The Baryonic Lords

A.D. 4,101,284

Erwal pushed out the greased flap of the teepee. Hot, humid air gushed into the blizzard, turning instantly into fog.

Damen, dozing, grunted and burrowed more deeply into his pile of furs.

Erwal pulled her mummy-cow furs more tightly around her neck and stepped out into the snow—it had drifted some three feet deep against the teepee's walls—and smoothed closed the flap. Clutching her slop pail she looked about in bewilderment. The world seemed to have collapsed to a small, gray sphere around her; rarely before had she seen snow so heavy. The flakes clung to her eyelids and already she could feel the down on her upper lip becoming stiff with cold. Dropping her head she began her struggle through the blizzard.

Somewhere above the clouds, she thought wistfully, was the Sun, still winding through its increasingly meaningless spiral between the worlds.

Already the snow had soaked through her leggings and was beginning to freeze against her skin. With a sense of urgency she forced her legs through the snow, dragging the slop pail behind her. Soon she was out of sight of the teepee; the rest of the village remained hidden by walls of snow, so that she had to make her way by memory alone.

At last she reached the village's central stand of cow-trees. She leaned against a tree for a few minutes, sucking at air that seemed thick with the snow. Then she began to dig with her bare hands into the drifts at the base of the tree, finally exposing hard, brown earth. She dumped the contents of her slop pail against the roots of the cow-tree and stamped the waste firmly down against the wood. Then, wearily, she straightened up and began to select some of the tree's more mature buds, filling her pockets. The meat buds were small, hard, anemic; she bit into one, tasting sourness.

A villager approached through the storm. At first Erwal made out only a blur of rags against the snow, but the villager noticed Erwal and leaned into the wind, making towards her.

Erwal shouted: "Good day!"

From within a voluminous hood there came a muffled, brittle laugh; then the hood was pushed back to reveal the thin, pretty features of Sura, wife of Borst. "It's hardly that, Erwal." Sura had dragged her own slop pail across the drifts; now she dumped her waste alongside Erwal's. As she worked Sura's shapeless fur blanket fell open and Erwal made out a bundle suspended over her thin chest, a sling of skin from which protruded tiny hands, a small, bare leg. Erwal frowned; the baby's exposed flesh seemed blue-tinged.

Once Sura had finished Erwal held her head close to the girl's. "How are you, Sura? How are your family?"

"Borst is ill." Sura smiled, her eyes oddly bright. "His lungs will not clear; he has been barely able to stand." Absently she patted the bundle against her chest.

"Sura, will you let me visit your teepee? At home there is only myself and Damen..."

"Thanks, my friend, but I'm sure I can manage." Again that bright look entered the girl's pale eyes and she brushed a wisp of hair back from a high forehead. "The child is a burden, but she's such a comfort."

"I'm sure she is," Erwal said evenly. The pain of her own lost child—stillborn soon after Teal's first mysterious voyage away from the village—was too long ago to mean anything now, and the dismal fact that she and Damen had proven unable to bear another child had come to seem trivial compared to the huge, greater tragedy sweeping down over their little community.

"How is the baby? Will you allow me?..." Erwal opened Sura's blanket just a few inches, tenting the flaps so that the snow was kept from the child, and ran her fingers over the hot bundle. Sura looked on, a vacant smile hovering about her mouth. The child's breathing was rapid, ragged; the tiny hands were as if carved from ice. "Sura, you must take the child indoors. Keep her covered. I am afraid her limbs are frozen—"

"She needs air," Sura said, her voice high. "It's so musty in the teepee."

Erwal stared into Sura's eyes. Her skin was smooth but her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Sura was little more than a child herself. "Sura," Erwal said urgently, "you aren't thinking clearly. The child is too cold."

The shallow smile evaporated. Sura brushed Erwal's hands away resentfully, and began to paw at the baby. "She'll be all right." She cupped one tiny hand in her own and began to rub vigorously.

"Sura, take care, I beg you."

"She just needs to get warm—"

There was a soft crackle, as if a thin crust of ice had broken.

It was a sound that Erwal knew she would remember to her dying day.

Sura's head jerked down; her jaw seemed to be swinging loose, the muscles in her cheeks slack. Erwal, watching in horror, felt as if she would faint; it was as if she saw the whole tableau, Sura, the child and the snow, from a great distance.

Sura opened the hands which had cupped the child's. Detached fingers lay like tiny jewels on Sura's callused flesh. The child whimpered, stirred against its mother. Sura jerked her hands back, so that the frozen pieces of flesh fell to the snow. She pulled her blanket tight around her and ran, oblivious to the drifting snow.

Erwal bent and scooped up the tiny fingers, the fragments of palm and wrist.

When she returned to the teepee, Damen had woken. Wrapped in a blanket, he held a pot of water over the fire with wooden tongs, and he scowled at the draught Erwal made. The smoke from the fire, disturbed, swirled around the teepee walls in search of the vent at the apex.

Erwal, wrapped in her furs, felt like something inhuman, a gigantic animal intruding into this place of warmth. She pushed away the furs, hauled off her frozen leggings and huddled near the fire; Damen wrapped a heavy arm around her until the shivering stopped. When the water boiled Damen poured it over fragments of mummy-tree bark. Erwal sucked at the thin, steaming tea.

Then she opened her hand.

Damen picked up one tiny finger. His face gray, he studied the tiny nail, the knuckle's bloodless termination. Then he took the rest of the fragments from Erwal and dropped them into the fire. "Whose child?"

"Borst and Sura; I met her at the tree stand with her slops. I have to go to her, Damen."

"Do you want me to come?"

"...No. It's best if I go alone, I think. You keep the teepee warm." She drank her tea, deeply reluctant to don her furs once more. "Damen, we can't go on like this. Every year is worse than the last. I suspect the trees are starting to die, and even the mummy-cows aren't immortal."

"I know, love. But what can we do? We have to survive until the Sun recovers, and then—"

"But what if it doesn't recover? It's been failing since your grandmother's day. Allel told us so herself. And now—Damen, it's only early autumn, but the blizzard out there is blind; if we're not careful the teepees could be snowed over before the winter's out." She shivered, imagining tiny pockets of warmth lost in the snow, the humans within suffocating, cooling, calling to each other.

"The Sun will recover," Damen said wearily.

She said urgently, "But we don't have to wait here to die. Teal said—"

"No." He shook his massive head, his gray beard scraping over his chest.

"But he told us there was a way out of here," she insisted. "The Eight Rooms. He found them, saw them. Your grandmother believed him."

"Allel was a foolish old woman."

"And Teal returned there. He said he'd leave a trail for the rest of us. Maybe if—"

He wrapped both arms around her. "Erwal, my brother was crazy. He hurt you, fought with me... He lost his life for nothing But now it's over. He's gone, and—"

"What if he survived?"

"Erwal..."

She sighed, pulled herself away from him, and began to haul her leggings over her still-cold feet.

Damen sat in silence, staring at the fire.

As she pushed through the snow Erwal heard odd snatches of song. The melodies, soft, harmonized and sad, were fragmented by the wind, and at first she thought she was dreaming. Then Sura's teepee loomed out of the snow. Before it she made out a series of low mounds about as tall as she was. Occasionally a trunk would lift out of a mound, the two very human hands at its bifurcated tip twisting together, and slowly the songs grew clearer.

At last Erwal recognized the ancient chants of the mummy-cows.

Five cows, almost the village's full complement, were grouped in a tight circle about a sixth; the latter lay at the center of the circle, and Erwal saw that some viscous fluid had leaked from its bulk into the snow. She pushed back her hood. "Sand? Are you here?"

One of the mummy-cows lifted her head; under a cap of snow a squat, cylindrical skull rotated on a neck joint and plate-sized eyes fixed on Erwal. "...I amm-m hhere, Err-waal..."

Erwal fixed her fingers in the shaggy fur covering Sand's muzzle. Since Erwal's childhood, Sand had been her favorite. "What's wrong? Why are you gathered here?"

Sand moaned and scuffed with delicate fingers at the snow before her. "It iss-s Cale. We are... s-singing for her..."

"Singing? But why?..."

Sand closed her eyes.

Erwal turned to inspect the body at the center of the group. Cale was silent, utterly motionless, and when Erwal pushed her fingers through the fur she felt only a diminishing warmth.

How could this have happened? The mummy-cows rarely reproduced these days—there was too little fodder for them to generate the growth required—but they were virtually immortal. She walked around the fallen cow to the patch of moisture she had noticed earlier. She bent and touched the stuff. It was blood. Crouching, she probed upwards at the mummy-cow's belly, exploring the soaked and matted fur. There was a tear in the flesh, a gash at least two feet long that was sharp and clean; performed by a stone knife.

She took deep breaths of the chill air; then she forced herself to reach forward, lift aside the flap of cut flesh, push her hands into the glistening stuff inside the cow.

She found a still, cold form. Snakelike entrails had coiled around the body in a hopeless attempt to keep it warm. Exploring by touch, Erwal found the tiny buds, hard as gristle, which had begun to grow to replace the child's lost hands.

"She's dead, isn't she?"

Erwal withdrew her arms, rubbed snow over them to clean them, tucked them once more into her clothes. Sura stood beside her, her arms loose at her side. "...Yes, Sura. I'm sorry."

"It worked for your husband, didn't it? Teal, I mean. That mummy-cow he took to the Eight Rooms kept him alive by opening herself up... I suppose you despise me because I have killed a cow." Sura sounded resigned, no longer caring. "Will you punish me?"

Erwal stood. "No, Sura. I understand."

"You do?"

"You were trying to save your child. What more can any of us do? What else is there? Come on." She took Sura's unresisting arm. "Let's go to your teepee."

"Yes," Sura said.

On the first clear day of the tepid spring the villagers filed in silence to a low hill a mile from the village. After months in the fug of the teepees Erwal took deep breaths of the cold, fresh air, and felt the blood stir within her. She looked around with renewed interest. It was a still, windless day; above her the lakes and rivers of Home shone like threads in a carpet. The ruddy light of the Sun was almost cheerful, and frosty snow crackled beneath her feet. She tried to imagine what it must have been like in the days before she was born, when the Sun was yellow and so hot that, even in spring, you could discard your furs and leggings and run like a child in some huge teepee.

At the top of the hill orange flowers were struggling to blossom through the permafrost. The villagers gathered in a rough circle around the flowers; some clasped their hands before them, others dropped their heads so their chins rested on their shirts of fur. Damen stepped into the middle of the circle. "We're here for those who died in the winter." His voice was flat and lifeless. Without ceremony he intoned a list of names.

"...Borst, husband of Sura. Brought down by fluid in the lungs. A girl, daughter of Borst and Sura; the frost attacked her flesh in the blizzards..."

Numbly Erwal counted the names. Twenty-two in all, mostly children. She glanced around the silent group; there were surely no more than a hundred souls left. Already, she knew, the outer portions of the village had been abandoned, so that their homes were encircled by silent, ruined teepees.

There were hardly any old people left, it struck her suddenly. In fact, she and Damen were the old people now. Who would be the last to go? she wondered morbidly. Some child, crying over the cooling bodies of its parents?

At that moment her resolution crystallized. With or without Damen, she had to leave this place.

Damen finished his list. After a brief, gloomy silence, the group broke up and returned to the teepees.

Twenty-five adults decided to commit to Erwal's plan. With their children, thirty-seven people would travel with her.

They gathered at the edge of the village. The split families and parting friends found little to say in the way of farewells. Erwal, with the assistance of Sura, made final adjustments to the harness around the neck of Sand, the one mummy-cow they were to take. To the harness was attached a broad pallet piled with furs, blankets and cow-tree buds. The rest of the expedition, spare clothes heaped on their bodies, looked on in subdued silence.

"I don't know what to say."

Erwal turned. Damen, thick arms folded, stood watching her. "Damen, don't even try."

He frowned. "Pride's an odd thing," he mused. "I should know. I've been proud, and stubborn. Pride can make it hard to admit you're wrong, no matter how misguided you come to realize—"

Erwal laughed, not unkindly. "I should swallow my pride, admit my mistake, should I?"

He looked hurt. "Erwal, you could die out there."

"But I believe we'd die here." She touched his arm, ruffling the mat of thick black hair which grew there. "This expedition needs you—"

"But I need you."

It was as if the Sun had broken through cloud. Struggling to keep her voice steady, Erwal said, "You've picked the damnedest time to say such a thing."

"I'm sorry."

Deliberately, with a sense of pain, she turned her head from him. "It's time to go."

"Where?"

"You know where. To the north. The way Teal described. A journey of a few days, following his markers and directions, to the Eight Rooms."

He snorted. "Following the babble of a mummy-cow and a madman?"

