heart lifting, Teal shooed the other cows away from the rope anchor and began to check the knots and stays.

The morning was approaching its murky peak by the time Teal and his unexpected ally had assembled a one-man balloon and attached it to the rope bridge. Teal wrestled with a cluster of alcohol burners, directing heated air into the leather envelope's brown gloom.

At last the envelope rose from the frozen earth, billowing like a waking giant. Orange strained to hold it back; she trumpeted in alarm as she was dragged across the ground. Teal pulled a harness round his shoulders.

There was a gust of wind. The balloon lurched higher and its guide ropes began to scrape up the rope bridge.

The harness dug into Teal's armpits. His feet left the ground.

Orange fell away, her huge head rotating up to him. Soon the anchor shrank to a cluster of bundles, anonymous in the gray landscape.

He wriggled in the harness, swinging slowly beneath the envelope. He looked to the south and picked out his home village. It looked like a muddy patch sprinkled with teepees... and out of one of the teepees came a running figure, shouting like an angry insect.

Damen, his brother. It had to be. Well, Teal couldn't be stopped now.

He continued to rise and Damen's cries dropped away. Soon there was only the creak of the rigging, his own rapid breath.

The barren landscape opened out further. It was a dreary panorama of red and gray, starved of color and warmth by the dying Sun. His grandmother spoke of flowers a bright orange, birds as blue as ice—of hundreds or thousands of people in villages clustered so close they were forced to fight over resources.

But now colors like blue were only a dim childhood memory to Teal. And there were only a few score people in Teal's village, and no one knew how far away their nearest surviving neighbors were.

The low clouds fell on him; the world shrank to a fluffy cocoon. Flecks of snow pattered into his face, and he drew the hood of his leather jacket tight around his head.

Then he burst into crimson sunlight.

He gasped at the sudden clarity of the air. Frost sparkled over his cheeks.

The rope bridge rose from the carpet of cloud below him and arced gracefully across the Gap, a spider's web between the twin worlds. Finally, on the other side of the Gap, it disappeared into a second layer of broken cloud... a layer belonging to another world, upside down and far above him.

The landscape of the world above—called Home—served Teal's world—called the Shell—as a sky; it was an unbroken ceiling coated with upside-down seas, rivers, forests, ice caps. Teal searched for familiar features. There were threads of smoke: fires warding off the chill, even at noon.

There was a sound behind him like the breath of a huge animal.

He twisted around and stabilized—and found his eyes filled with orange light.

The Gap between Shell and Home was unbroken. The two worlds' darkling daylight was begrudged them by a Sun, a mottled sphere a mile across—a sphere that now twisted and rolled through the sky towards Teal...

...But it was going to pass miles above him.

Cursing, Teal labored at his burners. The balloon yanked him upwards, but soon the harness's pressure began to ease. He was approaching the middle of the Gap: the place halfway between the worlds where weight disappeared. He knew that if he continued his ascent, "up" would become "down"; Home would turn from a roof to a floor, and the place where Teal had been born would once more become the Shell over Home, the world that his grandmother's mother had known.

The Sun's breath became a roar.

He used a soaked cloth to dampen the burners, trying to hover just below the zone of complete weightlessness. The guide rope creaked; the balloon bobbed in a gust hot enough to scour the frost from his face, and he turned to the Sun once more.

It came at him like a fist. Boiling air fled its surface. His craft tossed like a toy. His eyes dried like meat in a fire and he felt his face shrivel and crack.

The guide rope snapped with a smell of charred leather. His balloon flipped backwards once, twice, seams popping. He roared out his frustration at the impossible thing—

Then the balloon was falling. He caught one last glimpse of the Sun as it passed above him, splinters of ruddy light stabbing through slits in the battered envelope.

He fell back through the clouds. Snow battered his scorched face as he labored at the burners, striving to replace the hot air leaking out of the envelope.

Soon he could make out the bridge anchor site, now surrounded by fallen miles of rope. There was patient Orange running in little agitated circles, and a bearded man standing there hands on hips, shouting something—Damen, it must be—and now Damen was running towards the point he would hit, a mile or so from the anchor.