"Damen, don't spoil this." She studied him, desperate to hold on to these final traces of warmth. "I know what I'm doing."

"I know. I'm sorry, Erwal; we've been over all of this before, haven't we?"

"A hundred times." She smiled.

"...I wish you well."

She hugged him, feeling the rough fur of his shirt under her bare forearms. "And I you, love."

"I won't see you again."

"...Perhaps if I find what I'm looking for I'll be able to return for you."

He held her away, his face hard. "Sure you will."

With that, they parted.

With gentle encouragement the mummy-cow began its lumbering motion, the laden pallet scoring tracks into the hard ground. Erwal walked arm in arm with Sura. She turned back until the village was out of sight; for long after she was gone, she suspected, the dark bulk of Damen would be stationed at the edge of the village, hoping for her return.

A short, round-faced man called Arke walked with Erwal. "This winter," he said, "I lifted the body of my wife out of the teepee and into the snow. I had to wait for the thaw before I could bury her in the cow-tree stand. I barely know what you're talking about with your stories of stars and ships, Erwal, but I know this. If I'd stayed at home I'd surely have died. At least with you I'll die trying to find a way out. And," he finished doubtfully, "you never know; we might even succeed."

Many of her fellow travelers, Erwal suspected, had been motivated to come by much the same mixture of desperation and doubt; and yet they had come. And, as they walked, Erwal sensed a mood of optimism generated by the very fact of their motion, that they were doing something.

But winter came early in the north.

The winds hit them first, so that the children, wailing, were forced to stumble along clinging to the fur of the cow, who sang them simple songs. Then snow followed, and the march became a grim haul across a featureless plain punctuated by nights huddled in a single, shivering mound under a layer of blankets.

Erwal had memorized the list of directions which Teal had given to the village, and she was as sure as she could be that she was not leading her party astray. But on the more difficult days she was constantly aware that she was hardly equipped to serve as the leader of such an ambitious expedition; and when they entered the mouth of yet another blizzard she found tears leaking from her freezing eyes, and she wondered if she was guiding these people to their deaths.

Then, one day, Sura came pushing through the snow drifts. She grinned, excited, holding up a faded rag. Erwal, tired and bemused, pushed snow-speckled hair from her eyes and took the object from the girl. It was a strip of mummy-cow hide. Roughly cut and uncured, the strip had been frozen before it had a chance to rot; and it was tied with a double knot.

"Teal," Sura said. "This is one of his markers, isn't it? I found it tied to a dead cow-tree, just over that ridge."

Erwal stared at the battered little artifact. "Yes, it's Teal's. Call the others and tell them."

The find of the marker was treated as a great triumph, and the travelers drank Sand's milk with an air of celebration. They approached Erwal and touched her arms and shoulders, congratulating her. Erwal felt oddly distanced from all this. After all, they had only confirmed that they were on Teal's path—a path which, as Damen had repeatedly pointed out, might lead only to madness or death.

But she kept such thoughts to herself and did her best to join in the celebrations.

After a rest, they struggled on into the teeth of the wind, making headway as best they could.

They made a makeshift camp in the heart of another blizzard. They burrowed together in the snow, faces buried in their furs.

In the dim morning light Erwal was shaken awake. Thick with sleep and unwilling to leave her warm nest she slowly opened her eyes. Sura was bending over her, her cheeks flushed under spots of frostbite. "Erwal, we're there!"

"What?"

"The Eight Rooms! It's just as Teal described. Come on!"

Erwal pushed her way out of the snow. Her knees and hips ached. All around her, people were emerging from their snow cocoons. She rubbed a little snow into her face, then took a mouthful of the crumbling stuff and let it melt on her tongue.

For once it was a clear, still day. The snow lay in great mounds to the horizon, and the desolate landscape was punctuated only by the defiant remnants of cow-trees—and, on the northern horizon, by a building. Erwal squinted, straining to see in the dim daylight. It was a large, plain box, just as Teal had described.

The Eight Rooms.

Her party began to make for the artifact. The children ran whooping, the adults hurrying after. Erwal thought of cautioning them to be careful; but she stopped herself, almost amused. What precautions were there to take? Either the Eight Rooms would save their lives... or they would have to turn back, try to reach the village before the worst of the winter set in, and wait, exhausted, for the cold to kill them.

Either way there wasn't much point in being careful. Stiffly, Erwal made her way through the snow to the Eight Rooms.

The children were soon clambering in and out of an open doorway. Erwal paused some distance from the structure and studied it carefully. She recalled Teal describing his shock at seeing how the building floated, unsupported, a foot in the air; and, bending down, she saw a strip of snowy land beneath the Rooms. She frowned, puzzling at her own un-startled reaction. What was the great wonder? Every child heard stories of how powerful the ancients had been, of how they had built the very world humans lived in; why should a box floating in the air be such a surprise?

She sighed. Perhaps she simply wasn't very imaginative. Briskly she approached the Rooms, paused only briefly at the doorway, then stepped up and over the foot-high sill—

—and nearly fainted as she entered warm, still air. She felt blood rush to her face, and, seeking support, she reached out to a wall—and pulled her fingers back, shocked. The material of the wall was warm and soft, like flesh. Arke joined her, running a callused palm over the wall. "Isn't it remarkable? Perhaps this whole building is a living creature."

"Yes." Feeling stronger she turned and surveyed the Room. There were hatchlike doors in all four walls, and in the floor and ceiling; through each door she could see people in other Rooms running fingertips over the walls, their expressions slack. "It's very strange..."

...Wait a moment. Rooms beyond each door? But this one Room was big enough to fill up the cube she had seen from outside, so that beyond the doors should be only snow or sky...

And yet there were Rooms where there was no space for them.

Vaguely she remembered Teal's impatient descriptions of how the Rooms were folded over each other, and briefly she struggled to understand. Then she sighed, deciding to put the mystery of the folded-up place out of her mind. If it didn't bother the children, why should it bother her?

Arke went on, "Erwal, we've done well, even if we go no further than this. We are warm and dry, and we still have the mummy-cow for food. We could stay here, bring the mummy-cow inside, allow the children to grow..."

"But that's not why we came here," she said, suddenly impatient. "Teal went further." She looked up, recalling how Teal had described climbing up through the roof hatch. "Come on," she told Arke. "Help me up."

Arke allowed her to climb onto his shoulders; soon others, already in the upper Room, were pulling her up through the hatch/door.

The upper Room was just like the first, with light from nowhere filling the air. A few adults stood here, looking lost. Silently she climbed to her feet. She tried to picture Teal as he had taken these steps. Straight ahead from the hatch in the floor, he had said, and push at the door...

Beyond the door was the Eighth Room. It was shaped like the rest but its walls were clear, as if made of ice.

Beyond the walls was a black sky sprinkled with tiny lights.

There was a body on the crystal floor.

Arke stood beside Erwal. "Are they 'stars'?"

Shuddering, she said: "That's the word Teal gave us."

"And that—" He pointed straight ahead; beyond the farthest wall an object like a large, black seed pod floated in emptiness. "Do you think that's the 'ship'?"

Erwal tried to speak but her throat was dry.

She forced herself to look down.

The body was little more than bones swathed in rags of clothing. In one clawlike hand it clutched an elaborate knife. Erwal bent, took the knife; the skeletal fingers fell to pieces, clattering against the warm material of the floor. "This was Allel's knife," she told Arke. "Teal's grandmother. Teal treasured this knife."

Arke held her elbow. "It's a miracle he made it this far, you know. And the second time he came he didn't have a mummy-cow."

"He died alone. And so close to his goal."

"But he didn't die in vain. He brought us here."

Erwal, trembling, walked to the wall nearest the ship. "Now all we have to do is work out how to get out of here."

The others watched her, their faces pale with awe.

It is not true to say that Paul waited beside the Eighth Room after the brief appearance of the first human. Rather, he assigned a subcomponent of his personality to monitor events within the Room, while he turned the rest of his multiplexed attention elsewhere. And it could not be said that Paul's patience was tested by the subsequent delay. After all he was largely independent of the constraints of time and space; and the galaxies were available for his study.

And yet...

And yet, when humans reappeared in the Eighth Room, it seemed to Paul that he had waited a very, very long time.

The humans stared at the star-strewn Universe and retreated in alarm. Paul was fascinated by their angular movements, their obviously limited viewpoints. How unimaginably constraining to have one's awareness bound into a box on a stalk of bone!

But as Paul continued to observe, memories of his own brief corporeal sojourn on the Sugar Lump stirred, oddly sharp. Godlike, uncertain of his own reaction, he watched men, women and children talk, touch each other, laugh.

He noticed the ragged, filthy clothes, the protruding ribs, the ice-damaged skin. He pondered the meaning of these things.

Eventually a gray-haired woman entered the Room. Her behavior seemed different; she walked slowly to the crystal wall and stared out steadily at the stars.

Paul focused his attention so that it was as if he were gazing into her eyes.

The face was fine-boned, the skin drawn tight over the bones, and age had brought webs of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. The skin was scarred, the lips cracked and bleeding. This was a tired face. But the head was held erect, the eyes locked on a Universe which must be utterly baffling.

And behind those eyes a quantum grain of consciousness lay like an unripened seed, shaped by millions of years.

The woman left the Room; Paul, oddly shaken, reflected.

Over the next few days the humans investigated their crystal box. They touched the walls, staring through them with blank incomprehension. They were clearly aware of the spacecraft which lay waiting just beyond the Room's walls: they pointed, knelt so they could see under it, and occasionally one of them would paw at the walls; but there was no pattern to their searches, no system; they deployed no tools beyond fingertips and tongues. But they showed no frustration. They were like children in an adult world; they simply did not expect to be able to make things work.

At length there was a flurry of activity at the brightly-lit doorway. The humans were goading some sort of animal into the Room: here came a barrel-like head, a broad, solid body covered by shaggy fur. The humans punched the beast's flanks, tugged at the hair above its trembling eyes; the creature, obviously terrified, was almost immovable. But at last it stood in the center of the Room, surrounded by sweating, triumphant humans. It looked to left, right, and finally down at its feet. Paul imagined its terror as it found itself standing on apparent emptiness light years deep. The great head rotated like a piece of machinery and the beast scurried backward through the door, bowling some of the humans over. The people ran after it, shouting and waving their arms.

Paul, bemused, withdrew for some time.

These people were clearly helpless.

Crushed by uncounted generations in their four-dimensional cage, they had lost not only understanding but, it seemed to him, also the means by which to acquire a greater understanding. The Eight Rooms and the waiting ship were obviously intended to be found and used by the humans. But these ragged remnants were incapable of working this out.

This rabble was the relic of a race which had once had the audacity to challenge the Xeelee themselves. The strands of Paul's persona sang with contempt and he considered abandoning the humans, returning to his contemplation.

...But then he remembered the gray woman, the quantum jewel which had sparkled even within its battered setting of bone and dirt, and his contempt was stilled. Even fallen, these were still humans.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, he returned to the Eighth Room.

After the absurd attempt to push Sand into the Eighth Room, the novelty of the crystal box had worn off. The Room was left mostly empty as the villagers spread through the comfortable, opaque interiors of the other Rooms, laying their filthy blankets over fleshlike floors. Soon it seemed that Erwal could scarcely walk a yard without tripping over some running child or the outstretched legs of its parent. The purposeless, almost lazy mood was only to be expected, she supposed. Life in the village had been an endless round of cold and dirt, made only more meaningless by the endless legends of man's great past. The Eight Rooms were the driest, warmest, most comfortable place any human alive had ever seen...

But they had not come here for comfort.

Again and again she was drawn to the mysteries of the Eighth Room. She would lie on her back on its body-warm floor staring up at the star-buildings; or she would lie facedown, her nose pressed against the clear floor, and imagine herself falling slowly into that great, endless pool of light.

She studied the craft beyond the wall. It was some thirty feet long—nearly three times the size of the Room—and shaped like a fat, rounded disc. It was utterly black, showing only by starshine highlights. It was completely beyond her experience... but she knew what it was. Teal had told her what to expect, with his strange tales of men traveling among the stars.

This was the ship. It was a vessel to take them... somewhere else. (Here her imagination failed.) The Eight Rooms were merely a way station. But if they were to go on they had to find a way through these walls! She laid her palms flat and passed them over the warm, crystalline stuff. But this was not a teepee; there were no flaps to open. She slapped the wall in exasperation.

The gray-haired woman was frustrated! She wanted to explore!

Paul exulted. He slid quantum tendrils into her skull.

...She spread her hand wide and folded the fingers forward so that they formed a kind of cylinder; then she pressed her fingertips against the wall, just—here...

Erwal gasped and staggered away from the wall. She stared at her hands, flexing them and turning them over, as if to reassure herself that they were still under her control.

It had been like a waking dream.