The ground blurred towards him. He closed his eyes and tried to hang like a doll, soft and boneless.

The earth was frozen and impossibly hard. It seemed to slam upwards and carry him into the sky, sweeping up the wreckage of his balloon.

Damen carried Teal to his teepee and dumped him onto a pallet. Erwal ran to them and stroked Teal's face.

Overwhelmed with guilt Teal tried to speak—but could only groan as broken things in his chest moved against each other.

Damen's bearded face was a mask of contempt. "Why? You useless bloody fool, why?"

Something bubbled in Teal's throat. "I... I was trying to fix..."

Damen's face twisted, and he lashed the back of his hand upwards into his brother's chin. Teal's back arched. Erwal tugged at Damen's arm.

Damen turned away. He walked with Erwal to the teepee's open entrance, speaking softly. He cupped her cheek in his massive hand... and then ducked out of the teepee. Erwal tied up the flap behind him.

"Erwal... I..."

"Don't talk." Her voice was harsh with crying. She bathed his face.

He closed his eyes.

When he woke it was night. His grandmother was watching over him, her face a wrinkled mask of reassurance in the alcohol lamp's smoky light.

"How are you?"

Teal probed, wincing, at his ribs. "Still here. Where's Damen?"

Allel rested a birdlike hand on his shoulder. "Not here. Take it easy." She laughed softly. "What a pair. You, the hopeless dreamer... just like I was at your age. And Damen reminds me of my mother. A hard-headed, practical, obstinate—so-and-so."

The old woman's quaint Home accent was like balm to Teal. He struggled to sit up; Allel arranged the blanket of soft leather over Teal's bound-up ribs. "You're not too badly hurt," she said. "Just a bit flattened. Your wife's left you some broth: boiled-up mummy-cow meat buds. See? Come on, let me feed you."

"Thanks..."

Allel pulled a stone knife from her belt. She'd owned that knife all Teal's life; Teal knew it was one of the few remembrances Allel had brought with her on her last journey from her home world. Now she used the blunt edge of the knife to ladle broth into Teal's cracked mouth.

"She worries about you, you know. Erwal."

Teal nodded ruefully through the food.

"Not good for her in her condition." Allel's voice was as dry as a rustle of leaves.

"I know. But I had to go, you know, grandmother. I had to try—"

"To save the world?" The old woman smiled, not unkindly. "Yes, just like I was... or," she continued, "perhaps you are a bit tougher. I crossed the Gap with my mother—that was adventure enough—but I'd never have dreamed of challenging the Sun itself..."

Allel's rheumy eyes peered into the wavering light of a lamp. "There are so many differences between Home and Shell. We had no mummy-cows to feed us, you know. Only cow-trees. And we spoke a different language. It took me long enough to learn yours, I can tell you, and my mother wouldn't even try...

"I wonder if all these differences were intended, somehow. Perhaps the Sun was meant to fail. Perhaps there's a plan to force us to cross the Gap, to mix our blood and toughen ourselves—"

Teal pushed away the knife and lay back on his rustling pallet. He'd heard all this before. "Maybe, but such speculation won't help us find a way out of the trap the world's become. Will it?"

Allel shrugged mildly. "Perhaps not. But the alternative is ignorance—which can only drive you to spectacular suicide. Such as by crashing into the Sun in a leather balloon."

Teal found himself blushing under his blisters.

"Before you can find a way out of the world you need to understand its nature." She wagged a bony finger. "Are you prepared to be a little patient, and do a bit of thinking?"

Teal smiled and propped himself up on one elbow.

Allel put aside the bowl of broth and settled herself onto a mat beside the pallet, cross-legged. "When I wasn't much younger than you, my mother took me on a long walk to an old abandoned City to the north of Home. And there I learned something of the nature of our world.

"The world is a box. We locked ourselves into a huge box to escape from the Xeelee, whatever they are. But the nature of this box is quite remarkable."

Teal gathered the blanket tighter around his aching chest. "Go on."

Allel pulled up a section of the leather mat beneath her and bunched it into a rough globe. "Here's a model of the world. Let's imagine there are insects living on this globe." Her fingers trotted comically over the globe; Teal smiled. "They're perfectly happy in their little world, never imagining the mysteries above or below them. Yes?

"Now. I think the world we came from is a flat place, somewhere... else. Just like the rest of this mat—a flat place that goes on forever, and contains stars and Xeelee."

She pointed at the place where the globe joined the mat, encased in her spidery fist. "The worlds must touch, as these models do here. We have to find such a place. A place where you can walk out of our world and into the original... a door to fold through."

Teal nodded slowly. "Yes—yes, I understand. But where would such a door be?"

"Ah." Allel smoothed the mat and stretched her withered legs. "That's the question. Surely it could only be in one of the old Cities, at the northern extremes of the worlds... But nobody on either world knows of anything that sounds remotely like a door. No human, anyway."

Allel dropped her eyes, wrinkles clustering around her mouth. "And there's another question. Sometimes I think it would be better not to find the door. There's so much we don't know about the past. Why not? Suppose it's been deliberately forgotten. Suppose we shouldn't try to find out about the world, the Xeelee... about ourselves. Perhaps it's better not to know—"

But Teal wasn't listening. "What did you mean, 'no human'?"

Allel smiled at Teal. "Nobody here pays much attention to mummy-cows, you know. They're taken for granted... just walking meat and milk dispensers, a source of muscle power... but they were a real novelty to me when I arrived. And I've spent a lot of my time listening to their songs."

"But mummy-cows are so simple."

"Maybe. But they're almost as old as mankind. No? And they've remembered some things we seem to have forgotten."

Teal grabbed his grandmother's arm, forgetting his pain. "Do they say where the door is? Tell me."

"Not quite. Take it easy, now. But... there is a song about a place, somewhere to the north of this world. A place called the Eight Rooms.

"Seven of those rooms are strange enough, the song says. And when you've found your way through them to the Eighth—"

"What? What's in the Eighth?"

Allel's grooved face was neutral.

Teal found his mouth gaping. "I've got to go there," he said. "That's what you're telling me, isn't it? I have to find these Eight Rooms." He pushed back the blanket.

Allel's thin hands fluttered against Teal's shoulders. "Now, not so fast. You're not going anywhere for a while—"

"Or ever."

Allel jumped. The new voice was flat and harsh; a massive figure swathed in quilted leather stood over Teal's bunk.

"Damen." Teal subsided back with a sinking heart. "How long have you been in here? How much did you hear?"

"Enough. I'm surprised you didn't notice me coming in; I nearly blew the damn lamps out." Damen's bearded face was full of stern concern. "Grandmother, you should be ashamed, pumping his head full of this rubbish. Brother, I'm telling you now you're not leaving this village again. Not ever; not while I'm alive—not unless you get yourself exiled, anyway...

"Damn it, man, Erwal's a good woman." His voice grew soft with unconscious envy. "Yes, a good woman. And she's bearing your kid. You can't go chasing sunbeams anymore."

Allel wiped off her stone knife and began picking at her fingernails.

Damen squeezed his brother's shoulder with his great mat of a hand. "You just work at getting healthy." He stood straight and walked to the teepee flap. "I'm sorry to be so tough, little brother," he said awkwardly, "but it's for your own good." He pulled the flap closed behind him.

Allel cackled sardonically. "Now, where have I heard that before? People always mean so well... but we go nowhere, while the ice closes all around us."

Teal lay back and stared at the darkness beyond the teepee's chimney flue. "So that's it. Damen will never let me out of here." A despair as complete as the world's roof settled over him. "It's over, then."

"Not necessarily." Allel's voice was muffled.

Teal turned—and then began struggling off the pallet. "Grandmother, what have you done?"

The stone knife lay on the mat, streaked with blood. A great gash opened Allel's face from temple to throat. The old woman swayed slightly, blood pooling around her neck. "Take the knife," she said hoarsely. "I'll say it was you."

"But..."

"In my mother's day, they'd have killed you for this, you know? But now, as times have grown harsher, we've had to work out laws to control each other. So they'll be civilized... They'll exile you. Just like Damen said. You can go where you want."

"But—"

"No buts. I'll make sure Erwal is cared for." She slumped forward. "Take the knife," she whispered. "Do it."