It could have lasted no more than a second. She had seen her hand reach out and touch the wall in that odd way—it had been her own hand, undoubtedly; she had recognized the patch of white, frost-killed tissue near the center knuckles—but the vision had been laid over the sight of her real hand, which had remained resting against the clear wall.

She wrapped her arms around herself and retreated to the door of the Room. For some minutes she allowed the warm, human noises of the villagers to seep over her. She had felt able to cope with her bizarre experiences up to now: she had the stories of Teal to cling to, and as long as it was all out there, as long as she, Erwal, wife of Damen, remained the same, with her comfortable skin smock and her tiny collection of possessions, then she felt strong and able to endure.

But this was different.

Something had reached inside her head, and for the first time since she had left the village she experienced real terror. She wished Teal were here; surely he would be able to understand this...

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Teal wasn't here. And in any event he hadn't been able to go beyond this point himself. There was no use hiding in helplessness; the meaning of the vision was obvious. Someone, or something, had shown her the way out of here. Who it was, and how they had done it, she didn't know. Nor did it matter. Now she had to decide what to do. She could return to the warm fug of the villagers and forget about the challenge of the stars...

Or she could follow these clear instructions.

And what would happen then?

It was just as well she was so unimaginative (she walked back to the far wall) for if she had the faintest inkling of what she might unleash (she lifted her hand as in the vision, made a tube of her fingers) she would certainly never approach the wall and stab her fingers just so—

Nothing happened.

She leaned against the wall, trying to stop the shaking of her body, and stabbed again and again.

Suddenly there was a hole in the wall. It was a circle a little shorter than she was, and it led into a wide, well-lit room—a room inside the ship.

Suddenly her will broke and she ran, sobbing, from the Eighth Room.

The humans stepped cautiously through the circular opening and stood, incongruous in their furs and leggings, at the center of the ship's single chamber. Chairs of some dark, soft material lay scattered over the deck. The chairs were fixed in place but the humans quickly discovered that they would, with a judicious rock backwards, convert into couches. Soon the children were swarming over the devices, rocking back and forth.

Paul, watching, considered this. These chairs were so clearly designed for humans; in fact, of course, the whole life-system was human-based. And yet the rest of the ship showed few of the characteristics of human technology. Paul's attention foci prowled. The chamber occupied by the humans was a flat cylinder which, Paul realized, filled most of the ship's volume; its drive units, life support and other equipment must be embedded in the hull. And when he studied the paper-thin hull itself he found space-wings furled into tight coils within the body; and he discovered how it would be possible to expand collapsed compartments in the hull to accommodate hundreds, thousands of people.

Sadly this wasn't necessary.

Slowly the humans colonized the comparatively spacious environs of the ship. They spread their foul blankets over the floor, argued over occupancy of the couches, and even tried to goad the poor animal through the Eighth Room and into the ship. Soon they were hanging up their blankets to separate the chamber into a series of private cells.

The ship meant no more to them than would a comfortable shack, Paul realized, amused and irritated.

Only the gray-haired woman showed any continuing curiosity in the ship itself. She prowled the walls, touching, staring, studying. There were panels which showed scenes of stars, but they were not simple windows; they showed images which were magnified, inverted, or distorted, as if seen sideways in a reflecting sheet of ice. Other panels, larger in area, coated the lower walls like silver paint. And to a table fixed beneath an array of panels were attached devices which Paul instantly recognized as waldoes, tailored for human hands. Obviously this was the ship's control system. With a mixture of fascination and dread Paul watched the woman approach the strange, mittenlike objects; she poked at them tentatively, and once even appeared to be contemplating slipping her hands inside. But she backed away nervously and moved on.

Paul, with the wave-function equivalent of a sigh, resigned himself to waiting a little longer.

Erwal ran her fingers over the ship's gleaming surfaces. She stared at the panels, the strange mittens, the shaped chairs, and tried very hard to understand.

She stood before a silver wall panel. The featureless rectangle, about as tall as she was, reflected a tired, uncertain woman. Perhaps she simply wasn't up to this. If only Teal were here—

...She reached out her right hand and slid it through the silver panel, as if it were a pool of some liquid stood impossibly on end; she felt no discomfort, only a mild, vaguely pleasant tingling...

The dream evaporated. Her hands were safely by her sides. She held her right hand up before her face and poked at it, turning it over and over; it was unaffected, right down to the familiar patch of frost-bitten skin between the knuckles.

She found herself shuddering. The vision, like the first one, had been as real as life. It was as if her grasp on reality were loosening. She closed her eyes and stood there, alone in the muddy bustle of the ship, wishing beyond wish that she were with Damen in the warm, dark security of her teepee.

She forced her eyes open and stared at the silver panel. It shone softly in the diffuse light. She recalled reluctantly how useful the first of her waking dreams had turned out to be, the one that had shown her how to get into the ship. Perhaps this latest one would be just as valuable...

If she had the courage to find out.

She reached out a trembling hand. Her fingertips touched the gleaming panel, then slid without resistance into the surface. To her eyes it was as if the fingers had been cut away by a blade; but she could feel them in the unknown space behind the panel, and she wiggled them experimentally. She felt nothing; it was as if the panel was made of air, or some warm liquid.

She withdrew her fingers. There was no resistance. She inspected her hand carefully, pinching the skin, then looked doubtfully at the panel once more.

Almost impulsively she thrust her hand right through the silver, immersing it to the wrist. She felt nothing but a vague, deep warmth; her stretching fingers found nothing within the hidden space.

She pulled her hand away once more, studied it and flexed her fingers. It felt, if anything, healthier than before; as she moved the joints she was untroubled by the stiffness she sometimes suffered in her knuckles...

It felt much healthier, in fact. And it was now completely unmarked. The patch of frostbite between her knuckles was gone.

The news of the miraculous healing panel spread rapidly. Soon hands, forearms and elbows were being thrust through the silver curtain; they returned freed of cuts, bruises and patches of ice-damaged skin. Arke had a slightly sprained ankle, and he lifted his leg and comically thrust his foot through the silver curtain. Afterwards he strode around the chamber grinning, declaring the joint to be stronger than it had ever been.

One five-year-old was suffering from a debilitating chest infection, and in his father's hands he looked little more than a disjointed sack of bones. At last the father thrust the child bodily through the partition. Tears streaming down his face, he held the boy out of sight for several heartbeats.

When he pulled his son back the villagers crowded around expecting a miracle, but the boy appeared just as thin and pale as before. The father smiled bravely at the child, who was excitedly describing how dark it had been in there. The villagers turned away, shaking their heads.

Erwal kept her own counsel and watched the boy.

The improvement was only gradual at first, but after a few days it was beyond doubt: the boy's cough subsided, color returned to his cheeks, and, at last, his weight began to pick up. Everyone was moved by this and there was an impromptu party, with the boy's recovery toasted in wooden beakers of mummy-cow milk.

Erwal reflected carefully on the incident and tried to understand its meaning.

Over the next few days she experienced several more of the waking dreams, and gradually she learned to trust them. She reached into more silver panels and pulled out food and drink of a richness the villagers had never experienced before. That was an excuse for another party... Then she learned how to touch the floor—just so—to make a section of it open up to reveal a pool of warm, clear water. The villagers had never seen so much water standing unfrozen, and they stared at it uncertainly. The children were the first to try it out, and soon the adults found it impossible to resist joining in their games. Dirt floated away from Erwal's flesh, taking with it some of the burden of responsibility she had carried since leaving the village. The pool was soon reduced to dilute mud; but, as soon as Erwal had the floor close and open again, the water was restored to its clear purity.

The villagers took these miracles in their stride. As Erwal delivered each new surprise they would stare at her curiously, one or two questioning her on how she had known to touch the panels or the walls in just that fashion; but, unable to explain the waking dreams only she experienced, she would simply smile and shrug.

Perhaps there was something in the ship which sent the dreams to her. After all a dreaming panel would be no more miraculous than a healing panel...

But she could not believe that. There was an element of patience and sympathy about the visions that reminded her of people who had cared for her in the past: of her mother, of Teal, of old Allel. Surely there was a person behind these visions; and surely that person was a human like herself.

Gradually she came to think of her benefactor as the Friend.

She wondered why he—or she—did not simply walk through the door of the ship and show himself. She suspected she would never know his name. But she became convinced he intended only to help her, and she sent him silent thanks.

But then a new set of visions began, and soon she wished she could close off her mind as she could close her eyes, block her ears.

In these new dreams she was sitting at one end of the chamber, at the table to which were fixed the strange, soft mittens. She would slide her hands into the mittens and spread her fingers flat against the tabletop. That in itself did not seem so bad... but then would come a helpless movement, like sliding across a plain of ice, and the dream would become a nightmare.

Terrified, she resisted the dreams, but they battered at her awareness like snowflakes. Even sleep was no escape. She sensed an urgency behind the dreams, an anxiety; but there was also tolerance and kindness. Obviously the Friend badly wanted her to slide her hands into the mittens, to submit to this awful falling sensation. But she felt that if she failed to overcome her terror the Friend would stay and help her care for her people, here in the Eight Rooms and the ship, as long as they lived.

Finally, after some days, the dreams ceased. Perhaps the Friend had done all he could and was now waiting, resigned to whatever decision she might make. She grew restless in the confines of the ship and the Rooms, fractious and impatient with her companions, and she slept badly.

At last she approached the little table. Two of the children played a noisy game around her feet, barely noticed. She sat down and slid her hands into the mittens. She felt a million tiny prickles, as if the gloves were stuffed with fine needles, but there was no pain.

The ship quivered.

She gasped; the thrill that had run through the fabric of the ship had been almost sexual in its intensity, as if she were touching a lover.

She became aware of a lull in the noise of the chamber. The villagers had felt the ripple and looked about uneasily, their new home abruptly an alien place once more.

Slowly she opened her fingers, turned her hands palm down, and deliberately rested them on the tabletop.

Now another shudder ran through the ship; she imagined a giant waking, stretching huge muscles after too long a sleep. Fear flooded through her; but she kept her hands steady and clung to the idea that the Friend was hovering over her somewhere. Surely the Friend would not lead her into harm.

Arke came bursting into the chamber. He stared around wildly, sweat sparkling on his bald scalp. "Erwal! What are you doing to the ship?"

She turned. "What are you talking about?"

He gestured, swinging his arms through wide arcs. "You can see it from the Eighth Room. The ship has grown wings! They must be a hundred miles long and they're as black as night..."

Erwal barely heard him, for her head was flooded with a new series of dreams, as if the Friend were now excited beyond endurance. She closed her eyes, shook her head; but still the visions persisted. She could see the Eighth Room, but from the outside; it was a crystal toy against a backdrop of stars... and the ship was gone from its side.

She had no idea what the vision meant. Again and again it pounded into her head like a palm slapping her temple. At last, terrified and confused, she... reflected... the vision back.

There were screams; she heard people fall, splash into the pool. Then there came that terrible dream-sensation of sliding—

With a cry she snatched her hands from the mittens. There was an instant of pain, of regret, as if she were spurning a lover. The sense of motion ceased.

She stared around. Baffled villagers clung to each other, crying. The door which had led to the Eighth Room had sealed itself up. In one of the wall panels she saw the Eighth Room... but, just as in the dream, the Room was diminished in size, as if she were viewing it from some distance.

A muscle in Arke's cheek quivered. "Erwal, what have you done?"

"I..." Her throat, she found, was quite dry. She licked her lips and tried again. "I think I've moved the ship. But I'm not sure how."

He pointed to the door. "If that hadn't closed itself the connection to the Room might have just ripped open." He eyed her accusingly. "What if someone had fallen? Or what if the door had closed on one of us, perhaps a child? They might have been cut in two."

Her fears subsiding, Erwal found herself able to say calmly: "Arke, I don't think that could have happened. The ship simply isn't made that way. It's here to help and protect us."

He stared at her curiously, scratching his scalp. "You talk about it as if it's alive."

"Perhaps it is." She touched the mittens and remembered the excitement that had surged through her senses.

"Take us back." There was a barely controlled tremble in Arke's voice.

She looked up at the wall panels. Villagers inside the Eighth Room called soundlessly to the ship, hammering at the crystal walls; they looked like insects in a box of ice, and the occupants of the ship stared at them numbly.

Erwal nodded. "Yes. All right." Once again she slid her hands into the gloves; once again the ship trembled, as if it were some huge animal ready to do her bidding.

She sensed the Friend hovering close by.

She closed her eyes and—imagined—the ship restored to its berth next to the Eighth Room. There was another disconcerting slide through space, briefer this time, and the ship came to rest.

She looked up. The door barring the way to the Eighth Room had dissolved; the villagers in the ship rushed to the door and embraced their companions, as if they had been separated by far more than a few hundred yards and a few minutes.