Involuntarily, she cried out. Blood looped over her mouth.

Outside the teepee there were running footsteps, lamps, shouts. Teal struggled across the mat and put his arm around the thin shoulders...

...and grasped the knife.

They let him recover from his balloon fall. They gave him a suit of quilted leather, containers for water, flints, a coil of rope... they didn't want to think they were sending him to his death.

Although, of course, that was exactly what they were doing.

On his last night Erwal came to his guarded teepee. She pressed a bundle wrapped in skin into his hands—and then spat in his face, and hurried away.

Teal was twenty years old. He felt something soft dying inside him.

Inside the skin was his grandmother's knife, cleaned of blood. Teal tucked it into his belt and tried to sleep.

At dawn, most of the village turned out to watch him leave. Teal stared at the slack faces, the children with limbs like twigs, and beyond them the huddle of shabby little teepees, the piles of lichen, a half-butchered mummy-cow carcass. Once, he thought, we could build worlds. We even built this boxworld. Now: now, look at us.

There was no sign of Damen, or Erwal, or Allel.

Teal turned away, pulling his hood closed against the cold.

His feet were already aching by the time he passed the bridge anchor. There'd been no will to rebuild the world-bridge, and the rope lay crumpled amid the frost.

He felt as if he were walking through a great ill-lit room. Dead heather crumbled beneath his feet, gray in the ruddy gloom. Home, above him, was a mirrored roof as bleak as the ground beneath him.

Wind sprawled across the flat landscape. He walked until his legs were numb with fatigue.

When night fell he huddled beneath a shriveled cow-tree and sucked sour milk from its bark nipples. Then he buried himself in a rough bed of leaves, clutching the stone knife to his chest and determining to think of nothing until dawn.

There was a rustle under the wind. A warm breath, not unpleasantly scented—

He snapped awake and scrambled backwards out of his nest. In the starless gloom a huge shape hovered uncertainly.

He held out the knife with both hands. "Who is it?"

The voice was ill-formed, soft, and infinitely reassuring. "It iss me... Orange. I am so-ssorry to wake you..."

Teal let out a deep breath and lowered the knife. He found himself laughing softly, his eyes wet. How absurd.

Orange moved closer to the cow-tree, and Teal snuggled into her warm coat.

After that he slept for most of the night.

In the morning he breakfasted from the food teats clustered over Orange's lower body. There were milk and water nipples, and meat buds that could be snapped off, without discomfort to Orange.

They set off just after dawn, with Teal munching on a still warm bud. Orange wore a saddle-shaped pannier into which Teal loaded his meager possessions.

The morning was chill but comparatively bright, and Home was a shining carpet overhead. Teal felt his spirits lifting a little.

"Orange... why did you follow me?"

"Your gra-grandmother told me where you were going. So I decided to follow."

"Yes, but why?"

"To... help."

He smiled and wrapped a hand in the coarse hair behind her ear. "Well, I'm glad you're here."

That evening Orange used her articulated trunk to gather handfuls of moss. She packed his aching feet with it and then licked it off. "My... saliva has healing pro-properties," she said.

Teal lay back against her fur. "Yes," he said. "Thank you..."

The reddening world folded away, and he slept.

They came to an abandoned City.

Teal walked through arches, into low cylindrical buildings. The walls were as smooth as skin and knife-thin, showing no signs of age. But the interiors were unlit and musty.

They walked on despondently.

"Did grandmother tell you what I'm trying to find?"

"Yess. The... Eight Roomss."

"The trouble is I've no idea how to get there... or even how we'll recognize it when we find it. We're walking at random."

Orange hissed, "From the ss-stories I have heard, you will... know it wh-when you ssee it..."

Teal looked at her carefully. Was there a trace of amusement in that clumsy voice?

"What stories? What are you talking about?"

But the huge round face was blank.

On the fifteenth day... or maybe the sixteenth... a blizzard hit them.

It was a moving wall that reached up to the clouds. It turned Teal's world to a blur of huge flakes; the air was almost unbreathable.

"We must... must keep moving," Orange trumpeted. He buried his face in her snow-laden fur. She wrapped her trunk around his shoulders. "F... follow me," she said. "We will find... the Eight Rooms..."