After that many of the little group retreated to the comparatively familiar confines of the Eight Rooms—some went so far as to spend some nights outside, buried in the chill, comforting snow—and it took some time before they grew to trust the interior of the ship once more. For some time Erwal did not dare move the ship again; but when she slid her hands into the mittens it was like the feel of the muscles beneath the thick hair of Damen's forearm.

Paul exulted.

Unsophisticated the humans might be, but they were not primitive, Paul saw clearly. They had been shaped by the habitation of a Galaxy, over millions of years. The woman, for all her fear and tentativeness, had no difficulty with grasping the essential concepts—that the object she sat in was a ship, which could be directed through immense spaces—despite the fact that such things were so far beyond her own experience. It was as if humans had evolved for spaceflight, as if the imaginative concepts required were embedded in deep mental muscles in the woman's brain—atrophied perhaps, but now stirring anew.

Paul tried to analyze his own reactions. Not long ago he had been near the peak of his sophistication, his awareness multiplexed and his senses sweeping across the Galaxy... Now he was spending so much time locked into a crude single-viewpoint self-awareness model in order to communicate with the pilot woman that he was in danger of degenerating.

Why was he doing this? Why did he care?

He shook off his introspection. There were greater issues to resolve. He had focused so long on the question of teaching the humans to fly the ship that he had neglected to consider where they were meant to take it. Already he sensed the most advanced one, the woman pilot, was beginning to frame such questions.

He must consider.

He withdrew from the woman. (There was a sharp, bittersweet sense of loss.) Then his awareness multiplied, fragmented, and spread like the wings of the ship, and the small pain vanished.

The watching Qax had become aware of the quantum-function creature through its interaction with the primitives, and had only slowly come to recognize it as an advanced-form human.

Now the evolved human had gone.

The Qax considered.

The primitive humans were helpless. There would be time to collect them later.

The Qax departed, following the evolved human.

The Friend had gone.

Erwal worried briefly; but he would return when she needed him.

And in the meantime there was the ship.

Inside the warm stomach of the ship the days were changeless, their passing marked only by sleep intervals.

Erwal found a way to dim the light in the main chamber, and each "evening" the villagers would retreat to their nests of blankets, and soon a soft susurrus of snoring, gentle scratching, of subdued belches and farts, would fill the clean walls of the ship.

Erwal found it difficult to rest.

Nights—"nights"—were the times she missed Damen most. She lay alone in her cordoned-off space for long hours, staring up at the featureless ceiling. At length, driven by the boredom of sleeplessness, she would steal past sleeping bodies to the control table, slip her hands into the warmth of the mittens, and once more touch the great muscles of the craft.

She could not put aside the thought that they had not come so far simply to stop here. They had braved the snows to reach the Rooms—they had learned to use the ship's facilities to feed and cleanse themselves...

They could even make it fly.

Surely they should not simply give up? If they could make the ship fly, why should they not make it fly far and wide in this strange, roofless Universe?

The claustrophobic warmth, the cosy human scents of the cabin, closed in around her once more.

She wished the Friend were still here. But she was alone, with her frustration.

Arke came to her, concern creasing the flesh between his eyes. "You worry me," he said softly.

"Then I'm sorry. There's no need—"

"Erwal, most of us are happy simply to have reached this haven. Warmth, safety, peace, food—that's all we ever wanted. We don't want more uncertainty, adventure. You know that. But you—you are different. You seem driven," Arke said.

Perhaps she should tell Arke about the Friend—what a relief it would be to share her doubts and uncertainties with another!—but Arke, good man as he was, would surely conclude that she was simply insane; and she would never again be allowed to use the controls without the watchful eye of a villager on her.

Anyway, she reflected, at the moment the Friend wasn't here! So whatever was impelling her, making her restless, was coming from inside her.

She leaned forward and peered into Arke's pale, anxious eyes. "I think we have to go on. We can't stop here."

He spread his hands. "Why? We are comfortable and safe."

"Arke, this ship isn't just a teepee. It flies! Look—someone built the Eight Rooms for us to find. Didn't they?"

Arke nodded slowly. "Someone who knew we would need to escape the ice one day."

"So they released us from one danger—the cold. But, Arke, why give us a ship as well? Why not just stop at the Eight Rooms?"

Arke frowned. "You think there's something else—another danger; something we would need to escape in the flying ship."

"Yes." She sat back, resting her hands on her knees. "And that's why I think we have to learn to use this vessel."

Arke rubbed his broad nose. "Erwal, you've been right about a lot of things before. But—" He gestured at the sleeping villagers. "We aren't pioneers. We only came so far because the alternative seemed certain death. And even if you're right, this mysterious danger might not manifest itself for a long time—for lifetimes, perhaps! So why should we not relax, let our children worry about the future?"

Erwal shook her head, remembering the urgency of the Friend. "I don't think we have lifetimes, Arke."

Arke spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Frankly, Erwal, I don't see why the rest of us should let you endanger all our lives."

She nodded. "Then consider this: Arke, would you let me take the ship away alone?—Then I would only be endangering myself, after all."

He scratched his chin. "But the food lockers—"

"I wouldn't take the mummy-cow," she said briskly. "No one would starve."

"I don't know..."

She took both his hands in hers. "Arke, I've saved all your lives. Now I think I am saving them again! Don't you owe it to me to let me try?"

He stared up at her uncertainly, the lines of his face softened by the twilight of the chamber.

"Let's talk to the others in the morning," he said.

There was grumbling, complaint at the possible loss of the ship's wonderful facilities—and, Erwal was moved to find, genuine concern at her own welfare.

But they agreed.

It took a couple of days for the villagers to set up camp in the Eight Rooms once more; but at last the ship was cleared, save only for a few stray blankets, garments and other oddments. Erwal spent the time experimenting with the ship's panels, trying to work out a destination.

There was a light hand on her shoulder. Erwal turned. "Sura..."

The girl smiled down at her. "Are you ready?"

"What are you doing here?"

The smile broadened. "I couldn't let you go alone, could I?"

A soft warmth was added to the brew of exhilaration and fear already swirling within Erwal. Briefly she covered Sura's hand with her own—and then turned to the controls and slid her hands into the mittens.

The ship quivered.

Paul brooded over the wreckage of the Solar System.

Since the retreat of the Xeelee the Universe had been lost to baryonic life forms. The photino birds had not yet completed their vast conversion programs—stars were still shining, the Ring not yet closed—but at last, in a time not very distant, the final light would be extinguished and the baryonic Universe would grow uniform and cold, a stable home for the photino birds.

A shipful of primitive humans had no possibility of survival in a Universe occupied by such a force.

Therefore the humans would have to follow the Xeelee. Perhaps this escape had been the intention of the Xeelee all along, Paul mused. Perhaps they had provided many other junior baryonic races with similar "lifeboats," so they could follow the Xeelee to a place where baryonic life was still possible.

He saw it now. His humans would have to use their ship to cross space and pass through Bolder's Ring.

And Paul would have to guide them there. He felt a surge of determination, of anticipation...

And of fear.

Around his decision the diffuse cloud that comprised Paul's awareness coalesced. He prepared to return to the ship—

But there was something in the way.

Paul stopped. He assembled awareness foci to consider the new barrier, confused. The wave-function guides he was following had been distorted, even terminated, and—

He was being watched.

Paul froze, shocked; his sub-personalities condensed into something almost as coherent and limited as his old corporeal self.

There was something here: something aware and able to study him... and to stop him.

As if trembling, he tried to respond. The data that formed his being was stored in a lattice of quantum wave functions; now he distorted that lattice deliberately to indicate an omission. A lack. A question.

—Who are you?—

The answer was imposed directly on his awareness; it was like being exposed to a raw, vicious dream, to a million years of venom.

—Qax.—

The gateway between the Eighth Room and the ship healed shut, leaving Erwal and Sura alone in the ship.

"Where shall we go?" Sura asked innocently.

Erwal smiled. "Well, that's a good question." And, she realized, she barely knew how to start framing an answer. She flexed the gloves, and the panels, which had been displaying scenes of stars and of the Eighth Room, now filled with representations which were obviously artificial.

Sura stared at the graphic circles, the cones and ellipses, with confusion. "What does all this mean?"

Erwal withdrew her hands from the mittens. "I can only guess. But I think these pictures are meant to show us what this world is like." She reached up to grasp Sura's hand. "Sura, you know that the world we came from was like a box. There was the Shell below our feet, and Home above us, closing us in."

Sura sniffed. "Any child could see that."

"Yes. But now we've come out of that box; and out here it's different. There is no box anymore! The Eighth Room, the doorway to the box, is just—hanging there."

"The way the first Room was hanging over the ground, when we found it?"

"Yes, but—even more so," said Erwal, struggling to make sense. "It simply hangs! And there is no ground above it, or below it, as far as I can see. Just empty space, and a great pit of stars."

Sura, her mouth hanging open, thought it over. "I feel scared."

So do I, Erwal thought grimly; and she reflected on the many times she had instinctively sought a colorful roof-world over her head, and how she had cowered in her seat, wishing she were at home in her teepee with a hard roof of rock between her and the stars.

Sura studied images of the Eighth Room. "If we've just come out of a great box—through the Eighth Room—then why can't we see the outside of the box from here? All you can see is the Room itself!" Sura sounded aggrieved, as if this were an affront to her intelligence.

Erwal sighed and pushed a lock of hair from her brow. "That's just one of a hundred—a thousand things about this situation I don't understand at all. I think we have to proceed with what we can understand."

"And what's that?" Sura asked irritably. "Because none of this makes any sense so far."

Erwal pointed to a particular schematic. This showed a bright light, little more than a dot, surrounded by nine concentric circles. A small, framework cube sat on the third circle from the center, slowly following the track in an anticlockwise direction; a complex arrangement of light points similarly followed the sixth circle. The other circles were empty. "Look at that," said Erwal. "What does that remind you of?"

Sura reached out and, with one finger, touched the framework cube. The screen blanked and filled up with a magnified image of the cube; Sura snatched back her finger, startled.

Erwal laughed. "Don't be afraid. The panels won't hurt you."

"The box is the Eighth Room."

"That's right." Erwal touched a blank part of the image and the circles returned. "I think this shows where the Room is, you see. It's following this circular path around the bright light. And here's—something else—following the sixth circle."

"What's the bright light?"

"I don't know."

Sura touched the bright point; it expanded to show a dim globe, yellowing and pocked by huge dark spots. "Do you think we should go there?"

Erwal shrugged. "I don't know."

Sura restored the image of circles and counted. "Nine circles. We're on the third, and this other marking is on the sixth. But the other circles are empty. I wonder why."

"I don't know," Erwal said. "Maybe there were things there originally, which were destroyed. Or taken away."

"What could they have been?"

"Oh, Sura, how should I know?"

"I'm sorry." Sura studied the picture. "Well, then; there seems to be only one place to go."

"The sixth circle?"

"Yes. But how do we get there?"

Erwal smiled at her, slid her hands into the mittens once more, and flexed her fingers. A feeling of power, of release, swept over her. "That's the easy part," she said slowly. "I just close my eyes—"

The ship had waited a million years for this.

It spread its sycamore-seed wings wide and soared through the wreckage of the Solar System, barely restrained by the tentative will of the woman at the controls.

Erwal and Sura felt waves of motion-echoes. It was, thought Erwal, like being a child again and riding the shoulders of a lively mummy-cow.

Sura laughed and clung to Erwal's neck.

Within minutes the voyage was over; the ship, cooling, folded its wings.

The women stared up at the view panels.

At the heart of the sixth-circle complex was a single, immensely large, flattened sphere of gas. Much of the gas glowed a dull red, the color of burnt wood, although here and there fires still raged within the atmosphere, blurred patches of yellow or white. Three smaller globes, equally spaced, circled the center sphere; their panel images bristled with detail. Further out there was a ring of debris, broad and softly sparkling; Erwal wondered if there had once been still more of these globes, now long since destroyed.

She bade the ship slide around the limb of the fireball. She watched the burning landscape unfold beneath her, and shivered with a sudden sense of scale. "Sura, that thing is immense."

"What is it? Is it a sun?"

"Perhaps. But it is far bigger than our Sun ever was. And it seems to be nearly burnt out now."

"Perhaps it lit up the smaller globes," Sura said brightly. "Perhaps people lived on the other globes, and set fire to this one to give them warmth. Erwal, is that possible?"

"Anything's possible," Erwal murmured.

The ship had dipped so close that it had flattened into a landscape of glowing gas. Erwal felt a sudden thrill of apprehension. Without hesitating she pulled the ship up and away from the Sunworld.

"Let's go see the smaller globes," she said to Sura.

Beneath Saturn's ruined atmosphere, ancient defense systems stirred.