He closed his eyes and struggled on.

The storm took days to clear.

Teal woke to a world silenced by snow. Brushing clear his clothes, he sat up to look around.

Orange was staring straight ahead, her fingers working in agitation.

"Wha..." Teal squinted in the direction she was looking, to the red-lit north.

There was something on the horizon: a patch of darkness amid the snow.

A structure.

It was a cube with sides about half as tall again as a man. The walls were unbroken save for a single large door set in the south-facing side.

The whole thing was hovering about an arm's length from the ground.

"The s-songss," hissed the mummy-cow. "That iss what... the songs describe..."

"The Eight Rooms," Teal sighed. "You were right. It's unmistakable."

Orange quivered; he studied her curiously. She was paralyzed by fear... but she'd known where to look. He thought of generations of mummy-cows, used and despised by the people they'd been designed to serve—but all the time hoarding a knowledge and lore, a kind of courage, of their own.

He wondered uneasily how much else there was to learn about the world.

He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange's flank. "Come on," he said. "Just a bit further..."

Orange wouldn't come closer than a few paces to the structure. Teal approached alone. He knelt in the snow and passed his hand underneath the cube. "Must take an awful lot of hot air to hold this up..."

Teal walked up to the door and pushed tentatively. He found his chest tightening.

Orange whimpered and buried her eyes in her trunk.

He opened the door wide. The interior was pale blue.

Teal hadn't seen blue for a decade.

Blinking away tears, he climbed into the room.

They spent the night under cover for the first time since Teal's exile. He woke in comparative warmth and took a slow breakfast on water and a cheeselike bud.

It had taken a lot of coaxing to get Orange to clamber into the room.

"There's nothing to fear—it's just a big teepee."

"No, it is-isn't..."

"Well, maybe not..."

Now she huddled uncomfortably at the center of the floor, standing in her own muddy footprints.

Teal inspected the room. He'd found it empty save for a thing like a lamp bracket attached to the ceiling. There were doors leading out from all four walls—even hatches in the floor and ceiling.

The doors watched him like blank eyes.

He ran his hands over the blue walls. The material was warm, slightly yielding—disconcertingly skinlike. He thought of stroking his wife's belly through a soft leather blanket.

He pushed the image away.

He took his coil of rope from Orange's pannier. He tied one end round his waist. "Here," he said. "Don't let go of this. If you don't hear from me... after a while, try to pull me back. Do you understand? And whatever happens, go back and tell my grandmother what you've seen. All right?"

The great head dipped. He stroked her trunk, once.

He turned to the door opposite the entrance to the cube. Orange shivered as she watched him. Now then, he thought, logic tells me there's nothing beyond this door. Only another way out, to the snow.

Right?

He pushed at the door. It swung back smooth as a muscle.

There was another room beyond. It was like a mirror-image of the first: bare walls, single light pendant, doors all over it—

Maybe it really was a reflection.

No, that was stupid. He looked back at the trembling brown hulk of Orange. There was no Orange in the second room... and no Teal, for that matter.

He stepped through the door.

Well, the floor felt solid enough... and the air was just—air.

All his intuition told him he should have been hovering at waist-height somewhere outside the boxlike structure. Instead, here he was...

He laughed. So Allel's old song had been wrong. The wonder of the second room wasn't in what it contained, but in the fact that it was there at all.

Pulling the rope of twisted leather behind him he pushed at the door in the left-hand wall of the second room. Beyond was a third room, another copy of the first.

He decided he wasn't surprised.

More confidently he walked through the third room and pushed at the door to his left. Beyond this he'd presumably find a fourth room, making up a square array of rooms, and then he could turn left again to find his way round the square back to Orange—

The fourth room wasn't empty. It contained Orange. He was looking at her left side; she held a grubby rope that stretched forward through an open door.

She turned her head to him, eyes wide with astonishment.

He jumped back, trembling. Could he have miscounted the rooms?

His mind racing, he took Allel's knife from his belt and placed it gently on the floor inside Orange's room. Then he walked back through the third and second rooms.

In the first room, Orange was facing him. "Take it easy," he murmured abstractedly to her. "It's all right..."