Erwal brought the ship to the nearest of the globes. Soon the little world filled a panel; from pole to pole it was encrusted with detail, so that its surface reminded Erwal of fine leatherwork—or, perhaps, of a cow-tree overrun with lichen and moss. She spread her wings and swooped close over the surface: a miniature landscape rushed with exhilarating speed beneath her bow.

Sura clapped her hands, childlike.

Erwal studied the panel. Now she saw that the surface was coated with buildings: they were all about the scale of the Eighth Room, but they came in every shape Erwal could imagine—domes, cubes, pyramids, cylinders and spires—and there were bowls and cup-shaped amphitheaters lying open to the sky. Arcs and loops of cable, fixed to the buildings, lay draped over the landscape, knitting it all together like some immense tapestry.

Nowhere did Erwal see an open space, a single blade of grass. And nowhere did she see any sign of people.

With immense care she bade the ship settle to the top of one of the broader buildings. Sura wanted to climb out and explore—perhaps see what was inside the mysterious buildings—but the ship's door would not open.

"I think the ship knows what's best for us," Erwal said. "Maybe we shouldn't go outside. It might be too hot—or too cold—or perhaps it's dangerous for us in some other way we can't imagine."

"But it's so frustrating!"

Erwal frowned. "Well, perhaps there's something I can do about that." She slid her hands into her mittens. "Here's something I found a few days ago. Come and see."

The panel over the control table showed the blank exterior of a bubble-shaped building; a circular door led to an intriguing—but darkened—interior. Now Erwal moved her thumbs, raised her wrists—and the field of view of the window panel moved forward. It was as if the darkened doorway was approaching.

She felt Sura clutch the back of her chair. The girl said, "Erwal, are we moving?"

"No," Erwal said slowly. "But the picture is. Do you understand?" She waited nervously for the girl's reaction. Oddly, of all the miracles Erwal had encountered, she had found this one of the most difficult to absorb. So she was in a craft that traveled through emptiness: well, birds flew through the air, did they not?... And it was well known that humans had once built such crafts as routinely as Damen now built a fire. Even the Friend's visions were reminiscent of dreams she had endured before, particularly since the final disappearance of Teal. So these phenomena were just extensions of the familiar.

But a window was just a hole in a teepee, with a flap to gum down when the wind rose. Obviously every time you looked through a window you would see the same scene.

The idea that a window, without moving, could show different scenes—so that it was as if she were looking through the eyes of another—was beyond comprehension.

But Sura stared at the unfolding image, eyes empty of wonder. She said: "Very nice. Can you make it go any faster?"

Deflated, Erwal sighed. Maybe she should give up trying to work these things out, and accept the windows, as Sura evidently did, for what they were.

Useful magic.

For the next hour and more they roamed vicariously through the abandoned streets of the city-world. This had obviously once been a world of people—they recognized chairs, bedrooms, tables, all clearly human-sized. But there was no sign of humanity: no pictures on the walls, no decoration anywhere, no curtains or rugs beyond the severely functional. And building after building was filled with huge devices, quite unrecognizable to the two women: vast cylinders lying on their side or pointing through apertures at the sky, and rooms full of gray, coldly anonymous boxes.

Everywhere was darkness and—Erwal felt—coldness. The building-world had been left neat, perfect—not a chair overturned—and quite empty.

Sura, squatting on the floor, wrapped her arms about herself and shivered. "I don't think I would have liked to have lived here."

"Nor I." Erwal wondered about the purpose of all these banks of machines and boxes. The devices lacked the simple, human utility of the lockers she had found on the ship; these machines were brooding, almost threatening. Perhaps this was a world of weapons, of war.

Maybe, she thought, it was just as well they had found this place empty.

"Erwal." Sura stood gracefully and pointed at the image in the panel; an array of gray boxes was sliding away from them. "What's happening? Are you moving the image again?"

Erwal held her hands up before her face. "You can see I'm not. Sura, I don't understand what is happening." She thrust her hands into the gloves and changed the images in the panels; she looked below, above, to either side of the ship, half-expecting to espy a group of giant machine-men hauling at the ship...

Then she found something.

A tubular curtain, transparent but stained with blue, had fallen all around the ship. Its walls sparkled. The tube reached miles above the surface of the little world, and, looking up it, Erwal could see that it stretched all the way to the ruined Sun-world.

The ship was rising up this tunnel.

Soon the machine-world shrank to a fist-sized ball beneath them.

"Erwal! Do something! Take us away from here! If we crash into the Sun-thing, we'll be destroyed!"

But Erwal could only clench her mittened fists. "I can't," she said softly, staring at the panel. "I can't do anything. It won't respond."

The walls of the tunnel rushed by, a blur now.

A box had closed around Paul.

Of course it was not possible for Paul to be subjected to a simple physical confinement; nevertheless the wave-function world lines which constituted his being—and his link to Sol—were bent to the point of breaking by the immaterial walls around him.

He couldn't move.

Shock and surprise surged through him. Of all the strange things he had seen in his travels this was the first to endanger him directly. With a startling shift of perspective he realized that he had come to think of himself as a god, an observer, invulnerable, above interference. Now he felt an overpowering urge to retreat into the cave of a simple quasi-human self-model... but if he went that way, madness and terror would surely follow.

Striving for order he set up limited sub-personalities to study his prison. Data began to reach him, and slowly he came to understand.

He was trapped in the focal zone of a radiation of an enormously high frequency. The zone was a sphere only a few feet across; nonlinear effects causing energy to cascade into lower frequencies must have made the zone glow like a jewel. Individual photons darted through the focus like birds, their wavelength a hundred billion billion times smaller than the radius of an electron; the short wavelength implied immense energy, so that each photon was a potent little bullet of energy/mass... in fact, so massive that each photon was almost a quantum black hole. And it was this that was confining him. Black holes cut the world lines of which he was composed; it was as if a corporeal human were confined by a web of a billion burning threads.

So it was an effective cage. The Qax had taken him.

That left one question: why?

Calm now, he rearranged the data strung along his wave-function components so that the omissions represented by the question were clear and sharp.

He waited. He did not trouble to measure the time.

...The Qax returned.

Paul rapidly assembled a set of multiple attention foci. There was a more coherent feel to the sleet of singularity radiation now; in a systematic fashion the frequencies, phases and paths of the powerful quanta were being modified by their passage through his being. He was being interrogated, he realized: each photon was taking a few more bits of data from him, no doubt for study by his captor. It was a data dump; he was being read as if he were some crude storage device.

He felt no resentment; nor did he try to hide. What was the point? His captor had to be aware already of the little band of humans skimming their crude ship around Sol's gravity well. His best hope was to let the Qax learn, wait for some kind of feedback.

But he kept his question representations in place.

Slowly he discerned a further evolution in the hail of photons. He spread his awareness as wide as he dared, and, like a man straining to hear distant fragments of conversation, he listened. He caught glimpses of the Qax itself, elusive impressions of something fast, quick-thinking, physically compact; the radiation cage imprisoning him implied a command of the deepest structure of the physical Universe.

...And he heard hatred.

The brutal fact of it was shocking, overpowering. The Qax hated him; it hated him because he was human, and that loathing warped the path of every photon that tore through him. The hatred dominated his captor's existence and was harnessed to a determination to expunge every trace of humanity from the Universe.

Paul felt awe at the crime that had caused such enmity across a desert of time.

The unequal flow of data continued for an immeasurable period. Then—

A change. The boundary conditions of his photon cage were being altered, so that the region of spacetime which restrained him was translated...

He was being moved.

Now there was another component to the complex rain of photons. Paul strained. There was another individual out there; something huge, vast, stately, with thought processes on timescales of hours, so that its slow speculations rang like gongs... And yet it too was a Qax; there was such a similarity to the structure of Paul's captor that the giant surely belonged to, or at least originated from, the same species. And still the drizzle of inferred data was not resolved; there were unattributed overtones, like higher harmonics on a violin string.

There were more of them out there, he realized, too many for him to discriminate as individuals, a vast hierarchy of Qax looming over him, inspecting him like immense biologists over some splayed insect. They existed on every imaginable scale of space and time, and yet they remained a single species—scattered, multiply evolved, but still essentially united.

And they all hated him.

The photon cage disappeared.

Freed, Paul felt like a spider whose web has been cut. Rapidly he assessed the few quantum strands which still linked him to Sol, the Ring. Spiderlike, he set to work to build on those threads.

With a small part of him he looked around.

He was no longer in the Solar System. He saw a brown dwarf, a Jovian world ten times the size of Jupiter; it circled a shrunken white star. His focus of awareness orbited a few hundred miles above the planet's cloud tops. Studying the clouds he saw turbulent cells on all scales, feeding off each other in a great fractal cascade of whirling energy. A massive brown-red spot, a self-organizing island of stability, sailed through the roiling storms.

He mused over the spectacle, puzzled as to why he had been brought here. The energy for all that weather must come from the planet's interior and its rotation, rather than the wizened star. This monster world was self-contained and complete in itself: it didn't need the rest of the Universe. In fact, Paul reflected wryly, this world should be safe even from the depredations of the photino birds. While the dark matter foe turned stars to dust this world and billions like it would spin on, a container of massive but purposeless motion, until the energy dissipated by its huge weather systems caused its core to cool, its rotation to grind slowly down. Then at last it would come to rest, its only function being to serve as a gravitational seedbed for a photino bird Ghost world. The planet was harmless, dull and old; even that cloud spot might be older than mankind, he realized—

Again he was being watched.

A vast speculation thrilled through him. The huge Qax he had detected earlier, with thoughts like hours...

It was here. In the spot system. The whole self-organizing complex contained the awareness of a Qax, and it was studying him.

He opened himself. New data trickled into his awareness.

The Xeelee ship was semisentient. The function of the ship was to optimize the chances of survival of its human occupants.

It studied the machines working at the heart of the ancient Jovian, and considered how this might be achieved.

Once this System had been the home of a race who had waged war for hundreds of millennia. The Jovian had been reworked to serve as the hub of an industrial-military conurbation which had launched wave after wave of strikes out at the humans' perceived foe, the Xeelee. The ship saw how even the moons had been moved to their present altitudes, their orbits regularized, to serve as weapons shops. Power for the shops, and for the great fleets which had poured out of this system, had come from the substance of the Jovian itself.

Now, of course, the war was history, the human fleets brushed aside; the shops were deserted and the Jovian was largely spent—but still, the ship perceived, entities remained brooding at its core, vast machine-minds waiting to fulfill their final purpose—

The last defense of the Solar System.

They saw the Xeelee ship, with its cargo of two primitive humans, as a threat. And they had attacked.

The ship methodically studied the weak tractor beam which was drawing it steadily towards the Jovian.

Gravity wave technology—called by the humans "starbreaker beams"—had been one of the many Xeelee mysteries never solved by man, even after generations of study. The ship now recognized this tractor as a pale imitation of a starbreaker; and it made out, somewhere near the core of the Jovian, the generator which served as the core of the tractor. A group of point-singularities were being impelled, by strong electrical fields, to collide and coalesce. As pairs of the ultradense singularities impacted a new, more massive, hole would form; for some seconds the new hole's event horizon would vibrate like a soap bubble, emitting intense gravitational waves. By controlling the pattern of such collisions the modes of vibration of the horizons could be controlled—and thus, indirectly, the tractor beam of gravity waves was generated.

It worked. After a fashion.

The ship computed options.

It could simply spread its wings and fly away, of course. But there would be a period, a second or so, when its discontinuity-drive impulse would match the tug of the tractor beam; and when the beam was broken the ship and its occupants could suffer a jolt.

The ship assessed the (low) probability of damage to the humans.

The second option was simpler and, the ship concluded, entailed less risk.

It fired its own starbreaker, straight down the throat of the tractor.

Sura cried out and covered her eyes; Erwal, squinting, saw how the panel's brightness dimmed to a point where she could see again.

She still looked along the curtain-tube to the Sun-world. But now a beam of intense cherry-red light threaded out of the ship and along the tube's axis, spearing the heart of the Sun-world. Around the point of impact the Sun-world glowed yellow-white; the stain of light spread until it covered perhaps a quarter of the globe's huge area.

The curtain flickered, fragmented, faded; the red beam flicked off, as if doused.

Sura lowered her hands cautiously. "Is it over?"

"I think so."

"What happened?"

Erwal changed the panel view to look out over the blocky building-world landscape, now brightly lit by the revived Sunworld. "I don't know. It's worked, whatever it was. We're no longer rising."

Sura stared up at the panel. "But—look..."

The world was no longer dead.

Lights flickered on across the landscape; clear yellow or blue radiance poured from the doorways of the abandoned structures. Now some of the buildings began to rise from the ground, and Erwal was reminded of flowers which seek the Sun; soon the buildings were straining up at the Sun-world, their cables singing taut, and amphitheaters reached out like open palms; and for a moment she saw the machine-world as its builders must have intended it: as a place of vibrant power and industry.

Erwal felt her throat constricting. Why, she thought, it is beautiful after all. I just wasn't seeing it right.

But already the revived Sun-world light was fading; the building sank uncertainly to the ground, their interior illumination cooling to darkness.

It had lasted no more than a minute.

Sura said, "I think I'd like to go home now."

"Yes."

The ship spread its wings over the machine-world for the last time.

During his studies on the Sugar Lump Paul had learned of the history of the Qax. Paul's captor, constructed of the Virtual particle sets of the seething vacuum, resembled its forebears—the odd, vast creatures who had spawned as constructs of convection cells in a boiling ocean—as a laser rifle resembles a piece of chipped stone. But it could trace its consciousness back to that boiling sea.

And it remembered the human, Jim Bolder, who had once caused the Qax sun to nova.

Paul, his awareness tightly focused on the Jovian's roiling storms, began to piece together an understanding of the future plans of the Qax.

Unlike most baryonic species the Qax would be able to coexist with the dark matter photino birds. The Qax inhabited the turbulent, twilit depths of low-energy systems. It would not matter to the Jovian's Qax parasite, for example, if, thanks to the photino birds, its host's distant star failed to shine; as long as the planet turned and its inner core glowed with heat the Qax could survive.

So the Qax might become the last baryonic inhabitants of the Universe.

Eventually, though, the energy sources which fueled the turbulence sustaining the Qax would everywhere run dry. This Jovian would grow cold, exhausted by its own weather. Then, at last, it would be time for the Qax to leave. There would be a second Qax exodus, on a far vaster scale than the first, as the race followed the Xeelee through their Ring to a fresh cosmos. Paul speculated wildly on the container vessel which could store a consciousness based on the rhythms of galactic orbits...

But the Qax weren't yet troubled by such problems. They were aware that the photino birds' actions had doomed the Ring. The Ring would close eventually: having won the Universe the photino birds were sealing themselves into it. But, the Qax judged, there was plenty of time.

And besides, the Qax had another project to complete. A loose end.

The final destruction of humanity.

The Qax had waited through the humans' brief, vainglorious morning as they grew to dominate the species around them—only to waste their strength in the absurd assaults on the Xeelee. Eventually the Xeelee had gently sealed the majority of the surviving humans in the box-world beyond the Eight Rooms. Some small colonies of people in various forms had survived, however, and the Qax had watched as, one by one, these remnants dwindled and expired.

Paul suspected that the Qax had not been reluctant to speed this process.

Now the Universe seemed at last empty of humans. But after the actions of Jim Bolder the Qax judged that even a small group of humans represented a risk to the long-term survival of the Qax. So the Qax would ensure that humans would never again rise to threaten the species with their unpredictable plans.

They waited.

Eventually Teal had appeared in the Eighth Room.

Paul wondered wistfully why the Qax had not been disturbed when the antiXeelee had revived Paul himself; slowly he came to understand that he was not sufficiently human for the Qax to recognize him, and only by his association with the villagers had they come to learn what he was.

He experienced a profound sadness.

The Qax had been heartened by the descent into savagery evidenced by the nature of Teal and those who followed him. They could, of course, have destroyed the humans at any time. But they had been patient. It was clear that there were more humans within and beyond the Rooms, still inaccessible to the Qax; and it was also clear that the emerging humans could have only one plan of action: to take the Xeelee ship across the lost Universe to Bolder's Ring.

For that last voyage, surely, all the humans would emerge from the protection of the Rooms; all of humanity would be contained in a single, fragile craft, undertaking an exodus with ironic parallels to the evacuation forced on the Qax so long ago.

Then the Qax would strike.

Paul considered. The Qax's enmity to humanity had endured for millions of years; it transcended hatred, even calculation, and had metamorphosed into a species imperative.

It was ironic that until his entrapment by the Qax Paul had imagined that the humans' greatest source of danger would be the rampant photino birds. Now he found it difficult to envisage how the little band of humans could run the gauntlet of this ancient enemy and survive their passage to the Ring.

Time wore away on its various scales. The Qax did not molest him, content for now to absorb information. Paul set up an array of sub-personalities to debate options for the survival of the humans.

At length he made a decision.

She missed Damen.

Surely he would enjoy slipping his hands into these mittens and driving the ship as if it were some great bird. She imagined him here in the Eight Rooms sitting with the rest, semi-naked and glistening with sweat, gaining rolls of healthy fat—

But the image crumbled. In Damen's heart, she reflected sadly, there would never have been the will to confront the strangeness of the ship, the Friend. And now she had lost him forever. He, stubborn, would never travel to the Eight Rooms, and her companions would never agree to a return journey...

Then she had an idea.

The ship rested in its place against the Eighth Room.

Erwal sat at her table and slipped her hands once more into the mittens; and she walked the point of view of the panel over her head and out through the Eight Rooms.

Belatedly she realized that the mitten controls were coarse, intended to take the window-eyes through miles at a time; soon her fingers and thumbs ached with the strain of keeping the limited motion smooth. With practice, though, she was soon able to move the focus over the heads of the oblivious villagers and out through the door of the first Room.

She flinched as the point of view passed through the unopened door.

She hovered over a plain of dirty snow. She found herself shivering—but, of course, the panel brought her only the image of the ice land, not the sound of the wind, the bite of frost. With a twist of her thumbs she rotated her view so that she was looking back at the first Room. It hovered in the air, complete and plain, giving no indication of the wonders which lay beyond it.

"It's as if we were out there looking at it."

Erwal turned. Sura stood behind her chair, hands clasped meekly behind her back. "Why are you looking at all that snow and ice?" the girl asked. "It makes me feel cold."

Erwal reflected how young Sura looked; it was as if the warm safety of the Rooms, the ship, had restored to her the youth rubbed away by the cold of the village. "...I'm not sure. I suppose I miss it."

Muscles in the girl's cheeks stood out like ropes. "Well, I don't."

"I want to... ah, walk the window back to the village. But I'm not sure if I can find it again."

"I'll help you." Sura sat on the floor, folding her legs beneath her. "You go south from the Rooms. Look for the tree where we found Teal's marker."

"South... yes."

The focus moved at little more than walking pace over the icescape. Erwal and Sura peered at the screen searching for pointers in the blank terrain. Gradually Erwal learned to sweep the focus through miles in a few minutes, stopping occasionally at some vantage point to gain fresh bearings.

It was so easy, compared to the deadly pain of the real trip, that Erwal felt ashamed.

As the hours wore by other villagers observed what she was doing. Slowly a circle of them built up; some of them offered bits of advice while others preferred to keep their distance, simply watching. Erwal made no comment.

Eventually they found the treestump to which still clung a flap of cow skin. Sura placed her hand on Erwal's back; the fingers pinched painfully at Erwal's muscles. The villagers stared at the rag, subdued and silent.

After another day of surrogate traveling, with Erwal's hands aching, the panel-eyes came at last to the village.

Snow lay in drifts against the crushed teepees. No smoke rose. Mummy-cows lay in great mounds of snow, exposed flesh frozen to their bones.

Erwal snatched the viewpoint into the air, so that it was as if they were looking down at the ruins of a toy village.

Humanity's last enemy, winter, had won. Somewhere Sand lowed softly. Arke gently laid his palm on Erwal's head. Erwal probed at her emotions, seeking grief. Then she turned the panels opaque and drew her hands from the gloves.

The villagers were quiet, but after a few hours they returned to their lazy, peaceful shipboard life. Erwal found herself relaxing with the rest, and soon it was as if the images on the panels had been no more than a feverish dream...

Later, though, Erwal climbed alone through the Rooms to the first and pushed open the door. The cold air sliced into her lungs. Barefoot, dressed only in a tunic, she staggered into the knee-deep snow. Suddenly her grief was as tangible as the frozen ground beneath her feet. She gave herself to it and tears froze to her eyes and cheeks.

His scheme, his sub-units concurred, was as unlikely and improbable as any of the wild ventures undertaken by humans in the past. Its only merit was that it was better than allowing the Qax simply to crush the Xeelee ship.

His plan hinged on the fact that the humans faced two dangers: from the Qax and from the dark matter photino birds. The photino birds were vastly more powerful, but the Qax, with their unswervable intent, represented the greater immediate danger. Clearly the humans could not fight through either—let alone both—of these great powers to the goal of the Ring.

Well, then: the foes must be diverted.

Paul withdrew subtly from the Jovian world. He was aware that the Qax were watching him, but they did not try to interfere. He diffused the foci of his awareness and spread himself as thinly as possible along the quantum world lines. He organized the data comprising his consciousness into a particular configuration, an empty, interrogative form.

Like a child seeking its mother he called the antiXeelee.

The antiXeelee had left the Universe at the launch of the Sugar Lump seed fleet. It had traveled back in time with its fleet, and—simultaneously, and without paradox—had dissolved into countless melting fragments of awareness. So the antiXeelee had gone... but Paul inhabited a quantum Universe in which nothing was ever final. With patience and watchfulness he maintained his call.

...Fragments of the antiXeelee replied. It was like an echo of a lost voice. A pale outline of the awareness of the antiXeelee was reconstructed in response to the demands of Paul, and again Paul was surrounded by its vast, passionless humor. He responded as best he could, endeavoring to strengthen the presence of the antiXeelee.

He sensed confusion in the hierarchy of the Qax, but Paul ignored them.

At last the response he was waiting for came. Spectral ships miles wide coasted through the Jovian's system.

The presence of the antiXeelee might signify to an alert observer that the Xeelee had returned to the cosmos, and—as Paul had hoped—the Xeelee nemesis, the dark matter photino birds, had come to find out what was going on.

Paul, straining, maintained the illusion/substance of the antiXeelee. At length the dark matter ships departed with, as Paul intended, a new purpose.

He relaxed and the antiXeelee outline subsided into the quantum hiss of the Universe.

The photino birds, convinced that the Xeelee might reinvade the Universe from which they had been driven, would abandon their projects and focus their energies on Bolder's Ring. They'd already set in place long-term mechanisms to destroy the Ring. But now the closure of that gateway had to be accelerated; the Ring must be closed before the Xeelee could use it to return.

...But if the Ring were closed the Qax would be trapped in a dying Universe, their dream of species immortality threatened. So, Paul calculated, the Qax would have to get to the Ring and stop the photino birds from destroying it. With a sense of amusement and fascination he watched the urgent debate of the Qax, data and propositions chattering across all the scales of space and time.

Forgotten, Paul allowed himself to exult. His scheme seemed to be working. If so he had not only afforded the remnants of humanity a chance: he had also changed the species imperatives of two great races.

He slid along the quantum net to his little band of humans.

Across the Universe vast forces began to converge on Bolder's Ring.

The Friend had returned. And the visions were so vivid she could hardly see.

...A place, unimaginably far away, where a Ring, sparkling and perfect, turned in space; a place where all the starlight was blue...

"Erwal? Are you all right?"

The fantastic pictures overlaid Sura's concerned face. Erwal rubbed the leathery skin around her eyes. Her sight clouded by other worlds, she clung to comforting fragments of reality: the sound of children's laughter, the sweet, milky scent of the mummy-cow. "I'm all right. Just a little dizzy, perhaps. I need to sit down..." With Sura's help she touched the warm, soft wall of the Room and, as if blind, worked her way to the floor and sat down.

...She soared over the vast, tangled Ring; her fingers trembled in the glove-controls...

She opened her eyes, shuddering.

Sura sat down beside her, still holding her hand. "It isn't just dizziness, is it?"

"...No." Erwal hesitated, longing to unburden herself. "Sura, I think we have to travel again. Go away from here."

Sura's grip tightened. "Brave the snow again? But—"

"No, you don't understand. In the ship. We have to travel in the ship."

"But where to?"

Erwal said nothing.

Sura said slowly, "Why do we have to go? I don't understand. How do you know all this? You're frightening me, Erwal."

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to. But I don't think I can explain. And..." And I'm frightened, too, she told herself. Not by the mysterious visions—not anymore—but by what they represented: a journey the likes of which no human had undertaken for a million years.

She didn't want to go. She wanted to stay here, in the warmth; she didn't want to face anymore danger and uncertainty. But the visions were powerful, much more so than before; it was as if the Friend were screaming into her face.

The Friend was frightened, she realized suddenly. And what could such a godlike creature be fearful about?

"We have to go," she said. She could feel Sura's hand grow stiff in hers. "You think I'm mad, don't you?" she asked gently.

"No, Erwal, but—"

"For now you'll have to trust me," Erwal said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. "Look, I've been right in the past. About the healing panels, and the food boxes. Haven't I?"