The door to her left was ajar. A stone knife lay on the floor, just inside the first room. He walked across to pick it up, tucked it into his belt.

Well, it felt real. Were there two knives now?

He walked around to the third room again. The knife beyond the door was gone... of course.

So there was no fourth room to make up the square.

He sat on the bare floor of the third room and closed his eyes. If he wasn't careful, the strangeness of the place was going to overwhelm him.

He opened his eyes. He looked speculatively up at the hatch set in the ceiling of the third room. Surely he would break out of this odd cycle if he climbed up another level.

He stood up straight. The lamp fitting was just out of his reach, but he found that if he—jumped—he could just grab it with both hands.

He hung there for a moment, gently swinging, the burn scars around his chest itching slightly. Then he arced backwards, swung both feet forwards and slammed them into the roof hatch.

It fell back with a soft thump. Another swing, one-armed this time, and Teal had grabbed the edge of the hatch-frame. Then it was simple to haul himself up into the room. Orange's rope trailed after him.

The fourth room was empty—another copy of the first, with the usual lamp fitting and the six exits. He took a few deep breaths and let his heart rattle to rest; and then, with a kind of confidence—surely there was nothing else that could be thrown at him—he strode forward and pushed open a door.

He almost cried out.

Through the door in the wall he was looking into the first room again—but the whole room was tipped on its side. Orange looked as if she was clinging to a wall, a huge hairy spider. A rope trailed from her trunk out of a door ahead of her.

He shoved the door closed hastily, fighting back a sudden wave of nausea. Suppose he'd stepped forward... surely sideways would suddenly have become down, and he would have fallen full-length onto poor Orange. And if she'd looked up as he stood there, would she have seen him sticking sideways out into the air like an outstretched arm?

He didn't even try to work out the explanation this time. With some reluctance he turned and walked across to the door opposite Orange's. What next? Unconsciously he pulled his stone knife from his belt.

He opened the door.

It was the Eighth Room.

For the first time in a hundred thousand generations, starlight entered human eyes.

Orange had no way of telling the time.

She couldn't even count well enough to keep track of her thumping heartbeats. Holding her rope she hummed a song to herself.

She sang it over and over, ever faster.

The rope had been slack for too long now, surely. Trembling, she shuffled to the open door and fanned out one great ear.

Silence.

Was he dead?

Her hands slipping in anxiety, she began to pull the rope towards her. There was a weight at the end that moved unevenly—

—and then there was a bump and a slackening of the rope, as if the weight had fallen a considerable distance.

She waited, urging the silence to yield up its secrets. But she didn't dare go beyond that door.

She began hauling at the rope again. Now it moved easily. At last Teal's limp form came through the door, still clutching his grandmother's knife.

His eyes were open. They stared through her, and the walls, at... something that made her shiver.

She gathered him to the warmth of her underbelly and bathed his face with antiseptic saliva, longing for him to wake.

She waited in the alien place for days.

Teal's breath was even but his eyes never flickered. Hunger growled in her own belly. Soon she wouldn't even be able to feed him...

Finally she wrapped his face in his hood and, with difficulty, loaded the man and his tools over her broad back. With her delicate fingers she pried open the entrance.

She emerged into a blizzard.

Keeping her trunk arched back over her precious cargo she battered her way through the storm, stumbling as her great stumps of legs buried themselves in drifts and slurries.

The blizzard wouldn't stop. She found she couldn't even detect the passing of night and day.

Finally she sank to her knees, exhausted. She lowered Teal to the snow. His lips were gray.

Snowflakes like flat stones battered unnoticed at her huge eyes. So she had failed, and Teal would die...

She raised her trunk and bellowed out her defiance. Then she searched among Teal's effects for his stone knife.

Standing away from Teal, she held the knife in both her hands, point towards her, and worked her fingers around the handle.

Then she jerked the point backwards into her chest and ripped it down her underbelly, as far as she could reach.

The pain was astonishing. It didn't seem fair.

She dropped the knife and wrapped her hands around the slit flesh. Then she shuffled towards Teal, leaving a streak like a bloody snail.

She covered him with her ripped body, let the soft stuff inside gush over him. With the last of her strength she held her head high, to make sure all of Teal was tucked inside her. Then she let go. Her head slumped forward, and now the snow was as soothing as her mother's trunk had once been.

Her body had been designed, from the cellular level up, to serve humans; and now, she knew, it was performing one last miracle. Oxygen-bearing blood would bathe the shocked man like amniotic fluid, while her internal organs, now independent semi-sentient creatures, would cluster round him in this ultimate emergency and cradle him against the cold for as long as he needed.

She felt her thoughts break up and crumble.

Her mother came towards her across the snow. She was carrying a Sun on her back, but it wasn't orange, old, failing like the real Sun. It was yellow, and it melted the snow.

Allel heard the shouting from the gloom of her teepee.

Nobody shouted these days. With the Sun never brighter than the twilights of her youth, there wasn't much to shout about.

Except...

She unhinged her stiff old legs and rose from her leather mat. Outside, Home was a bloodstained raft floating over the landscape. The Sun was bright enough to sting her watery eyes, and the breeze pricked at the scar bisecting her face.

All the excitement was at the north of the little settlement. She saw her grandson Damen standing there, massive and obstructive. A few other villagers were walking towards Damen, dull curiosity brightening their drab faces.

Someone brushed past Allel: Erwal, Teal's wife. When she realized what was happening Erwal began to run.

It was him. It had to be. He'd survived, and returned. Allel hobbled over the icy mud.

Damen heard Erwal coming. He turned and spread his arms to catch her. "No! Ignore him. Don't hurt yourself anymore..."

Beyond them a silent figure stood alone. Allel squinted, but found it hard to make out a face.

Erwal shook her small fist. "Keep away from here. Keep away! I lost my baby because of the hurt you caused me, you... madman. Keep away from me." Then, deliberately, she pulled Damen's head down towards her and kissed him full on the lips. Teal watched this with no sign of emotion.

Damen wrapped his arm round Erwal's shoulder and turned to Teal. "You'll have to stay away, brother," he said sadly. "There's nothing for you here. You're an exile."

Allel came alongside Damen, gasping with the exertion. It was the furthest she'd walked from her teepee since her injury. "Why?" she asked. "Why bother, Damen? He's lost his family already—lost everything. What more can you do to him?" She looked around at the dozen or so villagers clustered around them. They were an array of shabby indifference, their eyes large and slack in malnourished faces. A baby cried feebly at its mother's shriveled breast. "We're at the end of things. Who cares anymore?"

Damen frowned doubtfully. Then he turned and led Erwal away.

The other villagers drifted back to their chores.

Allel was left alone.

In the gathering darkness Teal was obscure... changed. Allel walked towards him, wrapping her skinny arms around herself.

"Tell me what you saw. Tell me what was in the Eighth Room."

Teal smiled.

The far wall of the Eighth Room had been a great window, he said. He'd stepped cautiously through the door—and then the other sides of the cubical room had faded to clarity.

Dressed in skins, and brandishing a stone weapon, a human being once more stared out of a cave at the stars.

The stars were points of light unimaginably far away... much further than the distance between Shell and Home. He turned around and around, stepping over the rope that led back to Orange. There was no sign of the world he'd folded out of; the crystal box was suspended in space.

Gradually he began to make out patterns.

There was a great ball of stars over there on the right, neat as a mummy-cow's meat pod—but he guessed that this star pod was bigger than a million of his worlds. Above his head there were fragments of a cubical lattice, draped with wisps of violet gas... and behind him, most spectacular of all, a sextet of varicolored stars that rotated visibly around an empty center. Great arches of fire leapt between the sisters' surfaces.

There were loops of stars, knots of stars, stars in sheets like the cloaks of a god.

He remembered Allel describing the stars in the old days, randomly scattered like seeds. Well, since humans had hidden away, someone had rebuilt the Universe.

...Something moved past the stars. And again—

Nameless objects, black as night, were moving around him. They stroked at this fragile container like the hands of a huge parent.

He felt no threat. There was a sense of reassurance, of welcome, in their gestures.

I was meant to be here, he realized abruptly. Allel was right: the world is freezing by design. It spat me out, and these creatures have been waiting for me.