"...Yes."

"Well, now I'll be right again. We're in great danger. And to escape it we have to go to this other place." The visions cleared briefly—miraculously—and she was afforded a glimpse of Sura's wide eyes. "Sura, we'll be safe in the ship. We'll be warm and dry."

Slowly the girl nodded. "It can't be worse than the snow."

"That's right," Erwal said firmly. "Not as bad as the snow."

After a time Sura said: "What do you want me to do?"

It took the fattened, slow-moving villagers several days to organize themselves to Erwal's satisfaction.

Not everyone was willing to come, of course. Some decided to stay behind in the Eight Rooms, unwilling to gamble their security and warmth on Erwal's unexplained visions. The ship's food lockers would provision the travelers, and so Sand, the last mummy-cow in the world, was left behind to sustain the rest.

Erwal found it hard to blame the stay-behinds.

After so much hardship together the leave-taking was protracted and difficult, each villager sensing that there would never be a reunion. Erwal stroked the stubby hairs at the root of the mummy-cow's trunk; huge, absurd tears leaked from Sand's eyes.

At last it was over. The stay-behinds gathered in the Eighth Room. Arke was among them, and Erwal studied his round face, trying to imagine his future, locked up in these tiny Rooms. The children would grow, of course, and perhaps have children of their own—why not? The bones of the dead would be laid in the snow outside, in rising heaps, and time would pass without incident; until finally the faithful mummy-cow would succumb to age, and the last people would die with her.

Abruptly Erwal felt restless, anxious to depart. Surely the human story was not meant to end like this, with the last of them hiding away in a box.

Arke pushed at the door control; the crystal panel slid across the face of the Eighth Room. The ship was cast free. Erwal's group gathered in a nervous huddle at the center of the ship's chamber. Erwal, self-conscious, walked across the cabin to her familiar seat and slipped her hands once more into the magical gloves.

The ship unfurled its night-dark wings. She closed her eyes, feeling a surge of exhilaration. The Friend was with her: the barrage of visions had mercifully ceased, but she could sense his presence, as if he were standing behind her, grave and quiet.

It was time.

She summoned up a memory of the shining Ring—

—the ship quivered—

—and abruptly the Friend flooded her memory-picture with color and detail; determination flowed through her into the gloves and—

—jump—

It was like a stumble, a fall. There were screams behind her. She looked up, startled, at the panel-windows: the pale lines of the Eighth Room had vanished, to be replaced by a ball of fire, vast, red, brooding; flames as big as worlds licked out at the ship and—

—jump—

—and another jolt and the fire was replaced by nothing, nothing at all, and—

—jump—

—there was a tilted disc of color; she saw reds and browns and golds and it was so lovely it made her gasp but—

—jump—

—it was gone and—

—jump—jump—jumpjumpjump...

Images battered against the screens like gaudy snowflakes.

She switched off the screens. The panels emptied and turned silver-gray, and there was a sigh of relief from her companions. But the jumps continued; she could feel them as a soft flutter in her stomach.

Cautiously she withdrew her hands from the gloves, stared at the mittens as if they had betrayed her. She had thought she understood the ship; now she had been humbled, a child at the feet of the adults. She sensed the Friend's strained reassurance but took little comfort. I hope you know what you're doing, she thought savagely. Maybe we're more stupid than you know. Or... more fragile.

In their borrowed Xeelee ship the little group of humans hurtled across the hostile Universe.

Paul sensed the bafflement of the woman, and anguish infiltrated his partial personalities. He had known that the initiation of the Xeelee hyperdrive would terrify the humans, but there was little he could do to protect them.

There was no time for this introspection. He must seek the Ring himself.

Paul's focus of attention swept restlessly around the Solar System's abandoned periphery. He found shipyards, weapons shops, blood-stained hospitals, the foundations of massive industrial complexes. Warships and fortresses, some as large as moons, circled the distant Sun.

Once two objects have been in contact they are forever linked by a thread of quantum wave functions. Once this had formed the basis of humanity's inseparability communications net. Now the prowling Paul found tenuous quantum functions arcing from the warships to forgotten battlefields scattered across the Universe. Paul knew that the humans had attacked the site of the Ring, at least once; so among these haunted wrecks there must be relics of those great assaults, and a quantum link for him to follow.

At last he found it.

The Spline ship was a mile-wide corpse, its spherical form distorted by a single, vast wound a hundred yards across. Within the wound, organs and dried blood were still visible. Paul imagined the agony of the creature as it had returned from the battlefield, its guts open to the pain of hyperspace...

But this corpse-ship was embedded in a web of quantum functions which spun all the way to Bolder's Ring; these sunken Spline eyes, hardened now, had once gazed upon the Ring itself.

Paul wrapped himself around a pencil of quantum functions. Absorbing them into his awareness was like being stretched, expanded, made unimaginably diffuse.

Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence, he began to adjust the phases of the quantum threads, and the multiple foci of his awareness translated through spacetime.

Paul hauled himself along the quantum functions in search of Bolder's Ring.

It was as if he were sliding down a long, vast slope in spacetime. At first the slope was all but imperceptible, but soon its steepness was unmistakable.

The Ring was the most massive single structure in the Universe. It was like a boulder dropped into a pool: across a region hundreds of millions of light years wide its monstrous gravity well drew in galaxies as effortlessly as a lamp attracts moths. Now Paul was crossing the lip of that well, with the shining ruins of the Universe sliding alongside him. Eventually he saw how the fragile structures—the filaments, loops and voids of galaxies which had emerged from the singularity itself—were distorted, smashed, broken by the fall into this great flaw in space.

The galaxies—all around the sky—were tinged blue, he realized now. Blue shift.

He had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.

The Ring was a hoop woven from a billion-light-year length of cosmic string. Paul's principal awareness focus was somewhere above the plane of the Ring. The near side of the artifact formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, hard band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.

Paul could study the Ring as Jim Bolder never had. With relish he sent sub-personalities skating along the tangled quantum functions that reached deep into the Ring's stretched spacetime.

Cosmic strings were residual traces of the ultrahigh, symmetric vacuum of the primordial epoch—an era in which the forces of physics had yet to "freeze out" of a unified superforce—and the strings were now embedded in the "empty space" of the Universe, like residual lines of liquid water in solid ice. And the strings were superconducting; as they moved through the primordial magnetic fields, huge currents—of a hundred billion billion amps or more—were induced in the strings...

The strings writhed, like slow, interconnected snakes, across space. The strings were moving at close to lightspeed. They left behind them flat, glowing wakes—planes towards which matter was attracted, at several miles a second.

Paul looked into the center of the Ring. There he found a singularity. It was hoop-shaped, a circular flaw in space: a rip, caused by the rotation of the immense mass of the Ring. The singularity was about three hundred light years across—much smaller than the diameter of the Ring itself.

If the Ring were spinning more slowly, the Kerr metric would be quite well-behaved. The singularity would be cloaked in two event horizons—one-way membranes into the center—and, beyond them, by an ergosphere: a region in which gravitational drag would be so strong that nothing sublight could resist its current.

But the Ring was spinning... and too rapidly to permit the formation of an event horizon, or an ergosphere. And so, the singularity was naked.

Through the void at the heart of the Ring he could see blue-shifted starlight muddled, stirred. Here the wave functions were tangled, twisted, broken; here space was folded up like cheap cloth.

This distortion was the purpose of the Ring: this was the Kerr-metric Interface, a route to other universes—the gateway through which the Xeelee had made their escape.

...Ghostly flocks slid through the tangled cosmic string net that made up the Ring.

Paul widened his perception to embrace the entire Ring. Everywhere the photino birds soared, silent and purposeful. Somehow the great artifact seemed helpless, and Paul felt an absurd impulse to hurl himself forward, to try to protect the glorious baryonic monument.

At length the photino birds appeared to come to a decision. A knot of birds, billions of them, formed around one section of the toroid—perhaps some weak point—and from all around the Ring more bird flocks flickered in short hyperdrive hops to join the growing throng. Soon only a few scouts were left near outlying parts of the Ring, and around the weak point there was a swarm of shadow birds so thick they obscured the Ring itself.

Cautiously Paul slid his awareness focus closer to the stricken region. The photino birds, he realized, were now passing into the structure of the cosmic string itself.

If cosmic string self-intersected it cut itself. A new subloop formed, budding off the old. And perhaps that subloop, too, would self-intersect, and split into still smaller loops... and so on.

Paul understood. It would be an exponential decay process, once started. And so the birds, concentrating their mass, deflected the passage of string loops, causing them to self-intersect. Soon, threads—fragments of string thousands of miles long—drifted out of the structure, passing unimpeded through the ranks of birds.

Soon the ghost-gray birds were jostling in their eagerness to breach the threads; and, within minutes, a slice through the Ring—extremely thin, no more than a light year wide—began to turn a dull yellow.

The photino birds were cutting the Ring, Paul realized uneasily, and it didn't appear that it would take them very long. And his little band of humans was still hours away.

He swept over the plain of the Ring and studied the turbulent space at its center. Thanks to the activities of the photino birds the Kerr-metric zone was like a pond into which gravel was being thrown. Star images rippled, and the inter-universal surface was awash with a milky blue light. Already the access paths through the zone must be disrupted—

—and a shock wave of gravitational radiation burst over him.

Rapidly he withdrew his attention foci from the Ring and rose to the roof of its star-walled chamber, so that it was as if he were an insect in some vast cathedral. Something monstrous had erupted into this region of space, mere light minutes away from him. He surveyed the space around the Ring, seeking the source of the gravitational radiation.

...It had burst out of hyperspace like a fist. At first Paul could make out nothing but a blaze of blue-shifted photons and gravitons. Then, gradually, he perceived its structure. It was a sphere a million miles wide. Fusion fires still burned within it, although its structure had clearly been badly damaged by its impact at near lightspeed with the debris in the Ring chamber: great gobbets of material showered from its surface, so that it left a trail like some impossible comet as it blazed, Paul saw, towards the throng of photino birds.

It looked like a ball of ice-cream thrown into a bank of live steam. But it was a star: a star that had been accelerated to near lightspeed and then launched through hyperspace. And it was aimed directly at the photino birds' center of operations.

This was a weapon of war. The Qax had arrived.

After that things began to happen fast.

For days the ship had hurtled on.

Erwal knew she had no real understanding of the distances she was traveling, but she could sense how far she was being separated from the place of her birth.

And she and her companions were utterly alone. Even the Friend had withdrawn once more.

From time to time she slid her hands into the gloves and felt the continuing surge of the marvelous ship. And occasionally—when her companions were asleep—she would open one of the panel-windows and stare gloomily at the bright spheres which battered against the panel like vast insects, or at the distant pools of muddy light which sailed more slowly by.

Inside the ship there was, of course, no pattern of day and night by which to measure time, but Erwal counted the sleep periods that passed during the journey. Soon after the fourteenth she became aware, through the subtle touch of the gloves, of a change in the ship's motion.

Hastily, still blinking sleep from her eyes, she opened a panel-window.

The barrage of stars was visibly slowing, and the motion of the distant pools of light was almost gone. Had they arrived, then? She peered at the screen.

A wall of starlight, muddled and blue-stained, blocked off the sky. She stared, awed.

Her companions stirred in their nests of rags on the floor. Hastily she shut off the panel and sat in her chair, wondering what to do now.

The Qax assault approached its climax.

The hijacked star was mere minutes away from impact with the workplace of the dark matter photino birds, and its hellish glow brought a million dancing highlights from Bolder's Ring. Now Qax-controlled Spline ships crackled out of hyperspace in the wake of the star, their fleshy hulls sparkling with weapons fire. Paul saw how the photino birds were responding; insubstantial flocks rose from the Ring material, like steam from wet earth, to face the Qax vanguard.

One photino bird flock got too close to the star. Paul watched raging gravitational radiation tear open the flock's structure. Within seconds the birds had dispersed.

...And, just at this crucial instant, a little clump of consciousness knots popped out of hyperspace, emerging just outside the clear space around the Ring.

The humans had arrived. Paul hurried to them.

Wings outspread, the Xeelee ship hurtled through a storm of light.

The panel-window showed blue stars, hundreds of them jammed together, some so close they were joined by umbilici of fire. The villagers stood and stared, transfixed. Children clung to the legs of their parents and cried softly.

"Turn it off!" Sura buried her face in her hands. "I can't bear to look at it; turn it off!"

Erwal gripped the gloves grimly. "I can't," she said.

The Friend was in her head again, his visions a clamor that left her unable to think.

Onwards, he said. She had to go onwards, deeper into this swarm of insect-stars, using all the skills she had learned to haul the ship through this barrage of stars. Tears leaked out of her eyes, but she dared not rest. Her world narrowed to the feel of the gloves on her stiffening hands, the gritty rain of stars in her eyes.

With a soundless explosion the ship erupted into clear space.

Erwal gasped, pulled her hands out of the gloves; the ship seemed to skid to a halt.

They were in an amphitheater of light. The far wall was a bank of stars, hard and blue; it curved into a floor and ceiling also made of blue-tinged starstuff. And at the center of the vast chamber was a jewel, a Ring that turned, huge and delicate. One point of the Ring was marred by smoke; red and blue light flickered in that cloud.

Erwal felt Sura touch the crown of her head. The girl's hand seemed to be trembling, and Erwal laid her own hand over Sura's—then realized that the trembling was her own, that her whole body was shaking uncontrollably.

Sura asked, "Are you all right?"

"...I think so."

"Where are we?" Sura pointed. "What's that? It's beautiful. Do you think it's some kind of building? Why, it must be miles wide."

But Erwal barely heard. Once more the Friend clamored in her thoughts, pressing, demanding; she longed to shut him out—

Without hesitation she shoved her hands back into the gloves. The Xeelee ship plummeted into hyperspace.

The weapon-star burned through the ranks of photino birds towards the Ring. Vast as it was the star was lost against that great tangled carcass...

Until it hit.

The battered star collapsed as if made of smoke. Sheets of hydrogen, some of it still burning at star-core temperatures, were dug out of the star's gut by writhing cosmic string. The star's mass was reduced from lightspeed to stationary in less than a minute; Paul watched huge shock waves race around the Ring's structure.

Now the Qax's Spline warships followed up the starstrike; cherry-red beams lanced from their weapon pits, and Paul recalled the Xeelee gravity-wave starbreaker cannons observed by Jim Bolder. Photino birds imploded around the beams, flocks of them turning into transient columns of smoke that shone with exotic radiations and then dispersed.

For a brief, exhilarating moment, Paul speculated on the possibility of a Qax victory, a defeat for the photino birds after this single, astonishing blitzkrieg; and he felt an unexpected surge of baryonic chauvinism.

Soundlessly he cheered on the Qax.

But, within thirty minutes, the debris of the starstrike was cooling and dispersing. The photino bird flocks began to regroup, gliding unimpeded through the glowing wreckage of the star. Grimly the Qax fought on; but now, from all around the Ring, photino birds were flicking through hyperspace to join the battle, and soon the marauding Qax were surrounded. The Spline armada, with foe in all directions, became a brief, short-blossoming flower of cherry-red light.

Soon the end was beyond question. Ghostly photino birds penetrated the Spline fleet and overlaid the battered Qax ships, and the Spline, their effective masses increased enormously, began to implode, to melt inwards one by one.

Perhaps if the Qax had taken more time, Paul mused; perhaps if they had organized a barrage of the starstrikes...

Perhaps, perhaps.

Soon it was evident that the assault had been no more than a temporary inconvenience for the photino birds, and the shadowy flocks were swooping once more into the Ring's crumbling threads.

Dropping out of hyperspace was like falling through ice.

The panel-window filled with light, but Erwal, disoriented, could make no sense of the image: of the threads of crystal-blue light that crossed the picture, of the sea of milky, muddled stars below her. Were those threads the Ring? Then they must be very close to it, poised over its very center. And what was the meaning of the crushed, twisted starlight below?

The Friend returned, screaming visions at her. She cried out, but she grasped the gloves.

Night-dark Xeelee wings stretched across space for the last time. Ignored by the warring fleets the ship dived towards the Kerr-metric Interface.

As Erwal entered the sea of light there was a moment of farewell, an instant of almost unbearable pain... and then the Friend was gone.

She dropped into strangeness.

The ghost-gray photino birds slid through the Ring's pale flesh and its bruiselike discoloration spread.

Paul, somber, reflected that the destruction of the Ring had in the end provided the key racial goal for the human race. But now that the end was close the last human—Paul—felt nothing but a cultured sadness, an aesthetic pain at the loss of such power and beauty.

The surviving Qax, too, were, at last, no more than impotent observers, ignored by the photino birds.

After about half a year the photino birds withdrew. The fruit of their labor was a slice through the Ring perhaps a light year thick. Around this darkling slice the substance of the Ring was crumbling, turning to sparkling threads that drifted away from the structure.

The Kerr-metric Interface wavered, dissolved; and the Universe was sealed.

Paul moved his attention foci closer to the gap. The broken threads of cosmic string shriveled from the wound, so that the gap in the Ring widened at near lightspeed.

Photino birds swooped around the wound as if in a huge triumphant dance.

The vast structure had no mechanism to recover from such a wound. Now there was only its long, slow death to play out; and the photino birds, evidently incurious, began to depart, returning their attention to their own mysterious projects.

Like sea waves from the wreck of some immense ship gravity radiation surged out of the Ring's gravitational well, and at last the vast pit in spacetime began to close.

The observers—the Qax, the last photino bird flocks—began to leave the scene. Paul grasped his quantum threads and slipped into the gathering darkness.

The Xeelee ship emerged from the Kerr-metric Interface. It furled its wings, slid to a halt, and sent its sensors probing into the new Universe.

Erwal stared at a screen that had become suddenly a blank pane of silver, reflecting only her own tired face.

Sura asked, "What does it mean?"

Erwal frowned. "I don't know." She tried to move the focus of the screen, but there was no response. And the gloves around her hands were like dead things, inert.

The ship no longer responded to her touch. She withdrew her hands.

"I don't understand," Sura said. "Did we pass through the Ring? What should we do?"

"How could I know?" Erwal snapped. "We wait, I suppose."

Sura stepped away, uncertain.

After some hours, Erwal climbed out of her chair and stretched painfully.

Trying to overcome her enormous sense of anticlimax she established a routine. After each of the next few sleeps she crossed to the control table and slipped her hands into the gloves. But the ship remained inert, sealed off.

Gradually her routine broke down.

She was tired, and she had had enough mystery. She tried to settle into life inside this odd ship-village and forget the strangeness outside.

The function of the Xeelee ship was to optimize the chances of survival of its human occupants.

It studied the purposeless emptiness stretching around it and considered how this might be achieved.

Gas clouds, dark and cooling, reached to the limits of this expanding Universe. There were no stars. There was no evidence of intelligence, or life.

The ratio of helium to hydrogen here was about twenty-five percent. This, and various other cosmological relics, told the Xeelee ship that this Universe had emerged from its singularity in a broadly similar fashion to that of the Universe of its origin, with comparable ratios between the fundamental forces.

This, of course, was good.

The semisentient ship was capable of independent speculation. Perhaps some property of the Ring had guided them to an inhabitable environment, the ship wondered.

It did not spend much processing time on such theorizing. After all, speculation was not its primary function; and even if it were, there was no one to report back to.

So the Universe was broadly similar to that once shared by humans and Xeelee. With one important difference.

It was much younger.

Less than a billion years had passed since the singularity here. No stars yet burned. There was virtually no iron, no carbon, no silicon—no oxygen. Save for the helium and a few traces of more complex elements which had emerged from the singularity, there was only hydrogen. All the heavy elements would become abundant much later, when true stars began to shine and complex fusion processes in their cores got underway.

There were no Earths to land the humans on, no air for them to breathe, no metals for them to dig.

The ship unfurled its night-dark wings and dived into the hydrogen clouds. Cherry-red starbreaker beams blasted ahead of the ship; the gravity waves lanced through convection cells billions of miles wide, and a cylinder of roiling hydrogen-helium gathered. Within the cylinder temperatures rose by millions of degrees and complex fusion chains, comparable to those in the cores of the stars yet to form, were initiated.

A cascade of heavy elements emerged from the fires, and at last even a few atoms of iron were formed.

For three months the Xeelee ship patrolled the length of its creation; it passed its beautiful wings through the star-core cylinder, filtering out the heavy elements.

At last the Xeelee ship was ready to construct an Earth.

The heart of it was a core of iron seven thousand miles wide. Leaving the core at stellar-surface temperatures the ship now laid down a mantle of silicate rocks, constructed from the mineral banks it had built up, and overlaid the whole with a thin crust of oxygen and silicon. Next—compressing billions of years of planetary evolution into weeks—it deposited lodes of iron, bronze, tin, methane at suitably accessible points. There was even uranium. Then riverbeds, ocean floors, fjords were gouged out by the flickering of a cherry-red beam.

The process was creative; the ship almost enjoyed it.

After six months the bones of the planet were laid down. The ship landed at various points on the surface and, by firing refrigerating particle beams into the glowing sky, rapidly cooled the crust through thousands of degrees.

Next, ice asteroids were smashed into the bare surface, as were lodes of frozen oxygen and nitrogen. The ice melted and flowed into the waiting sea beds; gases hissed into a cloak about the planet.

All this took two more months; but at last the ship's night-dark wings cruised over clear oceans, through crisp blue oxygen.

The first clouds formed. Rain fell.

Next it was time to establish an ecosystem.

The ship had never visited Earth, or even the interior of the box-world its Xeelee designers had built for the humans. But it knew the general principles.

The ship's clay was the genetic material of its human occupants, and their various parasites and symbiotes. Tiny laboratories embedded in the ship's hull labored for many days.

The first priority was an oxygenating flora. The ship chose melanin, the tanning agent stored in the humans' melanocyte cells, to serve as the basis for a photosynthetic process. That, combined with extrapolations of the humans' intestinal flora, proved sufficient.

Rainforests exploded across the new continents, oceans of banyanlike trees force-grown by the ship. And a kind of plankton spread like a brown stain through the seas. Flows of energy and matter were initiated through the new biosphere, with life, climate and geology combining in a single grand organism, turning the infant planet into an autonomous, self-regulating life-support mechanism with a life span of millions of years.

Now: animals to populate the land and seas; to serve as food for the people? Human genetic material, the ship found, was a remarkably flexible substance; the adjustment of a mere few percent of the DNA strands gave astonishing scope for design.

This was another creative phase. The ship lingered over it, taking perhaps six months.

At last the various feedback cycles were established; the ecosystem, powered by sunlight, was established and self-sustaining.

The ship hovered over its creation, considering.

The world's sun was artificial, a fusion reactor, a miniature star. It blazed down, hot and red, over its unlikely new satellite. The star would last mere millions of years, but the ship decided that should be enough time for the humans to work out what to do next for themselves.

The wings of the Xeelee ship curved one last time over the new world.

It was done. It was good.

Without ceremony the ship settled to the ground, threw open its ports, and deactivated.

Enval arose from sleep, aroused by the soft scent of grass. She rose stiffly, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and made her way over sleeping bodies past the open port to the control table—

The open port?

This port had not opened for a year and a half... Now it led to a gentle ramp. The ramp lay in light, and it nestled against soft earth.

Trembling, Erwal walked down the ramp and into light which warmed her neck. She paused at the ramp's edge, uncertain. Then, deliberately, she pressed her bare feet into the ground. The grass was cool and a little damp, as if dew-sprinkled—and it was a deep, dark brown. A breeze, strange on her skin after months of ship's air, brought goosebumps to her bare arms.

She was standing on a grass-covered slope. The sun above was a pinkish red; beyond the sky, great billowing clouds were illuminated. The light brought out rich autumnal tones in the grass's dominant brown. The ship was a slim black cylinder, its wings folded away; it rested on the grass, incongruous.

The slope fell away to a river which slid, gurgling, between tree-lined banks. The leaves of the trees were brown too, a pale russet color; but they flickered convincingly in the breeze. (What was that she saw in the branches of the trees?—The little creature, about a foot long, returned her gaze with startlingly human eyes, and scurried out of sight to the top of a tree.) She looked along the river. As far upstream as she could see there were no ice-floes. In the distance gray mountains shouldered above the plain; snow touched their peaks. And downstream of the river she made out a line of light, right on the horizon. A sea?

Something came flickering through the sky, out of the Sun: a bird, no larger than her fist, scooting over the grass at about head-height. She reached up towards it, impulsively; the bird swiveled its tiny (human!) head towards her, opened its mouth in fright, revealing rows of jewel-like teeth, and veered away, rustling into the distance.

Sura came climbing up from the river. She was singing quietly. When she saw Erwal she smiled, her nose and forehead pink. "Erwal, where are we?"

Erwal laughed. "Wherever it is, it seems... agreeable."

Now more villagers came stumbling from the ship, open-mouthed; they seemed to expand as they sucked in the rich air. The children instantly ran off down the slope.

Erwal turned back to Sura. "What do you think we should do?"

The girl shrugged. "Get some teepees built, I suppose. Before the snows come."

Erwal nodded. "But maybe the snows won't be so bad here."

"No. Maybe not."

Arm in arm the two women walked down to the river.