The half-dozen shapes now drew away from his box and gathered together in a great blur transiting the stars. They moved past and through each other, ever faster, weaving themselves into a tight knot of darkness—

—and then, in a sprinkle of prismatic light, they shot away to... somewhere else.

They'd finished with the Universe, abandoned it. But they'd left something behind.

It was a ship. It nuzzled against his box, a great shell big enough to hold his village and a hundred more. The Universe would be his.

The stars began to spin like sparks in a fire. They tilted, overwhelming him.

His next memory was of crawling out of the corpse of the mummy-cow.

Allel shifted her weight between her stiff legs. "Xeelee ships," she croaked. "That's what you saw. Ships like plucking fingers." She coughed feebly, feeling the cold of the dying day sink into her flesh. "Listen. I know what you've sacrificed to do this. I know you've lost everything important to you... But, Teal, you've saved us all."

She reached out a hand to her grandson.

Teal didn't react. Allel dropped the hand nervously.

"You knew what I'd find, didn't you?" Teal asked coolly. "You suspected the truth of our history—the completeness of our defeat by the Xeelee."

Allel sighed, and folded her arms over her concave chest. "Yes. The truth about the past has been hidden from us so long and so well that it had to be painful. The story I learned when I was young was comforting: the Xeelee as marauding monsters bent on destroying us; our valiant fight and honorable defeat. A comforting myth.

"I've thought hard about that story... and seen past it to the truth.

"We were a weak and foolish race. We attacked the Xeelee, unable to bear their superiority. We were defeated. But we would have kept on attacking them until we were destroyed.

"And so the Xeelee locked us away like destructive children... for our own good. Just like an elder brother, eh? It's not easy to accept."

"No, it isn't," Teal murmured. "We didn't build this world to save us from the Xeelee. The Xeelee built it to save us from ourselves."

Allel studied his empty face. She thought of seeing the stars: of waking in a place without a roof over the world.

But, of course, the frozen lands to the north made the stars as unattainable for her as her own lost youth.

"Well." She wiped dampness from her eyes. "Come to my teepee. I've got food. And blankets."

She turned and began to hobble back to her home.

There was a transparent box, half as tall again as a man. It hung in space, in orbit around a cooling white dwarf star, apparently forgotten and purposeless. It would have had no conceivable significance in the long twilight of the Universe... if it had not occupied the site of Earth, the long-vanished original home of man, long consumed by its own sun.

A Qax had once visited the site. It was puzzled. The box was evidently one three-dimensional facet of a hypercube, extending into folded space. Perhaps it was a gateway, an interface to some pocket Universe. Such things had been constructed by the Xeelee elsewhere in the Galaxy.

But why here, in the ruined cradle of humanity?

The Qax had placed quantum-inseparability markers around the box. The Qax were linked to the markers by single quantum wave functions, ghostly threads that stretched across light years, and they had scattered millions of markers over the spaces once inhabited by humans.

At last the human called Teal walked into the box. He stared, openmouthed, at the stars. He was gaunt, filthy, and dressed in treated tree-bark; a rope tied to his waist snaked around a corner and into another Universe. After some time the rope grew taut and Teal's limp form was hauled away.

The inseparability markers blared their warnings. A Qax hauled itself like a spider along the quantum web to the box—but it arrived too late; the box was empty. The Qax hissed, settling into space like condensing mist.

With a patience born of millions of years it prepared to wait a little longer.

The event spread like a soft blue dye through the linked quantum phenomena which comprised Paul's being. At the site of Earth there was a human once more: but a human alone, weak, tired, close to dissolution. Paul, godlike, pondered the implications for an unimaginable interval.

Then he came to a decision. He reconstructed his awareness; a quantum jewel danced against the clear walls of the Eighth Room.

History had resumed.

"Allel was right," I said. "The defeat, the imprisonment, by the Xeelee was complete. Unbearably so. What a humiliating scenario."

"Perhaps. Humans as Eloi, to the Xeelee's Morlocks."

"....Eloi?"

"Never mind. Another prophecy, much older than mine..."

Inside the hypersphere cage, the human story seemed over. But the rhythms of life persisted, and with them the unwelcome urge to survive...